Building Engineering Culture with OGP, Stripe, Carousell and Endowus
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A couple of folks from Open Government Products (OGP) felt the gap in the tech events scene and came up with Deep Dive - a new talk series launched in collaboration with a few prominent tech organisations here in Singapore.
Our team went for the session, transcribed it, and summarised the key nuggets during the sharing. We hope you will find this useful!
These days, you hear a lot of the term “engineering culture”. Big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix all talk about their amazing engineering culture. But what is it?
In this session, we are super lucky to have a couple of great engineering leaders to share their thoughts:
Li Hongyi, Director, Open Government Products
Victor Neo, Director of Engineering, Carousell
Noah Pepper, Business Lead, Stripe APAC
Joo Won Lee, CTO, Endowus
TL;DR - our favourite parts during the sharing
General culture
Culture is both implicit and explicit - if you want consistency, be explicit (Li Hongyi)
Do not treat engineers as merely implementers (Noah Pepper)
Be firm on the cultural values you want and accept departures if people do not fit (Joo Won Lee)
Solve team burn out by solving team’s workload, purpose, and friction (Li Hongyi)
Documentation
Documentation helps reduce difficulty of remote communication (Noah Pepper)
Documentation helps lessen quantity of meetings (Victor Neo)
Start by writing documentation on the small things, eventually grow confidence on the bigger documentations (Noah Pepper)
Speed vs Consistency
Constant trade off between consistency in process and speed of delivery (Li Hongyi)
Have a standard definition of what “urgent” means (Li Hongyi)
“Great in the next week is more important than perfect in the next month” if optimising for speed (Li Hongyi)
Move fast on iterations with little consequences, be thoughtful on iterations with potentially huge implications (Noah Pepper)
Growth
In the early days, always rely on referrals (Joo Won Lee)
If team grows faster than your learning as manager, step aside but monitor their leadership and give feedback (Victor Neo)
Summarised transcripts of Deep Dive #1: Building an Engineering Culture
What is Culture?
Open Government Product’s Li Hongyi
Culture is essentially the operating context of all the people working together
It translates to the consistency of behavior in the team
Culture can be either implicit or explicit
Explicit are typically written rules eg. work hours, standard operating procedures (SOP)
Implicit could be unspoken rules eg. can you change the code base without approval?
How did the engineering culture change since the start?
Stripe’s Noah Pepper
Stripe has a unique and strong engineering culture maintained since founding of Stripe
Engineers are expected to deeply understand customers’ problems
Engineers are never implementation headcount eg. sales reps telling engineers to “build this feature”
Carousell’s Victor
Victor is the first engineer and now the director of engineering in carousell
Early days there isn’t much of an engineering culture - it is just the founders and engineers
As the team grew, culture of caring deeply for users kicked in
Everyone joined in on brainstorming and discussions with the business folks
No longer just about writing code, it is about solving problems for customers
This mindset developed over time organically with people who joined automatically doing so implicitly
There are instances where people just wants to write code. In such cases, expectations that engineers have to do more than coding ie. solve problems for users, will be made explicit
Endowus’ Joo Won Lee
One thing the team really well in the first 3 years is having Empathy
Providing emotional support and having an enjoyable working culture is the most important
Making sure engineers feel safe about sharing mistakes and even personal issues without any criticism or judgement is critical
This gives a psychological safety to the team
How has COVID-19 affected engineering culture?
Stripe’s Noah Pepper
Stripe uses a lot of writing, memos, and documentation to communicate
Such artifacts make communication easier especially as a global company with timezone differences and remote working
During COVID-19, more businesses need Stripe to run, interestingly this gave the team more conviction about their work
Carousell’s Victor
Carousell was already transitioning to written communication before COVID-19
Turns out nothing went wrong when COVID-19 hits and turned remote
You can also reduce number of meetings with more documentations
However, difficulty in bonding team remotely
Experimented with games over zoom
Tried having more sharing sessions with the team
Open Government Product’s Li Hongyi
Big thing that really changed was speed
The team had to move a lot faster than government traditionally is used to
As government systems are extremely important, huge amounts of time goes into planning and building
However, OGP needs to really push things out fast
Team faced a strange convergence between speed and importance
While government focuses more on processes, public impact matters more in OGP
The conscious trade off is lesser consistency on processes
Great in the next week is more important than perfect in the next month
One example is the COVID-19 Vaccination Appointment Booking system
Policies were changing and introduced almost on a daily basis
Another interesting thing during COVID-19 is the calibration of the definition of urgency in the team
While urgent could mean something is on fire and needs to be fixed on a national crisis level, in some places, urgent could mean “oh my boss needs it”
The team eventually calibrated the definition to “I need to wake Li Hongyi up even if it is in the middle of the night”
This allows everyone to calibrate according to this empirical bar and communicate on the same page
Stripe’s Noah Pepper
Some things at stripe must move really fast, some have to move relatively slower
It depends on the impact the change could bring
Things like changing the color of a button can be iterated quickly without much approvals
Some changes are one-way doors and require CEO approval
Say Stripe makes an API updates, it could break and potentially affect many
Historically, Stripe has almost never deprecated any API updates
Thus, the team stays very thoughtful about any updates pushed out
How do you know if the team is scaling faster than you? When do you know if you should hire externally?
