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To introduce myself

Hello, everyone My name is Chen Menglan, and MY name is Momo. I work in the Zhengcaiyun team as a front-end technical expert. I lead 10 people in charge of the project procurement business line in the solid line, and I am responsible for the construction of front-end material system and the direction of front-end AI intelligence in the dotted line. Today, the topic to share with you is: my way to advance in the front-end career.

Share the outline

The content of this sharing is divided into two parts:

The first part is about personal growth. It gives an overall overview of my career development process, as well as the problems, bottlenecks and solutions I have encountered at each stage in this process.

The second part, mainly through the whole process of growth, precipitation of some experience summary and prospects for the future.

Personal growth process

Phase 1: Front-line execution

From 2014 to 2017, the goal of this stage was to lay a solid technical foundation, expand the breadth of technology, and contact as many complex business scenarios and technical solutions as possible.

In terms of coding, we should pay attention to coding specifications and Code quality. We should conduct Code Review for each requirement as much as possible, or ask our senior students to conduct Code Review together to summarize the best practices. Usually can find time to see some open source project source, there will be a lot of harvest.

In addition, when it comes to expanding the breadth of technology, I personally think a better way is to start from the actual scene or problem to find solutions, and learn and practice new technologies in the process, so that the growth rate will be faster.

If we just focus on learning a lot of things, and a short period of time can not get the application of the actual scene, on the one hand, easy to feel confused and trapped, on the other hand, many times only after the application in the actual scene will find some problems and new related knowledge points.

Stage 2: Business interface person/senior teacher

Since 2018, I have led two students to take charge of a business line.

At that time, in addition to serving as the core development of the business line, I also needed to assist the growth of new recruits/junior teachers and help them improve their technical ability and professional ability.

As a business interface person, I need to control the rationality and expansibility of technical solutions, understand the short-term and long-term planning of the business, consider the input-output ratio of the demand, and help the business to maximize the benefits as much as possible.

Looking back at that time, it was also a stage of rapid improvement of comprehensive ability. Unconsciously, I have greatly improved my cross-team communication and coordination ability, risk control ability and business understanding.

Stage 3: Group Acting

Starting from 2019, 7-8 people will be in charge of multiple business lines. At that time, everyone was from different business teams, so there was less familiarity and trust between each other.

Therefore, AT the beginning, I deliberately arranged pairs to connect different businesses, so that we can quickly get familiar with each other. I’ve always believed that nothing is easier to build trust than having “fought a war” together.

With the gradual strengthening of the cohesion of the whole group, in order to better support multiple business lines, it is necessary to consider the gradient construction of the group, the cultivation of business interface personnel and my own Backup cultivation.

All these are the team building within the group. In addition, it is also necessary to have the ability of technical specialization in a certain field. The dotted line can drive others to jointly build and implement some technical construction projects.

I was personally responsible for the construction of front-end material system at this stage. Of course, at this stage, I need to face more people and things, and more cross-team communication and promotion, which will be very helpful for the cultivation of my soft power.

Current stage: Team Leader

In terms of work content, many of them are similar to that of last year, and I am also in charge of a brand new business and team this year.

At present, for me, I also need to further strengthen systematic ability, internal and external influence, cross-department promotion and construction, echelon construction and talent training, performance management (determination of performance objectives, process follow-up, result evaluation) and so on.

experience

Phase 1: Front-line execution

In the front-line execution stage, the problem I encountered was that after working in a comfortable environment like a foreign company for three years, I obviously felt that my growth had entered a stagflation period. At the same time, under the atmosphere of slow working pace, I felt that I would go downhill in this way.

So, the choice was to jump ship to the political cloud. However, after more than half a year, I gradually got familiar with the business and technology stack. After I was able to take charge of it independently, I found that I was still doing “pure business execution” in essence, which was not much different from before.

By “pure business execution,” I mean doing a good job of getting business requirements done and delivered on time, but not thinking about how to do it better from a business and technical perspective.

Game-breaking: cognitive breakout

At this stage, the game is broken, to a large extent, the ideological and cognitive changes.

