From software to teams - a Barcelona story

Right to left: Robert, Pedro, Rosa, Samanta, Katia, Inma, David, Miguel, Gerard

Once upon a time, there were intentions and rumors that we will expand to Spain and open an office in Barcelona…

There were a lot of uncertainties and only a vague picture of what this would mean. Nevertheless, the company offered me a great opportunity to be on the front line when opening a new location and recruiting a completely new team.

With little information and no clue what would await me, I partnered with our location manager Pedro. We tried to learn from previous developments and wanted to go some steps further to create this new location to be future-ready whatever may come.

When arriving in Barcelona mid of April 2019, Pedro already hired Rosa, our recruitment speedboat, and Samanta, our back-office conqueror. With this setup, we set out to explore all the foundations we can build upon and implement new ideas from the start.

During this time, I was overwhelmed by the time investment necessary to focus on a project like this. During the first weeks in Barcelona, Rosa and I mainly focused on recruitment: reviewing profiles, delegating technical challenges and doing on-site interviews.

Once we had the first contracts signed, we took of some energy from recruiting and started to account in people development. It can be considered bad or good, but there was little help or resources on how to develop our employees. This gave us a lot of possibilities, to design first versions for an onboarding process, a mentoring and personal development program in a new country facing cultural differences. Additionally, we invested resources in improving the interviewing experience of our candidates which would not only benefit our efforts in Barcelona.

One of the most important learning was, that we do not only need these initiatives and programs for the employees that are directly targeted. Also, the employee being the mentor or executing force will be thankful for every help or guidance, since we are all starters at some point and we also want to guarantee a superb minimal standard for everyone.

I learned that this is a constant effort where you should start and experiment, and the time investment did not stop with the departure from Barcelona back to Vienna. It would be of no help when designing these programs in a lab. Hence, we had people joining and trying out these programs with our new colleagues and then we improved it again!

Besides this, there was another challenge to be tackled. We opened our new department office in Spain, but the XXXLGroup was rather unknown as it does not have any stores in this country.

Our new colleagues and potential candidates believed in our story and goals for our digital department!

Luckily, a bunch of motivated and brave people decided to join us and be the first to shape the culture of this new location.

Now, we can proudly look at a new location for our digital department with lovely new colleagues that share our common values. We had a great start working together closely and connecting them to our colleagues from Austria.

With this great foundation, we are eager to tackle whatever may come and bring our products and culture forward!

Author: Robert Jacobi, Frontend Developer

Robert @Ironhackaton Barcelona

Team Barcelona