Building an effective team from zero

The reality that any employer faces today is that it is increasingly difficult to find new talent. Once you do find them, you need keep your employees challenged and happy in order for them to stay.

Last year we took a leap of faith and ventured in setting up an office at a remote location where we previously did not have a significant presence and achieved a mutually beneficial collaboration with the University of Rijeka.
We will demonstrate how we provided industry based knowledge to students, details of our internship program and how we managed to setup and grow an effective team of 9 that is thriving.

Finally, we will share our wins and fails, what we have learned and how we managed to have fun along the way.

The Manager in the Era of AI: Decision-Making Without Delegation

Every manager's role has three parts: strategist, leader, people manager. For the last decade, much of each was information work: gathering data, synthesising reports, building the case for a decision. AI collapses the cost of that work to near zero. That is where the job changes.

A practitioner's report from someone who went from iOS developer to the management board of a 300+ people company and now applies AI across an 80+ people engineering organisation. Three concrete shifts. Strategy: modelling 4 or 5 realistic scenarios instead of one or two gut reads, and a verification ritual for the day AI analysis nearly derails you. Leadership: why your span of control transforms rather than shrinks, and the line you never cross. People management: new hiring filters, the junior problem, quiet non-adopters, and the security blind spot most managers miss.

Closing question: once AI handles the information logistics, what is the manager's job for?

30 or 40 minutes. Delivered at Infobip Shift 2026 (Zadar, September 2026), next at next.app devCon Berlin, October 2026.