Interview with Eugene Bochkarev, VP of Engineering at Xero

Vidal: Welcome Eugene. It’s great to have you here on the show. How are you today?



EUGENE: Hi Vidal. Thank you for having me here.



Tell us about Yourself



Vidal: Could you tell me a little bit about your role and what does Xero do?



EUGENE: I’m VP of engineering in San Francisco office of Xero. Xero is online accounting system for small businesses. We provide the whole spectrum of tools on web and mobile for a small business to do accounting on the go. You can do invoices, expenses, bills, manage your inventory, reconcile bank balance. of the most important things Xero provides is more than 800 tools and integrations with the different accounting and financial systems.



Vidal: I noticed your title. It says “acting” VP of engineering. What does it mean “acting”?



EUGENE: Acting means I’m temporarily lead the engineering in the San Francisco office during transition of the product development to different offices. It’s a good challenge owning a global product transition, being responsible for a lot of people. Make sure that my teams still deliver on committed releases, complete the knowledge transfer, and still feel positive and engaged. I think e biggest part of my role here is to make sure people feel motivated to come to the office every day.



Vidal: Oh wow. One of the questions I was going to ask is what your biggest challenge is. Is that your biggest challenge to keep people motivated and transition it successfully?



EUGENE: Maybe, right now yes. If you think about a general engineering manager’s life, I would talk about different challenges, but when you are in a transition, and it doesn’t really matter on which side of the transition you are, it’s always about how to make extra effort to keep people motivated. Because when you transition a product that you’ve worked for a long time, it’s always important to feel that the effort, years, and hard work you put in a product is not lost. It’s still there.



What I like about Xero culture, I can see that even with transitioning product development back to New Zealand, they still will be successful products. The products will continue to grow, provide good services to small businesses. I think that’s what motivates people to come to the office and continue to transition the knowledge. Good question by the way.



What’s your background and how did you get into management?



Vidal: That’s great. That must be very interesting to have to do that when the people know that work is going away. I think that’s a good approach you have to it. We’ll get back to the general challenge of management. I would like to hear that. I know your background. I know you worked for example at Intuit for a long time. You worked at Chariot. Maybe you can talk a little about your background and how did you transition into management?



EUGENE: I have a really typical for engineer manager path. I worked more than 20 years as an engineer. Honestly I didn’t really want to go into management. I was really happy to be one of lead engineers and working hard on engineering challenges. At the same time I was kind of pushedinto management position. Pretty typical where a new engineering manager would say, “Oh, you know what? You want me to be a manager? Fine. I’ll continue doing engineering and I do some management on the side.”



I’m lucky. I had really complicated first few years. I got in a lot of troubles.