Dooliversary: A Year in the Life with Ryan Z.

At Dooly, we’re lucky to get to work with some of the coolest folks around.

We sat down with Ryan Z., who celebrated his first Dooliversary on February 16, to chat about hip hop, mechanical keyboards and how he’s enjoyed year one as part of Dooly’s growing engineering team.

Tell us about your role at Dooly.

I’m a software engineer on the Workflowers team working full-stack on the Dooly product.

What’s the team like?

The team’s great! We have a really fun, easy-going team. Everyone’s super helpful and they’re always willing to jump on a call if you need help with anything.

We get our work done, but we also do a lot of little games and things like that to bond. We installed an app called Kasem on our team’s Slack channel to submit songs every day, and at the end of each stand-up we’ll reveal one song and everyone will guess who submitted the song. Then we’ll do a big reveal, and they’ll talk about why they chose that song. It’s fun because sometimes there’s big surprises and you’re like, “wow, I didn’t think you listened to stuff like that!”

What was one of the first songs you posted?

It was Cudi Montage by Kids See Ghosts!

When the team was smaller, I was one of the only ones who listened to hip hop so after a while, it was easy for them to think, “oh, that’s Ryan!” Now we have a couple more hip hop fans on the team so it makes it more interesting to guess who posted what.

What’s the most unique part about working at Dooly?

The culture. If you ask other people, that will probably be the thing that’s brought up the most. It’s definitely the best, friendliest working environment I’ve been in. Everyone’s super helpful, easy to talk to, and it’s just fun, you know? There’s never a day when you wake up and think, “s**t, I have to go to work!”

Are there any parts of Dooly’s mission you connect with the most?

I’ve never worked in sales, so joining was a learning experience. I’ve learned so much about sales in the past year, and even after a year, I’m still learning things I didn’t know.

I like building things that people like to use, that’s easy to use and that provides value to someone. If I can make someone’s day-to-day work easier, that’s a win for me.

What do you think has been one of your biggest accomplishments in year one at Dooly?

There’s been a couple. I remember one of the first things I worked on was the Pipeline column total where you see the total amount of all of your accounts, which we never used to have. When we first shipped that, Ellie, our Director of Customer Success, would share Slack messages from customers telling her how excited they were and how awesome it was. It was great to see that and have immediate feedback within 4 hours from people using this thing that I built myself, which was awesome.

The biggest solo feature was probably the revamp filter bar for pipeline. It was adding support for filter groups in conjunction with filters, so “AND this, OR that,” and grouping it all together and rebuilding it. It was a lot of fun to work on because there was stuff on both the front and the back end, and we had to migrate all the old filters to this new format. There were a lot of interesting challenges that came up with that.

If you could only use one emoji for the rest of your life, what would it be?

It’d probably be 😂. I feel like that’s the one I use the most.

Last question. Since everyone knows you’re a hip hop fan, what’s something that most people don’t know about you?

I should have known this was coming! I’m into mechanical keyboards. Me and my roommate have both built our own keyboards. I got into it during the pandemic. Everything was shut down, there was nothing to do, so I ordered switches, a keyboard case, keycaps, and all that, and put it together. It was a lot of fun.

Do you take orders? Do you have an Etsy shop?

I never thought about it, but I don’t know, maybe I should!