Interview with Jonàs — CTO

We’re starting a series of interviews at Partoo to present different profiles in the Tech team.

We want to share and learn more about the amazing people behind the Partoo Tech Team. Today we present the testimony of Jonàs Bru, our CTO.

Before Partoo…

After school, I obtained a degree in Computer Science before joining INSA, an engineering school in Lyon. In my final year, I did a 6-month final internship with the Atlassian support team in Amsterdam. My mission was to evolve the tools of the support team to respond to the sharp increase in the number of customers. The problem was very similar to the one encountered at Partoo. This internship allowed me to discover the start-up environment and I loved the atmosphere there.

After this internship, I wanted to come back to work in France and join another start-up atmosphere. I joined AlephD, a company specializing in programmatic advertising. My mission was to create a monitoring dashboard for clients. I was working alone on this project, which allowed me to acquire a lot of technical skills, having no one to advise me or help me.

After 3 years, AlephD was acquired by AOL. There, I discovered the advantages and disadvantages of a large group: longer and more political processes, but with more resources and means. I was often seen as a mentor to newcomers, but I had never done direct management. After 5 and a half years there, I decided to leave. I had done the tour of my role, there wasn’t much that interested me technically.

So I left in search of a new adventure! I wanted a job in which I could be a manager, especially a Lead Dev position. A recruiter contacted me and suggested Partoo…

Why did you join Partoo?

I joined Partoo for two reasons: I wanted a Lead Developer position and I was looking for a product that I could relate to.

Since my arrival at Partoo, I have been fortunate to be able to evolve a lot.

When I started, there were few experienced people. I worked in pairs with Thibault Coudray (alias Thiboc, former CTO), whom I helped and who put a lot of confidence in me. I had a good command of the technical level. And 9 months later, I was appointed Deputy CTO for 5–6 months. With Thiboc leaving Partoo, I was then offered to replace him. And after interviews with Webedia, it was confirmed that I would take over as CTO!

What has been your most significant milestone since joining Partoo?

When Thiboc took over the Tech team, everything had to be built from A to Z: creating the features team, setting up processes, etc. When he left, I took over and I’m quite proud to have been able to optimize and grow the structure he had put in place. As Partoo grew and the product developed, the Tech team had to be strengthened with more senior profiles.

If you had to sum up the daily life of the Tech team at Partoo, what would you say?

That’s a pretty broad question!

The tech team is made up of 7 feature teams, grouped into 2 tribes. Next year we want to move to 11 features teams and 3 tribes. 70% of their mission is to develop the Partoo product by adding new features or improving existing ones. For the rest, the remaining 30%, you have to deal with incidents and lend a hand to other internal teams.

Tech teams are masters of Partoo products!

To give you an idea, for the typical week of a Software Engineer, we use an agile method in scrum mode:

• we run sprints of one to two weeks. A sprint is a time when we will define the work we will do in the weeks to come. It begins with a retrospective of the past sprint and then with the planning of the sprint to come.
• every morning, we have “Stand up Coffee”: we make a summary of the progress of ongoing projects, the team explains what they did the day before, what they will do during the day or if there are any blocking points.
• since the start of Covid, we also have a time of the week called “Chapters”, which are meetings to circulate knowledge between teams of developers.
  All members of the Tech team are encouraged to present a session on topics that are dear to them and to participate in our Tech blog by writing articles on topics that motivate them.

What are the tech team’s upcoming projects?

Partoo’s Tech team is growing as the company grows. We evolve existing products to take into account new customers, and invest in new products to meet market needs. “A product that does not evolve is a dead product.” We are continuing to improve and update our products in real time.

We are currently working on new features like Google Messages. You may have already seen on Google Maps that it is possible to send a message directly to an establishment on its Google page. We want to make these messages available on Partoo so that merchants can manage Google messages, but also Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. from a single platform.

We are also working on functionalities adapted to our large accounts and customer networks to allow them to modify their information in bulk. These are only a few examples, but there are many other projects, we’re clearly not lacking in ideas!

What is your message for future candidates?

From a technical point of view, we are facing more and more interesting challenges. The Tech team will evolve a lot over the next few years: the structure and best practices put in place today will guide us to boost it. Joining us now means having a guaranteed impact on the future product. Future candidates will quickly be able to take responsibility. The big challenges will be to adapt the application for international use and to simplify it so that it is also suitable for small traders.

What profiles are you looking to hire next year?

We want to continuously build new feature teams. For this, we are always looking for talented Full-Stack developers, Lead Developers and occasionally Back End specialists in Python.

In terms of human skills, we are mainly looking for Developers who have a product vision, who believe in our products and who want to have an impact. We want to recruit people who don’t just look at the code, who don’t just come for the technology, but who bring positive and lasting global change to the product and the team. Motivation and team spirit are essential values ​​for the positions to be filled!

If you want to join the team, we’re recruiting! Check out our offers: https://careers.partoo.co/jobs