Line’s CTO shares her secret to running a great engineering team

Line CTO Euivin Park. Photo credit: Line.

Line made its debut this year with a market valuation of nearly US$10 billion, solidifying its place as a leading technology company. MIT Technology Review once again ranked the Japanese messaging app as one of the 50 smartest companies, coming in above traditional IT giants like IBM and Intel as well as other fast moving startups like Slack.

“We have been trying hard,” says CTO Euivin Park. “It’s important to get the best people and create a good environment to get them.”

It takes one to know one

Euivin joined Line’s parent company Naver after the search engine company she was working for was acquired in 2006. She was then transferred from Korea to Japan in 2007 to join the company that would eventually become Line.

Euivin explains she got into programming during university because it was trendy at the time. The first game she built was similar to Tetris. After graduating, she worked on system maintenance but found the hardware work tiring and wanted to switch back to software.

This switch would lead her to Neowiz Games in 2002 before moving to the gaming company’s spinoff search service 1noon in 2005.

Photo credit: Line.

Euivin refers to her CTO style as makaseru style which means “let others take responsibility” in Japanese. She believes three things are important for a strong engineering team. One – take ownership. Two – take risks. Three – be open.

For example, the snowflakes that trickle down chat screens around Christmas was the initiative of one of Line’s iOS engineers. The company’s new member handbook encourages employees to “make use of the resources available to you. You have talented people with different skills and experiences all around you.”

Learnings are now not only shared internally, but with the entire developer community. I was pleasantly surprised to see Line go in depth at its event last week about what happened during a nearly two-hour disruption of service in March of this year.

Open sesame

“Open source is very important,” says Euivin. “There are so many things to do. We can’t do it ourselves.”

But to fully participate in the open community, Line itself needs to be more open. Euivin states that opening the platform to developers was something the company always wanted to do, but debated how much to open things. Seeing other messaging apps open APIs demonstrated the need to move quickly. Finally, around June of last year, Line decided to give developers full access to the messaging platform. In one of its first big steps, Line announced last week that bots would be completely available to developers now.