Juan Carlos Lopez, CTO and Chief of the Value Management Office at Cayala, explains how agile transformation, digital infrastructure and community-led services are supporting the expansion of one of Central America’s largest private cities.
Juan Carlos Lopez is CTO and Chief of the Value Management Office at Cayala, one of the largest private cities in Central America. Located in Zone 16 of Guatemala City, Cayala was conceived as a “city within a city” where everything is within walking distance. Its master plan is based on the 15-minute city concept, combining homes, offices, shops, restaurants, hotels and leisure facilities in a walkable environment, with commercial space on the lower floors, apartments and offices above, and parking located underground.
The concept began taking shape in 1983, when Cayala CEO and civil engineer Héctor Leal explored how his family’s land could be developed. After travelling to London and meeting Léon Krier, the architect and urbanist behind Poundbury in Dorset, the pair began discussing how to create a different kind of urbanism in Guatemala. The first homes were built around 2001, and Cayala has since grown to more than one million square metres of completed development, with over 7,000 families now living there and a further two million square metres under construction.
Cayala also provides many of its own services and infrastructure, including running water, electricity, solar energy, recycling and water treatment. It operates its own security camera network and is launching Cayala Connect, its own internet service provider. The development is now expanding into other parts of Guatemala, while also exploring opportunities to bring the concept to Colombia and Mexico.
In this Q&A, Juan Carlos discusses his role in leading Cayala’s agile and digital transformation, the operating model needed to support its rapid expansion, and how technology, community and resident experience are shaping the next phase of a place whose Kaqchikel name means “paradise” or “place of light”.
SmartCitiesWorld (SCW): Cayala is expanding – what does that expansion look like and what are the objectives?
Juan Carlos Lopez (JCL): Cayala is expanding quickly, but the priority remains the experience for people. Everything is within walking distance, and we have a lot of restaurants, parks and places where people can interact. We also have our own golf course, apartment buildings and houses.
We have around 17 projects under construction at the same time. These include our own full-service Marriott hotel and a new tower that we are finishing – it will be the tallest tower in Guatemala. Plaza Nogales has already been built, and next year we are going to start building the Avenia development, along with the remaining sections of this area.
The original master plan already took this expansion into account and was designed to be completed by 2038. However, we are expanding a little more quickly than expected. After that, we are going to move into an area called El Socorro. It is a large amount of land, and we are planning to start building there next year. That development will be around three times bigger than everything we currently have.
SCW: How do you balance your roles as CTO and Chief Value Management Officer?
JCL: I see the two roles as closely connected. As Chief Value Management Officer, my focus is on transforming how the organisation operates, and as CTO, I make sure the technology supports that transformation and matches the vision we have for the city.
We manage our city as a product, so we regularly measure client, customer and resident satisfaction. We noticed that customer satisfaction was also decreasing year by year. We knew that if we kept doing the same things, we were going to fail.
That is where the Value Management Office comes in. We focused the whole organisation on moving towards agile and created a new operating model based on product owners. We have many different business lines – services, houses and apartment buildings, hotels and commercial operations. We created chief product owners for each of them and redistributed more of the accountability, decision-making and authority.
What I told them, and what I told our CEO, was: “Everything you did over the past 20 years brought you here, but it is not going to take you to the next level.” Those ways of working will not hold up when we have four different cities to operate at the same time and need to continue expanding. We had to change the mindset of the organisation.
One of the things we did was something I had never done in another organisation. We worked with Scrum Inc to certify the whole organisation in Scrum principles. We have around 500 employees, and we certified everyone – from the maestros de obra, who manage the construction labour force, through to the C-level executives. Every person in the organisation received certification in Scrum Basics.
My CTO role supports the other side of that transformation. Our CEO is very open to technology, and when I started, I noticed that the technology being used was quite old and was not keeping up with current standards. I created a plan to bring everything up to our standard within one year – I saw it as essentially an emergency situation.
That is ultimately how I balance the two roles – the Value Management Office changes the way we operate, make decisions and deliver value, while the CTO role ensures that our technology is capable of supporting that new operating model and Cayala’s continued expansion.
SCW: Cayala is a private development – what governance structures do you have to work within? How do you bring contractors/franchises on that journey with what you’re trying to achieve?
