TechStack Episode 1 — Meeting the tech titan of Urban Company, Raghav Chandra, Co-founder and CTO

Learn what it means to be a tech first DNA company and how that shapes the culture of the company

This blog summarizes the top themes and insights of our very first episode of TechStack with the co-founder and CTO of Urban Company, Raghav Chandra. In case you missed listening to the talk, tune in to: -

Spotify- https://lnkd.in/gcQe--9W

Google Podcasts- https://lnkd.in/gQip-iRr

So, let’s dive in.

Role of an empowered culture

“Where every engineer knows what he/she’s building and whatever is being built brings the company closer to its mission”

Culture is something that’s neglected the most in the initial years because of a lot of other very obvious things that need to be aced in such high paced environments. And that itself is hard, but that needs to change, any company which struggles with that forever, is struggling with getting ahead of the curve. You do certain things in one way on Day 1, in some other way on Day 2, try comparing the better alternative on Day 3 and end up doing the same thing in yet another way on Day 4. It’s kind of a run of the mill hack, to get things done, you’ve to wear Larry’s hat some days, Bill’s hat on other days and say Mark’s hat on days when you really can’t decide.

And this is where Culture comes to rescue. It’s a force that unifies everyone’s direction at the company, from a marketer to an engineer, where all such paths lead to the vision of the company and all people think in an aligned manner. For UC this change started from year two onwards, where questions like “What does tech really mean for us?”, “what’s the role of tech in our company” filled the air. So, it’s a culture where business teams, product teams, marketing teams etc. also start thinking from the perspective of a tech company rather than a non-tech company.

What it actually means to be a Tech Company

“What makes us a tech company is not what we’re selling. What makes us a tech company is how we do things”

Any team, which is tech savvy: -

• Approaches problems from a first principles thinking and is aligned to the long term vision of the company
• Ends up giving large parts of the business problems to even tech teams to solve, including identifying the problem and solving it. It becomes the DNA of a good company, where one really can’t differentiate between a tech and a non tech team
• Is largely involved in identifying the problems first and then solving for them

“It’s when all your teams- be it business, product, marketing or tech; all are problem solving. Though, the levers they have at their disposal to solve the problem changes, there isn’t much segregation of rules.”

Empowering teams in the UC style

“We empower teams by letting them also have a strategic place versus just an execution place”

It’s a general rule of thumb to cater to the immediate needs first and then think of the future hassles associated with such temporary solutions. In a typical setup too, a Product Manager makes around 70–80% decisions serving the current needs and a meekly 20–30% of such decision making is allotted to the long-term goals and growth of the team. Such a proportion fails at empowering teams at multiple levels and just adds to the Tech debt. One hack to make empowerment come and greet the team is to let people with different experiences and expertise come together to solve a certain long-term problem.

That’s why the roadmaps at UC are generally built by verticals. Say one roadmap can be built around the problems, the other can be built around user delight. So, there exists a certain ratio of what kind of problems need to be solved. And these problems are solved by all the teams to absorb any heavy biases that one single team may have in the course of solving such a problem.

“There’s a healthy chaos that exists within the teams”. Because essentially all the teams are solving the same problem but with expertise in different dimensions. Like, the business team has an expertise in categories, the marketing team is an expert in consumers, the tech team is an expert in capabilities and so on. Hence, it’s ensured that all functions are coming together and brainstorming on ideas.

The trade-off between what people want to do vs what people need to do

“A lot of things that happen in a company are tied to its vision and vision needs context. Vision needs people to stick for multiple years to the same team to see that vision in action.”

And development of such a vision is not possible if people shift profiles every three-four month. At UC too, people’s movement is encouraged to promote cross learning but only when they have developed a sufficiently long-term view of their existing role.

Secondly, teams must be mapped to end-metrics as well as capabilities which shall promote deep thinking and healthy exposure. To quote an example, say instead of splitting the growth team by user retention and user acquisition, they can be tied to a lever, say CRM and this way the teams can build pretty deep expertise and solve multiple problems just within growth. In conclusion, the way out is that people don’t rotate too early and also have an appropriate exposure to get a better sense of the problem.

The Journey of Investing in Platforms

“Culture is all about standardizing. You can standardize how you’re doing things by putting a culture book, or you can just standardize the things with your platform thus, standardizing decisions, which your team members should not be making.”

There’s a trade-off between platformization of things vs letting the problem statement stay open to all the teams and then solving for it. To put this in better perspective, if you let DevOps for example, be solved by all the teams, then DevOps would be something that no one has an expertise on. No team would become industrial there. But if you want a team to be your asset vs just a run of the mill solution, then you must put a central stage in place. A central stage, that works on layers above the basic problems, that works on industry defining stuff rather.

It’s a tough call that every leadership has to take at some point in time i.e whether to carry forward the status quo and focus on results today or to invest heavily in the future today and witness results some 2–3 years down the lane. Investing in Tech always seems to be a costly affair in the beginning, but it smoothens the long-term curve at an exponential factor within just years of such a commitment.

UC in this way, reaped the compounding benefits of starting early with platformization. By already having a predetermined framework for standardizing the operation of, say micro services, even before the microservices were launched, they were able to unleash the full power of platforms.

Note: We highly recommend reading the UC’s blog on a 10x engineering at https://medium.com/uc-engineering/10x-engineering/home

Hiring Tips and Tricks

“It’s when you’ve been able to cause a change, which you wanted versus just executing, which is an unfortunate thing in engineering. Everyone takes pride in solving tough problems when those top problems are already defined to them, the real question lies in identifying such problems at first.”

Do you hire senior leaders first or do you hire engineers early in their careers or do you hire people with a specific skill set, when do you hire people, for what role do you hire etc. are some of the burning questions that a lot of new age founders are stumbling upon.

As Raghav states, a good proportion of weightage should be given to Design Thinking. This, along with the quality of a person being a go-getter i.e the person has a philosophy or a sharp opinion to begin with. And then he’s been able to pursue and fight the odds to get that done. This is easily reflected through his past experiences and assignments. It’s always thinking vs executing or identifying the problems in the first-place vs just solving for them.

So, a few good questions that hiring leaders can ask themselves are “is this person good enough to be a VP someday?”, “will the person raise the bar, or will he be average in the team?” etc. Testing candidates just on the basis of tech stacks, programming languages etc. may spell disaster for the culture of the company and its vision. They need to have a basic understanding of the ecosystem and beyond that, design thinking is what ideally should be judged.

Final advice to young CTOs

“Aim for a conviction led journey. Be furious, be fearful of the future and use that as a strength to build conviction.” Perspective is just as important as execution.