Thoughtworker Spotlight: Rick Poulin

From the great outdoors to the intricacies of engineering strategy, Rick Poulin is a Technical Principal at Thoughtworks who is always up for an exciting challenge. Shaped by an early interest in software development and an accidental discovery of consulting, Rick is reflective and continuously learning, expanding his knowledge of delivery efficiency across disciplines with each new experience. Insightful and solution-oriented, you can find him collaborating with clients and teams to ensure long-term success through alignment across team structures.

Beyond work, you can find Rick roaming Canada’s West Coast, going on backcountry expeditions, kayaking, skiing and more! With his love for the outdoors, can you guess what his favourite product is? Hint: It supports an active lifestyle while providing insightful community commentary. Find out this and more in this week’s Thoughtworker Spotlight!

Tell us about what you do

I support our clients and teams on all things engineering strategy. This involves making sure we establish the right foundations to set us up for long term success, including technology architecture, tooling and automation, team structures and communication.?

What’s the most interesting challenge you're working on?

Currently, I’m providing engineering strategy to one of our clients for the implementation and adoption of a design system. This initiative serves as a great way of driving alignment and improving delivery efficiency across a large swath of teams and spanning various disciplines such as design, product and development.

What inspired you to have the career you have today??

I became interested in software development at a very early age. I discovered consulting mostly by accident in my early career, and the notion of keeping things fresh by tackling diverse problems in different contexts greatly appealed to me. Over time, I came to realize that the hardest (and therefore, most interesting) challenges are not with the code, but in aligning people on what we’re actually trying to achieve.

What achievement are you most proud of in your career to date?

There isn’t one that necessarily rises above the rest. I’d say every project that comes to a successful completion is an achievement, often for overcoming very different challenges. Each one represents a significant milestone worth celebrating, while carrying learnings into the next project. It’s always surprising what decades-old learnings surface in sometimes very different contexts.

If you could go back in time and give yourself career advice, what would it be??

The first thing I would tell myself is to take more time to enjoy the relative simplicity of styling a web component or optimizing an algorithm. After all, people are much more complex than computers. Secondly, I’d emphasize the importance of prioritizing work-life balance sooner and being more mindful about the implicit tradeoffs involved in choosing to focus so much on one thing at the detriment of another.

What do you love to do outside of work?

The perfect tie-in to the previous question! After the pandemic, my partner and I moved to the west coast of Canada to spend more time in the great outdoors. We love our strenuous backcountry expeditions and we’re constantly pushing ourselves to tackle greater challenges. Hiking, camping, kayaking, snowshoeing, skiing – if it happens outdoors, I’m in.

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what album, movie, and book would you take with you?

Album – Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace by Foo Fighters

Movie – The Matrix

Book – Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy

And finally, what’s your favorite product and why?

AllTrails ! It is?a mobile app that has an enormous curated selection of hiking trails with varying difficulties, supported by a great community that, among other things, provides insight on trail conditions and difficulty. It also has GPS tracking and features to connect to smart watches, captures your activity log and provides all sorts of interesting statistics.