Jelena Laketić

Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are enjoying the DevOps Enterprise Summit and still have energy for a few more talks. For me, it has been a fantastic experience: so many great talks, great conversations. I really learned a lot, and I'm inspired to do different things and new things when I go back. I was also happy to see some familiar faces and reconnect with the people I met a few years ago when I was here, and also to meet some new faces.

Today I will be talking about the Distinguished Engineer program, the role, and the engineering culture.

First of all, before going into that, let me tell you a little bit more about myself. I started my technical career back in 2000 when I finished university in my home country, Serbia, and moved to Switzerland with the first job. Over the next few years I worked across different tech companies in Switzerland. Then in 2006, I joined UBS, where I stayed for 15 years.

UBS, for some of you that don't know, is the largest global Swiss bank, now since a few weeks even larger than before. It is also the place that was crucial for my career, that made me into the technologist that I am today. It was a really challenging experience, but as Rosalind said, through challenge we build our strength, and it was ultimately, at the end of the day, really rewarding for me.

I had a variety of roles, because this is how you stay for a long time in one company. I'm only going to mention two that were my favorite ones. The one that was really important for me is, of course, being a distinguished engineer. I became a distinguished engineer at UBS in 2018. Another one is strategic architect. This was my last role, and it was really interesting because I was asked to create the vision and execute the vision for wealth management IT, which is actually the biggest tech organization at UBS.

Of course, I aligned my vision with DevOps from the perspective of the tools, processes, organization, and culture. It was really funny to see: I was speaking here back in 2018, and I was talking about 12 years of injecting DevOps and Agile at UBS. So finally, I had a chance to implement DevOps more broadly than ever before. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was the pandemic, and vaccination was mandatory or you needed it to travel. I have no idea how that happened. But joking aside, I think it was just the right time, and I think timing for these kinds of transformations is everything. UBS was just ready at that moment in time to embrace this.

As I was just wrapping up with this initiative, I got an exciting offer in a different company. In March 2022, I moved to Thomson Reuters and became their first distinguished engineer.

Thomson Reuters, as many of you know, is a global provider of news and information-based tools for professionals and institutions. We like to say at Thomson Reuters that together with our professionals and institutions, we help inform the way forward to a more understanding, trusting world for all. I think we can all agree that in today's world especially, trustworthy information is more important than ever before.

When I say inform the way forward, how do we really do this at Thomson Reuters? We inform the way forward by delivering information that can be used, and that is used by professionals and institutions to come up with data-informed decisions, and very important decisions in many cases. Thomson Reuters products deliver very specialized information for a bunch of different businesses: to legal professionals, to corporates, to tax professionals in accounting. Everybody knows we also provide trusted news information as part of our business through Reuters News. On top of that, we have global print, where we provide print information to our tax and accounting professionals.

I always like to cover some facts and figures, so I'm just going to cover several facts and figures because I find them always fun. Our headquarters is in Toronto, Canada, and our enterprise center is in Zug, Switzerland. We have operations in more than 75 countries and have 25,000 employees. We have a really diverse workforce. This is one of the things that I really like. I would say that most of the people that I met in this short time, relatively short compared to my time with my previous employer, most or all of them are really competent at what they are doing, and they're very, very helpful. I think corporate culture is something that I see is really great at Thomson Reuters, and I do believe that was probably one of the reasons why I decided to join them.

On top of this, our employees also love to volunteer. Last year, they booked 67,000 volunteering hours just on topics they are passionate about. Of course, Thomson Reuters is also an award-winning employer. There are many different awards we are getting, but this one is the one that I'm really mostly excited about: being a female-friendly company is something that I would look for as a woman in tech. In addition, we generated $20 million globally in services in free legal assistance for NGOs and social enterprises, and we are running 100% on renewable energy for all our global operations.

Where am I in the organization? Obviously, being a distinguished engineer, you would think that I would be in operations and technology, and this is really where I am. Just to give you an idea how important operations and technology are for Thomson Reuters: Thomson Reuters has a rich history of leveraging AI for over 30 years, starting with the first AI product that we launched back in 1991. NLP, ML, all of our AI capabilities are really important when we are giving trusted information to our customers and clients to actually come up with decisions. All of these capabilities are enabling us to quickly give this information and enable customers across industries and across the world.

Operations and technology is really crucial for the success of Thomson Reuters, and so I'm very happy to be part of it and also to be part of a company that has been a pioneer in AI for so many years. It's an exciting time to be in, as Patrick said yesterday. I think we should explore and enjoy exploring AI, especially us as technologists.

