 Don't know Sao Xiong, okay so if you don't know, hi I'm Sao Xiong, his Dimension Director of the Digital Technology Unit in Singapore Palace, he was formerly in PayPal and he has led numerous technology team in HP, Garena and Yahoo, so his right person to you know to get in touch you know even after this presentation you know meet him you know have coffee you know take this session forward so yeah so Sao Xiong I just pass the mic to you and you can probably do a better introduction than me yeah okay I'm not sure I think you did a good job hi everyone my name is Sao Xiong, now that I look at it I'm not quite sure whether it is too cartoony in the picture but I was looking at talking about technology teams and the first thing that comes to mind is like hey pointy hair manager so there it goes, so the subtitle is or what does my manager actually do, this is my I think one of my very few or possibly my only ever talk that I've done that is not technical so and this is the first time I'm doing this kind of talk anyway so bear with me if I kind of get a bit rambly because I get uncomfortable when I can't show code so yeah before I begin maybe can I get like to understand what the crowd is here is like because I see a lot of people with long sleeve shirts and so I'm getting kind of nervous now because you guys could be could know this a lot better than I do and then could be embarrassing myself how many here are engineers how many are here have managed engineering teams okay that's good a good number there's a lot of people I can smoke so it's good okay okay it's not actually working okay anyone actually still reads Dilbert actually because okay not that many though so yeah I'm not getting enough laughter here okay lame joke let's move on okay so let me talk about about me my name is Sao Xiong I have done a number of years of managing teams I've been in the industry for about 21 years and managed software engineering teams for about 17 so 10 years in startups the kind of teams that you manage your startups are quite different but I've also done seven years in Silicon Valley tech startups so sort of balanced that out over time so I guess I know sort of what I'm talking about I hope I'm currently in Singapore Power that's the company that I just joined somebody was asking me earlier on Michael whether it's a startup so the answer is no it's not a startup it's a utilities company so the power that you get in Singapore actually are distributed by Singapore Power and I just started a new team there about two and a half months ago before that I was in PayPal and then I was also in Yahoo HP and so on I started on my career in ID and Singtel so I sort of have been on the other side as well okay not being able to click is not good for my nerves ah okay so what do engineering managers do so for those who are engineering managers what do you do you want to give a quick shout out okay anything else support the team okay any other things okay this sounds are you a manager okay how about engineers what do your managers do do you know what your managers do facilitators okay anybody else take take care of politics okay interesting um anyone else want to venture something shield the team from sales that's a good one um on a practical level what do managers do on a day-to-day basis clearly communicate priorities that's good you know you sound like you have a lot of corporate experience actually and this is a good one um so I have been asked I have been asked um relatively often like what do engineering managers do so after a while I actually listed down some of those things and maybe I should stand closer here okay so I listed a list of things um here to talk about what engineering managers do um organization basically organizing the team recruitment hiring people augmentation when your team grows a bit too big what do you do so you need to augment them you need to increase the team size and you can't hire fast enough what do you do um development basically developing your people right not just hiring them getting them to do a job but basically you need to to develop them into to better engineers um evaluation at the end of the year or maybe mid-year you do need to do performance evaluation um how do you increase the productivity of your engineers and if they want to leave what do you do you lock them up you know how do you retain them um the kind of culture that you build and um the the ones that you nurture what happens if you you start from ground up from a empty slate what kind of culture do you want to build and what happens if you inherit a team the team with culture already exists then what do you want to do with that uh does it click flickering and finally of course if there's conflict then you you manage conflict as well so in terms of some of the things that you talk about earlier on like um managing priorities yeah productivity you want to actually increase the efficiency of your engineers you want to make them more efficient um and a lot of other things that you talk about as well so in reality is um you will notice from the list here none of them are actually technical work right so does an engineering manager do technical work what do you think should I code okay um so actually a lot of some engineering managers do code um especially for the startups but relatively these are actually two different roles so if you're an engineering manager that's a different role and if you are also coding then basically you're playing more than one role right so you might not be as good so if I look at it then engineering manager is a role right just like any other role that you play and these are the tasks that you need to do like or some of the tasks that you need to do obviously within a talk like this I I can't talk about all of them at once um what I'm going to do is I'm just going to talk about very briefly the first three things um basically about organization how do you organize a team how do you recruit and how do you augment a team and of course which level right uh which level of people are you talking about