This article is the 14th day entry for the 10X 6th Anniversary Advent Calendar. Yesterday, BizDev’s Terasaki-san published an article “5 discoveries from meeting with over 100 retail companies”, so please read it as well.
Introduction
I’m jojo, who joined 10X in February 2023.
I intended to write an entry when I joined, but time flies, and I’ve realized that already 4 months have passed (without this project, I might not have been able to take up my pen lol).
This article is quite a personal memo, but I’d be happy if it’s helpful to those who are interested. This time, I’ll talk about the background that led me to decide to change jobs to 10X and what I’ve felt over these 4 months.
What Was I Doing at My Previous Job?
At my previous job where I joined as a new graduate, I was an engineer in the new business division of a mega-venture in the BtoB marketing domain.
The team was small and each person took on many roles, so with the momentum to pick up all the balls that were dropped, over 4 years I was involved in server-side (Golang) development while also touching frontend (React・TypeScript), renewing iOS apps, and broadly involved in product development. (I’m truly grateful for the environment that gave opportunities generously even to a first-year new graduate.)
I was also entrusted with the role of PdM (Product Manager), conducting hypothesis validation and promoting initiatives while collaborating with multiple stakeholders. The business unit that was a dozen people when I joined expanded to nearly 50 people during my tenure, and I witnessed the business become independent and eventually split into a separate company.
Why Change Jobs?
When I thought about how to use the last time of my twenties after looking at my life through events like marriage, I came to feel that it was necessary for me to be in a more challenging environment where I was required to shift gears up another level, moving from an environment with high psychological safety, discretion, and satisfaction.
Since it was my first job change, I thought it would be good to hear stories from various people and industries, so I had casual meetings with over 30 companies and listened broadly.
I organized the values that were verbalized while talking with each company in Notion. (Partial excerpt)
The three job change axes that solidified through this process are as follows:
- Working on solving serious and impactful issues in the world
- Being an organization that affirms engineers crossing boundaries in business creation
- Quickly cycling through development processes and product improvements with a user-oriented approach
The biggest reason I chose the company where I worked as a new graduate was also from the perspective of “working on solving serious and big issues in the world with technology.” As an engineer, I certainly love technology itself, but I’m more strongly interested in how to use that technology to tackle problem-solving and what hypotheses to formulate.
On top of that, the desire to belong to an organization where I can continuously improve so that I can be confident that the products I create are truly valuable to users became clear through conversations with many people. (Excerpt from Notion page I was organizing at the time)
Why 10X?
The path to 10X started from a casual conversation with a senior from my previous job on the way to a distant sauna (everyone’s favorite The Sauna) asking, “Is there a company where they create products focused on issues regardless of whether you’re an engineer or biz?”
Through that senior’s introduction, I got an opportunity for a casual meeting with 10X’s suumin, and was instantly strongly attracted to 10X’s charm, thinking “The sincere attitude toward product development is great! I’m excited about a product that can become social infrastructure!”
Even after having casual meetings with over 30 companies to confirm whether my feelings for 10X were real, my feelings didn’t change. Here are three reasons why I was fascinated by 10X.
Business: Expectations for the potential of the online supermarket sector, which I was convinced would become social infrastructure
While many other products can be bought online, I think it’s a distorted state that only fresh foods continue to be purchased in physical stores. There’s a huge market there, and I was excited about the business of creating future infrastructure in the online supermarket domain where there’s nothing but room for growth. (Reference: 「Culture Deck」)
Organization: An organization that faces current issues with a long-term perspective
I was attracted to Yamoto-san’s strong mindset reflected in product development, wanting to spend time and resources on “things that are valuable in the long term” rather than blindly creating businesses for short-term profits. (Reference: 「Because we know the difficulty of “10x”. The feelings of “10X” embedded in the company name and mission」)
Personally, I also wanted to face products with a stance of facing big issues with a long-term perspective while taking my time, and I thought it was amazing that this could be maintained despite being a startup.
People: A professional group with a customer-oriented “WHY” focus
I was attracted when I heard that both engineers and BizDev actually catch up on user voices in the field and create products, showing a real field sense of facing issues. (Reference: 10X Product Division / Engineering Division Introduction Document)
I’m also going to the store next week to hand out flyers!
Also, since I’m a user myself, it was good that I could face product issues from close distance.
What Am I Doing Now?
I’m mainly developing the online supermarket app. Although I had no experience with Dart before, I was able to enter relatively seamlessly because the language doesn’t have much peculiarity (though I still have much to learn).
Also, until recently, I was also working on a project to verify domain boundaries of teams to eliminate the increased load of context switching that comes with product complexity. (Reference: Transition to domain-based development structure)
What Have I Felt Since Joining 10X?
Now let’s talk about what I’ve actually felt after entering 10X for 4 months.
Overwhelmingly One Team Organization
Currently there are 5 development teams, and there’s a natural movement to horizontally deploy Good things from each team’s development process to other teams.
For example, as development scale grows, cognitive load increases, so we held a session to add comments to expand Dart Doc, and this naturally got deployed to other teams and applied across all teams, so now it’s natural to add comments when creating models.
Also, if you have trouble, just post in the #all_ask-anythings channel (anyone can ask anything) and someone who knows will quickly teach you even if not directly related to their work… There’s also an atmosphere where you can quickly call for consultation, which is very nice.
Amazing Document Culture
The mechanism allows knowledge to accumulate in the organization/team rather than individuals, so there’s a lot of information you can understand by reading documents.
There are tons of documents where “This knowledge documented here really helped me.” is the reaction, which makes you want to stock your own knowledge (there’s also a strong habit of leaving call logs).
Keep Changing to Become “Better”
10X continuously improves and evolves to become better.
For example, until now, there was an increasing load of context switching as the business expanded across all domain cross-teams, and as a solution, we conducted verification of dividing development teams by domain (currently teams are appropriately divided by domain). We established guild teams to approach from different angles for issues that can’t be solved within teams alone, and there’s a team-wide attitude of continuously improving the development process agilely in Scrum teams.
As a result, working agreements are born, visualization of team effectiveness measurement and development ratios, etc., and initiatives to increase team/organization efficiency and quality are actively being conducted. (Truly 10X!)
Abstract Problem Solving Makes Me Excited About the Future
Since we’re creating a future market, the abstraction level of issues to be solved is still high, and complexity is also high. However, this organization can do it, and I’m overflowing with feelings of wanting to provide more valuable things to the world together with these people.
I will also dive deeper into essential issue exploration and hypothesis validation at 10X, promoting customer-oriented product development that stays close to users.
Finally
Every day is filled with new stimulation and learning, and I’m having very enjoyable days. And if this article helps someone, I’d be very happy.
And 10X is recruiting members! Please also check out our recruitment page.
Tomorrow, QAE Broccoli (@nihonbuson), who also helped me at my previous job, is scheduled to publish an article. Look forward to it!