Today we have selected Lukasz Korol to take his interview. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Code & Pepper.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Thanks. We are doing quite well.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I started my career as an entrepreneur the next day after leaving my university. So, this is my first job, and I’ve been doing it for 15 years now. I always wanted to take part in building new digital products. This is what we do as a company from the very beginning to this day.
How does your company innovate?
We need constant change and improvement quite deep in our DNA. The only unchanging thing is the set of values we want to deliver to our clients. The finTech app development landscape is changing dynamically. We need to follow these changes and adapt to them as quickly as possible. We measure our performance and how the market responds to our services, and we try to experiment with new ways of providing them. Some of those experiments succeed and tell us how to adapt our business accordingly (whether this means changes in the organizational structure, commercial model, or technology.)
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
The pandemic changed the structure of our clients. We saw that smaller companies are much less ready for investments in general. It means that the number of new digital products, especially in the start-up space, is lower than before the Coronavirus. We needed to switch to a little bit of a different market segment and adapt our offering accordingly.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
I don’t recognize any specific difficult choice to make. The main lesson learned was not to take the current market state for granted. It was a lesson that was quite easy to take, as we were already in a state of constant growth and development.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
In the case of Code & Pepper, we were always paying attention to internal and external transparency. This results in a very robust organization. In practice, it means that whatever was happening, no matter what kind of changes we were implementing, we were already prepared for proper internal communication. Being an organization ready for a change makes you quite resistant to a potential crisis. It is just another shift in your environment to take into account and adapt to.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We compete mainly with digital consultancy companies that support their clients from the beginning until the digital product development journey. We are trying to build our advantage by focusing on the specific sector, which is FinTech in our case. We constantly grow our FinTech products portfolio, giving us unique competence in the big and competitive software development market.
Your Final Thoughts
We see that there is another big challenge ahead of us. This is a challenge that all players in our market have to face. It’s about providing some unique value for software developers and other engineers, as the employee market is becoming more and more competitive. It requires an effective employer branding strategy. This strategy has to build on a unique value proposition for engineers. Without such a strategy, there won’t be any possibility to grow in the whole software industry.
- Spokesperson: Lukasz Korol
- Company: Code & Pepper
- Website link: www.codeandpepper.com
