Why You Need to Take Risks as an Engineering Leader | GitHub’s VPE Neha Batra

04/30/24 • 43 min

1 Listener

This week, I sat down with Neha Batra, VP of Engineering for Core Productivity at GitHub. Our conversation is about the value of taking calculated risks in engineering leadership, using a “risk budget," and how you can leverage your social capital to take risks that help your career.

Neha also shares her insights on senior engineering leaders' challenges when aligning business needs with talent and product execution. She discusses her framework for strengthening company alignment and engineering efficiency using established communication paths.

Episode Highlights:
00:26 Frameworks that strengthen company alignment
03:11 How should you channel frustration into creation?
05:58 Conceptualizing your risk budget
12:53 Strategies for building communication pathways
16:04 Conducting AMA's with your team
21:47 How do you get team members to take accountability?
25:27 How do you gather signals from your team?
29:13 Mistakes leaders make you can learn from
36:32 Building curiosity into mundane experiences like dating
Show Notes:

Support the show:

Subscribe to our Substack
Leave us a review
Subscribe on YouTube
Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn

Offers:

Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream
Get your DORA Metrics free forever

Support the show:

Subscribe to our Substack
Leave us a review
Subscribe on YouTube
Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn

Offers:

Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream
Get your DORA Metrics free forever

Previous Episode

Unlocking Employee Engagement and Innovation | ADP’s Chuck Lafferty

In the last few years, disengagement at work has become a massive issue. We learned from Dr. Andre Martin’s episode that 53% of managers are burnt out and 1 in 3 employees leave their jobs in the first 90 days.

This week, we sat down with Chuck Lafferty, VP of CRM at ADP, to discuss ADP’s approach to employee engagement and innovation. Chuck dives into building trust within teams, innovative techniques like ‘Survey Roulette’ to incorporate user feedback into development, and the critical role of understanding and caring for individuals.

When employees feel valued, heard, and engaged in meaningful work, you see improved productivity and increased job satisfaction. The episode concludes with actionable steps to improve employee engagement through personalized interactions and empathetic leadership.

Episode Highlights:

01:51 How does Chuck define employee engagement?
04:06 Can you measure employee engagement?
12:05 How can managers engage individual developers?
17:16 Survey Roulette and how it helps engage engineering teams.
22:31 Winning in the workplace
23:45 The importance of separating the problem from the person
25:30 How can you improve employee engagement?

Show Notes:

Support the show:

Subscribe to our Substack
Leave us a review
Subscribe on YouTube
Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn

Offers:

Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream
Get your DORA Metrics free forever

Next Episode

Labs: Setting Engineering Goals and Reporting to Stakeholders

In our first Labs episode of the year, LinearB COO and Co-founder Dan Lines is joined by CTO Yishai Beeri to explore how elite engineering organizations set and report on their engineering goals.

Modern engineering leaders face a dual mandate of achieving operational excellence while aligning their work with business priorities. To achieve this, you need to deliver software predictably—projects need to be delivered on time, within scope, and as promised so the rest of the business can drive ROI. Dan and Yishai highlight goal-setting methodologies to achieve predictable delivery and key metrics to focus on, ranging from planning accuracy and capacity accuracy to cycle time.

Along with goal setting, we cover how to effectively report on your goals and progress to business stakeholders. Plus, you can download LinearB’s CTO Board Deck Template to leverage in your next board meeting.

Episode Highlights:
01:24 Key terms to know when setting goals
02:17 Engineering leaders’ dual mandate: operational excellence and business alignment
08:18 How can engineering leaders set goals to achieve both sides of this mandate?
11:37 Why engineering organizations need to deliver predictably
19:37 How to set goals around resource allocation
27:30 Reporting on your goals to business stakeholders
32:56 The LinearB CTO Board Deck Template
Show Notes:

Support the show:

Subscribe to our Substack
Leave us a review
Subscribe on YouTube
Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn

Offers:

Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream
Get your DORA Metrics free forever

Dev Interrupted - Why You Need to Take Risks as an Engineering Leader | GitHub’s VPE Neha Batra

Transcript

Neha Batra00:00:00.000

As we work in organizations over time we accrue social capital. to think of that as actually a risk budget, right? Where You can spend some of that risk budget on different bets that you want to make the tech world is very forgiving, right? And they reward people who take those risks and try to make those improvements.

Neha Batra00:00:21.375

You just want to react really quickly. You wanna clean it up, you wanna f