About Pragmateam

Who we are

We started Pragmateam with the idea of working with like-minded people to help clients with aligned values and mindset deliver software in a better way.

The word 'team' is in 'Pragmateam' for a reason: our true value, our power and what makes us different come not from an individual but from our interaction and collaboration as a team.

We are software engineers, UX designers, delivery leads and product owners and yet we are quite T-shaped: we do our role extremely well but also play other roles to help each other and form a better team.

We are experienced practitioners, passionate about what we do and always keen to learn more, inspired by what is best but anchored in practice and reality.

We are found working in LinkedIn and having fun in Instagram.

#7

Best Workplaces in Australia 2023

Values

Our values enable the right outcomes

 
 
 
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Our principals

Leadership team

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Juliano Bersano

Founder & Managing Director

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A pragmatic agile and lean practitioner, Juliano has a passion for building outstanding teams and delivering valuable and fit-for-purpose business outcomes, backed by over 20 years of hands-on software delivery management experience.

Originally a Computer Science graduate, he was a developer at DB in Brazil before moving into project and people management at HP. He was then Director of Technology building data quality and interactive marketing products before moving to Australia, where he eventually managed agile projects and delivery assurance at Thoughtworks.

Before Pragmateam, he was an agile delivery coach at CBA, Telstra, Westpac, IAG, BT Finance, SingTel (Singapore) and SoundCloud (Germany). On sunny days, he can be found playing padel tennis (fun and competitive sport from Spain).

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Karl Brown

Delivery & Product Principal

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Karl is a highly experienced, passionate and motivated digital product manager with a proven track record of delivering commercially successful outcomes for businesses across digital assets.

He has delivered digital products in over 30 countries and 14 languages, including Australia's largest financial institution, Microsoft, global publishers, national news broadcasters, government clients, small startups and also for the Olympic Games.

Karl is an experienced people leader having led the operational management of teams of up to 100 and owned product management capability cutting across assets in complex environments, with 55 scrum teams operating both on and offshore. He thrives on ‘getting it done and getting it done right’. Outside of work, he spends his time somewhere between the beach and the closest bike park.

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Phil Mitchell

Sales Principal

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Originally from the UK, Phil came to Australia as a sales executive with Ozemail, and then became a partner and sales director in a new software development business.

Phil moved to San Francisco and joined Slalom Consulting’s new office in Silicon Valley working with clients such as Cisco, Apple, Ebay and Paypal.

Upon returning to Australia Phil joined Thoughtworks as a Client Principal where he focused on selling agile software development services to NBNCo, Vodafone and CBA. In 2013 Phil was approached to join lawlab, an innovative law firm who are now a large national digital conveyancing business.

Also known as the organiser of the famous Sydney proptech happy hour! He is often found on a football pitch.

Our team in Brazil

Offshore done wrong is frustrating, so we decided to offer it only if we could set it up for success. That meant using all our delivery experience and high engineering standards to partner with a company we already trusted, with similar culture and mindset and that also brought their own experience to the table, combining it all to offer a premium offshore option that lives up to our local standards.

With a working relationship between founders that goes back 20 years, partnering with DB in Brazil was an obvious choice to bring scale to Pragmateam by extending our team. With over 600 employees, DB is one of Brazil's leading technology companies, with experience in banking, fintech, healthcare, large retail, telco as well as start-ups, providing high quality engineering, design, testing and innovation services. Our joint team shares and magnifies our values, our culture, our empathy and our passion for delivery.

Offshore teams ➔
 

The first 7 years

A brief history

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The past 7 years

A brief history

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The Pragmateam story

Pragmateam started in 2014 as a place for like-minded people to come together and support each other as we coached teams and transformed organisations in agile and lean ways of working, changing how products were managed and delivered. This was driven by passionate founders who wanted pragmatic changes to be 'sticky' for clients and not disappear when we left.

From the start of our delivery engagements, our focus has been to hire top notch software engineers with plenty of experience to mentor others, as well as product, UX and delivery management people of the same calibre. But just as importantly, we only hire those with good empathy so that working alongside client teams and helping them improve is a passion and not a chore. We have always looked for long term partnerships with clients - instead of the more transactional one-off projects - as they lead to the outcomes and relationships we prefer, reinforcing the desire to improve and make things better together.

As opportunities for product development and co-delivery grew locally and offshore - outgrowing the coaching business - we decided to focus exclusively on product and software delivery. The knowledge and experience from years of coaching and transformation - bringing pragmatic and 'sticky' change to teams and organisations - are still part of our DNA and are applied to our own teams, passed on to clients through co-delivery when needed.

With this sharpened focus on delivery, our priorities have been to build high quality software products, apply proper software engineering practices, facilitate product co-design and be very disciplined with delivery management, both locally and offshore. In this ever more distributed world, we have now doubled down on our ability and experience to run high quality distributed delivery through our offshore and local teams. But just like when this all started, ultimately we still look for like-minded people to work with and for like-minded clients to partner with so that we can simply deliver things better.

Juliano Bersano | Founder