Tech & Innovation Blog
Moving Forward, Welcoming & Connecting: A Leader’s Journey
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
‘¡Bienvenidos! ¡Pase, Adelante!’ – Welcome, come on in! Feeling connected and belonging allows us to feel comfortable and bring our authentic selves.
“We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things.
That is what we are put on the earth for.” – Dolores Huerta
ADP is proud to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month (NHHM) by recognizing the cultures and the histories Hispanic Americans contributed through generations in this country.
This year’s theme is Unidos: Inclusivity for a Stronger Nation, which means making positive impacts together. We connected with Isabel Espina, Vice President of Product Development, WorkMarket. She’s a dog-lover, a traveler, and a leader who always focuses on paying it forward.
Here’s her lens on giving back to the community.
Moving Forward, Welcoming & Connecting: A Leader’s Journey
By Isabel Espina, VP of Product Development
Isabel and her family in Abu Dhabi
Adelante, in Spanish, means to move forward. It is also commonly used to welcome someone into your place. ‘¡Bienvenidos! ¡Pase, Adelante!’ – Welcome, come on in! Latinos value family as a source of strength and protection. Welcoming others and making them feel at home is part of our DNA. The sense of family and belonging is intense and is not limited to the immediate family but the extended grandparents, cousins, friends, and friends of friends.
These families very often extend to our work families. Feeling connected and belonging allows us to feel comfortable and bring our authentic selves to the experience. ‘Estás en familia’– you are part of the family. You are safe, and we have your back. These values were core to my experience growing up.
I was born in Cuba during the height of the Castro Revolution. My parents were the first from their respective families to leave, seeking freedom of expression and opportunity. They left their homeland and family for a better life in the United States. They wanted their daughter to grow up with freedom and opportunities.
We arrived in Spain in December, a time of year meant to be joyous and surrounded by family. Instead, we were alone in a foreign country. Fortunately, we had kind neighbors who welcomed us into their homes, helped us with warm clothes, and invited us to ring in the New Year. They even showed up on January 6 (Feast of the Epiphany) with a small gift that ‘Los Reyes’ had left in their home for ‘Isa.’ This kind gesture from our Spaniard neighbors meant the world to my parents. We were not alone. We had support and felt a sense of belonging. The sense of inclusion gave us tremendous comfort.
This connection quickly grew into a community that gave us insight into navigating employment in Spain. Although we were not Spaniards, we connected to our neighbors through language, ancestry, and family values. With the help of the newly established community, we thrived in Spain and prepared ourselves for the next leg of the journey to the US.
The values ingrained in the Spanish culture of family, support, and solidarity translate directly to how we lead organizations.
ADP’s Research Institute has studied the data and developed a measure of Inclusion Measuring the ‘I’ in D-E-I. They define connection as one’s feeling of being seen, feeling heard, and feeling valued for their uniqueness. The study found that strongly connected people are 75x more likely to be fully engaged at work.
Isabel and her family traveling to Alhambra
It’s been 25 years since I first came to ADP. Key to the culture here is the sense of inclusion, which is why I stay. I joined to create innovative products, and I did. Every time I hear there are millions of users now with the ADP Mobile Solutions app, I think of the days when I brought it to life with my previous team. Although the app has evolved beyond what we did, I find it rewarding to hear how much people love it today.
The more comfortable one feels with the team, the better the ideas flow. The creativity and excitement then lead to an amazing product. We must attract a workforce representative of our clients and the communities where we live and work. These communities allow us to understand and provide insights into building better products.
One way to gain a sense of community is to join and attend events sponsored by a Business Resource Group (BRG). I am an active member of Adelante, a Hispanic community that allows us to connect based on shared values. These may be direct connections because you are Latin American/Spanish or have shared interests in the music, the food, and the culture. What matters is we can come together and share in a community. I can’t think of a better way to grow one’s professional network and learn.
Isabel Espina
In the course of my time with Adelante, they invited me to do a panel to support STEM women and mentor young students. I also recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration, where I met wonderful women technologists from diverse backgrounds working together to support each other. It was an extremely rewarding experience! I’m reminded of that sense of inclusion I felt when my family first came to the US. I’m inspired to give back to my support network.
As a technology leader, I always think about attracting great talent in this highly competitive environment. Digital transformation and advanced technologies continue to shape current and future jobs across industries. I encourage my team to grow together, meet other associates across different communities, and always support one another.
