Nurture.Team Sujay Maheshwari

We surely have seen a lot of folks who get caught up with fancy job titles and then there are others who do not care about what their title says - they just love what they do.
There is merit to having a title but when do you recognize that your job title isn’t fulfilling enough? What criteria you pick to may be “step down a level from your current role” and still stay happy in your next role? Is it alright for an individual to move from a VP to may be a Director Role to even just a manager role? Does it affect their future prospects?
On this episode I spoke to Zeesha who had a very interesting journey from a VP at Evernote to a Director at Branch Metrics and then to Senior Manager at LinkedIn.

The "pipeline excuse" is the most common term heard in building a diverse team.
In this episode, I speak to Michelle Gluaser (CEO of Techtonica) and we discuss
What is diversity? How to measure it and what’s a realistic timeline/ metric to improvise on it? How to deal with "I am not finding candidates for the open roles to build a diverse team" excuse - and how can this be fixed?  Finally I want to know the role of a hiring manager, HR organization and company’s leadership in fixing the pipeline excuse problem. About Techtonica and Michelle:
Techtonica was started to break down the barriers into tech for the people who are most underrepresented in tech and most in danger of displacement by tech. Techtonica is a non-profit that provides tuition-free tech training to low-income women and non-binary adults and places them in positions at sponsoring companies that are ready to support more diverse teams. Support the cause to #BridgeTheTechGap? You can donate by going to https://techtonica.org/donate
Prior to founding Techtonica, she was a Community Developer at Twilio and held software engineering roles at Zana, Get Satisfaction and various other companies.
 

In this episode we explore:
What does it take to build a high functioning team? How do you build a team which transforms itself at every stage of the company? What are the pitfalls to avoid when hiring and scaling in the growth stage?
About the guest?
Vishal Sankhla is currently a Director Of Engineering at Facebook. Earlier he has been a Product leader at Uber. Prior to Uber he was a Co-founder of ViralHeat which was backed by Mayfield and had a successful exit to Cision. He lives in the Bay area, California.

What does alignment in a company mean? Why it’s important and how can it be achieved? Who are the actors who play a critical role in getting this accomplished.
This episode will resonate with almost everyone. Doesn’t matter what size of their company, or the vertical they work in or the geography they are part of.

I have been in an age several years ago where there were dedicated DBA, Database developers, server-side developers and so on.
Lately, we hear more about “we are hiring Full-stack developer” and an engineer should be able to maneuver across any stack/ technology.
I want to learn from Diane why an organization needs front-end engineers and the value they brings to the table.
In this episode we talk about:
What is the definition of a front-end engineer? Why hire a front-end engineer? Do you think front-end engineers are a special category like a BI engineer or AI engineer? And how does it fit with full-stack engineering? How engineering leaders or organizations should invest in building a team of front-end engineers?

How to retain the culture of the company during Hyper growth phase. When a company goes through high growth spurts, we hear this a lot - “When we were small, we had a great culture. But it’s all lost now. Our culture has changed. It doesn’t feel like the way it use to”. Right?
I bet some of us have been part of this journey and have felt the same - or perhaps you could have heard this from the early employees.
I wanted to learn "What can an individual and the management teams of the fast growing startup do to retain the culture during its growth phase."
Guest for this episode:
Our guest today is Jim Miller. Jim needs no introduction. But still let me name few accomplishment he has achieved so far.  
He is a member of Board of directors at Wayfair He is a non-executive board member and director at Brambles He is part of technical advisory network at Boston Consulting Group He was CEO and now a strategic advisor at Arevo He is on various advisory board for Santa Clara University, Purdue University and visiting committee for IDSS @ MIT. In the past he has worked at VP of WW Operations at Google (for ~8 years), was VP of Supply Chain and Operations at Cisco, and at Amazon. A summary of this episode and several other such pearls of wisdom on creating a great team can be found at https://podcast.nurture.team