What is it about DuckDuckGo that excites you?
What excites me is that DuckDuckGo is building a more secure, privacy first and faster web. Having experience working for an advertisement platform, I understand how ugly our web is. I dislike a lot of ideas when we are asked to add more tracking to gain more useful information. If I launch something, the business will grow but that also means that the web is slower. But if I do the opposite, the web is better but it will stop growing our business. I just felt guilty for doing anything and it’s one of the reasons I left my previous job. At DuckDuckGo, privacy is a mission. I believe team members at GoGoDuck feel proud to launch the feature, as they are making the web better. This aligns with what I believe it should be, and it’s the thing that excites me
What is the last significant thing you learned to do your job better?
When I was a team lead, I learned that engineering might not be the best way to solve everything. Back in the day we developed a widget that could be customised according to customer needs. Due to the flexibility, now every customer has their own needs. We managed to come up with a popular template and it helped us to tackle almost 80% of the custom work. Still, for the 20% of customers, our team has to spend the engineering time dealing with CSS and HTML, which is not what we want to focus on. We spent time adding more templates and more automation but it didn’t help a lot. With a little bit of doubt, I accepted the idea to hire a designer to solely focus on the job. The hire was so successful, the designer managed to pick up everything in a short time and since that we spent almost 0% on the customization. Our team was a happy team and we delivered more. This taught me a lot about the power of hiring.
Share an example of something you failed at. What did you learn from that experience?
When I joined my current company, there was a new project where the ideas and execution plans were concrete. What needs to be done is to implement it. I took on the project because I think it could be something really impactful and it motivated me. Anyway, at the back of my mind, I somehow thought that while the “why” is clear, the “how” is somehow not the best solution. I never talked to anyone because I thought that further discussion will delay the release date. When it was near completion, we had a demo session with a wider audience and someone questioned the “how”. We didn’t have the best answer for that and it helped us to rethink our approach to the problem. In the end, we decided to make a new plan which could work better in the longer term. As someone who was writing the code, I should be able to clear my own concern but I didn’t. No matter who designs the plan, I should be the one that makes sure that is the best plan in the longer term. Instead, I was worried about the delay that led to a longer delay. “To be fast, you have to be slow”, is what I learn the most from this experience.
Since asking questions and questioning assumptions are big parts of our culture, we are curious to ask: what questions would you have for us?
- When we prioritise privacy, it means that we have to sacrifice user data, which makes it far less attractive for advertisers. How does DuckDuckGo pursue advertisers that non-targeted advertisements can still help them to achieve their goal? How does DuckDuckGo make sure this business model succeeds in the long term?
- I am so happy that DuckDuckGo finally launched a Mac OS browser app. I understand that building a browser requires significant effort but what has been the biggest reason to build the browser app and release it in 2022?
- Since DuckDuckGo has teammates from different time zones, what is the trick to make sure the correct group gets connected with each other?