Engineering a Unicorn

Our fearless leader of engineering, Rolf Njor Jensen, has toured the world this past year — telling his story of running an engineering organisation in a unicorn company over the course of 10 years.

Rolf is a humble Danish guy and his highest ambition is, like all good sons, to make his parents proud of the job he does.
But software can be hard to explain to people outside our industry, even more so to your parents.
Questions like “Did you really spend 10 years building only one product?” pop up at family dinners and it’s hard to find a suitable answer for this.

As Rolf once told me: “We should have been building bridges or houses instead. People can actually see the results of your work then!”

Last time Rolf presented his talk Engineering a Unicorn, we were lucky enough to get a recording of it, which you can watch above.
The video is from the GoTech World conference in October — which we previously covered here.

The presentation naturally highlights some of the technical challenges Tradeshift engineering has faced and solved. But it also focuses on how you scale the engineering organisation and how you keep your engineers motivated by giving them growth opportunities.

I hope you enjoy the video :-)

But wait, what is a unicorn?

Maybe the title of this blog post left you wondering:
What is a unicorn exactly?
Perhaps something you eat for breakfast? :-)

Unicorn definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unicorn