Jia Sheng, the Tech and Data Director of Telebort

Hi everyone, I am Jia Sheng, the Tech and Data director of Telebort.

I graduated from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in 2019 with a major in Applied Statistics. Before I joined Telebort, I was a loan processing officer in a bank for around three months. I quickly noticed that I couldn't apply the knowledge I learned from the university in this job and decided to change my career path.

Not long after, Telebort caught my attention for two main reasons: it is a startup company and a digital academy that teaches children computer science knowledge. I joined Telebort as an executive team member, where I was in charge of operation and workflow optimization.

Now, as a Tech and Data Director, my responsibilities are divided into two respective sides. For the tech side, my team and I focus on building and upgrading infrastructures, such as the Telebort Mobile App, Telebort Dashboard, and Telebort Website. Our main purposes in creating these products are to enhance students' learning process, provide a better platform for parents to communicate with the academic team, and make the teaching process more enjoyable for the instructors. As for the data side, I process quite an amount of data and eventually make the best decision for the company based on the data.

1. As a leader, what drives you?

Whether or not I am a leader, what drives me till today is always my passion for work. There are two questions that I always keep in mind when in doubt;

• If I am a billionaire today, do I still want to work in my position now?
• If there is no incentive or return, do I still devote myself to my current job?

My answer to both questions is a firm yes. Therefore, I consider myself to work for passion. There are some moments at work that I couldn't be happier to see;

• When I see the students gain confidence over time learning with Telebort;
• When I see the parents are happy and proud of their kids;
• When I see the instructors are having a good time teaching the students in class.

These precious moments are like fuel to keep me going till today and in the future as well.

2. What do you find most challenging as a leader, and how do you overcome them?

The most challenging moment would be the beginning stage of Telebort, where we were still new to entrepreneurship and lack of workforce and experience. I am from a Mathematics background, and stepping into the Computer Science education field was a complete shift of focus, meaning I needed to adapt and learn fast. Moreover, we could not bear letting any of our time and effort go to waste as we had minimal resources. Therefore, we must learn the right and necessary things in a short amount of time. Luckily with the guidance of White Room, a digital agency experienced in building software, we knew what we should focus on and saved up lots of our time.

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3. Can you tell us more about how you and your team develop Telebort products?

We design our products using a user-centric approach whereby we identify the problems faced by our stakeholders, namely students, parents, and teachers. We then figure out possible solutions to solve their problems. For example, our students found it difficult to retrieve the class recordings and material. Therefore, the Tech team developed Telebort Dashboard that centralized all the class information and allowed students to communicate with the teachers easily on the platform.

Talking about the process of developing a product, we will first draft a flow chart and then design a low-fidelity wireframe whereby we can visualize the prototype of the product. With more discussion, we will develop a high-fidelity wireframe where the design, graphics, and layout are created and act as a template for the following development process.

4. Can you describe what a typical work week is like for you?

My week is usually a cycle of three stages: Development, Staging, and Production.

Usually, my team and I will have check-in meetings on Wednesdays and Thursdays to discuss the week's focus and align our progress. We will discuss the new features or improvements we are working on for Telebort products. After that, we will go into the development stage, where we work asynchronously to boost productivity and complete our individual tasks.

For the rest of the week, we will have stand-up meetings from time to time to follow up on the progress and check the pull request and branch merging. After that, we will conduct feature testing in a staging environment to ensure that every product component can function well.

Lastly, we will go to the production stage on Sunday night, when the products are usually not in use, to ensure that the update will not cause inconvenience to any party.

5. Can you share some of your short-term and long-term goals for Telebort?

My short-term goal is to build a solid and robust learning management system (LMS) for students and teachers so they can enjoy the teaching and learning process to the fullest. On the other hand, my long-term goal is to utilize technology to deliver quality education in a more accessible way to more students from around the world and form a community within Telebort.