Vinod Marur, SVP of Engineering at Databricks, shares his vast expertise from leading teams at Google and Rubrik. He discusses the need for leaders to recalibrate their priorities in dynamic environments, emphasizing the danger of routine. Vinod offers strategies for assessing core priorities and maximizing leverage on time management. He also talks about evolving hiring practices in the AI era, the importance of building accountability through team rituals, and how effective communication fosters a culture of strategic growth.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Recalibrating Leadership Focus
Regularly assess your activities to ensure alignment with top priorities.
Embrace change and prioritize responding to important, timely needs over rigid routines.
insights INSIGHT
Routine Can Be Dangerous
While routine one-on-ones offer structure, prioritizing urgent business needs over them is sometimes crucial.
Flexibility allows addressing critical tasks, but balance is key to compensate for any trade-offs.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Pivoting Leadership Priorities
Vinod realized that prioritizing innovation over operational aspects like reliability and stability can negatively impact customer satisfaction.
This requires a shift in focus, cadence, and communication, even if it means developing new structures.
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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.
ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.
Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.
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.
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