Discovery: Marcelo López of UruIT

As the CEO and Co-founder of UruIT, Marcelo López is a true believer in teamwork. Any given week you’ll find him hopping from office to office, continent to continent, engaging (and depending on) a massive network of people, technology, and ideas.

These days his main focus is on assisting startups and established companies in the U.S., offering development solutions for new and ongoing projects (and more than a few thoughts about the future).

What is UruIT?

UruIT is a development company based out of Colombia and Uruguay. Our main strengths lie in the design and development of web applications. More recently we’ve done some mobile projects, following an Agile, user-centered design approach.

We’ve helped more than 100 brands, startups and SaaS companies in the US to bring their digital products to life. We’ve created everything from a telecom ecommerce portal to a content analysis tool focused on marketers to a SaaS rewrite for the commercial real estate industry.

How big is the company?

Our core business brings together about 70 professionals, including UX and UI designers, product owners, scrum masters, and full stack developers. Plus, we have other support roles working for US clients, either as an extension of their local teams or as a full remote scrum pod.

We have a few spin-off companies too, like a platform/product for gamification of sales teams. Another company implements Microsoft business solutions, then a third one assists other digital agencies with the creation of world-class public portals. In total, it’s roughly 120 people distributed across five or six countries.

What was your inspiration for co-founding UruIT?

My friend Iang Yim and I started UruIT in his garage in Uruguay. We met in 2004 while working for Tata Consultancy Services, helping to grow the branch that was serving the U.S. We learned a lot, but as Software Engineers we realized that there were ways of delivering products with improved quality.

In 2007, delivering software from Latin America was in its early stages. We decided to leave TCS and create our own company, where we could work in a different way … less hierarchical and bureaucratic than the way multinationals are run.

Our dream was to create a more flexible and innovative place, putting our focus on the clients and the best technology to serve them. We didn’t want to chase growth at the expense of quality. It’s kind of a boutique service in that way. One of our first clients was Microsoft, so we like to think we somehow started on the right foot.

You have clients all over the world, what guides you when you’re balancing multiple deadlines and time zones?

Actually, most of our clients are US-based, although we do help some corporations in Latin America, and our workforce is quite distributed.

We’ve invested a lot in Agile working methods, and that gives us tremendous advantages to dealing with deadlines and managing projects under pressure. We’ve been evolving not only the scrum ceremonies, but other initiatives such as having a flexible scope, budget caps, and aligning goals with discovery phases and early/frequent releases.

We’ve created an environment where it doesn’t matter if people are in the same room or in different countries. Our teams rely on a set of tools to stay connected with our clients (and among themselves) such as:

• Zeplin, built for designers and developers to exchange resources and suggestions regarding an application’s interfaces in real time.
• Trello, used to organize the project’s roadmap and the team planification.
• Slack/Zoom/Skype and similar tools, which allows the whole team to stay in touch and connected throughout the day.
• Assembla, a management tool we use to organize tasks.

For critical projects, we don’t hesitate to jump on a plane and travel onsite. That said, our clients love coming to visit us in South America, particularly during the US winter months.

Have you noticed any surprising trends this year?

I hope we see more real scenarios that introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the digital experience. We’ve seen a lot of buzz about AI, but not a lot that identifies a true return or strategic advantage in the respective market.

We continue to rethink how new products are built, with the actual users in mind. Smart companies are gathering and implementing user feedback as early in the process as possible. Blending design into Agile development is now a reality, and we are able to incorporate feedback from the users right from the kickoff, which is great.

UruIT has a fun vibe, how would you describe the culture there and how did it evolve since the founding?

Do you mean because we have a jacuzzi in our office’s backyard? Because we do! We still see UruIT as a horizontal organization. Anyone can participate in our company’s varying projects and activities — from presales to marketing — and I think that sense of collaboration has fueled our growth. Agile is in our DNA, not only our dev practices, but also in our values.

Recruitment and induction are part of our secret sauce. We take this process very seriously, including coding challenges and multiple interviews to make sure someone is the right fit.

We don’t rely on typical human resources policies, so we’ve been experimenting with holacracy and similar innovative ways of management. Although we’re constantly evolving, I think what remains the same is our taste for good quality code and technology.

How do you relax when you’re not building digital products?

Well, meat is very popular in Uruguay (official count is some 4 cows per person) so a classic Uruguayan barbecue is the best way to relax.

If weather permits, I also enjoy running. At home, I like Netflix (Casa de Papel, Narcos and Stranger Things are my top 3) or reading some good material on entrepreneurship or growth hacking.