Since our big announcement a few weeks back, we’ve dived in with our new CI&T colleagues to get to know each other and begin the integration of the two businesses.
Recently we were lucky to be joined in Melbourne by some of the CI&T team (Leonardo Mattiazzi (Partner), Nilton Tadashi (M&A Integration Director ), Felipe Rubim (VP Asia Pacific Japan) and Leo Abdala (Business Director) who came here from Brisbane and the US.
What a fun, productive and hectic week we had!
Having gone through acquisitions and integrations in the past, I was expecting formal meetings, presentations, change management processes, and top down approaches. But this was different.
From the moment I started interacting with them, one thing that surprised me was how easy it was for any of us to connect with them on a personal level. I could truly see their main company value of ’human first’ in action. They prioritised making deep connections with us over everything else. They showed interest in learning about how we do things, what is important for us and our people and wanted to co-design a future and vision together.
One of the first things they told us to do was to close our eyes and imagine Transpire had acquired a small team of seven people from Brisbane. But this Brisbane team comes with a global support system – like knowledge bases built by 6700+ people across the globe, case studies, initiatives, budgets, and multiple locations across the world.
It’s empowering to dream about all that we can do when not constrained by being small.
Together, we went through a few co-design workshops to understand the cultural differences, lean engagement models, growth units, and adhocracy – which enables CI&T to scale fast while keeping an entrepreneurial mindset and autonomy within smaller units.
It was humbling to know more about some of the things they have done so far, and on a scale we cannot even imagine (yet!).
Some of the things that really caught my attention and excited me throughout the week were:
Scale
As part of CI&T, the Transpire team will form part of the APJ (Asia – Pacific – Japan) unit, meaning we go from the existing Transpire team to working together with teams in China, Japan, and Brisbane.
People before software
Another CI&T value that is featured strongly is “we develop people before developing software”. There is an absolute commitment to supporting people to grow their skills and careers, with lots of amazing data around the training and support that all CI&T employees can benefit from.
Diversity & Inclusion
One of the things I was personally so happy to hear about was the investment made in giving back to the community. A recent D&I initiative – a bootcamp for training hundreds of underrepresented people to get their tech career started – was my personal favourite.
The CI&T team were humble, empathic, open and gave importance to making personal connections with each of us. We shared a lot of meals together, gave them their first taste of espresso-martinis and they made us Caipirinha. They even taught us some Brazilian hand gestures in return for teaching some Aussie slang.
After this week with our new colleagues, I am so looking forward to building great things together with our new big family.
