Build the most influential technology team

Lee University

I joined Jingdong in 2008, and witnessed the growth of Jingdong's technology team from 30 to 4,000 people, and also witnessed how Jingdong changed from a business-oriented company to a technology-driven company. Below, combined with Jingdong specific things to speak of the insights and feelings.

Jingdong R&D organizational structure

Jingdong technology team currently has more than 4,000 employees, with five major research institutes in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Shenyang.

Jingdong's system is relatively complex, covering the whole process of e-commerce value chain, from the front-end transaction system to the supply chain, warehousing, distribution, customer service and after-sales service, in addition to financial statements and financial statements, almost all of the systems are self-developed. Jingdong's entire business is running online. Jingdong CEO Liu Qiangdong now only one or two months a year at home, most of the time abroad. He can now see all the production through the information system, all the data at a glance. For example, warehousing a certain part of the congestion he knows.

Jingdong's information system supports Jingdong's consecutive years of growth at a rate higher than the industry's average growth rate - the market turnover in 2013 exceeded 100 billion yuan, reaching 125.5 billion yuan. 10 years, to achieve 10,000 times the growth behind the reliance on the information system.

In mid-2013, Jingdong's strategy of "four carriages" based on "e-commerce" had been basically perfected, including e-commerce business, logistics platform, technology platform and Internet financial business. In terms of management improvement, organizational capacity and organizational synergy, Jingdong is also conducting more useful exploration and attempts. Jingdong is undergoing a metamorphosis from a Chinese-type e-commerce company to an industry chain integrator. And the core of Jingdong's strategy is still to be driven by technology.

Organizational restructuring: the R&D system is divided into nine modules and four platforms

Managing a team of 4,000 people, I think the optimization of the organizational structure is a more important thing. In the past, Jingdong's technical team has always been a functionalized structure: product department, R&D department, testing department, and operation and maintenance department. And when we have more product lines and more projects, and more people, it's very complicated to prioritize, and communication is also very much more, and departmental collaboration is very difficult.

Jingdong this year on the technical team to make adjustments, the R & D system is divided into nine modules, basically on the organizational form in accordance with the customer, the division.

Of these, the cloud platform and operation and maintenance of the two departments are mainly responsible for the bottom of the network services, as well as to solve the problem of the top layer of the technical architecture, is to provide technical support for the platform. At the same time, they are responsible for researching unified R&D tools, including logging, monitoring and process engines, etc. Through these tools, they can improve the efficiency of other R&D departments, and also save them from duplicating the development of components. It can be seen that the function of these two departments is to provide the infrastructure to provide unified tools and platforms.

The marketing R&D department is oriented to the procurement and sales system, which is mainly for online marketing and is the locomotive of our whole company. We develop 3 major systems for the procurement and marketing system: one is the transaction system, to ensure the stability of the transaction system, and at the same time to achieve the website conversion rate increase, user experience optimization; the second is the supply chain system, to connect with the supplier, the order quantity prediction, and a lot of related supply chain control means are also realized in the department; the third is the open platform to open the entire supply chain system to the third party sellers.

Operation Research and Development Department is for the COO system, that is, the order production system, warehousing system, distribution system, customer service system are all by the operation research and development department is responsible for.

The Functional R&D Department is mainly the internal informatization management department of the functional system, which involves the functional system such as administration, personnel, strategy, and also includes our financial department.

The Marketing, Operations, and Functional R&D departments support all of our internal operations. The other departments serve these 3 R&D departments.

The Big Data Department provides a unified big data technology platform. The data platform is based on Hadoop, on which we do unified data collection, extraction, storage, processing, mining, and develop some value-added data products. Our search, recommendation system, and open data services are all done in this department.

The Mobile Division is responsible for client construction and mobile innovation, and is a very fast-growing division.

Research Institute is an umbrella term, and we have a specialized department responsible for the construction of national research institutes.

Finally, we have another department, similar to the General Management Department, called the Technology R&D Management Department, which is mainly responsible for the construction of the management system, including SQA, PMO, an IT service desk, and 24-hour monitoring and operation.

We have a 400 phone number, when there is a problem with the system, both external and internal can enter the processing process by calling this phone, first handled by the operation staff, and then handed over to the R & D department if it can't be handled. The reason why we put the R&D department back is because the R&D people don't want to deal with the problem directly, they prefer to write code. By filtering through the operations department, 80% of system issues have been handled directly.

