GreenTomato - Our Culture of Cradling Future Tech Leadership

The Story of GT - Lone Nuts, First Followers, Esteemed Hackers, T-Shaped Talents, and X-Shaped Leaders. We are all doers.

Recently someone asked me if I would be interested in being a career coach. This is on one hand a huge compliment (I must have said something that makes career sense), but on the other hand, a pinch of irony because I would consider myself the biggest flop in career planning.

Oh dear, but please don’t stop here. I promise after reading this, you will be clearer about your career plan or what types of ‘future talent’ you want to pursue. After all, GT has proven to be the place where talents find their career upside.

That got me thinking how I got to where I am now.

In my almost 20 year career, I wasted the first 10 years chasing what everybody else was chasing - packages, titles, status and the brand of a company, which only brought me nothing but misery. Then on the verge of depression, I got attracted by the then Hong Kong Movie app and took the most reckless decision of my life to join a company that I knew nothing about in an industry that I knew nothing about. The only tech-savvy things I knew (back in 2010) were using Instagram and Foursquare, writing blog-posts and reading MASHABLE.

How many times would you get drawn to a product of a company, so much that you would be crazy enough to want to join them and be part of the creation process? 

I am not talking about the ad of a brand, the Glassdoor celebrity CEO, the all-star LinkedIn manager, the stock price or the product launch from the news. I am talking about an organic process from discovering an app from an App Store to using it and one day, you saw the app name on JobsDB and realised there was a growing urgency in you that wanted in.

And I was not the only crazy one. A lot of us were attracted to GT because of what the company had created, the outcomes that entail the collective efforts and talents of the people that make the company.

Throughout the years, we might have been struggling with our brand positioning, gimmicky ways to label our processes and incorporating buzzwords in our pitches. But we have always been proud of what we have developed and the delivery satisfaction our clients have.

That is why the story of GT is worth telling. 

It is a story about how 4 lone nuts attracted a small team of misfits as their first followers. When the market was ready to embrace mobile technology, a group of esteemed hackers joined us to make our business growth possible. These self-taught guys learned the latest and best practices in tech to become our first batch of T-shaped talents. As GT scales up both in terms of project size and scope, and the company structures and organizes with increasing complexity, our first generation of X-shaped leaders have emerged.

It All Began with 4 Lone Nuts

GT began in 2003 and was ‘all about mobile’, right from the beginning. I call our founders “lone nuts” because why else would you want to do anything with the mobile internet when it was practically not even a thing?

If you are not familiar with the term “lone nut”, you need to check out this TED Talk by Derek Sivers.

All visionary leaders begin with the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. In doing so they attracted their first followers who play a crucial role in calling more people to join in. This is exactly what happened with GT. The first followers were embraced as equals and were allowed to shine in their own unique ways. That probably explained why GT’s flat culture is so deep-rooted. Our open office is not a gesture but a necessity for the teams to shout across the floor. Granted, techies are not the most huddle-friendly creatures and as our teams grow, people now commonly work on and off-site or remotely, (where it is quite inelegant to shout!). Nonetheless, this culture has persisted, just with less shouting but more /shoutouts via Slack.

The First Follower Transforms a Lone Nut into a Leader

Disclaimer! None of what I am going to say about our first followers represents GT’s current recruitment and talents management strategy. We have long passed that startup pirate phase. Our focus now is to groom and nurture leaders for our expansion, in a forward-thinking yet structured way. But you need to know that had it not been for our first followers, GT wouldn’t be the GT it is today. 

I want to tell you more about them because our first followers have shaped GT. They made GT unique and they were what was unique about GT. They were versatile and resourceful when resources were limited. They took pride in making the impossible possible for our partners and clients. They groomed like-minded talents whose candidate profiles may not have conformed to any typical job description. 

And by introducing them, I want to elicit empathy. Empathy towards the real people behind the early growth of our company. We are all familiar with enterprises, with their resources, well-established management system and legacy. But we usually forget that from nothing to something, there needs to be a progression. And GT certainly experienced plenty of that. 

Our first followers were all misfits in some sense. Some of them had a shiny education background but couldn’t fit neatly in the big corporate game; some of them were the very first iOS developers in Hong Kong and they were not needed anywhere when most people were still using Nokia; some are indeed ‘Renaissance’ men before IDEO popularized the term ‘T-shaped’ or the market saw the true value in full-stack. These misfits were drawn to the lone nuts because through their boundary-free leadership, they were given a slice of treasureland where they could feel fulfilled by solving technical challenges.

Those were the early years of GT. We were tossed mobile project after mobile project that no other development houses would take, either because they didn’t have the skillsets or they quoted outrageous prices that our clients couldn’t justify. Yet again and again, we completed and delivered.

