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And now, back to today's episode, my guest for today's
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julot and previously, the S VP of engineering at tokopedia in
this episode manage shared engineering Leadership Lessons,
From his recent experience, has managed started by describing
the role of A senior engineering leader before then explaining
some important aspects of engineering leadership such as
scaling up, engineering team hiring engineers and Engineering
managers creating culture alignment putting in place
engineering governance, and maintaining engineering
productivity towards the end manage shared.
Some of his important Lessons Learned before Ending by sharing
his Tech leadership. Wisdom.
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latest tech Trends, everyone welcome back to another episode
of the technology on our podcast today.
I'm so excited to meet someone who is nearer to my site design,
which is in Southeast Asia, my guess is manage our watch.
T, he is currently the CEO at Judo Financial Tech startup
based in each other. Before Judo manage, spend around
six years in tokopedia, helping them to scale to becoming one of
the largest scale of company in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia in
general as well. Managed today will be sharing a
lot of his lessons then maybe from top of video experience,
looking forward for this happy to have you here manage.
Thank you, Henry. Happy to be here.
So my knowledge I always like to hear first thing from the gas
Which is to share about your experience, your career Journey,
any kind of highlights and turning points that you want to
share with the audience. Oh sure.
So I come from India and I was born and brought up in northern
part of India. So from early on I developed
some interest in physics and Mathematics so engineering was
like a very natural course for me I was very fortunate to
actually get some very good teachers who got me interested
in those subjects. Very deeply.
I develop some serious, interest in programming and College.
And now I got introduced to see programming got introduced to
this operating system for Unix. It was 2000, error.com.
Crash was just about the happen. So we were busy working using a
dumb terminal when I say dumb terminals with.
These were like terminals, that will connect to very high-end
servers. So whatever command you type in
with Lee, they will go to the server and you'll get the
response back. So it may sound like a very
primitive at this time, but they were very exciting.
Even then, particularly throughout my Knowledge time, I
enjoy tinkering and coding more than on the subjects.
The academics has such apparent CI, learn Java, and they were
like a players and servlets. I don't know.
Whether you remember them know them or not.
So, it was a very interesting time in 2004, I got a job
placement done. I joined a huge software systems
in Delhi. India as software engineer, this
company was basically our Telecom software company and BC
built all this tag. That is probably getting used in
this podcast. For example, it will BJP
telephony, stack. It was some really exciting
work, then I got exposed to in that organization and being the
first job. I was really lucky to actually
get that exposure perspective of the code that you get.
When you read, good code, it actually sets you for future
with really done a lot by reading other people's code in
2005, I moved to a smaller startup called solid core.
So this was basically in to be, to be security domain.
They built the product, which was basically, We are time,
whitelisting solution, initially meant for installations.
On ATMs, for example, you do not want any vulnerable software to
actually run on the server, so you can have lock down the
server. So for that, we would write a
module or system with six in the kernel itself.
So, it was easier done on lyrics, and I was part of the
Linux team, but I got to work with people who were working on
Solaris product, which was not open source, then, on Windows,
which was not open source there and not to be those.
Now, they know so much, they were reverse engineer.
Mr. Rivers annual binary is when I was working with them
basically. I'll see them disassemble and go
through that disassembly, covid and figuring out, okay?
This is a big blister traversal or something adapt.
This was really fantastic and I really break, my Linux expertise
in the backfield of my career. It 2007, I moved to Adobe until
this time in a real industry set up.
I never worked for Consumer company consumer product.
It was mostly a command line protocol Stacks so far right?
So I wanted to actually gain Exposure as well.
And I do be here was a great choice for that hungry.
I got this opportunity, I was assigned to a product called
Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is a consumer version of
Photoshop. The interesting part is that
it's product actually shared actual code from Photoshop.
So, you are working on the same code base, in a sense work on
that product for multiple releases.
Again, reading code from real experts, people who actually
wrote Photoshop version zero when lot of them were actually
still there leaving that code and seeing how the performance
Actually a key factor while writing software and how quality
actually becomes so critical. You get very different
perspective on quality. When you move from companies
like startups into a bigger organization, like Adobe because
now you have to ship a code that time we were actually shipping
CDs, so they'll be yearly release.
