“I always deliver myself against these four things: you should stay true to learning; be curious, understand what is going on; optimize for people, don’t optimize for money; and if you want to do something, there’s only one reason to do it, that you want to do it." Ajey Gore is an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital India who was previously the Group CTO of Gojek. He helped build a strong Gojek engineering team with his passion, strategic insight, and innovative mindset, which was highly crucial in transforming Gojek to become Indonesia’s first decacorn. In this episode, Ajey shared his deep beliefs and motto of “earn people, not money” in various aspects of his career and life. We started from his sharing of his journey at Thoughtworks and what he learned there that helped shape a lot of his growth and leadership. Ajey eventually made a bold move, starting his startup journey which led him to founding CodeIgnition which was then acquired by Gojek. Ajey shared a lot about his exhilarating challenges and journey in Gojek, which includes the different Gojek scale and stages he went through, crucial technologies, and architecture decisions. He also shared his views about hiring and leadership that played critical parts to Gojek’s success. We also discussed briefly the importance of community contributions and his advice for fresh graduates to succeed in their career. At the end, I asked Ajey a philosophical question on how we should figure out what to optimize for in our life and career. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:08:11] Role in Sequoia - [00:10:36] Impact of COVID for Startups - [00:12:20] ThoughtWorks Journey - [00:14:38] Earn People, Not Money - [00:18:38] Moving to Startup - [00:22:34] Starting CodeIgnition - [00:23:50] Acquired by Gojek - [00:26:47] First Role in Gojek - [00:28:31] Gojek Scale and Stages - [00:30:01] Crucial Technologies and Architecture - [00:34:59] On Hiring - [00:39:14] On Leadership - [00:45:19] Community Contributions - [00:47:58] Advice for Fresh Graduates - [00:49:26] What to Optimize in Life - [00:51:27] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:53:48] _____ Ajey Gore’s Bio Ajey is an Operating Partner - Technology with Sequoia Capital India, based in Singapore. He works closely with Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s portfolio CTOs and CPOs to provide insight and expertise in building and scaling engineering, data science, product and design functions, and helps them build and mentor high-performing teams across Southeast Asia. Prior to joining Sequoia, Ajey was the Group CTO of Gojek. Ajey earlier founded CodeIgnition, which was acquired by Gojek. He has also served as the CTO for hoppr, which was acquired by Hike Messenger, and was Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks. Ajey has a B. Com degree in Commerce, Mathematics, and Statistics from University of Allahabad and a PG Diploma in advanced software technology/Computer Science from NCST. Follow Ajey: Website – https://ajeygore.in Twitter – https://twitter.com/ajeygore LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajeygore/ Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/23.

“A retrospective is a time set aside where you are looking at what has happened, you’re appreciating what happened, and you’re learning from what happened. And then you improve the ways of how you’re doing things." Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, agile coach, and the founder of Metadeveloper. She recently published her book ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” that describes the antipatterns and mistakes that she has made from facilitating retrospectives for the past 15 years, and what we can learn to avoid those. In this episode, we had a deep discussion about retrospectives and what we should pay attention to in order to facilitate a great retrospective, ranging from elements of a good retrospective, importance of Prime Directive, cultivating trust, facilitation skills, and coming up with good retrospective outcomes. Aino also shared her interesting story on how she ended up writing ”Retrospectives Antipatterns” and what we can learn from her experience. Towards the end, Aino shared her insights on how we can use retrospective to apply in our personal lives. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:05:24] Teaching the Teachers - [00:10:57] Metadeveloper - [00:13:43] Retrospective - [00:14:48] Postmortem - [00:16:31] Elements of Good Retrospective - [00:17:56] Retrospective Prime Directive - [00:21:51] Trust in Retrospective - [00:23:32] Role of a Facilitator - [00:27:08] Dealing with Different Cultures - [00:30:31] Presence of Managers in Retrospective - [00:32:36] Good Retrospective Outcome - [00:35:21] Retrospective Participation - [00:36:47] Retrospective Preparation - [00:39:12] Retrospective Fatigue - [00:43:16] Retrospective Action Items - [00:45:54] Retrospectives Antipatterns - [00:47:41] Writing Book Tips - [00:50:36] How to Read the Antipatterns - [00:52:06] Personal Retrospective - [00:56:07] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:57:51] _____ Aino Vonge Corry’s Bio Aino Vonge Corry is an independent consultant, who sometimes works as an agile coach. After gaining her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2001 she spent the next 10 years failing to choose between being a researcher/teacher in academia, and being a teacher/facilitator in industry. She eventually squared the circle by starting her own company, Metadeveloper, which develops developers by teaching CS, teaching how to teach CS, inviting speakers to IT conferences, and facilitating software development in various ways. She has facilitated retrospectives and other meetings for the past 15 years during which time she has made all the mistakes possible in that field. Follow Aino: Website - https://metadeveloper.com Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainovongecorry Twitter - https://twitter.com/apaipi Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/22.

