Tag: notes

Setting Up a Healthy Engineering Culture: A Blueprint for Success

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment
engineering culture

As organizations strive to build innovative products and deliver exceptional value to their customers, fostering a healthy engineering culture becomes paramount. A strong engineering culture not only attracts top talent but also drives productivity, collaboration, and long-term success. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key elements of a healthy engineering culture and provide actionable steps to set it up within your organization.

What Is Engineering Culture?

An engineering culture encompasses the shared values, norms, and practices that define how engineers work together to achieve common goals. It’s the DNA of your technical team, influencing everything from code quality to communication patterns. Here are some essential features of a robust engineering culture:

  1. Collaboration and Communication:
    • Encourage open communication and cross-functional collaboration. Foster an environment where engineers can freely exchange ideas, seek feedback, and learn from one another.
    • Use tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or other communication platforms to facilitate real-time discussions and knowledge sharing.
  2. Continuous Learning and Professional Development:
    • Invest in learning opportunities for your engineers. Provide access to conferences, workshops, online courses, and mentorship programs.
    • Encourage engineers to stay updated with industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies.
  3. Agile Development Practices:
    • Adopt agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum, Kanban) to promote iterative development, shorter release cycles, and adaptive planning.
    • Regularly review and adapt your processes based on feedback and performance metrics.
  4. Code Reviews:
    • Make code reviews a standard practice. They improve code quality, knowledge sharing, and alignment with coding standards.
    • Encourage constructive feedback and ensure that reviews are respectful and focused on improvement.
  5. Engineering Excellence:
    • Set high standards for technical excellence. Encourage engineers to write clean, maintainable code and follow best practices.
    • Invest in tools and practices that enhance code quality, such as static analysis, automated testing, and continuous integration.
  6. Innovation and Experimentation:
    • Create space for innovation. Allow engineers to explore new ideas, experiment with technologies, and propose improvements.
    • Celebrate successful experiments and learn from failures.
  7. Diversity and Inclusion:
    • Build a diverse engineering team that brings different perspectives and experiences. Embrace diversity in gender, ethnicity, background, and thought.
    • Foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and respected.

How to Build an Engineering Culture

  1. Lead by Example:
    • Leadership plays a crucial role in shaping culture. Demonstrate the desired behaviors, communicate the vision, and actively participate in cultural initiatives.
    • Encourage transparency, accountability, and empathy.
  2. Define Core Values:
    • Collaborate with your team to define core values that align with your organization’s mission. These values should guide decision-making and behavior.
    • Examples of core values: integrity, customer focus, continuous improvement, and teamwork.
  3. Promote Psychological Safety:
    • Create an environment where engineers feel safe to express their opinions, ask questions, and take calculated risks.
    • Avoid blame culture and encourage learning from mistakes.
  4. Recognize and Reward Success:
    • Celebrate achievements, both big and small. Recognize engineers who go above and beyond.
    • Consider peer recognition, spot bonuses, or team outings as ways to appreciate contributions.
  5. Invest in Team Building:
    • Organize team-building activities, offsites, and hackathons. Strengthen relationships and build trust among team members.
    • Encourage social interactions beyond work-related discussions.
  6. Measure and Improve:
    • Regularly assess your engineering culture. Use surveys, feedback sessions, and metrics to gauge satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
    • Iterate and adapt based on the feedback received.

Conclusion

A healthy engineering culture is not built overnight; it requires consistent effort, alignment, and commitment. By fostering collaboration, learning, and excellence, you can create an environment where engineers thrive, innovate, and contribute to the success of your organization. Remember that culture is not just what you say—it’s what you do every day.

WordCamp Mumbai 2023!

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Back in 2015, when Mumbai WordPress meetup was kicked off with enthusiasm, I did not dream of this thing catching on and becoming something special. It was a good gathering of some pretty cool folks enthusiastic about WordPress. In 2014, my own understanding of WP was pretty smattering and thus it was with a bit of trepidation that I decided to attend a meetup in 2014.

This was our second year at 13 Llama, and it was pretty much the time when we had chosen to focus on WordPress as our primary stack. Earlier, we had done some development projects which were all over the place – Node, Core PHP, Smarty, Yii, Cake … we were all over the place and having found WP, it really did feel like home.

Mumbai WP Junta

Over the period of a decade, there are some familiar faces which have remained as part of this WordPress meetup. Some who have moved on and some who have faded into oblivion. But there are those few who have been a steady set of community leaders and built this friendly community of WordPress fanatics.

A whole lot of them are directly working with WP, but a bunch of these cool people just happen to use WP and have built some pretty cool things with it.

The hiatus

After we closed down 13 Llama Studio and the development arm, one of the things that I did miss is the conversations around WordPress and this community. Over the years, as I was busy in building out the technology at Homeville, I steered away from WP. At Homeville, we were using WordPress as a headless content management system (CMS). That’s it.

