Founded in Sweden in 2016, Favro is a collaborative planning platform for fast-growing SaaS and live games companies. They raised $4.3 million in seed funding at the end of 2021, led by pan-Baltic venture capital fund Practica Capital and followed by Scale Capital and serial entrepreneur Christopher Beselin. Previous investors Inbox Capital and Creandum, an early investor in Spotify, also participated in the round.
The investment will help Favro scale its Lithuanian office, which will be the global center for marketing, sales, account management, and agile advisory. Edvinas Vosylius, Chief Sales Officer at Favro, told us everything you need to know.
🔵 Let’s start the interview by briefly discussing the product itself. We have all used Trello/Asana/Scoro/Notion/pick-your-productivity-tool. Why do teams around the world need another productivity app? How Favro differs from others?
Favro was created by industry veterans. They previously built Hansoft, a successful platform for agile software development, which is used by large companies in telecom, defence, electronics, and game development. Today, startups, enterprises, and game developers are all becoming SaaS businesses. Favro’s founders realised that to stay competitive, these companies have to make the whole organisation agile, not just development.
Favro was designed to tackle these challenges with collaborative agile planning that allows all teams to stay in sync autonomously. Executives and managers can apply a modern approach to leadership – be facilitators managing the flow of work rather than micromanagers of tasks.
🔵 Favro launched in Sweden back in 2016. Where are you today?
At the moment, Favro has more than 1500 clients, including world-renowned brands such as Wolt, Xbox, Disney, SAP and EA. Our team is only 26 people with international talent from 6 different countries.
🔵 In addition to HQ in Sweden, Favro already has offices in Vietnam & Ukraine, and now you are expanding to Lithuania. How did Favro find Lithuania and you as the head of its global sales operations?
In order to build an international team and attract multinational tech companies as clients, one needs a global network.
I met Patric Palm, CEO & Founder of Favro, in 2017 at one of Rotary’s global events. We kept in touch afterwards, and I found myself discussing SaaS and global expansion with Patric in December 2019. It turned out that my experience and Favro’s needs matched perfectly. Now, our Lithuanian office already has 8 employees.
🔵 Why do you think Vilnius is the best place for a new office out of all the potential options?
Vilnius has a unique community of young, ambitious, experienced, yet humble professionals. The local talent is appreciated due to their business mindset and strong drive. The work done over the past decade to develop the startup ecosystem shows tangible results, but there’s always room to improve.
🔵 Patric Palm, Founder and CEO of Favro, said that the Vilnius office launch coincides with a shift from “organic growth to more structured organisation development”. Could you expand on what that means?
For the first three years, Favro’s growth was solely led by the product, with the help of some social media marketing. The company didn’t have a team for sales and account management.
However, we noticed that both enterprises and startups were eager to speak with us since the product builds upon deep agile management thought-leadership. They want to learn straight from the experts before buying the product. So, we developed a new strategy to support global growth with a team for sales, account management and product/agile advisory based in Lithuania.
We are also recruiting more developers, but that team is fully remote so brilliant candidates for those positions can really live anywhere.
Favro’s go-to-market leadership team. From the left: Edvinas Vosylius, Chief Sales Officer, Patric Palm, CEO & Founder, and Jarune Preiksaite, Chief Marketing Officer.
🔵 How do you plan to build those teams out? What are your plans to attract top talent to join the company?
The Favro Lithuania team already has eight full-time employees. They were headhunted for their already proven brilliant skills. I build teams on the highest level of trust, where the right attitudes, drive, and ability to work autonomously is more important than a long CV.
Stock options are a key part of our talent attraction efforts. Once they have passed the trial period, every employee is included in our stock options program. This way, everyone is personally invested in the growth of the company – If Favro grows, the value of stock options grows as well.
The third reason for top talent to consider joining Favro is the possibility to work directly with senior leaders at Fortune 500 clients and hyper-innovative companies using Favro. There are not many startups in Lithuania where you could close deals with Electronic Arts, Amazon, Xbox, Wolt, SAP or Tobii. It’s one thing to close SMB customers, but working with globally recognised brands is a totally different experience.
🔵 Who are you hiring at the moment? What are the main qualities you look for in new people joining your team?