I realized that changing platforms didn’t solve the underlying problem, but rather that I saw myself in a purely executive role and felt that the product requirements were enough.

However, business support is not just about delivering business requirements as scheduled, but about self-driving to find some pain points in the business, looking for solutions, promoting implementation, and then continuously iterating optimization, forming a complete closed loop. It’s about making a difference in the business from done to done.

Sometimes I wonder what my personal value is to the company. If I just do business purely, then everyone is the same, because it is the most basic job to do business.

Therefore, the embodiment of personal value lies in finding problems that others cannot find and solving things that others cannot solve.

Case: Trivia robot

Here to share a specific Case. There was a trivia little robot business that needed to be handed over to me.

During the handover process, I communicated with the business side and the product in advance about the business plan for the following quarter, expecting to implant this little robot in all pages of all businesses on the whole platform, with a total of 100+ front-end applications.

However, based on the technical scheme implanted at that time, the cost of implantation was very high, and each line of business needed to be manually connected one by one. In the subsequent iteration of small robots, each line of business also needed to be issued.

Obviously, the technical solution at that time had an impact on the expansion of subsequent business, so we decided to promote the reconstruction, and finally realized the implantation of 0 cost of each line of business, and there was no perception of each line of business in subsequent iterations.

This Case is actually very small, but probably everyone will encounter similar problems in daily work.

We can draw two lessons:

  • First, take the initiative to understand the business follow-up planning in advance, not just the current product import needs, which will be very helpful for the selection of technical solutions
  • Secondly, it is necessary to have a certain insight, to find some pain points, find solutions, and promote the implementation of the business to promote quickly

analyse

For the first-line implementation stage, I made a review and summary, which can be divided into four aspects: basic requirements, higher standards, quality bottlenecks and capacity structure bottlenecks at this stage.

Basic requirements:

Including business understanding and support ability; Independent undertaking and execution; Solid technical background and coding quality; Awareness of risk feedback. Among them, the awareness of risk feedback is relatively easy to ignore, which is also a relatively important basic requirement.

  • Why is awareness of risk feedback so important

    It is difficult to ensure that all requirements are implemented without risk. There are many reasons for this risk:

    • For example, there are omissions in the early evaluation of technical solutions;
    • Requirements change during the development process;
    • Demand disassembly is not detailed enough, resulting in inaccurate estimation, etc.

  • If a risk does arise, it’s important to give feedback in a timely manner, and if it doesn’t happen at the last minute, the team won’t be able to work horizontally to resolve the problem, which can lead to project delays

  • Do not think that risk feedback is not enough. In my opinion, timely risk feedback is the embodiment of professionalism. How to avoid similar risks in the future? But at present, the most effective way is to timely feedback the problem

  • At this stage, one person is usually in charge of a certain business module or business line, so business understanding, independent responsibility and independent execution are also very important, which can reflect our technical background and problem-solving ability

Higher standards:

Including the quality of coding excellence; Self-driven initiative to find pain points, with strong execution, can output good solutions to problems and promote the implementation.

  • Some people may have a weak perception of the problem and not have the habit of refining by nature.
  • What some people lack is not the perception of the problem, but turn a blind eye to the problem after finding it. They may make fun of it, but they will not take the initiative to find a solution and promote the implementation of the solution.
  • But the goal is to solve the problem eventually, so you need to have strong execution.
Quality bottleneck **, physical strength **

At this stage, most things are solved by physical force. The next stage is solved by mental force.

Capacity structure bottleneck

It includes business understanding ability, technical solution ability, communication ability, feedback consciousness and strong execution ability to promote implementation.

Stage 2: Business/team core

At the stage of being a business interface person/mentor, I began to bring several new people to take charge of a large business line. The problem at that time could be summed up in one word as “busy,” but in this case, busy is actually problematic.

Since I had been in this line of business for a long time and was more familiar with the business as a whole, other partners used to come to me when they had problems.

At the beginning, I still used to solve many things by myself, working overtime late every day. However, for the new staff, they could not grow faster, and the overall business support ability of the team was also low.

Game-breaking: Thinking and reviewing

The busier you are, the more time you need to think and review.

