Silicon Valley is a hotbed of technology innovation, scrappy startups, and has seen the rise of a few lucky startups to be worldwide industry titans.

Most innovations try to solve problems cheaper, faster and better.

I immigrated to the US, and Silicon Valley at the end of the dotcom boom cycle (just before 2000). And shortly after that, America as a super power went through a generational transformation with the shocking terrorism attacks of 9/11.

At the time of the dotcom bust and Y2K fallout, I lucked out to be employed in etrade.com, which is one of the few dotcom survivors.

I switched to technology management at my time in E*TRADE. Once I had obtained my green card, I felt no longer time and employer constrained.

I caught the startup bug that is prevalent in the valley. I joined my first startup (Right90) as employee number 20 or so. The product allowed its users to manage and perform sales forecasting using a web browser with an excel like UI. The product was a hit with enterprise users, but it could not command the premium required to keep the startup afloat.

My second startup (YouSendIt) looked more promising. It allowed users to send and share large files. At its highest point, the company had around half a million paying customers! In hindsight, the big miss was the company’s inability to harness and exploit the switch to mobile that happened with the launch of iPhone.

After spending almost a decade in startups, I started to apply the lessons learned at more established companies. I currently work as a director of software engineering at larger firms.

I lead with technology. I am a big picture person and I love to build cheaper, faster, and better software solutions. I try to understand and keep abreast of new useful patterns being birthed and developed in the industry, and perform thought experiments if a composition could be useful in a given context.

Overall, I enjoy working on challenging problems and delivering tangible outcomes. Over the years, I have been fortunate to work and help advance careers of many smart engineers.

I am a specialist in building, managing and operating web software platforms, with the following ilities:

  1. Configurability: program and or system behavior can change with settings.
  2. Extensibility: allow users of the system to add behavior to various parts of the system.
  3. Reliability: have the system fail in known ways, so that it is recoverable by users and system operators
  4. High performing: ensure that the system scales well to the demands put on by ever increasing volume of data
  5. Secure and compliant: manage user information in a way that ensures it remains private, authorized, and adheres to laws of the land

Software platforms are complex beasts, and requires savvy technology management. Multiple software engineering teams are needed to keep them working well. My philosophy to keep them healthy is simple:

  1. Identify gaps where customers aren’t served well. Collaborate with existing people working in those areas, and develop a strong understanding of existing process and its limitations.
  2. Assign and align team charter and mission statements to problem ownership. Each team documents these agreements in an up to date document, which is shared with engineering stakeholders on a monthly cadence.
  3. Encourage the assigned team to define and deliver incremental outcomes (OKRs) for those problems. Ensure that there exists a healthy and adequate feedback loop for the team to improve their solutions over time.
  4. Promote a culture of diversity and inclusion. Ensure mutual respect, communication, trust, work life balance along with a fun environment.

I have multiple senior engineer and manager reports. We keep weekly 1:1s to have candid no holds barred discussions:

  1. To develop a personal rapport where we become familiar with each others strengths, motivations, and improvement areas
  2. To keep abreast of talent development, and assess if existing opportunities are enough to help foster growth
  3. To explore the problem area together, and brainstorm solutions

A regular staff meeting is a focused review of current project priorities, risks, and upcoming interesting milestones.

I keep monthly skip level 1:1s, so that understanding of customer problems, project risks, talent risk remains crisp across my organization.

I summarize my work in a quarterly check in document. This tends to also result in coming up with new improvement proposals. These proposals can range widely, for example, starting a new team building activity to widening an existing teams charter for a newly understood gap. The proposal document is widely shared for feedback, commentary and action.

In my 1:1s with my peers, project stakeholders, and my manager, I provide updates on upcoming milestones, enumerate existing risk, and most importantly listen hard for feedback on how well we are performing. These discussions can result in action items that are delegated either to my directs or even a change in existing work for teams.