DSMN8 Team: Introducing Ryan Marsh – Q&A with a Startup CTO

89% of employees believe that a social media presence helps promote a company’s products and services to consumers

Employees, on average, are trusted 16 percentage points more than CEOs

77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company when they hear about it from someone they trust.

sources: DSMN8 White Paper: The Social Employee (2016); Edelman Trust Barometer (2017)

A compelling argument has been made for brands to adopt the previously unheard of marketing medium of employee advocacy. But no mistake should be made: this is an unexplored realm for the majority of industries. To say that this is a brave new world would be an understatement. And if the challenges of employers harnessing workforce advocacy is imposing, then designing an app to empower them in grasping this model is inevitably even more so.

DSMN8 is being developed to help brands do just this – coded to capitalise on the power of employee advocacy. At the helm of our tech start-up is CTO Ryan Marsh – central to our efforts to create a ground-breaking app.

Setting out in his career some thirteen years ago, Ryan began as a software and web developer; he moved onto increasingly senior roles spanning technical architect, lead developer and senior developer that would take him from New Zealand to London; and now to Dubai, stepping into the fast and furious world of tech start-ups, where agility is critical, and a clear direction is vital.

Q&A  

Describe your role in 5 words

Deliver the business’s product vision.

Who or what inspires you?

Curiosity, technology, mountains and space (the latter three of which we’d all likely know less about if it weren’t for curiosity).

Can you describe DSMN8’s current architecture?

Micro serviced distributed nodeJS.

How do you define the launch features of a product or service, and how do you prioritise features in a development cycle?

Quite simply, it always comes down to the purpose of the tool. Everything that is required to deliver on this purpose is given priority, anything else is placed on a back burner to be built upon later – features that are weighed up in terms of benefits to the users, versus risks to the business. As we progress through development, potential features naturally emerge as either required or redundant.

Maintaining a focus on a lean platform is key to being able to adapt to this. Ultimately, we aim to be agile – to get users onto the platform, get feedback, evaluate, implement and deliver.

What are your top tips for effective communication with a development team?

Trust and respect – it goes both ways and at DSMN8 we have an open door policy for all.

Every member of the team relies on each another to achieve what are our collective goals. You can have all the meticulous planning and impressive project management tools in the world, but without a solid team, you’re unlikely to succeed.

I always place great value on video calls with those working remotely – it adds something to the line of communication that goes beyond the average email or phone call.

What are the main challenges in creating a product that scales, and how do you overcome them?

Code that runs fine during testing but blows up under load can be hard to identify unless you are actively reviewing code for that reason, as the platform grows this gets harder to control. To reduce the risk of this I take a lot of time with the team to discuss the patterns that produce scalable systems, raising the teams overall understanding and knowledge on the topic is the most useful method I find to produce predictable outcomes.

DSMN8 is set to use machine learning – what challenges are you facing?

Machine learning is taking centre stage for DSMN8 – providing insights into optimal times for particular activities, offering useful suggestions about content and feeding back on common patterns that deliver higher click rates.

But here’s the crux of the matter – a machine can’t learn without data, and in development (when we lack real world data), this presents a challenge. To overcome this, our platform is publishing as many relevant data points as possible, which we’ll start feeding into our learning system. We already have a pretty good idea as to what the churned out insights will be – although the excitement lies in the data that is unexpected.

What are the main challenges facing start-up CTO’s today?

Talent. It’s as simple as that – building the right team, from the right people is something that a start-up’s culture relies on.

Of course the rapid evolvement and advancement of technology is also a consideration – as are the increasing number of platforms that spring up, but with the right strategy, tech advancement can almost always lead to opportunity.