TrustYou: A self-reflection and farewell letter.

April 30th was my last working day at TrustYou. It has been an amazing 6 year journey and I feel grateful for all the opportunities and growth. Working as engineer, manager and director building Reputation Management solutions for the Hospitality sector has been incredibly challenging and rewarding.


I still remember when I joined with the purpose to co-create and stream-align the process to enable scale and grow, and we did it (at least in some parts and up to a certain degree). Everything boiled down to continuously contributing to the mission of “Making the Guest Happy” by building and evolving incredible reputation management products like: Meta-Review, TrustYou Analytics and CXP Platform. Products used by world-wide key companies in the hospitality industry like: Accor, B&B group, Google, Microsoft and Hotpepper, just to mention some.


I feel honoured for having had the opportunity of leading and/or actively participating in: creating and scaling a new office in Spain, define and implement DevOps best practices (version control, automated testing, CI/CD, pair programming, ...) in a Big Data and Data Science (NLP) environment, working with and evolving old legacy code, experiment and validate ideas about Batch Processing, Stream Processing, Data Warehousing and Dimensional Modelling, building Data-Intensive and Analytics Products for B2B customers, being member of the management team of the Company, collaborate with Senior VPs and C-Level, collaborate in company strategy for increasing indicators like ARR and EBITDA through technology and product strategy, collaborate in maintaining and recovering the company during the pandemic, transitioning from on-site/hybrid to full-remote setup, and some others. Furthermore, I specially emphasize the opportunity to test and learn in each of the aforementioned experiences, being a key aspect for my personal and professional growth in this organization. 

10 Learnings of the journey

 

1. Stay true to your principles. A lot of times the organization or some people within the organization, with good intentions, will try to drive you away from your principles or core values to achieve a goal. The problem is that sometimes our blindness puts more weight in reaching the goal (The What) than on the values and principles (The How). Be consistent with your principles, don’t let the environment affect that.
2. Continuously work on (Self)-Awareness. Know yourself, give feedback to yourself, create an environment where you are constantly receiving (and off course giving) feedback. Because knowing yourself allows you to lead with compassion within your team and environment, to understand your strengths, weakness and improvement continuously, and generate a self-awareness culture around you.
3. Invest! in People and Technology. In short, they are the foundation for building technology-powered products.
4. Middle management is hard, sometimes ungrateful and ... after some long feedback loops can even be rewarding. Learn to deal with that.
5. Product roadmap could work in organizations for a while. Exact dates estimations could be necessary in very, very limited situations. But the combination of both is a recipe for killing innovation, reducing quality and an output-driven organization. Long-lasting and successful companies cascade a culture of continuous innovation, high quality standards and an outcome-driven approach; the recipe to achieve it is different.
6. Focus. Drastically reduce the amount of things you are doing and (over)-communicate it.
7. Writing up your ideas is an incredible tool for understanding the lack of knowledge and clarity you have about it. Give it a try.
8. Agile and Lean Software Development practices can’t be implemented in the same way always, it won’t work. We need to put them into context: the team and the nature of the project/product (Ex: Data-Intensive != Web Development != AI … ). Beyond the luxury of embracing the practices and principles, the challenge is understanding how and when to apply and adapt them.
9. Continuously create space for the Build - Measure - Learn cycle.
10. Starting company-wide initiatives without the main sponsor's buy-in could lead you to delay, cancellation and frustration. 

Thank you!

I want firstly thank Victor Mendez for trusting me from the beginning, for empowering me and guiding me through part of the journey. It was, again, a pleasure to work together. You keep inspiring me with your servant leadership and principles.


I want to extend a big thanks to the Team, which means not only the ones that are there today and not only the engineers, but every person that one way or the other played in the same team with me to achieve something during all these years. Each one of you has, in some way, had an impact on me, and I’m grateful and thankful for that. The TrustYou Team is the strongest power of the Company. The level of diversity, knowledge, courage, respect and adaptability are paramount and beyond the necessary to immerse yourself in a mission with them. Last but not least, THANK YOU my beloved Data Team for your continuous support, trust and team-work during all this time, you really made my journey worthy.


I want also to thank C-Level, especially Steffen, Ben, Roland and Nikolai for the trust and opportunities you opened for me in multiple stages of this TrustYou Journey.


Thank you TrustYou!


Now, it’s time to move on to new challenging opportunities and keep growing. Stay tuned!