the as a line manager where engineers actually report to you you would actually do things a lot different forms say as a middle manager or even like executive management but nonetheless whatever I mentioned just now in terms of the tasks that needs to be done these are quite universal it's just like the level of things that you need to do right um for example the as and I will go through some of them the organization at the top level the cto or the vp engineering probably needs to decide how he wants to organize the team but even down at the line management level you might want to organize the team differently is the kind of tasks still remains it's just at which level and which level of granularity all right it works now okay so first thing I'm going to talk about is recruitment um I spent a lot of time actually I spent more time looking out for pictures for those slides so hope you guys appreciate it it uh do you know what this is oh okay great con so what do you think this tricking them is ah okay yeah yeah so uh I hope I pronounce it correctly because I'm not really good at pronouncing madri names you pay he was trying to convince tucca liang to join him right and visited his house three times and that is his recruitment right in the end he did recruit tucca liang and and you know fame and fortune and and suit but it's not a easy task recruitment is never easy so hiring is is really a project that you need to consistently work on it is not something incidental it's actually a lot of hard work so some of the basic questions you want to ask yourself it's like why why do I want to hire it's like do I have enough people uh what's the purpose of the new hires which roles do you want to hire which roles do you need the most first which comes later or which I do not need at all um how many the numbers am I hiring too many am I hiring too little um what are the things that are available for you to help you to hire uh people who help you resources to help you um organization to help you what is there available for you and then what's the strategy how do you want to strategize your hiring and what are the processes that you want to implement or already in in place because if you are joining a um corporate like what I just did in Singapore power then there are times that you can't really define your hiring strategy neither can you define your hiring processes then how do you actually adapt to it or maybe you adapt the processes to yourself oops just do can I go back please ah um is there another back I can't remember okay no sorry just go front yeah okay so uh one of the things you need to do is really want to build up a recruitment pipeline and recommend pipeline um well it depends on where it is for some it's I'm just going to get an external recruiter I'm going to pay him money and it's going to recruit people for me so the answer is really no um you need more than that so your recruitment pipeline could be from your network from your friends the your family even alumni ex-colleagues and so on um if you have been around ex-colleagues is is great because then you have a network of people whom you already work with and you know who are good and who are no good um and then you can hire accordingly um not no good as in really bad but maybe not suitable for the role from the community like meetups like this right then you meet people uh maybe you find somebody whom you hit it off well and then you can work well with then you have recruiters both external internal uh in larger corporations usually you would have like internal recruiters or talent acquisition uh depending on depending on the company itself um and then you also have external recruiters you could have you could be working with external recruiters as well although I think it really depends on the external recruiter you will some are are really good some are really technical and really understand your needs some are really more like they just want your money but nonetheless they are a possible source and then other stuff like job boards um so posting on things like job street and job CV still works at a certain level but I think increasingly they are being replaced by other things like LinkedIn and and so on um advertising I'm not sure anybody actually still advertises today but I suppose it depends on the different kind of roles that you're looking for okay thank you right um guess which picture guess guess what this is no this is a bit hard right this is hansing from the pre-hand days no yes no okay never mind way way too deep yeah um anyway so interview panels you you want to set up a team to do interviews um it could be a permanent team semi-permanent team if you're looking at short term or it could be a uh ad hoc team that you could say look this you guys when we have a recruitment going on then I'll randomly pick from any one of the of you why do you want to do that because you really want to prep up your interviewers you really want to brief them what you want to to hire and and all those questions we asked about earlier on you need to actually talk to them you need to actually let your let your team know or the interview panel know who you are what kind of people you're trying to hire and of course there will be processes and and so on um number of rounds that you want to run and not just engineers alone because I think that's tempting sometimes okay let's just get engineers to interview but you want to actually get different perspectives say let's say you want to hire uh engineer do you want to get your product people in to sit in right to really see whether he's suitable to to be part of the team as well um so that's interviewing and these are some of the people that you probably work with as a um from this side if you are the manager then you're the hiring manager then you need to get interviewers um you would have internal recruiters to help you then external recruiters will should work on both sides so of course most of the time they are paid by you but nonetheless good external recruiters should actually be working for both sides