The Challenge
A leading European mobility company needed to scale its engineering capability. Software was becoming central to its products, and the business was consolidating suppliers to simplify delivery and reduce complexity.
Growing the team only in its home market was no longer realistic. Experienced engineers were hard to find, and hiring took months. Alternative locations were an option, but best quality and cost-efficiency were targeted.
The company needed an engineering capability that could understand complex products, adapt as priorities changed, and deliver consistently for years. The challenge wasn’t finding more engineers. It was building the right engineering organisation with the right culture, identification, processes and structures that sustainably delivers high quality output into an international collaboration set-up.
Our Approach
We didn’t start with team size or job descriptions. We started with the business itself.
Every engagement began with a short, structured workshop involving management, delivery manager in the first phase and engineering leaders, product owners and relevant stakeholders in second phase. The goal was simple: understand how the business worked before deciding how the engineering team should work.
We explored the product vision, the market, the technology landscape, and the roadmap ahead. We asked what skills were needed today, and what capabilities the business would need in 3–5 years from now.
Only once this was clear did we begin designing the engineering organisation itself.
The Solution
The workshops became the foundation for every decision that followed — how to hire, who to hire, when to hire them, and how to integrate them into the international collaboration with the customer and involved partners with appropriate structures and processes.
Instead of designing a team around available talent, we designed it around the business’s actual trajectory, around business goals. Hiring, structure, active mentoring, organisational onboarding, know-how transfer, team integration, continuous feedback & improvements and sequencing all followed from that understanding, not the other way round.
The Impact
Every decision that followed — who joined the team, and when and how they were integrated — was shaped by the customer’s business, not by whoever happened to be available.
This gave the customer an engineering organisation aligned with where the business was actually going, not simply where it stood on day one.
Why This Matters
Most engineering partners open with a project/program requirements document. We open with a conversation. Understanding a business and their goals properly, before building anything, is what keeps every later decision — hiring, structure, integration, growth — pointed in the right direction.