Why we hire new graduates

As we’ve matured as a company, one core value that continues to stand out to us is for us to constantly inspire and be inspired. We believe in our responsibility to groom and grow the next generation of new graduates in Singapore to be the best software engineers and continue making an impact to the tech ecosystem. We also believe that the infusion of new blood into TradeGecko will allow us to be inspired by new ideas that we may not have thought of before.

Our interview process

We have a three part interview process that can be completed in less than two days.

1. Those who qualify after a resume screen will be invited for an initial conversation with two people from either Engineering, Product or Design. This is an opportunity to assess a mutual fit. We may have a discussion about your past projects, and we might whiteboard together with you.
2. After going through the initial screen, we will give you an opportunity to showcase your technical prowess through a technical exercise.
3. The last part of the interview will assess your culture fit — this is your opportunity to learn about our culture and how we solve problems together as a team!

What we assess

Technical prowess:

We care less about which school your degree was from or your current GPA. What we care about is your ability to dissect a technical problem, develop a solution, and articulate why you went with a particular solution. You may be asked to do a coding exercise, pair with us for half a day, or walk us through some code that you’ve written in the past.

Passion for Technology

What we care about is that you’ve excelled in the things that you’ve picked up. If your favorite course was a Human Computer Interaction class, we want to hear all about it and how you were technically challenged. We also want to hear all about that side project that you’ve built while you were in school to try out a new language.

We care about your passion for technology because that’s the bread and butter of how TradeGecko engineers operate. You can expect to see engineers tinkering with new technologies in the evenings or weekends to learn about how they can apply this to problems inside and outside of work. We actively contribute to open source projects (e.g. a couple of us work on HospitalRun.io). Engineers that experiment and try new technologies will inspire others to think differently and outside of the box.

Customer Centricity & Product Sense

One of our values in TradeGecko is for every employee to be Customer Obsessed. What that means is that we expect every engineer, designer, product manager, and support advocate to empathize and care about getting our customers to their desired outcomes.

One of the questions which we’ve used to assess this (since retired) was “How would you design a doorknob?”. The design of the question was intentionally vague that it forced the candidate to dig deep into who we’re solving the problem for, what their key challenges are, and how we can design a solution that can truly make their lives better. Candidates who were able to disect this vague problem would have learned that we were looking for a solution that allowed AirBnB hosts to remotely manage their household and allow guests to come in and out as they pleased.

Intellectual Horsepower (IHP)

We firmly believe that everyone is coachable in their technical skills. However, what we lookout for is a baseline level of intellectual horsepower to handle complex and vague problems that are thrown your way. Most of the problems that you’ll see as an engineer in TradeGecko are vague and open-ended. Having enough IHP to take you through the day-to-day is a key part of the job.

Throughout your interview process, we’ll be challenging you to think outside of your comfort zone and giving you hypothetical scenarios which you’ll have to break down, analyze, and build a solution for.

Culture fit

A big part of the interview is for you to meet other team members (perhaps some in Sales, Marketing, and our Executives).

In these sessions, we’re assessing you on our five values:

You’ll be expected to share a little more about how your past experiences have reflected some of these values which we hold dear. We want to learn about when the last the last time was that you learned a new skill or taught someone something you were passionate about. We also want to hear about how you went above your call of duty to get something done when you weren’t told to do that specifically.

—

About the author

Yi-Wei is the Director of Product at TradeGecko, and is responsible for hiring new graduate software engineers and product managers. Interested to work with us? Drop him a line at yiwei.ang@tradegecko.com

How we hire new graduates in TradeGecko was originally published in TradeGecko Product Development on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As the reviews rolled in, we rallied around what to do with our detractors, passives, and promoters. It was clear that we need to jump in and ensure that our detractors have their feedback heard right away. However, what wasn’t clear was what we should do with our promoters.

If you’re running an NPS survey, it’s easy enough to leave your promoters alone — but that’s a wasted opportunity. Here are a few ideas of what you can do with your promoters as part of your NPS program.

1. Ask them to write a review

Comparative shopping is one of the most common things that consumers do when they’re close to a purchasing decision. Whether it’s an app or a SaaS subscription, consumers are often one Google search away from knowing what everyone else is saying about your product or service.

The first thing that you can do with your promoters is to ask them to leave you a good product review on app stores, partner portals, or comparison sites like Capterra. Incentivizing them with credits or gift cards can be a really nice touch!

It’s been researched that positive social proof is more persuasive than saving money. Further, more 5 star reviews also help you rank higher on app stores and comparison sites. Leveraging your promoters to boost your presence across the web will do wonders for how your brand is perceived.

2. Refine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Investigate from a qualitative and quantitative perspective, who your promoters are. Learn about what distinguishes a promoter and a detractor from their usage patterns or persona characteristics.

To get qualitative feedback, call up your promoters and have a deep dive into how they use your product. What kind of company are they? How does your product make their lives better? What are some of the features that they absolutely can’t live without?

On a quantitative basis, identify what distinguishing product usage patterns exist for your promoters. Are customers that use a certain part of your product more likely to be promoters? You can also segment usage patterns by engagement, plan, number of users, how long they’ve been using your product, and their touch points with your company (i.e. support).

