Program manager: a wearer of many hats

Even for a modestly sized start-up, effective coordination among its teams is absolutely essential. As a program manager, David Gutman is responsible for making this happen at Homiwoo, with his tech background giving him a 360° view of the platform.

In the early days of any start-up, when everything (or almost everything) needs doing, confidence in the business and its creators is a key factor in convincing talented people to join its teams. When David Gutman joined Homiwoo in 2019 with a dozen years of experience as a software engineer, he knew perfectly well what he was getting into – having been a long-time friend of its founders, Adrien and William.

"As soon as the fund-raising enabled them to hire me without any reduction in salary compared to my previous job, I joined the team. It was a very small one at the time, as there were only five of us," he recalls. With such a small staff, "everything we did had major implications, both for our solutions and for the company itself," says this computer engineering graduate from Polytech Grenoble.

After his studies, his early career took him to a series of service providers, where he specialised in front-end development, coding with different technologies at different times (Java, .NET, etc.). He then worked as a contractor for large companies, and joined Thalès in 2013, where he stayed for nine years. His experience with the group made him an expert in the processing and integration of geographical data, a field known as geomatics.

From technology to project management

When he first started at Homiwoo, David Gutman used his technical expertise as a developer to focus on the production side, an area that includes customer operations, maintenance, and support, among others. As time went on and the payroll increased, David's days became more focused on project management. "Homiwoo is a growing start-up. To be efficient, we need to be organised and to make sure that teams are happy in their work," he says, having recently taken on the role of program manager. His task is to organise the various projects using a roadmap based on certain indicators (such as objectives and deadlines) that are agreed with the company’s founders.

To give a practical example of his day-to-day work, he reveals the organisation of a recent Homiwoo project to estimate the energy efficiency performance of people’s homes. Drawing on tens of thousands of datapoints, the project mobilised several different Homiwoo teams at the same time. One of them (known as the ‘constitution’ team) was responsible for retrieving the data, while another (called the ‘application’ team) placed a number of algorithms in competition with each other, and a third team (‘delivery’) created an interface for displaying the results clearly to clients. Lastly, a fourth team worked on the issue of scalability, focusing on the calculation pipeline and the necessary infrastructure for the solution to be deployed on an unprecedented volume of portfolio data. "We’re able to harness the different skills of each team, and internally, these are all considered to be different projects," says David Gutman, who is responsible for the overall project coordination with Adrien Bernhardt, the CTO.

Less technical, more strategic 

While still involved in the technical aspects of his job – and the management of the platform's infrastructure in particular – David is now taking on a more strategic role in the company. "I'm thinking more about where we want to get to, rather than how we're going to get there," says David, who never imagined finding himself in such a role after just three years. Despite having been an early advocate of remote working, long before it became widespread during the pandemic, David now particularly enjoys the days when everyone is in the office. There is no comparison in terms of atmosphere “and the coffee breaks are much nicer when you're not all alone…"

Today, much of his time is taken up by meetings and he admits that he sometimes misses coding, being a developer by trade. But he also recognises that “being able to get a solution out the door has a real impact on the company. At a service company or a large corporation, your impact is much smaller, because you can't influence the operational decisions to the same extent.” But in a company like Homiwoo, such an organising role is certainly a rewarding one.