We go on a journey with Engineering/Technology leaders to understand their approach to Engineering strategy, viz. how they figure out what is needed from the Engineering team to help their company win, and how they apply that to their Engineering teams.
Each company context (company, business, marketplace, competitive environment) at a given point in time is unique. In order to succeed, a set of choices within Engineering on Objectives, Culture, Organization and Process & Systems needs to be made. We seek to gain an understanding of the tools and practices/processes for building teams and products to help companies win.
Mohan Umapathy : Building AI-enabled Teams & Products
Mohan Umapathy, Founder & CEO, Qikr AI, sat down with me to share his experience building AI-enabled Teams & Products. 5:45 Leveraging AI to improve teacher productivity, student learning effectiveness, and administrator intervention oversight 11:30 Frequency of change in tools and methodologies for building with AI 15:18 Leveraging AI to improve Engineering/Product/Design Team capacity 17:47 Adapting to AI Tooling changes by constantly revisiting your Engineering Process 22:53 Skill...
25 Jul 2025
Deepak Sheoran: Building AI-enabled Teams & Products
Deepak Sheoran, Founder & CTO, DwellFi, sat down with me to share his experience building AI-enabled Teams & Products. As a hands-on technology leader Deepak has valuable insights to share. 3:58 Adoption & Budgeting Framework for AI Tools6:34 AI-enabled Requirements Capture/Design/Review Process: How to get it right?9:45 Codifying your Engineering Process to leverage AI Tooling effectively12:25 Why you need a QA-first mindset to leverage AI effectively?18:50 AI-enabled Testing &am...
20 Dec 2024
Building Teams and Products with Pat Cullen
Pat Cullen, a seasoned leader, shares actionable principles for building high-performing teams and products by leveraging the 'Rule of 3' framework to drive scalable engineering and product success.
21 May 2024
Building Teams & Products with Deepak Sheoran
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
20 Nov 2022
Building DevRev with Dheeraj Pandey
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
27 Mar 2022
Building ArmorCode with Nikhil Gupta
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 them
15:00 [People] Company Culture & how it keeps evolving
23:02 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Navigating the delicate line between drinking your Kool-Aid & not getting discouraged by customer feedback
26:38 [Customer Discovery (Process)] "Art" of digging deeper to uncover "true" customer feedback on your "Problem Hypothesis"
7 Mar 2022
Building Eng at RudderStack with Sumanth Puram
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 developers
3:54 [Customer Validation (Process)] Hypothesis Testing of the need for a "CDP for Developers"
6:54 [People] Type of people you need in the initial team
18:20 [Customer Validation (Process)] Challenges with building a product for Developers
23:30 [People] How Transparency helps with scaling the team
31:40 [People] Book recommendation for frameworks for scaling Eng teams
6 Mar 2022
Building Nirmata with Jim Bugwadia
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 Nirmata
5:19 [Pitch] Empower every SW team to operate like Netflix/Google at scale
9:10 [Process] Being patient when building a company for the long term
19:50 [People] Importance of communication skills in addition to Problem solving skills
24:50 [Customer Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source
31 Dec 2021
Building AccuKnox with Nat Natraj
Nat Natraj, Co-Founder and CEO, AccuKnox, shares the story of building AccuKnox.
3:50 Picking the right problem to solve
7:14 [Provenance] Bringing Phil (SRI), Nat & Asif together
17:56 [Pitch] Easy Button To Zero Trust
23:30 [People] Picking the right investment partner & building an “All Remote” team
27:20 [Customer Validation (Process)] Product & Go To Market (GTM) Pivot to Open Source
37:30 [Customer Discovery (Process)] Testing & Qualification of Product Hypothesis
28 Nov 2021
Building Acumen with Nevo Alva
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 & Business
15:48 [Values] Transparency, Ownership and Team play
25:00 [Hiring] Building a team of Mentors & Mentees and Hiring for Potential
29:15 [Team structure] Commando teams and Army
37:00 [Process] Pragmatism, Balance & Building in early
30 Nov 2020
Building Eng at Impira with Anand Mariappan
Anand Mariappan, VPE, Impira, shares his experience inheriting and running the engineering team and adapting to remote work. He also provides an overview of his 3Ps framework for enabling people to do their best work, by equipping them with the right processes and a clear sense of purpose.
4:00 [Objectives] Focus on time to market
9:30 [Company Values] Empathy (Virtual Water-cooler/Virtual Coffee and other ways to stay connected with the team)
14:10 [Engineering Values] Transparency (The team that sees reality the best wins - Jim Dethmer)
16:08 [Engineering Values] Autonomy (Enabling the team to reach their full potential)
21:00 [Hiring] Two-way (Company and Candidate) evaluation for fit
27:05 [Engineering Levels] Career Ladder (Working with the team to identify desired Engineering values & traits at each level)
31:25 [Team Structure] Frameworks for team structure (Product Versions, Use cases, User scenarios, Product Functionality) and resource allocation (Feature Dev/Foundation/Moonshot ideas, Core Product/New initiatives/Moonshot ideas)
37:35 [Architectural Decisions] (Leveraging Brain Trust from Pixar)
42:25 [On-boarding] 3-4 person team (Manager, Engineering mentor, Engineering buddy, Cross-functional buddy)
50:00 [Testing] Balancing product quality expectations, time to market and available resources
53:10 [Adding Capacity vs Optimizing Software] Focus on understanding the bottlenecks and starting with optimization
27 Sept 2020
Building 1.0 and beyond at Rubrik with Fabiano Botelho
Fabiano Botelho, Founding Engineer (#2) and Fellow/VPE, Rubrik, shares his journey as an Engineering leader at Rubrik on helping build the teams and product lines for 1.0 and beyond. He also provides insights into his experience with scaling & growing the Engineering team at Rubrik.
5:25 [Objectives] Focus on building the system and getting to market fast
11:05 [Values] Examples of Rubrik values in action (RIVET)
22:02 [Collaboration] Building a connected team & traits of good mentors for helping scale an organization
33:30 [On-boarding & Off-boarding] Welcoming and bidding farewell to team members
39:17 [Tools(Programming Languages/Frameworks)] Picking the right tool for the job while balancing cognitive overload
44:20 [Architectural Decisions] Empowering the team to make & own their decisions
50:10 [Company Building] Enjoy the ride with the people
31 Aug 2020
Transforming DevOps at VMware with Hüseyin Dursun
Hüseyin Dursun, VPE/Head of Engineering Services, VMware, shares his teams' Principles & Practices wrt Engineering Culture, Organization, and Process & Systems, as part of the DevOps transformation at VMware.
8:37 Everyone owns quality
15:00 Customizing development methodologies to work for your company culture; Building & Operating SaaS (BOSS), a page from VMware’s Engineering Manifesto
27:30 Book recommendation for leaders or anyone involved in Engineering/Technology development; Hiring for values without undermining diversity; Metaphor for thinking about your teams
34:30 Psychological safety for effective Post-mortems and readouts
44:44 DevOps vs SRE; Promoting collaboration between Development engineers & SREs; Developing SREs
49:35 Psychological safety for effective Pre-mortems (Production Readiness Assessment (PRA))
55:30 Managing error budgets
Video of the show
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSti2BNzQ3Y)
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
333
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Podcast Authority Score: 23 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
21
Social presence
0
YouTube
63
Engagement
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