Treat people like adults — Dimitri Baeli (Lesfurets.com)
CTO.Pizza summarizes daily challenges of great startups CTOs, heard directly from their mouth during an informal discussion around a pizza. Follow us to stay up to date or register to the newsletter.
Lesfurets.com is a leading insurance comparison website in France with headquarters in England.
- Founded: 2005
- History: Bought by BGL Group in 2010
- Company size at time of writing: 80
- Tech team: 23 developers, 2 ops, 5 product owners
What’s on your pizza?
Tomato-mozzarella with parma ham at Bacino
Let’s talk about you
I am the minister of foreign affairs: the product teams manage their internal issues themselves and I manage the interface with the external world
What’s your background?
I studied at ENSIMAG, then worked for 15 years for software vendors. I started as a developer and became a Rich Client Platform UI Architect (Java/Swing expert). The industry then really caught up with the need of developers and I dove deep into the subject of software factories. I worked on open-source projects for a bit and met during that time people from eXoplatform where I worked for a while.
I’ve now been for 5+ years at LesFurets. I first met the former CTO and realized that working in the web was a lot more fun than the software industry because we could potentially push to production daily. The CTO at the time realized that coaching the development teams was an important task and hired me for a position about “developing the team’s capabilities”. The goal was to deliver more often (and we moved from one production push a month to one a day).
What’s your job since becoming CTO?
My job spans over production, development and office management in a team with the director of e-commerce. We are organized around feature teams with a lot of autonomy and I consider myself as the minister of foreign affairs: the product teams manage their internal issues themselves and I manage the interface with the external world.
People can expect me to manage the teams as well but we have great senior people that thrive doing so. Most of our developers have been here for 4+ years, we don’t have a big churn!
My goal is to make sure that the teams understand the challenges instead of only build what we ask them to. We don’t really have a lot of features to add on the site every year, but we still change 40% of the codebase yearly!
Let’s talk about tech
What’s your stack and why?
We use Java without a framework. On the database side, a mix of MariaDB and Cassandra. On the front-end, GWT and React. We’re following the trends when it comes to Java technologies, and use best practices all over the place: continuous delivery, docker, etc.
We are more pragmatic than hype when it comes to the longevity of our stack. We have a really rich cultural diversity within our dev team, with engineers that closely follow the PHP and Java ecosystems and that can think forward — they are not only developers.
Can you describe a crisis you had to solve at Lesfurets?
I can’t say we had too many serious crises, thank god. OVH went down for a few hours and our site was down, like a 400k+ others. The financial impact was smaller than the impact on our image — but as the information spread out widely that OVH had issues, people were quite understanding about this problem.
This lead us to set a goal of not being down more than one hour, no matter the issue. We have a specific relationship with data: most of our data is transient. Once the request has been done, we send the user to the company they chose. That means that any database outage doesn’t lead to 100% revenue loss. But still we’re trying to avoid this :-)
CTO Life
Treat people like adults: they make their own choices and have responsibilities
Your biggest challenge?
To keep renewing the interest of the project for our developers. The codebase is about 500k lines, and there’s a lot to do and to improve, even though it doesn’t seem to change much for the end users.
My second challenge is to treat people like adults: they need to make their own choices and have responsibilities. Companies tend to infantilize their employees by checking on their work and deciding for them all the time — this is bad.
Your biggest responsibility?
Make sure added value ends up going to production! There’s a lot of subjects that we start working on and that die on the way for various reasons.
I’m at the end of the line — right before it goes to the customers — so I am responsible for choosing the right subjects to work on without being the decisional boss. I try hard to be a servant leader.
The CTO also has to set a certain exemplarity. All of my developers go to conferences and I try to make some actually be speakers. We organize conferences as well like Tech.rocks to contribute to the ecosystem.
There’s a new ecosystem of CTOs that needs to rise up because we have a problem: Our bosses don’t understand what we do, at all. We need to be able to play ball with people with the same point of view!
People
CTO: Somebody that fights so that IT is considered as a competitive advantage for the company.
What is a CTO, in your own terms?
Somebody that fights so that IT is considered as a competitive advantage for the company. You want your team to get out of the “you’re costing us money” label. The CTO needs to be fully proactive and find opportunities that technology can enable. The day another team asks you to think about a new opportunity regarding technology, it means that you did not move fast enough.
The CTO also needs to develop the IT brand outside of the company to be able to hired the best developers. This means being transparent about your tech team and try to be as visible as possible in the community. I don’t want to hide my best developers to the rest of the world! I want to make them stay for good reasons.
What do you look at in a potential candidate?
I don’t hire too much. As I said, teams are independent also manage their hires. We want people that are able to discuss their choices and ours: why we don’t use a framework, etc.
We usually bring in candidates in the team for about half a day to see if we can work together. I meet them once they’ve been validated by the team and I mostly check the culture fit.
Any tips for startups that need to hire developers?
We’re trying to make each team its own startup to attract talents. For that, you need your team to contribute to the ecosystem, be present at events, be active on open-source projects, etc.
Future
What are the next 5 years going to be like for Lesfurets?
My team won’t be too much larger in terms of people but will operate on a much larger scope. I would really love for the team to have launched new products because of opportunities that we seized.
I have this dream for every single one of my developers to become CTO of their own startup inside of the company, that would mean that they fully took their responsibility and are now flying with their own wings.
A developers has two ways to grow: Become a tech expert or become a manager. The best ending being to become both!
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