We follow the principle that “A-players” want to work with other “A-players”. So even though Favro’s team is only 26 people strong, our results look like we had an army. We operate with a very flat organisation where everyone is trusted with a lot of autonomy to manage their work in alignment with company objectives.
At the moment, we are looking for Sales Development Representatives, Account Executives, Account Managers, Marketing Specialists, e.g., Content Managers, Digital Media Specialists (PPC). We especially value candidates with experience working with agile methods and/or at a startup. Gamers are extra welcome – We would love to hear what games you like to play.
🔵 And the final question. I know that you officially opened Favro’s Lithuanian office only recently, in autumn 2021, but where do you think it will be in the next 2-3 years?
The plan for the Lithuanian office was to hire a top team of sales and marketing professionals and raise a successful seed round by the end of 2021. We successfully reached those goals. This year, the Favro Lithuania office will grow to 20 people and then we will go full speed towards an IPO in a few years.
Team of Favro Lithuania with CEO & Founder Patric Palm (in the middle).
It goes almost without saying that scaling an organisation by 10x is difficult. Maksim Grigorjev, a Senior Enterprise Architect at Adform, offered us an inside look at the growth journey of the tech team in the adtech industry.
He answered our questions ranging from working with massive datasets and managing microservices to dividing work between a 200 people strong tech team and maintaining a healthy technical community inside a large organisation.
🔵 How would you describe Adform as a product for the people outside the adtech industry?
Adform is a technology powering the open internet – a modern and effortless digital-advertisement toolkit enabling the publishers to effectively monetize their ad space and advertisers to reach the most relevant audience.
🔵 You have spent almost 12 years at the company. Do you remember why you chose to join in the first place?
From the early days of my professional career, I always enjoyed data-design and data-processing related tasks the most. With each subsequent position, I focused more and more on the data-related topics, accumulating practical experience as well as building a theoretical foundation from books and papers. Tools and approaches used in data-related tasks differ highly based on the size and amount of the data.
Twelve years ago, there weren’t that many companies in Lithuania working with data warehouses of such a massive scale. After the first interview, I already knew that it was a perfect match for my technical area of interest and a great learning opportunity. Time has shown that data is not the only interesting technical challenge that Adform provides, but it was the one that lured me in.
🔵 During your time in Adform, the organisation has grown rapidly and continues to do so. How much has your business and team grown over the past 10-12 years? How has it felt inside the company?
Currently, I have the privilege to work with ten times more colleagues compared to when I joined the company. Our technical stack likely has grown even more during those years. As one of the first scrum masters in the company, I also saw the company-wide agile transformation first-hand, which was a major cultural shift and a great learning opportunity.
It has been a compelling experience to see the company reimagining itself and adjusting to both the organizational and technical challenges that come with rapid growth. Making mistakes is unavoidable, and not all approaches work out in the end, so you learn to value flexibility, experimentation and not being afraid of failing fast. Rapid growth also means that you need to learn how to onboard new teams and work effectively on the same product in parallel with a much greater capacity.
We also had to change our architecture to reflect the changes in the organisation. For example, moving away from monoliths towards microservices came naturally because, otherwise, dependency management and work parallelization would’ve become too painful and error-prone. We learned the hard way that microservices alone do not give sufficient productivity boost if not supported by the powerful internal platforms taking care of cross-cutting concerns in a unified way.
🔵 How large is your technical organisation at the moment? How have you divided the work between teams?
Dev & IT is around 200 people now, split into four development groups, an IT department and several supporting teams. Each development group is responsible for the specific horizontal layer of our product (high load, big data, business application and web) and supported by the dedicated solution architect.
We made a conscious decision to organize our teams around a specific layer or a platform (instead of a product). For example, all our domain APIs are owned by the same development group and all client-facing user interfaces by another group. This approach allows our developers to specialize and excel in a reasonably small set of technologies and find common, consistent and highly reusable solutions to the same technical challenges across all of our products.
The IT department is responsible for our physical infrastructure, internal cloud platform, databases, security and multiple centralized DevOps services (monitoring, logging, deployment pipelines, etc.).
🔵 As a senior-level enterprise architect, you are constantly thinking about the big picture. What unique challenges does working at adtech offer to developers?
Adtech as an industry is quite challenging and very fast-paced. It’s still in its early days, very open to innovation and the product landscape changes every year.