Giving back to our communities is good for not only our business but for all of us. I invite you to explore ADP and all we offer, including our BRGs. Be a role model, grow professionally, and pay it ‘Adelante.’
We look forward to continuing sharing stories from Latino and Spanish technologists.
Interested in Product Development?
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
#nationalhispanicheritagemonth #givingback #careerjourney #productdevelopment #ADPTech
Tech & Innovation Blog
Team APIs: What They Are and Why They Matter to Teamwork
Voice of Our People, Innovation, Future of Work
Team APIs could vary depending on team context and needs. One universal value is to listen to your people and act on what they vocalize.
Team APIs: What They Are and Why They Matter to Teamwork
Charles L., Senior Director of Application Development, shares team topologies and how you can use the concept of APIs to better manage teams. In this blog, Charles explores various team management methodologies, including four different team types and three interacting models.
We live in a world where people are always looking for the next best thing. When it comes to leadership, we know that if you’re not engaged with your team, they won’t be engaged either, which translates into a lack of passion and excitement in the products they are creating! One way to create more cohesiveness and get everyone on board is to use Team APIs. These team communication interfaces have become the backbone of modern tech companies.
What is a Team API?
In the case of software development, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of instructions that tells a computer how to interact with another piece of software. We can use the same idea to create instructions for interacting with our team.
I first read about the Team APIs in Team Topologies, a book by Matthew Skeleton and Manual Pais that talks about creating effective teamwork and helps businesses choose the right pattern of interactions for their organizations. The authors also teach you how to keep software healthy while optimizing value streams.
Let’s Begin: Build an API
A critical first step to creating a communications API for your team is to establish a contact point. This can be a team lead, business analyst, or product owner. All communication will flow through that person from outside the team. This keeps the work visible and consolidates the Works in Progress (WIP) under one contact.
Charles and his son
Tool Recommendations
If you are looking for a tool to assist in this process, consider products such as Asana, Basecamp, or Jira to streamline communication within your company. The tools can help you manage projects, tasks, and meetings efficiently while also providing an environment where everyone can work together harmoniously.
My prioritization and goal-setting approach have changed over time, influenced by Allen Hollub and Domenic DeGrandis. When running a software team, the two hardest things are working together and ensuring each person’s work is meaningful and making sure each team player produces quality results without feeling overwhelmed or undervalued by their organizations. This is when these tools come into play and help us stay organized, while creating an easy developer experience.
Easy Developer Experience
While prioritization comes down to leveraging and optimizing the flow, it’s also important to create an easy developer experience. This translates into spending time improving our team’s development process every quarter to make code more efficient and ready for production. It’s essential to optimize and align goals between business and development processes.
Developer experience is so important because developers should focus on building software that solves business problems. Developers should not be burdened with non-business value add work like dealing with infrastructure, deployments, firewalls, domains, provisioning, procurement, or networking etc. A good developer experience makes it so easy for a developer to do their work, so they can focus on building and experimenting with features that enable our clients to do more.
Introducing Team Topologies
According to Team Topologies, the authors introduced different team types and interaction modes.
Four Types of Teams
- Stream-Aligned: A team that is uniquely positioned to drive business change and opportunity, with an alignment of core values, skills mix tailored towards delivering value on their own.
- Platform: A team that helps to reduce cognitive load by providing everything in one place.
- Enabling: A team dedicated to helping other teams with the adoption and modification of software, as part of their transition period.
- Complicated Sub-system: A team with the mission to help other teams transition as they jump from old software and processes into something more modern.
Three Interaction Modes
- Collaboration: Two teams work together to solve a shared goal, particularly when it comes down to finding new technology or approaches.
- X-As-A-Service: One team consumes APIs, tools, or full software products from another team.
- Facilitating: An enabling team facilitates the other team learning or adopting new approaches.
The bread-and-butter of team types is Stream-Aligned. This team type has everything it needs to deploy software to production independently. The most common interaction model is a collaboration where two teams work closely together, for example, X-AS-A-Service, meaning one team uses another team API.
Why APIs Matter in DevOps
APIs are a crucial component of software development. They provide greater insight into how applications work and allow for faster integration, easier consumption across the lifecycle – all things that DevOps teams want in their task lists!