and then as a candidate um one very important thing is that as a person or as an organization that who is recruiting people you need to be I think you need to be a bit more aware about candidates because candidates who come in for interviews um they are people too so you really need to treat them to have a good candidate experience because not only it affects your recruitment he also affects the branding of a company as a candidate who comes in and he has a very bad candidate experience it will only show up badly for your branding of a company so whatever it is you should try to uh have good like interview experience um and good recruitment experience even if you do not hire that person in the end you should strive to have the best recruitment experience possible okay so strategies for hiring actually differs so you don't have like um um sort of one strategy fits all one size fits all kind of strategy normally for different levels you have different things so if you are talking about interns sometimes you you probably want to do like in this university liaisons have some people closer to the the university recent grads then there'll be other things you want to do coding tests maybe you want to do some competition hackathons uh someone junior maybe again more coding tests uh referrals mid-level then you probably want to do away with the coding tests because you find it hard for for mid-level or senior people to actually agree to doing your coding tests um and for senior people executive recruiters actually work pretty well you know because they have to reach and um they know uh people at a different level so they are actually pretty good but if you look at it all overall i think referrals is probably the best and and for me in my experience is that uh i usually get the the best people through referrals people who who knows people because they have worked with them before and they think that these are the people who you should be working with and that works especially well with your internal folks so you have engineers you should let them try to pick the people they work with um because then it actually do well but for do better for a more um cohesive team right you have a team of people who work well together right so that's for recruitment um let's talk a little bit about organization how you organize a team familiar no yes like i said i spent too much time on getting the pictures so organization they in an in an engineering team they are and also like the the adjacent teams they are lots of different types of people uh so you need to know what kind of team that you're trying to build right and i'm talking about building here it's not about recruitment it's really about how do i assemble the team together right what kind of roles do i need and how do i structure the team so you look here there are different lots of different types of engineers um and on an adjacent level you have like team leads uh project managers architects and during managers and so on and so forth so there are lots of people that you you need to work with so how do you put them together oops right so you have a sample your team um quite incidental actually the adventures but so you have a sample team so how how do you actually put these two these people together who should be the ones going to your team right um so the first thing is really the scrum teams you assemble depends on what you want to deliver if you're delivering a mobile app then you really want to have more mobile engineers in that team but at the same time you don't want just all mobile engineers because mobile apps usually don't just work on their own right so you need some back-end systems as well but you want to get like front-end engineers who does CSS and HTML maybe not so suitable for like a mobile app team um but at the same time as you assemble a team everyone needs to have a role you should not assemble a team where you have people in there then you ask him or her so what part do you play in this team and he or she doesn't have a role that's that's really bad um and the skills should be complementary so again if you have a team of very high level people or very um junior people then you should be wary as well you should always have a good mix of teams um skills as well as levels and not everyone needs to be a rock star and finally of course you need to have a team that can work together right because always start with a team who can already work together or you try to get them to be more cohesive and then then work your way towards right um don't end up in this case yeah right so um next thing functional versus delivery so talking about functional teams versus delivery teams how do you organize the teams um functional teams really are very very common in in most organizations and it's a very natural thing to do because most of the time an organization a company is organized around functions like you have marketing as a team you have uh finance as a team you have a HR as a team your sales as a team so very naturally it's coming out of the engineering hey let's organize people as QA people these are all your mobile engineers your web engineers your API engineers and so on so forth um it is not entirely wrong but as you know you deliver in scrum teams you don't really work this way right so what you really want to do is to deliver in delivery teams and then you mix and match people accordingly to deliver the products that you want right then again this is not the perfect thing either because you can't have delivery teams because if you have delivery teams only then it will be very um there will be a lot of duplications people will be repeating things that have been done by somebody else you're always reinventing the wheel um so ideally what you have is really a kind of hybrid team where you have delivery teams as well as uh functional teams right and that's what most people actually gravitate towards now some of these things sound very common sensical to you and and they are but trust me they are actually a lot of people who end up like um just having