I sit in product engineering in Switzerland. My boss is Shawn Malhotra. He's the head of engineering. My part of the organization has around 4,000 people, and across tech we have around 6,000 people. As my role is global, I work with all of them. I also work with other parts of operations and technology. In addition to that, I work with different areas. I work with the different business areas. I also work with product and design organization, and I even work with HR.

Let's go back to what I was saying. I joined Thomson Reuters back in March 2022 as their first distinguished engineer. What was really great was that I joined and had the chance to define what is a distinguished engineer. There is not really a unique definition or standard definition of a distinguished engineer across the world, simply because it can vary depending on the industry and organization where the distinguished engineers are. So I think the better question here to ask is: what is a distinguished engineer at Thomson Reuters?

My definition is that this is an experienced senior technologist, very influential, with knowledge in different technical methodologies and best practices. Somebody who is supporting innovation, who is inspiring and triggering innovation that is happening around the company. This is a person that has a track record of technical achievements. It's somebody who knows how to deliver production technical products.

It's also somebody who is a mentor and coach, who is supporting people, who is a technical thought leader, and somebody who can explain maybe the most difficult complex topics or concepts to different audiences and spark the commitment and engagement that you would expect. It is also somebody who can see the big picture, but can understand the details and go into the details when it's needed.

I'm also seeing a distinguished engineer as a person who has a presence internally and externally, somebody who is able to promote technical achievements, to share the knowledge, to be part of the community internally and externally. Externally, as I am here today with all of you, sharing my experience and listening to you.

To be more precise, you may still be wondering: how do you become a distinguished engineer at Thomson Reuters? To become a distinguished engineer at Thomson Reuters, I'm expecting this individual to cover four key competencies, and they're really related to what I explained as my definition of a distinguished engineer. This is technical skills, expertise, and excellence; technical leadership; internal and external tech ambassador; and minimum five years at Thomson Reuters.

This last one is a very important one because I wanted to select the people that are already doing this at Thomson Reuters. They're already bringing the value. They're visible not just to the tech community, but also to the business. They're visible to the whole company. I basically wanted to choose the individuals that are no-brainers. If somebody sees the distinguished engineers that we today have, nobody's surprised that these people are there, because they have been doing this for a long time. Before I was there, I was basically just acknowledging their excellence.

We had a really rigorous selection process. There was a very high standard they had to achieve. I was interviewing people together with the heads of other tech organizations. Basically, in December 2022, we selected the first cohort of distinguished engineers. So in 2023, I'm joined with four more distinguished engineers. Together, we are going to make the company stronger, and we will make sure to bring value to Thomson Reuters, not just internally but also externally to our products and customers. At Thomson Reuters, we are committed to having our distinguished engineers at the table as we make the most important decisions for our customers and our company.

All of this is great, but you may also be wondering: what do I do in my day-to-day work? What does this really mean when you wake up in the morning and go to work? As a distinguished engineer, I'm involved in a variety of topics and initiatives, and I'm going to walk you through them. I categorized them just to give you a better overview. I'm taking my example, but it's very similar for the other distinguished engineers. I'm just going with my example because it's me and it's easier for me to share my experience.

The first one: I'm involved in innovation. Innovation has always been very, very important to me over the years. Specifically, applied innovation is looking at technology from the perspective of the value that it can bring to the business or organization that you are in. Over the years, I created many different concepts and ran many initiatives. I think that curating innovations in the company enables the company to establish and maintain competitive advantage. I think innovation makes companies more relevant, and customers appreciate it. Also, for the people working in those companies, these are the environments where they are stimulated to do more and to enjoy their work.

If I look at innovation, I like to look at top-down and bottom-up innovation. Bottom-up innovation is the one that is coming from employees. They usually know their products, they know shortcomings, they know strengths, and they always have an idea how to improve things. Top-down innovation is the innovation coming from other leaders. It's usually driven by some strategic vision, direction, and so on. What is really important is that, for successful innovation in the corporate setup, it is important to continuously balance both types of innovation. This is how you will achieve a successful culture of innovation in the company.

At Thomson Reuters, I have already been involved in and built several concepts. I ran the ideathon for our law associates for global law firms, our clients. I also ran the hackathon that I did in collaboration with our AI department, focused on our AI internal tools and product usage data. I'm currently running an ideathon that I think will unleash the creativity of our Thomson Reuters employees and kind of demystify scary concepts like LLMs and ChatGPT. It's going really well. I think we have more than 200 ideas at this point in time, so it's going to be really tricky for me and other evaluators to evaluate them. I'm also planning the global hackathon in September, which will be the cross-functional applied innovation event with a set of challenges. The ideas winning in the ideathon will have a chance to be prototyped there.