“Programmers have to come out of their cubicles. Innovative software development doesn’t happen with one person in a cubicle with great ideas. Because it’s not just even about code. Anybody can write code. It’s about what does the code accomplish. And if the code accomplishes something innovative, great!" Vaughn Vernon is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and reactive software development. He is well-known for his best-selling DDD books and IDDD workshops. In this episode, we discussed many things about Domain-Driven Design and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Apart from the fundamentals, Vaughn shared many of his insights around the two, such as why developers should learn more about DDD, the most important aspect of DDD, the benefits of EDA, eventual consistency, event storming, and event sourcing. Towards the end, Vaughn also gave a sneak peek about his new book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” and why he wrote it. Listen out for: Vaughn’s career journey - [00:06:44] Domain-Driven Design - [00:16:47] Why DDD can be expensive - [00:21:43] Why developers need to know DDD - [00:23:59] DDD most important thing - [00:27:15] How to start with DDD - [00:30:05] Event-Driven Architecture - [00:32:28] Benefits of EDA - [00:36:00] Eventual consistency - [00:40:13] Event storming - [00:45:22] Event sourcing - [00:49:13] Vaughn’s new book - [00:53:09] Vaughn’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:00:26] _____ Vaughn Vernon’s Bio Vaughn Vernon is an entrepreneur, software developer, and architect with more than 35 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design and reactive software development, a champion of simplicity, and he is the founder and chief architect of the VLINGO/PLATFORM. Along with his three best-selling books, Vaughn was recently commissioned by Pearson/Addison-Wesley as curator and editor of his own Vaughn Vernon Signature Series. Follow Vaughn: Website - https://vaughnvernon.com/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/VaughnVernon LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaughnvernon/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/21.

“The most important thing we can do in order to get whatever success we want—build the best product you can. Invest all your energy in making the product absolutely best that you can think of. If you really focus on building an absolutely best product possible, everything else will follow." Arno is an inspiring tech leader with decades of experience in two major creative companies—Apple and Adobe. I’m honored to have him sharing his career journey and passion in this episode. Arno shared his amazing start of his career at Apple, especially when Steve Jobs came back and led the company back to focus, which was the key success factor that brought Apple to where it is today. The entire company had to adapt to Steve Jobs’s new ways of working and to work in an iterative fast paced approach, at the time when Agile was not yet widely known, including how Arno led a complete rewrite of the macOS Finder. Then Arno shared his next illustrious career at Adobe, where he had the opportunities to explore different projects and establish his engineering leadership skills. Arno led an audacious move when he proposed Adobe to open source XMP, a bold action when open sourcing wasn’t common back then. He also shared his lessons in dealing with halted projects, and the perspective that we should embrace when that happens. Arno then shared his invaluable wisdom on how to build products that people love and what to focus on in order to create successful products. Right at the end, Arno shared with me what made him decide to end his career and pursue the things he is truly passionate about. Listen out for: Arno’s career start - [00:08:07] Journey at Apple - [00:11:44] Steve Jobs impact - [00:14:17] Apple’s key success factor - [00:19:08] Working in agile manner - [00:20:40] Building without clear direction - [00:24:38] Tips when revamping product - [00:26:53] How to decide a technical rewrite - [00:30:36] Journey at Adobe - [00:33:00] Contributing to open source - [00:37:18] Dealing with canceled projects - [00:40:33] Director of products - [00:43:56] Building products people love - [00:45:36] Arno’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:47:42] Why Arno decided to pursue his passion - [00:53:09] _____ Arno Gourdol’s Bio After a tech career at Adobe and Apple, Arno now travels around the world to capture beautiful landscapes with his camera—living life to the fullest spending time on things he is passionate about. Arno is also an active contributor to some open source projects that he is passionate about. Follow Arno: Website- https://www.arno.org/ Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnog/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/arnog Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/arnog/ GitHub - https://github.com/arnog Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/20.

