Seven years, and never bored

Julia has spent seven years at the company that became Tektome. In that time it has grown from a handful of people into a platform business, and she has kept finding new ground to cover without ever needing to look elsewhere.

From translator to project manager.

Julia is a Japanese- and English-speaking project manager, and her route into the work was a sideways one. She started as a translator at Ganapati plc, then moved into project management at the company’s Malta arm. By the time she arrived at Incubit, Tektome’s parent company, she had become a generalist, and a particular kind of one.

If I see something that needs fixing, I often go myself and try to fix it.

Julia, Project Manager, Tektome

That instinct, to step in and sort a problem out herself rather than wait for it to be assigned, is the thread running through everything that followed.

Looking for a company with a real vision.

Before Incubit, a spell as a business development consultant at Vaco ran into persistent contract issues, and that friction pushed her to look for something new. She applied for a project manager role at Incubit through the Daijob board.

She was applying to other places at the same time, and the comparison is what stuck with her. Among all of them, Naoki and Incubit were the only ones who seemed to have a proper vision: a company that actually looked like it could go somewhere. Seven years on, that is the part worth underlining. The direction she signed up for has held steady. What has expanded is the range of problems it takes on.

One generalist, many industries.

Julia joined when the team was still fewer than ten people. Incubit back then was a spread of products across strikingly different fields, from tools for reading topographical maps to a system for detecting throat cancer. She took charge of layout-generation projects for a range of clients and moved between domains as the work demanded.

Clients often arrived with broad goals and sweeping requirements, and this is where a generalist earns her keep. Julia’s real value was a second kind of translation: breaking those big, vague asks into something the team could understand and act on, then leading people forward to deliver what the client actually wanted.

In the early days, much of that meant teaching colleagues how to annotate information for AI to ingest, and setting the direction for how it was done. Today she is on the other side of that effort, actively using the large tools all of that groundwork helped make possible.

Room to grow, without leaving.

Ask what has kept her at Tektome for so long, and the answer is that she has never had to stop growing to stay. There is always a new problem worth taking on, and the team is small enough to encourage trying things, without the bureaucracy that slows larger companies down. The vision stays fixed; the work in front of her keeps widening. For someone who likes to build range, that combination is rare, and it is why a seven-year tenure has never felt like standing still.

A few questions for Julia.

We put some of that directly to her: what it feels like to watch the company mature, and how the recent wave of AI has looked from the inside.

Both answers point at the same thing. Tektome has grown into a more structured organisation, as any company must, and the openness has held through it: Julia can still get what she needs from any colleague, and collaboration is encouraged rather than assumed. That is what has made seven years possible without the work ever settling into the same shape twice.