This is the second episode of Soft Skills, Hard Code, our new show where we interview tech leaders and renowned programmers. In this episode, we interview Rajashree Pimpalkhare, the VP of Engineering at Twilio.
Previously at Intel, PayPal, and Intuit, Rajashree has a strong track record of building high-performing engineering teams who build software for a global audience. In this interview, we discuss her early career, what she learned at PayPal, and how you can create an inclusive engineering environment.
Her Early Career
Rajashree always wanted to be an engineer. She graduated with a Bachelor's Degree from IIT Bombay and then moved to the US to do a PhD at the University of Maryland. Two years into her PhD, Silicon Valley called.
More specifically, Intel. The company had just begun building their Pentium processors and hired Rajashree as a Senior Design Engineer for the Pentium Pro.
After Intel, Rajashree moved to Synopsys to build software for chip design. It was Rajashree's first deep dive into the world of software engineering.
Working at PayPal and Intuit
Rajashree spent six years at Synopsys, after which she moved to PayPal to build financial software for a global audience. This is where she learned to always solve for the customer first. When you do, it usually ends up benefiting the company. Solving for the customer first has been informing Rajashree's decisions ever since then.
She worked at PayPal for seven years, during which she ran the mobile team to build the first PayPal iPhone app. She also worked on an initiative called Funding Mix that sat between PayPal's merchants and customers and focused on improving the customer and merchant experience.
And she worked on Pay After Delivery, which was an initiative where, once a transaction was completed, the merchant was paid immediately but the customer only had to pay once the product or service was delivered.
It was a win for the merchant and a win for the customer, but it was a win for PayPal too, because Pay After Delivery only works with a customer's bank account info (and not their credit card) which lowered PayPal's processing fees.
The theme of solving for the customer first continued at Intuit, where it was all about discovering customer problems, figuring out the right value proposition for them, and then using technology to drive towards the right solution for each problem.
Culture Is Set at the Top
If you want to build effective engineering teams, you have to understand what makes for a strong engineering culture. Rajashree always takes her own personal values to the team, but also includes the values that may be important for the business or even for a specific situation.
For example, speed and iteration are more important values for a startup or for a young product than they are for a global company with mature products, where stability may have priority.
However, Rajashree identifies three durable core values that are important everywhere:
- Customer focus
- Engineering excellence
- Leading with transparency
Additionally, as a tech leader, you have to know what you expect from your people. It's a leader's role to be clear about the rules and responsibilities for each person on their team. You also have to make sure you bring the right talent on the team and help them understand what success in any particular project looks like.
Many frustrations and differences will fall away by themselves when you're lined up towards the same goal.
The Importance of Diversity & Inclusion
Rajashree believes that diversity is an inextricable part of life. Even within the same sex and ethnicity, there's diversity. Inclusion is important because if you make people feel like they're part of your team, you'll get much better work from them than you would if they don't feel part of the team.
So for every team that Rajashree works with, she makes sure to get to know everyone. What's their value system? What do they like? What do they dislike? It's really important to consciously invest time in this.
Additionally, diversity and inclusion is important for global companies, because if you're building a product for the world, you have to build it with a team that reflects the world. So encouraging diversity leads to better business outcomes. But you have to invest in it. You can't expect it to happen on its own.
Improving the Developer Experience
To improve the developer experience, you need to be clear about each developer's role and responsibilities. You need to understand what skills they currently have and what training they may require.
After all, the engineering team is a product too. How are you growing the team? How are they learning? How are their responsibilities changing? What about their impact? These cannot be afterthoughts.
AI to Speed Things Up
Rajashree believes that the jury is still out on AI. It's great innovation to further simplify the software engineering process, but that's not substantially different from previous tech innovations. Software engineers will be able to write great code faster and will simply move their focus to harder problems.
One Positive Change for Software Development
If Rajashree could have one great change to improve much of software development, she'd want better telemetry. Better metrics. Life would be easier if there were an easy way to have the right metrics on whatever you want at any time.
Enjoyed this episode of Soft Skills, Hard Code? Have a look at the first episode we did, where we interviewed Martin Spier, the VP of Engineering at PicPay.
