Here begins the first chapter "My onboarding at fabriq, building a team after fundraising".

Fabriq in a few words

Deployed on the shop floor, fabriq centralizes and digitizes industrial routines: actions, issue management, visual management, performance indicators. It helps optimize monitoring, speed up incident resolution, and spread a lean management culture. Backed by two major fundraising rounds (€4M in 2022, then €22M in 2025), fabriq is accelerating its growth and industrial operational excellence.

My mission at Fabriq

I was hired at Fabriq as a hands-on engineering manager to lead the Experience Team, a unit dedicated to meeting the challenge of an increasingly complex application, while guiding field users, who are often far from digital habits, toward a simpler and more user-friendly interface. The mission drive adoption and platform efficiency by regularly delivering tangible improvements focused on saving time and making the product more desirable. This team also plays a strategic role in strengthening our competitiveness against visual management players like Shizen and iObeya. The goal is to clarify Fabriq’s added value which is to empower every shop floor operator by improving their experience and maximizing time-to-value for our industrial clients.

Onboarding, First Observations, Priorities, and Early Initiatives

From week one, I chose to turn an initial challenge the tedious setup of my development environment into an opportunity. In 2 hours I developed a CLI tool that automates setup for all newcomers. This initiative has helped to improve onboarding, reduce wasted technical time, eliminate configuration errors, and was a concrete illustration of the continuous improvement culture I want to instill in the team.

In my second week, I seized the chance to organize several pair programming sessions with a senior frontend developer who wanted to join the team. This was the perfect way to accelerate my understanding of the codebase, share perspectives on the product, and quickly build a collaborative working relationship. This proactive approach embodies the culture I want to foster, collective progress, mutual support, and direct feedback every day.

Recruitment After Fundraising

During the first two months, alongside learning about the product with engineers, Ops, PMs, sales, CTO, and the CEO I was tasked with building up the Experience Team by hiring two senior fullstack engineers. This recruitment campaign, launched after the fundraising, aimed to attract senior profiles with a lean culture and a drive for continuous improvement, two essential prerequisites to address technical debt and support our ambitions.

Our recruitment process was structured in four steps:

  • System design and algorithmic test with me and another engineering manager or senior engineer.
  • A fit interview with the CTO, focused on abstraction, synthesis, and understanding the product.
  • A meeting with engineers, CSM, OPS and QA members to test cultural alignment.
  • A final interview with both co-founders.

I was involved at every staged from test preparation, conducting interviews, managing feedback, and communicating throughout the process whether proceeding or declining, to connecting with future hires.

For this phase, we relied on HR tool Homerun to structure the process, and on our staff manager, who brought significant experience in intensive recruitment phases.

Given the success of these recruitments, I also actively contributed to the hiring of other key roles (EMs, senior engineers), overseeing all dimensions of the process: interviews, salary, technical roadmap alignment, and cultural fit with fabriq’s values.

Strategic Bets

One real success was scheduling pair programming sessions with the senior frontend engineer eager to join the team. Today, her added value is evident daily, and her proactive integration was an excellent choice, a resounding "yes" both technically and personally.

On the recruitment side, unexpected success, I deliberately bet on a candidate with a solid infrastructure background (Scala, Go, Java), which initially caused some reluctance when reading her CV. Given my interest in functional languages, I focused on her broader potential. Despite a merely adequate technical test, she demonstrated real abstraction skills, composure, and a thoughtful attitude during interviews, challenging the team constructively. It was a winning bet, today she played a key role in our complex migration from Vue 2 to Vue 3, a major organizational step that I will detail soon. Also she brings real added value to the organization through her technical expertise and her calm and rational temperament

Measure what matters with DORA metrics

As part of our continuous improvement journey, I advocated for introducing DORA metrics to measure and optimize our delivery performance. After discussing the approach with our CTO, we agreed that having clear visibility into our deployment frequency, lead time, and recovery metrics was essential to support our technical debt reduction efforts. Importantly, I committed to using these metrics as decision-support tools, not as rigid objectives, to avoid the common pitfalls and negative behaviors that can arise when metrics become targets

I led the investment in Swarmia, a comprehensive engineering analytics platform that seamlessly integrates with our existing stack, Linear for project management, GitHub, and Slack. Beyond standard DORA metrics visualization, Swarmia enables us to set intelligent alerts and guardrail like maximum concurrent PRs, PR size limits, review time thresholds (while still prioritizing pair programming), WIP limits etc...

This implementation created a synchronized view of our engineering health, enabling proactive conversations rather than reactive firefighting. The tool doesn't just measure, it helps the team self-organize around flow efficiency and quality standards.

Impact: We now have objective data backing our delivery discussions, clearer bottleneck identification, and automated nudges that keep our lean practices consistent without micromanagement.

Key Learnings

  • Taking the time to listen and observe accelerates alignment and the relevance of managerial decisions.
  • Encouraging continuous improvement, even through small, concrete action anchors a lean culture deeply within the company.
  • Rigorous selection based on potential and values has a lasting impact on the dynamics of the organization.
  • Establishing a culture of collaboration, mutual support, and direct feedback from the very start enables tackling bigger projects with confidence.

Next Blog Topic, Frontend Migration at Fabriq

Our front-end client migration from Vue 2 to Vue 3 was a critical challenge that opened up new opportunities, improved security, and required strong organizational coordination.