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 oversight11:30 Frequency of change in tools and methodologies for building with AI15:18 Leveraging AI to improve Engineering/Product/Design Team capacity17:47 Adapting to AI Tooling changes by constantly revisiting your Engineering Process22:53 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 Tools6:34 AI-enabled Requirements Capture/Design/Review Process: How to get it right?9:45 Codifying your Engineering Process to leverage AI Tooling effectively12:25 Why you need a QA-first mindset to leverage AI effectively?18:50 AI-enabled Testing & Automation21:20 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 approachStart 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/RoadmappingAnnual PlanningQuarterly PlanningWeekly/Bi-weekly Planning12:40 Building Engineering team and culture for first ten/next couple of dozen/scaling to hundreds of membersTechnical SkillsAccountabilityTeam Cultivation/Communication21:08 Ensuring Execution/Processes & SystemsEvolution (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 days7:20 Details in the daily status updates that he focuses on8:05 Secret sauce for 5-10X productivity gains over the competition8:52 How to leverage AI for your Engineering team11:11 How to go about making technology choices14:16 Framework for Engineering bandwidth allocation19:00 Framework for Engineering Goals25:10 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, partners3:08 [Company Building] Building a brand based on values6:40 [Customer Discovery] Begin with your passion, conviction and skill before trying to find an underserved market8:28 [Problem Hypothesis] Poor end user experience/ease of use, Expensive/lumpy Go-To-Market/Distribution13:36 [Customer Discovery] Unearth desires in addition to pain points and needs16:04 [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 them15:00 [People] Company Culture & how it keeps evolving23:02 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Navigating the delicate line between drinking your Kool-Aid & not getting discouraged by customer feedback26:38 [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 developers3:54 [Customer Validation (Process)] Hypothesis Testing of the need for a "CDP for Developers"6:54 [People] Type of people you need in the initial team18:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Challenges with building a product for Developers23:30 [People] How Transparency helps with scaling the team31:40 [People] Book recommendation for frameworks for scaling Eng teams

Jim Bugwadia, Co-Founder and CEO, Nirmata, shares the story of conceptualizing and building Nirmata1:38 [Provenance] Career move that helped plant the seed for building Nirmata5:19 [Pitch] Empower every SW team to operate like Netflix/Google at scale9:10 [Process] Being patient when building a company for the long term19:50 [People] Importance of communication skills in addition to Problem solving skills24:50 [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 solve7:14 [Provenance] Bringing Phil (SRI), Nat & Asif together17:56 [Pitch] Easy Button To Zero Trust23:30 [People] Picking the right investment partner & building an “All Remote” team27:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source37:30 [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 & Business15:48 [Values] Transparency, Ownership and Team play25:00 [Hiring] Building a team of Mentors & Mentees and Hiring for Potential29:15 [Team structure] Commando teams and Army37:00 [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 market9:30 [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 fit27:05 [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 resources53:10 [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 fast11:05 [Values] Examples of Rubrik values in action (RIVET)22:02 [Collaboration] Building a connected team & traits of good mentors for helping scale an organization33:30 [On-boarding & Off-boarding] Welcoming and bidding farewell to team members39:17 [Tools(Programming Languages/Frameworks)] Picking the right tool for the job while balancing cognitive overload44:20 [Architectural Decisions] Empowering the team to make & own their decisions50:10 [Company Building] Enjoy the ride with the people

 Hüseyin Dursun, VPE/Head of Engineering Services, VMware, shares his teams' Principles & Practices wrt Engineering Culture, Organization, and Process & Systems, as part of the DevOps transformation at VMware.8:37 Everyone owns quality15:00 Customizing development methodologies to work for your company culture; Building & Operating SaaS (BOSS), a page from VMware’s Engineering Manifesto27:30 Book recommendation for leaders or anyone involved in Engineering/Technology development; Hiring for values without undermining diversity; Metaphor for thinking about your teams34:30 Psychological safety for effective Post-mortems and readouts44:44 DevOps vs SRE; Promoting collaboration between Development engineers & SREs; Developing SREs49:35 Psychological safety for effective Pre-mortems (Production Readiness Assessment (PRA))55:30 Managing error budgetsVideo of the show