Leadership Principles

Key Value
1. Customer Obsession
  • Value: Leaders earn and keep customer trust
  • Project: CR1. Designed and developed custom metrics and improved observability
  • At: Cybereason
  • Situation:
    • A UI server has multi-components
    • Difficult to troubleshoot
  • Action: Improved observability
  • Result: Reduced MTTR for enterprise customers
2. Ownership
  • Value: Leaders act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just one team
  • Project: EN1. Developed a generator tool for manifests and Terraform configurations for new microservices
  • At: enechain Corporation
  • Situation:
    • Developers had to write manifests and Terraform configurations when creating new microservices
    • Slowed down the development speed
  • Action: Developed a generator tool for manifests and Terraform configuration
  • Result: Reduced time to first deploy for all teams
3. Invent and simplify
  • Value: Leaders expect innovation and find ways to simplify
  • Project: IT4. Migrated from a modular monolith to microservices architecture
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation:
    • Adopted a monolith architecture first
    • Write traffic on the database was increasing
  • Action: Migrated to microservices architecture and separated the responsibility
  • Result: Simplified the architecture and improved the database performance
4. Are right, a lot
  • Value: Leaders have strong judgment and good instincts
  • Project: GU1. Analyzed data from millions of users and designed A/B testing
  • At: Gunosy
  • Situation: User retention rates were declining
  • Action: Designed A/B testing scenario (Optimizing the first view) and implemented
  • Result: Increased user retention rate beyond the standard A/B testing
5. Learn and be curious
  • Value: Leaders are never done learning and consistently seek to improve ourselves
  • Project: EU1. Developed a processor that compiles user scripts into WebAssembly files and executes them efficiently on a wasm runtime
  • At: Eukarya
  • Situation:
    • Needed to create an extension for users to use their custom scripts
    • Needed to learn WebAssembly (Allows efficient execution of code written in various programming languages)
  • Action:
    • Researched and developed
    • Documented
  • Result: Provided users with useful features and built a knowledge base for the team.
6. Hire and develop the best
  • Value: Leaders develop leaders and take seriously our role in coaching others
  • Project: IT6. Migrated from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation:
    • Needed to migrate MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0
    • Encountered an incident
  • Action:
    • Resolved the incident and successfully migrated
    • Did pair programming with team members
  • Result: Led the project to success and built a knowledge base for the team
7. Insist on the highest standards
  • Value: Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products
  • Project: LX1. Developed an event-driven notification system within a closed network
  • At: LayerX
  • Situation:
    • Needed to develop a notification system to tell the workflow status to users
    • Our client was Japan's top financial institution, and we had the highest security requirement
  • Action:
    • Communicated with the financial institution's network manager
    • Developed the system
  • Result: Released the system with the highest security standards
8. Think big
  • Value: Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results
  • Project: IT1. Designed SLI/SLO and developed custom metrics and tracing
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation:
    • Got a chance to introduce the system to Japan's largest real estate company
    • But realized that the existing operation didn't meet the required level
  • Action:
    • Decided to sacrifice agility temporarily
    • Introduced SRE practices
  • Result: Got a contract with the enterprise customer
9. Bias for action
  • Value: Speed matters in business. Leaders take calculated risks
  • Project: EN2. Developed a system for local development by deploying Telepresence to the Kubernetes cluster
  • At: enechain Corporation
  • Situation:
    • Each microservice depended on the others
    • Slowed down the local development speed
  • Action:
    • Decided to introduce Telepresence (OSS to help create a local development environment)
    • It lowered security standards, so I limited the scope to the dev cluster and added security patches
  • Result: Minimized security risks and improved the development speed
10. Frugality
  • Value: Leaders accomplish more with less
  • Project: AL1. Developed a serverless training pipeline for LLMs
  • At: Algomatic
  • Situation:
    • Needed a training pipeline for fine-tuning LLMs
    • Needed costs efficient solution
  • Action:
    • Utilized serverless architecture
    • Developed a training pipeline
  • Result: Enabled fine-tuning LLMs efficiently
11. Earn trust
  • Value: Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully
  • Project: 2. Analyzed thread dumps and heap dumps to troubleshoot a server
  • At: Cybereason
  • Situation:
    • A UI server crashed occasionally for an enterprise customer
    • This incident ticket involved with many teams
  • Action:
    • Gave instructions to other teams as an incident commander
    • Analyzed thread dumps and heap dumps
  • Result: Organized details about the incident response and solved the availability issue
12. Dive deep
  • Value: Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details
  • Project: IT3. Tuned indexes and queries of databases and implemented read replica and cache
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation: Had frequent slow queries
  • Action:
    • Tuned indexes and queries of databases
    • Implemented read replica and cache
  • Result: Reduced the number of slow queries
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit (Conflicts)
  • Value: Leaders challenge decisions when we disagree. Once a decision is determined, we commit
  • Project: (New) Migrated Google Cloud to Oracle Cloud
  • At: Cybereason
  • Situation: Executives planned to migrate from Google Cloud to Oracle Cloud
  • Action:
    • Disagree: Used number & vision
    • Commit:
  • Result: Created a better migration plan and reduced infrastructure costs
14. Deliver results
  • Value: Leaders deliver outcomes with the right quality and in a timely fashion
  • Project: IT2. Developed a group chat service and notification system
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation:
    • Needed to develop a group chat system
    • Schedule was tight
  • Action:
    • Adopted polling (Inefficient but Simple) instead of WebSocet (Efficient but Complicated) to simplify
    • Developed a group chat system
  • Result: Developed the expected system in time
15. Strive to be Earth's best employer
  • Value: Leaders have a vision for and commitment to our employee's personal success
  • Project: (New)
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation: One of our engineers repeatedly delayed the deadline for a feature development
  • Action:
    • Communicated and found he was lack of understanding of the product code
    • Reassigned him to an important refactoring task with a more flexible deadline
  • Result: He became familiarized and started handling complex feature development tasks
16. Success and scale bring broad responsibility
  • Value: Leaders create more than we consume and always leave things better than how we found them
  • Project: IT4. Migrated from a modular monolith to microservices architecture
  • At: Industry Technology
  • Situation:
    • Adopted a monolith architecture first
    • Write traffic on the database was increasing as the business grows
  • Action: Migrated to microservices architecture and separated the responsibility
  • Result: Simplified the architecture and improved the database performance