The introduction

China architecture is one of the most hot topics in recent one or two years, its commitment to provide enterprise reuse is very attractive for all companies, thus group after group of enterprises successively in China reform, however, success is not much, as failures appear intermittently slaps, why such a problem? This paper gives the thinking of the technical team of the companion fish from the exploration of the goal and vision of the organization structure of the companion fish technology & Data.

Do the middle platform structure, is following the trend, or really think clearly?

Technology trends, like fashion trends, represent people’s current mainstream choices. At the same time, technology trends, like fashion trends, are not necessarily suitable for everyone and companies, and only temperament matching can complement each other. In 2018, the technical team of Companion Fish began to adjust the middle and Taiwan architecture. At that time, the decision of the technical team of Companion Fish was based on the following two aspects:

  • Thinking about the current situation of Accompany fish: At that time, there were three business lines of Accompany fish: 1 V 1 Children’s English, picture books and AI class. For these three business lines, it is an urgent efficiency demand to sink some basic and business capabilities and make them middle platform.

  • Thoughts on the future of companion fish: With fish is a rapid development of online education company, education in this area was born with two dimensions of teaching subjects and teaching scene, the cartesian product of two dimensions is the number of business types it can, of course there are multiple subjects and multiple scenarios for responsible by a business line, but on the whole, due to the difference between the subject and scene’s business is very big, The emergence of multiple business lines is an inevitable trend, so some of the basic and business capabilities in Taiwan, improve the enterprise reuse ability is the most suitable for the future business development of the company’s organizational structure.

Can be seen from the above, both present situation and the future, for with fish, conveniently for China strategy is a decision, is a complement each other, so the technical team with fish opened up the exploration of China, but this is not an easy thing, for China with fish technology, we are faced with one of the first questions is: The contradiction between technical output and business value.

This is a technology-driven team, but there is more focus on business value

Perhaps, each platform has its own problems to solve. For the companion fish technology & Data platform, we are faced with two problems:

The first problem is that the technology & data center of Companion Fish is a team of technical decision making. We need to solve all the technical problems that Companion fish may encounter in the development process, such as the stability and horizontal expansion of traffic from network, database, framework to each layer of business. Real-time and correctness of data from generation, flow, calculation to storage; Must also be efficient and elegant way to solve at the same time, it is better to let business department has no sense to use, as natural as breathing air, so we need to gather a group of engineers, the most outstanding, Geek has powerful technology strength and confidence, believe that technology can change the world of ideal, engineers challenge and willing to move forward.

However, hiring a good engineer is a difficult thing, and China as with fish & technical data, we must gather a group of the most outstanding, Geek engineer, this is a difficult thing, especially in technology & data with fish China early, in the process of recruitment, candidates are often asked question is: With the fish technology team now how many people, with the fish technology Taiwan now how many people? We always answer truthfully that there are less than 100 people in the technical team of Companion Fish and less than 10 people in the technical center, and then a question that comes up almost every time: Why do we need to be in the middle of the company and the team are so small? In the face of this problem, we will introduce the present and future technology and business development of The company fish in detail. Along the way, there are moments of disappointment, and there are moments of surprise. The most important thing is that we found an engineer who is willing to believe in us and has the same technical strength, technical confidence and technical ideal.

To today, with fish technology & data China already has a very high density of talent, have enough technical ability, and can be very good to company business, and then asked why China needs to do technology of time less and less, we can also more and more confident to answer this question, there are more and more excellent engineer to join in.

Second question, we have gathered a group of excellent engineers, so the direction is very important at this time, otherwise the opposite direction, the greater the ability, the greater the problem may be, so how to define the goal of the middle Taiwan team? Determine the goal of a team, should jump out of the team itself, standing in a higher dimension to think, so for China with fish technology & data, we were standing in the company’s Angle to think about the team’s goal, then it is very clear, our team is to provide general ability, for the business to business r&d team focus on business innovation. Therefore, within the Middle Taiwan team, it is important to focus on supporting, enabling, and servicing the business team, and on how the middle Taiwan team’s output contributes to the business value.

Here, we see the two seemingly contradictory places: This is a technology-driven team, but it pays more attention to business value. However, after understanding their internal connection, we will find that these two aspects are very harmonious: one is the requirements of the team, and the other is the goal of the team. But there is an unusual gap between the team’s requirements and its goals: technical determination and business thinking. So how do you integrate this gap?

Natural is the best way to reach consensus through culture, so in the implementation of open, equal and rational, pragmatic and encourage exploration and creation of engineering culture at the same time, the business priority is a core part of our culture, with fish technology & data of middle engineers need to focus through the technology to create business value, not only focus on the technology itself, In fact, this is the core part of engineer culture: technical team focus on business value is rational and pragmatic embodiment, through technology to drive the development of the business is exploration and creativity.

Therefore, after understanding the two contradictory dimensions of “this is a technology-oriented team, but it only focuses on business value”, the Company Fish Technology & Data Center team clarified the goal of our team: to build a geek technical team and provide extreme technical services.

What is the path from technology output to business value?

