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...

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 effec...

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 Pl...

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 makin...

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] Beg...

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...

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)] Cha...

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 sol...

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 So...

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...

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...

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 valu...

 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 quality 15:00 Customizing development methodologies to work for your company culture; Building & Operating SaaS (BOSS), a page from VMware’s Engineering M...