Interview with EQS Group CTO: Juan Antonio Galán Martínez

I interviewed Juan Antonio Galán Martínez, the CTO of EQS Group which is a leading international RegTech provider operating in the fields of Corporate Compliance and Investor Relations. He joined the company in October 2020. We talked about his career, his experience and challenges within EQS Group, and finally his preferred questions when doing some interviews.

Can you give us a small overview of your career, so far and how you ended up the CTO of EQS Group?

It has been quite a journey! I have always been interested in computers and programming. I had my 1st PC when I was not even 7 years old, it was a very limited 286, but it really got me into the world of PCs. I learned to program when I was around 9 years old, using QuickBasic in MS-Dos. For some reason, my uncle, who was a self-taught software engineer, left a book about QuickBasic at our home and I started using it to learn. At that time, I had no idea this was something one could do as a job, but the idea of being able to create software picked my interest. And it grew every day.

Eventually, I made the decision to study computer science and did that in Barcelona, although I dropped out in the last year for various reasons. One of them was that I got my first full-time software engineer job in a small company, in which I wrote some internal applications using PHP 4 (laughs). I had a few other jobs as a software engineer until one day I joined a company in 2009 and shortly after I got promoted all of a sudden to a leadership position. It was quite stressful but also a career-defining moment, I was leading a remotely distributed team working in a global e-commerce. That is quite normal now in 2021, but absolutely not in 2009. After that, I went on to take other leadership positions: Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, CTO… in different locations including Canada, Munich, and Dublin.

Then, a series of coincidences took me to talk to EQS Group. I loved the team, the company, and the vision, so I accepted the job and moved to Munich for the second time in my life.

How many times have you been a CTO/Director before joining EQS Group?

I’ve been in a few senior management positions since 2010, all quite different. From Head of Engineering at early-stage startups to Director positions in scale-ups such as Westwing. But this is the first time that I lead a large engineering organization.

What were the defining points of your career?

The first one was my decision to leave the first company that I joined after university. I was happy but I was not really learning at a high pace. I moved to a small company and had the luck to work next to two great engineers from whom I learned a lot, which changed my views and opened my mind. The software engineering world was changing very fast and I was finally in an environment that allowed me to catch up with it.

After that, came my unexpected promotion to a leadership position, as I explained before. It was challenging, stressful, nerve-wracking, … but I managed. That probably made me who I am nowadays.

The other career-defining moment was joining Westing in its 4th year of life. There I learned a lot about how to work in a fast-paced environment. Before Westwing I was a technical guy but in there I became a more holistic leader. I see technology from a different angle, and I understand better how businesses are built and how important is to have an engineering strategy that is adapted to each stage.

You must have had some interview tasks in your career. Can you give us some of your favorite questions?

Lately, I am frequently not responsible for purely technical interviews, but rather to test what we call cultural fit. Following that pattern, my best question, hands down is “Tell me about yourself”. One of my best advantages is that I understand people very well and can quickly connect with them. To me, the best way to form an opinion is to ask what they did in life, what is important for them, etc. Just hearing them, what they highlight, what they omit, can give me a very good view of their personality and interests. It is not perfect, but it has been very precise for me

When I test technical skills, I like to deep dive into a certain topic that both I and the candidate are familiar with. I try to get beyond the candidate’s limit of knowledge to see where it is and how they react to that. Are they open-minded accepting other solutions? Are they quick in thinking when they find themselves out of their comfort zone? Do they feel comfortable challenging me if I throw at them a bad solution or idea?

Looking back to the first day you joined EQS Group, what were some of your biggest challenges leading the existing technical landscape?

When I joined EQS Group, I was not asked specifically to take care of any topic in particular. The message was: “EQS Group is a very successful business, and we have a lot of ambition. But also a lot to do to get where we want to be, we need you to tell us how to get there from the technological point of view”.

In the first couple of weeks, the biggest challenge I saw or realized was the lack of engineering leadership at many levels. It was too big of a team for the number of leaders we had. We introduced the Engineering Manager role and the associated training. Luckily, we found a lot of them already in the teams, ready to take the step forward. I think we cannot move fast enough if our teams are not self-sufficient, so they can take care of everything related to their responsibilities. We also introduced roles to have individual contributor leadership, to clearly split leadership from management. That is allowing some very technically skilled engineers to adopt leadership positions, and have a much bigger impact at EQS Group, without the need to jump into management if they don’t want to. We all benefit from that.

EQS Group is a solid, established business. We have very ambitious targets, for which we need new products, more features, etc. but there was no emergency. That is why I decided I needed to focus on building the team so that everybody could take their decisions accordingly.

At our scale, we need an organization that is not dependent on a reduced group of people that takes decisions but rather one that can decide by itself when given the right context and expectations. I have worked a lot on that topic, and now we see strong leaders growing in the organization taking their decisions responsibly, challenging others, offering different points of view, changing their minds, etc.

We find ourselves in the situation now that most of our decisions are taken at the lowest level possible, which is the persons that are directly responsible for that matter. I am really happy with the progress we’ve made.

So your decision and time invested in the leadership program is already paying off, can you now focus more on company-level strategies?

Yes indeed. Sometimes the lowest level at which a decision can be taken is no other than myself, and I have the luxury to have the time to do that when needed. But as a CTO I also have the luxury to be just another opinion in the table most of the time and not a required decision-maker for every important decision. I make sure the right context and expectations are set before decisions are made, and then the rest is taken care of by the relevant people for every situation.

Nine months now since you joined, what are the emerging challenges?

We recently acquired our biggest European competitor in the compliance field, Business Keeper. They are a very respectable company and now that we join forces we can go way much further together. But we must first take care of the integration, which is always a complicated process. The better we do it, the further we are going to go and the sooner we’re going to do it. So far, I couldn’t be happier with the progress.

Does your heartbeat for developing exciting SaaS products? We are always looking for motivated new team members. Take a look at our vacancies: https://eqs-group.personio.de/recruiting/positions