Employee Spotlight #23: Andy Zhang, Founding Engineer at Jemi

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Andy is a founding engineer at Jemi, a website builder start-up. Before Jemi, he was the first PM for Uber Eats for Business, an engineering intern at Figma during its beta years, a product design intern at Quora, and a software engineering graduate from the University of Waterloo. Outside of work, Andy can be found crafting experimental music chords on his piano or playing pickup basketball.

Jemi Founding Engineer Andy Zhang.

Frederick Daso: What was your journey to becoming a founding engineer at Jemi?

Andy Zhang: My journey to joining Jemi started with a love for building and a constant interest in trying something new at the University of Waterloo. I loved attending hackathons to prototype new ideas during my first few years of college. After a couple dozen scrappy projects, I realized that my excitement in these projects lay in the magic of using the product. While I was trying to make a pivot into the world of design, I ended up landing an engineering internship at Figma while they were just short of 10 employees and in beta. Those formative four months ignited my excitement for working at a fast-paced startup.?

After a short design stint at Quora, I decided that working as a product manager would give me the full package of skills needed to operate at a startup. I eventually landed the role of an associate product manager at Uber, where I met Jason, Jemi's now co-founder. After two exciting years at Uber, Jemi's other co-founder, Annie, reached out to see if I was interested in joining Jemi. The synergy in our complementary skillsets was evident, and I felt excited to work with both Jason and Annie, so I followed my gut and agreed in a heartbeat. Fast forward a year and a half, and it's been everything I expected and more.

Daso: There's a lot of conventional career advice about being a successful software engineer, but are there any unorthodox lessons that you've learned through experience or been taught through mentorship that more of your fellow engineers should know?

Zhang: My biggest learning during my time as a PM is the value of written documentation. In the first week of our Uber APM Bootcamp, one of my favorite presentations was from a director of products for Marketplace. He discussed how taking notes during a meeting is a superpower. After applying it for several years, I've learned that it serves two great purposes. First, it acts as a source of truth. There isn't a need to remember something and leave room for error when you can refer to something written. Good documentation can capture important takeaways from any discussion or decision. This ends up being super important at a startup because there's so much going on. Second, it's a great way to structure thoughts. When thoughts are structured, it's significantly easier to make good decisions and prioritize properly. This enables us to be as efficient as possible and applies to all roles, including engineers.

Daso: What's the toughest project (professionally or personally) that you worked on as a founding engineer or in general? What were the most important lessons you learned from that project?

Zhang: The hardest project I've worked on to date was a project to enable users to have multiple websites per account. The circumstances of the project made the project especially challenging. My team was working from a different timezone on the other side of the world, which made it difficult to coordinate, and it was a project that required significant changes on every part of our product. Although the project launched successfully, the process of getting there was anything but smooth, which gave me a different perspective on how to tackle large ambiguous projects in the future. It taught me the importance of upfront engineering planning before diving into any implementation work. It also taught me the importance of milestone design. In my case, I felt demoralized and less productive because I always felt so far from hitting a milestone. If my milestones were smaller and clearer, it would've been easier to celebrate more frequently with my team and share the project's progress. In this newly remote world of work, I expect there to be more instances where I'll need to work remotely, and I feel much more confident going into future large ambiguous projects while remote.

Daso: Who are some of the most inspirational people you've worked with during your tech career??

Zhang: The first two people that come to mind are Annie and Jason. Both of them embody an inspiring level of hustle, kindness, and work-life balance, and it made joining Jemi an easy decision.?

Outside of Jemi, so much of the early Figma team inspire me. I especially look up to Sho Kuwamoto and Jessica Liu for their leadership style and to Rasmus Andersson for his prolific career working as a designer and an engineer. Coincidentally, the two people who've inspired me the most during school ended up at Figma: Jamie Wong and Jenny Wen, both of whom are some of the smartest and kindest people I've ever met with very tasteful writing.

Daso: How would you define your company's culture, and how does it create an environment where you can do your best work?

Zhang: People-first, bias to action, and customer-focused.

We all treat our team as our extended family and care for each other. We care about each other's well-being and growth, and we want everyone to be able to feel 100%. When we can feel our best, that's also when we can do our best work. We also care about enjoying the ride and having fun along the way by learning and enjoying our time working with each other. I do my best work in this environment because I feel like my team is invested in me and my well-being is just as important as my output. For example, if I'm not feeling 100%, Jason is always the first to propose I take time off as needed so that I can return at 100%.

We're also very action-focused and act like owners. Our team size enables us to make quick decisions, allowing us to focus on taking action. We're not afraid to ask for help from each other because we're a team, and we know that we're greater than the sum of the individual parts. I'm a builder at heart, and I know I thrive in an environment where everyone is so biased toward action.

We also used to all be PMs and carry forward a customer-obsessed mentality from our previous roles. There would be no product without a customer, so we're always trying to deeply understand the problems of our target customers and solve them. Getting constant validation from our customers is always reinvigorating, and we always celebrate it because it means a lot to see the fruits of our labor. For example, one user mentioned that Jemi has been life-changing for them, and it really meant a lot for our team and gave us a lot of motivation.

Daso: What are the most important skills you've had to develop in your job, and what specific projects or assignments did you work to develop each core skill?

Zhang: One of the hardest parts of my role is knowing when to wear which hat and understanding the biases of each. For example, during product discussions, it's best to focus on what're the best ways to solve the problem as opposed to thinking about how to design the infrastructure or any engineering constraints. Working on more end-to-end features (customer feedback/data insight, product discussion, designs, engineering, testing, launch) allowed me to practice context switching and also establish processes so that the hat that's required is clear.

Daso: What's one interesting (non-work related) thing that more people should know about you?

Zhang: I love playing the piano! After being classically trained at a young age and despising it, I developed a love for playing music by ear and experimenting with different types of harmonies. I'm no Jacob Collier, but I'm somewhere in between him and your typical retired classically trained pianist (and probably much closer to the latter). My favorite chord is Fadd9, the first chord played in the Spirited Away soundtrack.

Daso: What's something you want to accomplish in your career that you haven't yet? What motivates you to get there?

Zhang: For now, it's to help grow a company with a team I like and reach a Series A. I don't like to look too far into the future and prefer looking at the closest immediate milestone, which is to grow the company. Hitting this milestone would mean a lot because I would be able to celebrate it with a team I love, and I get to feel like I played a huge role in making it happen.

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