Through these projects the misfits learned and evolved. So when GT needed to attract more people to join, they stepped up to the role and led. They might not have had the formal management training but they certainly attracted another kind of unconventional talent - the esteemed hackers.

The Esteemed Hackers

Intimidated by the term ‘hacker’? Maybe it’s time you should get used to it because I would argue the ethical hacking mindset is the most important mindset change if you still want to stay relevant to the future workforce.

I like Seth Godin’s definition of esteemed hackers the best - the esteemed hack of figuring out how to use code or other forms of technology to solve an intractable problem by means of an elegant shortcut. Once given a boundary or a goal to work towards, esteemed hackers figure out ways to get there. They are adaptable to the project environment, flexible enough to bend around the SOP and find workarounds when the set methodology does not suffice.

Esteemed hackers to this day still form the pillars of GT’s growth engine. They are the reason why we carry out processes as needed even before the market hears about the process terminology. This is something intrinsic that we are still looking for in our potential employees.

Back in the days when we had only the design and development teams, our UI designers would already incorporate the UX deliverables to explain the customer journey. Our marketing clients were the early adopters who were not freaked out by giving feedback on wireframes instead of something with a visible interface and graphic design. 

Our client account team was equipped with a strong business analyst sense early on. When design thinking was not widely adopted, we were already using App Annie for competitor analysis, app market research, and SEMrush for understanding user behaviors. Of course, now all these activities are grouped under the persona ‘analysis expertise’, but who knows what more magic tricks are up our business analysts’ sleeves.

To smooth out the working between IT and marketing departments, our system analysts would use APIs as a way to minimize friction over data ownership. Or when the waterfall methodology induced a lot of bottlenecks and clients were not yet receptive to scrum, we snuck in an iterative approach by introducing the clients’ working teams collaborative tools like Jira and Figma.

GT was one of the earliest teams in the market to adopt CI/CD and DevOps company-wide (which I shall have a separate post to talk about what they are) in order to scale up our development and delivery quality.

Even recently when we were voted the ‘best scrum player’ by our client, we did it not because we adhere rigidly to the scrum methodology (although I am always impressed by how ceremonies are so skillfully conducted) but because our scrum masters adapt and are flexible enough to adopt the agility mindset according to the actual project situation and to the client company culture to make sure project delivery success.

Of course some of our ex-colleagues might find their “hacky” peers too nonconformist which we completely respect. But our esteemed hackers allow GT to adapt quickly to the market and bring new ideas to the clients. They bring business growth to the company, career growth and are a positive influence on their more progessive peers. Last and perhaps most importantly, they bring personal growth to themselves. 

Esteemed hackers Naturally Evolved into T-shaped Talents

What is T-shaped? T-shaped skills, or a T-shaped individual, refers to characteristics that make an employee valuable. They have outstanding expertise and skills in particular fields - the deep skills, complemented by broader general knowledge across an entire platform - the broad skills, making them good at communicating with others and adaptable to changing technology and market environment. This term was first used in-house at McKinsey & Company, and popularized by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown.

There aren’t many companies that have the right mix of business model, clientele, project natures, and culture to appreciate the true value of ‘T-shaped’. Fortunately, GT has the perfect environment and it is also in the company’s interest to cultivate T-shaped talents.

Take the role of a developer for example. T-Shaped developers specialize in one area, usually front-end, back-end, or a specific technology stack. They are, however, capable of a wide range of development, design thinking, and product management tasks. T-shaped developers allow GT to take on new project challenges and expand quickly. A small group of T-Shaped developers can also work on our project, say POC or MVP assignments, from start to finish, allowing for smaller teams with more accountability.

Still remember our esteemed hackers? We have observed that an esteemed hacker possesses the essential traits of ‘T-shaped’.

In practice, T-Shaped developers are focused and rarely confused even though they’re working in projects with great uncertainties (there’s no point sugarcoating it, you and I both know projects, especially complex digital and IT projects involving matrix of departments, are big vortexes). We need our engineers to be able to discuss across teams and with our clients, their skilled subjects and the comparative merits of other methodologies and technologies. It is because of these hands-on experiences that they always know what is going on in their project and can find from multiple sources the root cause of a problem quickly.

Hence, it is no secret that GT’s workflow and internal training strategy places a heavy emphasis on grooming our colleagues to be T-shaped talents. We are a reputable digital transformation consultancy because our specialists offer domain expertise. However, throughout the project development cycle, there are regular tasks that do not require such domain experts. 

Take a look at our scrum training. Our scrum masters have been rated by clients as outstanding project specialists. While on the other hand, most of our teams see the benefit of having daily standup meetings. But that does not require all of us to be scrum masters. Team members learn the fundamentals of scrum ceremonies and are encouraged to host these meetings. This sort of skill and experience cross-training contribute to a cross-functional working culture right across GT. 

