00:03:58 · Benjamin Mann
So I made quite okay amount of money for my age, and I would probably have done this for much longer, if not my mother would have one time said, you need a job. Right? You cannot work like this forever. And I'm like, do I have to? And she insisted, so I started to work in my first company. So I was working for a company in Austria called Global Blue. So we introduced a lot of products that today in the industry of tax free refund and tax free shopping are common, but they really weren't when I joined there. So we built a lot of them for the first time. One of a sudden, the VP of engineering back then moved to Singapore and he asked me like Ben, do you want to come along and help me build the Singapore engineering team? I'm like, why not? And then simply moved on through various phases. I became a senior engineer, a principal engineer, tried management once, hated it, went back to becoming a principal engineer and swore myself, I will never manage people again in my life. Walking into a team environment where trust is lacking is I think the hardest one to solve because it will take a long time and you can't screw it up. Right? If you make make one mistake there, you're back to zero. I learned there that if you wanna have a team successful, you really need to focus on yourself, how you are as the leader of this team, because your team will never do what you say, but always do what you do. Right? So they will always follow your behavior and what you see is acceptable or good or what the kind of role model that you are as a leader, you will see that in the culture of your team. Most of the times, positive lessons, sometimes you learned it the hard way, but then I gave it a couple of, another try a couple of years late.
00:05:41 · S0, S1, S2, S3
Ad[00:05:41] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:06:07] S1: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:06:36] S2: Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Ad[00:06:49] S3: Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
00:06:49 · S3, S6
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00:07:21 · Benjamin Mann
[00:07:21] S5: So, and then I've never looked back and I just moved from role to role and from company to company leading bigger engineering teams. Always very focused on building products for end consumers and end users. I really enjoy building at scale. What got me into Foodpanda is I really like to build consumer products that are on a global scale, on a on a multi country scale, and that are simply on the phone of everyone around you. From the outside, you say, like, how hard can food delivery be? Like, you open the app, you press the button, and you get food delivered. People think it's simple. It's really not. The amount of steps, the number of steps that you need to execute near perfectly as a business and as a tech in order to guarantee that the customer gets their food in twenty five, thirty, thirty five minutes. It's insane. Literally hundreds of steps that fire in parallel and in sequence that need to be coordinated with each other with very little room for error because one tiny mistake, the customer gets their food ten minutes late, which in e commerce terms is nothing. Whoever delivers ten minutes earlier or not, who cares? But if you're a hungry person, ten minutes feel like a million years. Hungry hungry people are not patient people in general. Now I'm loving this part of the industry the most. As you can see, tiny changes have this almost butterfly effect through your entire delivery chain on both good or bad. As long as you're out the industry, you really don't see it so much. Delivery Hero owns Foodpanda. So technically, I've been always working for Delivery Hero since day one in Foodpanda. And my boss approached me one day, would you wanna have a conversation about becoming my successor? Right? Then I met the Delivery Hero CEO. I started to see this really as something that I would even enjoy more than my current food panda roll. So I went through an internal interviewing process and became quasi the natural successor to the Delivery Hero CTO. We experimented with a new way of deploying software and managed to basically undeploy parts of our infrastructure causing a significant incident. I have this great example. It was a couple of years ago. One of my engineering team had this great idea of what they wanna build to improve their search result. They they built the perfect solution and rolled it out to the customers, and they hated it.
00:09:39 · Benjamin Mann
They hated it with the passion of a thousand sons, and they let us know. Our customer service was, like, swamped with requests, like, why are you doing this? You've ruined the app experience, and so on. This happens. You have two ways of reacting. You can be really depressed and say, oh my god. We screwed something up. We made a mistake and the world is ending. Or you take this as a learning opportunity. Okay. We went into this feature thinking we're gonna build something that our customers love. Now we've built something that our customers truly hate. So while the product that we've built may not have fit this, the end result was still a great one because now we know more about our customers, and in the next iteration of the product, repeat our process and build a better product at the end of it. I learned there that in hyper growth and hyper scale environments, it's very easy to forget that people that are new to this don't have the entire history of what happened before. There's people coming in and they understand the entire history of a decision you've taken three years ago that puts you in the spot where you are today. So you need to constantly repeat not only the history but also where we are going so that people stay aligned, that people stay focused on what matters, that people understand, quite frankly, also why their job is important. So you need to overcommunicate a lot, and every leader that I know, including myself, thinks they are way overcommunicating, but in reality are undercommunicating a lot. So that's one. The second one is that the mindset of the engineering team also needs adoption as incident times need to become shorter. Stability numbers need to go up. Mobile app quality needs to be driven up because
00:11:22 · S0, S1, S2, S3
Ad[00:11:22] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks, Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up required compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:11:48] S1: This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Ad[00:12:17] S2: Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Ad[00:12:29] S3: Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.