D-code Portait: Pierre Gallet, CTO at Totem
Before starting, could you please introduce yourself? Who are you, what’s your startup, what’s your role?
My name is Pierre, I’m co-founder & CTO of TOTEM. I manage the product team and I am very involved in product strategy & vision, a bit of brand & design, and most technological decisions.
Code 👩💻
Have you always been interested in engineering / coding?
I studied engineering at Centrale Paris, and always have been fond of mathematics, definitely at least since high school. I always loved to solve problems and make things work. I also enjoy to find the magic of good products.
What were your first experiences in coding?
My first (real) experience coding was when I was studying data science, specifically neural networks, in python, during my last year at Centrale.
I’d actually never much coded for the web before TOTEM. So I started by learning everything from scratch, servers to databases, passing through reactJS (frontend), nodeJS (backend) and product design.
I did have a first experience with the web with a music website (nyewmusic.com), which I launched during my second year at Centrale, and where I mostly contributed on the project & product management, as well as overall design. It was basic, though, I started by diving into basic html / css / js stuff, without coding myself.
Leadership ✊
What were your biggest fears when you became CTO?
Will I be good enough? Will I be able to have a real team one day, and drive them toward individual & team success? :)
How do you feel in the role today? What does your day-to-day look like?
My role has evolved a lot, mostly into a manager position today. I do still code a lot, as I’ve been doing over the first 2 years of TOTEM. I love my work today, I feel very confident that we are moving in the right direction, building a core team very human as well as very productive and efficient.
My weeks start with a lot of meetings and end with a lot of meetings, and I try to be as productive as I can in the middle. I separate my tasks between helping other teams, handling feature requests, gathering feedback by visiting customers, updating the product roadmap to fit our vision in the near future, coding new features, solving bugs, helping ops, and giving direction when people feel lost.
What challenge(s) that you’ve overcome with your engineering team are you most proud of?
I can think about a lot of things, so I’ll only talk about the last one (last week). We were really proud to complete a full migration of our database — a move that helped improve our customers’ load time on the app by a whopping 3X. Very proud of the team, congrats again to Michael, Badr & Samrith.
At the very beginning, nothing exists except your ten fingers.
Evolution 🦄
How have you evolved professionally in your role?
At the very beginning, nothing exists except your ten fingers. It can be very hard for people to join at this time, as software engineers expect things to already running in production, tasks to already be well defined by product teams, and the pre-prod to be up and ready to test new features. I guess the most beautiful evolution is when you first really start to feel like a professional :)
How have you evolved personally?
Building a company and more specifically, in my case, a product, is quite a challenge. You have weeks where you feel a lot of diametrically-opposed emotions. It is a rollercoaster and you need to ride along with it. Over time, that gives you a lot more calm & wisdom. You start to understand people better, you start to understand what drives them in life, and you feel that you’re becoming a better person. That feeling is priceless and makes the overall journey worth every second. It’s amazing the energy you can find when you’re always being challenged and never settling down.
Tips 🗒️
If you had to name one impressive CTO, who would it be? Why?
Oddly enough, only great inventors come to my mind right now: Leonard da Vinci, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Stephen Hawking… I guess I must get another look at the CTO job description ;)
What would you recommend that aspiring CTOs read or learn?
Depends a lot on what you are trying to build. Thus I will only recommend reading a lot of non-technical books. Can be fiction, science fiction (good for the imagination), but also a lot of very good business books such as The Hard Things About Hard Things from Ben Horowitz. It will give you the distance you need to take from the very technical aspects of your job. Also, I believe that a CTO should have a good feel for the arts, design & craftsmanship, as they’re the one responsible for the creation of a product people should ultimately love.
If you had to start all over again, what would you implement from day one to perform better in your current role as a tech leader?
A lot of my engineering friends will laugh, but maybe one thing: tests :)
Big thanks to Pierre for taking part in D-code!
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Reach out to me with any comments, questions or suggestions you might have about D-code: vladimir@thefamily.co 💌
PS: Thanks Kyle for helping me with the article 🧡