More companies have started to build core platforms, accelerating and scaling development. The state of DevOps conducted based on DORA metrics by Google points to an increase in large enterprises adopting cloud and high-performing software companies in 2021. Good documentation is key to implementing development capabilities and positive team culture to mitigate burnout risks. There is another DevOps report by Puppet Labs that focuses on team topologies. These are all evidence where Team APIs makes a positive impact on DevOps.
Team Success: Prioritize the Developer Experience
An effective team values the Developer Experience (DX), meaning the overall experience developers experience in working on your product. DX is essential for a company’s core product and development. Large enterprises learn to react quicker to market changes when they remove friction in the development process, which leads to revised change management practices and more frequent deployments. Shortly, I see this happening. Companies will modernize their change management processes to accelerate their software delivery. When teams prioritize the DX, their success is inevitable.
Charles and his family
Teamwork: Care for Your People
Another consideration in team building is the lag, meaning time spent waiting on someone or something to happen. Grouping people by functions like Dev, QA, or Ops, or Product creates a lag in your team’s flow. What happens when people must wait? They get bored and work on something else. Once a developer works on two things at once, the chance of introducing a defect rises.
Grouping people into functional tribes also creates unwanted behaviors. One of the most important things to understand in DevOps is the people; they are your teammates. Since everyone is on the same scrum teams, instead of calling each other by roles such as OPS or QA, use ‘my teammate’ and recognize ‘my teammate needs help on this item.’ Your mindset changes when you apply the rule in day-to-day life. You’d want to help and contribute more to the team.
What You Should Know: As a Leader in DevOps
How do you know that you are doing a fantastic job as a leader? The answer can be found in the feedback loop. Making the workplace a more comfortable and enjoyable place can help associates flourish. A positive feedback loop achieves that by listening to the voices and using the comments to improve organizational structures.
I recommend The DevOps Handbook for any technology leader looking to improve their organization’s culture and innovation levels. The book includes three DevOps principles: Flow, Feedback, Continuous Experimentation & Learning. To improve any system, you need feedback loops, and the faster the feedback, the better. It is important to improve any system, especially in delivering software to production. Not having suitable feedback loops can lead to poor outcomes.
For example, my team uses ADP’s Standout app, a high-performing tool that helps identify each individual team member’s strengths through a series of surveys that are designed for different types of companies with various needs, including software developers. You’ll find out exactly where tasks need improvement on both individual levels and group discussions, ensuring everyone has an opportunity to share their opinions about what works best within these parameters.
Our community: ADP’s Transformation
I’ve seen such a great technological leap forward over the last decade. I love the direction ADP is going. We didn’t have all these avenues for connection when I founded the ADP Developer Community back in 2013. Coordinating inner sourced projects was more difficult. Since then, the openness and sharing within GPT have been incredible. I feel encouraged hearing our leader, Don Weinstein, celebrate innovations such as CI/CD. What we do at ADP is incredible, especially the annual GPT Connect developer’s conference that shows sharing technology across teams is a high priority.
Team APIs could vary depending on team context and needs. One universal value is to listen to your people and act on what they vocalize. Prove to the team you hear them and do something about their proposed ideas. I believe a high-performing team will be open and honest with each other. It’s a group effort for the team members to use feedback to improve while receiving support and help from their leader.
Interested in DevOPs or Application Development positions at ADP? We’re hiring!
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Designing For All People: Inclusive UX at ADP
UX Design, Inclusive Design, Voice of Our People
Amber Abreu, Senior Manager of User Experience (UX) research at ADP, speaks with us about the essentials of inclusive design, educating with empathy, and the future of UX innovation at ADP.
Designing For All People: Inclusive UX at ADP
Amber Abreu, Senior Manager of User Experience (UX) research at ADP, has devoted her career to working in the field of inclusive and accessible UX design. She speaks with us about the essentials of inclusive design, educating with empathy, and the future of UX innovation at ADP.
What are you working on these days?
I just started a new role as Senior Manager of UX Research for the Growth team. ADP’s Global Product & Technology organization has three UX teams working under an “OneUX” umbrella: Our Generative team focuses on foundational understanding of our customers and internal associates, the Emerge team handles next-generation products, and the Growth team, my team, does boots-on-the-ground, day-to-day research for various product teams. OneUX is a huge effort with a focus on inclusive and accessible design. It’s a new initiative, and we’re all sort of holding hands as we move through this process together.
