In this episode, Gokul Rajaram illuminates how eng leaders can better impact business outcomes & become key players in business strategy! We also address strategies for better goal setting & decision making, shifting to a customer-centric structure, recommendations for building alignment between cross-functional groups, positive collaboration between product & engineering, and how to achieve greater productivity.

Gokul Rajaram is an investor and company helper. He serves on the boards on Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. Most recently, he was an executive at DoorDash, a food ordering platform. Prior to DoorDash, he worked at Block as Product Engineering Lead, where he led several product development teams and served on Block’s executive team. Prior to Block, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook, where he helped Facebook transition its advertising business to become mobile-first. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch the product and grow it into a substantial portion of Google’s business. Gokul is also on the board of The Trade Desk and Coinbase. Gokul holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he received the President's Gold Medal for being class valedictorian. He also holds an M.B.A. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he received the MCD University Fellowship.

• Why it’s critical for eng leaders to drive business outcomes (2:04)
• How to shift your leadership to impact organizational changes (4:18)
• Facilitating conversations around setting numerical / time-driven goals (6:56)
• Navigating the shift to a customer-centric structure & approach (9:18)
• Recommendations for building around this customer-oriented model (12:04)
• Decision-making strategies when approaching customer outcomes (13:25)
• Understand the role of confidence in the decision-making process (15:40)
• Challenges faced by eng leaders when making this customer-centric shift (18:06)
• How eng leaders can introduce / reinforce accountability in eng orgs (20:11)
• Bridging the gap between PMs & eng leaders (23:07)
• Challenges / dysfunctions that prevent product & engineering alignment (25:01)
• Establishing trust, open dialogue, and mutual respect from the get-go (26:39)
• Communication frameworks that increase alignment between product & eng (32:39)
• How eng leaders can better approach “move fast & break things” demand (35:37)
• Rapid fire questions (40:19)

• Gokul’s website - Contains a collection of Gokul’s writing that covers a wide range of topics related to product development, hiring, strategy, leadership, and more!
• The Mistborn Saga - Brandon Sanderson’s high fantasy saga which chronicles the efforts of a secret group of Allomancers who attempt to overthrow a dystopian empire and establish themselves in a world covered by ash.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Ryan Fox, CTO @ Super.com, joins us to dissect his leadership transition from Vice President of Engineering to CTO. He shares how he created his own job description and – perhaps most importantly – identified & found buy-in around his “not do” list. We also cover Ryan’s favorite strategies for coaching department heads, why it’s important to focus on strategic thinking as an eng leader, tips for instilling accountability & autonomy, and defining different levels of situational leadership. Patrick and Ryan also dissect Super.com’s MAT leadership approach and how it is incorporated into their engineering functions.

Ryan Fox is the CTO at Super.com, an all-in-one app that has helped millions of customers save, earn and put over $150 million back in their pockets. Previously, Ryan worked as both a SWE and SRE at Google.

• Ryan’s background / experience with Super.com (2:04)
• What sparked his transition from VP of Engineering to CTO (3:40)
• How Ryan tackled creating his own job description (5:50)
• Strategies for prioritizing responsibilities & developing a “not to do” list (8:20)
• Process for defining what not to do (9:32)
• Examples of building buy in for a “not to do” responsibility (11:45)
• Insights on prioritizing company wide outcomes vs. departmental outcomes (13:33)
• Transitioning from a department head to coaching other department leaders (15:26)
• Components of a successful coaching conversation about strategic thinking (18:48)
• Frameworks for instilling accountability & autonomy in department heads (21:25)
• Understanding situational leadership & S3 / S4 definitions (23:08)
• Incorporating mission-aligned teams into the engineering organization (25:37)
• Why the MAT leader focuses on business, not people aspects (27:52)
• Elements that contribute to the MAT model’s success (29:32)
• The intersection of MAT & functional leadership (32:04)
• Ryan’s advice to leaders new to the MAT approach (34:20)
• Rapid fire questions (36:29)

• MAT Resource Guide - A guide to understand the Mission-Aligned Team organizational structure, how Super.com rolled out MATs, and how such a structure may be able to help your organization.
• All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, the show features insider takes on business, technology, and society and interviews with the world's most influential thinkers.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, we’re bringing listeners into the final conversations from the pop-up podcast booth at ELC Annual 2024! Patrick sat down with a few eng leaders attending the event to discuss takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 & eng leadership insights they want to share with others in the community. He chatted with Nick Hurlburt (Executive Director of the Aselo program @ Tech Matters), Manju Abraham (Vice President of Engineering, Primary Storage @ HPE), and Bhupesh Bansal (Head of Engineering - Product Server @ Square). These leaders share some of the guiding principles of their eng leadership careers, highlights from ELC Annual 2024, advice for first timers attending these types of events, and more.

Nick Hurlburt is the Executive Director of the Aselo program at Tech Matters, a nonprofit with a mission to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity. Aselo is an open source contact center platform used by crisis helplines in over 15 countries. After completing an MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Nick began his career developing early, large-scale AI software at Amazon. He then spent six years overseas working on conflict relief efforts in Burma and South Sudan before returning to the U.S., where he managed software teams at a San Francisco machine learning startup before building the initial version of Aselo as Tech Matters’ first engineer. He gets excited about systems thinking, understanding different cultures, and walking through forests reminiscent of his rural Wisconsin childhood.

Manju Abraham was VP of Engineering for Primary Storage products at HPE. She has over 25 years of experience leading Engineering organizations to deliver enterprise products of high quality, building, scaling and leading transformation, as an effective change catalyst, across companies like HPE, Delphix, NetApp, HP etc.

Entrepreneur and technical leader passionate about making a positive impact in the world. 18+ years track record of building teams, large-scale distributed systems, and consumer products scaling to 100M+ users.

• Why it’s important to incorporate non-eng principles into engineering (1:52)
• Don't run if the people can't run (4:20)
• The importance of iterating & identifying patterns that work (5:57)
• Nick’s ELC Annual 2024 highlights (7:35)
• Advice for first-time attendees to get the most out of ELC Annual (8:10)
• Challenges around cultural transformations (9:33)
• How transformations incorporate structure & order (11:35)
• Manju’s experience at / takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 (15:14)
• Advice for folks on how to get the most out of an experience like this (18:19)
• Bhupesh’s roundtable on managing yourself & learning to let go (20:17)
• When Bhupesh started to embody the principle of managing yourself (21:52)
• Frameworks for making the shift to identifying yourself as a leader (24:17)
• Top ways you can invest in yourself & final takeaways (26:27)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/