Promoters are by definition, the people who promote your product. Odds are they’ve been sharing your product with friends or other businesses. Figure out the top three reasons for why they promote your product — do your customers benefit from sharing your product with their friends? Ask about how they’ve been pitching your product to others as well. You’ll learn a lot about what messaging resonates with people whom they’ve shared your product with. From these interviews, you’ll have a set of headlines, landing pages and banner ads that you can A/B test in your next sprint (We practice Agile Marketing).

3. Make it easy for them to promote your product

When you have a set of promoters, you’ll want to make it as frictionless as possible for them to bring on referrers. Ask yourself, how are your customers promoting your product today? Is there an easy way for them to be an advocate to bring on 10 new customers?

Uber for example, streamlines this process by giving you a link that you can send to your friends through any channel. They’ve identified that I’m likely to communicate with my friends through Facebook or Whatsapp, and it’s easy for me to just send them a link through those channels.

If you’re an eCommerce store, check out our friends at ReferralCandy about making it easy to spin up a referral program.

Side Note: How do you calculate your product’s NPS score?

Many companies that I’ve talked to threw around NPS numbers saying that they’re at “-13” or “0” and the numbers never made sense to me until I dug deeper about how it’s actually calculated. I figured I would give everyone a TL;DR if you don’t yet know the definition.

When asked “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend,” those who give a score of 0–6 are detractors, 7–8 are passives, and 9–10 are promoters.

NPS = % who are promoters - % who are detractors

Note: % of passive users don’t contribute to your NPS score.

About me

Currently the Sr. Growth Lead at TradeGecko. Former PM at Microsoft and UX Researcher at IBM.

Hit me up at yiwei.ang@tradegecko.com or http://www.yiweiang.me

However, the notion of Agile Marketing is still a relatively new concept. It’s something that we’re trying for the first time at TradeGecko. We believe that focusing on hypothesis-driven methodologies in rapid iteration will lead us to our conversion and customer-acquisition goals. That applies to every paid ad, blog post, and landing page that we put together.

What does an Agile Marketing team look like?

To come up with what an Agile Marketing team looked like, we took a lot of inspiration from our company values and the agile marketing manifesto. Here were the top things that we cared about:

1. Team ownership

We determine the backlog, priorities, process and execution as a team. We succeed and fail together as one.

2. We don’t do anything we can’t measure

Why? Because we can’t improve what we don’t measure. We don’t measure vanity metrics, we measure in cold, hard metrics that matter (qualitative and quantitative).

3. Being the best at getting better by always being curious

The biggest thing we care about is learning. We measure how doing things affects adjacent areas and we’re always curious about how we’re changing the way people engage with us. We focus on consistent learnings that help drive our backlog.

We’re brutal at cutting things that don’t work, and are resourceful at throwing our team’s weight behind things that do.

4. JFDI

We value actions over words. When in doubt, we try, experiment and see if it works. Ship it and let data do the talking.

Opting for SCRUM

Why SCRUM?

While we did have a few traditional Agile methodologies to work with, the one we opted for was SCRUM (with two week sprints). Here are a few reasons why we chose SCRUM as a framework:

1. Transparency

SCRUM provides a clear set of team deliverables that we could commit to on a bi-weekly basis. We send out a Sprint Kickoff email at the beginning of every sprint to make our commitments clear to the company.

2. Ceremonies provide structure

While SCRUM has been criticized for being too heavy on the ceremonies, we felt that these ceremonies help keep the team in check and ensure that we don’t skip important activities like retrospectives or prioritizing our backlog when things get too busy.

3. Delivering as a team

SCRUM is big on committing a set of work items and delivering the sprint’s deliverables as a team. Team ownership was one of the core values that we cared about. As such, ensuring that we finish what we had committed to in the beginning of a sprint as a team mattered a lot.

Taking a first stab

Our SCRUM board

The structure of the board is simple — it’s built so that every column was absolutely necessary. The Backlog always ebbs and flows as stories move up and down the list. Anything on and to the right of To-Do is locked to a specific sprint.

We currently use Trello as a backlog management tool. While Trello doesn’t quite support SCRUM out of the box, it seems to be working well for our purposes with minor tweaks (e.g. columns that get archived at the end of a sprint).

Populating our initial backlog

To build up our initial backlog, we got everyone to put down all of their Work in Progress (WIP) and Future work items that they cared about. We further segmented it into small, medium, and large stories. Given these set of stories, we populated the backlog and prioritized it at our first grooming meeting.

Our stories usually contain a few key components:

1. A proper story title in the template of: “As a … I want to … So that…”
2. A hypothesis in the template of: “We believe that doing … will result in… we know that we’re successful if…”
3. Story points (decided on as a team during grooming)
4. Acceptance criteria to determine when a story is truly done

Over-communicate

We’ve publicly shared our backlog with the entire company, where they can see what deliverables we’ve committed to, how we’ve prioritized our stories, and what items we have on our backlog. We have also allowed anyone in the company to bring new items to the backlog if they have an idea, suggestion, or need from the marketing team.

Focus on continuous improvement

What’s next? We’ll find out soon enough. In a few days, we’ll be done our first sprint. Our first retrospective will certainly shed light on what went well, what didn’t, and how we can continue to morph this process for our team!

About me

I’m currently the Growth Lead at TradeGecko. Former PM at Microsoft and UX Researcher at IBM.

Hit me up at yiwei.ang@tradegecko.com or http://www.yiweiang.me

Bringing Agility to Marketing was originally published in TradeGecko Product Development on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.