In addition to innovation, I'm also involved in tech-relevant topics, and that's no surprise. Basically, these are the topics that are ensuring standardization from a technical perspective, adoption of the tools, governance around the tools, and so on. The topics I can mention here are, no surprise, DevOps and modern tool adoption, as well as path to production or AI model experimentation. There are many different topics where I am involved as an advisor or more deeply going into the details.

In addition to that, I'm also involved in cross-functional activities. These are activities where I collaborate with other parts of the organization. As an example, I took part in a service design delivery model, which was our process that we defined for how to create new features and new products. I'm also working together with product and design organization, looking at our product teams' way of working and checking their effectiveness.

In addition, I'm involved in people and culture initiatives. All of these initiatives are strengthening the engineering culture, but I would say this one does that most obviously, also because it says it in the name. What it means here is that I'm supporting initiatives like technical mentoring, learning paths, creating communities of practice, and giving opportunities for our technologists to continuously educate themselves and keep on learning.

If you are asking yourself, how do I get to these initiatives? I think this is really important. Being a distinguished engineer is also having the opportunity and chance to get there. Some of these initiatives are self-triggered, just based on my observation and the gaps that I see, and just by talking and listening to technologists. Others are coming from leaders as a request. In either way, they're bringing value to Thomson Reuters and they're aligned with the vision. It is important that even if you have an idea, if it's totally off from where we are going as a company, it really doesn't make sense.

These initiatives are also aligned with my capabilities, my experience, my technical skills, and so on, which means that other distinguished engineers have slightly different initiatives that are aligned with their own capabilities. What we usually do is work together on these initiatives. This way, I can go into something that is not necessarily aligned with my current skills and make sure that I continue my development, because I have to continuously learn and grow.

How do we know that we are bringing value to Thomson Reuters? It's not simple, but in a way I and all the other distinguished engineers are measured by the value we bring through the success criteria of the initiatives we're involved in. By this I mean even if the initiative is whatever comes out of the initiative, whatever we came to do, and even if it's lessons learned, it is my value as well, and my work is measured through this initiative. In addition to that, of course, we are measured by Thomson Reuters OKRs, because what we are doing is bringing value to the organization, and by the Distinguished Engineer program OKRs.

Now I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the Distinguished Engineer program. When I had a chance to join Thomson Reuters as distinguished engineer and define the role and select other distinguished engineers, I thought this was a great opportunity for me to build the program. I like to call this more a framework, because a program has an end. I don't want this to end. I want this to continuously evolve and grow and make sure that we maintain that strong culture. As we are making our engineering culture even stronger than it is, the idea is also to continue that and maintain it.

I think all of you know, we are all technologists: maintenance is sometimes more difficult than kicking something off. Keeping something at an excellent level sometimes takes more people and more effort than actually the concept and the idea you are kicking off.

I was inspired to do this even during the interviewing process. I talked to the Thomson Reuters colleagues. They were not my colleagues at the time, but I listened to them and I understood what the company needs. Then obviously I had my experience as a distinguished engineer and somebody working so many years in tech.

I came up with a Distinguished Engineer program with the following mission: to recognize the outstanding technical achievements of our technologists, and therefore our key technologists; to establish a rewarding technical career path. This is really important. The technical career path that I'm calling here is an individual contributor path.

Why is this important? Before I joined, Thomson Reuters only had the managerial people-manager path and architect path, and there were people stuck in roles that were the wrong fit. We all heard that talk yesterday. That is always problematic. You don't get anything from people if they're stuck in a wrong fit.

So I created the technical career path that allows people who want to stay hands-on engineers and want to develop further to further their career. There are two roles that I introduced here because I saw there was one role missing when I introduced the distinguished engineer. Distinguished engineer role is an executive role, and there is a principal engineer role, which is the senior role that is very, very important also to build that pipeline for the distinguished engineers. You need to give people time to grow into what you want them to do as distinguished engineers. This was really something that the Thomson Reuters engineering community needed, and everybody is still excited about it, as they should be.

In addition, as this is a no-brainer here, and I'm mentioning this already several times, the mission of the Distinguished Engineer program is really to strengthen our engineering culture, to provide purpose for the technologists while helping us retain, grow, and attract talent. From that perspective, if you think about the initiatives that I mentioned before, those initiatives are also measured by the Distinguished Engineer OKRs. We have our own OKRs that are obviously aligned with the Thomson Reuters OKRs, but are very specific for our program. As I'm continuing building out this program together with the other distinguished engineers, we're making sure that we are fulfilling our mission while bringing value to Thomson Reuters. This is just the consequence.

