Staff Asia

The company

Staff Asia ran a team of WordPress and Laravel developers delivering client sites and platforms. I worked with them in 2020, based in Sylhet and working remotely.

My role

Before Staff Asia I had spent seven years freelancing on Elance and Upwork, mostly as the only developer on each contract. I joined in March 2020 as Senior WordPress Developer. By May I had been promoted to lead the team as Team Leader and Project Manager.

The job changed. As a developer I owned my own tasks. As team lead I owned everyone’s. That meant three things.

• Timelines. I planned the work and managed delivery using agile workflows, so clients knew when things would land.
• Delegation. I decided who worked on what across the WordPress and Laravel developers, rather than doing it all myself.
• The bridge between clients and engineers. I handled stakeholder communication, turning what clients asked for into work the team could build, and explaining back what the team had done.

I also reviewed code and set standards, so the quality of the work did not depend on who happened to pick up a task.

What it taught me

Staff Asia was my first real experience of people management and technical leadership. It is where I learned that leading a team is mostly communication: with the client, with the developers, and in writing so nothing gets lost.

That grounding carried straight into the next roles. Later in 2020 I was leading Find Visa Counsellor for Worldview International Group, and in 2022 I founded Devute.