The industry is burnt and later on it, we actually went to a
cloud-based software and so on. But the idea is that when you're
shipping here, this huge responsibility of shipping it.
It cannot break you do not have an option of attaching it all
the time when you do have an option, but I mean it is a very
costly. Also, as for the company, it has
all changed in the webinar, but still it was a very interesting
experience that I got a different perspective on
quality. How do you do that?
So, after multiple reasons for many years where I worked on big
product, flows image algorithms and so on, I also got some
interest in computer vision. There are 2012, I'd move within
Adobe, I move to a different division which was marketing
Cloud Vision. This is when I kind of
reconnected to web Technologies written in Java, mostly a Java
itself had evolved. Since I tried it in college
other than those Web services. I've got to work on some very
exciting stuff, like big data. And I also got introduced to a
very exciting area for machine learning which leave your
deploying random Forest to solve certain problems.
In 2015, I was discreetly at a juncture where I thought, okay,
I want to explore the startups Aguirre, moving from A, to B,
the commerce was growing, a lot in India and basically, I was
looking out for opportunities, but at the same time, I got in
touch with tokopedia two things, excited me a lot.
So one was the business model itself before this.
Never heard of a Marketplace which does not charge any
commission from the merchants because that decision itself and
it did not also believe much in the cash back and it will keep
up to the scale. I could imagine the rookie if
you go with this approach what kind of scale you can actually
attract in the business. So that rule 1 the second was
when I came to Jakarta just to meet our team.
There are a lot of systems that should be built with not been
really a lot in. That was a very attractive
opportunity for me. I will not find a similar
opportunity. To do go and rebuild value those
systems in India that this lie about me.
Moving through, Indonesia pursuing tokopedia opportunity.
When I came here we go to 16. We were already on a journey
just beginning. So it was a basically a mono
that written in Perl. That was the e-commerce website.
It was all implemented in a political framework developed by
the team here. We were basically in the process
of breaking that monolith piece by piece into services and those
Services were all written in goal and we chose goal and for
its performance. It's concurrency support and it
was a And language and is very simple to learn.
I mean case in point is that okay all the top of your team
basically was well versed with were but they did not know
galang. But you also learned it on the
job. So when I came it was already in
progress. And I joined as team basically
solving the scalability problem for hats.
And then later on, I joined as an architect, but I picked on
like many rules putting a different hat.
Depending on, what do you want to get done?
Helping the mistake team as well moving search platform from
solar to elasticsearch. Doing Rock migrations initially.
We were on pram, basically on cold data center called.
Is that then from business we move to Cloud first movie to AWS
later. On also moving from AWS to unbar
following the Alibaba investment and they were like copper other
regions as well. So over time, over six years and
it's been very, very exciting Journey.
Our later are specially leading the market place team in
tokopedia and data science, and data entry team over time.
I Think We crave a lot leadership actually also gave a
lot later, part of We'll be getting we were able to attract
some really good talent from Valley who actually helped shape
tokopedia pattern and transforming it into a
world-class organization, who benefited a lot from all over
experience for our have been a very fulfilling Journey as a
starting from a smaller starter to IPO, which we went after our
merger with go-jek, and gtf in to go to subtitles a really,
really great journey after spending, like, six and a half
years into obedia. I had this personal ambition to
go again and work in a smaller set up, I can of harder.
Okay, this is the right time. Let me actually do this now
because I'm already turning 40, if not.
Now then when I only get older so I joined too low as a CTO
assembly. Just two months back here,
either from Tech startup at you just said this company is into
consumer lending three things excited.
Me one was the mission and vision of jewelry itself, which
was basically to enable access to credit for all the consumers
in Indonesia. Especially the ones that do not
have access to, the traditional means of cry.
Unbanked population under Bank population and so on, if that
axis is, don't provide it to them two things happen rights
one either they cannot get out of where they are.
Sometimes they need money for paying school fees for their
kids. Sometimes they want to purchase
up bike so that they can actually join good.
Egg has arrived in and improve their nature and prostate and so
on. I think this mission and vision
was like, pretty exciting for me.
The second was, basically the founder and reuse a CEO Hideaway
persistent in New York, and keeps that a problem.
For a long time. He started this company, six
years back, almost the same Diamond.
