The Most Awesome Agency You’ll Know This Year 🚀

Oh, hi there! Welcome to an introduction to PICUS on Medium!

You might be reading this because you know of PICUS and you want to hire us. Maybe, you’re our next team member, and you decided to check out our work. Or maybe, you are just mindlessly browsing through Medium and stumbled upon this article.

So, let’s get straight to the point — what is PICUS?

PICUS is a digital product agency based in the small town of Viana do Castelo, Portugal. We deliver great digital products by focusing on the quality and the user experience.

Don’t leave just now, yet!

We have partnered with organizations of all sizes to design, develop, and grow their products for Web and Mobile. We have more than 25 years of combined experience in our team and developed +50 projects for clients in +8 countries.

Among our clients, we have worked with a series of company in multiple sectors with a focus on several private clinics that assesses medical conditions by analyzing brain activity, a startup that combines satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to give trustworthy data about terrains, and a startup that gives you delicious recipes and allows you to order the ingredients necessary to your home with a touch of a button.

Our Processes

Our Playbook contains all the guidelines needed to develop our projects.

It is the core of PICUS. The playbook outlines, our planning, our technology stack, designing, developing, production, measuring and our company culture.

If we could summarize our development process down to a few words, you would get something like…

• Behavior-Driven Development;
• Security; Continuous Deployment;
• Git; Scrum; Pair Programming;
• Rapid Prototyping; Testing & QA;
• Clean Code;
• Trello;

Candidates

We work at a sustainable pace of 40 hours per week. We give 5 weeks of vacation time per year, in addition to national holidays and sick days. New parent? We got you covered — at least 6 weeks leave with the option to take at least 6 months off.

We really value learning. If you want to stay on top of your game, you need to be continually growing, so that’s why we pay 50% of the expenses when one of our members speaks at conferences. Also, we cover all costs for job-related training.

Fridays are the best days of the week. No, not because it represents the end of the week! It’s because on, Fridays, we have our investment time. On Fridays, we make time to invest in bettering ourselves, PICUS and our community. We learn new tools, techniques, blog and work on open source projects.

In addition to all of this, we have a competitive salary, with remote days, a flexible schedule and health/dental insurance. Oh, and you also get to work in Viana do Castelo, one of the best beach towns in Southern Europe.

Our Community

Every month, we organize the Viana Tech Meetups. These are monthly gatherings of technology enthusiasts from the North of Portugal, to discuss the latest topics related to Design, Development, and Technology overall. We have organized +10 of these meetings, and we upload the full video of the meetup on our Youtube channel, for everyone to see.

We also have an internship program, dedicated to helping students and young graduates develop their skills. We organize these Bootcamps by seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) and we let our new apprentices learn about Development, Design or Marketing. With these intensive weeks of training, we give our contribution towards creating a better future for our Bootcampers.

We don’t want to take more of your time. We hope we got your attention. If you want, you can send us a “Hey from Medium!” over at hello@picus.pt. Or, if you are going back to scrolling social networks, make sure if you stop by our Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. We promise you won’t regret it.

Ricardo is the CEO of PICUS. Obsessed with becoming “Design Sprint Go-to-Guy” in Portugal. He organizes meetups at his hometown, occasional speaker, and overall a tech enthusiast. Follow him on LinkedIn or Instagram!

Want to see how we work day to day at PICUS? Follow us on Instagram for our daily story updates and feel free to ask us anything!