8Minute Talk show — Kamyar Paykhan CTO at Hamrah Mechanic

Sadegh Shahroodi: Hi. We are beside you with another 8-minute talk show in the Technology segment. Our guest is dear Kamyar, and he is the CTO of Hamarah Mechanic. You are welcome, Kamyar.

Kamyar Paykhan: Hello. This is Kamyar Paykhan. I started studying computer programming when I was 13 years old, but I started my professional career after university when I was around 20, and it started by joining Hamrah Mechanic Team. It had 12 members, and We were responsible for optimizing Internet bandwidth. Then, I started working in Network and computer planning again. I developed integrated hardware and software solutions in the Telecom group. I did some projects for large banks and private nationwide companies. It’s been a year that I am the CTO of Hamrah Mechanic.

Sadegh Shahroodi: What is the important skill of a CTO?

Kamyar Paykhan: It is better to say there is a group of skills. In my opinion, the most important one is the skill of communication or soft skill. A CTO faces two different groups of audiences. He interacts with his team members. For example, he interacts with the development and network team, and they have technical discussions together. The next is his communication with stakeholders, business owners, and units, customers, and investors. A CTO should convey technical concepts to the audience in simple language. Learning new trends and updating ourselves is important in IT, and this is the duty of a CTO.

If we want to choose a technology, at first benchmarking from other countries is important. We can benchmark their performance, scales, and adaption. These benchmarks help us understand the costs of that technology.

Technologies integration is important. When we use open-source technology, we take a look at its GitHub followers, or we look at the frequency of code committing on that open-source project. The number of technical staff working on a project is important. If you use the best technology, but you can’t employ a staff during a year, you have made a bottleneck for your solution. When you make a wrong decision, at last, you leave the chosen technology, and you will choose an efficient technology.

Sadegh Shahroodi: How do you measure the efficiency of technology?

Kamyar Paykhan: It divides into two parts. The first is technical efficiency, and the second is non-technical efficiency. The second is more complicated, and it contains three parts; profitability, productivity, and consumer value. We can measure them in interaction with different organization’s departments. The summation of them shows the technical efficiency.

Sadegh Shahroodi: How do you organize a team for your projects?

Kamyar Paykhan: There are two sights about this question, the first is technical sight, and the second is product sight. The first sight organizes a team based on abilities, and the second sight organizes a team based on products or features. For example, you want to add the search feature to your website. In this case, your technical team designs the back end or front end, and the database team does database activities. But, in feature base sight, you have a team that is responsible to deliver the search feature. The advantage of this team is the team’s responsibility for the feature’s delivery. The back end does its job and delivers it to the front end. The front end gets the data and delivers it to the database. We choose a mix of these two teams. In traditional companies, component base teams are more than feature-based teams.

Sadegh Shahroodi: Is there any book you would like to introduce to our audiences?

Kamyar Paykhan: The book that helped me a lot and gave me a great insight into soft skills is Radical Candor by Kim Scott.

Sadegh Shahroodi: Who would you like to invite to this talk show?

Kamyar Paykhan: I invite Rasool Hesampour, CTO at Digi pay.

Sadegh Shahroodi: We will organize a meeting with him. Thank you for participating in this Talk Show.

Kamyar Paykhan: That was my honor.