Pat Cullen, Former SVPE, Carrot Fertility, sat down with me to share his principles and practices for building Teams & Products. At Carrot Fertility, Pat grew the Technology team from 3 employees to over 75, spearheading Engineering, Information Security, Data Privacy, Product, Program Management, and Data functions. Pat used the "Rule of 3" framework to share his learnings across Planning/Roadmapping, Building Engineering teams and cultures, and Ensuring Execution.

• 4:20 Overall approach
  • Start from a place of curiosity and empathy. Understand your stakeholders' needs/points of view.
  • Reflect on your individual beliefs/points of view.
  • As long as you have the right people, there are many different processes that can be adapted to suit the needs of your organization.
• 7:50 Planning/Roadmapping
  • Annual Planning
  • Quarterly Planning
  • Weekly/Bi-weekly Planning
• 12:40 Building Engineering team and culture for first ten/next couple of dozen/scaling to hundreds of members
  • Technical Skills
  • Accountability
  • Team Cultivation/Communication
• 21:08 Ensuring Execution/Processes & Systems
  • Evolution (Resistance->Over-adoption->Enabling too abstractly->Pragmatic middle ground)
  • Minimum Viable Compliance (Weekly, Bi-weekly/Monthly, and Quarterly updates)
  • Flexible Team Dynamics (Daily level)

Deepak Sheoran, Founder & CTO, DwellFi, sat down with me to share his principles and practices for building Teams & Products.

• 2:20 Areas a CTO/VPE needs to focus on during the early days
• 7:20 Details in the daily status updates that he focuses on
• 8:05 Secret sauce for 5-10X productivity gains over the competition
• 8:52 How to leverage AI for your Engineering team
• 11:11 How to go about making technology choices
• 14:16 Framework for Engineering bandwidth allocation
• 19:00 Framework for Engineering Goals
• 25:10 Things he would have done differently

Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO, DevRev, and Co-Founder & Former CEO, Nutanix, sat down with me to share his wisdom on Company Building, Customer Discovery and Building Culture & Teams.

• 3:08 [Company Building] Building relationships with people, viz. end users, buyers, customers, employees, partners
• 3:08 [Company Building] Building a brand based on values
• 6:40 [Customer Discovery] Begin with your passion, conviction and skill before trying to find an underserved market
• 8:28 [Problem Hypothesis] Poor end user experience/ease of use, Expensive/lumpy Go-To-Market/Distribution
• 13:36 [Customer Discovery] Unearth desires in addition to pain points and needs
• 16:04 [Building Teams] Look for underserved people (rebels, people who want to make a difference, people who can think visually, people who can execute)
• 21:24 [Building Culture] Embracing a Design Culture