Engineering Manifestos Raj Palani

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, partners3:08 [Company Building] Building a brand based on values6:40 [Customer Discovery] Begin with your passion, conviction and skill before trying to find an underserved market8:28 [Problem Hypothesis] Poor end user experience/ease of use, Expensive/lumpy Go-To-Market/Distribution13:36 [Customer Discovery] Unearth desires in addition to pain points and needs16:04 [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

Nikhil Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, ArmorCode, sat down with me to share the story of pursuing his crazy idea to start ArmorCode during the modern world’s worst pandemic.
4:19 [Provenance] Why Nikhil embarked on the ArmorCode journey (WHY "This Problem", WHY "Now", WHY "Him")?7:10 [Pitch] Customer Pain-points & taking a "People-first" approach to solve them15:00 [People] Company Culture & how it keeps evolving23:02 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Navigating the delicate line between drinking your Kool-Aid & not getting discouraged by customer feedback26:38 [Customer Discovery (Process)] "Art" of digging deeper to uncover "true" customer feedback on your "Problem Hypothesis"

Sumanth Puram, VPE, RudderStack, shares the story of scaling the Eng team more than 10X, on the path from Customer Validation to Customer Creation.
1:58 [Provenance] Build tooling for developers3:54 [Customer Validation (Process)] Hypothesis Testing of the need for a "CDP for Developers"6:54 [People] Type of people you need in the initial team18:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Challenges with building a product for Developers23:30 [People] How Transparency helps with scaling the team31:40 [People] Book recommendation for frameworks for scaling Eng teams

Jim Bugwadia, Co-Founder and CEO, Nirmata, shares the story of conceptualizing and building Nirmata
1:38 [Provenance] Career move that helped plant the seed for building Nirmata5:19 [Pitch] Empower every SW team to operate like Netflix/Google at scale9:10 [Process] Being patient when building a company for the long term19:50 [People] Importance of communication skills in addition to Problem solving skills24:50 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source

Nat Natraj, Co-Founder and CEO, AccuKnox, shares the story of building AccuKnox.
3:50 Picking the right problem to solve7:14 [Provenance] Bringing Phil (SRI), Nat & Asif together17:56 [Pitch] Easy Button To Zero Trust23:30 [People] Picking the right investment partner & building an “All Remote” team27:20 [Customer  Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source37:30 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Testing & Qualification of Product Hypothesis

Nevo Alva, Co-Founder and CEO, Acumen, shares the challenges & learnings while scaling Eng at his previous company that led him to build a solution for addressing the pains of engineering leaders of growing organizations.
7:44 [Objectives] Weekly company updates & Product Roundtables to align Eng & Business15:48 [Values] Transparency, Ownership and Team play25:00 [Hiring] Building a team of Mentors & Mentees and Hiring for Potential29:15 [Team structure] Commando teams and Army37:00 [Process] Pragmatism, Balance & Building in early