In this episode, Vinod Marur (SVP of Engineering @ Databricks) shares his approach to recalibrating leadership priorities as organizations scale. Vinod breaks down his personal recalibration framework—why he does it every 3–6 months, signals that it’s time to reassess, and how to design communication and collaboration structures that reduce information asymmetry during periods of rapid growth. We dive into rewriting hiring playbooks, tailoring recruitment pitches, and the impact of AI on hiring. Plus actionable strategies for onboarding and empowering senior leaders, identifying the highest-leverage problems to solve, and finding champions to carry key initiatives forward.
Vinod Marur is the SVP of Engineering at Databricks. He was previously at Rubrik where he served as SVP Engineering and established a mature engineering organization geared for rapid product development and innovation with a deep focus on product quality and organizational development. Prior to that Vinod spent nearly 15 years in leadership roles across some of Google’s most critical business units, including Search, Ads, and Payments as well as tapping into his passion for developer platforms to create and lead the Actions on Google platform, used by third parties to develop for Google Assistant and other Google products.
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SHOW NOTES:
- Vinod’s process for recalibrating his leadership focus / priorities (2:25)
- Why routine can be dangerous & the mental shift required to prioritize impact (4:17)
- Examples of pivoting & how Vinod’s leadership priorities adapted (7:57)
- Strategies for assessing core priorities when scaling (9:39)
- Identifying where the most leverage is for your time (11:05)
- Signals that it’s time to recalibrate your organization’s priorities (13:27)
- Solving for information asymmetry: designing communication and collaboration structures (16:20)
- Rewriting hiring playbooks & tailoring recruitment pitches in a shifting market (18:56)
- Hiring tactics that worked five years ago that don’t anymore (21:21)
- The impact of AI on hiring practices (22:55)
- Current factors impacting hiring engineering leaders (25:30)
- Vinod’s framework for identifying the right problems to solve when transitioning to a new role (27:14)
- “The best leaders often start small, and progress to tackle larger problems” (28:33)
- Strategies for accelerating the impact of senior cross-functional partners (29:40)
- Obsessing over a single organizational goal & identifying champions to carry initiatives forward (31:25)
- Vinod’s latest obsession: the implementation and evolution of operational reviews (33:48)
- Rapid fire questions (36:36)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
- ACQUIRED - Acquired tells the stories and strategies of great companies, hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Acquired is a depth-first show. Episodes are 3-4 hours long, and are better described as "conversational audiobooks" than "podcasts." Episodes occasionally feature guests, such as the founders/CEOs of NVIDIA, Berkshire Hathaway, Starbucks, Meta, Spotify, Uber, Zoom, CAA, Sequoia Capital, and all five Benchmark partners.
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/