For Internet companies, technology is the cornerstone, and business value must be based on technical output. Then why is there a question about how technological output is transformed into business value? In fact, this is the choice of technology output, which is to determine the direction of technology output with business value as the guidance, or to talk about technology output apart from business. Therefore, the culture of “business first” of companion fish is the best answer to this question.

After solving the problem of consensus between technical output and business value by “business first”, how do you use business value orientation to determine the direction of technical output? In the accompanying fish technology & data, we think we should do the following things:

  • Excellent service awareness, high quality and high priority to complete the business line R & D engineer needs;
  • Excellent product awareness, actively find and solve the pain points encountered by line engineers;
  • Good planning awareness, anticipate the long-term business development trend and make technical layout in advance;

These three aspects are progressive requirements: first, do a good job of passive services, then actively find problems and optimize, and finally do a good job of long-term technical accumulation. Let the business line team trust and rely on the middle and Taiwan team, and be confident to develop business innovation and growth.

Technology & data at present with fish China have done a lot of things on service consciousness, in addition to the already into the technical culture “business priority” and stressed the excellent service consciousness, r&d experience every quarter report is also a very good feedback collection, understand the current service experience, avoid behind closed doors.

In terms of product awareness, by strengthening Owner awareness and cultivating engineers’ product thinking, combined with excellent service awareness, the overall progress is good, but this part needs to be achieved to the extreme, so now Companion Fish Technology & Data Center has begun to build a product team to ensure the quality of the platform and service.

It is difficult to show the effect of planning awareness in the short term, but Companion Fish has always been very good in technical vision and taste. When the company was founded in 2015, we chose All in Golang and micro-service architecture, so that Companion Fish has almost no technical debt during the rapid development of its business. At the beginning of 2018, All in NewSQL (TiDB) systematically solved the problem of horizontal expansion of the storage layer, so that companion fish almost did not encounter the capacity bottleneck in the process of rapid business development; At the end of 2018, I decided to carry out the middle Taiwan construction, which effectively reused the previous experience and accumulation for the rapid expansion of subsequent business. But now, in 2020, we decided to build around the data and get through the online platform, data platform and AI platform, through the efficient flow of data to drive the rapid development of business.

Using technology to drive the efficient flow of data, using data to drive the rapid growth of business

People often say that the Internet company’s core value lies in the data, in fact, the Internet company is not only the core value of the data, is more essential is that Internet companies use technology to build a data channel data company, from the perspective of an abstract, in the use of an Internet product scenario, the APP according to the use of user behavior data, The server stores the data generated by the APP, and the APP and the server continuously exchange data through the network. In the whole process, the technology has been doing the things of building Bridges and repairing roads. What is circulated and transformed is the data, and what is finally deposited is also the data. In short, the value of data flows to Internet companies is the value of money flows based on the economy.

So, the key thing for technology is to drive the efficient flow of data across all systems and platforms within the company. The faster the flow of data reduces the decay of data value over time, and the greater the value. The more systems and platforms the data flows through, the more times the data will be reinterpreted, and each reinterpretation will generate new value. For example, BI report is the reinterpretation of data based on statistics, and AI model is the reinterpretation of data based on machine learning.

For Tongyu, using technology to drive the efficient flow of data means connecting the online platform, data platform and AI platform directly with technology, so that the data can flow efficiently among the three platforms. In fact, this is a very difficult thing to do, generally speaking, to do this thing well, the technical ability of small companies is the bottleneck, it is difficult to have the technical strength to build these three platforms at the same time, to get through efficiently is even more impossible; Large companies have the technical strength to build these three platforms at the same time, but the bottleneck is organization and coordination. These three platforms may belong to multiple departments, and it is very difficult to efficiently coordinate and get through these three platforms.

But in with fish, we have the right place, right time, and, with China has fish technology & data at the same time build three platforms of the density of technical strength and talent, with fish technology & data at the same time China belong to the same department (AI China was among them, have entered the planning, construction) is about to begin, and for now, Data-driven business is a company-wide consensus business culture and a company-wide effort, so it is also the core goal of the middle and Taiwan department.

At the same time, the rapid growth of the business driven by data is even more critical for online education. In addition to the usual data-driven growth and data-driven decision-making, we believe there are three aspects:

  • First of all, the value of online education data to users is much greater than that of other Internet companies, because it is the data related to users’ learning. We can use data analysis to make users’ learning more effective, and learning itself is a very valuable thing.
  • Secondly, online education, to a certain extent, is to replace the teacher teaching scene, and the teaching scene is very complex, AI technology to solve complex problems is the best choice at present, and the level of AI technology is determined by data;
  • Finally, as the scene and mode of online education have changed, there will be a lot of innovation in teaching methods. These innovations are the future of online education, and the innovation based on AI technology is one direction of the future technological evolution of online education. Obviously, all these are growing on data.

Therefore, we believe that the key to the competition of online education in the future lies in the application of data and the rapid growth of business driven by data. How to use data to drive the rapid growth of business is a question that needs to be answered through technology. At the same time, this is the vision of the Company Fish Technology & Data Center team: to use technology and data to drive the rapid growth of business.

Companion Fish technology & Data Center team is exploring, but we have a clear goal, all the way forward, to build a geek technical team, to provide the ultimate technical services, with technology and data driven business rapid growth.