Pedro at Loggi: The experience of a Portuguese in a Brazilian unicorn
By: Pedro Martinho
Tags: Lisbon, Loggi, Portugal, Technology, Logistics

Background

I have a very diverse profile, I am a chemical engineer, specialized in biotechnology by IST, I have a postgraduate degree in business by INDEG/ISCTE and an MBA from ESADE.

I’ve worked in aviation, consulting, logistics, marketing and finally in product management.

Throughout my career I’ve lived in Portugal, India, Spain, Luxembourg and worked a bit all over the world.

Getting to know Loggi

Due to Covid-19 I lost my job at a technology start-up in Lisbon. I rapidly found another job at a multinational company but the Loggi recruitment process was ongoing and when I received the offer I had to accept!

When I first saw Loggi’s ad for a Senior Product Manager on Linkedin I didn’t know the company, it’s not a household name in Portugal. Loggi’s website seemed professional, Crunchbase indicated it was well funded by known investors and LinkedIn corroborated my impression that it was a company with great potential. The most important thing, for me, were the profiles of people working at Loggi, people with experience in very interesting companies. I was convinced: the challenge of connecting Brazil was too interesting to pass up.

When the recruitment process started I went in search of the office and was pleasantly surprised: between the river and Santa Apolónia with a fantastic view of the river on one side and the National Pantheon on the other. The offices are awesome, although, due to the pandemic, I was unable to take advantage of them as much as I would have liked.

Recruitment

The recruitment process already gave a glimpse of what Loggi is all about. In total I had four online interviews, with HR and product people.

The first interview was with Fernanda Lelli who explained a bit more about Loggi, the company culture and the position I was applying for.

The second interview was with Diego Nogueira, VP of product at Loggi who explored my product experience and explained the team structure, product mindset, etc.

The third and fourth interviews were on the same day, first with Eduardo Thuler who opened the Lisbon office and is my current boss. Eduardo focused on the culture, my professional experience and on how I would solve product problems.

That same day I had my fourth interview, withNara Zarino who focused on Loggi’s culture and on how I could contribute to the company.

Finally I had a meeting to discuss the offer, all this in less than three weeks!

Throughout all the interviews Loggi’s culture shone through, it cares about people, is inclusive and has a big focus on continuous learning.

“They’re not looking for people that know it all, they are looking for fast learners. People that adapt to new situations and can help other Loggers grow.”

One of the main attraction points were the Loggers, people I can learn from, with great experience who genuinely care about other people.

Xboarding

Xboarding is the word we use for our onboarding, it’s a mix of experience and onboarding.

“The most interesting onboarding experience I’ve had: for an entire week we focused on knowing the company, meeting people and learning.”

In order to ensure we don’t lose focus we didn’t even have access to email, slack, etc.

At first it seems weird, we’re dying to get started and we’re told to enjoy the first week to get to know each other and the company… it feels like we’re not contributing to Loggi.

One of the great benefits of our Xboarding is that we have people from all areas, Brazilian as well as Portuguese, which allows us to start a network of people outside of the folks we’ll be working with on a daily basis. I work in product management and my Xboarding class included product people, developers but also agency managers, logistics operators, security guys, etc.

It’s also worth mentioning that three of the people in my team started on the same day! It gives you a glimpse of the growth we’re experiencing here in Portugal.

Working on Brazilian logistics

Brazil is huge, it’s practically a continent with major differences from one area of the country to another. Our goal is to connect Brazil: you can imagine the challenges!

For example, there are areas in Brazil which you can only reach by air, others with strong road networks and others with dirt roads exclusively. Security is also a major factor, with a high impact on how we transport goods.

Finally there are taxes, Brazil is a federal state so there are multiple taxes: national, state and local taxes. When transporting goods there are taxes to be paid when they cross a municipal border for example.

All these factors matter and require us to think about our product holistically. For example the decision of how long to take from collecting a package in one city and delivering it to another has an impact on cost (which impacts price) but also on the density of that route and, at the limit, on the development of a region. The fact that Loggi can deliver a package in 6 days in a region where it previously took 24 days opens a whole world of opportunity for the citizens of that region.

