Interview with co-founder & CPO at CELUS, André Alcalde

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, André Alcalde shared his vision on how to promote innovation in the electronics market and what the future holds for electronic development. 

Hi Andre, let’s talk about you and your background. Tell us how your interest in electronics began.

It all started when I was a small kid, about 7 or 8 years old. I really liked to dismantle toys and see what was inside, and guess what, I found lots of electronics in them. My dad had a lot of magazines and books related to electronics, since he was a hobbyist, and I was trying to understand how these things worked all the time. I would build new toys using motors and boards from other toys, so that is how my interest in electronics and building new things grew up. From an early age, I was sure I wanted to study electrical and electronics engineering.

What influenced your desire to join CELUS?

When I got to know Alex and Tobias Pohl, CELUS was still Contunity and pretty much in its infancy, a couple of weeks away from its official foundation. I was working on a couple of ideas myself and felt that the vision was deeply related to my interests, my working experience, and that I could really contribute to bringing this idea to life. That's why I contacted them, joined the co-founders, and from that point on we started working together.

Tell us about your role at CELUS. What does a Chief Product Officer at CELUS do?

Designing a product can be a very complex process. As a CPO at CELUS, I oversee the highly motivated product team in understanding users and customer pain points and designing solutions that address those points. This requires communication with all key stakeholders such as customers, users, sales and marketing, and also a very good alignment to the R&D team, that writes and deploys code that makes our product possible. I work quite often on feature prioritization, our feature roadmap, presentations to communicate at different levels with people from other departments, and spend also a lot of time supporting my team and other teams in achieving their targets.

How does CELUS deal with increased complexity in electronics development?

In many other industries, such as software and semiconductors, the complexity of designs created a bottleneck for technical innovation that humans could not surpass. The solution was, in both cases, to structure the data and automate processes to unblock new developments. For several reasons, the development of electronic boards is getting to a point that, combined with the lack of enough professionals in the market, creates a void between new advanced technologies and established design processes, preventing innovation. At CELUS, we are applying learnings from those industries to unlock the next-level design processes for electronics.

How do you stay fresh on new technologies and where the market is going?

I read pretty often news and newsletters related to the industries that interact with us, electronics, design processes, and, of course, cloud software. I like also to attend meetups and webinars to get to know people from those industries, there is always something to learn from a good conversation.

At CELUS, we are applying learnings from those industries to unlock the next-level design processes for electronics.

What helps you to stay so energetic?

In the morning, coffee is what drives me! But the main motivation definitely comes from having a vision and working with an equally highly motivated team to make that vision a reality.

Tell us a secret: What is your favorite dish and why?

My favorite dish is not actually a dish, but some kind of food event: I really like barbecues - both doing it and enjoying the food! I think it is such a great way to meet up with friends, talk about anything and spend a sunny day outside.

Interested to work in the product team at CELUS? Check out our open positions and send your CV today.