After becoming a business interface person, we should not only consider the improvement of our own personal ability, but also learn to solve problems with the strength of a group of people, and consider the growth of others and the business support ability of the group as a whole.

We should give sufficient authorization and trust to new recruits, make training plans for new recruits, coach them in the process, communicate with them periodically every week, and help them grow up quickly.

At the same time, weekly internal Code Review, business sharing and technology sharing are all good ways to improve team members’ business understanding, technical ability and overall output ability.

Case: construction of material system 0 to 1

At this stage, in addition to the solid line in charge of the business line, the dotted line leads the construction of the whole front-end material system.

So I’m going to explain to you what a dashed line is. In our company, the technology construction is not done by an independent front-end architecture group. Instead, students from different business lines form a “dotted line” group.

In fact, all the technical construction itself is to serve the business, business line students will have a deeper understanding of business problems, and how to land.

Next, I will briefly review how to plan and build the entire material system from zero to one.

What was the problem we were facing?

  • First, due to historical reasons, the visual specifications of various lines of business are not unified
  • Second, there was only one React library of UI components at the time, which was still a thin layer in the material system

We know that the explicit goal of material system construction is internal r&d and efficiency improvement. First of all, let’s think about the question, how to achieve r&d efficiency? For material systems, the two most obvious directions are to improve efficiency through material reuse and instrumentalization.

What should the material contain? Because the front end delivers complete pages, we can break down a page into templates, business components, UI components, and underlying visual specifications, as detailed in the figure above.

In fact, the tool is to make the r & D students in the process of using materials more convenient, further improve efficiency. Of course, there is also an essential module in the construction of any technology, is quantitative data statistics.

The data can well reflect the use of the whole material system in the business line, and also provide data support for the continuous optimization and iteration of the subsequent material system.

In fact, my first version of the plan did not cover all of the above content, only about 70%. What I’m trying to say is that sometimes it’s okay to think about a lot of things all at once. It’s a gradual process of improvement. First build the most core capabilities from 0 to 1, and then continue to enrich and improve, optimization iterations from 1 to 10.

In addition, here to share with you, how to do the overall planning? Clear and detailed planning gives people a sense of purpose and direction, and allows them to better control the pace of progress.

One way of thinking is to define what needs to be done in the broad direction, then refine the various actions, and finally think about what those actions accomplish.

But even better is this:

  1. Analyze the background/current situation from the business/technical scenario
  2. According to the current situation, analyze and list the pain points and problems
  3. What are the overall goals we need to specify in order to address these pain points and problems
  4. The overall goal is refined and disassembled into small phased goals
  5. For each stage small goal, think about what can be broken in order to achieve the stage small goal
  6. After having a specific direction, targeted disassembly into the corresponding Action
  7. Plan milestones
  8. Landing and promotion

analyse

For the stage of business interface person/senior teacher, the review and summary are also made, which can be divided into four aspects: basic requirements in this stage, higher standards, quality bottlenecks and capacity structure bottlenecks.

  1. Basic requirements, including in-depth understanding of the business, independent, training of new/junior teachers, risk control, control of technical solutions, communication and coordination skills.
  2. A higher standardThis includes thinking about ROI, helping the business win, and motivating and influencing people.
    • Why is the input-output ratio important?
      • In companies with rapid business development, the growth rate of business demand is very fast, usually the volume of demand is more than the r&d resource capacity.
      • With limited r&d resources, we need to consider input-output ratios to maximize business value delivery along with products.
  3. Quality bottleneck, brain power.
  4. Capability structure bottlenecks, including leadership, process perception, ROI considerations, cross-functional project PM capabilities.

Stage 3: Leader

In the third stage of Leader, I will focus on some problems I have encountered this year and the solutions because I have just been transferred to a new team this year.

