Trailer
Podcast with George John Vettath Part 4
Podcast with George John Vettath Part 4
Summary:
George's favorite books are Product Lead Growth, Measure what matters, and the Bible. His most commonly used app is Linkedin. He shares 4 key tips on building a successful career in the digital space. They are 1. Adopt a T-shaped approach to career planning, 2. Learn consistently 3. Try something, 4. Learn to do and accept failure as part of learning. He also talk about the importance of ethics and sustainability in doing business.
Notes and transcript can be found here: https://www.andrewliewweida.com/podcast
[00:00:00] Andrew Liew Weida: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the AI of mankind show where I share anything interesting about mankind. I'm your host for this season. My name is Andrew Liew. I work across four Continents and 12 international cities. Also, I work in tech startups across a range of roles from selling products, making customers happy, figuring out fundraising, making finance tick, building teams, and developing sticky products. Apart from building startups. I've also worked in fortune 500 companies as a chief data scientist or technologist or people leader. You can call me Jack of all trades or master of learning. I hope to make this podcast show a great learning experience for us In each season, there is a series of interesting things that I invite guests to share their views about their life and interests.
[00:01:09] Andrew Liew Weida: Now let the show begin.
[00:01:26] Andrew Liew Weida: In the previous episode, George shared his views on how low code enables the future of work, and support reskilling, and upskilling. This episode continues the part 4 conversation with George and George shared his career advice on how to build a career in AI, digital, and data. Let's continue.
[00:01:44] Andrew Liew Weida: Okay, great. This is one of the things that, the audience in this podcast show so they want to know what it's like to learn from successful people like you So coming back to the topic of learning, what is the best book you read about digital transformation?
[00:01:57] George Vettath: I probably would recall two books and they may not exactly be digital transformation, but they're the ones that influence me the most to think with. One would be a book called product-led growth, by West Bush. What it does is it says that in the future, when you build software products, it should be good enough so that people adopted without training. I should be able to see it play around with it. It'll prompt me on what to do next based on what I'm doing, give the next thing and it's so simple and easy to use, and it gives very specific techniques on how to do it. So the entire time to value from when you. Give us software to someone when it delivers value to an organization reduces drastically and the training consulting time, everything reduces. So a lot of very practical tips, that was one book.
[00:02:38] George Vettath: The other book is the, I think by John doer, which was about this: [Measure what matters OKR objectives and key results]. It's the key. It was the secret source of Google and many companies in the valley. And now it's becoming popular around the world. It's a lovely big business practice, which was really useful during COVID times because the focus is on outcomes. You work on outcomes then things keep moving I think OKR is a great way and I loved it so much that we built the product out of it. So Stragility has OKR as one of its products. And if you ask me the third book, that influences me is of course the Bible. I read it every day and I get inspired by it.
[00:03:14] Andrew Liew Weida: So now after the book that you have read tell us, what is the number one application software that you use every day
[00:03:21] George Vettath: I'm not much of a fan of these apps apart from our own suite that we use internally and are built out of stragility. But I think the one that I tend to use most is LinkedIn. Surprisingly the kind of feed that comes across, I find it interesting and inspirational how many people tell their stories and then, and the articles they link to. And so when, when one of my friends recommends an article, I am definitely okay. He said it, it must be good. And I go in there and see it. So LinkedIn's kind of been my favorite app from that perspective.
[00:03:52] Andrew Liew Weida: For those who are very keen to start a career in the digital space or the software engineering space or product management what are your top three career tips that you can offer to the audience out there?
[00:04:05] George Vettath: There's an old concept which I picked up a long time back, it's called the T let's called it a T concept. The bottom part of the T is vertical. Like that means you've gotta be good at one space and be almost the best in the world in one space, you choose something and become very good at that. And it's a narrow space and you've gotta be among the best in the world. So over a period of time, choose what that is and keep going after it for your career throughout. So if you are deciding to be, do something in programming, be a programmer for your life to be very good at that. If you wanna do consulting, be good at it because sales are good at it. Whatever you're doing, decide that's your space. I think when you go through college or you finish first your jobs and your career, you can decide what the rest of your life is all about becoming the best in that particular T going down. The third part of the T is about breadth. It's getting as much experience as possible in all related fields related to, your T in place. The broader it could be economics. It could be advised finance. It could be any topic, but you have to have consistent learning.
