Ok, so hi everyone. Um Thanks Anna for the introduction. I'm Hitomi. Um as she introduced me, I'm a product lead at Sony. Um So yeah, um I'm trying to leave the five minutes Q and A session at the end.So please feel free to like ask any question in the chat. Um There's no things as like a stupid question, so feel free to ask anything. OK, so let's start how to lead tech teams as a non techie. So, um how many of you see yourself as non techie? Like maybe give me a thumbs up in the chat if you are non technical? Can I see it? Yeah, it's OK. It's so my side. But um I hope uh most of the audience, like many audiences, uh many audience today are like non tech or someone who have experience working with the non tech people, right? But um thanks for joining the reason why I chose today's topic, how to lead tech teams as a non techie is that I received so many questions uh from my mentees that they don't feel confident leading tech teams or they feel powerless because they don't have any technical background.

So my mentees are probably very similar to you all like bright young women who are interested in moving into the tech industry. Um They are in their mid twenties to thirties and they have very good education and have strong career aspirations. So I encourage them because the tech is a very hot sector and you know, I want to see like more women getting involved but the worry that every single one of them has had his biz I'm not technical. How am I going to succeed with my team. One of them like even told me rather desperately, like even my seven years old nephew code, but I don't, I can relate to this so much because I am one of you. I am a non techie. I don't have a stem degree or like experience as a software developer before joining the tech industry. I was a broadcast journalist in Japan and I wasn't even covering the tech industry. I was covering murders, natural disasters and later on politics. And you can see it's so unrelated to tech and what I do now. But when everything in the media was moving online, I felt that I was pointless. How could I help like transform my company when I didn't know anything about the technology? I am one of you. I went through that path of feeling powerless. I made mistakes along the way and I learned quite a lot of lessons that I think you may find useful.

So today in 15 minutes, I'll try and give you three hints that you can try from today to become a better at like a better leader at lead uh leading tech teams. OK. So now let's move on the first deposit today. Um That is that you need to understand how tech people think behave and operate. Why is this important? It's important because you are leading people on that machine, you may find like some of them like uh somewhat emotionless, like some, some just don't uh are not expressive but those like those people are humans and you need to understand what makes them motivated, what their fears are, what frustrate them and how to encourage them.

This is especially important because tech teams usually have power within the company and without their cooper operation, you will not get your job done. When you look at what like many tech companies do, you will understand that they develop something using technology and monetize by selling the product to users. The first part is done by engineers and developers or you know the tech. And because this part is so fundamental to the business, they tend to have a strong say within the company. So you need to understand them like inside out to be successful, to be a successful leader. So what are the key traits you should be aware of? Let me tell this story at the current company I work with very very excellent tech colleagues who are very bright, enthusiastic and have great ideas. Like I really respect them for like one of the projects that I was leading. The engineers and engineering team said that they wanted to use A five G technology in the next generation of one of our products. As you know, A five G is 1/5 generation mobile network technology that you can send data faster, more reliably and with very low latency, the engineers were very excited and said, you know, five G is great.

He told me it will solve all the connectivity issues that our customers were experiencing and ask me if I'm happy if they go ahead with this idea. But because like, you know, they, they can get very excited about the new technology. One of the things that you should watch out for is that they don't get into the pitfall of going into the technical spiral without thinking about customers or the value the final product will bring to the end users. But at the same time, like as a leader, because like, you know, they are so enthusiastic. Um It's supernatural that you don't want to discourage them. So here the role you should play or the value you can bring as a team leader is to ensure that, that, you know, you guys are investing in the right product for customers, which will lead to company growth as well as the team's growth, right? So what I did for this case was to ask them again. Is that really? So will it solve all custom problems like a magic after conducting a market research, speaking with customers and identifying their pain points. One of the things we learned was that the speed of the connection was not a major problem of like our customers were experiencing. Of course, like yes, it will help indeed. But the customers major pain points are in the different areas.

So with this data, it was very clear to my team that looking at the five G technology on me was not good enough. We agreed to build a road map with a good balance of solving the high priority custom issues and using the latest technology. So now they know where we are going and how to get there. They are much more efficient and we are solving customers problems very fast. This is just like one of the many similar examples that I've experienced. You need to ensure that like you understand how they think and how to motivate them. You know, sometimes they are quite far away from the business impact that their product is making and they forget about customers. It's your job to tell them how much impact they are bringing to the company and to its customers. So we all can focus on solving customer problems. I am lucky to have like experience leading teams in both in the media sector as well as the tech sector, uh what teams do, like what my teams do are quite different. But, and you know, if I'm being honest, I've experienced quite a difficult team members in both industries. But why can, but like, you know, what I can assure you is that they are people after all.