these teams alone because hey you know this what scrum teams are all about this is what agile is all about and all they end up with this because this is very functional it's very convenient for me to example a team of all mobile engineers and let them let them run right but nonetheless if you want to you want to have a well balanced team then you should try to aim towards this kind of structure okay um of course that's from one perspective I think different companies have actually gone through or have tried different things and one of the more interesting things I've seen the company try is by Spotify I'm not sure anyone of you know how Spotify organizes their teams so it's pretty interesting and I think there are some companies in Singapore actually model after this this particular model what Spotify has is in the verticals these are what they call the squads and the squads are basically scrum teams and you have a group of squads under a tribe and tribe is a group of scrum teams that work for a particular purpose or particular product but beyond that they have something called chapters chapters will unite say let's say these are all front end engineers so you have a chapter of front end engineers here chapter of mobile engineers here right and then you have different tribes but in this case you will also have duplications because let's say you have front end engineers here and your front end engineers here how does that work then you would have something called guilds or rather not you they would have something called guilds so this is an interesting model I seen another company in I talked to somebody in another company who was actually modeling something on this it's quite interesting in fact I've tried something like this in PayPal as well and it actually works pretty well I was I was trying it out and it actually works pretty well it does get people much more excited even as you're working in scrum teams you will cut across the scrum teams and get them to be trying out or sharing information about what they have done within that scrum team because at the engineering manager level sometimes because you have a lot of information right because you get information from every one of your scrum teams or a number or maybe a two or three scrum teams and you know all these things but you'll be surprised at the scrum team level they sometimes do not know what the other teams are doing so often they don't know what the other teams are doing so you do this kind of sharing it actually enriches everybody and if you're you're running multiple scrum teams I would I would say I would encourage maybe you want to try something like this maybe not at that level where Spotify is doing like even calling the scrum team squads and then so on tribes and so on but really try like a something that cuts across the different scrum teams right so that's for organization and oh sorry that's for talking about special organization I'll talk a little bit about job levels and and and families and these are quite common things because if you're a startup and you come in and you start out say hey I hire engineers and engineer the engineer is an engineer but then everyone has on their own their desire to advance right they want to progress they want to become better how do they become better by in many companies this is what they do going by job levels so you start off let's say software engineer one go up to two senior software engineer and so on so forth climbing climbing up the ladder um you've even been around my seems like hey you know that seems very corporate that seems very true but we all human beings there is always a desire to be able to advance you want to know how well you have done right so you you're running a startup and you have an engineering team do watch out for this because people want to know whether they have improved they become better and they do want to know whether they can they are they are being promoted uh if they've done something well or if they want to be promoted how do I actually get about being promoted so you do really need to think about what does it mean for you to get from software engineer one to engineer two to be senior software engineer to be principal software engineer and so on so forth for smaller teams maybe it might matter less but as the team size grows then there was the comparisons like is he better than me how am I compared to him and if he's better than me then how do I get to be like him right and so on and so forth so this um progression job levels um and job family as well it's sometimes something to say look this is like um engineering I don't care about anything else but if you try to organize things a little bit then you you should try to say um other kinds of roles maybe say a design role you might have the same ladder as well because in that case you would want to match one with one as well yeah and that's sort of give a sense of organization to the team right uh right so something to describe it job levels are important um give your estimation as an individual where you are tells you where you're hating as well so sometimes job levels depend on years of experience sometimes you see people actually measure by hey but he's younger than me why is his job level higher than me then there will be some some some queries so you do really need to define the job levels well and you need to be based on more than just years of experience or even capabilities a bit of relaxation chill out no okay um job titles job titles are important um again this is like um something that sometimes people miss out as well and say it's not important what job titles are are not important but actually they are important they are important because this is how you're being perceived externally and this you is also how you're being perceived internally uh it also affects how you perceive yourself and it also affects how your family and friends perceive you um one anecdote that I want to talk about is it's quite interesting because I was talking to somebody right I traveled to Bangalore and I was talking