Posts

Last week, I was chatting with a small group of folks, early to mid-level engineers trying to figure out how to grow without getting stuck in the “just keep grinding” loop. The one where you work hard, stay low-key, and hope someone notices. So I wrote down a bunch of thoughts based on what’s helped some of the best in my team get noticed and grow faster If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: hard work is rarely the problem. Most people are already putting in the hours. But visibility, leverage and momentum? That’s where things start to click. ...

AI is everywhere — but figuring out where it actually helps (and where it doesn’t) is still very much a work in progress. In my current role, I lead 2 charters - tooling for customer success and improve engineering productivity. Over the last few months, we have been carefully exploring how AI can play a meaningful role across both. When automating Customer support, the tolerance for error is low. We can’t afford to mess things up. Every touchpoint matters - understanding their language, reducing back and forth, empathising with their frustrations. The customer usually reaches out after they’ve tried everything else. It’s not enough to be correct - the customer needs to feel that their concern is actually being addressed. ...

If you’re a fan of Severance, you’ll get the title. Your innie clocks in and does the job. Your outie lives the rest of your life, and the two never really know each other. Sometimes I feel like my own version of that. I’ve spent so long optimising for the innie - work, productivity, performance. Only now starting to wonder: who is the outie? What does he enjoy, beyond the job, beyond the career? ...

I am skeptical of frameworks that prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach to executing a role. Most leadership literature focuses on how to be a good boss, but seldom addresses how to effectively help your team achieve their best. As engineering leaders responsible for a diverse team of super-smart engineers, we need to tailor our approach to each team member’s abilities and personalities. I recently attended a leadership workshop on “Situational Leadership” which made good sense. The idea is to indentify what stage of performance and maturity one’s team-members fit into and accordingly play a different role to help them succeed. The official docs are all fancy so I try to simplify this per my understanding. ...

We all struggle with managing time. We want to do 100 different things, but we have only so many hours every day. At work, most of our hours are governed by stakeholders and teammates. This is typical for most of us working in a product-engineering org. An ideal day is when you work 100% on what you planned to achieve. But the reality is so much different. Propose a new idea for that feature Review the doc shared on Slack Read the interesting article Help out a new teammate get onboarded Learn that new tool and play around with it Handle escalations from stakeholders Prepare for leadership connects Think of ways to improve the team’s productivity The longer someone has been part of a team, the larger their laundry list becomes, and the more overwhelming it gets. There are so many random things which you need to get involved in whether you like or not. Morever, it is common knowledge that people who take the ownership of things beyond what is expected out of them, and add more value to their customers, are the ones who see faster growth in their careers. ...