Engineering Manifestos

Deepak Sheoran, Founder & CTO, DwellFi, sat down with me to share his principles and practices for building Teams & Products.

• 2:20 Areas a CTO/VPE needs to focus on during the early days
• 7:20 Details in the daily status updates that he focuses on
• 8:05 Secret sauce for 5-10X productivity gains over the competition
• 8:52 How to leverage AI for your Engineering team
• 11:11 How to go about making technology choices
• 14:16 Framework for Engineering bandwidth allocation
• 19:00 Framework for Engineering Goals
• 25:10 Things he would have done differently

Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO, DevRev, and Co-Founder & Former CEO, Nutanix, sat down with me to share his wisdom on Company Building, Customer Discovery and Building Culture & Teams.

• 3:08 [Company Building] Building relationships with people, viz. end users, buyers, customers, employees, partners
• 3:08 [Company Building] Building a brand based on values
• 6:40 [Customer Discovery] Begin with your passion, conviction and skill before trying to find an underserved market
• 8:28 [Problem Hypothesis] Poor end user experience/ease of use, Expensive/lumpy Go-To-Market/Distribution
• 13:36 [Customer Discovery] Unearth desires in addition to pain points and needs
• 16:04 [Building Teams] Look for underserved people (rebels, people who want to make a difference, people who can think visually, people who can execute)
• 21:24 [Building Culture] Embracing a Design Culture

Nikhil Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, ArmorCode, sat down with me to share the story of pursuing his crazy idea to start ArmorCode during the modern world’s worst pandemic.

• 4:19 [Provenance] Why Nikhil embarked on the ArmorCode journey (WHY "This Problem", WHY "Now", WHY "Him")?
• 7:10 [Pitch] Customer Pain-points & taking a "People-first" approach to solve them
• 15:00 [People] Company Culture & how it keeps evolving
• 23:02 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Navigating the delicate line between drinking your Kool-Aid & not getting discouraged by customer feedback
• 26:38 [Customer Discovery (Process)] "Art" of digging deeper to uncover "true" customer feedback on your "Problem Hypothesis"

Sumanth Puram, VPE, RudderStack, shares the story of scaling the Eng team more than 10X, on the path from Customer Validation to Customer Creation.

• 1:58 [Provenance] Build tooling for developers
• 3:54 [Customer Validation (Process)] Hypothesis Testing of the need for a "CDP for Developers"
• 6:54 [People] Type of people you need in the initial team
• 18:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Challenges with building a product for Developers
• 23:30 [People] How Transparency helps with scaling the team
• 31:40 [People] Book recommendation for frameworks for scaling Eng teams

Jim Bugwadia, Co-Founder and CEO, Nirmata, shares the story of conceptualizing and building Nirmata

• 1:38 [Provenance] Career move that helped plant the seed for building Nirmata
• 5:19 [Pitch] Empower every SW team to operate like Netflix/Google at scale
• 9:10 [Process] Being patient when building a company for the long term
• 19:50 [People] Importance of communication skills in addition to Problem solving skills
• 24:50 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source

Nat Natraj, Co-Founder and CEO, AccuKnox, shares the story of building AccuKnox.

• 3:50 Picking the right problem to solve
• 7:14 [Provenance] Bringing Phil (SRI), Nat & Asif together
• 17:56 [Pitch] Easy Button To Zero Trust
• 23:30 [People] Picking the right investment partner & building an “All Remote” team
• 27:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source
• 37:30 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Testing & Qualification of Product Hypothesis

Nevo Alva, Co-Founder and CEO, Acumen, shares the challenges & learnings while scaling Eng at his previous company that led him to build a solution for addressing the pains of engineering leaders of growing organizations.

• 7:44 [Objectives] Weekly company updates & Product Roundtables to align Eng & Business
• 15:48 [Values] Transparency, Ownership and Team play
• 25:00 [Hiring] Building a team of Mentors & Mentees and Hiring for Potential
• 29:15 [Team structure] Commando teams and Army
• 37:00 [Process] Pragmatism, Balance & Building in early

Anand Mariappan, VPE, Impira, shares his experience inheriting and running the engineering team and adapting to remote work. He also provides an overview of his 3Ps framework for enabling people to do their best work, by equipping them with the right processes and a clear sense of purpose.

• 4:00 [Objectives] Focus on time to market
• 9:30 [Company Values] Empathy (Virtual Water-cooler/Virtual Coffee and other ways to stay connected with the team)
• 14:10 [Engineering Values] Transparency (The team that sees reality the best wins - Jim Dethmer)
• 16:08 [Engineering Values] Autonomy (Enabling the team to reach their full potential)
• 21:00 [Hiring] Two-way (Company and Candidate) evaluation for fit
• 27:05 [Engineering Levels] Career Ladder (Working with the team to identify desired Engineering values & traits at each level)
• 31:25 [Team Structure] Frameworks for team structure (Product Versions, Use cases, User scenarios, Product Functionality) and resource allocation (Feature Dev/Foundation/Moonshot  ideas, Core Product/New initiatives/Moonshot ideas)
• 37:35 [Architectural Decisions] (Leveraging Brain Trust from Pixar)
• 42:25 [On-boarding] 3-4 person team (Manager, Engineering mentor, Engineering buddy, Cross-functional buddy)
• 50:00 [Testing] Balancing product quality expectations, time to market and available resources
• 53:10 [Adding Capacity vs Optimizing Software] Focus on understanding the bottlenecks and starting with optimization

Fabiano Botelho, Founding Engineer (#2) and Fellow/VPE, Rubrik, shares his journey as an Engineering leader at Rubrik on helping build the teams and product lines for 1.0 and beyond. He also provides insights into his experience with scaling & growing the Engineering team at Rubrik.

• 5:25 [Objectives] Focus on building the system and getting to market fast
• 11:05 [Values] Examples of Rubrik values in action (RIVET)
• 22:02 [Collaboration] Building a connected team & traits of good mentors for helping scale an organization
• 33:30 [On-boarding & Off-boarding] Welcoming and bidding farewell to team members
• 39:17 [Tools(Programming Languages/Frameworks)] Picking the right tool for the job while balancing cognitive overload
• 44:20 [Architectural Decisions] Empowering the team to make & own their decisions
• 50:10 [Company Building] Enjoy the ride with the people

• 8:37 Everyone owns quality
• 15:00 Customizing development methodologies to work for your company culture; Building & Operating SaaS (BOSS), a page from VMware’s Engineering Manifesto
• 27:30 Book recommendation for leaders or anyone involved in Engineering/Technology development; Hiring for values without undermining diversity; Metaphor for thinking about your teams
• 34:30 Psychological safety for effective Post-mortems and readouts
• 44:44 DevOps vs SRE; Promoting collaboration between Development engineers & SREs; Developing SREs
• 49:35 Psychological safety for effective Pre-mortems (Production Readiness Assessment (PRA))
• 55:30 Managing error budgets