Our Engineers Don’t Just Build, They Create
Just about every technology startup has an engineer as a founder or co-founder. At BCG Digital Ventures, we encourage our engineers to think like founders and creators.
By Alexander Grosse, VP of Engineering at BCG Digital Ventures
At DV, we invent, build and invest in startups with the world’s most influential companies.
Engineers play a key role in this mission from the start. Rather than working through a series of tickets to make someone else’s ideas into a finished product, we focus on our creative potential as engineers and also the possibilities for the products we build. And at DV, we build businesses.
As VP of Engineering at DV, I want our engineers to be more than cogs in a machine. I want us to use our intrinsic creativity to play a part in steering the direction of the products we build. I want to leverage the valuable skills we already have, and develop our engineers into leaders, creators and business-builders. We’re engineers, but we’re also entrepreneurs.
Variety and adaptability
I don’t expect engineers to come to DV fully-formed. That’s why we’ve put into place programs and processes to help our engineers grow. One example is the development program we recently introduced to put our engineers on the path to becoming CTOs of our ventures.
We build many companies, and they’re all different in their own way, solving vastly different problems with different solutions. The technology we use adapts from project to project, each lasting between three and nine months. Then, after a few weeks where you can focus on training (with courses paid for by us), you’ll move on to your next venture.
Maybe you’ll be working on a software project that’s heavily data-focused, before moving on to an IoT-based project that involves a completely different set of requirements. There’s no danger of being bored.
In the words of Timothy Clifford, a Lead Engineer at DV:
“One week we may be building a micro-service in Scala for a banking venture in Berlin and the next week deploying an Apache Spark cluster for a logistics venture in Amsterdam. Each new venture brings with it a different set of business and technical challenges and as engineers at DV we assist in solving both.”
Focusing on the future
Because we’re always focused on the future at DV, you’ll get to work with the latest technology as part of a framework geared towards large-scale adoption which also makes use of established technologies. You’ll be encouraged to learn skills at the bleeding edge of the industry and combine them with competency in mainstream technology that enables easy maintenance and user experience. When we work with partners, we often suggest projects that leverage brand-new technologies that will revolutionize the market, and we work to combine these with practical established frameworks.
For example, AI and IoT have both recently reached market-readiness, and we’re currently building companies that use these technologies as a key part of their offering. But we can’t just rely on bringing in readymade AI experts from the outside: We expect our engineers to build expertise in these areas through training and internal projects, which they work on between ventures. This principle applies to every groundbreaking technology on the horizon (and over it!). Our engineers are always developing new skills at the forefront of technology.
Progress won’t stop in any of these areas. We constantly map technologies we expect to be market-ready over the next few years, and support our engineers in exploring what will come next so that when the time comes we have the resources to deploy the most cutting-edge tech.
Cultivating creativity
It’s more important than ever for engineers to build creative skills, creating value and becoming leaders in order to define the path that technology takes.
Our engineers don’t just follow orders, they make their own decisions. They have an equal seat at the table alongside product, marketing and design.
Engineers at DV are involved in developing ventures at every stage. Our venture building process encourages this: We start by generating ideas and testing them on a small scale, a stage in which our engineers play a large part. In fact, we have a specific role responsible for facilitating idea generation and testing: that of the Creative Engineer. A Creative Engineer will use their broad knowledge of technology to explore what’s possible and, when it makes sense, build prototypes to test ideas.
There have been many instances of ventures for which a Creative Engineer has played a key role in the inception and development of a venture. One of my favorite examples is Atfarm, the venture we built with the agricultural company Yara. Atfarm combines Yara’s technical resources with satellite data to help farmers determine the optimum fertilizer distribution for their crops. Afarm is now used by thousands of farmers to manage hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland.
Atfarm came out of technological experimentation and development led by a Creative Engineer, who later joined the company as CTO. This is a prime example of how we give our engineers room to explore their ideas — and the resources to make them a reality.
Training the next generation of leaders
We also give our engineers the opportunity to become leaders. Every engineer at DV has the chance to become a Venture CTO, and we’re building a dedicated training program to develop engineers into CTOs.
I believe that engineers are particularly well-placed to provide unique value in building companies. With this in mind, our Venture CTOs are expected to act like co-founders, responsible for the technical aspects of the company that are integral to its success while also having an eye on the wider strategy and overall operation of the venture.
There are plenty of examples of DVers joining as engineers and developing the skills necessary to take key roles in building companies from the ground up, acting like co-founders to structure a venture’s technical side, and balancing this with the other elements necessary to build a successful business. Additionally, the CTO position isn’t the ceiling for our engineers — they’ve also gone on to become General Managers, leading ventures.
In order for engineers to grow, they need to cultivate more than just their technical skills. Many of us began our careers as engineers in order to create, and the best way to fulfil our creative impulses is to become leaders as well as great technical problem solvers. By combining these skills, we can create better products, solving today’s problems with technology and creativity.
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