How do our own skilled and dedicated employees describe our tech and development community? We’ve had a chat with one full-stack senior consultant, one Product Insights Lead, and one Product Development Director about what it’s like to work with tech innovation at Visma.
You can read the first interview with Brian Ye, Product Insights Lead in the Data Science Tech Hub, here.
Q&A with Louise Lindberg
Tell us a little bit about your background?
I’ve studied MSc in Industrial Management and Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. I was especially enthusiastic about the programming courses in my studies, and even though I knew that software development was not my future job, it led me to the tech industry. I’ve been working at Visma for four years and I started as a Management Trainee.
During the last three years, I’ve led a development team working with automation to optimise the work processes for Visma’s customers and internal employees. One month ago, I got the opportunity to become the Product Development Director for a portfolio of products and development teams delivering common components to all Visma products.
At the age of 27, managing an organisation of ~65 people is nothing that I believe any bigger organisation would allow—but here I am. I’m so happy to work in a company where I get to challenge myself every day, with people that believe in me and give me these extraordinary opportunities.
What does a typical workday look like for you?
My typical workday is mainly about coordination, driving projects and ideas in the direction of the strategy—and finding out what the strategy should be.
This means I have several meetings with the team and development managers to assist them in their daily work and point them in the right direction. We also discuss the team or product and how to move forward, what they need to focus on in order to follow the strategy.
Currently, we are also looking into how we can position and market our products better at Visma. That means, I arrange workshops and create slides, posts, and so on to establish the message we want to communicate to our potential clients.
Interested in learning more about how we work with software development and technology innovation? Visit our TechZone.
From your experience, how does Visma’s tech culture differ from other companies?
Being at a large company like Visma means we have many processes in place in areas that we find important, such as security. This means, you can focus on your product and the development. Even though processes are in place, Visma allows you to test and try new technologies and tools, and it is OK to fail and learn, as long as you can change direction if something goes wrong.
In that sense, we are a large, established tech company with an extremely strong market position that also has an entrepreneurial and innovative mindset and culture. I believe this is different from many other tech companies. The fact that Visma was founded in Norway has also influenced the culture. We rely on the employees to make the best decisions.
How would you describe the developer community in the company?
There are several ways to get in contact with like-minded people, which creates a community for Visma’s developers. Our guilds are arranged for and by people with the same interest or work focus to meet, share knowledge and get help.
For example, the Data Science guild is open for everyone interested in joining; you do not have to be a data scientist. If you have an issue, there are plenty of Slack channels to reach out in to get support from colleagues around the world.
If you are looking for opportunities to expand your expertise, we have online courses created internally at Visma aiming at sharing knowledge. Being a large company also means that if you want to advance even more and change position, it’s often possible to arrange internal rotations or promotions.
What are the main benefits of working in diverse teams for you, and why do you think it is important?
When developing software that shapes society, it is important that our solutions are sustainable in terms of fitting the needs of many. It also has to be sustainable from an ethical perspective. Our employees have different backgrounds and experiences which brings different ways of looking at problems.
Together, a diverse team can be more creative and innovative in collaboration with each other—where one person sees obstacles, another one sees opportunities. We can learn a lot from each other and this is helping Visma in creating better solutions.
I also see the advantage of avoiding bias with a diverse team thanks to them having diverse perspectives and consequently understanding different customers’ needs and taking different things into consideration.
For someone interested in becoming a developer at Visma, what are the top 3 things they should know?
- A great work-life balance where every employee’s needs are important to us, where we rely on developers to make the best decisions on how to do their work.
- Visma is promoting an entrepreneurial attitude where test and fail fast is a motto allowing the developers to be creative in their solution design.
- It is an organisation with low hierarchical processes, where your ideas and thoughts are highly valuable. This is why the responsibility lies in the teams.
