Developers Want to Hear About Your Problems – Not Your Solutions

The FX/CFD industry is experiencing a cultural shift as more brokers realize that product development is not a top-down process, and that empowering employees pays more dividends in the long run. Vincent Gross, the recently appointed CTO of Titan FX, saw this paradigm shift coming over the past 15 years as he managed tech teams and invested in start-ups in the forex and crypto industries.

“There used to be lots of management-by-committee. Higher-ups would make priorities and their rationale would get lost once it trickled down to the rank and file,” Gross observed. “When employees are given tasks unidirectionally, without any significant involvement in decision-making, they become detached from their work and only produce a fraction of their potential.”

“The other major side effect of top-down management is to slow everything down by organizing tasks in a linear ‘waterfall’ model. It’s probably a legacy of Industrial Age assembly lines and that’s how many workers still experience it,” he added.

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His solution: embrace a more hands-off management style that fully leverages everyone’s potential, makes employees happy and creates more value for customers.

Autonomy is the way forward

“Developer empowerment has been the mantra for Silicon Valley firms and related industries for some time. CFD brokers have taken longer to understand and implement it correctly,” Gross added.

But he’s vowed to make Titan FX a champion of the approach. More specifically, he’s a self-proclaimed admirer of the Spotify school of development in which cross-disciplinary teams are organized into semi-autonomous squads to disrupt silos and speed delivery.

“Each squad should have a healthy mix of technical and business people, including a product owner who’s a peer to the other members. Instead of being led from above, the squad defines its priorities and organizes its time as a collective, using agile methods to smooth up development without having to wait for guidance or approval. In an emergency, you can always add more external squad members,” Gross said.

He cites an exemplary squad dedicated to finance at Titan FX. Whenever a new payment services provider needs to be onboarded, or any new process implemented, the product owner explains the situation to their technical colleagues who debate the best way forward.

“When everyone has partial ownership of the issue, the group is empowered to give its best. Developers are problem solvers at heart, so instead of asking them for a specific solution, just present them with your issue and they’re motivated to tackle it,” Gross noted.

An agile industry is a growing industry

The tech veteran hopes that many brokers will follow Titan FX’s lead because the widespread trend toward developer empowerment might be precisely what the industry needs to flourish.

“People get nervous when it comes to their money, and there’s no shortage of unexpected incidents in the CFD industry – from payments providers that go out of business to software bugs that have an impact on the market. The swifter we react and the less damage these events cause, the more we enhance our reputation and grow our addressable market.”