Spin with Vinyl: 5 Insights on Engineering Operational Excellence from Giovanna
“September is my favourite time as a DJ. Every September, I am back to Sardinia to DJ at the SUNANDBASS festival. I don’t use any of the DJ mix software. I only DJ with vinyl,” exclaims Giovanna, Head of Engineering Operations at OLX Group.
“I think spinning with vinyl connects with my job in engineering operations. To spin with vinyl, you need a mix of precision, order, selection, and rhythm. Similarly, operations excellence is a wheel constantly turning. You have to make sure the wheel turns the right way!’
In our first blog post with Giovanna, we discuss more about her career and work at OLX, using DJing as a metaphor for operations excellence.
Now, let the beat drop…
1. Hear the mix, then spin
As an article in Digital DJ Tips states, you don’t have any waveforms to look at it when DJing with vinyl. You have to take time to listen to the music, get familiar with it, and understand how to work those sounds.
“As a DJ, you have to listen in first. You have to take a look at what you have then fully immerse yourself in spinning. Similarly, as Head of Engineering Operations, I have to look from the outside before going in and getting to work,” states Giovanna.
What Giovanna alludes to is that if you’re immersed in a task without thinking of the big picture, you fail to see how you could do that activity more productively. Likewise, if you just start spinning a vinyl record you’ve never heard before, you may think you’re in tune, but the sound may not be optimal. Individual tunes might sound great alone, but then once you start the mix, you might find that they absolutely don’t belong together.
“You really have to listen and observe before taking action.”
Giovanna’s career path has helped her develop this skill of observing, identifying solutions, and then executing. Giovanna spent much of her life in London. Before coming to OLX Group, she spent time in Shanghai gaining professional experience and later moved to Lisbon.
“I moved to Lisbon to work in consulting, and OLX was a client. So, my relationship began as someone from the outside. This has enabled me to discover solutions in ways others within the team perhaps couldn’t have seen. I believe this is often a benefit consultants have, which is being able to say things straight.”
While consulting, Giovanna fell in love with the attitude of things at OLX. When a job opportunity arrived, she took it. And that ability to have an outside view has helped the team greatly.
“My role as Head of Engineering Operations is actually a completely new position at OLX. So, things are constantly evolving and I’m figuring out innovative ways to improve operational efficiency. Engineering operations take engineer-centered processes, like communication, collaboration, and learning, and turn them into scalable programs and systems.”
As Aditya Agarwal wrote in a blog post, embedding an operations team isn’t that novel of an idea: sales, marketing, and customer support functions have been doing it for a while — why not engineering? Engineering Operations exists to systematically improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and happiness of an engineering organization through scale. Effectiveness means engineers and engineering teams are able to solve the right problems for their users, measured by product quality and customer satisfaction. Efficiency means engineers solve the right problems quickly, with minimal duplicated effort, measured by go-to-market velocity and overall shipping speed. Happiness means engineers have a sense of connectedness to and autonomy in their work, feel like their growth rate is accelerating, and are recognized for their efforts. Happiness is measured by engineering retention rate and overall satisfaction scores.
One initiative Giovanna has worked with the teams on is making Request for Comments (RFC) an integral part of the engineering team’s processes. To get the team on board, she used the analogy of a condominium. Giovanna explained that RFCs are like condominiums because it’s multiple residents (or engineers) formally agreeing to share a common property and the costs and work that comes with it.
RFCs are tools to expose intentions, get advice, and learn from each other. We also use ADRs (Architectural Decision Records) to log overarching decisions that have a wider impact. We typically arrive at these decisions through discussion in Request for Comments (RFCs) or during our engineering meetings. It’s here that Giovanna referred to RFCs as ideas that could surface in a flat and ADRs as decisions that make sure we have a clean and sturdy shared staircase, which would be managed by the condominium association.
“Engineers like patterns. They don’t want jargon, but rather explanations that show the utility of something. The condominium analogy worked. Because the team saw that, if we all chip, we can fix and improve the shared technology together.”
2. Bring twice the amount of music you need
When DJing with vinyl, you not only must become intentional with your selection, but you need more tracks on hand to ensure you play the right songs at the right time. After all, you can’t download a song on the spot.
“When it comes to operations excellence, I have a similar approach. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, so you can’t pre-package solutions,” notes Giovanna.
“Not everyone is the same. Pushing for standardization of everything is what kills businesses. We need processes that make work faster in some cases. In other cases, we need to build processes of innovation.”
Giovanna uses the analogy of going to the store to buy clothes and accessories. With some clothing products, shoppers choose among different sizes, colors, and styles. With some products, there’s just one size or style.
“In some cases, it makes sense to have one size to get people things faster and cheaper. In other situations, where size does matter, the clothing company would need a strategy that makes production more efficient.”
This is why, as Head of Engineering Operations, Giovanna thinks a lot about processes and procedures. Understanding of these is how you build a more effective team.
“A process enables you to get somewhere more efficiently. Good processes lead to more effective operations. A procedure is an established set of rules you have to follow to get somewhere. Good procedures guide you when there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.”
