Everyone talks about product-market-fit, but at Athenian, there’s something we like to call customer-purpose-fit, which comes from answering the question: Why does an engineering leader come to Athenian?
People come to us because they want to set up their engineering organization for success, and they believe data and metrics are a great place to start, because they show where you need to invest your efforts to continuously improve.
There are three pillars of continuous improvement at Athenian: The first is the end-to-end visibility of your engineering organization’s pipeline. The second is our ”team-level,” no individual metrics philosophy. The third is Engineering Success, where we provide guidance and help make sense of the data as your engineering organization scales.
Every single person at Athenian owns the success of our customers. But having José Caldeira as our VP of Engineering Success guarantees that we’re invested in the success of our customers - because the journey José will guide them through is one he is familiar with.
What Is Engineering Success?
At Athenian, we often say: “We’re not successful if our customers are not successful”, but how will we help engineering leaders set up their organizations for success?
👉 By providing support throughout the implementation of Athenian (setup, rollout, training, etc.)
👉 By making sure engineering leaders are continuously improving as they navigate through the challenges of organizational growth.
We offer a tool that provides data, but what do you do with the data once you have it? This is where Engineering Success comes in.
Engineering Success goes beyond offering support when something fails. It’s about helping customers get closer to their goals through data and metrics and guiding them through every step of that journey.
With José as our VP of Engineering Success, our customers will be able to define their goals, identify blockers to success and create habits that will set them up for smooth sailing as their organizations scale.
Introducing José Caldeira, our VP of Engineering Success
Like Dilbert, our favorite cartoon-strip engineer, José was born with "the knack" for technology and started coding games in C when he was 14. Fresh out of his degree in Computer Science, José joined a small Portuguese start-up called OutSystems, and what was supposed to be a short trip became a 16-year journey. José went from being one of the first individual contributors to becoming VP of Engineering, leading one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the world.
José first stumbled upon Athenian in 2019 (with a little help from our friend Nuno Antunes) and has been helping build our product from the outside since. So, when Eiso Kant invited him to join the team, a mix between engineering leadership and customer success seemed like the perfect challenge and precisely what Athenian needed to ensure the success of our customers. So, José joined Athenian as VP of Engineering Success in May.
“OutSystems is my baby, and leaving was the roughest part of this decision. But my desire to help engineering leaders continuously improve, and to do it while building a product that I wished to have for a long time, made joining Athenian extremely compelling.” - José Caldeira
The learnings from José's 16-year adventure at OutSystems, and experience as a mentor to hundreds of engineering leaders, especially on Plato, make him the perfect person to lead Engineering Success and partner with our customers on their journeys to continuous improvement.
