CTO interview: Steinunn Arnardottir, building a thoughtful digital experience for kids
In this interview, I got the chance to speak with Steinunn. With an impressive educational and professional background, going from Stanford to Native Instruments, she decided to get involved into making a thoughtful digital experience for kids.
I’ve been impressed by your academic studies, going through Stanford, and professional journey: you stayed more than 10 years in a company. It is becoming unusual to see today. How did your journey prepare you for what you’re doing today?
At Stanford I studied Electrical Engineering and specialized in music technology. Landing a job afterwards with Native Instruments, an industry leader in SW & HW tools for music production and DJ-ing was therefore a dream opportunity. I worked several years hands-on in Audio Signal Processing research and implementation of Digital Audio Effects such as filters, reverbs and compressors (think: you change how something sounds using software — someone like me worked on the algorithm to make that possible). Later I stepped into management and worked with a broader set of teams across platform, web and data. As a music passionate, it was a true privilege to work on products used so widely in music production and by many of my favorite artists.
Technically, having hands-on experience with audio is helpful as a foundation for any media tech job. In an interactive setting (such as the games we are building at Totoli), low latency and precise syncing of audio is critical and this can be tricky to get right for a cross-platform app working on many different clients. Experience from working with the platform teams at NI has been helpful when it comes to backend infrastructure and components such as CDN.
Native instruments grew from 100 to 600 people during my tenure and there was simply never time to feel bored! It was valuable to get the opportunity to work with different areas of the tech stack and business. I learned how to scale teams and processes as well as growing a great network of friends and experts to look to, when you are wearing a lot of these hats yourself in an early stage start-up.
Could you please tell me more about Totoli?
Yes. At Totoli, we believe that mindful media handling of young children is a necessary part of digital education, and as parents we were missing tools that could support us as families on this journey. In the current setting, screen-time tends to be filled with friction for families. Parents use a lot of hacks in order to reduce the likelihood of melt-down around or after screen-time (I can imagine many parents are familiar with the 5 minute before end warning, not stopping an episode in the middle, and so on). Parents also feel insecure and guilty, some of the most common questions we have heard during our research and surveys are: “What is constructive content for my kids?”, “Could my child be growing an addiction to screens?”, “Are they being presented with ads?”, “Should they be actively learning instead of passively watching?”.
And in the end often you granted your child screen-time as you wanted your child to have a nice time while you get something done: the last meeting of the day, start preparing dinner — but you ended up spending more time on facilitating your child’s screen-time and dealing with the aftermath than you actually got done.
These types of scenarios were the motivation for us as a team behind Totoli: an app that turns screen-time into quality time. Our content (video, audio, interactive games) is curated and developed in such a way that it supports the key areas of early childhood development (emotions, cognitive skills, creativity, movement and culture). The child has a magical experience during screen time, but also learns how to build a healthy relationship with screens. And parents can have some peace of mind.
What are the key things to look after when building tech for kids? How do you find the right balance between bringing some value-added while avoiding kids’ addiction to screens?
Testing with 2–5 year old kids is definitely different than working on a product for grown-ups. It is very hard to do early testing sessions with children with half finished features. To for example have a paper prototype in front of a 3 year old and asking them to imagine a scenario where they could press a certain button simply does not work. A prototype to test a concept thus needs to be relatively polished.
Small fingers and the curiosity of children also requires special attention to touch sensitiveness with a screen-based product. We have been through many test sessions and iteration cycles to get this right.
It is certainly a fine line between creating a magical world that children want to stay in — and at the same time help them accept the boundaries connected with it. When starting, we had our hypotheses and life-hacks as parents — but found it important to team up with both academic and practicing experts in pedagogy and psychology to develop these further. The experts work very closely with the team and are very involved in feature development and our content curation framework.
What tech stack did you choose and why?
Our backend and several parts of infrastructure is built on AWS. The backend layer handles among other user access, content ingestion and the metadata around it, transcoding and delivery of content. AWS Elemental MediaConvert combined with existing best practice Cloudformation template for Video-On-Demand streaming played a part in winning us over to AWS early on. They provided helpful to get quickly up and running and also enabled us to integrate more complicated video streaming components at a late stage like video encryption / decryption.
We use Python and GO for the backend. We decided for the dual-language approach as Python has a great ecosystem for everything regarding data processing and GO we use where we need to provide fast response times. We use Terraform to manage our Infrastructure as a Code.
We are a small team building a cross platform product (iOS and Android). After some evaluations, we decided to use Dart/Flutter to build the app. We did think about the risk of Flutter being a relatively new player, and there have been some areas where we have had to put in a bit of extra work where plugins and packages are missing/lacking maturity or not fully covering our use cases. However, overall we are happy with our choice. You can feel the increasing momentum with the growing ecosystem. Developer satisfaction was also one of the factors we considered — getting up and running on Flutter has been fun!
Do you have any fun fact or horror story that happened throughout your career?
Had to think about this one! I would not say it’s a horror story, but I tend to enjoy my work the most when I am mildly out of my comfort zone. Early in my management career I was asked to take on a team that was working with a tech stack that I did not have personal experience with. There were many urgent tasks to take care of and pressing projects that needed investment. A number of people had left, resulting in an understaffed team. This was a central service team with a lot of stakeholder-pressure, so they needed shielding to stay above water. It was at points challenging to get so quickly up to speed in a new stack and to fully understand what often felt like circular dependencies. Luckily it went really well, which the good team spirit we could create can be thanked for. The team showed a lot of grit and solution oriented thinking, and the engineering manager stepped in as a great PO.
In hindsight it was a great preparation for a CTO role, where one needs to switch constantly between diving deep and zooming out. Such experiences also make one a better coach: larger projects need constant dividing and conquering — surrounding yourself with a great team where you trust each other is how to effectively move forward.
If you want to connect with Steinunn, click here.
To learn more about Totoli, visit their website: totoli.kids
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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