“With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with people, the interesting part is: if you get all the parts right, the sum of the parts will be definitely greater than adding them together." Ranganathan Balashanmugam is the co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams, where most of us can relate to with the remote working becoming a norm nowadays. I had a pleasant conversation with him in this episode to discuss many strategies and thought leadership on how to lead a distributed team by taking parallel from distributed system, overcoming challenges of building a team with different culture, and how to nurture a team. We started with him sharing his career journey and interesting story of him conquering the Mount Everest Base Camp, where he gained some insights and inspiration throughout the trek. Ranga then shared what led him to take his first management role and developed strategies around scaling distribution teams over the years. We then discussed about hiring and onboarding, the concept of orchestration vs choreography when managing a team, and the qualities of an excellent leader. At the end, Ranga also shared about EverestEngineering and its differentiators to ensure good engineering quality for their clients. Listen out for: Ranganathan’s career journey - [00:06:16] Trip to Mount Everest - [00:08:19] How Ranga took management role - [00:12:55] Scaling distributed teams - [00:14:43] Onboarding new joiner - [00:26:23] Orchestration vs choreography - [00:31:01] What makes a good manager/leader - [00:36:41] EverestEngineering - [00:43:13] Ensuring good engineering quality - [00:47:09] Ranga’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:52:27] _____ Ranganathan Balashanmugam’s Bio Ranga has worked with globally distributed teams for the last fifteen years. He graduated as a civil engineer and became a developer for nearly eleven years. He worked on web, mobile, and distributed technologies to scale software. Later he picked up operations and engineering management at Aconex, where there were teams distributed in four different time zones. He is currently co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering, which he scaled the organization to 80+ people in the last two years, in three other regions. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams. Microsoft MVP for Data Platform - 2016, 2017. Experience in building two startups. Speaker at many international conferences and meetups Experience in building distributed high-performance teams and offices. Organizer of one of the top technology meetups - Hyderabad Scalability Meetup. Follow Ranga: Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranganathanb Twitter – https://twitter.com/ran_than Medium – https://medium.com/@ran_than SlideShare – https://www.slideshare.net/techmaddy Follow EverestEngineering: Website – https://everest.engineering Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/19.

“What I come to realize is that technology doesn’t move that fast. The fundamentals are roughly the same. It’s the fact that we don’t necessarily teach fundamentals. When you start to focus on the fundamentals, then you don’t mentally get attached to one particular implementation." Kelsey Hightower is one of the leading figures in open source, cloud computing, and Kubernetes. I’m extremely excited to have him with me sharing a lot of his insights around many things in tech. We started the conversation with what he has been doing recently—his involvement in serverless technologies and security landscape. Kelsey then shared his interesting career journey of how he got from working at fast food in high school to where he is at Google today. He also shared his advice on how one should learn and develop knowledge in the current fast changing technology landscape, and how he shifted his learning mindset to overcome impostor syndrome. Kelsey also discussed various latest updates on cloud, serverless technologies, and Kubernetes. He also shared how he has developed his fundamental understanding of certain technologies by learning them “the hard way” and publicly. We also covered his latest observation and views on microservices vs monolith. Last but not least, we close off the session with Kelsey’s Tech Lead Wisdom on his take around personal growth, learning, and his preferred way of leading by inspiring others. Listen out for: What Kelsey is up to - [00:06:39] Kelsey’s career journey - [00:10:15] Succeeding in tech from under-represented groups - [00:13:21] Understanding technology fundamentals - [00:16:45] Impostor syndrome - [00:21:19] On cloud latest and cloud native - [00:27:51] Twelve-Factor application - [00:34:00] Serverless latest - [00:36:14] Monolith vs microservices - [00:42:44] Learning things The Hard Way - [00:54:20] Kubernetes-ify everything - [01:02:15] Kubernetes resources - [01:08:54] Kelsey’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [01:12:13] _____ Kelsey Hightower’s Bio Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, but most enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration to his favorite Linux distro of the month. Follow Kelsey: Twitter – https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower Github - https://github.com/kelseyhightower Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/18.

