Engineering Manifestos

Mohan Umapathy, Founder & CEO, Qikr AI, sat down with me to share his experience building AI-enabled Teams & Products.

5:45 Leveraging AI to improve teacher productivity, student learning effectiveness, and administrator intervention oversight
11:30 Frequency of change in tools and methodologies for building with AI
15:18 Leveraging AI to improve Engineering/Product/Design Team capacity
17:47 Adapting to AI Tooling changes by constantly revisiting your Engineering Process
22:53 Skills needed to build with AI (Identifying & providing oversight/guidance when the tool output doesn't meet your system requirements)
26:12 Current Challenges in building with AI (Level of autonomy that can be delegated, managing token costs, future-proofing your system to work with newer models)

Deepak Sheoran, Founder & CTO, DwellFi, sat down with me to share his experience building AI-enabled Teams & Products. As a hands-on technology leader Deepak has valuable insights to share.

• 3:58 Adoption & Budgeting Framework for AI Tools
• 6:34 AI-enabled Requirements Capture/Design/Review Process: How to get it right?
• 9:45 Codifying your Engineering Process to leverage AI Tooling effectively
• 12:25 Why you need a QA-first mindset to leverage AI effectively?
• 18:50 AI-enabled Testing & Automation
• 21:20 AI-enabled Deployment & Operations (DevOps/SRE)
• 23:40 Building an AI-enabled Product Architecture (MCP-First, Intention-driven UI, Cross-Feature Automation, Multi-agent framework)

Pat Cullen, Former SVPE, Carrot Fertility, sat down with me to share his principles and practices for building Teams & Products. At Carrot Fertility, Pat grew the Technology team from 3 employees to over 75, spearheading Engineering, Information Security, Data Privacy, Product, Program Management, and Data functions. Pat used the "Rule of 3" framework to share his learnings across Planning/Roadmapping, Building Engineering teams and cultures, and Ensuring Execution.

• 4:20 Overall approach
  • Start from a place of curiosity and empathy. Understand your stakeholders' needs/points of view.
  • Reflect on your individual beliefs/points of view.
  • As long as you have the right people, there are many different processes that can be adapted to suit the needs of your organization.
• 7:50 Planning/Roadmapping
  • Annual Planning
  • Quarterly Planning
  • Weekly/Bi-weekly Planning
• 12:40 Building Engineering team and culture for first ten/next couple of dozen/scaling to hundreds of members
  • Technical Skills
  • Accountability
  • Team Cultivation/Communication
• 21:08 Ensuring Execution/Processes & Systems
  • Evolution (Resistance->Over-adoption->Enabling too abstractly->Pragmatic middle ground)
  • Minimum Viable Compliance (Weekly, Bi-weekly/Monthly, and Quarterly updates)
  • Flexible Team Dynamics (Daily level)

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