We can divide our T-shaped training into two major tracks, deep skills and board skills. Deep skills are identified as each colleague’s core grouping of tasks linked to their specific skills and technological expertise. The goal is to equip them to be an expert in that field which means they become well versed and also well informed of the trends and latest developments in that domain. While for board skills, there are cross-training, formal and informal, with adjacent function teams, whom they collaborate regularly or have a lot of handshake activities with. 

So when it comes to design thinking, this is the deep skill of the Business Analyst and UX Designer, while our Project Executives and Quality Assurance Testers would learn the design thinking theory to aid their test plan designs. Coming up with testing strategies is a deep skill for QAs but our PM training empowers our PMs to assess the effectiveness of a particular test plan. 

The informal training for broad skills is dynamic and more embedded into our workflow and working mentality. We emphasize a lot on documentation and collaborative systems and tools when it comes to cross-team communication. Such enforcement may seem mundane at first but by providing such communication platforms, colleagues learn from other teams through the technical languages and terminologies used; facilitating drawings, diagraming, and all sorts of rapid prototyping practices. Through these organic working systems, teams are introduced to new ideas and best practices across disciplines.

From time to time, we have internal sharing between teams, we invite external guest speakers from partners like Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft, and enroll ourselves in cross-team hackathons. But among all initiatives, I would say cross-team communication and on-the-job project guidance are the most impactful when it comes to developing broad skills.

The level of our upskill plan success is indeed our north star metric. GT’s fully embracing T-shaped talents greatly enhances not only the team spirit, but also brings out our distinct culture of supporting each other to solve challenges, dealing with tricky situations, and the natural tendency to cover each other’s back.

This altogether has opened unimaginable doors for us. Whenever we encounter a new industry, we are not confined to work just within the IT or digital departments but we also work directly with the business departments, developing products that directly impact our clients’ top-line. The fact that our specialists are multi-faceted puts them in front of clients’ counterparts, ranging from working teams, senior key business owners and executive decision makers.

T-shaped Converting More T-shaped, Evolving into More X-shaped Leaders

Let’s face it, we are not the only company that pursues T-shaped talents. Talents with proven T-shaped skills and project track records are harder to come by and more difficult to retain. 

The talent war is real and our talent strategy is simple - recruit esteemed hackers, train them up into T-shaped talents and groom them into X-shaped leaders.

OMG. Not another piece of jargon. What on earth is an X-shaped leader? 

A X-shaped leader has one slash that represents the above T-shaped skills, and with the other backslash that denotes leadership and executive skills, which includes leading people, managing risk, communication, negotiation and conflict resolution, planning and control, and personnel management.

Notice how the slash and the backslash end up crossing? This is the quintessence of X-shaped leadership. A X-shaped leader is human glue, a person who doesn’t only possess knowledge for success but also excels in leading teams and managing projects by keeping the knowledge flowing within an organization.

X-shaped leaders stay with GT because this is a place where they deliver success and make things happen.

Find Your Career Upside

Why am I telling you all this? Because we need more like-minded people to join us. In an organization of over 300 colleagues, 20% of us have stayed with GT for over 10 years. This was long before we formally documented our talent philosophy, at least not in such an organized and structured way. 

No MBA told us what would work nor that copying other bigger companies would help. We worked our talent philosophy out by adjusting and adapting to what works best in our constantly evolving business and technology environment. 

When I mentioned wanting more esteemed hackers to join us, what does that mean? It means that we’re looking for doers. And “doers” form the DNA of GT.

The only way we learn as a team is by doing. We read research reports, methodology best practices, Github commits etc. to give us good preparation, but not until we practice them in our projects do we call it our own ‘know-how’. 

On the other hand, learning is the act of failing on the way to mastery. While we can’t afford to celebrate failures like startups as our projects demand precision, accuracy and uncompromising performance, we embrace errors and accommodate room for improvement during the process. We do not want to kill the doer spirit by penalising errors and bugs. That is why we groom support among teams, adopt an iterative approach whenever possible, keep optimizing our quality assurance and focus on practices like peer code review to gate-keep quality.

10 years ago Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world”. Today we will only predict that the “eating up” is going faster than ever. Soon there will not be a tech industry because all companies, small or big, will have digitally transformed their businesses. Arguably all commercial entities will require technology talents. GT sees business opportunities and expansion but we also see ahead of us a tough talent war, not only in the local market but throughout the world. GT will continue to strive to develop and nurture new talent by providing the opportunities to upskill their stacks. We will help them find their career upside. 

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If you know any good engineer, designer, PM, BA and QA, please put in a good word for #GT #GreenTomato ?? We are hiring!