I actually came to Indonesia somehow, I got in touch and I
all moved by that. The third thing was, despite
this being a very large Market a very crowded Market as well.
I like the focus that the team actually has a mannequin has on
the core of the business. So those things actually excited
me as well and I'm here leading the technology module area.
Thank you so much for sharing your Rich experience.
One thing that I could see the core stays the same in
engineering. You started with very Hands-On
from The call may be some device and operating system go to
photoshop, which is a lot of algorithms, I believe that you
have to look that now, moving into startups and Indonesian
market and now becoming leadership senior leadership,
maybe that's not from there by becoming a senior engineering
leader. What do you think a role of
senior engineering leader should be?
What's the responsibility is or what are unique about being a
senior engineering leader? That's a great question.
So answer you. I don't like that word but as
you rise up the ladder right is a position.
Ins couple of things happened there.
So what is the responsibility? Then Grease, the threads in
figures. So when I sit back in business,
I mean now your school bacteria becomes larger.
One thing that also increases the ambiguity that expectations
from your roll T increases. So now, you do not know very
clearly. What is expected of you to give
an example. There is this phrase, when you
start your career initial few years, when you're a software
engineer or seniors, or be here, you're told what to do.
And you're also told how to do when you have to go and do it.
You go further may be seen as a failure to principal indeed.
There are so on. Now you are told what to do.
But not told how to do you need to figure that out but as you go
further I think you are not told even what to do and how to do we
have to figure it out, you have to figure out what to do and how
to do so that is what happens here, but for senior engineering
leadership roles, there are bunch of things that are very
common as you move into a managerial ladder particularity
for data. First, one thing is a given,
right? So you will be spending Being a
significant part of the time in the people management, managing
people just it can change based on the organization size.
For example, if it's a small start-up less than 10 people,
you as a CTO will also be there in a certain responsibility of
writing code etcetera etcetera. But when started actually goes
beyond certain size, for example, it's a 300 people start
up, you will really do so, but people management remains true
even for a small start-up where I think people management.
What do you mean by that? I mean, for example, hiding or
even like before hiring writing the job, That looking for people
partnering with your group and team ensuring hand be pipelined
hiding those, people onboarding them building the process for
onboarding growing providing a clear career path.
For each of them coaching them, mentoring them and all those
actually become part of the people management level.
You have to do is a very important part of your job
description. You need to partner with the HR
team of people team in your organization.
Take care of the organization, ensuring the right policies are
being built and they are helpful in that knowledge.
Knowledge industry. Sometimes, there is this
conflict at work. A lot of HR folks coming from
say additional backgrounds, they will actually put a policy that
does not apply to the ID as much doing a performance appraisal
effectively. And that also like a kind of a
black art and then participating an egg branding, for example.
So all these are the people aspect.
So that is one. The second aspect is that now
you have a team that we are built and the team is active are
taken care of second important thing.
And probably, this is the most important function of our
technology leader is executing on it.
Enabling the business of product through that execution.
So there is a vision that is set by the founder and by the power
of theme the weather business team that they want to do
certain things in general. Team is the one that will
actually make it through here, so that execution is super,
super important. LG execute as you bid, those
products release them. Yes, them monitor them, they'll
be bunch of things that are spoken, right?
So for started setting speed matters, a lot.
How fast can you actually do this?
But in addition to speed quality matters, A lot.
So, whatever you're doing, you have to do it in the right
manner. If you don't do that in the
right manner then also you are able to churn out products or
forward very quickly. It is not helping the customers.
We have to ensure that its speed is with quality.
Third aspect is often forgotten and that is where the technology
part comes in is the agility with wrist.
Your team can actually react to the changes in the requirement
or changes in the business. And so on this requires,
fundamentally agreed architecture.
That is where all these Companies need to understand
that they are technology companies first.
Then we'll be on top of that, you build the business and
products. So that is the second part of
the first part of the people, the second part of the execution
and the third part of the technology leadership is
building a tech rotovap when I say, take a road map, so else
you get into the cycle of churning out products building
things and so on. And as you see it from the first
100, user thousand users to 10,000 users to a million users
root n by n. And so on she would accumulate
debt. And what is tagged a TechNet is
busy? That you have taken a decision
in the past, which was good for the past, but not good anymore.
