Manu

What advice would you give to aspiring IT leaders? “… to cultivate your soft skills, which become crucial when you reach leadership and managerial positions ...

I think that as a leader, in a key IT position, there is a lot of psychology involved in your inner game as well as in your interactions with other stakeholders. Fortunately, our company BDEO is really attractive to new talent due to the possibilities of growing inside the company and the relevance the company is achieving in the market. In this type of situation, the scope of the project was not clear from the beginning, and the customer had too much power to make changes. So, the training hasn’t been directed to replace my functions, but instead, to train different people specialised in the various fields that I was covering myself previously, and that had me totally overwhelmed by the amount and diversity of tasks. The technology field evolves so quickly that it is really important to keep up to date. Fortunately, I was advised that most of the companies created by recent graduates go bankrupt very quickly, and it would be better if I first found a job for a few years to develop some experience. As a CIO and a co-founder, when we started the company, it was easier just to allow the culture to be transferred informally from the co-founders to the rest of the team. I think that my career path is quite different in the sense that I was very much interested in having my own business, and that business needed to be in a field that I was fully interested in: software development. So, we incorporated a process to define our values and culture in an explicit way, always including the team in that process. I don’t want to stress about the difficulties of filling any specific role, as I think it is complicated in general. As a CIO, my role is internally oriented to the company. More specifically, we are reaching incredible numbers in terms of accuracy in the detection and estimation of damages with our AI for motor insurance.