The first five months

It’s only been five months since I joined Loggi, it feels longer as we’ve accomplished so much!

“Loggi grows really fast and there’s a big focus on experimenting and learning, which means that in five months I’ve been involved in several projects, helped develop and launch new tools and saw (and measured!) the impact we created.”

We use the usual product tools, from Confluence for documentation and Jira to manage product development, to Slack, Zoom and Hangouts to communicate. We’re working on a service oriented architecture in order to avoid hard to manage monoliths.

One interesting point is that we don’t look for experts on a specific technology, mainly because the stack will change over time, we look for people that can learn. For example one of our data guys came from banking where he used mainly SAS, at Loggi he’s using Looker, Python and R for data analysis and doing an excellent job. Curiously we started in the same Xboarding.

Due to the pandemic we’re mainly working from home, part of my team is in Lisbon and the other is in Brazil which means knowing how to work across different time zones is paramount.

The work environment is awesome, people help each other and we use the time zone difference to our advantage, in practice we can work on a subject for 12 hours without having someone work over 8 hours.

What about personal life?

Balancing personal and professional life is a top priority, it’s quite normal to redistribute work in our daily meetings, if someone says they worked late, in order to reduce their load in the following days.

I have an 18 month old baby, who is my top priority. Everyone in and out of the team, supports me so that I can leave the baby at the nursery, bathe her at the end of the day or take her to the pediatrician. The same happens with all my coworkers either due to kids or other responsibilities.

Sometimes the pressure to finish something or to reduce the workload of a colleague is high but we’re on the lookout within the team to signs of overwork and try to keep people from self-pressuring. We need to work at a sustainable pace, to have time to work, learn and have a personal life.

What’s it like to work with Brazilians?

This is a recurring question I get from my Portuguese friends when I speak about Loggi.

It’s funny how Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese from Portugal, although they have the same origin, have a lot of differences. I guess my Brazilian colleagues think I speak funny Portguese, with weird verbal tenses, etc.

At the beginning it felt like I was working in a foreign language. I’m used to working in english and had to make an additional effort to understand what was going on.

Additionally we have the idiomatic expressions, right at the beginning my boss told me “chega mais” for me to join a meeting, he had to translate as I was still uncertain if I should join!

In my experience Loggers are really nice people, great learners and highly focused on delivering the job in a sustainable way. It’s been a great experience!

As they say in Brazil: “tamo junto!”

What I learned about Brazil so far?

There are movies, series and soap operas which paint a picture of Brazil and which are, probably, the main source of information about Brazil for Portuguese people.

I’ve travelled to Brazil several times as a tourist and had an idea of how large, diverse and complex the country is. Between my work in multinational companies with operations in Brazil and the innovation projects my wife did in Brazil I also had a decent grasp of the bureaucracy, rules, taxes, etc.

Even with my prior knowledge, working for Loggi has opened my eyes: Brazil is impressive, it is a huge country, very diverse and with extremes. In Brazil we have big metropolises such as São Paulo that house over 12 million people and small settlements in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. There are huge international companies such as Embraer and lots of individual entrepreneurs. There are rich states with large cities and less developed states. There is very rich gastronomy. There is everything. If we think about the sheer size of Brazil it’s quite normal to find such diversity, after all Portugal is a fraction of the size and we still find big differences from seaside to interior and north to south.

Come meet Loggi!

My expectation is that Loggi will continue to grow exponentially, solving the logistics problem in Brazil means there is an endless stream of interesting problems to solve, a large quantity of strategic decisions to make and opportunities to learn something new every day.

Loggi has an important impact on the lives of Brazilians, we help develop the country and at the same time, it allows us, Loggers, to evolve, learn and work in a fantastic environment, and I’m not speaking only about the view from the Lisbon office!

We are connecting Brazil, we have continental size problems to solve with technology. We need product, engineering and tech people. If you’re looking for a continent size challenge, Loggi may just be the place to develop your career!

Explore our opportunities.