to somebody and was telling me that job titles are important for him because that's how he can get married because he doesn't have a good title then he can't get married because you know it's not just about the salary it's also about how he's being perceived he will not be able to market himself and get himself a wife really he doesn't have a good job title so that's something that I thought was quite interesting it's something that I've never really talked about but at the same time it is it is important because if you go in and you think about I don't care everyone is the same and so on yes to a certain degree because there's always this thing about self-worth and and how well your being is right so as a manager you might really want to think a little bit about this and as an engineer if somebody starts to tell you that look job titles are not important think a little bit about it are they really important or not really important for say Chinese it's not about going for getting married for example during Chinese New Year your relatives ask you it's like so what are you now this year you're your software engineer 10 years later you're still software engineer how do you think your relatives will perceive you right again I'm not saying that this is the most important thing you should be doing and neither am I saying that you should ask for this kind of roles I'm just saying that don't consider that as totally unimportant you know it's kind of funny most influential person in China of China okay last bit about organizational organizational changes how many of you are football fans so you know who this person is right you remember what happened after he retired right the the problems that were faced yeah so organizational changes are critical they are important but at the same time they are also inevitable like because don't expect the organization that you are in today will not change ever right because very cliche the only constant is change yeah there will be change and as a manager managing changes is very very critical because organizational changes as they are inevitable they are also one of the most painful things that can happen in the company so it's a very important part of the job don't trivialize it as a manager nothing nothing beats the human touch you need to get engaged to your engineers you need to talk to people you need to make sure people understand why there's change and manage to change through right so funny picture but the reality is yeah in when organizing change you only have one job don't screw it up okay right so let's talk about augmentation augmentation is really about say you hire a team now you have a team of 20 people but you also have 20 projects so what do you do like hire quickly probably you can't hire fast enough so what do you do there are many ways of actually doing augmentation these are some of the things contracting body shopping outsourcing offshoring doing remote teams oh by the way if you anyone knows what this picture is this medieval german mercenary all right curious facts you know anyway so augmenting your team generically this applies to all the methods you use to augment your team right the pros is not headcount and for some companies it is important because for some larger companies sometimes not having headcount is important because headcount affects a lot of other kinds of calculation right whereas having contractors or having people who are not looking for you not full-time engineers a matter as well also not employee and that depends on country and engagement not headcount not employee and of course if you really need some people to come in and do some job it is a quick fix so definitely these are all the advantages then there are other advantages as well but there are also a lot of disadvantages the cons it it can be actually costlier than hiring somebody of course if you are not if you are a mercenary then you really don't have much loyalty more importantly as a person who is managing like the intellectual property of your organization you don't have the retention of knowledge if this guy quits then you lose the the knowledge and managing contractors managing outsource people are actually quite different from managing employees so as a as a manager as an engineer manager you need to consider that you have to manage two or more different types or groups of people right and you need to change your style accordingly right um so contracting contracting is the simplest because now you directly engage an engineer so you hire him basically um this can apply to freelancers part-timers consultants usually time and material basis once you get him to kill somebody you know that's that's it right no one's laughing that's so serious yeah the pros you have direct control of the engagement normally there's more loyal to the company and relatively cost effective but at the same time there's a lot of work right because the amount of work that you spend on contracting somebody why not just hire that guy right just not making an appointment employee um and there is a risk in being considered as employment so if you contract directly contract somebody long enough when they come to labor dispute it could be considered as employment and you could run yourself into trouble if you are supposed to be below certain account now um and finally of course if you are directly contracting means you actually have to recruit as well so all those things I talked about earlier on about recruiting this comes through here you just need to do the same kind of work so again again if you go through all this kind of work um hire a contractor the one who just hired you as a full-time star right so pros and cons um body shopping I call it body shopping you know really you're also seeing to a a company uh to engage a contractor and normally the engineer works for the other company although he's permanently stationed in your office so he would be like a contractor he would be like an employee except that his paycheck comes from another company again time and material basis the pros