A lesson you learned as an engineering leader

Yeah. It’s a good question. I was asked that question during the interview. What were my hard-learned lessons? I could easily come up with few. I could not easily define what was the hardest one. When I came back I start thinking about it and this is where this article came from. The answer is the same for me today as well. When you are a hiring manager and you build your team, it seems, especially in the Bay Area, everyone has multiple offers. To hire, making sure somebody will come work for you, you need to fight for every single person.

Yeah, that’s a good one. One of the things that I’ve learned, and this is very common it goes across all disciplines, the hardest problems are around communication and talking to people at the right time with the right context, the right tone and we have a saying: expect best interests. If you come from a place that like hey, I’m here to work for you as a manager. That’s usually how I see things. But being able to have that empathy for the individual contributor who you’re managing, so they can see that you’re working for them as opposed to the inverse, I think it’s one of the biggest challenges and it’s all about, like I said,…

One of the most recent stories I can share is about Base Web’s versioning policy and release cadence – it’s both a technical and a people problem. Initially, when we started building the component library our biggest concern was to build as many of the components of the design spec as quickly as possible, so engineers can start leveraging them. With this mentality, we released 30+ components in a short period of time – but we also ended up with 4 major versions. Initially, bumping majors frequently was not an issue – barely anyone used our library. As more and more teams started adopting Base Web, it was very frustrating for product teams to…

This is a great question. One of the lessons that I have learned is to show a “detached attachment.” It’s a great term that I learned from my mentor that as an engineering leader or as a leader, one of the things that you have to do or you have start showing is attachment towards your team, the product, the quality of the product or the quality towards making your team deliver better or be very highly productive. At the same time, be detached about it. So, this is a great lesson that I have learned that do not get emotionally attached, but at the same time think objectively, try to make the right objective decisions. Do not try to take hasty…

Yeah, this is a hard one and I’m glad I learned it, but I definitely learned it the hard way. I’ve had a lot of good fortune to work with different people with very different backgrounds and performances. And for some folks when we have the performance improvement conversation, I think earlier in my management trajectory, I didn’t say things as clearly as I should have. I had an experience where after the performance review, the employee left the review feeling they have done a good job, while my intention was to say, “You need to work a lot harder, so, to meet the expectations.” And…

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple of different ways to go with this. One is assuming that I knew everything and not asking enough questions to really get to the foundation of what the problem was that we were trying to resolve. You get into the problem solving mode and everything looks like a nail because you’ve got a hammer. You forget oftentimes that now, especially with so many different integrations, so many different opportunities and complexities of systems, it’s not necessarily always the same as what you’ve seen before. Asking good questions instead of just assuming that I knew the answer that’s been a lesson that regularly gets…

Yes. I think the lesson I always keep going back to is, relationships transcend companies. We might be sharing the same company today, I know I’m working on the same job, but these relationships that you build with humans and their stories matter. I’ll give you an example. So, last year as I was leaving my role at Model N, I went to say goodbye to my team that I had in place for eight years in Ukraine. And, while on the last day, prior to me leaving, my team asked me if I would volunteer…having spend some time with youth were at risk and motivate them to pick up a career in tech.

Certainly, but let me first start that we are all humans and we all make mistakes. I was leading one of the critical projects during the Hyperion and Brio software integration. Then I was promoted like I mentioned, I was an accidental manager. When I was promoted, I was more fear of bringing the team that I came with like from the Brio team rather than giving equal value or listening to my management, managing them equally. I was a little bit inclined towards the team I used to work with. And one of the lessons that I learned from that was to give your team equal opportunity and get to know them and team what that really means.