Market participants are constantly finding more and more effective ways to collaborate and provide the end-user with the most relevant, optimized and engaging advertisement. The majority of market participants are both integration partners and competitors. On the one hand, you need to be well-connected and maintain compliance with industry standards, but at the same time also distinguish yourself from the competition. It is also a highly regulated industry with an emphasis on privacy, which puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders to keep the data safe, correct and protected against fraud.
All this allows developers to work on a portfolio of products not isolated from the outer world but highly integrated with clients, partners, exchanges, vendors and data providers. Industry standards also require constant evolution, and it is not uncommon for our lead engineers to take an active role in the industry working groups shaping them.
🔵 Could you give us a sense of the scale of datasets Adform’s products use? What challenges come with it?
We crossed the petabyte-scale threshold a while back and every day we process tens of billions of new transactions. This scale requires careful consideration in designing how the data is loaded, transported, processed, aggregated and queried. It also raises complexity in testing the pipelines, handling spikes, recovering from failures and ensuring the high availability and predictable latencies.
At its core, we use technologies that are well-known in the industry and have a proven track record to perform well in big data environments (Kafka, Hadoop, Storm, Spark, Vertica, Aerospike, etc.) with components written in-house for data loading, transformation, aggregation and query generation.
At such scale, it is not possible to dump all raw, unstructured data in one place and use it as a source for real-time, end-client reporting or augmenting the user interface with relevant KPIs. Therefore we invest a lot in cleansing, structuring and pre-processing the data to push as many calculations upfront as possible.
We also carefully design effective aggregates which would give sufficient flexibility and predictable querying latencies to the end client, but at the same time preserve enough row-level data for offline analysis or asynchronous exports.
🔵 How many microservices do you have? What’s your approach to developing and maintaining them?
We have several thousand deployable units – the exact number changes as new units are developed, and old ones are put on the path for deprecation.
Newer services are all based on the same tech stack, deployed as containers, and utilize central platform services, like monitoring, logging, alerting, deployment pipelines, etc. We aim to offload all repeatable or cross-cutting concerns into centralized platform offerings to make sure we solve the issues once and then apply them consistently. We also aim to minimize the boilerplate in new service development and ideally have developers focus explicitly on the business logic.
Our products have always been quite interconnected, so we struggled to find a common approach for data exchange between domain-private data stores and data synchronization between microservices. As a result, we invested in building an internal data distribution platform with all business domains exposing their public contracts by default without any change in the service itself. All consumers interested in a particular dataset can subscribe to the change streams exposed from those domains and build local read models of that data.
🔵 We have talked about data and back-end infrastructure quite a lot. However, for the end-user, a well-designed interface is also a must. How has Adform managed designing web applications?
User-experience and effective workflows are indeed very important for end-users as it directly impacts their productivity. Quite often, it is a deciding factor between our products and others.
Historically, we struggled with multiple segregated web applications which all looked somewhat similar but always had a slightly different look & feel and inconsistent feature sets. Three years ago, we realised this approach leads nowhere, so we decided to replace ~80 web applications with one new and modern application rewritten and redesigned from scratch. All user workflows are now based on a single framework, a single library of components and follow consistent functional patterns and design stereotypes. It was a highly rewarding project that received positive feedback from our users, gained industry recognition, and eventually won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award.
🔵 And finally, we heard in a previous interview that Adform people share a special vibe. How would you describe the company culture inside the technical organization?
I think there are a few factors why we have an open, positive and friendly technical community:
Even though we have more than one product in our portfolio, all of those are interconnected and often offered as a package to the end client. As a result, all the teams feel that they contribute to the common goal, eliminating the internal competition.
Customer success and product organizations work closely with development to get input from the developers and also pass along feedback about new features. This is crucial for the technical organization to feel like a fundamental part of the company and maintain the feedback loop between your effort and the results.
Using a common stack of technologies allows our developers to contribute to projects, features or incidents outside their direct ownership. This grows developers’ overall domain knowledge, expands the social circles and also cross-pollinates ideas and best practices across the organisation.
We hold regular tech talks where the technical community shares the insights, challenges and lessons from the latest component developments.
Adform is a global digital advertising technology company with a major site in Lithuania. The people filling the client-facing roles work in a truly international environment with the biggest brand names in the world.