As you scared for the or you took a shortcut in the past, but
that shortcut needs to be fixed. Basically, at that time.
You said, oh, I will fix it tomorrow, but tomorrow, he has
already become yesterday. I'm so you need to go and pay
that debt. So, proactively designing, or
redesigning the architecture to ensure that platforms ready for
future scalability requirements. That is another responsibility
that this team actually has. And when I see Tech roadmap, it
does not only mean He said that were part of the product.
It also means infrastructure and security it needs the data
protection. It means the back end in the
front end. It means the Q&A, practice Elder
automations and so on all those in so those three things,
people, execution and Tech roadmap.
I think as you become a senior leader, that will be important
one. Last piece I will say, which is
a general requirement as you go into, especially the executive
management level is having or developing the right business
product mindset. Because what I fear is a unless
you Actually have a great business product, understanding
you cannot even build the right architecture or design because
it has always to be in the context of current requirement
or the local context. Basically, there are things
which are basically a kind of a fully booked for scalability,
okay? You should actually have a
replica for our database. If you'd actually use caching
skill your database, you should do many thing called a scale in
your vertical scaling and so on. But in the end great
optimization results will actually comes from leveraging
the knowledge of your business. Fixed by tell of N2 into your
contributors, The Architects that you need to understand and
design for the current context better.
You understand the current requirements more optimization
exactly ago and Cody Cody, I hope that answers the question.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, this is great.
Right? So for those listeners who are
in senior engineering leadership, maybe it's like head
of engineering VP of engineering director of engineering or even
sitio themselves that think their love GCF from your
experience from history. I personally like your water And
how framework? So when you're a junior, you're
being told what and how as you go up, there told nothing.
You didn't even know the water. He didn't even know the how and
you have to come up with both. So I think that's really
insightful for me throughout time.
I'm sure in tokopedia or your journey, you've seen a lot in
property in particular you grew like an engineering from eighty
to two thousand plus I guess right?
That's really a rapid kill. Maybe can you share some of the
growing pains or maybe the hiring challenging I called to
scale the team from? Small size to a bigger size,
maybe some of the insights. You can share here probability
Mass Appeal from ATP to our two thousand people now as your
skill. I think we need to work on
revamping lot of the ways you work.
For example, your hiring process will need to get rebound.
Onboarding process has to believe and and improve, from
time, to time as your team size increases and your cultural
integration process has to deliver why this is important is
because especially, you know, hyper-growth kind of phase when
you achieve higher, many people These people are coming with
their own background, their own field of work their own cultures
and we can be very different. And when I say culture culture
is basically a shared set of beliefs.
Now, how do you integrate them in your culture?
Because this is a very important part of been forgotten that end
of the day, unless you actually integrate them in your culture,
get them to your values, your teams will be very
heterogeneous, they do not have the shared beliefs until the
critical requirement for a team work.
So you have to ensure that a more tactical party that
standardization of the If you do not focus on standardization and
do not have some governance in place, you might end up like
being, there are 20 teams and they have been using drones tag.
And that is okay, typical IG debate, both sides.
But I think it's not going to be very beneficial for the team.
Because I mean you cannot actually have sharing of the
knowledge. You cannot have people moving
from one Department to another and so on.
So a lot of things actually can break, sometimes it may also
happen. There is no governance in place
and people are just using different choices.
And you have, for example, five different kind of cues in the
system 7 different kind of databases and that becomes
operational. I think disaster when I say
onboarding process, what I mean is that, for example, having a
clear documentation of War systems are in place how we
work, clear onboarding checklist, when I Engineer comes
out and leader comes, they already know what to do in my
first few weeks, how to, actually familiarize myself on
this company is way of working also, having bootcamp kind of
training. And this is a very useful thing
in tokopedia Vagabond. And there was like, a couple of
days of boot camp training for every Commander joins that
basically sets them up for, okay, how we work, what is the
worst texts are? What our work product, who are
our customers, what things we are building, and what our
values, our DNA wraps on. As you scale, another thing that
I want to point out is that you cannot keep your organization
slack forever. When you start small -
Engineers, they can all be reporting it to see to, it's
fine. I mean, even that would like too
much but once it becomes like, 200 300 and more, I think you
need to actually set our organization structure.
