Get to know Sean Alaback of Intellicore as he discusses his role within the company.
What is your role within the company?
I run the business analysis and quality assurance parts of the business. My focus is understanding what our clients and potential clients are looking for, translating that into a form where it can be developed into an actual application, and then making sure that the final product both matches those expectations, and meets the level of quality people expect from Intellicore.
What do you like most about working for Intellicore?
We aren't a tiny company, but we aren't big either. It's easy to see the impact you make on the business on a day to day basis, but it's also a large enough organisation that if there is a particular direction you want to go down, we likely will have the space to make that happen.
What first attracted you to your area of expertise?
I like to create things and started my career in marketing and communications on Madison Avenue. The best part of my job was helping guide entrepreneurs and business leaders to think through how to grow or pivot their businesses. Now I get to do the same thing, but rather than write a press release at the end of the process, I get to design and help build the technology that makes that growth and those pivots possible.
What are the values that drive you?
I like to make things be the best I can possibly make them. There will of course be some limits to that but no matter what I make, be it fresh pasta or an ERP system, there is a great deal of pride that comes from looking at that product and feeling like I couldn't possibly have done it any better than I did.
What is a key challenge that your customers face that you want to solve/have helped to solve?
A lot of people are really used to computers and computer systems controlling everything they do. When we start developing a new system, clients will often think that what the system can do will be restricted to "what the system can do". But with a bespoke system, we are writing it from the ground up and the limit to what is possible is often imagination. The breakthrough moment I usually look for in software design is the moment when the realisation clicks with a customer. They don't need to fit their process into what the software is able to do, they can create their process and the software will support that.
What is the most exciting part of your job?
There is nothing better than unveiling a final product to a client for the first time. Especially to someone who is going to be working with a tool every day. Many of they systems we build may only have a few dozen users, but many of those users may be using it for four or more hours a day, which means making that application work really improves the quality of their work life. So getting to show them that new system for the first time is pretty amazing.
Outside of work, what are you passionate about?
I enjoy cooking, travelling and setting a really poor example for my son...
What's something about you that not a lot of people know?
After school, I moved to Los Angeles and pursued being a television writer, with a little bit of success.
Describe yourself in three words.
Just a boy.
What are your hobbies/what do you do on the weekends?
When I have the space for it, I enjoy gardening. I try to do a good bit of swimming but at the end of the day, I'm a nerd and with nothing else to do will quickly pull out the computer and start coding some idea I have.