Chau BCG! Gracias... Totales!

When a chapter finishes, another one starts. I'm here now to talk about the one I'm closing.

Last Friday was my last day at BCG...

When I joined BCG, it was out of boredom and an everlasting feeling that I was stuck, and I was. During my last year at Careem I had more managers than the previous 4, there was a lot of restructuring and in terms of growth I wasn't feeling I was accomplishing what I wanted and the kind of problems I was solving I didn't find them interesting anymore, I wanted to dip my toes into some technologies that were not part of the stack at Careem but the team I was working with didn't have the scope to introduce them, mid-management was enforcing some enterprise design patterns that made sense only in large codebases, like some of the services we were running at the time, but not every single one, it was just overkill to only pass interfaces around in a 10 files microservice, for example. Hence, I chose to move on at the time

One thing I remember the most when I joined BCG was one of the Principals who gave me one of the onboarding sessions, Sebastian Wismayer, who told me:

Don't worry, you won't get bored at BCG

And he was completely right. I was exposed to many industries at multiple levels and many different technology stacks I was not familiar with. I was exposed to different types of engineering, I did Data Engineering, I did AI Engineering, I even did a bit of Data Science, I had to adapt to what each project needed and this mix of different industries and engaging at different levels gave me the breadth I wanted to become a more integral Engineering professional, able to talk business, manage a diverse team effectively while also keeping the technical depth I had.

I was part of full blown mobile banking rewrite, digital data platforms design and implementations, real time data pipelines, DevSecOps inceptions in the context of complete transformations, Agentic AI concept proofing. Engaging in multiple levels, I've managed multiple teams at the same time, handling 20+ cross-discipline mixed (consultants from different agencies and client staff) team members in hybrid environments (remote and on-site), I've engaged in systems design and architecture, team structure conversations, project steering and rescuing, strategy as well as in technical implementation across multiple industries such as banking, airlines, public sector and investing, all of this gave me a broader view of how the Engineering function can contribute to businesses in different industries, how innovation looks like in each industry and how to push it forward.

It was a very exciting 3 years and a half period for me, but also very demanding and tiring. During those 3 years I spent only five months at home counting the weeks in between projects, with the exception of a 4 weeks internal project I did remotely from my home in Dubai. Airports became my second home and flying was part of my weekly routine. Departing often from Dubai at times so that I could be early morning next day at client's site, my luggage bags became my entire closset.

I remember times when I went on a dinner date with my wife or to watch a movie with the family and then leaving to the airport straight from the mall. There were projects where sleeping was a rare luxury, we often finished working at client site and continued doing some project steering or defining strategy after hours in hotel lounges or alone in my room working on slides or talking points for the next meetings with my client counterparts.

I learned a lot, but specially I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I am stoic and resilient, I can adapt to many conditions and many roles depending on what the project needs from me. I can lead, I can be an expert, I can be the technical person who owns the system, I can manage a whole domain. I have a pretty good learning elasticity, oftentimes I had to bring myself up on a topic I knew nothing about the week before and master it as if I was an expert practicing many years so that I could speak with my client counterparts. I can mentor others and learn from them while they learn from me, BCG was like going to school again, only getting paid this time.

There were a few colleagues I enjoyed a lot working with: Johannes Wimmer, Jakub Fila, Sebastian Wismayer, Ben Dietz, Ning Yang, Anne Kleppe, Lukasz Bolikowski, Kamal Mukhalalaty, Nicolas Guelzow, Anna Battle, Nelly Abdrakhmanova, Llewelyn Strydom and Sandra Nolasco, my staffing coordinator who found all those amazing learning opportunities for me.

It was time for me to embark on another adventure for personal reasons, that travel intensity was not sustainable for me over time anymore. I enjoyed a lot for sure, but I was in need for something that let me be more time at home and share more with my family.

I'll tell you about my new adventure soon enough...

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