Guillaume is our Innovation Manager, and he is responsible for guiding the development of new products and features in alignment with the needs of users, data providers, and software. He interviews stakeholders, understands their needs, translates them into requirements, and ensures implementation delivers the value expected.
As of 2024, Guillaume has been with ecoinvent for ten years. We asked him to share some insights into his experience.
I act as a subject matter expert (SME): I take part in discussions with software architects and developers.
In my day-to-day, I describe the features we need internally or from the perspective of our users. I interview users, data providers, and third-party software developers who build on ecoinvent data. I also monitor growing trends in LCA and see if we need to plan for it. My day-to-day is very diverse, but in a different way to the past.
During my ten years at ecoinvent, my role has evolved quite a bit! When I joined, there were five employees, and I was the only one who could write code.
For a few years, we exclusively hired people with a graduate degree in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Now, we are looking for a wider range of expertise to make sure we build a product that is useful for our expanded range of clients.
In this setting, I ended up doing a bit of everything. But after a few months, I saw what the most common tasks were, where the needs for automations lay, and I developed a generalized code base that could be reused in most projects. I used it to support data providers, manage Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods, compare new and previously published releases, and pinpoint what change in the source data has caused a change in scores… It was very diverse.
After a few years, I enabled ecoinvent to change the way we managed our system models. By reverse-engineering an external piece of code, I was able to develop tools that are used today by our team of fifteen data analysts.
I continue to maintain this code, responding to small bugs and implementing our analysts’ ideas for it, which makes their work easier.
When I started, ecoinvent’s clients were mostly academics and consultants who were already LCA experts. Now, LCA is spoken about outside of our bubble. People with different backgrounds and needs see the benefits of working with ecoinvent data.
Looking to the future, we aim to explore how the ecoinvent database could better support industry-specific needs such as ecodesign tools, circular economy projects, and environmental reporting. We publish a very complex and comprehensive product, which can be overwhelming for outsiders.
One of my favorite memories at ecoinvent is still an ongoing joke. Many years ago, while helping one of our more junior colleagues, he started calling me ‘master’. The name stuck, and as we hired new joiners, they simply started to mimic him, and now there is a whole group of people calling me ‘master’. I find this hilarious! But it also reminds me that even if sometimes I feel like I never know enough, that I have had a wide range of experiences that make it possible for me to have something relevant to say in many projects.
Our team is young and highly motivated, and even if we are sometimes stressed, we are always able to throw some fun in the middle of it.
If Guillaume’s ecoinvent story inspires you, check out our careers page for more information about our current job openings.