The whole restructuring, which I think has been quite successful, has greatly improved customer satisfaction. Whereas customers used to communicate with many of our departments, now they only need to communicate with one department, and each department's customers are clearly identified, so the department's main responsibility can be focused on improving customer satisfaction.

While we have nine departments, we have actually divided the entire R&D team into three levels and four platforms:

The first level is the technology platform, which is mainly based on the cloud platform and operation and maintenance departments mentioned before, to create a cloud-based technology architecture to support all the applications on it.

The second layer has two pieces, the first is the big data platform. We have made the data independent, and we can't let every application handle the data. If every application handles the data, the data will be messy, and the data may form islands that are difficult to **** enjoy and circulate throughout the enterprise. The second is an open API platform for e-commerce, where we build up the core platform for e-commerce and at the same time serve it as an API service, which is important for companies with long value chains and complex processes and systems.

The third layer is the application platform. Because with the above two layers as support, it is very easy to do specific applications on it. So our application platform, including our own website, mobile client, internal ERP and external ISV development applications, can call the e-commerce core API, while the corresponding data are into the big data platform. Moreover, all these applications can be realized on the application platform.

In Jingdong, we have some better practices for enterprise architecture. You can compare the benefits of building our information system with reference to such a model. In the past, when we wanted to develop a requirement, we had to start combing from the front-end website, to the procurement and marketing system, to warehousing and distribution. Because the whole value chain is very long, it requires a lot of communication and cooperation. Now through the e-commerce open API is very simple, reducing the communication and coupling between the various systems. Because the e-commerce business is developing faster, this mode of developing applications is more suitable for the rapidly changing needs of the business sector.

Through these four platforms, we can see that there is a logic here, the bottom is actually our technical architecture, used to solve the problem of architecture. The data on top of that plays a role in data governance, and the API platform solves the service governance problem. Development is based on SOA, we all use a certain service, there will be confusion, the need for governance platform to be resolved. These three keys to grasp, the application platform above the application can be colorful, our system logic will be clearer.

IT Management 123: 1 Vision, 2 Focuses, 3 Systems

MBA, EMBA, these theories are from the production line, from the front-line workers, these management theories are not mature for IT, so we are exploring in IT management.

First, have a vision. A team of a few dozen people relies on physical behavior, a team of a few hundred people relies on a system, and a team of a few thousand people relies on a vision. After having a vision, the team will have a sense of mission, pride and fulfillment.

Two key tasks, one is culture. After the team is big, the culture and atmosphere is the most important.

For the company as a whole, such as Lao Liu, and then other business executives, can they respect technology, the company can form an atmosphere of respect for technology, which is the company's chief technology officer to consider. I want to create an environment that respects these experts.

Inside the R&D department, I mentioned three words, the first is trust, the second is sharing, and the third is growth.

Trust is empowerment. Trust reduces the cost of communication, and an atmosphere of trust should be formed between superiors and subordinates, subordinates and superiors, and peers. For example, it is possible for an R&D person to create an accident, do you think he did it on purpose or for the sake of innovation? You go against the process, making a mistake is of course to be punished. However, Jingdong set a rule, because of innovation mistakes, we are tolerant of not punished. Tolerance of failure in the R & D system can form an atmosphere, which is also based on the trust of employees.

Sharing means sharing best practices. a team of 4,000 people must have some people who are good at something, and I'll let them share it for others to learn from. We also promote tolerance for failure, learning from mistakes and gaining experience. Learning from best practices and learning from mistakes is all about sharing experiences and improving. Developers write code every day and will have some code to be proud of, and last year we ran a campaign to get them to show it to others. The code doesn't need to be a system, it may just be a little insight. Every Friday afternoon this activity, very hot. This way programmers want to write good code when they are writing code, and they want to emulate the strengths of others when they are learning their code. We have an internal GitHub-like software that allows programmers to put shared code on it. Sharing is important for R&D people and can help them grow quickly.

On growth, because R&D people are generally young and generally want to learn and grow, we build a culture of growth internally, including giving them training. Jingdong's technical staff is graded according to T1 ~ T6. T1 is fresh out of school, T2 is two or three years after graduation but the level is still insufficient, we let T3 and T4 give them lessons, daily training, so that they can grow. We also invite some teachers from outside to give us lectures. For example, we did a UML training one year, and the result was very good, we learned some architecture and thinking methods, and mastered some tools. We also started to train R&D managers, and everyone participated. When they improved, our R&D efficiency improved, and innovation increased.

