S1 - Episode #7: Juha Ristolainen - Chief Technology Officer - Upvest
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About Juha:
Juha Ristolainen is the Chief Technology Officer at Upvest. He is a software leader and technologist with over 20 years of professional experience in delivering and building digital services and applications. Juha has worked for companies of every scale - from startups and operators to mid-size corporations and even large OEMs. He's built high performing software delivery teams using efficient and well developed processes within organisations of varying sizes from tens of employees to several hundreds and thousands of driven professionals.
Juha has extensive experience as a software engineer and app developer, building mobile apps to traditional backends and microservices. Juha is a hands-on leader who can take up coding or DevOps or CI/CD on demand. He’s also passionate about blockchain technologies.
Synopsis:
In this episode of The Technology Leadership Podcast, Juha Ristolainen discusses modern leadership and onboarding skills for top-rated professionals in the tech industry. While expanding on his experience scaling up as a developer, Juha details the responsibilities that come up with every role in a team. We learn why onboarding lies within the core of a successful organisation, view modern leadership as servant leadership, and mention hiring smart minds to drive towards the organisational vision and mission. On the technological front, Juha gives a quick picture of the various software and methods he’s used, including apps, microservices, and domain-driven designs.
Key Takeaways:
The roles and responsibilities of growing as a senior in your team.
Onboarding as the fundamental process to building an effective team - unless you’re certain they’re a good fit for your team, it would be hard to have them in your company for long.
Enabling new joiners to take charge of their onboarding and upskill themselves
The benefits of having “onboarding buddies” in your organisation
Modern leadership as being a servant-type leadership - you show them the greater purpose and encourage them to drive forward to it
Why your future workforce could be largely remote and global
Empowering employees to exercise their judgement and bonding as a team
How to keep driving the organisational mission and vision to everybody
The importance of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
The benefits of microservices over monoliths
Why the war for talent is bigger right now, post-COVID
Episode Outline:
[00:41] Meet Juha
[09:27] Juha talks about the biggest challenges of his career
[11:45] How do we challenge individual contributors to get to the level of VP of Engineering or Head of Engineering?
[14:38] How do you quickly and efficiently grow a team?
[17:11] Juha discusses a brilliant method of onboarding
[17:48] About the first day stepping into a company as a fresher and modern leadership
[12:20] What are the traits and skills that leaders need to start to cultivate earlier in their career to be able to become a CTO?
[21:24] Why hire smart people?
[23:31] Juha’s thoughts on recruitment and hiring in the coming year
[25:14] Letting people exercise their judgement and creating a healthy working environment
[27:13] Aligning employees with the company vision
[28:55] About KPIs
[30:36] How do you measure your meeting success?
[32:50] What advice would you give to people working in startups?
[34:21] What are your reasons behind building a monolithic and then moving to microservices?
[37:46] What are your thoughts on bringing on a non-executive director or board member to your company?
[42:21] Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?
[44:34] Juha’s weapon of choice
[47:25] How difficult is it to hire talent within a team?
[50:02] The biggest challenges for engineers of the future
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