5 things I learned about building a great tech-career from Norman Sasono, CTO of DANA

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5 things I learned about building a great tech-career from Norman Sasono

A dive-deeper look into a personal career journey of Norman Sasono, CTO of DANA

“I'm a software developer but I'm stuck in mid-level for 5 years. Should I change my career path?”

Are you a developer looking to advance your career? I recently saw this question on a Quora forum and got me thinking about a “Coder’s Block”. Do you feel like you are in a “Coder’s Block” for your career? Similar to Writer’s Block, this is a period where you feel stuck, the cure is to keep writing (and coding), keep progressing if I must say. How you progress on your journey will determine your path and career, so let’s learn from Norman’s journey and what you should know to get ahead of your career as a developer.

This is part of Skilvul’s sharing session, where I moderated a fireside chat with Norman Sasono. I happened to learn along the way through the session. Here are 5 things I learned from Him that I want to share with you.

1. Your personal habit & self-discipline will determine your success

Norman shared that, “Motivations wear out. As simple as that. So, the best strategy is not to rely on motivation. We need to rely on other things. Ourselves. More precisely, Self Discipline. Motivation may get us to start, but to get us going, we rely on Discipline.”

Norman also has a habit to wake up early, as early as 4/4.30 AM on any given weekday, and He also takes cold showers in the morning. He repeats this and his other daily habits to give Him momentum every day to keep being productive.

The World Economic Forum posted that cold showering can even make you less likely to get ill, people who take cold showers had 29% fewer sick days off work. Other studies have also shown that showering with cold water can increase immunity, reduce stress and build stronger will power (you can just google on this topic and you may find a lot of interesting articles about it).

In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel H. Pink shows that timing is really a science. There is a timing for everything, and morning is usually good for deep productive work (except for a “night owl”). I found this book is really interesting and very helpful to me too, especially with how I craft my time management throughout the day. I begin to shift my deep work in the morning rather than in the afternoon, and I found it to be very effective.

These are some of the examples of habits that can help you to grow personally and at work. However, everyone is different, find and tune your daily habits and time management to better suit you, try and experiment with a couple to start.

2. Promotion is always earned, never given

Norman shared about his experience where he took initiative when still working on one of his early jobs, Intimedia, where he spent after-working hours to solve team’s issues that led him building a system for Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) and Coding Guidelines. This is also his key turning point of his career, where it led him to being promoted as Architect, Principal Engineer, then CTO.

Go beyond and step up - spend the after hours if you need to, do beyond your scope, find your “x factor” and build your credibility to earn you that promotion. Norman also shared the importance of work smart and work hard, you will need these two to succeed.

3. As you grow, you will do more than just coding (technical aspects)

Equipping yourself with non-technical/soft-skill is equally important for your career journey, as you try to climb up the ladder of your career, you will not only be required to code, but also managing teams, setting up priorities, help solve problems for your squad, resolving conflicts among your team, and many others. Norman shared that he does not push or PR to Repository anymore, he shared that his 5 key roles as a CTO of DANA are:

a. Defining and implementing Technology Strategy: One of Norman’s roles as a CTO is to define how Technology can bring competitive advantage to the company or the business, how the company can win in the market today and relevant tomorrow by using technology. Own the strategy, build the roadmap and lead the execution.

b. Enabling the Business: Leading the team in building and shipping products and features are one thing, but as part of a business, the CTO will have to ensure that when a product is built it can give value to the customer and the business. Any solution/product that is being built has to be able to solve customer pain points and serve better experience, thus adding value to the business.

c. Optimizing the Tech: Leading the team to maintain technology quality of services (availability, reliability, performance, scalability, security, resilience of system, etc). Evolve the architecture, drive the infra and tech stack modernization.

d. Leading Technology Innovation: Create new or 10x Tech innovations, trendspotting and foresight, drive innovation culture, and innovation/portfolio management.

e. Talent Strategy / Manage Technology Organization: Afterall, it’s the people behind your team that build the product, hiring the right people in the right position at the right timing is golden. CTO will have to ensure that your hiring pipeline is sustainable, working with HR to lower turnover rate and building the right culture that can enable teams to work well with each other. Also enabling the team to learn and grow, to be better engineers and better people in general.

As you can see, all of his main roles above are more on the strategic level that require not only technical competencies but also entrepreneurial mindset, problem solving skills and business savvy to perform well as a CTO.

4. Train and improve your problem solving skills

Norman also added that often times, his key role is to facilitate a problem-solving situation, and he emphasized the importance of core computational skills (this may even be more relevant for fresh grads and junior programmers) as part of the way to increase your problem solving skills. Norman shared that there 4 key elements to learn to improve your computational thinking skills:

• Decomposition: breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts.

• Pattern recognition: looking for similarities among and within problems.

• Abstraction: focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail.

• Algorithms: developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem.

This is also very crucial to advance your career as a programmer or a product developer, since the no. 1 key of building a digital product that sticks is to build a product/solution that really solves the problem of your customers.

5. The importance of UX

“This is the current battlefield!” he shared in our session.

Norman also shared that “Customers don't care about the technology behind it - unless the technology really gives value to the customer”.

So having a mindset of “Customer first - problems first” will lead you to seek the user experience.

Norman shared his experience from His previous startup, where he built Loyalty Express - a Marketing Platform that focuses on loyalty model, where product is desired but flow is broken, turned out customers don’t want a separate app just to upload and manage their loyalty points (Loyalty concepts are also being introduced by His work right now through Dana)

For a developer out there, and technically anyone, don’t forget to upskill and reskill, adding a UX skill under your skill badges can be beneficial for your career journey. Afterall, during this pandemic, we have seen many companies restructuring their companies’ workforce. Those without “x-factor” will be more likely to be demoted and even cut from the team.

Never Stop Learning

Learning can happen anywhere, anytime - alone or with others. There are many ways to learn and upskill/reskill, Skilvul is an online learning and job-preparation platform for tech talents. Most of our courses are free, and we also offer challenges, virtual work experience and certification programs. Check out our website for more information. Never Stop Learning. Use my code UXBARENGWILL to get 20% discount on our UI/UX Design Mastery Course

Speaker’s Creds

Norman Sasono has built and shipped various computing systems in more than 20 years, in both enterprise and startup environments. The 7+ years of those was in Microsoft Developer & Platform (Developer Experience) Team. He also co-founded two tech startups; bootstrapped loyaltiexpress.com (Customer Loyalty Platform) and VC-backed Bizzy.co.id (B2B e-Commerce Marketplace Platform). In these startups He built the systems from the ground up, and formed and led the Engineering, Quality, Data Science and R&D team. Currently, He leads the technology team that build and run Digital/Mobile Payments Platform (e-Wallet), DANA Indonesia, serving more than 85 million users. In 2020, Norman was awarded World Top 25 Fintech CTO, and ASEAN CIO50. In 2021, I was invited to be part of the global Forbes Technology Council.

About The Writer

William Hendradjaja is the co-founder and Chief of Business of Skilvul. William has 10 years of experience handling businesses from enterprise-level to small-medium businesses. William has also been involved in many verticals including an agriculture business where he started his career, and since then has co-founded a couple of businesses and impact initiatives including Impact Hub Jakarta, a coworking space in Jakarta and SIAP - Social Innovation Acceleration Program (www.socialinnovation.id), an incubator and an accelerator for early-stage social enterprises. William now focuses his time and energy in the education sector - building accessible tech education with Skilvul.