Why The Engineering Team is Important | Jeanine Jue

Hi again, my name is Janine Ju. I'm Director of Developer Evangelism at Envestnet Yodlee. We're a financial data aggregator, so we provide APIs that you connect to your bank account and we vet and normalize transaction data. So we're one of the top financial data aggregators out there. So my job is to pretty much just evangelize APIs, evangelize new technologies, as well as focus on the fintech space. I have Vu here, part of the evangelism team. He's like the expert guru. He rocks. Yeah, I want him to build a startup, but he won't do it just yet. Anyway, so just a little background for me. And I've been in engineering— I'm sure you can figure out my age— for about, I'd say, for about 20 years now. I started off in the government sector. And I'm really grateful for that experience, because having a having a top-secret security clearance, in managing engineering teams and managing your projects. It's just night and day in terms of what you have to deal with in the startup world. If you screw up, if you leak one piece of information, you're in jail for 10 years. So it was just constant stress for multiple years. But I learned a lot in terms of managing my time, managing the developer team, and also being super anal in terms of how we handle our code. in also writing secure, clean code. And as you mentioned, I'm a tech mentor, an advisor for a couple of startups. I've been doing that for years. And it's really great experience, right? 'Cause you can see where all these startups have screwed up and everything, and you learn from it. I've also had a startup. It failed, and I learned a lot from that experience. I also learned a lot financially as well. But it was great to kind of go through the whole thing. Now one thing I also mentioned here Is I have what I call, when I advise companies, my fix my team support. Because a majority of the startups that I work with, a major problem is their team. And so people actually bring me in to fix their engineering team. And especially if the founder is not technical, which as we go through these slides, I'm gonna show you, you don't have to be technical in order to manage your engineering team, especially when you're picking out developers as well. You just need to know the little games that their thought process, what they're thinking, some of the games, the way they talk in order for you to be able to properly manage them. And so what else do I have here? Okay, so agenda. I'm telling you, I was putting my slides together over the weekend. There's just so much I could share about this. Why engineering teams are important, which is a high level. A day in the life of a developer, engineer, perfect engineering team, managing your team. We're gonna touch a little bit on project management, touch a little bit on Agile. and conclusion in terms of next steps that you are. So first, before we continue, I'd love to get a feel for where you are at in your startup. Like, how many of you are developers, first of all? Uh-oh, okay, well, so that's good. And so how many of you have developers on your team? Okay, so this is great. Okay, so this is good. So first, now that I get a good feel for what's out there. So first, I know it's really hard to see, the top 20 reasons why startups fail. Okay, and I actually took this from a Forbes article. I really want you to pay attention to this because 90% of startups fail, right? And if you could just avoid all this, you're good to go. So they run out of cash. Why do they run out of cash? The majority of companies I talk to, they do not properly allocate and construct their engineering team. They may have a front-end developer who doesn't know Angular or something. They just have a very basic level of it. They're spending $100,000 out of their $500,000 budget when they don't need it. So misallocation of funds for engineering. Not the right team. And investors will tell you this. It's all about the team. If you don't have the team, then at that point, it's just going to go to flop anyway. So which other one? They get outcompeted. Why did they get outcompeted? Due to the fact that possibly the engineers don't deliver the product in time. And so somebody else got there a lot faster than you. A poor product. Again, development, your engineering process. Lost focus. As a developer, again, I've been coding for like 25, 30 years, I tend to lose focus. Why is that? because the requirements weren't clear to me. My boss didn't give me a proper statement of work in order for me to better understand what I need to implement. Disharmony of team investors. Again, team issues. Pivot gone bad. One of the things coming from a developer perspective, we hate throwing away code and we hate pivoting. It's like, what? I've been working on this damn thing for so long and now you're gonna make me throw it away and build something new? So again, slowly putting somebody into a whole pivot mindset will certainly save your company. Lack of passion, of course. I mean, as a developer, if I'm not passionate about a product, I'm gonna do a crappy job. And that's really important to keep that in mind when you pick out your engineering team. And failure to pivot, that could potentially have a lot to do with the engineering team as well. So overall, The common theme is that the engineering team has to be strong. The team as a whole, but primarily the engineering team. And it's up to you to guide them in order for them to put together the perfect product. Well, even though there's no such thing as perfect. And my former boss, he was a VP of engineering for a company. He had a bachelor's degree in computer science and he had a master's degree in child development. I was so blown away by that. And he said, you know, when you're managing an engineering team, it is like managing children. And a lot of them, a lot of his management style does come from his master's degree studies.