As you rise up the ladder, a couple of things happen here. One is the responsibility to increase the breadth in careers. As you move into a managerial ladder, particularly I'll talk for that at first. The second aspect is that now you have a team that you have built and that team that you will take and get off. For startups, I think speed matters a lot; how fast can you actually do this? If you don't churn out products or fold very quickly, then it is not helping the customers. So all these are the people aspects. Third aspect is often, for 10M, that is where the technology part comes in.
“Every organization has a mission, a vision, and a set of values. As a leader, your number one task is to live those values and talk about them at every opportunity with your team to create alignment."
Manoj Awasthi is the CTO at JULO and previously the SVP of Engineering at Tokopedia. In this episode, Manoj shared engineering leadership lessons from his recent experiences. Manoj 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, Manoj shared some of his important lessons learned before ending by sharing his tech leadership wisdom.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:05:46]
- Role of Senior Engineering Leader - [00:15:02]
- Scaling Engineering Team - [00:21:31]
- Hiring Engineers - [00:24:28]
- Hiring Engineering Managers/Leaders - [00:27:06]
- Aligning Culture - [00:28:47]
- Engineering Governance - [00:32:25]
- Maintaining Engineering Productivity - [00:35:58]
- Sharing Lessons Learned - [00:39:12]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:41:39]
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Manoj Awasthi’s Bio
Manoj Awasthi is the CTO at JULO, a fintech startup based in Jakarta. Prior to JULO, Manoj spent more than six years leading technology teams at Tokopedia wearing multiple hats during the growth years of Tokopedia from 2016 until 2022 as it scaled. During this time, he witnessed the tech team growing from 80 people to 2000+. He is a techie at heart, has a natural empathy for people and believes that wonders can happen through the alignment of teams towards a clear goal. When he is not working, he can be found either reading a book (almost every day) or having quality time with his family.
Follow Manoj:
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For episode show notes, visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/115.
