On a scorching hot day in Buenos Aires (36 degrees Celsius!), we had a refreshing visit to the office of Intive-FDV and met with some truly cool people.
‘Somos mucho màs que software’ (we are much more than software) is the company slogan you can find on Intive-FDV’s stationary, t-shirts and walls across the company. And as we experienced, the company really lives by this slogan.
FDV was founded by 7 software engineers and university friends in 2006. Since then, the company has integrated with Intive and has grown to 160 people in their Buenos Aires office with a total of 1600 worldwide.
Intive-FDV are proud of their people centric approach. The People, Cultural and Development team (PCD) is just one example of this. They are considered the ‘soft’ part of Human Resources and formally meet with everyone in the company at least twice a year. However, their door is always open to discuss anything from training requirements, career paths and plans, to raising issues regarding the work environment. The PCD team members are like Scrum Masters dealing with personal impediments.
The culture at Intive-FDV is one of openness. People are encouraged to raise anything they are concerned about. To keep a creative and innovative environment with high client satisfaction, Intive-FDV recognises that talented and engaged team members are essential. When talking to team members it came across how proud and passionate they are about making a contribution to the company.
There are several guilds where different competencies regularly meet to exchange ideas and learn from one another. On the day that we visited, the front end developer’s guild was having a session. We heard about the plans to start a guild for Product Management. Sharing knowledge and continuous improvement is engrained into the ways of working. When speaking to Mariano, one of the founders, it became clear that the pillar of ‘inspect and adapt’ is something that Intive-FDV fully embraces. In our conversation the ‘20 ways not to teach coding in the soup kitchen’ came up, referring to the initiative started by the founding partners to attempt to teach coding to people from dis-advantaged backgrounds. They faced challenges, adapted the approach and now various social community projects are running succesfully. For example; working together with ‘Developers 4 Good’ in Buenos Aires, organising hackatons for creating free apps to have a social impact. For example, an app for people with Down syndrome was created and apps for people with autism.
It was inspiring to hear the stories behind Intive-FDV (Mariano was such a good story teller, I could have sat and listened for hours), meet the people behind the success and see the quality products as a result of putting into place practices inspired by the fundamental Agile values and principles.
Many thanks to everyone at Intive-FDV for spending time with us and making us feel welcome. And special thanks to Christina, for organising our visit 😊.