3. Stick to your foundations
A post in Magnetic Magazine makes a great point about DJing with vinyl:
“Analog sound lets you truly understand the foundation of what music should sound like at its best.”
In her role at OLX Group, Giovanna stresses to the team to remember the foundations and what good code looks like. You don’t have to get overly complex.
“Beautiful code that doesn’t have to be complex. We need simple code that can be understood elsewhere,” attests Giovanna.
“So, if I’m in OLX Autos, I need to understand some patterns in real estate, which are two of our vertical platforms. I also need to be able to understand our horizontal marketplaces across all OLX’s markets. Context does a lot, but with ‘low code ownership,’ you can benefit from having simple, readable, throwaway code that will not require a batch of paracetamol to understand.”
What Giovanna emphasizes here is the value of simplicity. There are dangers in making things unnecessarily complex.
4. Study anthropology, understand the impact of robotics on society, and discover where you belong
“If you look at all these DJ software applications, it’s almost as if they do all DJing for you. As someone who spins only with vinyl, this upsets me. We gave the industry so much, and now technology is replacing us. Over the years, I started enjoying the weight of a record-box, even when I was walking through a snowed-down road in Vilnius at 4 am. That’s the feeling that I strive for, but not everything needs to be hard…” states Giovanna.
“Vinyl DJs have to find the value of what they do. We can find our place even if advanced technology like robotics can DJ. We need to redefine what is the product that we are now providing. Playing music isn’t enough. Playing good music isn’t enough either. So, what is it? Is it about taste, curation, storytelling..?”
What’s happening in the DJ world resembles many industries. Machines and AI are taking over jobs. And it can lead to team members feeling left out. On a daily basis, Giovanna strives to combat this and help the team identify where they can contribute.
“However, just because there’s a tool out there that does ‘everything’, it might not be the best choice. We need to reposition our purpose in these times of change.”
“One thing is the importance of engineering culture. For an organization like ours, where engineers build the product, we need to make sure we have good culture. We need to incentivize good culture and not just watch or wait for it to happen…”
With the right mindset, Giovanna believes the team can always find purpose and discover ways to create value, even if technology is doing some of the work they used to do. Still, they must do more to ensure a sense of belonging.
Giovanna uses her diverse skillset and knowledge to help her here. She’s specifically studied the anthropology of robotics’ impact on society, and has identified how feeling included and part of a team is vital to success in today’s world.
“Anthropology is the study of human behavior. It’s connected to technology and the workplace culture at tech companies. At OLX Group, we have terms like Pack for teams. We have Tribes and Squads. This is all about a sense of belonging.”
However, Giovanna wonders, what do you do when technology says you no longer belong?
“You have to give team members a greater sense of purpose.”
As John Saddington, a developer, wrote in a blog post, developers want to “build stuff that matters,” “collaborate better with other talented folks,” improve at what they do, and be recognized for their efforts.
“If engineers don’t feel they’re doing things that have importance, the company will face cultural challenges as new technologies and processes are put in place.”
“For instance, a manual tester may get dismayed that a piece of code can now do the work they were doing. But we need to look forward and ensure the tester can focus their efforts on higher-value tasks. They could, for example, do exploratory testing of things that technology doesn’t know how to test just yet. That’s how you create a sense of belonging, purpose, and shared mission.”
5. Start with vinyl and evolve from there
Many DJs advise those starting out to learn vinyl first. This way, you can grasp the art of DJing and acquire valuable skills.
“Spinning with vinyl literally puts you in touch with the music. You know where you are,” says Giovanna.
That ‘knowing where you are’ part is important. When it comes to companies, Giovanna states you must know where you are in order to scale. To describe the process of scaling, she likes to use the analogy of children, adolescents, and grownups.
“Once you’re an adolescent, accept that. Take responsibility for where you are. This is the key to pass inflection points and not stall out. You need a leadership team in the company accepting the fact of where they are. You can’t speak to a 10-year-old like a 20-year-old. Similarly, if you just go to digital DJing without learning vinyl, you won’t reach your potential. ”
Giovanna believes companies must accept the stage you’re on. If not, it won’t feel right and you won’t succeed.
The challenge Giovanna describes is something Dropbox realized as they scaled. Dropbox found that, as engineering teams scale and new technologies are introduced, culture and collaboration have greater potential to erode. So, they created an engineering operations team to take communication, collaboration, and learning and “turn them into scalable programs and systems.” This has helped ensure engineers continually grow and improve along with the company.
At OLX, Giovanna has been working on doing something similar in her position. And we’re excited to see how OLX Group will grow in the coming years.
Come along for the next journey…
That concludes the first part of the interview with Giovanna. We hope you’ve learned a lot about Giovanna’s work at OLX and what it takes for engineering operations to achieve excellence. And perhaps, you’re now inspired to DJ with vinyl!
Stay tuned for part two. We’ll learn all about Giovanna’s personal journey and her adventures from London to Shanghai to Lisbon.
