Top Books, VietnamWorks Releases and Lessons of 2015

On 29th December of 2014, I wrote a simple and short brief about VietnamWorks Engineering results in matter of deliveries. I will do the same for 2015, also I will put some items that I failed as a leader and also the things that I learned in 2015 including some of books I read which might worth sharing and might help some folks.

In 52-week (plus one extra day) of 2015 we managed to have 195 releases which is 89.32% growth compare to 2014, we also increased the staff by 34% in engineering team with a great turnover rate. I appreciate, admire and respect each of my team members that spent so much effort to make this happen. Incredible team and results.

At the moment, engineering department is running the biggest portfolios that are extremely impactful on our strategic drivers. Engineering department portfolios are listed as below:

• vietnamworks.com, job seeker mobile app and complete set of APIs that empowers open innovation
• employer.vietnamworks.com and complete set of OAUTH2 APIs
• CRM and Lead Automation Processes
• Microsites Platform
• New Services such as TechLooper, Success (newly launched Real-Time Application Tracking System), and new mobile applications
• Data Management
• HelpDesk & Support

In 2015 we have several interesting updates that were extremely impactful in our strategic drivers listed below but not limited:

• VietnamWorks Widget
• RFM, a completely new model of analytics
• New Employer Portal, completely new UX/UI
• Advance Resume Search, our resume search accuracy increased by 68%
• COHORT, that empowers us to measure more efficiently
• ProductBoard, a transparent and kanban-model to improve our internal communication
• CFP, a common platform for all of our front-end development that increased our agility by 35%
• Chrome Extension of Job Alert and many more

Indeed we have many more initiatives that helped us to have better communication and improved our efficiency as well as engagement such as:

• Transition into Slack that help us to have real-time anywhere anytime communication
• Upgrading our tools and products
• Launching innovation accounting fully integrated with Slack
• Data Driven Leadership and open channel for all employees to send feedback 24/7 which this model has been featured in an article from Entreprenuer

At VietnamWorks we always shape the future of recruiting in Vietnam and 2016 is going to be one of the most exciting year for engineering department as I have explained in this article.

Some of interesting things that I learned in 2015 either soft or hard ways are listed below and I hope it is not limited to these ones, I appreciate all those folks that patiently taught me these awesome stuff (I cannot name one by one because there are so many awesome dudes, I salute each of you and thousands respect):

• Real-Time frameworks such as Meteor and FireBase
• Conversion Rate Optimizations
• Basic understanding of Machine Learning and Real-Time Recommendation Engines and building one simple example 
• How to build a chrome extensions 
• Learned a new term "Intrapreneur" which made me very excited, seems I have to agree I might not be a good entrepreneur but still have some hopes :D
• Website Obesity Crisis 
• Data Driven Leadership and Lean Leadership
• How to do a better and more meaningful employee orientation
• I got to know about new job titles "Chief Entrepreneur" and "Chief Happiness Officer"
• A new management model called Holacracy

I also bought a kindle that helped me to read a lot more, here is some of the books I read and I think it worth reading:

1. Users not customers
2. CEOFlow (Mini-CEOs)
3. Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
4. Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High Velocity Sales Machine
5. Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker (I read it once a year)
6. Work Rules by Laszlo
7. How Google Works
8. Lean Marketing for Startups: Agile Product Development, Business Model Design, Web Analytics, and Other Keys to Rapid Growth
9. The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge
10. Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com
11. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
12. Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today's Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth
13. Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers
14. The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops
15. Reinventing Organizations
16. Some tech stuff such as (read some chapters as more like a reference): Neo4j in Action, Collective Intelligence (old book but I just read it this year), HBase in Action, Machine Learning in Action, Discover Meteor (hopefully soon Meteor in Action), Tika in Action, and Web Crawling and Data Mining with Apache Nutch