8Minute Talk show — Sajad Baharvandi CTO at Sheypoor

Sadegh Shahroodi: Hi. We are beside you with another 8-minute talk show in the Technology segment. Our guest is dear Sajad, and he is a member of the Sheypoor team. You are welcome, Sajad.

Sajad Baharvandi: Hello. Thanks dear Sadegh.

Sadegh Shahroodi: would you please introduce yourself?

Sajad Baharvandi: I am Sajad Baharvandi. I’ve been working in the technology field for over 15 years, and mostly in the IT field. I am CTO at Sheypoor now.

Sadegh Shahroodi: Cool, that sounds nice! What is the most important ability that a CTO must-have?

Sajad Baharvandi: These days, there are lots of technology and job kinds changes so, every manager should know how to lead his team. How to lead and guide people to develop is one of the hardest duties of a CTO. We need to guide the new employees who are not experienced enough and help them improve in their job. A CTO needs to know how to plan long-term goals for his team, CTO is familiar with the business and knows the business target and its future.

He should prepare himself to face new changes such as market, interoffice, and societal changes, though he should be able to plan well for the team to help the business and the team improvement. These days there are lots of changes in technology and its language, so you should always be prepared for changes.

We made some changes at Sheypoor during the last year, we changed it to a microservice. We defined smaller projects, divided new and previous codes, and try to work on new codes to develop them. Furthermore, we separated different parts with different languages, we have two criteria in choosing a language, the first is the sufficiency of that language technology for the member and the data traffic. Furthermore, it should be battle-ready and work well. The second is the team’s favor, everybody in our team may love different languages. In this case, we let them choose and manage the team and microservice together.

Sadegh Shahroodi: How do you manage the efficiency of new technology?

Sajad Baharvandi: we do two activities to measure efficiency. We emphasize data to plan and create a new service. At first, we discuss the old data and our expectations. For example, we discuss the current conversion rate and the one that we expect to reach. In this way, we may add a new product or service to get closer to the expected rate. we have some criteria in the basement which include; the usage of the server or the team activities and the time that they spend on the server. When we start a project we will check its improvement. If it doesn’t improve well, we won’t let it go, and we’ll search for the problem and solve it. If we had made a mistake during the process, so we’ll solve it. To have a coherent team, you should gather similar people together in technology knowledge. Also, people should have the same behavior. We always try to employ team player people and those who love to work with people in a team. Sometimes some of them aren’t suitable for a team, we won’t fire them. We will join them on another team.

Sadegh Shahroodi: How do you predict the future of the technology team?

Sajad Baharvandi: in 1399, many of them couldn’t migrate due to Covid-19, but it may occur in 1400. Some people reach the senior level and get experienced, they leave Iran and prefer to work in foreign countries, and It affects IT companies because companies can’t find reliable and professional employees. We should try to train trainees and give them time to learn new things about technology. We can ask our seniors to be the trainers.

Sadegh Shahroodi: Thank you, I enjoyed your speech and your experiences.

Thank you all and Good luck.