To get a glimpse of life in a global adtech company, we interviewed Karolina Baltuonytė, currently a Global Platform Solutions Consultant at Adform. She has travelled to the US & Asia to work with clients and now helps global brands with technical onboarding.
🔵 How would you describe Adform as a product for the people outside the adtech industry?
Adform’s business might sometimes be confusing for outsiders, but actually, most people interact with us daily! Every time you see an ad online, it might be served by us. Adform connects brands to the right audiences in the right environment, making digital advertising work in an automated and seamless way.
🔵 How did you find your way to joining Adform?
It’s an interesting story, actually! Back in 2016, some of my former colleagues were working at Adform, and I only heard the best things about this company and the work environment. I was 100% sure I also wanted to work there, even though I didn’t even know what Adform did.
Back then, I had just graduated and went around the world travelling. Whenever someone asked about my occupation, I said without any hesitation – once I’m back in Lithuania, I’ll work for Adform. When the time came to move back to Vilnius, I sent a single CV – to Adform. I was just so sure that I’d get the job. And luckily, I did!
🔵 You have worked in various positions within Adform, including relocating to the US office way back in 2017. How did you get this opportunity? How did that experience go for you?
It still feels unbelievable I got to work in our New York office, in the center of advertising! I’m very grateful for that opportunity to this day.
My Team Lead at that time encouraged me to apply for a temporary position in the US, even though I had only worked at Adform for 1,5 years and still felt like a beginner. If someone had told me then that I would soon lead a client meeting in the Empire State Building, I would have just laughed.
But as soon as I moved across the pond, I was soaked in the advertising world – Our American team took me to a client meeting on my very first day. In addition to being jet-lagged, I was a bit intimidated and confused as it was a completely new experience for me. Before that, I had supported clients exclusively via digital channels and emails. So the first days felt like a lucid dream at times, but it forced me to adjust to the new situation rapidly.
I was also living very close to Times Square, which stunned me completely. Such experiences really make you believe in the ”If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” mentality.
Overall, it was an exceptional way to get out of my comfort zone, boost my confidence and gain more industry knowledge. The time in the US office built a solid base for my next career steps in Adform.
🔵 What were some of the US-specific challenges?
One of the biggest challenges initially was the time difference with the tech people from the Vilnius office. If I had any questions before, I could simply approach the correct person in the office. But by the time I got to the office in New York, the people in Vilnius were already wrapping up for the day. This turned out to be a great learning experience: to support clients independently and on time, I had to expand my knowledge about the various aspects of Adform’s products.
🔵 What did you learn about the US market from your time there?
NYC’s hustle and bustle gets you into a workaholic mode, which was very enjoyable for me! I saw the American way of doing business and pitching clients. Their style is more fast-paced than in Europe – if you don’t impress the client during the first minutes, it will be much harder going forward. It felt like a constant battle for everyone. If it’s not you, then it’s someone else. You simply cannot lose focus.
One more thing I learned – you can always blame the subway if you’re late to the client meeting. 😁
🔵 What’s your current role? How would you explain your job in layman’s terms?
My current job title is Global Platform Solutions Consultant, meaning I’m managing the accounts of well-known global brands. I focus on the technical side of things, for example, making sure that Adform’s products are smoothly onboarded and used across the markets the client requires – no matter if it’s the US, Spain, Japan or Australia, they all must operate in sync. Or if I had to explain this to a 4-year-old – I’m building a customized puzzle and making sure it doesn’t break.
My role is global, so working at Adform’s Vilnius office makes cross-team and cross-office communication really easy and fun! Having client support and development teams here is very convenient as you can easily have a “coffee chat” about your business case followed by a good pool game. The foreign colleagues also often visit the Vilnius office, which gives us a chance to catch up.
I’ve never worked around such inspiring and supporting people before. Even though the company is vast, you still feel like a part of the team and working towards a united goal.
🔵 What have you learned from working alongside the biggest advertisers in the world?
It was most interesting to see that we speak the same adtech language anywhere, but it’s wrapped in a different cultural environment. Out of personal experience – eating a fried pigeon in China or raw chicken in Japan makes you feel like a complete outsider. But once you get into the meeting room, we’re back on the same page, speaking adtech.
