Standing Up a Development Centre in a New Geography
Brazilian Data Product Development Centre stood up; effective data capacity expanded without a culture rupture.
In brief
Situation. The company’s data product capability was concentrated in European development centres. Growth ambitions and talent economics both pointed to expanding beyond Europe.
Complication. Establishing a development centre in a new country is not the same as opening an office. It requires balancing existing teams’ roadmaps, transferring company culture, deciding who travels, who gets promoted, who teaches, and how compensation works across regions. Get it wrong and you build a B-team that resents the A-team. Get it right and you double your effective capacity.
Resolution. I led the establishment of a fully-fledged Data Product Development Centre in Brazil. The work included identifying culture ambassadors to transfer the company ethos, assessing existing team members for promotion, identifying training needs, and adjusting compensation frameworks to be fair across regions.
Impact. Centre successfully created and fully integrated into the global data strategy, enabling localised development aligned with company objectives. Effective data capacity expanded without a culture rupture.
The longer story
Setting up a development centre in a new country is mostly an exercise in anthropology. The technology travels easily. You can install the same tools anywhere. The culture does not.
Send the wrong person to set up an office and within six months you have two cultures, one of which is the parody version of the other.
The trick is to identify, in the existing team, the people who carry the culture without realising they carry it. They are usually not the loudest. They are usually the ones whom everyone else cites when they say “this is how we do things here.” Those are your culture ambassadors. Send them. Pay them well. Promote them when they come back.
The companies that successfully internationalise are the companies that recognise this is a human-systems problem, not a logistics problem. The companies that fail tend to send whoever was available.