“Asynchronous communication promotes flow. And flow is generally what we’re all looking for. Not only because it’s more productive. Not only it’s because it’s within this state that we produce the best work. It’s also within this state that we feel the most fulfilled." Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, the remote-first company behind Todoist and Twist that has a mission of building the future of work by creating tools that promote more fulfilling ways to work and live. Doist has been a remote-first company practically since the founder started working on Todoist in 2007 and with its first remote hire in 2011. In this episode, I learned a lot from Gonçalo about Doist and its remote working history and culture, including some advantages and disadvantages of remote work. We also discussed at length about having asynchronous communication as the first preferred communication style instead of synchronous, and why it is such an important communication style to adopt in a remote team. Gonçalo then shares about Doist core values, the cornerstone of every single thing that Doist does as company, from creating processes to decision making and recruiting. Towards the end, Gonçalo also shares some engineering and technical practices that Doist does, especially the ones important for a successful remote team, including the importance of pre-allocation and prioritization. Listen out for: About Doist - [00:05:59] Gonçalo’s career journey - [00:06:52] Doist remote work history - [00:10:30] Remote work advantages & disadvantages - [00:13:01] Asynchronous vs synchronous - [00:18:53] Handling emergencies - [00:25:10] On meeting and real-time chat - [00:26:48] Hiring and onboarding - [00:30:38] Doist 5 core values - [00:39:01] Role of a manager - [00:41:07] Technical practices - [00:42:47] Prioritization - [00:48:55] Doist architecture - [00:54:04] Remote work resources - [00:55:48] Gonçalo’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:56:54] _____ Gonçalo Silva’s Bio Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, creators of Todoist and Twist. He’s been working remotely for over a decade and managing remote teams for most of that time. He loves long-term ambition, asynchronous communication, and programming. Follow Gonçalo: Twitter – https://twitter.com/goncalossilva LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/goncalossilva/ Follow Doist: Website – https://doist.com/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/doist LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/doist/ YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/DoistApps Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/doistofficial Our Sponsors Are you a startup in software development which is less than 5 years old? If yes, our sponsor at JetBrains has a 50% startup discount offer which allows Startups to purchase multiple products and subscriptions for up to 10 unique licenses over a period of months. To find out more, go to https://www.jetbrains.com/store/startups. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/17.

“Having the conversation within the business, the data science teams, and the technology teams about what problems are you trying to solve? What can AI do with the data that you have? Sometimes business comes with a lot of problems that are like science-fiction." Feng-Yuan is the co-founder and CEO of BasisAI, a Singapore-headquartered augmented intelligence software company that helps data-driven enterprises deploy AI responsibly. He has a vast experience in the tech sector, working with the Land Transport Authority Singapore to make public transport more efficient; and with GovTech pushing data initiatives for Singapore’s Smart Nation projects. In this episode, I talked to Feng-Yuan about responsible AI and how to build trust in artificial intelligence, including the possibilities, challenges and dangers that AI and ML offer to businesses. We began by talking about his company, BasisAI, which offers bespoke AI solutions that are built responsibly. Feng-Yuan explained why it’s important to differentiate between what is interesting and what is useful when it comes to AI trends. We also spoke at length about deepfake, the dangers that come with it, and how to prevent such instances. At the end, Feng-Yuan also shares some wisdom about effective communication in the age of AI and ML. Listen out for: BasisAI - [00:04:48] Feng-Yuan’s career journey - [00:06:23] Feng-Yuan’s interesting projects at GovTech - [00:11:57] The fear of AI/ML - [00:17:29] AI/ML current trends & challenges - [00:20:15] The danger of AI/ML - [00:23:07] Responsible AI - [00:25:00] Explainable AI - [00:28:24] Challenges for implementing AI - [00:30:14] Managing expectations for AI projects - [00:33:12] Productionizing AI - [00:35:07] Role of ML engineers in product team - [00:38:31] Data Scientist and ML Engineer - [00:41:03] Hyper-personalized AI - [00:43:16] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:45:50] _____ Liu Feng-Yuan’s Bio Feng-Yuan Liu is the co-founder and CEO of BasisAI, a Singapore-headquartered augmented intelligence software company that helps data-driven enterprises deploy AI responsibly. In his previous capacity, he was responsible for leading and driving Smart Nation data initiatives for the Singapore government, including setting up and growing the data science and AI capabilities within GovTech. Follow Feng-Yuan: Email – fengyuan@basis-ai.com LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/feng-yuan-liu-9b09aa42/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/fengyuanliu Follow BasisAI: Website – https://basis-ai.com LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/basis-ai/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/basis_ai Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/basisai/ Our Sponsors Are you a startup in software development which is less than 5 years old? If yes, our sponsor at JetBrains has a 50% startup discount offer which allows Startups to purchase multiple products and subscriptions for up to 10 unique licenses over a period of months. To find out more, go to https://www.jetbrains.com/store/startups. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/16.