is that you won't have the risk of being considered as employment um you wouldn't have that kind of administrative work because the payroll leave management and so on it's all done by the other company and of course this is the the magic word right so if you don't like this guy he doesn't perform accordingly he can just go and call up the other company and say please replace him and normally the other company will just replace him um not the best thing to do in the world but yeah that's that's something that can happen the con is that it's directly it's actually costlier than an alright contract it has to be because you are paying another company to do this and the engineers themselves the ones who are contractors to you are normally I mean I've encountered it so many times right they are given a lot less than direct contract say you pay this contractor uh this contracting company $10,000 for a hit count um he could be paying the engineer $3,000 and the over hit $7,000 would go to the company itself and this happens and then the terms for employment for the contractor are actually quite um quite bad so like some I've encountered cases where the employee actually employee of the outsourced company do not get medical benefits like and if they take leave then they would actually have salaries deducted and so on and so forth so it can be a bit abusive over time and of course if you are actually working with somebody like that and you see that he's actually like a lot worse off than your other engineers something sometimes some it doesn't feel right but it is another option if you want to do body shopping um outsourcing is something that's very common I think everybody knows about it is you engage a company to deliver an entire project you don't know what this picture is right behind here okay some say you know um yeah so uh pros in that you don't need to manage people directly you're just managing deliverables uh liability shift to outsourcing vendors for field projects this is probably why a lot of people do this right if anything fails is the vendors fault right so you're shifting your liability for the delivery of a project to your vendor um gain not the best in the world but yeah this is a reason why a lot of people do that and there's always a perception that the vendors because you know they are big repeatable technology companies they are able to hire better quality engineers so this is a real perception right so the perception is like hey I'm I'm a company that does fashion why would I want to engage engineers directly I don't know how to manage engineers I would not be able to retain them why not engage a company who has 10 000 engineers they know how to manage engineers why don't I get them to deliver the project for me so that's always this perception I call it perception because obviously I I don't believe that's case but I'm also not saying that it's entirely not true as well I think it's always a balance but this is not something that you should take as a matter of fact the con is that upfront you often need to give clear specifications which is not always possible and it's not definitely not very agile um the other one is is this is something where a lot of companies start to realize as well the engineering capabilities are not available in house anymore right because you become a company that outsources a company that just become project managers you also have risk to your intellectual property because a vendor can develop a competing product or even sell your they develop something for you and then they sell the same solution to your competitor now of course they always like contracts to to stop this to them happening but you can't really stop whatever goes in the brain right I learned all those things developing a product for you I could I mean even if the company doesn't do that that person could just vote for another another company right and it's hard to stop it um and yeah the kind of resourcing strength for you has changed or will be changed to having a team of technology people to a team of project managers that's kind of inevitable so outsourcing um let's go on to the next one whoops okay offshoring so you are engaging a company deliver outside the country it cannot be time it can either be a time immaterial or per project basis because it is in a different country usually you want to outsource to a lower cost country because I'm not really heard about outsourcing to a higher cost country except in some companies you know but there's a different story usually more cost effective and because it's lower cost you can probably scale the con is that again you need upfront clear communications this is very important the next one communications risk it's not about the other team doesn't know how to speak English well or whatever language well right sometimes it's not about language it's about time zone you talk to him it's five o'clock it's it's uh 10 o'clock in the morning for you it could be midnight for him like or vice versa time zone is a real serious problem I encountered it very very often um face to face it's very different when you have somebody in front of you and you discuss something and somebody over the phone or on skype or whatever it is it's actually completely different thing and finally of course cultural differences right you are sometimes you could the guy could sit there smart you keep nodding you think that you're okay done he understands what I'm saying right he delivers something completely different um yeah that's that happens pretty often you need to have very strong project management and not very strong project management here you need to have very strong project management there but you need to have somebody very strong look at it there so what that means is either you need to pay for something someone really expensive on the other end or you need to fly somebody that you trust over there as well so whatever it is you do it is expensive because you do need to frequently travel and finally the remote teams so this is probably the something that some companies