00:07:21 · Benjamin Mann
[00:07:21] S5: So, and then I've never looked back and I just moved from role to role and from company to company leading bigger engineering teams. Always very focused on building products for end consumers and end users. I really enjoy building at scale. What got me into Foodpanda is I really like to build consumer products that are on a global scale, on a on a multi country scale, and that are simply on the phone of everyone around you. From the outside, you say, like, how hard can food delivery be? Like, you open the app, you press the button, and you get food delivered. People think it's simple. It's really not. The amount of steps, the number of steps that you need to execute near perfectly as a business and as a tech in order to guarantee that the customer gets their food in twenty five, thirty, thirty five minutes. It's insane. Literally hundreds of steps that fire in parallel and in sequence that need to be coordinated with each other with very little room for error because one tiny mistake, the customer gets their food ten minutes late, which in e commerce terms is nothing. Whoever delivers ten minutes earlier or not, who cares? But if you're a hungry person, ten minutes feel like a million years. Hungry hungry people are not patient people in general. Now I'm loving this part of the industry the most. As you can see, tiny changes have this almost butterfly effect through your entire delivery chain on both good or bad. As long as you're out the industry, you really don't see it so much. Delivery Hero owns Foodpanda. So technically, I've been always working for Delivery Hero since day one in Foodpanda. And my boss approached me one day, would you wanna have a conversation about becoming my successor? Right? Then I met the Delivery Hero CEO. I started to see this really as something that I would even enjoy more than my current food panda roll. So I went through an internal interviewing process and became quasi the natural successor to the Delivery Hero CTO. We experimented with a new way of deploying software and managed to basically undeploy parts of our infrastructure causing a significant incident. I have this great example. It was a couple of years ago. One of my engineering team had this great idea of what they wanna build to improve their search result. They they built the perfect solution and rolled it out to the customers, and they hated it.
00:09:39 · Benjamin Mann
They hated it with the passion of a thousand sons, and they let us know. Our customer service was, like, swamped with requests, like, why are you doing this? You've ruined the app experience, and so on. This happens. You have two ways of reacting. You can be really depressed and say, oh my god. We screwed something up. We made a mistake and the world is ending. Or you take this as a learning opportunity. Okay. We went into this feature thinking we're gonna build something that our customers love. Now we've built something that our customers truly hate. So while the product that we've built may not have fit this, the end result was still a great one because now we know more about our customers, and in the next iteration of the product, repeat our process and build a better product at the end of it. I learned there that in hyper growth and hyper scale environments, it's very easy to forget that people that are new to this don't have the entire history of what happened before. There's people coming in and they understand the entire history of a decision you've taken three years ago that puts you in the spot where you are today. So you need to constantly repeat not only the history but also where we are going so that people stay aligned, that people stay focused on what matters, that people understand, quite frankly, also why their job is important. So you need to overcommunicate a lot, and every leader that I know, including myself, thinks they are way overcommunicating, but in reality are undercommunicating a lot. So that's one. The second one is that the mindset of the engineering team also needs adoption as incident times need to become shorter. Stability numbers need to go up. Mobile app quality needs to be driven up because
00:11:22 · S0, S1, S2, S3
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00:12:29 · S3, S6
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00:13:02 · Benjamin Mann
[00:13:02] S5: At huge scales of millions and millions of daily users, even 0.01%, it's a lot of people that you affect. Sometimes, especially engineers that are a bit longer in the organization, they need a gentle reminder of that mind switch, not because they don't care, but simply they forget how big you become. And that's why this over communicating becomes really important. I think one very helpful skill to have as a CTO, you gotta be really at home in chaos because you will have a lot of random things popping up. Position of a food delivery company on the outset of COVID was an interesting one because user demand spiked overnight. Governments all of a sudden had very concrete ideas what you need to do and what you have to do to provide for the society and what you should do. The business has very strong ideas of where to handle the growth that's come and how to handle the demand. And very likely, the platforms have not been built for this growth. Right? So what the challenge was multiple at the time. A, how do we ensure that our platform, overnight become an essential service for a lot of people, right, people really couldn't go out and needed food, it becomes from a luxury thing to a really essential service for survival. That completely also changes the game on reliability. Right? You cannot be down then all of a sudden, while at the same time, balance... Accepting the fact that we now have a growth in usage for which the platform was not built. So the first couple of months in foodpanda, the main mission was, okay. Let's make sure that we keep that service up and running, right, even if it's a bit rough around the edges, and let's make sure that we deliver the things in the time that we need them where it's most critical. Right? And let's ensure that whatever curveball comes from the side, like, for example, one government deciding starting tomorrow, you don't accept cash payments anymore, only electronic payments. Okay. Tomorrow is a bit short in terms of implementing something. Right? So simply handling with all of this. So the first couple months were chaotic. The second one, how to deal with technical debt, technical debt being either architectural legacy or core qualities or whatnot that you need to fix is I try to teach people to look at it from the angle of what happens if you don't fix it. Right?
00:15:21 · Benjamin Mann
Where's the point in time where this impacts your business negatively under which conditions? And then have an eye level conversation with your business stake holder about where should that point be and and when is the right time to fix it. The engineers struggle with quantifying this a little bit, which makes it hard then because then you get into this discussion. Oh, it's technical debt, but is it really important? Can we fix it maybe quarter? And by having this continuous discussion about when in time this particular technical debt will become a problem for the organization and for the business result, you take a lot of this vagueness out. Right? I think one thing is above everything is as a software engineer, you need to have an unbelievable laser focus on the experience that you give to your customer because I fundamentally believe in order to have a successful business, you first need to provide outstanding experience to the customer. No matter what the product is, no matter what the industry is, I don't think you can build a long lasting profitable great business without taking care of the experience of your customer first. Sometimes our engineers forget that a little bit in the heat of timelines and complex requirements or unclear even situations that your intent to jump into troubleshooting mode before you've really understood what the trouble is. I mean, it's our job as engineering leaders to always bring them back and say, okay. What problem are we trying to solve for the customer here? Let's figure out really what the problem is first and then think about how we solve it. Sometimes we tend to skip the clear definition of the what the problem is start with the how we're gonna solve it, and I think that's dangerous. Be very open minded and just be very positive and try a lot of things. In my almost twenty years of managing people in various sizes that very often think, can we succeed outside of our country? My experience with everyone who tried is yes. Don't give in to that almost imposter kind of syndrome that asks you like, am I good enough to succeed in the outside world? Because I can guarantee you from my personal experience, yes, you are. And there's not even a question of a doubt around that.