Jokes aside, onboarding large multinational advertisers usually means staying with one account for at least two years, as it takes a while to build that customized puzzle across all the markets. In the end, you are so involved that it almost feels as if you’re working at the company. It is a priceless experience as I get to see the digital marketing strategies in different industries – retail, automotive, telecommunications. Not to mention meeting the brightest, most inspiring people along the way!
🔵 And finally, you have now worked in Adform for nearly six years. What has kept you in the company for so long?
I previously thought that even three years at one company would be too long. But here we are… 😁
Adform keeps challenging me to this day, and I still see a lot of opportunities to grow. That’s the most important thing for me. Additionally, the team is hands-down one of the best things in Adform. It’s difficult to explain to people outside the company, but we have a special vibe that all our people share due to Adform Guiding Principles, the seven of them in total. It really is a great environment for kick-starting or accelerating your career!
Rakettitiede is a Finland-based IT consultancy company. Their core expertise lies in web and mobile services, IoT, and embedded systems. And this year is their 10-year anniversary!
We had a chance to talk to their first employee Jartza Tulilahti, who has seen the company’s journey from the very beginning till today. In contrast, we also talked to Minna Wahlroos, who joined the company at the beginning of this year.
We talked about employees’ independence, their projects, as well as the company’s radical transparency and opportunities for the employees. Of course, we were curious to know what makes Rakettitiede such a company where people want to work for long years. What’s special? And we got the answers!
The Interview
🔵 Nice to meet you, Jartza and Minna! How are you?
Jartza: Resource number 1 is operative. All systems go. How may I serve you?
Minna: Good! Caffeinated!
🔵 Jartza, you were the first employee of Rakettitiede! What’s the story behind joining the company?
Jartza: My professional IT career started in the ’90s. After around 15 years of experience in the IT business, I started to feel that I’m just a money-making machine to other people in a business that always ends up in co-operation negotiations. Then, after spending up to 160 days a year in hotel rooms working as a traveling instructor via my own company, I felt like enough is enough.
Then I started a plumbing business. 10 years ago, when I understood that being a sole proprietor didn’t always guarantee steady income, I posted my thoughts to Facebook: “Maybe I should get a real job?” An old colleague of mine soon replied that they had started a consulting business and asked if I wanted to join them. I hesitated for an hour or two, but in the end, I was convinced that the company was on the right track and immediately felt I was in the right place. I still do.
🔵 Minna, what is it like to be a newcomer in Rakettitiede? What caught your attention to the company in the first place?
Minna: I became aware of Rakettitiede’s kind of a “hybrid model” between freelancing and fixed salary employment. And I had overheard good things about Rakettitiede’s culture and people. So it was by word of mouth you could say.
🔵 Jartza, you’ve been in Rakettitiede for 9 years now, which is longer than average to be in one job. What is it that makes you do this work every day?
Jartza: It’s the perfect combination of lean bureaucracy, interesting projects, healthcare benefits, highly professional people, and learning new things every day. Rakettitiede has grown steadily, but not too fast – our recruiting methods try to keep the company culture alive while also taking care of the people already in the company. People respect each other and you can also always learn something new from others as everyone has their own area of expertise.
Rakettitiede takes care of people by providing a very extensive healthcare plan, not to forget the mental part. There is always help available for an overloaded mind. The occupational safety committee not only takes care of the statutory things but tries to think of new ways to implement so-called “preventive maintenance”, acting before problems grow too big.
Our projects have provided enough challenges to keep the work interesting. And in the end, salary is, of course, something you can’t dismiss. It’s very competitive and motivating.
🔵 In Rakettitiede, employees are called Rocket Scientists. What does this mean for you personally?
Minna: Personally, it does remind me that I’m in a group of solid professionals and we work on complex problems that sometimes may feel like rocket science.
🔵 The previous interview with Rakettitiederevealed that the company has loads of different projects and could also find the right fit outside the embedded / mobile / web header competencies. Is it expressed in your practical work and how?
Minna: When being often a sole reinforcement, there’s a wider range of responsibilities involved, and sometimes helping clients to maximum extent involves additional skills to “just coding to the spec”. Often there are no clearly laid out specs, and maybe creating those is the primary work.
🔵 What has been the most memorable project for you in Rakettitiede?
