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How Spike Went from Developer to CTO at Colorkrew

Ning “Spike” Li shares how his proactive stance helped grow Colorkrew’s team, expand its product line, and earn him the title of CTO.

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Ning Li

Ning “Spike” Li joined Colorkrew six and a half years ago as a senior software developer. Now he’s the CTO, because of a personal decision he made early on.

 I think I just changed my mindset. I felt, ‘Yeah, I don’t like to work here. Why not just make it a suitable place to work?’

When Spike was hired, Colorkrew was expanding, and the situation for developers wasn’t the best. “We didn’t have a development team,” Spike said. “We didn’t have a development flow. Every developer was just kind of managed separately in our project.”

Colorkrew was struggling to retain the few developers they did have. “In that period, I also thought, ‘Maybe I should leave,’ because the situation was not good. But eventually I got a better understanding of the company and I started to feel, ‘If the environment is not good, maybe I should be the one to change it.’ So I started to think and do a lot. Of course sometimes it’s difficult, but I think the result is okay.”

Actually we increased our team from 3 members to 25, for now. We have our own development flow. We have our own evaluation guidelines for engineers. That made everyone happy. What makes me happy is I feel I made some changes in the team. I built this team up.

This proactive mindset, and the results, earned Spike a promotion to lead engineer. From there he became increasingly involved in  team management, until, Spike said, “Finally, I got the CTO role.”

“But it didn’t change much,” Spike added, noting that he’d already taken on much of the work he currently does as CTO. “I just feel more and more responsible.” Receiving the title after doing the work is typical for the Colorkrew promotion process, Spike told us.

In Colorkrew, we don’t do assignments [to new roles]. You earn the position.

Spike earned his by helping solve what he described as a “chicken-egg problem.” Colorkrew needed both new products and more developers—but which should come first?

“For us,” Spike said, “we increased our products first with the current engineering resources. We have smart guys who can kick off new products very quickly.

“After that, we needed more engineering resources to maintain and improve them. We put a lot of effort into getting good candidates and keeping them, we improved the team’s fundamentals and work environment. We kept this cycle [going] in the company’s strategy and finally got to our current size.”

The actual team-building he described as a three-part endeavor: enhancing team recruiting, building out an onboarding process, and improving team fundamentals.

“We put a lot of effort into building our interview process, including clarifying interview standards/content and training interviewers,” he said. Colorkrew aims for candidates who are “above the team’s average level.” Then, once the candidate is hired, they receive a customized onboarding process.

For each newcomer, we [create] for them individually a suitable onboarding plan, based on their career phase and personal requests. We ensure they can integrate into the team quickly and grow smoothly after they join.

Engineers are also able to move between teams. Spike said, “We feel rotation is important, so every one or two years, I will ask them if they want to change teams. Because our technical stack is similar,  React and Golang, it’s not difficult for them to switch between different projects.”

Spike explained that “We want to create an exciting environment for engineers to work in. . . . It can [help] people stay because they have hope for a better future for the team.”

He certainly shares that hope. “I have my own idea . . . regarding how a development team should work.” So far, his ideas have paid off. “Before, we could only maintain maybe one product, with preliminary features. But now, actually we can maintain up to 10 products, and each product can have active development with complicated features.”

“Our conversations also became much better,” added Spike. “We share knowledge and experience, consistently every day.” While Colorkrew has a hybrid work policy, with at least two days spent in the office to encourage face-to-face communication, Spike makes a point of being in the office more than most.

After becoming CTO, I’ve spent much more time in the office, because I feel if people need my help they shouldn’t be waiting for my next available slot. They can just come to me to ask for any support or help, so I want to be reachable as much as possible.

There are also many casual chats. “If I sit at a table, sometimes the people just come to me,” said Spike. “[They say] ‘Yeah, I heard you have experience with these topics and I actually encountered this problem. So, what’s your opinion?’ This is the kind of conversation that happens every day in the team.”

Colorkrew holds technical seminars in the office every two weeks, where anyone is encouraged to present, as well as regular technical solution reviews. “We will involve a lot of people, not just inside our team but also outside the team. We have a discussion regarding how to make our solution better,” Spike said.

