Be Kind, Be Courageous, and Be You at Octopus Energy
Nao Arimura, Lead Software Engineer, talks about Octopus Energy’s award-winning work culture, her growing engineering team, and the kind of developers she’s hoping to hire.
Nao Arimura, Lead Software Engineer at Octopus Energy (OE), is not only in charge of the OE Engineering Team, but was one of the company’s first employees in Japan. “I was one of the earliest joiners for the company, so one of the first four or five developers back in the day.”
I saw the first customer for Octopus Energy Japan, which was really, really exciting. . . . And now we are at the scaling phase, so the company of course got more people and the organization itself has become more structured.
What Octopus Energy does
Octopus Energy’s aim is to bring affordable green energy to the world. On the international level the company offers many green tech services, ranging from leasing electric vehicles to installing solar batteries to providing platforms for users to sign up for sustainable energy programs. Octopus Energy Japan specifically focuses on helping Japan expand its renewable energy market.
Octopus Energy and Kraken Technologies scaled up together, from their branding to their mascots to their technologies. However, Kraken Technologies has recently been spun out from under the Octopus Energy Group’s umbrella.
“Kraken started as a backend system of Octopus Energy, which eventually became a gigantic product in its own right, with multiple international clients.” Nao explained. “Whereas Octopus Energy’s focus has always been on being an innovative and agile environment, outstanding customer service, and accelerating the energy transition [to renewable energy].”
Though the two entities are no longer directly related, they continue to share a mutually beneficial relationship, and the teams share a similar, award-winning work culture. Nao believes much of this comes down to the Octopus Energy CEO, Greg Jackson.
I like the culture Octopus [has had] since the beginning. I think this is Greg’s philosophy and personality, which is like, ‘Be kind, be courageous, and be you.’ . . . In any circumstances, working at Octopus, we can apply this slogan.
Octopus Energy’s culture
“Generally speaking, instead of being provided [with specific] rules or benefits,” said Nao, “if we ask, ‘Hey, can I get something?’ our company’s quite flexible.”
For example, “We have a ‘level up day,’” said Nao, “which is [that] anyone can take a day—not ‘off,’ but away from projects or daily requests, and spend time learning. . . . [They can] try some new LLM stuff, or whatever they’re curious about.”
Octopus Energy was Nao’s first job entirely in English. “So maybe in the first three to six months, my brain shut down around evening and I got sleepy so quickly!”
She doesn’t think there’s much of a language barrier at work, though. “Probably I tend to ask questions a lot during meetings. . . . But I think it’s still okay, and sometimes it works as confirmation for everybody else as well.”
In another example of employee initiative, “One of our engineers [started] an English Club Channel in Slack and just manually matched everyone, asking, ‘Hey, today, or this week, would you like to contribute? Then please give us a Japanese emoji or an English emoji.’ That means like ‘I am a Japanese speaker,’ or ‘I’m an English speaker,’ and he matches everyone just randomly.
“We call it Language Club, and sometimes we go to lunch together and do half the time in English and half the time in Japanese. So this is less of a learning vibe, but it’s more practical and fun. This type of culture just happens.”
The way Nao described team activities, it seems as if many employees come to the office frequently, but that’s not necessarily a requirement. “I like to work in the office, so I come here mostly every day. But somebody [else] comes here once in six months, or two days a week—it totally depends on their preference.”
That flexibility also applies to career progression.
We can choose an individual contributor or leadership [path]. When you become a senior [engineer], your manager will discuss career progression. I talk about this topic with each member [on my team] as well. So anyone can express their preference for technical or leadership.
Team members are even able to switch between pathways. “[Sometimes] they are in the middle, like ‘I want to try leadership,’ and then ‘Actually I want to go back to being an individual contributor.’ This happens quite a lot.”
It’s clear that Nao herself really enjoys, not just being a team lead, but working at Octopus Energy in general. “I think Octopus culture is one of the greatest parts of Octopus. . . . If you want to do it, then you can do it.”
Why Nao joined Octopus Energy Japan
Nao has always been passionate about the environment. “My major was forest science and timber engineering, so no computer science at all.”