As our CMS requirements grew more complex, we kept stretching what WordPress could do for us. Over the next 5 years or so, a strong solid conviction grew that having a headless CMS is pretty much a no-brainer for most product organizations. It saves so much of time!

After COVID, most of the meetups and WordCamps had come to a stand still, however, this year the community reached out and setup a meetup and the organization for Mumbai WordCamp 2023

Mumbai WordCamp 2023

Coming back to attending WordCamps after so long was a great experience. Most of the organizers and regulars are known faces and thus, catching up with them after close to a decade was like meeting old friends and making some new ones!

The one thing that this community has taught me is that there are so many things to learn about a topic that you would want to include pretty much everyone in the conversation instead of just speaking to the devs! I remember the early days of this community when there used to be some pretty heated debates on who is better – the maker or the user! Thankfully people have matured :)

This year, I thought I would speak about our headless CMS and the pros and cons for the same. The talk went well – honestly, I thought that this topic would be considered a done and dusted kind of thing, however, much to my surprise a fair number of attendees were hearing for this for the first time.

Always learning

One great thing that I love about attending WordCamp is that you always get to learn something new! This time around, there were discussions on template parts, custom templates, how to contribute to WordPress without writing a single line of code, how to do public speaking (super useful!) and also an insight into the recent DPDP Act of India!

Seeing this trend continue, I decided to ensure that instead of focusing on financial technology only, attending these events and then applying the learning would help!

My slides on headless CMS

WordPress as a headless CMSDownload

Now on to WC Ahmedabad!

Technology is not a silver bullet

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

As someone who has led the technology function in multiple start-ups, sometimes as a founder, sometimes as a consultant (a consulting CTO), one of the key learnings that I have seen is that whenever technology is viewed as a silver bullet to all the problems of the business, then that start-up is bound to face a lot of scale up hiccups.

What is a silver bullet?

A silver bullet was considered the only way to kill a werewolf. The term therefore is used as a magical solution to a difficult problem. In India, we have another such term … रामबाण

So, a solution which takes care of your problems.

What does technology represent?

When I refer to technology, I am not using this as a generic term. This is specifically intended to mean information technology resources … including machines, people, code and systems.

Technology usually represents scale through automation. It does not neccessarily mean problem solving. The solution to the problem that technology has to solve, is usually a process, or a product.

This product or process usually has to be designed. This design is not necessarily the domain of someone who knows information technology. Usually, a person who knows the business pretty well is able to do better design, as opposed to a person who can code.

Design requires engagement

Engagement with the problem so that the solution can be found. Therein lies the problem.

Now if the technology team that is within the organization knows the business well enough and if they are willing to engage with the problem at hand, then a proper solution can be designed.

Technology + Business could possibly do this

More often that not, technology resources are not business centric. They are “requirements” centric. I am being a bit harsh, but this is so rampant in India that IT leaders need to start rethinking the way they engage with the business. Perhaps a small business centric subject be included in the engineering courses.

Some symptoms of this problem

However, until business and technology do not partner on an equal ground, this problem will always be seen. What problem you may ask … here are some symptoms of this, folllowed by what typically happens with such teams.

  • An entrenched technology team which is in a “victim” mode all the time. They do not have any control on what work they are doing, and have no say in the business.
  • A rigid technology team which raises a mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy for all incoming tasks. Forms need to be filled in triplicate, and multiple documents need to be created and this is then project managed by a committee. A line of code requires a months paperwork.
  • A technology team that’s viewed as nincompoops or defunct because of their lack of being effective and responsive to the business. Inspite of having inhouse resources, different team chose to outsource work to their vendors.
  • An overworked team that’s loaded with so much work that they just don’t care about meeting deadlines or creating something of value. Testing is haphazardly done, rarely things get documented, cowboy coding is rampant.
  • A risk averse team that lacks the confidence to do great things. Inspite having inhouse capabilities, no one is willing to risk their neck and therefore chooses to outsource to vendors.

When you notice such teams in a start-up, more often than not, that start-up is not going anywhere. Until and unless the team and the business undergoes a severe change in attitudes towards each other, the team is not going achieve shit.

Such a technology team is not a silver bullet, they are a white elephant.

 

Thoughts on Social Media

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment
Social Media

I wrote this note out for a discussion on Social Media sites and how their relationship with publishers has evolved over a period of time. It goes to show that too much of reliance on any one channel may not be such a good thing after all!

Can we as digital marketers and analysts create a measurement model that can reliably help us to identify whether our social media investments are justified?

Social Media and Creators

One of the problems that new Social Media websites face is generating enough content that users want to consume. This they do by welcoming publishers to come and register on their websites. This is the main fuel for their growth.

The social media site in question (including Facebook) does all it can to attract publishers and creators. The focus is on getting more creators and therefore more users. Users get to follow their favorite brands and celebrities on these sites. Brands and celebrities get a scalable way to engage with their fans. A win-win on paper.