ER, in place so that better management can actually happen
for the team. Those are some things that I
think is important when grow in the organization on the hiding.
Question, for example, when I'm hiring Engineers, I look for
engineers who can emit coding is important, right?
So, definitely must be able to code.
They must know, they are hard skills.
So language is not important but they must be able to
problem-solve. So that is one thing that I look
for the second is that attitude, this is a very critical thing.
There is always this discussion between Disco by the way.
So if people do not have will and do not have a skill, of
course, each don't have that, but it's, they have a skill and
they don't have a bill, then you can hire them.
But because they have a skill did not have built, will have to
motivate them. You need a leader who can
actually motivate them to actually have the will if
somebody has the bill but they don't have skill.
It's an easier problem to solve in my opinion.
If they are base level than they can always be up scared.
You need to train them and so on.
And if they have both skill and will, I mean I'm Raising you
have a rockstar there. I recently told my team at Judo
what could Engineers qualities. Are it may sound a bit rhetoric.
I feel that good Engineers. I'm not talking about 10x
engineer that used to be discussed on Pretoria.
So, I'm just that good engineer. I think they should be
pessimists. They have three quality.
So first is being pessimists, they should understand that.
Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong someday.
They are basically people who believe in writing as rock-solid
software as possible, so they'll probably go and check every
error, that is happening. Was that error is being written
for some reason. You must actually handle it.
And so on, I give an analogy to my 0 team for example, good
Engineers are dual Indians who built Bridges, which can stand
there for hundreds and thousands of years.
And that is because they have taken care of everything that
they can, that can go wrong. So they have taken care of
foods. Can go wrong, will actually take
a backup or this backup can go wrong.
Let me pick up back up for backup.
The second quality of a good Engineers they are also
optimistic. They know that whatever they're
building will basically not only Lisi the light of the day but
also grow in number of users that use it.
And hence I need to actually think about the architecture and
design. Very seriously, third thing is
that they are also realistic like pragmatic as in, yes, I
know that. Okay, I want to build a perfect
software, but there are all kind of constraints here in the
currents. So if my users are only 10,000
users, I should not go and try building a system for 10 million
users. Yeah, it does not make sense
from the economics perspective so I think originals are those
people who actually take all these things.
Conservation. Well, really interesting
perspective, on how you hire Engineers.
I like the will and skill attributes and also, sometimes
like contradictory right? Good Engineers pessimistic but
also optimistic and also realistic.
So it's like a different Spectrum all together, how about
specifically for engineering, maybe managers of meat managers
or the leaders are there anything different on top of
what you have shared just now. So for ensuring manager and
leaders parents one entire new dimension that goes On top of it
one, is your 70 days? Are important.
Engineering leaders should not shy away from DJ's.
I've seen that happen, often Orion my career Engineering
Management is a very difficult job because I had an engineer, I
think, when you come for work and of the days where you've
used from work, you feel very satisfied.
Why salt? So many bugs, I wrote that
algorithm. I improve this performance and
so on, ensuring manager does not have this kind of pleasure, they
come to the job and of the DVD Austin says, or what did I
accomplish today? I just did this meeting that we
did, So on but those meetings are very important when I look
for Asian leaders. So you can managers.
I am looking number one that they understand this motivation.
What is the purpose? So they do their management well
which means ensuring that Park is being managed at.
The same time, people are being taken care of.
And at the same time, there is a long-term Vision that is in
their mind. Another thing that they must do
with the kind of become the guards of the values that
company believes in so different company that you have different
value systems. Ensuring that we are aligned
toward a common goal. So those are some of the things
that I look for. When hiring heaters people
aspect is 180 days are important.
And they must know how to manage that ambiguity, When you mention
about guarding the values and goals and you touch on a bit.
Also, just now about building a culture that aligns together
with the scaling of the people, because when you hire a lot,
obviously the way of working the perspectives.
The values are different from. All those new joiners.
Maybe, let's move on to the culture, right?
How do you actually Align, try to align people to think the
same value, the same ways of looking at the same.
This can be challenging when you grow into a hundreds thousands
of Engineers, right? Maybe she has some tips on this,
whatever you before I drop to answer your question.
One thing that comes to my mind tokopedia, that would be
successful in generating more and more leaders who crave
organically from within the organization.
