Essential questions & leadership principles to navigate change, fear & uncertainty w/ Rukmini Reddy #214
Apr 1, 2025
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Rukmini Reddy, Senior Vice President of Engineering at PagerDuty, shares her insights on navigating change and uncertainty in tech leadership. She discusses the evolution of engineering roles post-pandemic, highlighting the rise of financial acumen and emotional intelligence. Reddy emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions to align teams with their mission and the necessity of creating safe spaces for open communication. Additionally, she introduces a seven-step framework to guide organizations through transitions, fostering a culture of resilience and adaptability.
Engineering leadership has evolved to prioritize resilience and crisis management as teams navigate rapid changes and uncertainties post-pandemic.
Financial acumen has become essential for engineering leaders, necessitating alignment between engineering initiatives and broader business goals to drive customer value.
The concept of 'hugging the elephant' encourages leaders to acknowledge emotional challenges within their teams, fostering trust and openness during transitions.
Deep dives
Expanding Professional Networks
Virtual meetups and one-on-one match events are being hosted in over 30 cities worldwide to help engineering leaders expand their professional networks. These events provide opportunities for participants to connect, share insights, and explore future collaborations in a lightweight and engaging manner. To participate, individuals can visit the elc.community website, navigate to the chapters section, and find their local event to RSVP. This initiative encourages professionals to start building meaningful connections in their city today.
Evolving Leadership in Uncertain Times
The role of engineering leadership has significantly evolved from 2021 to 2025, especially in response to the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent technological advancements. Leaders are now tasked with navigating transition and uncertainty while fostering resilience within their teams. A key focus is on crisis management, operational reliability, and maintaining a connection to business goals amid rapid digital transformation. This evolution necessitates an adaptive leadership style that prioritizes clear communication and empathy as teams face new challenges.
Critical Leadership Skills for 2025
As engineering leadership continues to evolve, the importance of financial acumen has emerged as a critical skill for leaders, surpassing the previous focus on hiring. Understanding the financial implications of technology decisions is now essential for aligning engineering efforts with broader business objectives. Leaders are expected to communicate how engineering efforts contribute to customer value and business success, thereby creating a more integrated approach to leadership. This shift underscores the need for leaders to continuously adapt their skill sets to meet evolving business demands.
Hugging the Elephant: Emotional Leadership
The concept of 'hugging the elephant' emphasizes addressing the emotional aspects of leadership during times of change. Leaders are encouraged to engage in self-reflection and explore their own fears and uncertainties, enabling them to better support their teams. By acknowledging the emotional landscape, leaders can facilitate open conversations that foster trust and psychological safety. This approach allows teams to process their emotions, making it easier to navigate transitions and adapt to evolving circumstances.
Navigating AI Adoption in Engineering
With the rapid integration of AI technologies into engineering workflows, leaders must guide their teams through the transition from informed pessimism to curious optimism. This involves addressing common fears regarding job security and the reliability of AI tools while fostering a culture of experimentation and learning. Leaders can support their teams by promoting evangelism, encouraging experimentation, enabling skill development, and implementing measurable goals. By focusing on the benefits AI can bring to team productivity and customer satisfaction, leaders can help their teams embrace this transformation more confidently.
Rukmini Reddy is the Senior Vice President of Engineering, responsible for managing product and platform delivery, infrastructure, and data science. Reddy joins PagerDuty from Slack where she guided the vision, strategy, and execution of a comprehensive re-architecture, transforming the messaging software into an automation platform that empowered users to streamline their work.
Additionally, Rukmini spent over a decade in senior executive roles at various enterprise companies, where she built a strong track record in driving engineering and product strategy during periods of hyper-growth and product transformation across SaaS, B2B, and B2C business models.
Rukmini has a master of science degree in computer engineering from the University of Arkansas and earned a bachelor’s degree from Osmania University in computer science and engineering.
SHOW NOTES:
How the role of engineering leadership has evolved from 2021 to 2025 (2:35)
The rising importance of financial acumen & enduring importance of resilience in engineering leadership (5:28)
Key questions to ground and align your team with mission, vision, customer impact, and position to win the market (7:04)
What it means to become the leader your business needs (9:31)
“Hugging the elephant” and overcoming fear & uncertainty in 2021 vs. today (12:26)
Five questions to help you lead your team through transitions and change (16:03)
How to incorporate this framework to drive org change with empathy (18:10)
How to address questions about job security and future roles within an organization (20:21)
Strategies to guide your team through unspoken fears & unknowns (23:47)
Rukmini’s advice to create high-trust, high-impact sources of support through fear, uncertainty, and doubt for the first time (25:19)
Navigating org change from first principles (27:21)
How to move from the “informed pessimism” dip to “curious optimism” as a team & org (30:00)
Using evangelism & experimentation to tackle common adoption fears (34:07)
Examples of enablement & skill development / delivery (37:32)
The role of enforcement in the adoption transformation curve (39:07)
Rapid fire questions (42:33)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters -Richard P. Rumelt clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.
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