Paulina and Kamil Walkowiak’s life revolves around their newly minted digital agency — Cloud Development — and their “main project,” as they playfully call their 7-month old son Jeremy. Whether they’re attending a tech conference, business meeting or traveling, Jeremy is always right along side.Originally from Poland, the couple relocated from Gdansk to Berlin in search of a more relaxed and easygoing way of life. For Paulina, it was about time as she had started to have health problems due to her 16-hour workdays. Meanwhile, Kamil was questioning the meaningfulness of his job as a developer. On top of all that, they were expecting their son who triggered questions like “How can we spend time with him without missing the most important moments in his life? What can we do?” Although they never planned to work together, it was clear that they had to bootstrap their own company.
“We come from very different mindsets. Paulina has a humanistic background and has worked as a communication designer. I was living in the rational, product-focused IT-world. However, I felt it wouldn’t be enough to work solely on single tasks without understanding the end user’s needs. That’s where the mix of our both experiences comes into play — IT with a human-centered approach.”
So far, they’ve managed to build a 7-person team based out of Germany, Poland, and London. While advocating new technologies such as cloud computing and data tracking, the pair always puts the human aspect first. During their projects, the couple makes sure to understand their clients to understand their end users and reasoning behind their decisions. Particularly during this digital era of “fake news” and massive amounts of data, it’s necessary to learn how to read and interpret individual’s needs, explains Paulina.
“A lot of companies gather lots of data without having defined a purpose. It’s not our goal to encourage random data collection, but rather, how to understand human behavior and draw conclusions in a holistic context. It’s the human experience we have to pay attention to.”
For Paulina and Kamil, it is precisely their sensitivity to understanding, interpreting and imagining that differentiates humans from the technologies we can code and move to the cloud.
“We need to stop being afraid of technologies and become more aware of our human values. Without humans, everything we have, even technology, is useless. Hence we won’t be replaced by it.”
Tuesday April 25th, 2017