As I was preparing this, Gene asked me to put a few testimonials in here. I thought it's a good idea because when I was selecting the distinguished engineers, I relied also, because I was new in the organization, on those 360 reviews from different people. I basically wanted to choose the technologists that other people think are great, not the ones with inflated ego that think they're great but don't have anyone to back them up. From that perspective, I think it's also important that my distinguished engineering program is checked all the time and reassessed, and that I get testimonials from the people that are somehow involved about the program.

I'm not going to read through them, but I chose a few that were my favorite ones from Shawn, my boss and head of engineering; Kirsty, our chief operations and technology officer; and Ryan, my fellow distinguished engineer. If you look here, the basic things are customer-focused technology, bringing value to Thomson Reuters, helping us achieve competitive edge, and enabling the distinguished engineers to be involved in strategic decisions.

Before I finish, I want to go back to that strong engineering culture that I was talking about, or engineering culture in general, as this is really the core of the Distinguished Engineering program: strengthening the engineering culture. What I think is happening at this point in time, and for all the right reasons, is that all companies are right now concerned about engineers and engineering culture. This is a good thing. I think most of the talks that we've seen are touching upon that. Are the engineers happy? How do we make them happier? How do we motivate them? How do we make sure they're the right fit? I think we are in a good time. It's good that companies are thinking in this way, because going forward they will need even more engineers, I'm sure about that.

What is really important here to point out is that engineering culture is really the culture that matters to engineers. It's something that can impact how they behave, how they make decisions, even how they feel. So it's normal and logical that it's important. From that perspective, I think purpose is something that we are looking for, maybe even through the whole pandemic experience, it's even more important. I believe that a strong engineering culture provides purpose for the technologists and ultimately helps retain, grow, and attract talent.

I like to compare culture with a garden. Is anyone here someone who likes working in a garden? Okay, there are a few hands. For a garden, you can have a great vision and you can have really great seeds, and you are like: awesome, I'm going to have this garden. You have your vision boards, everything. Now, if you don't fertilize and hydrate your soil, your flowers will not grow. You will have nothing there. If you actually invest time, and you need to continuously do that, you need to continuously fertilize and continuously hydrate, your flowers will grow. And not only will they grow, but they may achieve the wildest vision, not even the vision that you had in mind, but maybe even go over that.

This is how I see it: as the soil is foundational to your garden, in the same way culture is foundational to your organization. If you invest in your culture, and specifically into an engineering culture, and provide the place where technologists want to work, you will get more outstanding technologists, and you will attract even more. It's really logical. If you have that healthy culture, you will have a healthy organization, and a healthy strong organization automatically brings value to the business. This is just common sense. We all know common sense is not always as common as it seems, but it is at the end of the day common sense.

From that perspective, I see a strong engineering culture establishing inclusive workplaces where technologists are empowered to achieve and maintain excellence, where senior technologists provide technical mentoring, where we have organic and applied innovation from any role, and where learning paths, communities of practice, and growth opportunities are available for everybody.

As a distinguished engineer, I want to make sure that the company where I'm at, Thomson Reuters, together with my fellow distinguished engineers, continues to have a strong engineering culture. We do have a strong engineering culture, but we need to make sure to maintain this, because culture is not something, as with a garden, that you do once and that's it. No, you need to continuously reassess the situation in your organization. In this case, I'm talking about the culture, but it's the same for a garden: in your organization, see if your technologists are happy, if everything is going the right way. It's a continuous job of leaders, not just distinguished engineers but any leaders in the organization, to make sure they are providing the environment that enables others to flourish and become the best version of themselves.

With this, I'm going to leave you with a few questions. Did you recently pulse-check your organization? I don't mean the survey that you send out and so on. I really mean: did you recently talk with your engineers about their work aspirations, things they love, and things they hate? I think we had a talk yesterday about somebody going 40 floors every day to find out how their engineers are doing. I don't think you need to do that, but find a way to find this out.

Are you aware of the buzz about your organization outside of your usual official channels? We also had a talk where they said what the organization is talking about internally is sometimes not the same as the buzz that is coming in externally. What do you hear about your organization when nobody knows that you are from there, or in engineering communities, or conferences like this?

If your answer to this is, "I don't know," take some time to find out, because you will get valuable insights and great ideas for improvement. With this, you can create and ensure that you are strengthening engineering culture in your company. You don't need a Distinguished Engineering program. You can actually do this just by listening to others and following with some activities.

With this, I'm just going to say please reach out to share with me your journey. I'm here still, but you can always reach out to me via LinkedIn. Maybe you have some suggestions for me, because I am here also in the beginning of the journey and I'm learning as well. I think we all are. I just want to say, let's continue the conversation. Let's not stop on this. I hope to hear more from you and learn about your experiences. Thank you very much.