So if we can grow from within the organization, actually
definitely grow. And there is no glass ceiling
irrespective of which geography are Um, from what background
you're coming from. It is always the career path for
every single individual in the organization, so that helps a
lot. But again, it takes a lot of
effort. It takes a lot of coaching,
trust-building those competencies, and so on.
So coming to your question on the culture, every organization
had a mission of region, every mention actually has a certain
set of values. So living, those values is
supercritical, even as an industry leader, you must ensure
that number one task that you have to do, is your living those
values. You're talking about those
values. Every opportunity that you get
to talk to your team, it should actually become kind of a
day-to-day Affairs. This helps a lot in alignment.
Whenever there are decision-making.
Probably you can align to your values and see, and make the
decision easily, then be less confusion.
For example, Google is actually known for their values of c,
transparency and Innovation. Amazon is known for their back
protein leadership principles, and they actually become kind of
a guiding force. A Guiding Light for you for
making notice here. So that is one the second
building, a strong technology are requires you to I actually
have a focus on Tech as a core part of building products.
That means people realize that those Tech platforms are very
important, you are not taking shortcuts, but if you are taking
shortcuts, you actually relying on your Tech leaders to go and
solve those problems. And you get that support from
entire nation. S is I mean enabling your
Architects or I see is to become kind of guards of your design
and architecture when I'm seeing that it does not only mean that
I could you give them the responsibility for becoming the
guards. You also make them accountable
and ensure that this is publicly Share.
So the business and product, you just know that they have to
ensure this aspect, then celebrating not only product
releases, but also technology improvements, which may not show
up directly, but are always adding to the customer.
Experience is also very important.
So some of those are the things that category on culture aspect.
One, more thing is innovation, we find many companies talking
about Innovation a lot. I feel that Innovation can not
happen until you tell every tree go and prepare and ground for
innovation. Asian, this Innovation is you
are motivating your engineers to go and find our invent a better
way of solving a problem. The problem has been there, but
it's time to let you find a better solution.
A more novel solution to solve the problem.
Now, this cannot happen if they are actually rushing from one
screen to another Sprint. Barely able to finish the rest
of the points. So they have to find some slack
to your team. Should actually kind of achieve
that state when they are shipping.
So many products, they're taking care of their Tech day and they
still have quite some time to kind of be at themselves.
Dude, some tree thinking that is the only way to actually Foster
that process of innovation. So sometimes these Innovations
can be challenging, especially when you grow very rapidly from
a start-up to become a scale up. So everything is about product
features, building more things for the products and business.
But yeah, I mean, select time is definitely probably a luxury for
some of these companies. Thanks for reminding that
sometimes when you want to breed Innovation, you will need to
deliberately prepare the ground their environment and the
culture. So that people are I'm not
afraid to give it a try. The key is probably select.
I'm not just focus on just doing delivering work.
Also, another thing that I want to touch on, you mention about
governance, standardization of tech stack and things like that.
So maybe there are some lessons learned from you what kind of
engineering processes or maybe some kind of governance that
people like senior engineer leader.
They should be putting a discipline on so we touch on a
little bit. But maybe, are there any other
areas for engineering leaders? Want things to standardize or
govern in terms? Engineering Process and best
practice. I think I meant a bunch of
solutions for engine leaders. I think governance is very
important, especially on the sterilization system, to blend
it very well from early on centralizing.
Some of the things we're actually help.
I mean this may come with some pain or team wants to try this
fancy new database and then also our risk items that will you
actually become close to the new ideas, new developments at all,
so it has to be balanced and there has to be a process.
So it's not about closing something, but it Either just
building a process around. How will you introduce our new
technology in the stack? What are the pros and cons of
that? Do you have enough expertise on
those technology or you think that you can build enough
expertise in time to come? If you actually go through that
process, I think we'll actually have less appeals in future so
that is what I believe but then there are a couple of other
things that are helpful for engineers are emotional from my
own experience. In fact, as I graduated from
tokopedia and received a, thank you, note from one of my
leaders. And he also shared some feedback
for me. Those feedbacks were so apt
because they were also in my notebook and the Sea back for
myself, for example, he did this year making.
