HERE Technologies

Flexibility is crucial to our company's culture because it recognizes that employees have unique needs and responsibilities outside of work. By trusting employees to manage their time and work environment, the company fosters a sense of ownership, well-being and loyalty.

A personal example: During a particularly busy period in my personal life, having the option to shift my working hours allowed me to take care of a family member without compromising my professional responsibilities. I was able to attend necessary appointments during the day and manage my work in the evenings without any stress or fear of falling behind.

This experience deeply reinforced how much I value working at a company that treats employees like humans first, not just workers.

To make flexibility work for everyone, clear communication and the right tools are essential. We rely heavily on collaboration tools like Webex for instant communication, and Confluence, Jira and other platforms for project management and documentation, ensuring that everyone is aligned, no matter where they are working from.

Regular stand-up meetings and agile methodologies help keep teams connected and focused while also giving room for asynchronous updates when needed. On the lighter side, we enjoy a year-end vacation and team events sponsored by the company. These interactions play a huge role in maintaining a strong team culture, even when we are geographically dispersed.

We recognize that it is important for everybody to learn and grow. The company organizes a week-long annual HERE Learning Festival, which comprises a plethora of talks on a variety of business-related topics, with some deep dives into specific technologies.

All the employees are invited to allocate some time to attend or at least access the meeting recordings. Sometimes, an online "brown bag" meeting is also organized by a specific team. We can then learn about different approaches to problems and technologies from our colleagues, possibly incorporating some of our findings into our direct team's work.

It often happens that we stumble upon something interesting during our daily work or just want to share our way of working with other teammates. During internal Tech Review meetings with a targeted audience, we share our work item solving process, disseminating good practices within the team faster than what can be accomplished through a code review.

We can also access a range of online courses, allowing individuals to learn at their own pace. Having such a multi-tier learning structure helps everyone identify inspiring and useful pieces of knowledge in their daily routine.

In this way, we can leverage the potential of every team member. In particular, this reduces the bottleneck of someone being stuck on a problem for too long, as we also have an open team space, where we can ask questions if we encounter something problematic.

Within our frequent standups and Tech Reviews, we are also made aware of specific team members' areas of expertise, so we can also reach out to them directly for help. For example, by attending an AWS course, I was able to better understand the solutions used in templated deployments.

This helped develop extra tools for observability, making issue investigations much easier than before.

It's important to give engineers some time to learn and even encourage them to allocate some time to it, apart from their daily tasks. It is also a good idea to have these internal Tech Reviews, so that good practices and interesting new technology applications can be shared.

Finally, it is essential to have an open space for every team member to ask questions when something is unclear without being judged. More experienced team members can lead the way so that newer team members are also presented with a space open to learning.

COVID changed perceptions of workplace flexibility, but not entirely. Remote work existed pre-COVID, especially in the tech industry, attracting candidates with its flexibility and lack of commute. It appealed to me too — working from a comfortable environment sounded ideal.

However, during lockdown, I discovered I needed in-person interactions to thrive at work. Connecting, bouncing ideas, gaining perspectives, and solving problems efficiently all felt more natural face-to-face. Online meetings just couldn't replace the spontaneity and dynamics of office discussions.

Though I still value the convenience of working from home, I now prefer the office. I've adjusted my company's two days in office and three days at home schedule to spend four days in the office, using Fridays for winding down and catching up on admin tasks.

Office time allows me to engage directly with colleagues, including those from other departments, fostering collaboration and connection beyond the digital realm. Additionally, our company's remote work policy — allowing temporary work from other countries — offers flexibility to adapt to life's challenges and support loved ones or simply change the scenery for a while.

Like many tech companies, HERE operates in a constantly evolving landscape. The rapid advancement of AI and the challenges of mapping a changing world demand that our teams balance time for connection with time for focused work. For many engineers, focus time is vital and directly enhances their productivity.

This balance also requires self-discipline, clear communication, and a strong task-tracking system to maintain visibility of deliverables and manage expectations effectively. A blend of office and remote work is essential to fostering a healthy environment where teams can connect, create and deliver.

In my own projects, this flexibility has been highly beneficial. I schedule solutioning workshops for office days to leverage the dynamics of face-to-face interactions, while allowing the team to set their own home days. This approach not only supports individual productivity but also ensures that communication remains seamless and outputs are delivered efficiently.

Like many companies, we rely on standardized communication, collaboration and project tracking tools to maintain a consistent platform, which isn't a bad thing. That said, we strive to make the experience enjoyable. Our discussions are typically informal, with numerous chat groups — some of which aren't work-related.

My personal favorite is the rugby chat, where we follow matches and exchange playful banter among international team supporters. We even have "secret" chat rooms solely for venting about the quirks of certain software tools. Successfully managing a globally distributed workforce, however, requires more than just tools and processes.

Trust, enjoyment, and understanding are critical components. Teams must negotiate time zones and find optimal setups for strong connections and collaboration. While this process often involves some trial and error, an open mindset about what works and what doesn't, enables teams to quickly find their rhythm and achieve outstanding results.

The focus on business deliverables vs. people aspirations is so well balanced that you feel absolutely thrilled to be a part of this journey and share in the success. During my tenure, I have developed significantly, both personally and professionally, as a part of the HERE India family.

As a senior engineering manager, I am responsible for HERE WeGo engineering: HERE WeGo mobile apps, the HERE WeGo website and our app back-end services. A constant challenge when working on complex software is quality assurance. Automated tests help to ensure things keep working.

We have many different kinds of automated tests: unit tests, component tests and end-to-end tests. This year, WeGo and the HERE SDK QA teams have automated a large portion of our smoke and regression test suite that our QA team used to execute manually.

HERE WeGo is mostly written in Flutter with some native code for Android and iOS. Most of our tests are written in Flutter as well using our own custom framework using flutter_driver. These tests are maintained by the app developers.

End-to-end tests are maintained by the QA team instead and are written in Appium. Appium is the industry standard for mobile end-to-end testing, so it is easy to pick up and integrate with other tools like Cucumber. Our test engineers further use GitHub Copilot to speed up test development and integration with other systems.

We see HERE WeGo as a guardian of the quality of the HERE tech stack. Our testing ensures quality not just for HERE WeGo itself but also our enablers and services — HERE SDK, HERE location services, offline maps and more. Of course, all teams do their own testing as well, but we put it all together in a real-world consumer application.

This gives us an end-to-end view on all our products. With our end-to-end test suite, we can provide early feedback to our enablers and find defects much earlier, which in turn prevents shipping these defects to our customers.

"Now that we've laid the groundwork, I am super excited to bring our end-to-end testing to the next level. "More visual tests: Ensure the expected map features and overlay UI are correctly rendered. "Better integration into team processes: End-to-end tests give early feedback, but handling failed tests is still very manual.

A QA engineer looks at the failure, manually reproduces and creates tickets and more. Much of the work can and should be automated." "Explore how AI can help with the above: We already use GitHub Copilot to support test case development.

We already employ OpenCV for visual testing, but we only scratched the surface.".