Get to know our Sevendos partners: Wunderdog!
Wunderdog - Future-proof design & development
Sevendos is a newly formed company joining the forces of Polar Squad, Hidden Trail, OrangIT, Finitec, Cyberdo, AI Roots and the star of today’s interview: Wunderdog! Get to know our partners by reading our blog.
I interviewed the COO of Wunderdog, Miki Wiik, to better understand what their mission is and how they work in the area of software design & development. Read on to get to know them as well!
What is Wunderdog about?
There’s three aspects to us that are really important:
We’re a consultancy offering services in full-stack software development and software design. One of our key values in that aspect is that we’re focused on continuous growth: the technologies, the market and our customers are always changing, so continuous learning and adapting to the ever-changing situation is critical to our success.
We strive to be valuable for our customers in becoming their partners. We’ve found that the customers that we have greatest synergies with are those that wish to embark with us in a mutual growth journey, so they see value in us by finding here the opportunity to scale up fast and grow, and these customers usually align best with our values and help us grow as well.
Then there’s the most important part: our people. We want to be the best platform for professional growth. We want our team to be offered opportunities to grow professionally by working for various customers which are challenging and insightful.
What does Wunderdog mean when they say “full-stack”?
We use the term in its literal meaning: we can take care of the entire lifecycle of software products. For example, a typical software product will have to be designed properly for a good user experience. Then, we’re looking at a user interface, whether it is a website or a mobile app. The business logic interacting with a database to store data will typically require one or more backend servers. Those servers will have to be deployed on some infrastructure, which could be in an on-premise infrastructure or on the cloud. All the code involved in the product will require various elements of software testing. Figuring out how to have a team (or multiple teams) solving this business challenge in all its details and intricacies is what we call the full stack, and it is in this sense that we say that we do full-stack software development consultancy.
No individual can do all of that on their own, but we are aware of that and we have people taking those various roles, each having their own individual focuses, to be able to cover the full stack as a team, and we are working together with our customer to solve those business challenges.
Can you tell me about Wunderdog’s history from your perspective?
Wunderdog began about 10 years ago and I (Miki) started working here about 8 years ago, so I’ve seen most of Wunderdog’s history. Over the years, there’s been so many changes in the software industry: the Agile movement, design thinking has changed, cloud providers grew really big, the DevOps philosophy has had major impact on software development teams, quality has also become a big topic, machine learning happened and are evolving so fast in changing the ways we do business in all aspects, etc. For Wunderdog, that meant that we constantly had to adapt to this ever-changing landscape and this has generated a lot of growth opportunities for our team. We had to figure out how to stay at the top of our game, how to remain a big player in the market, what problems we want to be solving. I am proud to admit that we’ve done that very well, and that we’re still doing it!
When I began in Wunderdog, I had been doing mostly software development; that’s the bulk of my professional career. I believe that the reason I am here today is because Wunderdog has empowered me into this growth journey and I embraced it, leading me to grow within the organization as well as an individual; I think this is what’s beautiful about Wunderdog, that we’re all trying to grow together, both as individuals and as a team.
Miki Wiik, COO & hands-on Advisor at Wunderdog
What problems are you trying to solve in the field of software?
The companies we work with are usually already building software in-house and have their own products. Using their own understanding of the capabilities of software development, they come up with ideas. But then a few questions arise, such as
Do we have the skills to do this ourselves?
Do we have solutions to the problems that our ideas will bring in the future?
Have we succeeded in doing similar achievements, ensuring that we know we can execute on our ideas?
Do we know anything about the technologies required to execute?
and this is where we shine: we can not only help them answer those questions, but we can become part of the answer by working together with them, whether is it by assessing our customer’s capabilities, supporting their software & design teams by joining them with our consultants, or spearheading our customer’s projects; it all depends on our customer’s needs, and we do our best to align with those.
What kind of approach do you take to tackle these problems in practice?
Let’s look at an example. Suppose we’re speaking with a company that has an existing product. That means they already have existing processes in place, with various levels of maturity and quality. Our people are consultants with quite a lot of seniority, so they’ve seen many environments and know how to navigate them. One of the key skills of our consultants is that they know what needs to be done and they adapt to the existing processes and technologies in place. This adaptive mindset is crucial when moving from one assignment to the other, so that we can provide solutions that work for our customers.
For example, from what angle should we see a current struggle our customer is experiencing? Is it a business challenge? Is it problematic because of the software architecture? Are we supposed to re-design something? Tackling a problem from the right angle is critical to align how we collaborate with this customer and get the best outcome.
In the end, our process trickles down to our values. Being a consultant is very self-driven; it’s a very personal thing, it’s a people game. Before one of our consultants proposes a solution, they really need to understand the problem and listen to their customer to answer questions such as
What’s the business problem?
Who’s the decision maker?
Where can we propose a solution?
Only then can we propose something that makes sense for the customer that aligns with their agenda. Achieving this successfully is key to our growth at Wunderdog as well.
What are your future plans at the moment?
We are in a position where we need to continuously redefine how to stay relevant for ourselves, because the market is constantly changing at a very fast pace. We cannot do everything, so we need to make sure our focus is clearly defined, even though we have a lot of capabilities. Just to list a few examples, we can work in areas like software development (building products), developer productivity, design, machine learning assistants, the list goes on.
How do we use data to drive our decisions? How do we use GenAI in a sustainable way? I think those are very interesting themes overall. One thing that is always a topic of discussion for us is how to enable providing people with the best platform for professional growth in a way that is clear, concise and efficient.
One big change that we’ve adopted recently is that we’ve re-organized ourselves internally and setup people leads. We try to be a flat hierarchy as much as possible to provide people with the freedom to grow, but we also want to support our people in their growth. So we’ve introduced this perhaps more traditional supervising role but we felt like this is what we need to have to provide everybody with the ability to grow according to our values.
How do you see Wunderdog’s collaboration with Polar Squad, and more generally with Sevendos?
In my mind, this is a very natural coalition of companies. If you look at the lifecycle of a company, all of these consultancies fit a certain need in that lifecycle. If you are growing as a company, you might need help from different partners in different phases where you need different sets of skills. So I think together we can provide a much broader supply of skills to help any customer dealing with software.
Wunderdog has very broad shoulders to stand on. For example, cloud infrastructure is a part of the full stack. But it’s good to have colleagues that speak the same language of software development and we are able to very easily see according to our values how to succeed. Now we need DevOps experience beyond what we already have, that’s Polar Squad. They are our partners in that area.
But if there’s a quality issue we’re dealing with, we have Hidden Trail to support us. If we’ve built a new product and it’s in production, we can pass the ball to OrangIT who specializes in maintaining software products. If there’s skills that we don’t have or needs that we don’t match, there’s this large pool of skills provided by Finitec, AI Roots and Cyberdo that can support us to fulfill customer expectations in all kinds of areas (especially data and AI), and we do use them quite a lot!
So all in all, I think this partnership is making it official that not only are we in a strong position, but our ecosystem supporting us is strong as well, and we will only keep growing together!