Instead Nao worked at a variety of Japanese companies, from traditional large enterprises to small startups, before deciding to switch careers to software development. To do so she enrolled in a coding bootcamp, which was basically the first time she did any coding at all. “I did Free Code Camp, just a beginner thing online, a little bit ahead of Code Chrysalis, because to apply I needed to write some kind of code to enable the submit button.”
Following the bootcamp, Nao worked as a software engineer at a Japanese tech startup for a year and half, before being referred to Octopus Energy. “At the point I applied to Octopus, I already had awareness that I am a more startup-y person. . . . I had experience in like 10,000 people [companies] with so many divisions and hierarchies, and also [start ups] that had 7 people or 200 people, and I prefer the latter a lot. With international companies and Japanese startups, sometimes the culture overlaps—more freedom, and more responsibility and ownership.”
Beginning as a Frontend Developer at Octopus Energy Japan, she was eventually promoted to team lead two years ago.
Becoming team lead
“ I [was] just asked, ‘Hey, Nao, can you do this?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ So that’s how it happened,” said Nao with a laugh.
Obviously there was a bit more to it than that. “I started earlier and I’d experienced Octopus a little longer than other people,” Nao explained. “I also prefer to keep an eye on the wider scope . . . including the business or company vision as well. So probably my tendencies and my personality fit is what the company wanted.”
“I’m kind of a minority in the organization,” she added. “I’m from Asia, and female leads are still not the majority in Japan, and also in the company as well.” However, Nao feels fortunate that Octopus Energy supports women developers.
We don’t have [enforced hiring ratios], but luckily our team has some very nice diversity, coming from very different countries, and also half of us are female, which is great.
As team lead, Nao’s day-to-day has changed over the past two years. “I don’t code every day, and recently I’m super busy hiring—that’s why we’re meeting! . . . I’m not on big projects or even day-to-day tasks. I’m more on monitoring tools like Datadog or even Vercel, [checking] the logging dashboard and fixing errors or investigating.”
That’s fine with Nao. “[As a developer] I shipped lots of projects,” she told me. “That was also fun, and I’d say I made some impact. But I think I do enjoy this current lead role, because it’s very vague and ambiguous, and lots of people are involved and they have different interests depending on which business domain they are in, but still we aim for one goal.”
So I am not solving code errors, but I’m solving business issues or people issues. I’d say I’m tackling more abstract things compared with just being an [individual contributor], and it’s of course more comprehensive and more difficult, but to me it’s been quite meaningful.
Nao’s engineering team
Nao’s team has recently expanded to include the engineering team in New Zealand, meaning they take care of the whole APAC region. “Our team is the Octopus Energy Engineering team,” Nao explained. “In Japan, we work closely with our Product & Delivery and Data teams. We are fortunate to operate as an ‘internal’ tech team for OEJP [Octopus Energy Japan] while also being part of the global community.”
We get the best of both worlds: freedom and responsibility within Japan, but many types of support from our global peers.
Ultimately Nao’s team supports whatever software the business team needs, whether it’s solutions that make business impacts, bring value, or keep their software up to date. “When they want to create a campaign, or when they want to have a partnership with external clients, we build systems for that.”
Because Octopus Energy has so many business divisions, including marketing, business, a B2B team, and low carbon tech development, there are always areas that could use engineering help. “We don’t use paper to sign up, we use online [platforms]. So any solution that could happen online, our team helps with it. I’d say there are always many new projects.”
Growing while staying lean
Compared with when Nao first started, the business has grown significantly. “I cannot follow everyone’s face and name, not anymore,” said Nao. “It’s kind of sad, but I see it as a good thing because, if our business was not successful like this, then we wouldn’t be able to have [our team] right? So it’s a good sign. And speaking of the tech team, we try to keep our team as lean as possible.”
We are growing as well, but compared with the pace that’s happening on the business side, we are slowly growing. So on the tech team side we still have lots of ownership and freedom, which I like.
“Seeing what we produce,” she added, “I would say [we’re] really, really lean. That is one of the keys, that we can move faster. Of course if we have lots of developers, then we can produce more, maybe. But we also need management for those people when we have a very big team.
