Align & Scale Engineering AND Product with Jeremy Henrickson #38

Jeremy Henrickson VP Engineering & Product @ Rippling shares how to align, lead and scale a combined engineering and product organization! You’ll learn about the common tension points while scaling, different ways to structure your org, when to combine your orgs vs. split, and how to realign your teams when expectations get out of sync. Plus how to build credibility with new teams and acquire product skills as an engineering leader!

“When I have like a number of teams and each of them has like a product leader AND an engineering leader... the expectation that I set with them is like, "Look, you guys are gonna have different points of view. And that's okay. But when you come to me, you either need to one, have a really clear, shared point of view on something, because you've gone into this together and have thought it out. Or a clear point of disagreement, so that you know, we can tie break on, okay, which one of these is actually more important right now?"

And either one of those is totally fine. But a shared understanding of the facts, a shared understanding of the trade-offs is sort of the floor that I draw on those conversations.”

JEREMY HENRICKSON, VP PRODUCT & ENGINEERING @ RIPPLING

Jeremy Henrickson is responsible for scaling a world-class engineering team across two continents. Previously as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, he oversaw 5x growth of the product and engineering organization and transformed a scrappy startup into a global cryptocurrency platform with millions of users. He began his career at Apple in the 1990s and holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford. Jeremy enjoys playing board games and piano with his kids.

SHOWNOTES

• Jeremy’s experience scaling engineering and product at Coinbase (3:00)
• How to bridge the gap between engineering and product (5:26)
• How to think about hiring the right people for early and growth stages of a company (7:56)
• Finding both true believers AND skills for scaling + navigating hiring doubt through the “crypto-winter” (9:37)
• Common tension points while scaling engineering and product organizations (14:27)
• How much technical detail and context should be shared between product and engineering? (19:00)
• How to build trust and credibility when you’re leading a new team (21:11)
• Dunbar’s number and the different phases of scaling a product and engineering organization (25:43)
• Different ways to structure engineering and product organizations (29:20)
• When You Should Combine Engineering and Product Orgs & Jeremys different approaches with Rippling, Coinbase & Guidewire (35:16)
• What to do if you want to pursue a career in product AND eng leadership (40:13)
• How to get engineering & product aligned when they have misaligned expectations (43:02)
• Where to begin if you’re an engineering leader who just took over product manager responsibilities (45:21)
• Takeaways (46:29)
   

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