This is a series of stories talking about my journey in Shopee as a software engineer leader.
For people who did not know me, I am a backend developer in Shopee since 2016. Started from a new grad of software developer, I became a team leader with 13 developers + 10 more QAs & PMs (similar to a staff engineer position in the industry). I witnessed the rapid growth from a small company to a company with more than 2000 developers, which was an exceptional experience for a regular developer.
As I am going to leave Shopee in few months, I would like to, by chance, retrospect my entire journey in Shopee. The objectives behind are:
- Talk to me and consolidate my memory before I forget them
- Note down some learning points from me, so probably it can give lost people some direction or inspiration.
This is NOT a series of articles talking about how to get promoted by doing something, becoming a great leader, or how good or bad Shopee is, etc. This is a series of articles talking about MY STORY being a leader in Shopee and what I have learned as self-reflection.
Here is the outline of articles I planned to write so far:
Firstly, I want to talk about my motivation.
Do more for my team
As I mentioned in the beginning, I am going to leave Shopee in few months. The top thing I will miss is my team. It is probably because this team was built by me 2 years ago from 1 member (which is me only) to a team with 15 members, along with my growth of becoming a leader. The entire process was quite painful, not because they were hard to manage but because I could not find a purpose for me to be a team leader. After two years passed, I finally find my purpose of being a leader (which I will talk about later in the other article). Everything also goes in the correct direction, and most importantly, I love the team and people here. If you asked me, I would tell you this team is very close to the team I want to work with forever. This process may be similar to be a parent or accomplish a project from scratch. To be honest, I am not honored to be a developer in Shopee, but I am proud of being a leader of my team.
In the past few months after deciding to leave Shopee, I kept thinking about what I can do to my team and what I can leave to my team. I could help write some codes to accelerate some projects or improve the system. I can write more documents to note down the experiences or knowledge I established or plan longer for the team, so they don’t need to worry about these significant changes after leaving. I can do lots of things, but will those things really benefit the team? or was it just because I was too worried about my team?
We are a team not because I built the team but because all members formed the team.
Back to my core value of leading a team: people are human and not coding machines. I sincerely believe that the best leading style is not doing everything for people but letting them have self-awareness and take responsibility. My role here is to support you and help to push you to inspire your potentials. This team is not MY own team, but all members’ team. What the team will become depends on people in the team, not me (and I will become a legacy soon XD.) This is the spirit I want to pass down to people and let people decide their future.
Therefore, I realized that what I want to do and must do is just giving them some stories about my journey in Shopee. In terms of what action you want to take after my leaving, it will all count on you all, not the new leader but all of the members. (Of course, I will still help to do the things I mentioned above and support the new leader for sure XD.)
BTW, this is why I wrote this article in English, which I am not good at XD”, to provide stories to my members.
Self-reflection and consolidate memory
Since day one I joining Shopee, I kept thinking about what I could bring with me after leaving this company. From time to time, I thought about these questions, and this also reminded me that I do not learn things from a superficial aspect. You need to think and learn something deeper. Even I have been in Shopee for 4.5 years, being good at delivering features and have experience of leading a team to a certain extent. I am not sure how much I can take away with my leaving.
Along with becoming more and more senior, and the scope became bigger and bigger, I found that keeping thinking is one thing, but consolidating your thoughts and transforming your ideas to be wisdom is another thing. Being a team lead accelerated the process of consolidating my experience. I tried to write lots of documents, create templates, establish procedures to scale my work, and pass my experiences and knowledge to people. To achieve this, I need to think and consolidate in a form that other people can understand and follow. This is one of the answers to what I think “senior” means.
I have written many things about physical things like process, knowledge, etc., but I rarely wrote my learning journey in Shopee. The objective is totally different from passing my knowledge to somebody but recording my feeling and experience to future me. I believe this will be a great benefit for me and a way to prevent me from forgetting the lessons I have learned in the last few years.
Hence, this series will be not only the stories but also a journal to talk to me.
Provide my learning process of being an engineering leader
As I mentioned above, transforming from an individual contributor to a leader is a struggling process, especially for the people like me that is quite good at being an individual contributor but have zero leading experience. You got promoted to a leadership role not because you had great leadership skills but because you were a good individual contributor. Does it sound a bit weird? There is a huge gap between being responsible for the projects and being accountable for a team.
Few articles and books are talking about this kind of career path changes as a software engineer. The most well-known books I have read were The manager’s Path[1] and Staff Engineer[2]. One for manager road and the other for staff engineer road. If you are struggled with choosing which path you should pursue, I would highly recommend you to read these 2 books.
However, I would say even after you read those 2 books. You will still not know how to be a leader. It is not like a martial art secret that you suddenly get how you are going to do after reading. What kind of leadership style you will adopt is highly depending on what the real circumstance is, what company expects you to be in charge, what your team structure is, and most importantly: what kind of person you are, what is your core value, and what do you want to be.
Take me as a simple example, I had never wanted to become a manager before, and I thought technology is much more interesting to me. I did not want to deal with people, and I wanted to be an expert on technology, not an expert on managing people. I struggled and was frustrated even after 1 year of becoming a team lead. Luckily, things got changes due to series of trials and talks to different people. I finally found my own purpose and passion for being a leader. Along with these changes, I started to think in a leader way and grew a lot. This is actually just a mindset change, but it affects everything in my world. And where did I find the purpose? I learned that by understanding myself about what mattered to me and what I was interested in.
I want to convey that no matter how other people say about how to become a good leader, you need to understand yourself first. You cannot become a good leader if you cannot understand your passion and purpose.
By telling my story about becoming a leader, I hope this provides some guidance and direction to people who have lost amid the forest trying to find the light to the road to be a good leader.
Conclusion
Overall, I want to write some stories about my experience and learning points from the journey of being a tech leader in Shopee. It is mainly for me, and also for my team. If it can help any people, that will be great. And hopefully, this will not be the last article of the series XD.
[1] Fournier, Camille. The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change. O’Reilly Media, 2017.
[2] Larson, Will. Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track. E-book, 2021.