The first thing I did when I came to this new team was to deal with people and things. During the process, I found the following problems:

  • The business process link is long, the complexity is high, and the R & D students are not familiar with the overall business
  • The technical selection of some projects is old (jQuery) and there are many historical “debts”
  • Partner students accounted for a relatively high number of code quality is uneven
  • Demand iteration process is unreasonable, and front-line students feel tired

Break: Team environment upgrade

Facing the above problems, my current solutions are as follows:

  • Sharing precipitation: strengthen internal business sharing and establish business knowledge base
  • Technology selection and upgrading: reduce complexity and maintenance cost, improve r&d efficiency
  • Process specification: standardization, rationalization
  • Echelon building: Develop your own Backup. Each business line is equipped with business interface person + partner. Each new appointee is assigned a corresponding senior, one to one
  • Team cohesion & atmosphere: help each other, willing to share, brainstorming

analyse

As a Leader, I am still learning and growing. Reviewing my experience in this stage, I also made a brief review and summary, which can also be divided into four aspects: basic requirements at this stage, higher standards, quality bottlenecks and capacity structure bottlenecks.

  1. Basic requirements, including echelon building, performance management, communication and coordination, drive optimization & change.
  2. A higher standard, including breaking the circle construction, cross-department project PM capability, exploring new technology areas.
    • To break the circle is to go beyond the front-end functional departments and look at it from a broader perspective. Better cooperation and joint construction between various functional departments will help the business get better results.
  3. Quality bottleneck, heart.
  4. Capacity structure bottlenecks, including forward-looking, sense of purpose, dominance, integration, the ability to drive and get results, influence, leadership.

Function capability matrix

The above figure represents the matrix of competencies required to be a good front end of professionalism.

Vertically divided into four parts, business support, technical innovation, organizational development, internal and external influence. Many of these abilities have been described in detail before, so I won’t go into them here.

In fact, everyone’s growth process is constantly enriching and improving their own abilities:

  • When the business is very busy, the process can focus on improving their business support.
  • When the business is relatively stable, we can do some technical construction to better empower the business.

Tips

  • At any career stage, strong technical skills are the foundation of the foundation
  • Keep track of industry trends, new technologies and trends
  • More horizontal/vertical comparison, three people will have my teacher
  • Frequent replicating, frequent summary
  • Maintain altruistic and win-win thinking

The future: Smart

The word that comes to mind when I think of the future is “intelligent”. Over the past few years we have achieved a significant improvement with Low Code builds, but builds ultimately depend on component iterations.

I believe that the next is the era of intelligence, simple HTML + CSS can be generated directly from the UI visual code in an intelligent way.

At present, we have started the exploration of “UI to Code”. Students who are interested in this aspect are welcome to join us.

Good book recommendations

Personally, I highly recommend the Book “Pyramid”, which can help us strengthen our thinking structure ability and logical communication ability, and help us think, express and solve problems more efficiently.

Recommended reading

From internship to Entry: Share with you my work and growth in Zhengcaiyun

Little white must see, JSBridge preliminary study

, recruiting

ZooTeam, a young passionate and creative front-end team, belongs to the PRODUCT R&D department of ZooTeam, based in picturesque Hangzhou. The team now has more than 50 front-end partners, with an average age of 27, and nearly 30% of them are full-stack engineers, no problem in the youth storm group. The members consist of “old” soldiers from Alibaba and netease, as well as fresh graduates from Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, Hangzhou Electric And other universities. In addition to daily business docking, the team also carried out technical exploration and practice in material system, engineering platform, building platform, performance experience, cloud application, data analysis and visualization, promoted and implemented a series of internal technical products, and continued to explore the new boundary of front-end technology system.

If you want to change what’s been bothering you, you want to start bothering you. If you want to change, you’ve been told you need more ideas, but you don’t have a solution. If you want change, you have the power to make it happen, but you don’t need it. If you want to change what you want to accomplish, you need a team to support you, but you don’t have the position to lead people. If you want to change the pace, it will be “5 years and 3 years of experience”; If you want to change the original savvy is good, but there is always a layer of fuzzy window… If you believe in the power of believing, believing that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things, believing that you can meet a better version of yourself. If you want to be a part of the process of growing a front end team with deep business understanding, sound technology systems, technology value creation, and impact spillover as your business takes off, I think we should talk. Any time, waiting for you to write something and send it to [email protected]