Niilo
Säämänen
This week, we have the pleasure of an Up-Close interview with Niilo Säämänen, the Chief Technology Officer at Wolt and last years Digital Masters Awards winner for Excellence in Technology. Join us as Niilo shares his invaluable insights on hiring top-notch engineering talent and reveals his secrets for maintaining low attrition rates.
Growing Wolt from 10 engineers to 420 (100-150% scaling YoY) with 1% unwanted attrition. We have built a best-in-class delivery platform with far less headcount than our competitors. Along the way, I have learnt that ambition about the product is essential, along with hiring the best people to solve problems – then creating an environment where these people can thrive, ensuring that the culture is retained and improved along the way.
Career highlight to date? How has this influenced you as a leader?
“We have built a best-in-class delivery platform with far less headcount than our competitors”
What’s your secret on keeping attrition so low?
Culture first - ensuring that the environment is genuinely human centric, building what’s best for customers together. At Wolt, everyone is ambitious but we retain a really collaborative culture – I make sure that there is ownership and accountability across the team so that engineers can contribute and are part of the vision-making process. It is essential to keep the bar high when hiring – we hire for potential, technical excellence and culture fit. Hiring engineers with an entrepreneurial flare is vital as they tend to be natural problem solvers. Every modern company says they’re culture driven, focusing on teams over individuals, however it is a complex balance to actually do so.
This is an interesting one and depends on the person. When I first started scaling Wolt, I was responsible for building the engineering, analytics, product and design functions, however I think there is a danger of one person owning too much - I think that the push and pull is needed at every level. I work alongside a brilliant product leader at Wolt. We fight constantly but ultimately, we are aligned on the overall strategy. I think that leaders tend to over-index on either product or tech – balance within an organisation is important. If you have product and tech teams reporting into one leader, it's important that both teams have strong leadership to pick up on any blind spots. Finding a leader who can genuinely do both is a rare unicorn.
What’s your view on the rise of the CPTO role?
How do you ensure you establish the right balance between collaboration as well as challenge with your product counterpart?
I don’t believe in having separate structures for engineering and product work; there should be one backlog and one prioritisation framework. Leaders on both sídes should give teams the ability to prioritise and enable them to make decisions – this will ensure that there is the right level of ownership as close to the problems as possible. It is essential that every engineer understands customer value and the end user business plus the value of best-in-class product. Ultimately both sides need to be proud of what they’ve built.
“I don’t believe in having separate structures for engineering and product work”
Do you think that the role of an engineering leader has changed during your career?
This world changes every year! Engineering leaders used to be focused on pure agile coaching - making an efficient team - whereas now, leaders need to look at outcomes and impact, and be active in prioritisation as well as the short and long term architecture of our solutions. Engineering leaders now need to take much more ownership and accountability for building a customer proposition. Moving away from pure management roles, individuals in these roles now need to truly lead – a rare talent.
“I’ve had the pleasure to fence ideas with folks ranging from Spotify to Airbnb that have been hugely influential and helped make it so far on this rickety ride”
What makes a great engineering leader?
It is essential that a great engineering leader is ownership driven – you’re there to solve a problem, figure out whatever needs to be done. I believe that great engineering leaders can solve anything if they have the right mindset. They need to be focused on building really capable teams, constantly challenging the business and their team to be better. Effective recruitment through the ability to sell and assess potential is also key – I spend more than half of my time recruiting engineers. Overall, ownership, impact and operational excellence are key attributes to a great engineering leader.
I am big on ownership and entrepreneurship – I often ask the question ‘what have you been most proud of?’. In this question, I am looking for concrete examples around what they have done and how they solved problems. The key to hiring great talent is identifying potential; some people might be in the wrong company but are amazingly capable when given the right environment. I have found that much of the best talent comes from really random, diverse backgrounds, and I try to focus on how they actually solve complex problems, rather than the companies that they have worked for or anecdotal technical tidbits. This strategy has also helped with my hiring given how competitive the market is.
What do you look for when hiring engineering talent?
“The key to hiring great talent is identifying potential”
I think it is a lot about building a great understanding of what good looks like with your talent acquisition partners. I am a big believer that recruitment really needs to be close to the business – internal teams need to be given the knowledge to weed out what is potential and what is not. By working closely together they find out things like team fit for a specific role, or peculiarities of the project that are great selling points for candidates, plus a lot more! Referrals and utilising networks is also key.
How do you find hidden gems when hiring?
What’s the most important thing you’ve learnt about the mistakes growth companies make in engineering?
So many! If I were to limit it to three things, they would be:
1 Driving too much structure too soon – reading blogs and trying to roll out a model which is suitable for a 500-person engineering organisation, when you have 50. Companies tend to over title, delineate and over structure too soon.
2 Not continuing to take care of the code base – it’s ok to take shortcuts but there is a balance. No business wants to wait a year, however they should be constantly pruning and caring about excellence.
3 Finding the balance of hiring vs building from the inside – growth companies sometimes purely focus on hiring external talent rather than supporting internal people rising up through the ranks. I’ve seen that a lot of growth environments don’t recognise the value of long-tenured employees.
What do you think tech leaders can put in place to solve the challenge of limited diversity? What have you done?
Ratios aren’t good enough – tech leaders need to build a humane culture based on respecting people, over indexing on communication. At a more tangible level, tech leaders need to over-index on sourcing, diversity should be at the top of the funnel. Hiring high-potential junior talent and interns through structured programmes helps to build future stars, leaders then need to be focused on growing that talent through the organisation.
“Hiring high-potential junior talent and interns through structured programmes helps to build future stars”
What have been your biggest intellectual influences in developing your approach to engineering leadership?
Probably the best influences I’ve had are through mentors; like minded folks, both investors and leaders in a similar domain to myself who match my way of thinking and the company I’m building. I’ve had the pleasure to fence ideas with folks ranging from Spotify to Airbnb that have been hugely influential and helped make it so far on this rickety ride. From books it’s the classic ones, I still love Radical Candour for the humane approach, and really enjoyed Marty Cagan’s Inspired book for setting up structures between product and engineering.
