My experience working in tech for a beer company
Working as an ML Engineering Director at the biggest beer company world wide has been an extremely challenging position but I am enjoying the ride. Let me tell you.
I’m getting work done. I’m working with great professionals. I envision tons of opportunities to work in. I like what I’m doing.
Responsibilities
I was given the responsibility to transform our analytics solutions into software products. To make that happen I started understanding in detail what we needed to make it viable. First who, then what, so I started by hiring each of the MLE’s in my team and onboarded them with a GAP assessment tool to guide them during the transformation journey on each of the solutions in the portfolio. I also opened the feedback door to improve our WoW quarterly and started executing.
Challenges
Several challenges were identified initially, some of them under my control, some of them not. I started getting things done with what I managed to influence and it felt super good to have so many low hanging fruits under my control. That helped us (me and my team) build a great relationship with our stakeholders (mostly Data Scientists).
With collaboration as a mindset and with open and direct feedback for product creation.
In order to accelerate the journey, an important cloud platform project started and created a lot of expectations among us. None of them materialized in the mid term. Nevertheless, it helped me identify the root cause of some of the biggest technical challenges we had. Another cloud platform project was in progress. Despite that, those challenges invite me to commit with those projects even more.
I am very confident of the quality delivered by my team. I am convinced that my biggest responsibility is to inspire them, encourage them, even demand them to contribute with the best we have on our side to build those platforms together. With collaboration as a mindset, with open and direct feedback for product creation and based on the end user in mind we jumped on that boat and we are still sailing those difficult waters. But you know what? We love sailing!
Opportunities
Inside the company we have an enormous amount of opportunities where technology and decision driven insights will make the difference. Some of them being high expectation projects with capable people allocated in the wrong project. That mismatch makes me feel frustrated from time to time. But by the other hand there are several high impact projects being led by the most talented professionals I have ever met. That makes me feel motivated, willing to provide direct and constructive feedback and to help the organization to learn faster.
By the other hand. I want to discover high impact opportunities inside the company. Attract the best talent inside the organization and build projects from scratch. We already have great examples of successful digital ecosystems such as bees.com and tadadelivery.com. And great examples of intelligence behind those platforms such as promotion optimization, customer touchpoint personalization, routing optimization, demand forecasting and much more. This makes me feel motivated.
And you know what? Opportunities are infinite. I am pretty sure that for those very sharp guys inside the company the possibility to lead the next big thing is very high. Something useful, meaningful, risky, were you will experience how it is to build something and sell it to your customers (who might buy or not).
Closing
Even in a massive company you should keep preparing yourself for the future. That is why I keep feeding a Startup mindset by cooking new blue ocean ideas internally. We call it the MACRO ENTREPRENEUR mindset. In that way I am developing skills such as creating the optimal backlog to execute faster than others, managing resources optimally and building strong people networks. Hopefully I will find the right sponsor and product market fit for my next adventure.
That is how I manage to work in technology for massive non digital native beer company.
Cheers.