JCL: We work within the same overall governance system, and we have our own agreements and arrangements with the local authorities. Because everything within Cayala is on private land, we manage the development with our own internal rules, security and operating structures – but we still have to comply with government regulations.
Environmental governance is also important. We have recently been certified to ISO 14001, so we have to consider the forests and the wider environment when building our projects. We need dust sensors and other environmental controls, and government representatives come here to inspect what we are doing. We have to integrate all of those requirements into our projects.
Last year, for example, our focus was on speeding up construction. We reduced one construction process from around 36 months to 28 months. We completed four projects that we accelerated by around 80 per cent, and on one of our biggest landmark projects, we accelerated the process by around 150 per cent.
Achieving that meant creating alliances with our contractors and providers. We create the plan and follow up on it, but the actual building is carried out by our contractors. We therefore need to bring them into the journey with us.
We began with around 45 contractors across three different projects. We did not try to transform every project at once – we selected three of our most difficult projects and they became our north star. We established where we wanted those projects to be within six months and what we needed to do to get there.
We explained the new model to our contractors, certified them in Scrum and paid for their certification. We then worked with them to create the plans. At first, many of them did not want to be part of it. Once they began to see that it was helping them deliver faster, however, their attitude changed. We also created a reward structure, so they were rewarded for finishing faster and delivering better quality. That gave them a reason to become involved.
We have around 17 projects under way at the same time, so we need a large pool of contractors. We also need to create long-term contracts that allow our contractors to expand alongside our organisation. Rather than constantly rotating them, we want to build alliances for the next 10 years so they can grow with us.
It was difficult at first, and it is still challenging, but I think we are past the roughest point. Our contracts now establish the way we operate. We have development planned for the next 60 years, so we have a lot of work to offer. If a contractor, provider or franchise partner wants to work with us, we explain what we need from them. We certify them and show them our operating model and how we are changing the way we work.
At the same time, we actively ask for their feedback. We created spaces where contractors and providers can tell us how we are doing things and where we may be making their work more difficult. That has created opportunities for us to help them – and for them to help us.
SCW: How does community and operational resilience factor into the development of Cayala?
JCL: Community and operational resilience are both central to the development of Cayala. As an enterprise, the transformation has been difficult, but we are focusing on the outcomes we are trying to create and the adaptability we need to get there.
Operationally, that means letting go of some of the decision-making power that was centralised at C-level and empowering the next lines of the organisation. Our analogy is that we are creating small football fields – defined spaces where teams can operate as they want, within clear boundaries and rules. We give them the outcome we need and explain why we need it, but they are able to decide how they want to get there.
For our next projects, for example, we are telling teams, “You need to build this project, and this is your budget, but you are able to make the decisions needed to deliver it.” We want to see whether that freedom inspires more innovation, changes the processes or creates solutions we were not expecting.
The idea is not just to sell properties. We want to retain people, create commerce and encourage them to live here. That is what creates a real community, and it also supports Cayala economically. Residents spend money in our restaurants, hotels and other businesses, so we need to create the community around them and give them spaces they genuinely want to use.
That is how we came up with the idea of creating our own internet service provider. When we surveyed the community, one of the biggest frustrations about living in Cayala was that the internet service provided by existing contractors and providers was not stable. Instead of focusing on another issue, such as parking, we prioritised the internet problem and looked at how we could solve it.
We developed our own business plan and launched our own ISP. So far, we have received a lot of positive comments. Residents are telling us that the internet is better and that the experience is much stronger. Nobody is forced to use our service – it is simply another option for people who are tired of the existing internet situation. We are trying to give them more choice.
Operational resilience also depends on how quickly you can make a decision. We have been changing our culture so that people are not afraid to fail and know they will not be punished for failure. However, if we are going to fail, we need to fail fast, fail cheaply and learn quickly. The idea is to take action as soon as possible.
To take advantage of the opportunities we have now and the ones we will have in the future, we need to be adaptable and make decisions faster. We need to lead the market instead of allowing the market to lead us. That requires us to be flexible, move quickly and be willing to take risks if we want to remain a differentiator in the future.
Instead of doing more planning, we needed to take more action, learn from how we were doing things and experiment more. I think Cayala is now moving in that direction, enabled by our CEO’s vision.
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Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: Smart Cities World, 21.08.2026
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