For our Computronix employee interviews, we sit down with people from all levels of our company and ask them about their jobs, and what it’s like working for Computronix.
The POSSE product has undergone tons of changes, updates and overhauls over the years, to the point where there’s very little code that’s the same now as when it was first created almost 25 years ago.
However, perhaps the biggest update to POSSE came between 2011 and 2013, with the Winchester project. This involved migrating POSSE from a client-server environment into a web-based environment, while still trying to keep all of its functionality intact, making sure it was backwards compatible so that current clients could upgrade to Winchester without losing any of their data or processes.
It was a huge undertaking, but the Computronix staff responsible for the project took it on and achieved it, and ultimately renewed the POSSE platform. “Most of our growth and success since then is tied to that renewal,” explained Kirk Syvret, the POSSE Product Manager. One of Kirk’s first projects as a Product Manager was this very influential Winchester project.
Kirk leads the POSSE product team and is responsible for shaping the future direction of the product. As he says, “in order for a product to survive, it needs a long-term vision of how it will be maintained, how it will fit all of our clients, and how it will stay current in the marketplace.” This can mean adding new features, updating old ones, or in what Kirk says is the toughest part of the job, removing features that are no longer relevant.
In contrast, one of the most exciting parts of the job is something called “solution discovery.” Solution Discovery is a collaborative process where members of the team “look at a problem and review it by looking from different angles, trying to find the simplest possible solution.” This is a very open process, where “anyone can question anything, anyone can bring an idea forward, anyone can contribute.”
And when that solution is finally found, it’s an amazing moment. There is absolutely “a euphoria when it falls into place, realizing that it’s going to serve our clients well.”
