Engineering & Data Science @ TravelTriangle — Building High-Performance Team (Part III)
This is Part III of three-part series discussing realizing our tech vision through generic and scalable framework as well as setting right engineering guidelines, teams and culture @ TravelTriangle.
This concluding article of the three-part series talks about building a high-performance team, which plays a crucial part in making any vision realized. It includes aspects like alignment, empowerment, hiring right people, building & maintaining great culture and environment, having the right engineering guidelines/philosophies, etc. These aspects truly drive things but behind the scenes.
Alignment — Common Vision & Direction
Please do read Part I & Part II of this series, if you haven’t, which talk about a few generic frameworks that we have built @ TravelTriangle aligned with our product & tech vision. It also talked about interesting things being developed by our QA and DevOps teams. Such vision & direction helps align teams to work in a common direction and have a greater purpose together.
Empowerment & Enablement
Any vision and direction wouldn’t mean anything if not executed well and further if teams are not enabled to think long term, keep learning as well as failing fast while keeping a balance between the delivery of business impact and future tech/innovation. You can read, in details, about how we aim to build future leaders / mini-CEOs in TravelTriangle.
To enable from bottom-up, since the start, we have made sure that 30% bandwidth of our tech and analytics team is used for internal tech and analytics projects while 70% is available for company projects producing a business impact in the short and near long term. That being said, 30% bandwidth is not left unchecked and gets connected with long term gain in the company too. There is a mechanism to prioritize projects within it using themes as mentioned below:
- Cost-Effective Scalability — No slowness with scale in a cost-effective manner
- Stability / High Availability — 24X7 Availability
- Performance — Low response time, high throughput, and no data loss
- Security — Secure and fraud-free system
- Team Efficiency — Quality output, faster development
The outcome from these projects is then mapped to actual business impact objectively in terms of outages and/or slowness, product bugs, team efficiency, infra costs as well as load testing metrics to know future scalability.
Development Guidelines/Philosophy
Some of the guidelines/ thought process that we have imbibed, and which we keep reinforcing, in our engineering team to build for complex and highly scalable systems.
- Design for the future, build for the present — Balance effort to impact
- Think differently for the experimental feature [fail-fast] vs long term feature [high quality & scalabilty]
- Don’t reinvent the wheel, if not needed — Evaluate build vs buy.
- Think SDK, gem OR API interface and not just MVC
- Design for Reusability — Stateless & Configurable Systems
- Design for Failures — Everything fails all the time. Make application resilient.
- Design for Scalability — Don’t over-optimize, But know when your design will fail
- Design for Monitoring and Debuggability (Part I, Part II)
- Design for Recovery / High Availability — System will fail, plan how to recover.
- Design for Security — Systems will be abused, deliberately or by Mistake! Secure it.
- Swear by RCA — Our RCA template
People, culture, clear roles and high performing environment
The main force of getting things done is people. Without them, nothing is possible. Hiring the right people and then building/maintaining great culture is key to building any high-performance team. Further only talent alone can’t carry an organization but even talented people need to be given continuous oversight and direction, by leaders while ensuring that they are engaged, motivated, and challenged on a daily basis.
Hiring Right People
One harsh reality in our evaluation system is that people are scored based on few hours of exercise (be it an exam or be it an interview) and evaluators miss the fact that there could be certain reasons due to which otherwise talented people might not have been able to show their true capabilities in few hours of exams or interviews. I agree that it has one pro of getting people accustomed to pressure, but it also has a big con of getting a person evaluated just based on that.
With that said, in our hiring process,
- we weigh more on the potential of the person instead of the experience or knowledge that s/he has gained. Knowledge will become stale, constant learning will not.
- Also, we put more focus on the type of work and projects that s/he has done instead of years of experience or the college. We understand that there are times when the person is talented but just haven’t got the exposure s/he needed. While there are times when a person has gained experience of “6–8 years” in just “2–3 years” working on great and complex projects.
- Startup & Culture Fit comes above everything else — We had rejected very highly talented people just because they deemed not fit for our startup/culture. This is something that we have set as non-sacrificable at any cost and have helped us a lot to avoid any “negative” culture @ TravelTriangle getting created.
We test it above things by evaluating a person’s thought process, attitude, zeal, design philosophy as well as problem-solving skills. In cases where there are doubts, we have given task rounds to the person, to use the internet or any IDE but code the problem in hand and get back for the discussion within a few days.
Our intent is that if the person is able to solve the problem, no matter if using the internet, IDE but able to navigate/solve and build over it in the discussion, later on, then we are unnecessary concluding things based on just 1.5–2 hours discussion and might be losing a great candidate with zeal to “get things done” supplemented with great “learning” skills. This has worked like charm for the person who, for some reason, is not exposed to certain technologies but can learn fast; who sometimes have gone into pressure unnecessarily or; who might not have all pros/cons of each kind of tech tool and stack on fingertips. Of course, our expectation around these matters changes based on how senior is the profile under consideration.
Setting the right goals, measures, process as well as accountability
- Set clear goals and measures of success in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
- Set clear RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) for every project/initiative. Keep in mind that more than one accountable means no accountable.
- Set compelling dashboard and periodic progress checkpoints to unblock team or improvise execution, as and when needed.
High Performing Culture
We encourage and push our team members
- to own things end-2-end,
- be outcome-oriented than just process-oriented,
- think of the customer and business impact first,
- fail-fast but learn, make data-centric decisions,
- always evaluate between multiple hows and challenge your own solution first before others do,
- balance effort to impact in terms of the task in hand and
- lastly, work as one team/one goal.
- In all, definitely not ignoring having fun, parties with your team members and manager.
We truly believe in “walking the talk” instead just “talking the talk” so you would get a hint of such culture and philosophies in our day-2-day discussions about anything :)
With this, I conclude my three-part series around generic and scalable frameworks being developed by our engineering and analytics architecture as well as to give you a glimpse of engineering guidelines and culture @ TravelTriangle. You can read Part I and Part II talking about various generic frameworks built within TravelTriangle.
A lot of interesting things happening @ TravelTriangle. Join us in solving these challenging problems and creating a world-class holiday B2C and B2B ecosystem; email at lead_on@traveltriangle.com
If you know anyone in your network who might be interested in solving these problems, do share this article.
If you like the article, do like and/or clap so that others might stumble upon this article.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
