Building an Engineering Team

My slides at Plug & Play mentoring session. It's mostly about building a startup with emphasis on Engineering teams.

Transcript

1. Building an Engineering Team
 
 By Batista Harahap
2. Batista Harahap - Cofounder & CEO of Prism What I really do: * Listen, Listen, Listen * Execute * Measure * Listen, Listen, Listen * Execute * Write (codes, blog posts & music) * Parenting Find me here: bango29.com github.com/tistaharahap soundcloud.com/tistaharahap
3. Mobile Dashboard with
5. 42 People
6. Team Location
7. Multicity Teams Yeay or Nay?
8. Multicity Teams Don’t do it!
9. How Prism do it
10. People then Product then Profit
11. People First
12. Culture
13. - Offices are open 24-7-365 in all cities - As well as Slack - In Jakarta, spend the morning remotely, go to work around 10-11 AM - In Bandung, spend the morning remotely, go to work around 10-11 AM - In Jogja, from 9 AM to 6 PM - 12 Days Annual Leave, Unlimited WFH, Unlimited sick leave - #announcement in Slack is where we tell people about commitments & leave Work Policies
14. - 3M (MondayMorningMeeting) - every Mon 9am sharp - mandatory for all - BrownBag (Sharing Session) - every Fri 4pm - Pinkbag (Product BrownBag) - Wed 4pm (when applicable) - Dereded - Everyday 4pm - Prism Techblog - https://medium.com/prismapp - Futsal, Muaythai, Badminton - every Thu 7pm - Men sana in corpore sano! Weekly Activities
15. - Slack operating hours 08.00 - 22.00 (kinda) - Working attire - as comfortable as you want - Leave request - should be informed 1 week before via Sleekr, need approval from direct superior - Blog posting - whenever you ready! post maintained by Editor team Useful Info
16. Engineering Structure
18. - Effective for stability in an industry where everything move fast - Very good for mentoring and appraisals - Great for careers - Not effective for day-to-day operational problems Structure
19. Engineering Culture
20. Done is better than perfect.
21. - Everyone is capable in coding in PHP, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Python & NodeJS - Code in these languages to achieve high engineering coverage - For RDBMS the choices are MySQL and or PostgreSQL - NoSQL databases are Redis, Elastic Search and Cassandra - Golang is effective if you use this to do one thing and do it really great - Kotlin is the best language for Android and Server Side APIs needing JVM stability Tech Stack
22. - Unit Tests are engineers peace of mind - Integration Tests are tech lead’s peace of mind - UI Tests are QA’s peace of mind - A/B Tests are Product Team’s peace of mind - Analytics/Data is everyone’s peace of mind - Revenue is the company’s peace of mind - sustainable pride Peace of Mind?
23. Process
24. People then Product then Profit
25. Feedbacks then Build then Capture
26. Build: Design First Philosophy
28. Spike and Stabilize
29. Scheduled Routine Release
30. Always spend more time in testing!
31. Accommodating Failures
32. - Don’t hesitate to ask forgiveness for a mistake - A decision is better than no decision, even the wrong ones - Learn, Learn, Learn from mistakes - Hate the game, not the players - Over communicating is always a good choice until it’s not - Accept the fact that burn outs will happen, trust your team mates Rule of Thumb
33. - Low targets means no vision - High targets means you’re not being realistic - Pick the battles you want to win NOW - Don’t control what you CAN’T control Setting Targets
34. Knowledge is an engineer’s achilles heel
35. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/fscottfit100572.html
36. 23 Hard Earned Lessons
37. 1. Timing is a bitch 2. 2x is usually 10x in Indonesia. If you do 10x, it’s actually 20x for the users, they don’t get it 3. Experiment all the time - Build, Ship, Track, Build, Ship, Track… 4. Make data available, be a fanatic about this 5. Assumptions kills more startups everyday than Mary Jane ever will 6. Chicken Nuggets are preferable than Chicken Katsu. Chicken Katsu is preferable than Grilled Whole Chicken 7. A complex/complicated problems usually is best solved with a simple solution 8. When you build features, there’s no such thing as half-done because of xyz, always deliver QUALITY 9. The founding team (your partners) over time must be people you’d die for and they’d die for you 10. Maturity is more often is the one that got away 11. Ego kills your product along with the whole team, it suffocates 12. Be brave, launching early is always right!
38. 13. Play with your strength 14. Overcommunicating is always better than undercommunicating 15. Never get satisfied too early, shit happens whenever shit feels like to 16. Advocate for failures, success is the side effect of failures, no one can get it right the first time. No you’re not that good. 17. Revenue === Pride
 No matter how small, it’s better than negative revenue 18. Scaling is not just a tech problem, it’s a global problem for the company 19. Be honest 20. Delegate, delegate, delegate - no one player is bigger than the team 21. Hire the right people - take time - referrals are always good! 22. There is an I in TEAM - don’t believe that bullshit that there’s not - you are real and you are your own startup 23. Bisa ga bisa cuman masalah waktu
39. tista@prismapp.io PT Koneksi Integrasi Jl. Melawai XI No 56 - Jakarta Selatan Thank You