Colorkrew’s most unique way of encouraging communication, however, is their lunch/dinner reimbursement policy.

At Colorkrew, we have go-to-lunch and go-to-dinner support. So if you go to lunch together [with coworkers], the company will pay half of the price.

This only applies to meals with fellow employees, and it can only be used once a month by each specific group. However, employees could in theory enjoy an entire month of subsidized lunches by eating with different groups, or varying the group composition, every time. Spike feels this promotes cross-team communication and relationships.

Strong lines of communication are necessary, as the company has diverged into several departments. Though founded in 1999 as a custom solutions company, Colorkrew only recently decided to sell its own product, necessitating the creation of a development team.

“So now, actually, we have two directions for the business,” Spike said. “One direction is the client service. We receive the client’s request regarding infrastructure or software, then we do the development for them. This is one part. The other part is our own in-house products.”

Colorkrew’s in-house products aim to streamline company processes and support collaboration, and they include general affairs tech, HR tech, security, and groupware. Spike said, “We are kind of leading the market in general affairs tech. But we’re trying to stretch our portfolio into groupware and HR tech too.”

They also want to expand their customer base. “For now most of our customers are in Japan, but we are trying to stretch our market to other countries. We have a sales team in Brazil, so we have been trying to sell our products in Brazil for at least two years. This year, we decided to expand our business to South Korea.”

According to Spike, Colorkrew follows a fairly standard production process, but with an emphasis on carefully deliberating each new feature that’s proposed.

“Our planning is more around if this feature should be done or not,” explained Spike. “For this part, we discuss heavily, but also quickly. So if we decide this part [needs to be] done, we don’t do a lot of planning for the future schedule—rather than developers and designers giving exact estimations, we set task priority and trust the team to manage the schedule and delivery themselves.

We have a rough target for the release, but we don’t make plans very strictly because I think it’s a little risky. You will encounter a lot of sudden situation changes during the development. So it’s better to just have a go, and then we handle everything case by case.

The exception, Spike told us, is if they’ve contracted with a customer to release the feature by a certain date. “This is the only case [in which] we have a very firm deadline, because there was a promise already to the customer.”

Spike also encourages developers to question, not just the “How?” of each feature, but the “Why?”

I receive this question almost every day from our members. ‘Why are we building it? What’s the business purpose? Is it meaningful?’

As CTO, Spike is pleased by this sort of honest, even blunt, communication: “Our culture is very open and transparent.” And that’s not just concerning features, either. Spike is always open to receiving feedback from colleagues, regardless of hierarchy. “Actually, I appreciate that because [if I don’t receive] feedback, I will start to think, ‘I’m so perfect, I have no need to improve myself or grow.’ It’s stupid, right? No one can be like that.”

This realistic attitude is also reflected in Spike’s expectations of the team. “Even though I’m committed to my job, I don’t work too much overtime because I need to keep up my performance. This is a work style thing.”

At Colorkrew, we don’t push for overtime at all. I think [overtime is] a bad decision, because your performance will be reduced and finally you cannot get things done with great quality. So we just don’t do it.

Colorkrew is continuing to expand, and Spike knows exactly what he’s looking for in future candidates. “The first layer we want is good fundamentals,” he told us. “You should have solid coding ability, and you should have a thought process for resolving a problem and transferring your thoughts to workable code. . . . The other part is that we want you to have good communication abilities. You can understand the point others [make], and even if there is a conflict, we should be able to resolve it with proper discussion.”

Spike’s definition of good communication skills includes English, as it’s the official language of the product development team.

We have a policy that we will speak in English. And if you talk in your native language, for example, Japanese or Chinese, you can do that, but you need to translate it [the conclusion] into English and then share that with the others in the meeting.

The last must-have, Spike said, is “potential to grow.’” Given Spike’s own career path at Colorkrew, it’s not surprising that the CTO would be drawn to candidates with a similar proactive mindset.

“I feel it’s an accomplishment to have such a team working so well,” Spike said. “That’s the reason I’m here. I’m still saying, ‘Yeah, we are not good enough, but I plan to [improve] our team further.’ That’s my motivation to work here.”

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