Sometimes you get into that conundrum that I want to make
the right decision about the right decision is not so easy to
actually come to and you basically delay that until I get
to know what the right thing is, I just delayed, I think it hurts
more than it helps here, as ancient leader, and lot of
people may get blocked on you. They will actually be waiting
for you to actually take a call and maybe you are just kind of
Of not arriving at a decision and that is hurting our nation,
not helping him. So I will set is actually for a
genius and it is a note to myself as well.
Take this years sooner than later, I mean every DCM rack, we
have pros and cons but taking the decision will only fast in
the process can always go and learn.
The only thing that will be an exception to this is a fatter
Vision but if that is the final decision that you should
actually go and reach out to other stakeholders and take help
from others. The third one.
Is that not asking enough questions the cost of Peanut
wrong. Question is literally zero in a
worst-case. Equal May laugh at you or they
can basically erect you they can see that.
Okay. That question is invalid and so
on but that is the zero cost. We should not take ourselves too
seriously but the cost of snot asking questions, especially
important questions is very high.
So we should definitely be asking more questions than and
not asking enough questions. Last point that I want to share
that sometimes we underestimate what can happen by having the
non works. Setting for building vegetable
out team and getting the team out for lunch or a dinner or out
paying whatever. So sometimes, what happens is
that your one-on-ones? However, good, they are, they're
not able to capture the trust as much as it is non but setting,
those are like, bunch of things that I would like to suggest
based on my journey so far. So I think I like the
perspective of not delaying decision too long, especially in
engineering. Love things are like, what you
mentioned? Thank death.
He was just lying around waiting for things to happen.
Day letting normally when the day happens, is probably too
late and it will be quite chaotic from the engineering
point of view. Thanks for sharing that one last
aspect that I want to touch on from your expertise and
experience as well. It's about engineering
productivity. So we talked a little bit about
engineering productivity like when you grow and scale we built
a lot of features. How do you ensure things are
still moving fast because what tends to happen as the
organization grows is that engineering velocity is deemed
to be slower and slower maybe from In your experience.
What key things that you probably control baby.
You improve in terms of how engineering can be always,
delivering values in the constant stable manner, I need
to answer that question. I mean one I personally do not
believe even measuring developer velocity of productivity and the
number I don't think there's any way we can actually assign a
number to people that are oh you are productive at this number at
so that that is very hard. And I think it's a futile.
Exercise honest. We can definitely find out ways
to actually move faster. As I said earlier, speed,
quality and activities. Those are the things that we
want to aim like in tokopedia Also earlier when we adopted
some kind of organization structure, the way we are Mega
ourselves, it was based on type system.
It is originally coming from Spotify.
They are tribes their chapters and they actually work together
as many startups so every tribal actually consists of
representatives from Tech Team, the product team and the
business need and they work together.
So it comes a mini starter which has a similar meaning Bishop to
launch the product that you're working towards they work in a
fashion and they can adopt a process from a Dye World
Backstrom. That is one way to actually go
and put in place a very deterministic of predictable set
up for the teams to actually function in so that has worked
well in my understanding, most of the time when I found that
there are released delays, I think one of the root causes
always communication, it's not complicated well enough.
So communication is one thing that To be explored at a
significant priority. Now, when I say communication,
there are two kinds of permutations one is a verbal
communication. It is important, but it should
be generally written communication.
That should be mandated, as you go toward that, you'll probably
find that lot of these problems of misunderstandings.
They go away one company that to I respect a lot and we can
actually all borrow a lot from is Amazon.
In that respect, they have set up writing culture, which is
worth emulating for most of the companies.
So I've spoken to Amazon people from Seattle from India and I
find similar kind of culture. So the me down really has done a
great job in establishing that culture across the geographies
and then how can you actually make it further better?
Automate like really things that can be automated must be
automated as soon as possible in tokopedia.
In fact there is a team itself. Visit engineering productivity,
that works on building tools that can actually help us, have
a sustained level of quality, whenever we are making
religious, which is test automation, but also having
taste Mr. Automation, to ensure that you are actually reliable
at a higher load, then there is a tooling for developers to be
more productive. Thanks for sharing some of the
tips. So, automate like crazy, there
are so many things that can be automated these days.
There are so many tools already built.
In fact offered as a service product or maybe open source
tools. So yeah, you should probably
always find innovative ways on introducing automation.