Jartza: Most definitely it isTagsu – an electronic name badge I designed, implemented, sourced the components, mechanics and arranged the production of the device. The device itself is simple, but as a project, it was extremely educational for all the steps required to get something from the idea to the actual physical product. Without the help from Rakettitiede, this kind of learning project wouldn’t have been possible.
Minna: I have been working the whole year on a single project, and it’s great! I have a chance to contribute to something that brings comfort and safety to people’s everyday life, and not just money. Using bleeding-edge technologies, with a great team!
🔵 In Rakettitiede, how is it decided, who gets which client and project?
Minna: There’s very clear visibility on what external needs have reached our sales, so everyone interested can see immediately if something especially appealing comes around. Then you discuss further to be 100% sure if it’ll be appealing to both parties. Contracts are implemented so you can hop out if necessary, however, it isn’t common due to transparent and clear pre-gig discussions.
Jartza: Yes, it’s always the consultant who decides. If for some reason a consultant feels a need to change position, they can always talk to sales to find a new project. Some gigs are short, but others last for years. Some of the longest projects have already lasted over 5 years!
🔵 Rakettitiede is currently looking for experienced full stack, mobile, and embedded software developers. What would you recommend to new candidates?
Minna: I think Rakettitiede is a good company for experienced developers who want the comfort of having a company supporting you, as well as being a part of a like-minded community. I see it as a very worthwhile alternative to freelancing, especially with Finnish taxation.
Jartza: We’re indeed looking for new talented developers, so send us an application! Even if you won’t get selected now, we might be able to provide you with some insights on how to improve your talent and apply again later. There’s nothing to lose.
🔵 And my final question will be direct – how Rakettitiede has helped you in your working life?
Jartza: By providing me with the opportunity to work on interesting projects, providing all the necessary tools I have requested without hesitation, and being supportive in case of any issues. There is always help available if you just ask, be your problem work or personal life related.
Minna: Do you mean after finding me a wonderful gig? 😀 I’m quite independent, but they’ve definitely supported me when I had doubts about something. I love the radical transparency that runs in the company.
Hiring is currently a red-hot subject in almost any industry, but even more so in the IT sector, where there never seems to be enough talent. Finnish tech companies are therefore looking beyond the country borders to find a sufficient number of specialists.
That’s where Wefind IT comes into play with its hiring solutions geared towards attracting technical talent in the Eastern European region, especially Russia. We interviewed Mikhail Kotsik, Technical Director, and Ainura Kiviniemi, Head of Sales & Marketing, to find out how they can help with building remote product teams or relocating talent to Finland.
Interview
🔵 The shortage of talent has paved the way for many freelance, remote, relocation or nearshoring service providers. How does Wefind IT fit into this picture? What services do you offer?
Ainura: In short, Wefind IT offers comprehensive HR & recruitment services for Finnish companies looking for IT talent. We feel that we are an exact solution to the ongoing hiring problems in the IT industry, especially when a company is open to working with English-speaking remote engineering teams.
Our motto is “We bring international IT talents to you!” and that is precisely what we do. We have built a talent pool across Eastern Europe, working in software development, cloud consulting, and data engineering. Our services include hiring these specialists for part-time and full-time positions, subcontracting project work, IT consulting and direct recruitment.
🔵 From which countries does Wefind IT search for talent?
Mikhail: We have recruiting partners in Russia, which is a breeding ground for top professionals, but we do not necessarily limit ourselves geographically.
🔵 Do you focus more on providing talent for temporary (project-based) or permanent positions? How about relocating talent?
Ainura: We always tailor the recruitment solutions to the client’s needs as hiring challenges are never alike. Our focus is on providing full-time specialists for remote/project-based positions, but this might not always be the best fit. For example, to boost internal communication, some employers only hire talent that can participate in team meetings in person. As a full-service recruitment provider, we can help clients in those situations as well.
A significant factor is what candidates we manage to attract for a given position and whether they prefer to work remotely or can, in fact, travel or relocate to Finland. To summarize – both options are possible. We serve the client based on their needs and candidates we can find on the market.
🔵 How long does it usually take from contacting Wefind IT to finding suitable candidates?