do but not as often you would then build an entire remote team that is part of your organization these are full-time employees and they sit outside your main development center right you will sit in the external side this this actually happens to both big and small companies but they have their own pros and cons so the pro is that you keep you do keep your knowledge internally so that's that's good right and you are able to scale if there are lower cost countries or companies or cities but it is very costly you need to have a lot of investment both in terms of money the kind of work setting it up because you are literally setting a different company in a different country um and all the communications risks that I talked about earlier on they are all true as well so this is actually very true and you need to fly as well you need to fly a lot you know either you need to fly to them or need to fly to you either way there's a lot of flying around okay so just want to close up on on augmentation and really on the rest of the presentation augmentation is not easy it's really like sea monsters you see like those ancient maps sometimes that here be sea monsters you know so the whole augmentation piece is like here be sea monsters right uh sometimes you step in thinking that it's easy way out to solve a problem immediate problem you have but it is not so you need to really think carefully about it there is there is no silver below that there is no absolute answer whether whatever you're doing is right or very often use your experiment um but just be aware that you want to do this it's not as easy as sometimes it's made up to be especially if you talk to say outsourcing render and they say it's great work well together we're delivered for these 10 different large companies successful projects he just didn't show you the hundred other field projects right so just need to be a bit careful about this so that's my last slide and my contact details if you need to reach out to me thank you any questions for star show we're open so you can ask me and think life i'm just curious uh in terms of uh because you managed both startups and conference right you probably have seen the what called sequential growth problems where as you grow the company how do you organize the team or how do you decide what are the roles to fill up over time um i mean the the actual answer and the cop out is really like it depends right because every i mean different companies would work differently right and um it you will get different projects as well and so you need to stuff up the team according to project so it's actually very subjective it depends on the kind of team that you're trying to build up and sometimes it's not just scaling up it's also scaling down you know because um like i said organizational changes happen all the time so sometimes organization change you lose part half your portfolio which happened to me a couple of times and then you need to scale your team down that's that's what it is right and then uh you need to scramble to say look i lost half my portfolio i still have my full team what do i do is it layoff time or what right so um they are different so there are different answers to it sometimes it could be like okay i'm going to scramble to look for other work for for these guys because these are good guys i want to retain them sometimes it's really say look actually uh i don't see any other growth for for such skills and it is uh it's probably a sin for me to try to hang on to them right if they have better roles in other organizations then maybe i should find them better organizations so scaling up is always i mean scaling is not always just up uh you need to consider how you can scale down as well so those those are the most dangerous sorry just answer him yeah um so sometimes these are the most dangerous right because you have a government commitment say hey you know edb gave me x million dollars uh but at the same time they need me to hire 50 people at 50 engineers here so i've hired 50 engineers but what do we do they really have nothing to do because i yeah i'm just fulfilling a government uh you know obligation that's pretty dangerous because once the edb money goes away then there's no need for such jobs right as a manager may as an individual they feel it's really sucky right you are you're a pawn basically yeah you're being hired because of funding then you're being fired because there's no funding and it's like you're being moved around with chess pieces as a manager it's horrible as well because you know now you need to hire and fire people right uh so i mean sometimes getting this kind of things are not the best but you need to play along with it because you have no choice uh then you need to be a bit more creative and maybe finding new projects or new world or develop products always try to keep something in your back pocket like this product that you might want to to actually uh develop if there are no other work to do so this team have number one something to do something to improve the skills and potentially take this product and sort of wave it around say hey you know this team has done great job uh what else can they do right so some of the things that you can do your answer to this might be independence as well but from a startup perspective and i guess it's kind of two part of the question what should a non-tech co-founder be looking for in a tech co-founder and conversely what should a tech co-founder be looking for in a non-tech co-founder what makes the ideal partnership there what are the fundamentals okay it depends um i i think it depends on how well the individual works together is i mean for me i think the the skills must be complementary so the uh uh tech co-founder must be able to do something that the non-tech co-founder can do and vice versa if you all have the same capabilities then there's probably a gap somewhere like so you want to actually be complementary that's the first thing the second thing is you you need to work together um you need to be able to work together