The other of the two priorities is structure. A lot of the problems in R&D management are structural.

When the team reaches several thousand people, we have to pay special attention to the structure. Just now we talked about the talent structure, the talent structure is the echelon problem, the talent echelon is very important. In the past, there were many low-level talents, T3, T4, T5 is too little. For this reason, we have sent microblog recruitment, received hundreds of resumes. About the talent structure we also did a thing, the management and technology separate, before the technical people to a certain extent must be transferred to management, treatment can only be improved, now we distinguish between the technical staff also graded, in the structure of the solution to a lot of problems. Another structure is our organizational structure, the adjustment of which was mentioned earlier, changed to division by customer direction, which is also very successful.

Lastly, let's talk about the 3 systems.

The first is the product system. Our company's experience, whether it's the consumer's experience, the third-party seller's experience, the vendor's experience, or the internal business unit's experience, is product-driven. We create a culture of letting product managers do the talking. In the past, what the product did was first kidnapped by the business department, which said what kind of thing you want to make this, the product manager wrote it down, and then directly found R&D to do it. In addition, our managers want to do a good job, subjectively according to their personal good and bad command products, so also the product manager kidnapped. Then, the developers say it's too troublesome to design this way, it's better to do it that way, and then they kidnap them again. 3 kidnappings are like 3 mountains, destroying the product manager. We propose to let the product manager have the final say, not the manager, not the business department. For example, every marketing department wants to set the rules of search sorting, but we have an internal iron discipline - the rules of search are only responsible for the conversion rate. The business sector tells you only suggestions, the product manager will have their own space to play, can be responsible for the final user experience, which is very good. After building out the product system, we also set up a product committee, and then elected the executive members of the committee.

The second is the architecture system. Architecture lets the architects talk, not the managers. The manager often thinks he's great at his specialty, but in reality he has a ceiling. In order to let the architects have a say, we set up an architecture committee, the same as the product committee, which decides what kind of architecture Jingdong has. The planning, implementation and review of Jingdong's technical architecture are all the work of the architecture committee.

The third is the management system. There are two aspects to the management system, the first is project management, which is to increase the power of the project manager, the implementation of the project manager responsibility system. Once a project is established, the project manager has a lot of power and is directly responsible for the project, including progress, quality, input and output. The project department has a bonus, bonus-driven projects, project bonuses how to allocate, the project manager has the right to decide, and a lot of power, R & D staff to the project inside, the assessment is also by the project manager said. We have a project management platform, on which the status of all projects is clear at a glance. Moreover, each person and each job inside the project can be listed by person and department, and can be counted by person, project and department, so the human effect is clear. So big teams have to be managed by systems.

The second aspect of the management system is the leadership system. Jingdong 4000 people team, there are 12 departments, each department more than 300, 300 people management is very difficult. Difficulty mainly comes from the management of people, I can not manage more than 14 people, more will not be able to manage. To manage people, you must have influence and leadership. We are very weak in leadership, because many technical managers are transferred from experts, so the language used is computer language, all professional language, EQ is generally not high, but the leadership system requires high EQ, especially when communicating with business departments.

"Management 123" is my experience, but also our R&D system to implement things, the effect is still good.

Giving the team a vision: to be China's most influential technology team

Jingdong's vision was originally "to make shopping simple and happy", and this year made an adjustment to "make life simple and happy". And for the 4,000 people in the technology research and development team, under the premise of obeying the company's vision, we put forward a more in line with the Jingdong R & D people's vision: "to do China's most influential technology team. After this slogan was put forward, our R & D staff is quite happy, feel a sense of pride, more a sense of accomplishment and a sense of mission, feel that this is more in line with the aspirations of our engineers. Jingdong's investment in R & D has increased every year, and we are considered to be a relatively large investment in the R & D team of Chinese enterprises. If we continue to invest in this way, our R&D staff is confident that we can do a better job with our technology. Our technicians also feel a strong sense of pride when they see their systems growing in the company's development.

30 people of the team, the manager may be physically, lead by example, because everyone is watching you, how do you do, we follow you, you have to pay attention to the details. 300 people when you want to build a system, at least project management, which is very important, otherwise 300 people managed to be very difficult. But to 4000 people, I think there should be a vision, there is no vision of the 4000 people's goals are not the same, it is difficult to unite. Re-emphasize the vision of the Jingdong R & D people: "to do China's most influential technical team"!