Ainura: On average, the search for talent takes about 2-3 weeks, but the record time for finding a suitable candidate is only a couple of days. The timeline mostly depends on the required seniority – highly qualified specialists are more likely to need headhunting as they usually don’t look for new opportunities themselves.
When looking for a specialist, we utilize our significant proprietary talent database, consisting of experts we have already worked with before. Additionally, we publish the vacancy on the leading job boards in the region & on social media, with our in-house HR manager helping to sort the candidates.
🔵 Mikhail, let’s talk a bit about your talent pool’s technical qualifications. Does Wefind IT cover all the prevalent modern technologies? What are the most requested skills from your clients?
Mikhail: I think it’s important to distinguish between the most popular and most requested technologies. Modern technologies are not always among the most requested from clients.
Usually, the best developers spend a lot of time pursuing excellence in modern technologies. They also invest a lot of time to keep their knowledge up to date. So it is usually much easier to find a developer proficient in a fancy modern technology than an expert in a legacy enterprise solution.
In most cases, we successfully find the requested developer. But it’s important to keep in mind that some skills are more popular than others between talents. The most popular technologies at this moment probably don’t come as a surprise: Java, PHP, GoLang, React, ReactNative, VueJS, and AWS.
🔵 How do you screen talent’s technical skills beforehand? For example, do you have technical assignments?
Mikhail: We always follow the clients’ standards for technical assignments, as the developers become part of their team. So we cover all assignments and interview rounds the client requires to make sure the candidate is indeed a good fit for a position.
However, I want to stress that ideally, the hiring process shouldn’t take too long in the current market conditions because developers sometimes get 3-5 offers at once. The faster employers have an advantage.
🔵 What have been the most complex projects that Wefind IT has carried out?
Mikhail: I believe that with a correct process, everything is possible. So far, the most complex project has been creating a team from scratch for a huge banking project at the intersection of cryptocurrencies and the modern banking system.
🔵 What recruitment trends currently have the biggest impact on your operations?
Mikhail: The coronavirus and continuously growing need for IT specialists forces companies to rethink their work arrangements. They have to adapt to remote work, which certainly is a positive trend from our point of view. Also, the Finnish educational system clearly doesn’t satisfy the market demand for technical talent, and it’s unclear when the situation will improve.
Ainura: When talking to the clients, it sometimes feels like all senior IT talents are already working for the biggest IT companies in Finland and enjoying comforting salaries with great company benefits. As a smaller tech company, it might be difficult to compete in that environment. However, smaller players still need the same level of professionalism to develop their products or lead their tech department. This is where we can help by pitching the employer to our senior specialists.
🔵 Based on your experience, is it challenging for employers to start working with international talent? For example, companies might have to deal with translating all the documentation into English.
Mikhail: Seriously, the only problem is time zones. 😉 I think keeping technical documentation and comments in English is a widely adopted best practice by now. It is mauvais ton to have comments in the local language. Of course, it goes both ways, so we have also implemented a professional-level English test in our recruitment process to verify talents’ abilities.
🔵 If everything sounds good so far, where can you learn more about Wefind IT and how to get started?
Ainura: The easiest way to learn more about our services is to look at our website. Additionally, you can send us an inquiry via email or LinkedIn.
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Developing business-driven ecosystems and enterprise architectures all have a clear objective to make clients’ lives easier and businesses more effective and functional.
Multinational strategic change and technology company Nortal’s Partner and Head of Technology Jarkko Enden explains why digital ecosystems utilising modern CRM and ERP solutions are a hot topic in IT at the moment and how teams at Nortal embrace it.
Interview
Hello Jarkko! Tell us a little about yourself.
I have 20 years of experience in different areas of software and IT service development. This includes enterprise architecture, full stack development, concept and business development, agile processes, DevOps, software architectures and quality management processes.
Healthcare is topically my strongest area, since I’ve worked as CTO in a healthcare company. I also have a long background in developing with Microsoft’s tools.
Your role, Head of Technology, covers a wide range of responsibilities. When did you start at Nortal and how does your daily work look like?
My career at Nortal started about 4 years ago, after working in healthcare technology for almost 20 years.
At that point Nortal had worked with healthcare clients mainly in the Baltics, and my role as a Lead Architect was to kick-start this business in Finland. It was quite a big risk, but during these four years we managed to grow this part of our business exponentially, and currently our teams consist of more than 60 experts.
