For this month's Rangle Employee Spotlight, meet Michael Mrowetz, Senior Solution Architect, Head of Experience Architecture at Rangle. He has been with the company for four years, working with clients to bridge the gap between technology and people.
Tell us about your role at Rangle.
My title recently changed to Senior Solution Architect, Head of Experience Architecture after initially starting at Rangle as Solution Architect four years ago and holding a Technical Director, Digital Innovation title for the last year.
A Solution Architect at Rangle is a bit of a shape-shifter, depending on client and team needs as well as one’s personal preferences; the role offers a lot of variation and elasticity. The core pillars of this role include working closely with client stakeholders and teams and coming up with the best technology and process solutions, given the constraints at hand. Communicating tradeoffs, opportunities, and the ability to judge teams' technical preferences, capabilities, and potential is important, too, since ultimately, they will be in control of the systems we help them build. Technical brilliance is also important, but coming up with a technically perfect solution that the organization can’t maintain is still failing the task – it’s important to bridge the gap between technology and people.
Another important skill is curiosity and thinking outside the box, particularly on process – finding shortcuts to quickly reduce unknown-unknowns and, thereby, risk. All of these attributes are closely linked with Rangle's guiding principle: “Doing the right thing, the right way, and then improving it.”
What path got you to where you are today?
I got interested in web development as a young teenager when I got a copy of Macromedia Fireworks 2 from a PC magazine CD. Initially creating some designs, I found out that it could export them as a website, which led me to build one for the skate crew I was part of. After a few iterations of the site, I got into Flash for cooler effects, like a 360° menu of the local skate park and into PHP to add a guestbook and, later, a forum. I would occasionally build websites for friends, clubs, and later for smaller companies, after school.
Later on, I studied Media and Information Technology, a very interdisciplinary course, which allowed me to widen my interest and get experience beyond software engineering, dabbling with design, filming, editing, marketing, and many other related fields. The internships embedded within the course were my first chance to leave my native Germany and spend half a year in Sydney, Australia and later Galway, Ireland – which led to my first professional developer job at a digital agency.
The fast-paced, iterative approach of an agency – working on many projects over a short time – was a great way to gain experience quickly. I moved between front and backend teams, building many different things, from 5-star hotel websites to a bus booking engine that is still in use today. Ultimately, I found that full-stack – before this was a term – was the type of work I enjoyed most, while I had to realize my design skills were not the best. The commute was also a great chance to learn – I started listening to podcasts (particularly Boagworld) which is still a great way of widening one’s input given the explosion of podcasts since the 2000s.
After a few years in Ireland, I moved to Toronto for the first time and started working in a larger agency network, mostly helping big-box stores to move and succeed with their e-commerce platforms. I also started attending meetups and conferences, which have been a huge inspiration to push the needle further and try new concepts and ideas. Besides learning a lot about partnering with clients, leading teams and building resilient and scalable architectures, I also got very involved with the performance space, creating a few open-source tools that are still seeing some good use today.
After three years in Canada, my wife and I moved back to Korea for two years, where I worked in the innovation team of a CDN company. This was an interesting experience, I learned a lot about product development and lifecycles, DevOps and Go, which I leverage to write container orchestration tooling.
Our next stop was Berlin. I stayed in the product and tooling space, working on internal, distributed cloud infrastructure tooling for PlayStation Now, Sony’s cloud gaming platform.
Back in Toronto, I’ve been with Rangle for four years now – the longest I’ve been with any job so far. I enjoy the work as a consultant as it gives you a lot of flexibility and room to grow. You’re always somewhat part of two companies – where one keeps changing and you get to solve interesting new problems all the time by having the connections to your colleagues for additional support and exchange of ideas.
If you had to pick one skill that will help make a Solution Architect successful at Rangle, what would it be?
Empathy. It is very important to understand a client's and, by extension, their user’s, problems and constraints in order to draw up successful solutions with them.
The same is true for the internal teams; understanding not everyone has the same experience and interests helps you to support and coach them without unrealistic expectations.
What advice would you give other people looking to move into a Solution Architect role?
Keep on learning. It’s less important to know everything than to be able to quickly learn, categorize, and understand new concepts. Most answers are only a few keystrokes away when you have an idea of what to search for.
Empower the team, be patient, and celebrate finding bugs. The teams you work with can benefit greatly from you sharing your time for pairing and debugging sessions – and will learn new things too. Problem-solving strategies are one of the most important tools in every developer's toolbelt. Helping the team learn and exercise those will help their growth tremendously. Share if you find bugs in your own code, or if one of your assumptions was wrong – this removes the stigma from bugs and embraces learning and continuous product improvements.
Embrace automation. Codifying tasks or removing the need for tedious work helps the team and clients to document steps and reduces cognitive complexity.
Keep architecture as simple as you get away with. The easier it is, the more people will be able to work on it and evolve it. We all sometimes have the desire to go all out and over-architect systems for the sake of architecture, but I’ve seen enough systems descending into entropy because no one could understand them, and teams just bolted on functionality wherever it's easiest. The level of “simplicity” is relative and depends on the problem domain and teams you work with, but using this knowledge and aiming to build a pitt-of-success, where it is easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing. This creates solutions that teams enjoy working with and stand the test of time.
What are some of your hobbies or interests outside of work?
As my frequent international moves might allude to, I’m an avid traveller – I’ve currently visited 29 countries across four continents.
I also enjoy photography, mostly in the landscape, urban and travel categories, but for the last three years, I’ve done a lot of dog photography too. Last year, I picked up painting again, which has been quite relaxing. Beyond that, I do a good bit of cycling, working from home, not that much for commuting anymore – now more for chores and leisure.