“The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much." Gergely is a seasoned software engineer and engineering manager, previously worked in hypergrowth companies such as Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype. He is the author of “The Tech Resume Inside Out” book and “The Pragmatic Engineer” blog. In this episode, he shared about his interesting programmer-to-manager career journey path, starting from small companies and moving to hypergrowth startups. We then discussed on the importance of a tech resume and the common pitfall that people have in their tech resume, which led him to write his recent book that came up after he has been helping so many people improve their resume during the pandemic. I also had an insightful discussion with Gergely about how the Engineering team works at Uber, which brought us to touch on what Silicon Valley gets right when dealing with software engineers. Gergely also shared the reason he quit Uber recently and his future plan. We then talked about his blog, where he has been sharing many interesting technical topics that he learned throughout the years, helping him to discover many viewpoints from others and shaping him as a better communicator. We also discussed some of his popular blog posts on distributed systems and software architecture. Lastly, Gergely also shared his firsthand experience seeing Uber’s pace of change and its growing number of microservices. Listen out for: Gergely’s career journey - [00:06:51] Why getting interviews could be tough - [00:13:00] “The Tech Resume Inside Out“ book - [00:16:29] Tech resume pitfalls - [00:21:51] Working at Uber - [00:25:20] Managing Engineering team at hyperscale company - [00:27:16] What Silicon Valley gets right dealing with Software Engineers - [00:33:34] Leaving Uber - [00:37:12] Writing blogs - [00:40:01] Distributed system - [00:42:44] Other popular blog posts - [00:44:53] Uber’s pace of change and microservices - [00:49:31] Gergely’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:51:30] _____ Gergely Orosz’s Bio Gergely Orosz is an engineering lead, previously at Uber, Skype / Microsoft and Skyscanner. He is passionate about helping engineers grow. He published articles on software engineering on The Pragmatic Engineer blog, has written the book “The Tech Resume Inside Out: what a good developer resume looks like”, and is currently writing ”The Software Engineer’s Guidebook”. Follow Gergely: Website - https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/gergelyorosz/ Our Sponsors Are you a startup in software development which is less than 5 years old? If yes, our sponsor at JetBrains has a 50% startup discount offer which allows Startups to purchase multiple products and subscriptions for up to 10 unique licenses over a period of months. To find out more, go to https://www.jetbrains.com/store/startups. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/15.

“Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s job. It’s the CEO’s job." Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore who played a major part in the Office 365 founding team. In this episode, I had an inspiring discussion with him around his journey founding the Office 365, the challenges he faced, and on how to approach digital transformation adoption. Our conversation started with some interesting observations on how organizations in Singapore are adapting to the COVID-19 impact, followed by the unique organizational structure Microsoft has in regional aspects and the regional CTO scope in decision making and shaping of Microsoft’s product and culture. Richard also shares how the Office 365 team was structured to instil an independent yet collaborative environment, his viewpoints about technical product management and the importance of cloud technologies. Busting the myths of digital transformation, he provided some advice about how organizations should approach it. Last, Richard also shared about his external contributions to the community, including SGTech and some wisdom on continuous learning with a growth mindset. Listen out for: Impact of COVID - [00:05:59] Richard’s career journey - [00:07:56] Microsoft’s unique regional CTO structure & scope - [00:10:09] The region macro trends - [00:13:43] Founding Office 365 - [00:15:58] The art of Product Management - [00:24:09] Building Office 365 - [00:26:26] Importance of cloud - [00:30:06] Digital transformation adoption - [00:35:02] Community contributions and other interests - [00:40:34] Responsibility Tech - [00:45:01] Richard’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:46:45] _____ Richard Koh’s Bio Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore. In this role, he is responsible for engaging with key executive leaders across government, industry and academia; bringing in the macro technology landscape; and helping customers leverage technology innovations for their digital transformation. His focus areas include guiding technology policies, standards, legal and regulatory matters, as well as security, privacy and compliance decisions. Richard was part of the founding product team for Microsoft’s flagship productivity cloud services suite – Office 365. Follow Richard: Full bio – https://news.microsoft.com/en-sg/richard-koh/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/richardkoh LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardkoh/ Our Sponsors This episode is brought to you by JetBrains. Do you want to learn to code? Do you have friends who are looking to learn how to code? Our sponsors at JetBrains recently launched JetBrains Academy, an education platform that offers interactive, project-based learning combined with powerful, professional development tools. Advance your Java and Python skills, with more programming languages to come. To get an extended 3-month free trial on JetBrains Academy, go to https://techleadjournal.dev/jetbrains-academy. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/14.