Leadership & Collaboration
Leading a four-person data integration team, running student programs for 1,500+ participants, and working with clients across three countries in a second language.
Where this came from
Two places, in this order: Secretary of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union for my faculty at UIT, running programs and events for over 1,500 students; and then leading a team of four on data integration and warehousing at FPT IS.
The student union came first, and it is where I actually learned to run a team — three years before anyone at work asked me to.
Leading the data integration team
Four people, a domain none of us had shipped before, and a delivery date.
Written definitions before written code. We agreed what "sales-out" meant, in one document, before anyone created a table. That document prevented more rework than any technical decision on the project.
KPIs the team could see. Flows completed, load duration, reconciliation variance. Visible numbers beat status meetings — people correct course on their own when they can see where they are.
Rotate the hard problems. Whoever had not yet touched CI-DS took the next CI-DS flow, paired with someone who had. Slower for two weeks, much faster for the rest of the project, and nobody became a single point of failure.
Unblock, then get out of the way. Most of what a lead does is remove the thing stopping someone, and then not hover.
Working with clients
Understand the process, not the request. A requirement arrives as "we need a report with these columns". Twenty minutes with the key user usually reveals a different and smaller problem. On Kim Tin I sat with warehouse supervisors until I understood how they actually moved stock — that conversation, not the interface spec, was what made the integration work.
Say the difficult thing early. A risk raised in week two is a plan. The same risk raised in week ten is an escalation.
Write it down. On the Goldilocks engagement — international client, time-zone gap, English on both sides — an ambiguous sentence cost a full day. Precision in writing is not a soft skill in that context; it is throughput.
Mentoring
I joined FPT IS with three weeks between my start date and my first project, so I know exactly how the first six months feel. What I try to give the people I mentor:
- The reason behind the rule, not just the rule.
- A real task early, with a safety net — competence comes from shipping, not from reading.
- Honest, specific feedback. Vague encouragement is comfortable and useless.
To expand: the KPI framework I used, and what I would change about how I ran that team.
Want the detail behind this?
Happy to walk through the technical decisions in a conversation.