Deepak Sarda

At Endowus, we believe that “growth” is multidimensional. At its core, growth is defined by increased levels of ownership and impact. It isn’t just about changing your job title. Real growth happens when you take on end-to-end ownership of a product feature, when you master a new functional domain (like pension schemes or private markets), or when you learn to architect systems that can handle millions of dollars in transactions without flinching. It happens through mentoring peers and collaborating across teams. Of course, clear career progression is a vital part of that picture. We want every engineer to know where they stand and what the next step looks like. One of the most common questions we get is: “Do I have to become a manager to grow?” The answer is No.

In an earlier post, we shared how we think about Engineering Values at Endowus and how they guide our decision making. In this post, we will share some instances where we applied these values in real scenarios. By the way, we also covered this topic in a talk titled “From Theory to Practice: How Engineering Values Inform Technology Decisions,” at APIdays Singapore 2023. The complete talk can be viewed on YouTube.

At Endowus, we believe that happy & productive developers create products that customers love. Thus, we regularly invest in developer experience and in this post, we are sharing the story of one of our larger investments in this area. The story of how we increased our engineering productivity by building an internal platform that allows our developers to deploy and test our full digital wealth platform in isolated production-like environments.

There have been many attempts at defining the culture of an organisation. Some claim culture stems from a company’s vision and mission. Others think it’s about perks and benefits. We think the best articulation of what constitutes a company’s culture is found in Ben Horowitz’s book “What You Do Is Who You Are”, in which he writes: Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you are not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. This rubric of decision making can be captured as that which a company values. As individual contributors, and later as engineering leaders at many different companies, we’ve witnessed first-hand how engineering teams make choices and decisions that are influenced by these cultural values. Every company, every department, and every team has values. Whether they realise it or not and whether they explicitly write them down or not - they exist and are the invisible force guiding employee behaviours and decision making.