Carousell’s Victor
Carousell did hire experienced Individual Contributors and Managers during its journey
As a young manager, there is always a cycle of learning and unlearning, which can be painful
When the company grows, the amount of leadership and direction to be provided to the team also changes
When that happens, it’s a good chance to step aside and see how the new hire leads the team
Had many discussions amongst the founders to decide on the desired engineering culture, and if the new hire is going along the same direction
All in all, managers will grow, albeit at different pace
Do you face resistance when introducing new engineering practices?
Endowus’ Joo Won Lee
Sometimes as the engineering leader it is important to explain to the business side and get buy-in when engineering team has new processes
Within the team, there will be engineers who may be resistant to the culture the manager wants to establish
The engineer will leave eventually
The departure is not as painful as engineers these days have many options
Can Singapore become the next Silicon Valley?
Stripe’s Noah Pepper
There are always more roles open than there are engineers to fill them
It's a global problem not unique to Singapore
We see Silicon Valley as a gravitational force
It’s a force that pulls in other talents, forming the critical mass of talents for ecosystem to thrive
In Singapore for example, a lot of Crypto engineers and companies are coming here
This creates the critical mass required to attract more Crypto talents and having the healthy ecosystem
Ultimately, for ecosystem to succeed, need a bunch of players from small to large organisations
The large organisations train the fresh graduates
Startups and home grown successes (eg Grab, Carousell) help create the vision and excitement, allowing engineers to take riskier bets by paving the way that startups can succeed
Super early startups for engineers to play and experiment with new technologies
As someone who has seen Carousell grow in name, what changed?
Carousell’s Victor
Some things got easier and others got harder
Easier to gain trust from talents (eg when they Google’d about funding)
Harder to meet the rising expectations of hires, especially on engineering quality and processes
How to face burnout in the team?
Open Government Product’s Li Hongyi
Burnout can be caused by a few dimensions: workload, purpose, frictions
On solving Workload:
The limitations to productivity in a group is not how much you work
Like a car, to go far, it is not how hard you press the accelerator, you need to optimise for fuel, pit stops, etc
Work modulation is important for the long term
On solving Purpose:
Share stories of impact on actual users
It takes mental energy to think about the impact of their work
A lot easier for the team if leaders share the stories upfront
On solving frictions:
Slacken the tension in the team
Push people to take leaves and breaks
Aim to bond and build relationships amongst team members
Without warm connection, minor frictions in the team can become terrible friction.
Connections help make conflicts easier and more manageable
“I am the first engineer, I am keen to know how to scale to a team of 100”
Endowus’ Joo Won Lee
We are not 100 yet, can only share how we grew to size of 30
From 0 to 10, it is early stage, no option but to ask network of friends who are brave enough to join you
Need to convince them this will become something big
Growing from 10 to 30, need to ask these friends to ask their friends to join
Eventually, consider hiring recruiters, join career fairs, etc
What do you think is the biggest push and pull in your organisations
Carousell’s Victor
Seen everyone that joined and left
Sometimes departures are not a bad thing
People do leave, if they leave to learn new things
It can be good for the ecosystem as they go on to spread the knowledge
One of the year Carousell tech team grew from 25 to 100 and spawned a lot of cultural conflicts
Have to learn how to balance between people who prefers processes versus “fire fighting”
Ultimately as some scale, it boils down to acceptance of people leaving for cultural misalignment
As leaders need to take feedback and hear from people who left or stay
Eventually with the feedback, need to decide what is the culture you want to build
How to overcome inertia to start a writing engineering culture?
Stripe’s Noah Pepper
Getting comfortable with writing comes from just starting
Start by writing for lower stakes products
Slowly becomes habit
When time comes to write documentation for higher stakes products, you will have more confidence to write
It is also okay to write and rewrite documentations
Modulate the depth and quality of the documentation based on how many people will benefit from your writing
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