As a team leader, I’m excited to support people who are making a positive impact. The work we do on this team really does help people in their lives. I like having a sense of purpose that gets me out of bed every morning, and I want to share that feeling with the rest of my team.
You’ve had quite a career journey and came back to ADP. What brought you back? 
Someone I used to work with at ADP remembered me, told me they had an opening and asked if I was interested. I liked the people and thought it was a good fit. It was that simple. But I also saw it as a place where I could make a difference. In the 15 years since I’d previously worked at ADP, I’d worked on UX teams at companies like Delta and AT&T, where I’d been able to educate so many people about accessible design.
I think lots of organizations don’t fully understand what inclusive design actually means, even if they think they do. They might have UX teams, but sometimes they’re just checking a box—though I see this less and less as more people become aware of what smart user experience design can achieve. I was happy to come back to ADP because their commitment to inclusive UX matches my own.
Your passion for inclusive design is evident. How did you follow that career path?
In art school, we had only one semester on inclusive design, touching only a small facet in the much larger field of research and design. Inclusive UX is very technical, but the way you implement and deliver technical requirements can be so innovative. I’ve always been drawn to the intersection between problem-solving and really technical aspects of design. Think of some of the technologies we take for granted, like Alexa or Siri. Those ideas came out of inclusive UX design trying to help people with different capabilities and needs. Now everybody uses them, not just people with disabilities. Also, consider people who, for whatever reason, can’t use a mouse. What’s their user experience going to be?
My personal story is one of the reasons I’m passionate about inclusive design. I was paralyzed due to one of my pregnancies and lost the use of one side of my face. I couldn’t drink from a cup anymore. I couldn’t close my eye. I had to relearn how to do all sorts of things. My experience isn’t the same as someone who is permanently disabled or missing a limb or blind, but I think going through that and being willing to share the experience helps us talk about how UX can affect people and how it can help.
Probably the most significant technological innovation in modern history has been computerized technology and the internet. Technology was supposed to make our lives easier—but an entire segment of the population wasn’t considered and was left behind, which is antithetical to the whole purpose. If anything, computerized technology should create more equity instead of causing a great divide. I’ve been working my entire career to close the gap.
What’s your approach to inclusive design?
I try to educate and create empathy. At previous companies I’ve worked for, I’ve tried to bring people from the community to help inform designers of their particular experiences. I’ve also taken designers to an exhibition called Dialogue in the Dark that simulates total blindness. When you go in, you’re in utter darkness. You can’t see the hand in front of your face, and you confront the challenges blind people face every day. People who aren’t blind know it must be challenging, but being exposed to their daily experience helps us understand what that means.
It’s important to ask a lot of questions, seek knowledge, and share that knowledge. I tell this to people all the time: You’re not the first person to have this problem; someone has solved it. We just need to talk to each other.
How do you see your work shaping the future of ADP?
We’re still in the early days of evolving our UX teams. One area we are focusing on is the employee experience—if you’re an employee and you have to go out and check your payroll statement or your W-2, you’ll see changes there. We’re also updating our all-in-one platform for payroll and HR software targeted at mid-market clients. We’re working to make all of our visual design and interactive components accessible from a shared library. Once we get further, those changes will be visible across other products in our portfolio.
In the next six months to a year, I would like to put in place a solid foundation for an inclusive research program. It would include recruiting partnerships to bring people into research who have different disabilities and language capabilities and people from communities outside of ADP offices. Long term, I’d like to stand up a dedicated research program focused on informing future-thinking designs so we can operate on an international scale in countries with stricter accessibility requirements like Australia, UK, and Canada.
What excites you about what’s next?
There’s this misconception that the accessibility guidelines are only for people with disabilities, which is not true. They are for people whose first language is not in the system language. They’re for people who are older or less educated. There are different tiers of accessibility. And the core fundamental principles are that this work should lift up everyone.
There’s a lot here to be excited about, and because we’re all working together, we’re going to be stronger in the long run. Our team is growing, and we want people who care, who are willing to say, “I don’t know, but I’m willing to learn.” Every person who works on the project will say that they directly impacted someone with a disability in a positive way.
Interested in a career as a UX Designer or Researcher?
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