[00:05:09] George Vettath: I think one of the mistakes I made when I finished when I finished my MBA or something like that, I thought I knew everything. That's when you realize you just know nothing so you're just starting off. And what you should be really thinking is education helps you to learn how to learn, whereas your readiness to learn is lifelong and because things keep changing every three years and self-learning is going to be your tool into the future. Nobody is going to teach you anything after, and you'll be outdated so you gotta keep learning. These are all the tips that I have. I think I just add one more. I just thought of one more. Get your hands dirty. When you're learning, it's easy to learn theory, and read a lot of books, but nothing works as well as trying something out. It's okay. If you fail, just keep trying don't learn something, just any course that yourself learning doesn't stop at the listening part, get into the exercise, try something, and do something that's also quite important.
[00:06:01] Andrew Liew Weida: I'm also a believer of do, as you learn and learn as you do so that you get some mastery. So let me summarize a bit about your three wonderful, great tips. So the first one is to enable T-based knowledge, be an expert at one area, go after it tremendously persistently, passionately, and do cover a bit of both horizon so you get a better breadth of things and keep learning to be good at that thing. And then as you chalk out a specialist path, the best way of learning is actually do, as you learn, and learn as you do. Great, fantastic career tips out there. And so finally what is your request from those who are listening to this podcast? What is your ask? Please tell the audience
[00:06:38] George Vettath: From an ask perspective I'd say that the low code and AI are going to be the key things in digital transformation. So while low is not so well known. Look at it quite seriously. And to those who. Either investors or those who are looking at getting transformation done, do look at it seriously. And we are always there. Anytime you can checkout stragility.net, you can find out what we have done testimonials as well as contractors on what we can do for you. We are always there. The other is, yeah, everybody's ready for the investment of growing. So we are also ready for growing a company and scaling it globally. They looking for not only investment but also good people to join us. So anyone out there who's interested in, we love what I'm saying and are happy to interact with you.
[00:07:23] George Vettath: There's a bit on ethics that I want to talk about, especially those in the tech. We are going to face a lot of things, which test our ethics, for example, AI can be a bias-related. We can build applications that can be biased. We can build applications that are true and honest .
[00:07:40] George Vettath: And the other thing is about technology is about sustainability and the climate. And please I think the younger generation knows it better. We gotta be doing a lot more protection for sustainability and the climate, and of course in general, inequality is really what we want to eliminate in all forms. And we are anybody that everyone needs to focus on that. And yeah, we are to keep things in mind, like privacy and security and so many things are there involved. So we all have a part to play..
[00:08:05] Andrew Liew Weida: Fantastic, George, that was a handful of, let me have you summarize, man. So the folks out there were listening to this podcast George is a great person of approachability and of the great wealth of knowledge about low-code. If you have any questions that you wanna ask about low-code you wanna build any products and if you wanna invest, please go and talk to him. You can find on all my show notes about the website link and his LinkedIn profile, please contact him. And of course, he's also a guy who really cares about the earth so he could even tell you how low code can be more energy efficient, and not only that but in terms of ethics, he's also a man of character where, you know apart from getting business done, he also cares about how do you build the product.
[00:08:50] Andrew Liew Weida: Once of all, thank you so much, George, for coming to the show, we have come to the end of the show
[00:08:54] Andrew Liew Weida: Hi everyone, we have come to the end of part 4 with George and this is the end of the podcast series with George.
[00:09:00] Andrew Liew Weida: Thanks for listening to this podcast. If this is the first time you are tuning in. Remember to subscribe to this show. If you have subscribed to this show and love this. Please share it with your friends, family, and acquaintances. See you later and see you soon.