How we learnt to ship 3 times faster

As the CTO of Helpchat, I am responsible for making sure that our product ships on time, again and again. Running a 80+ member tech team requires a very different skill set compared to running a 30 people team.

Over the last few months, as we grew more quickly, it became more and more important for us to design our culture in such a way that it enabled us to ship faster.

In tech businesses, execution is (almost) everything.

Background

Before I jump into what we did, here’s a quick background of why it was necessary for us to go deep and solve this as a problem.

The average Indian user is fed up with installing apps, and our app helps him save over 600 MB of space and about 100 MB of data usage by providing a lot of functionalities within one app. And from our research, it was obvious that mobile users in India are very conscious about saving space and minimising data consumption.

Here is what the main screen in the app looks like:

There are companies which have spent months building the experiences in each of those tiles alone. The difference for us is that we do API integrations with different players, and don’t have the challenge of building the vertical business itself.

Our challenge is to build UI/UX to match the underlying services and add a layer of personalization.

Speed is of the essence in an internet business.

Along the way we knew that we’ll make mistakes, have to do a ton of experiments and basically improve across so many different categories at a phenomenal pace. All the time while building infrastructure that scaled. It’s easier said than done.

To understand the best way to accomplish our goal of becoming “the fastest tech company in India”, we spoke to over 30 different companies of all sizes (the biggest was a 400+ people engineering team within a company with a $2B market cap, and the smallest was a 25 people engineering team) in India, Silicon Valley, and China.

Here are the 5 things that we did

Conclusion