Today we have selected Abel Osorio to take his interview. He is the CEO of WeDevelop.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
We were hit hard by the pandemic. It not only accelerated things but also made some things clearer to us. We’ve been focusing on learning and improving our company and processes since COVID kicked in. It was really good for us to face a crisis like this while still a young and flexible company. I have to add that being a Lean Startup was crucial for us to adapt to change and learn from it quickly. Now, WeDevelop is stronger, smarter, and 10x a better company than before this global pandemic.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I’ve been in the software engineering world since I was a teenager. It’s my passion. I love to design things and see them come to life. After more than 10 years spent writing code and learning about this exciting industry, I decided to take a leap of faith and start my own company. It was one of the hardest and most challenging things I’ve ever done, but luckily I had a great team to share and materialize my vision with. I have found a new passion: building productive teams made of amazing and beautiful people.
How does your company innovate?
Put it: by making mistakes. We love staying out of our comfort zone. We love trying out new things and hitting the wall from time to time. But when we do, we don’t struggle about it but quite the opposite: we enjoy it. I can easily track down our more creative and innovative moments, and they all come from us playing around with some cutting-edge technology or trying out completely new stuff.
The thing is, you have to be willing to undo plans and discover new and maybe unknown paths to learn something new. As Dr. Einstein said: “if you want different results, do not do the same thing.” We’ve achieved the capability of encouraging our team to be creative this way while keeping the company organized, clean, and productive.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Right now, the effect of the COVID pandemic over WeDevelop has been taken down close to none. That’s because we’ve always been a fully remote company and our culture grew strong on practices, methodologies, and principles about remote collaboration. I know that some companies struggled about leaving the office, but that didn’t happen for us. We fight against local and international restrictions, and of course, people are still getting COVID, but we’re relentless. The show will go on.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
Yes. Of course. In a world moving this fast, most of our decisions were super hard and time-sensitive. We made quite a few changes in the company. In a few words, we became more goal-oriented, not by focusing only on our goals but on our clients’ goals. During the first waves of COVID, we decided to run a research project about how companies were affected by COVID, which helped us learn about our clients and their needs. I have to thank Cindy Alvarez’ work on customer research. Learning is the #1 skill every person and company should have.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We simplified our management a lot. We used different tools and software to track data that wasn’t relevant to our business. We’re now leaner than ever and focus our management on a few basic KPIs. Our teams have adopted the Agile methodology – from HR to Engineering, making things a lot easier, agile, and efficient. I can personally say that my schedule has become lighter, and my productivity increased a lot by the mere fact of simplifying and putting the focus where it has to be.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
It’s hard to say. There are thousands of companies that provide software development services as we do. It gets tricky when many of them don’t have a clear value proposition, or the quality of their work is not up to any good standard. In 2021, with this industry growing so freaking fast, we’ve got thousands of competitors, but I truly believe that only the good ones will survive in a few years, and I’m confident that WeDevelop will be one of them.
I learned a lot of life-changing lessons, and WeDevelop has done the same. Our plan to stay in the game is as simple as having a clear and real value proposition -crafted by listening to our clients-, and being smart and flexible enough to adapt to a world that’s changing faster every day. Not to mention that we strive to provide white-glove service at the highest standards.
Your Final Thoughts:
Life has hard ways to teach us the lessons we need to learn, and sometimes we’re running so fast that life has to hit us hard for us to get ready to listen. COVID was a real hard snap, which made us stronger, whether we liked it or not. Now it’s time for us to create a new world and face many more challenges that life will present to us. I’m happy to be part of the WeDevelop family and see how its mission is fulfilled.
I want to use this space to encourage companies to try out our services. I’ll happily attend the meeting and make sure everything goes well. Our vision is to be the company everyone wants to work with, and we mean it.
- Spokesperson: Abel Osorio
- Company: WeDevelop
- Website link: https://wedevelop.me