“Now everybody is super self-sufficient, no need for micromanagement at all. Most have been at Octopus for more than three years. So everybody’s already super used to this culture and our values and what we do.”
How they work
The small, close-knit team enjoys a lot of flexibility in their workflows. “We have three types of processes,” Nao explained, “and the first one is strategic projects, when the business has something they want to solve.”
For example, if one of the other divisions wants to create a new product, the team follows a flexible but well-established protocol. “We have a product manager. She does a lot of discovery, talking with, of course, the business people, but also myself or developers. We also go to the meeting together and make a POC of how we will build the system from scratch. . . . When the design is fixed, we are super agile and just aim to launch it as quickly as possible.
“For the MVP I start assigning some people on my team. And depending on the size of the project . . . I think I’d say [it takes] a couple of months. We launch the MVP and after that, the digital marketing team tracks how it goes. We do some adjustments for nice-to-haves or post-MVP tasks, and just do continuous integrations and improvements.”
Aside from project work, the team also handles smaller day-to-day requests and sets aside time for ongoing maintenance. Nao monitors the team’s overall velocity, manages their backlog and unblocks them if they have obstacles.
I try to save time for monitoring or removing tech debt or writing documentation. Those types of things are easily missed, especially when somebody is busy.
To help ensure such tasks get addressed, the team holds a monthly “spa day” “for maintaining the code base or documentation . . . away from daily projects or tasks. The company provides lunch for that day, to encourage people to come to the office. It’s just nice to see everybody in person.”
Nao prioritizes this time, no matter how busy the schedule gets. “I encourage people to start thinking about what to work on for the next spa day about a week before.”
Maintaining balance
“I hope it’s not super chaotic here,” Nao laughed. “At our weekly check-up, we check each [team member’s] board and ask about their balance. Everybody is a superstar on our team, so their velocity and their capability is massive. I’d say they’re super quick and can do lots of things. And we have a nice deployment pipeline so that we can deploy [projects] quickly, and also we can revert them quickly, if any issue happens in production, as well.”
Fortunately, according to Nao, the team rarely deals with more than two large projects at a time. Nao also carefully monitors her team’s workload.
I try to keep my eye on their life-work balance and also the amount of pressure. Often our projects are quite demanding, so I try to reduce pressure as much as possible, and also make sure they don’t work too long as well.
Generally, however, she favors a hands-off approach. “I don’t manage all the proportions, like ‘Please work 17 percent of the week on a project and for 30 percent do other stuff.’ I don’t do it like that. I just completely delegate that decision. But I have one-on-ones with them quite frequently, and also each project has a weekly or fortnightly catch-up. So priorities will be changed quite a lot, but we can just balance.” Developers who are busy on a new project, for example, aren’t expected to also contribute to erasing technical debt.
Nao emphasized, “Everything is possible here, because our team members are super talented, self-driven and genuinely kind.”
Nao’s ideal developer
We asked what types of people, specifically, Nao wants to hire for her team.
There’s a list of specific traits that Octopus Energy looks for, she explained. “But basically, ‘Empowered, customer-obsessed, impact builders,’ if we describe them in one sentence.”
“Customer-obsessed at the core, and they get shit done the right way,” Nao expanded. “With a ‘freedom and responsibility’ mindset—they don’t have to be told every single thing they need to do. And a ‘builder mentality in ambiguity.’ [That means] questions are super welcomed, because this is very critical when we start something from scratch, and that’s very common in our projects.
“This one is really important as well—’authentically themselves.’ . . . We don’t have to push how we do [things]. We want to learn from them. So, ‘being yourself’ is quite important not only for them, but for our growth as well. And generally, [people who are] really nice and find joy in work.
If somebody wants to make a difference and is interested in impactful work, instead of being one developer among thousands of developers, then please join us.
This is particularly true if you share Octopus’s environmental philosophy. “How will we overcome the energy crisis? How will we pass on this wonderful Earth, which has sustained us for dozens of generations, to the next generation? No one has clear answers to all these uncertainties.
“We, too, are groping our way forward every day, experimenting and struggling. We are moving forward, [but] not by paying the “easy” price of endurance or resignation. We are powered by courage, conviction, and most importantly love. . . . If you’re interested [in that], let’s work together.”