So maybe throughout this journey or any kind of mistakes or
expensive lessons that you have learned along the way if you can
share. Um is there anything that you
can share my knowledge? I already shared that as part of
my equation two integrators, expensive Mystic, highly
regarded that pulley. Other delayed decision making it
has been pretty extensive writing.
We could have just taken a call and we'll see that bad and
beating for that as you become a reader and especially working in
an organization which has multiple functions communication
as the another key that you need to get a hold on for being more
effective possible in 2018 to be a started as shopping Festival.
And this was first time us doing it in Indonesia and there was no
other company doing it. This was basically like a
replica of single stay in China. You're going live on tv.we
basically prepared our systems to scale well and be estimated
that over a Target would be like 10 x 5 x 10 times.
What we receive at the current Peak, the tasks that we got
during the event, was more not an X.
So our systems were playing and I was like really in shock later
on when we did the root cause analysis of that mosquitoes.
A bunch of things including one was Miss estimation, of course.
And since then, of course teams have started working or how can
we better estimate, the business impact?
What kind of traffic will be attacked?
When we do this or that? The second was busy having more
and more transparent communication between product
business and technology that has very beautiful thing in
tokopedia. Now that I see all the teams
actually said together in one meeting and there's one
competition happening, not of processes were introduced after
that. Example, we introduced the
regular kind of on load testing, which is called bien.
There. He would have for it on auto
scaling and he was often automation that happened.
Those are some of the Lemmings. And since then, 2019 2020 2021
20th to, we have done this same event at the same scale or
larger scale. And we have not face any
trouble. Thanks to the leadership at
Wikipedia. Well, couldn't imagine myself as
well like when you predicted then X but it turned out to be
more than x. So let's follow.
It's really challenging. It's a good problem to have all
this. You saw at the end of the day, I
will kill you. We spoke to a leader that we're
so sorry when we miss predicted but just put some from
depressive or no worries. I'm so excited because this
tells us how big the opportunity is to serve people in The
Innovation. Thanks for the plug because
happening during this kind of like crisis situation, the
empathy from leaders, right? Not blame for kind of culture.
I think that's really key. So my daughter she's been a
pleasant conversation unfortunately.
Due to time, we have to wrap up pretty soon.
But I have one last question that I normally ask for all my
guests, which is to share your version of three.
The leadership wisdom think of it like advice or maybe
something that you want to tell to the audience from your
journey or your experience. So I decided she told my leader
set, you do as well. These are all the things that I
learned over time. The first one is that done?
Is better than perfect. Don't wait for the perfect
solution. So, go perfect.
Is the enemy of the good. There's another way you can put,
it s. Is that a more?
You sweat less? You bleed, during peacetime
generally. People think the, oh, we can
actually deliver tank. There nothing is.
Breaking right now will actually pay it later.
That is not the approach that you should take because one day,
they be time of judgment. Karma is a bitch there it will
bite you when you it hurts, you the most.
So instead of that, especially when you have some peace time,
if you focus on strengthening your back home, the third one is
that teamwork is the ultimate competitive Advantage.
This is what I've seen time. And again, the feeding teams,
even if it is not comprising of a layers, they will win against
people are team. If they have better teamwork
that I've seen time and again, So use find this in sports, you
find it and Destroy them. Teamwork is the foundation of
all the success team were a not come without pressed.
So that's why I believe that. Especially he said you'd as they
must actually work on establishing a trust amongst
their team members and aligning them towards one common goal.
So those three things are very. Thank you.
I like the way you explained it, right?
So done is definitely better than perfect sometimes Engineers
tend to want to build things perfectly right there.
You will think about all scalability patterns
architecture. Today's complex it microservices
in hundreds. So sometimes we should not go
into that perfect mode, just build good enough for the
current context, it's been a pleasant conversation. - if
people want to continue this conversation with you, is there
place to reach out or maybe interact with you on mine,
whatever they are. I'm inaudible on Twitter and on
LinkedIn. How can I share that with you?
Yeah I'll put it in the show notes later on though Lee.
So yeah thanks again - for spending your time in this
podcast recording. I really enjoyed.
This composition. Hope you feel the same.
Good luck for your next venture. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me here. Don't be talking to you a good
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