So see, the importance of understanding your team is the key to building an efficient team. Spend lots of time with your team. Have one on one with every team member, show respect to what they do understand how they think and operate, know what motivate them and discourage them that will all help you and the team to be more efficient and can work better together. So that was the first step. OK, let's move on to the second tip of the day. The second piece of advice today is to know the right technical details and strengthen it by using capabilities that you already have. As you can see, I'm not saying anything special here. This is not only for the tech industry. If you want to be successful in your career, you need to be an expert in your domain. If you are new to the industry, you must learn about it. I learned some Python and SQL and it helped me great me to understand how engineered think and operate. So it helped me understand technical concepts discussed during the meetings and it supported me putting the product ideas into the form that that's like easier for them to understand, ask questions to your teams. Don't be afraid to say that you don't know.

Sometimes you may feel like you may feel embarrassed to say that you don't know, especially if you're a team leader, but it's much better than pretending that, you know, because tech people can smell your fake when you try to show off by using jargon without like knowing much about them.

Um So what I do for this case is that I sometimes declare that I'm learning the technology my teams are using so and announce that I will be asking stupid questions. Um from my experience, one of the great traits of engineers, developers especially and like really everyone in the industry is that they love tech and they get very excited about it. They want to tell you what they are building and how it works and they like you, when they say like when you say that you want to learn about uh what they do, they're happy to explain it to you. So try and leverage that don't be afraid to ask questions, be honest and have genuine curiosity in what you and what your team do. But here when I say you should know the right technical details. This doesn't mean that you should know everything you want to find a few key places where understanding more details will allow you to maximize your strengths, do that instead of trying to learn everything and not achieving much. You cannot be an expert in everything, know the right technical details, but not everything and try to strengthen it by combining your knowledge and skill sets you already possess. What do I mean by that?

To give you an example, I'm leveraging my journalist skill set to be the catalyst between the tech teams and the business. I'm trained to summarize and explain the complex concepts in simpler terms. So naturally, my focus has been to understand the technical details that matters the most to the business impact. I do not or like I, I cannot develop software like my teams do, but I can explain the impact of my team's work to the customers and to the company. Another example is that I'm using my business skill set. I learned from my MB A, I can put the impact in the financial terms. And this also helps to illustrate the impact of my team's work, especially to the senior execs within my company. OK. So make an effort to learn technical stuff to understand the technical discussion that is required at your job level. Do not waste your time trying to become an expert, focus on what you chose to learn about. No, you are better off knowing sufficient details of some aspects of the tech than trying to learn everything and not knowing much about anything and trying to combine your newly acquired knowledge with the strengths you've already have. Yeah, you may not realize that then you may not feel that you don't have much transferable skills. Um And that's probably why you may feel um not confident but you have lots of transferable skills. Think about it.

I didn't know my, you know, my J skill sets will be useful in the technology sector until I join here. So the second piece of advice today is to know the right technical details and strengthen it by using your capabilities that you already have. Last. But not least, another key thing to remember is to keep a strategic head and serve as a bridge between your tech teams and other stakeholders. Some of you may feel you can't contribute much in those technical meetings as they can often spiral into the deep, deep technical discussions.

But keep in mind that being the most technical in the meeting is often not the most important thing. Of course, like understanding those details is important, but the more important thing is not to forget the big picture, keep your eyes on the big strategic goals and um goals of the project and of the meeting, you know, you should serve as a bridge between your tech teams and other stakeholders.

I'm sure many of you have experienced at least a few tech meetings where engineers went on discussing every single details and meeting ended without achieving the desired outcome. So make sure you bring them back on track so the team or the company can focus on the strategic goals.

Ok. So these are the few things that I've learned along my journey and hopefully you can start trying them from today. Ok. So I'll repeat the first one is understand how tech people think behave and operate. Two know the right technical details and strengthen it by using your capabilities that you already have. And three keep a strategic head and serve as a bridge between your tech teams and other stakeholders. Ok? So don't think that you are not good enough. You are good enough, be confident. Yeah, be confident. You are good, good enough uh to lead the team. That's why you are in your position. So be confident and continue building your like great teams. OK? So thank you. Uh That's all.