VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

If you think of it, if you spend your time with the machine rather than human, of course you learn the way of the machine rather than learning the way of the human, right? Today I am joined by Marius Hanganu, Managing Director of Publicis Sapient C.

Hey Alex, good to be here.

Marius is one of the co-founders of Tremend. Tremend was founded in 2005, grew into a 650-person company that was one of the fastest growing and largest independent software engineering companies in Europe. Last year they were acquired and now Marius leads the team formerly known as Tremend as part of Publicis Sapient's global distributed delivery model. So what was your background prior to starting Tremend?

For many years I've dreamt of becoming one of the best software developers. I realized I needed, let's say, more brain to do that. I have colleagues that are, if I can say this, much more amazing, if you want, and they're really excellent engineers. And somehow I found, let's say, my spot in the whole mix. I still enjoy building platforms and so on, but my spot was this mix of technical knowledge, of architectures and so on, but also delivery.

What are some of the challenges you're facing in terms of melding the culture of the startup that you founded into a larger company?

As humans, we have a finite amount of energy, right?

Right.

So we have to be careful where we spend that energy, right? And if you are to execute some tasks, but at the same time you need to deal with five organizational changes and, I don't know, allocation for certain files you are used to changes and, oh my God, where are the, you know? And again, coming back to ChatGPT, the fact that some of this workload is facilitated by ChatGPT, right? I mean, the instant you don't know something, you get a boost, a kicker, something that jumps you from zero to one instead of, I don't know, days and weeks, minutes and max hours, right?

What Publicis Sapient delivers for clients is transformation. And you as a founder have gone through your own transformations when running a company and now in becoming part of a larger company, it's constant transformation. So you have personal experience in this transformation that we're selling to our clients. What does that bring when you are speaking with a client, working with a client? What are your own experiences with transformation bring to a client engagement?

Definitely the empathy that not just myself, but I guess any colleague will feel towards a client in terms of the struggle to use a new system, change some process and so on. We will feel much better. We'll feel that from this perspective, especially since as digital companies, we go, as you mentioned, through this quite dynamic and continuous transformation. When we see clients in other industries struggling to maybe adopt a new platform and you become more empathetic and you become more close to their feeling. And from that, you actually start building amazing experiences, amazing customer experience.

Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to hear because engineering in general is thought of as a very hard skill as opposed to a soft skill. And then a company like Tremend started not just with software engineering, but even more on the hard side with embedded chips, a lot of very hard and technical things. But it sounds like what you're saying is that for a transformation project to succeed, it's as much, maybe even more so about the soft skills. It's about perception, psychology, empathy than the hard skills. So do you find that to be true? And also how does that work in terms of the people who are actually executing that transformation or partnering on that transformation? If they come from a more, if you would say, right brain perspective of hard skills and technical and detail, how does that work in terms of bringing along those people to employ more of those soft skills in what they do?

A more structured way of approaching this would be really understanding the psychology of change, which is usually goes together hand in hand with understanding a bit about hormones, dopamine, and all kinds of mechanisms that are described in neuroscience. And once you understand the underlyings of it, just like an engineer understands, okay, this code does this and that, right? Once you understand the underlying way of functioning it, then somehow it becomes much simpler, right? I mean, it's not just a blunt deployment of small tricks and smoke and mirrors here and there to trick the user into transforming, into following this digital business transformation path. But it becomes a more solid way of building not just the platform, but also the whole array of, let's say, mechanism. And in working with groups of people in adopting or changing or transforming and so on and so forth.

Is what you're saying a sort of path forward for engineers to become more empathetic in their work and to fold in not just the technical side, but also the human side into what they do?

The short answer is that it's just a matter of practice. I remember like long ago when I started my psychotherapy and I wanted to adjust some behaviors and the answer I kept getting from my psychotherapist at that point was, you just have to expose yourself to that experience in order to get more familiar. So if you think of it, if you spend your time with the machine rather than human, of course you learn the way of the machine rather than learning the way of the human, right? I mean, the salesperson, right, is all about interacting with people and understanding even if in an unstructured way, but understanding how things run. Versus when you spend the same amount of time, but looking at a piece of code and finding creative solution to make it work. So basically it's a matter of practice. I think everybody has it.

Marius Hanganu, Senior Vice President at Publicis Sapient and co-founder of Tremend. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Alex.