um and i think the third thing is you should not be too close uh i see that i say that because i mean again this is like anecdotal right i've seen so many like boyfriend girlfriend husband wife close friends roommates from from university come out co-founders and then they just you know split apart because of work so that gives me to think about a having a co-founder who is really too close sometimes might not be a good thing i'm not necessarily saying that that's that's like the absolute truth but i've seen enough to think that that there is there is definitely risk to it because startups usually are pretty risky in the first place right and this is really a strain to the relationship sure i just say avengers assemble and they all come really i mean the um the serious thing is i uh basically basically i i have interesting roles right to fulfill i mean i've seen roles in my my current organization and most of the time people just say hey you know why do you join singapore power why why are you joining utilities company especially a singapore uh government linked company right um and then i'll start talking about it to to them and talking about the roles and uh i would ask are you interested in joining me and they will say i'll think about it and after a while they send me the resume and then it just happens from being keeping my text process we have good relationship with south yong and we we work with it and we know that the things that he's capable of is able to provide us so there's an implicit trust between him and us that's why he's able to get a lot of good people yeah he's being too modest only south yong can do this yeah he says it just happens but it will only just happen for him yep you are deliberately you're deliberately embarrassing me it's a second reputation uh yeah okay but it's not just anybody saying now you want to have a team and then you get it done in two months you get probably most of the very good engineers in in singapore but there's something i'm curious because in the article you mentioned that there's no KPI's and you're trying to make sure that everybody works together well before you step out you decide on the hierarchy and so how do you decide on how you know you position everyone in the team in terms of seniority in terms of you know structure again i'm saying this not because i know it all neither am i saying that this is the correct way of doing things but i'm getting people in first and i wanted to work together i wanted to start working together and once you start working together they will realize you know who has capabilities of doing certain things and then a natural leader normally forms right and that will probably be most likely the leader who's going to be leading the team it doesn't often mean that the leader is the most senior person or maybe the leader is the most capable person it just means that the person is able to lead the team to do to achieve certain targets because you have different people with different experiences and then you try to form the team and get them to work together but natural leaders will not emerge and people who are phone lovers will also end up here but there will be a difference in the equity right in terms of how everybody will perform within the organization i mean this i mean depends on what you mean by equity i mean it will not be equitable right because somebody will be more experienced somebody less experienced so there's no i mean it's not equitable what i'm what i try to do is try to put a goal forward to say look this is what we try to achieve and whatever it is this team should be achieving it right and people inside that team will try to achieve the goal accordingly i'm hoping that as this goes by there would be a natural leader and something will come up of course i cannot guarantee that in which case i'll probably need to figure out who the best leader is and then make that person the leader that's the best way right then everyone acknowledges that's the leader one last question for social yes leader is somebody who's able to lead and let me let me rephrase so i mean i need to uh i don't think about a leader is a boss so you already know the answer right so i i think um for me the leader is somebody who's able to deliver results right who's able to governize the team to deliver results you know so that's that's it for me the leader is able somebody who's able to bring the team together and deliver a result so whether it is the first way or the second way if he can governize the team and he can convince everybody to work with him to deliver the results the first way the second way does really matters little you could either leave on the front or leave on the back or leave the middle as long as you are able to bring the team together and deliver the results then you're the leader right thank you this session is interesting so i think there are a couple of like key components that saoshan has talked about like first of all the fundamental thing hiring the key questions that you should ask yourself founders as like managers and then he talks about organization how do you organize and form like a squad of avengers or like suicide squad that's what i yeah that's what i think and last one would be augmentation which i found very interesting like body shopping and yeah and stuff like that so if you guys have any like further questions yeah just feel free to like hang around and you know connect with each other and i think to wrap up i would like to just like introduce like the ti community we actually have an online facebook group that we would welcome everyone to join and be part of it so it's like we share like discussions and we help each other out so there's investors there's like technical people there's non-technical people so we try and like um gather all these like like mind the folks online so it will not be people based in sing and fall only but like across asia yeah so um i will drop you guys a note like after this event and then yeah we'll connect from there thank you guys for coming thank you thank you