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By Scott Carey
The Managing Editor, News, InfoWorld
Lego the maker of plastic bricks is rapidly expanding its software development teams to meet the increasing demand for virtual experiences.
Lego is expanding its software engineering team rapidly as it transforms from plastic bricks to bits and bytes. But is it able to compete with the best tech companies to recruit the best talent?
The Danish company is investing heavily in becoming an increasingly technologically-driven business after the exploding popularity of online brick-building games, such as Roblox and Microsoft's Minecraft.
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In April, Lego announced a partnership to Epic, a maker of videogames. The two companies will collaborate to build new experiences in the metaverse, blurring lines between physical and digital building experiences.
"The partnership with Epic is our way to the metaverse, and there is a huge product piece to develop and the technology component to design for that," Atul Bhhardwaj (group chief of technology and digital at Lego Group) told InfoWorld.
To tackle these opportunities head on, Lego is looking to create an in-house software engineering team, with a goal to increase its digital workforce by 1,800 people by 2023. The team will be spread across offices in Copenhagen and Billund in Denmark, London, and Shaghai.
Powering a digital transformation at Lego
Bhardwaj explains how Lego can be more product-driven and engineering-driven than it is today.
He stated that he sees as being project-led rather than product-led. This means that "the problems you tackle are defined as a set of digital products that you build and design."
Bhardwaj wants to make Lego Group more engineering-led. He wants to concentrate on the craft and architecture. "What engineering skill do you require to be able to build world-class, high-performance systems?" he asks.
Software engineers will continue to play significant roles, however, as the digital team expands, digital designers, product managers and technical program managers will also be required.
The development of a cloud-native infrastructure
These ambitions must be supported by a strong digital architecture. Bhardwaj is looking for Lego to create systems that "can grow, operate 24 hours a day, and are flexible, open, and easy to connect to."
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Lego is currently building a new unified data platform and refreshing its infrastructure to be more flexible and cloud-native. Lego hosts 54% today of its workloads in the cloud in contrast to just 1% months ago. Lego has plans to achieve 100% of cloud services in the near future.
"We're seeking speed as well as responsiveness and flexibility, which the cloud provides," Bhardwaj said.
Lego Group uses a variety of languages and frameworks. They include Unity for new consumer-facing products, to React for Lego.com and SAP ABAP back-office systems. Bhardwaj declared that "We've got almost everything." "In the data platform, we're using Scala and Python. What's exciting is the technology we're using. If you're an engineer looking to learn more about an advanced tech stack, then you'll find it here."
Connecting with the Lego story
Software and Lego go hand in hand. Many engineers enjoy building physical models when they have time off.
Bhardwaj said that every interviewee has an Lego story. "There is connective tissue there."
Modular software components have for a long time been marketed for their Lego-like capabilities that allow them to "snap on" to other components. This idea is now extended to how Lego itself creates software through loosely coupled systems and extensive use of APIs.
"When I describe amazing architecture, it's like Lego bricks, which is where we can construct something, then break it up and then rebuild it easily. This is what we're trying to achieve here," Bhardwaj said.