Over 1,900 employees are working in the heart of Lisbon on BMW’s latest and greatest digital and infotainment systems. “Our technology works” is the the tech office’s motto, a joint venture between Portuguese company Critical Software and BMW Group. Critical TechWorks was born in 2018 with BMW holding a 51 percent stage. At launch, the joint venture employed 240 people at its locations in Lisbon and Porto. But today, the tech offices are quickly expanding their workforce and skill sets.
To learn more about the latest software developments, and exclusively see some new infotainment features, we stopped by the Lisbon office to meet with Rui Cordeiro, CEO of Critical TechWorks, and Philipp Nitschke, the COO. A large majority of the engineers at CTW come from the Portuguese workforce, including from local universities and from an academy founded by CTW. Even more interesting is the human resources structure.
Philipp Nitschke
The tech joint venture is organized horizontally with a focus on teams and units rather than individuals. In many ways, this structure is similar to the late Tony Hsieh’s Holacracy operating structure at Zappos. There is no direct relationships between employees and managers, instead the teams are held accountable for deliverables. Even the official titles are fun: Cordeiro goes by Chief of Purpose, and some engineers by Agile Gandalf.
Rui Cordeiro
But of course, when it comes to car architectures and platforms, more structure is needed. Therefore, the car tech stack is split across four different domains: Cloud and Edge, Software Applications, Software Platforms and Hardware Platforms. The CTW engineers currently work on the BMW OS for driving, Infotainment Operating Systems and even on some autonomous driving operations.
Naturally, the BMW iDrive 8 was part of the CTW’s development map and one of their latest car projects include the BMW iX electric crossover and the i7 electric limousine. Some of the highlight features worked on in Portugal are the entertainment systems, Apple Car Play and Android Auto integrations and E-Mobility. Their latest major product roll out: BMW Parking Payments in Germany.