Currently I’m the head of our Technology & Business Solutions unit, developing our internal processes and solution portfolio, as well as overseeing the work of various development teams. I also work as an enterprise architect in large digital ecosystem projects.
Nortal in Finland has 4 offices (headquarter in Helsinki), nearly 200 employees and 35 years of history! The company is providing technological solutions and consulting in all domains – healthcare, public sector, industry, enterprises etc.
The importance of education is a trending discussion in the computer science sector. Do you think studying is worth the effort for an IT expert?
I have studied at Helsinki University and have a master’s degree in computer science.
It is many times said that you really only learn once you go to work. But as a serious IT expert, it helps to have theoretical knowledge to be able to look at the big picture.
At Nortal you talk a lot about ecosystem thinking. What does the notion mean and why is it a hot topic now?
Basically, this idea comes from the fact that the whole world has gone digital. Nortal’s digital ecosystem approach initiates a shift toward viewing IT as an ecosystem, rather than a simple business function.
As technology can change entire industries’ business models and create new business opportunities for innovators, IT must become a strategic partner to management and an enabler of business transformation.
For us at Nortal, we strive for long customer relationships. Our aim is to be the enterprise architects of the digital transformation of our customers. We are very much focused on business benefits and tailoring solutions for each customer.
To put it very simply: IT is not a business unit anymore, but rather an enabler for the entire business ecosystem. It’s quite natural that this is a hot topic in an exponentially digitalizing society.
No arguments there, digitalisation is far-reaching and full of potential. What tools do you use at Nortal to make this happen?
Our aim is to utilize the most modern and robust tools available. Depending on the customer case naturally. We want to make sure that our tools and architecture solutions support modern environments and are also future-proof.
In our customer projects we aim to utilise secure, cloud-native solutions and hybrid cloud architectures. We have deep expertise in all the main cloud environments (Azure, GCP, and AWS).
Nortal values cross-functional teams. How do you implement it in Nortal’s daily life?
Especially in larger projects our teams are built around business processes instead of technologies, and they are composed of cross-functional experts. In one team you might have CRM and ERP experts, and custom software developers, all working towards the same goal.
However, certain dedicated projects might have expert teams focused on a specific system, such as CRM.
At Nortal, we value cross-functional know-how and learning. We have a ‘Friday Techie Show’ for all our developers and IT experts, where people get to present their work and findings to others.
Also, our Finnish IT architects have their own group, which normally gets together quite often to discuss architecture decisions, technologies and current business topics.
Our senior architects also typically contribute their know-how for sales activities.
Give our technologically talented readers some tips. What does it take to become an IT architect?
Generally, a senior IT architect needs to have a good understanding of enterprise architectures, business processes, data solutions, and client communication, to mention a few. Leading architects also need to develop suitable leadership skills, which in today’s working culture have to be based on merits on architectural thinking, and not top-down management.
The role of a solution architect at Nortal is a very strong and responsible one. Architects have an important role in projects, but they also hold the torch of implementing practices around the organization.
Nortal is a strong supporter of constant learning and education. We support our employees in applying for certifications in different areas, such as Microsoft Dynamics and cloud technologies. All Nortal group employees are also entitled to use one workday per month for education.
What’s hot in the talent market and what sort of specialised expertise are you currently looking for?
CRM is a hot topic right now, especially as part of a comprehensive IT architecture renewal program. CRM, customer relationship management, is traditionally viewed as a standalone sales tool. In the modern world it is actually a lot more than that. CRM (or XRM) is an essential part of a modern enterprise ecosystem.
Nortal is currently looking for CRM specialists/architects to take part in these ecosystem projects.
Do examples inspire you? Who is your role model or guru if you can say so?
This is easy! Martin Fowler, who is perhaps the best-known software architecture expert in the world. Among other things, he is considered to be the father of microservice architectures. He introduced innovative solutions already as a young IT guru in the 1990s. He is still a visionary in his own field of designing software.
It’s evident that joy is built into your profession! But how do you take your mind off business?
I have a passion for music, and I tend to joke that I’m another failed rock star. Back in the day our band was close to making it, at least we thought so.
I still play guitar in a few bands. Together with Nortal’s Chief Legal Council we have a group, which you can see as the house band at Nortal’s parties.
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