Sometimes when you want to breed innovation, you'll need to deliberately prepare the ground. The key is probably slack time, not just focus on just doing delivering work. I think governance is very important, especially on the standardization stuff. Delayed decision making hurts more than it helps here. Not asking enough questions is literally zero. We should not take ourselves too seriously. But the cost of not asking questions, especially important questions, is very high. Those are like a bunch of things that I would suggest based on my journey so far.
“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.
