More than a decade ago, I jumped in a life change experience as a Business Consultant at Intec Telecom Systems (acquired by CSG in 2010). Telco business back in the 2000s was the hype with the world investing in mobile enablement business and Intec was a leader in that space. I joined because of my software engineering and software architecture background. But it wasn’t behind a screen but instead on the professional services front line of complex system integrations. I helped customers with digital transformation which was happening fast.

I talked to hundreds of customers to understand their problems and their needs to help with modeling software solutions. We balanced between successes and failures and we delivered world-class services and products to more than 30 top global telco operators in 20+ countries which gave me the opportunity to travel the world. Looking at today, I’m happy to say we achieved that (and more) with a lot of fun.

Back to core product software development

After an intense period of immersion on software requirements and the business world, there was a moment of reinventing myself and hitting refresh once again. That moment was a challenge to build the first pure software development team in Brazil for CSG. This challenge took me to a new level. Built from scratch and sustain an already in production huge customer basis with more 30+ deployed systems. The risk was great! Oh, that scared me at the beginning but it was truly a fantastic team experience, in less than six months Brazil was added on the map for CSG software excellence.

Game Changer and my transition to management

2013 was a game-changer year for me due to two aspects. First, because I started to transition to people management, which is a big difference from technical lead. Second, I became a multiplier of the knowledge and scaling the team and processes. With a team handling multiple customers and software solutions We achieved a 30% reduced cost for new deployments (DevOps was not brand back there), increased customer satisfaction with faster response times on incidents and new feature development. All this effort resulted in a fantastic recognition of my work from CSG and I received the annual Game Changer Award.

In 2015 the team and I expanded our work to support Cable Business Unit in the U.S. and it was a new chapter for all of us. Including support of .Net/C# systems which we had no previous exposure! Wow! That was a challenging task to get production deployed systems and be ready to keep it all up and running! But all turned out to be a learning experience and a success at the end. In 2020, there were 20+ engineering software professionals at CSG Londrina Brazil and the team expanded to Bogotá Colombia.

What I’m most proud of is how I helped to empower people and allowed them to show their excellent work in the form of quality software ( #SoftwareDeVerdade ). I helped to build a strong and respectful software engineering presence in Brazil that today directly build and sustain software solutions and products to customers around the world.

Growing teams create an opportunity for all people to develop different skills and abilities. I learned a lot about technical, business especially and most important about PEOPLE. I’m thankful for all the kindness and open-mindedness of all the people that I worked at CSG. Respect ground all good relationships and teamwork that CSG people have in their values.

What’s Next?

I very much enjoyed my time exploring the business, improving the tech teams, influencing the direction of CSG and valued the experiences and tough situations I encountered. I’m grateful for the experiences of working so closely with wonderful people.

It is time to hit refresh and build a new chapter on my career.

Cheers,

//Rafael Gorski