Senior tech leaders Louise Richardson, Vice President of Technology Delivery Enablement, Shilpa Arora, Engineering Director, Commercial Services and Archana Dixit, Engineering Director, Global Merchant Network Services discuss how American Express’s business culture and core values contribute to confident and dynamic decision-making within the corporation — from individual team member career choices to top-level strategy.
Perspective and knowledge are great investments
Good decision-making involves more than just technical knowledge — it requires the context and inspiration that comes from a breadth of understanding, knowledge and perspectives. ‘One of the most amazing gifts that we give every employee of American Express is Five Plus — five or more days dedicated to and guaranteed for learning where you can pretty much choose to learn anything that you want,’ says Louise. From exploring a new language to learning a different discipline, investing in specialist or lateral learning not only benefits the employee’s growth, but how they can give back to the company, offering a greater knowledge base that can ultimately lead to innovation, inspiration and, ultimately, better decision-making in their roles.
Customer experience is your guiding star
‘The customer is at the heart of everything that we do,‘ says Archana. ‘As such, the first step for us is to understand the big picture. Then to go into the problem space we can ask… what are we trying to solve?’ The customers’ needs will necessarily dictate the priorities that then inform the core of any work that is undertaken, she notes. For her, the cut through is simple: ‘This is what the customer wants. That’s what we want to solve.’
Integrated working produces better decisions
While silos engender specialism, joined up working allows for more effective decisions that impact the way in which a company can serve its customers. ‘In many organisations, tech is not involved in the design and engineering of new products and services. User stories just get chucked over the wall and the tech team doesn’t often have insight into the broader picture,’ says Louise. ‘At American Express, we work side-by-side with our product teams and the relationships we have with them are key. We help them to architect the platform and capabilities that they want — and we strive to deploy together frequently.’
It pays to empower those with knowledge, not just seniority
‘Engineers help determine how developers write code and by joining a guild with the authority to make decisions within a particular tech stack they have the ability to affect how they work on what they work with each day,’ says Louise. The importance of empowering teams to be able to make the best decisions was highlighted by the creation of Amex’s new supplier payment service. ‘One of the software engineers asked if we could create this new platform in Kotlin [a programming language]’ says Shilpa. ‘And I had three choices. To say, yes, because, it sounds cool; no, because we haven’t got experience in it; or the third, which was to say to him, ‘How do we make this decision?’ In the end, the process called in continuous learning by an interest group of engineers who discussed the pros and cons and investigated concerns, building a culture of teaching among the team. ‘In an enterprise environment, making sure that the whole team is on board is important, because it’s going to be a moment of change,’ notes Shilpa.
Change should always be an enabler for value
Decision-making based on outcomes needs to be about the value gained. ‘We don’t want to implement a new language just because it’s shiny, it should be an enabler for value,‘ says Shilpa. And before any change, she says, it’s important to consider how much you know and how much you need to know to start the journey. ‘The first question we faced was around the long-term evolvability. Since Google officially adopted Kotlin as the language of choice for Android development, the community size has increased significantly. That said to us that the language will evolve, and it will be the right choice in the future talent pool. ‘Kotlin was a new language but also a new paradigm because we were doing things differently. The change had to be all about delivering value so we had to know what it would mean for us and also what would we lose if something was to go wrong.’
Let futureproofing inform decisions
Futureproofing is crucial to a fast-moving industry like tech and in the mix for any competitive business when considering strategy or functionality change. Archana and her team used this focus in deciding which programming language to use to create a new payment network platform. ‘We process millions of transactions a day and although the platform was already great, we wanted to ask ‘How do we go from millions to billions?’’ Deciding between four programming languages to build a flexible payments network that could be scaled up to future needs was a big decision, with many technical pinch points to consider. However, developer happiness was also factored in, because as Archana notes, ‘a programme is written once, but lives forever’ and therefore needs to be easy to maintain. ‘In the end, Golang was a clear winner because it was developer-friendly and easy to learn, simple and with a great ecosystem of tooling.’
Two (or more) heads are better than one
Making use of others’ experience and insight is crucial for more informed decision-making in our careers. At American Express, informal and formal mentoring networks are an important part of how the organisation helps to widen the knowledge base for its employees, including being able to be matched with an expert in an area they’re passionate about outside their daily remit in order to explore it further. For Louise, mentoring, whether formal or informal, specialist or generalist, is especially important for women in tech, providing inspiration and tangible role models that can help with their own decision-making process. ‘Mentoring can help you see what you can become and how others are getting to where they want to be.’
