Brigad connects hospitality businesses with qualified & flexible staff. Jean is Brigad’s co-founder, CTO & CPO, managing four teams: Product, Engineering, Quality and Data. Yes, all at the same time :) He will share both his experience from 3 years of handling these functions, what he learned in the process & his beliefs about the mix: Should all startups have a CPO & a CTO?

1. WORK YOUR WAY.
11/07/2019 - D-Code at TheFamily

2. Brigad?
We match businesses with
vetted temp staff in the hospitality industry.
Currently available in 6 cities in France and in the UK.
4000+ freelancers / 1500+ businesses
70 employees

3. My role
Co-founder, CPO & CTO
I’m in charge of Product, Tech, Data and QA
~30 people by the end of the year
4 direct reports

4. My background
Geeking since 13 y.o.
First real production done at 16 y.o. (and still live!)
Epitech master degree
Worked in different startups
Tried to launch different projects prior to Brigad.

5. FEEDBACK ABOUT
BEING CPO & CTO

6. Extremely efficient for Seed / Serie A
Mastering 80/20 decisions
Ability to split large features into small iterations.
Find quick wins that have a strong impact on the business.
Limiting technical debt while remaining lean.
Pros

7. Easy to balance your product debt vs technical debt
You're responsible for both
Exit long debate to prioritize technical debt among features.
Knowledge about debt which is the most harmful for the business.
Balancing the Build vs buy dilemma.
Pros

8. You can’t run daily operations
You build a team of doers with managers
Your impact as a solo contributor is very limited.
You need to build a team of doers and managers and it has a cost.
But it forces you to structure your team which usually is a weakness during early stage phases.
Challenges

9. Brain gymnastic on different topics.
Staying ahead of the curve
Constantly switching from one topic to another.
You need to keep track of internal and external factors of your company.
But they are complementary and help you to make global decisions.
Challenges

10. HOW DOES IT SCALE?

11. Scenario #1
Focusing on company strategy and board level.
Impacting the product & tech vision.
VPs own each vertical.
Voice of the “tech” departments at the board.
Good way to step back as a co-founder.
Critical size needed to be impactful and not overlapping VPs.

12. Scenario #2
Splitting the CPO and CTO roles
Focusing on one of them, being more impactful.
Opportunity to hire someone complementary.
Can be a good intermediate step.
Less impact on the overall organization.
Risk of misalignments between CPO and CTO.

13. SHOULD ALL CTO BE CPO?

14. CTO & CPO ?
Depends on the mindset
I'm a generalist with a technical background
I broadcast the vision toward teams
and scale the global organization

15. CTO & CPO ?
“The company is a network, people are nodes, discussions are APIs”
Henri Asseily

16. CTO & CPO ?
Depends on the project
B2B Marketplace with low volume intensity
Main challenges are UX, Automation and Data Science

17. CTO & CPO ?
IAAS, SAAS and Open-Source technologies
make building and running of software easier.

18. HAPPY TO TALK
ABOUT IT
jean@brigad.co