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people on the platform. Thanks a lot, every organization had a mission of region and we mentioned actually has a certain set of values. Use. So believing those values is supercritical, even as an industry leader, you must ensure that number one plastic move have to do with your living those values. You're talking about those values on 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.
Hey everyone. My name is Henry Surya, we Robin. And you're listening to the technology, you know, podcast the show where I'll be bringing you the greatest technical leaders practitioners and thought leaders in the industry to discuss about their Journey ideas and practices that we all can learn and apply to build a highly performing technical team and to make an impact in your personal work. So let's dive into our Journal.
Hello, to all of you. My friends and my Listen this welcome to the technology on our podcast, the show where you can learn about technical leadership and Excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If this is your first time listening to tackle the journal, don't forget to subscribe and follow the show on your podcast app and on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
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And now, back to today's episode, my guest for today's episode is Manoj hours, the Minaj is currently the CTO at 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. I really enjoyed my conversation with manage. As there are many insights from this composition, related to engineering leadership, which are highly applicable.
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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
conversation. Thank you for listening to this episode and for staying, right until the end if you highly enjoyed it. I would appreciate if you share it with your friends and colleagues who you think would also benefit from listening to this episode. And if you're new to the podcast, make sure to subscribe and leave me your valuable review and feedback. It helps me a lot. In order to grow this podcast
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