A platform is born

As more users sign-up and start using the site, it soon starts being recognized as a platform. This platform now is independently known and now, creators are attracted to the platform not because its easy to publish their content or its easy to create their content … but because that platform already has their potential target audience.

So, from engagement at scale, the reason why the platform is being used shifts to reach and discovery. The very publisher who used to get throngs of crowds flocking around them now is looking at the platform as the source of that crowd. The shift of behavior due to the change in thinking is not amiss to platform owners.

From Win-Win to Monopoly

The platform owner now knows the dependence of the publisher upon the platform. E.g Facebook single-handedly crippled the stock prices of Zynga (famous for Farmville app on Facebook) by taking it off their Featured apps page.

Take the organic reach that Facebook now provides. Some years back (circa 2012), a single post on your Facebook page would be shown to 10-12% of your followers. This has slowly trickled down to 1% now (3%-4% if you have high engagement on the page). The reason behind this is because every brand out there is pushing out more and more content than what the platform was designed for, and every brand / celebrity out there wants to create content that goes viral.

Pursuit of Viral

Publishers in the pursuit of this holy grail tend to create a Sea of Crappy Content. This is loads and loads of content which does not drive engagement. Platform owners now are scared by the very publishers they used to chase. Not because they don’t need them … but because they are not clearly able to differentiate the good ones from the bad ones. The definition of quality becomes more blurred.

Zero Organic Reach

In the end, the platform owner plays the one card that they can control. Throttle the impressions and reach of the publishers. Quality is then replaced with budgets, with the underlying assumption – if you can create great content, most likely you have enough budgets to buy the impressions required to go viral.

Another example to highlight this is to look at any Facebook page which has over 10,000 likes, the last post of that page won’t even have an engagement rate of 1%. The problem may not with the page or the post in itself, it stems from the throttling down of organic reach.

So what can be done?

Do we pay the piper and buy our followers? Or do we dance to the tune of the platforms and keep pushing more content in the hopes of getting that one beautiful post that gets shared by the millions.

Can we instead, arrive at a scientific method of identifying what platform works and what doesn’t in furthering our objectives?

A Success/Failure method for Analytics

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

When identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of your business, it makes sense to choose the proper measures of success. I have written about choosing the proper measures of success in the past. Since most of the work that I do is in the realm of the web, the principles via which we operate and do reports are more or less the same.

The only thing that changes is the conversion … or the success metric. In other words, the reason for which the website is built, the purpose of that site. Hence, the measure of success approach works.

Designing for new paradigms

However, what would happen if the product being built is not meant for the web, or was not based on the same principles? How would we go about identifying metrics and actionable reports.

For that we would have to go to the very reason why we need analytics.

The Purpose of Analytics

If I were to define the reason why we use analytics in any product, it would be to –

  1. Identify the wins, celebrate them and try to find the rules which get us more wins
  2. Identify the failures, and figure out ways to fix those failures so that we can improve

This view helps us do two things primarily, one to find out and scale the good things, and the other to find out and weed out the bad things in our product.

To do this, we would need metrics (or KPIs) that would indicate a success or a failure.

Measures of Success

The measure of success metric help in identifying the clear wins and celebrating them within the team. These also help in figuring out what worked for you in the past and on how to re-create those wins. One definitive thing that needs to be done (and I have learnt this the hard way), is that wins or measures of success metrics need to shared in a broader audience to give a sense of purpose to the entire team on what they are working on.

A good measure of success is task completion rate, or conversion rate, or profitability.

Measures of Failure

The measure of failure metric help in identifying failures within a certain activity. These are also metrics which help in identifying opportunities of improvement. Measure of Failure metrics should help us root out problems within our current design/product. I say root out, because once you identify the failure, you have to act and ensure that the failure does not happen again.

An example of measure of failure could be bounce rate.

Unlike measures of success, measures of failure may not be shared with large teams. Rather I feel (and I am want your opinion on this), that they are much more effective when communicated to the right localized teams.

Notes from Pune Digital Marketers Meetup

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

March has been an exciting month so far, with multiple speaking opportunities both for 13 Llama Studio and me.

On the 1st of March, I was invited to speak at the Pune Digital Marketers Meetup. In case, if you are in Pune and are working in this exponentially growing industry, then this is one meetup which you should not miss!

You can find more about them and their event schedule here – Pune Digital Marketers.

As having led the digital marketing campaigns of one of the companies that I used to work for, I had a few thoughts on how to go about setting up a monitoring framework for start-ups. Sharing this would help me quickly gauge –

  1. Can this framework be improved
  2. Is there merit in this approach

Not to mention that I think that there is huge potential in this approach and one of the goals that I have would be to create a product in and around this space. This meetup was an opportunity not only to check this in action (that has already been done, in fact the approach is a gist of what my learnings have been).

In fact, for those interested in learning this in a more formal method, we have partnered with EduPristine to offer this as a certified course in Digital Marketing. As far as I know, this course is being conducted in India across all major metros and also in the form of webinars during the weekends.

Here is my deck,