Optimizing Virtual Teams and Scaling Engineering Teams for Customer Persona Focus

In Part 3 of the Top 10 Challenges series, we’re addressing the biggest org-level challenges that eng leaders face. We’ve compiled conversations from past podcasts and conference sessions that cover org-related topics, such as aligning engineering & business goals, team topologies & org resourcing, and thinking strategically. This episode features a slate of top eng leaders with valuable insight to share: Jessica McKellar @ Pilot, Andrew Lau @ Jellyfish, Samir Naik @ Plaid, Former VPE @ Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, Aaron Erickson @ NVIDIA, Mike Tria @ Gusto, Emad Elwany @ Docusign, and Scott Woody @ Metronome.

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SHOW NOTES:

• Aligning Engineering and Business Goals: Invest in tracking metrics to identify / meet long-term business-building goals w/ Jessica McKellar (00:43)
• How to align metrics with overall, long-term business strategy w/ Andrew Lau (4:56)
• Planning Team Topologies and Organizational Resources: the transition between PMF & scale-up w/ Samir Naik (12:12)
• Approaching org design & planning during periods of hypergrowth w/ Surabhi Gupta (18:45)
• How to do an effective reorg w/ Aaron Erickson and Mike Tria (24:41)
• Strategic Thinking: Organizing engineering by strategic themes & complete units of value w/ Emad Elwany (30:12)
• The transition from a large unified eng team to embedding experts and building specialized teams catered to specific customer personas w/ Scott Woody (37:26)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Becoming a better strategic contributor & business leader with Jessica McKellar
• Navigating 2024: Engineering management principles to tackle the unknowns & challenges ahead with Andrew Lau
• How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth with Samir Naik
• Hypergrowth, Scaling & Org Design with Surabhi Gupta
• How to Do an Effective Reorg with Aaron Erickson and Mike Tria
• Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity with Emad Elwany
• Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models with Scott Woody

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

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/