Bala Muthiah: Building Teams and Cultures with Systems Thinking

When Bala Muthiah became director of engineering at Lyft, he took on a role where speed and scale intersect every day. He had to not only support systems that power millions of real-time decisions, but also lead the people who build them.

Bala brought a unique asset to this role: Years at early-stage startups, fast-scaling companies, and enterprise platforms, as well as time volunteering for an elementary school. That background taught him that building great infrastructure isn’t just about tooling. It’s also about purpose, communication, and trust.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Bala unpacks what it means to lead at velocity while empowering your team. He shares how systems thinking applies to code and culture, why writing things down can help you decide if you’re ready for leadership, and why doing the small things is the job of every leader.

  • 37 min

Bala Muthiah: Building Teams and Cultures with Systems Thinking

Keep Moving Forward

Play

Trusting Others to Lead

The transition from individual contributor to leader brought Bala one of his hardest lessons: learning to let go.

“When I started delegating, and people were not going from point A to point B to point C, I was freaking out,” he admits. “And then it took me a while to understand that A to C is my goal. I should not worry too much about A to B to C. That is something that they can themselves figure out.”

By trusting people to navigate challenges in their own way, he realized that leadership was less about control and more about instilling ownership in people and creating space for them to succeed.

“Every leader I have personally interacted with, learned from, always emphasized that people are the key. That is the one common factor,” he says.

Leadership as Teaching and Learning

Bala compares leadership to parenting and teaching. The work is rewarding, humbling, and full of surprises. And, importantly, leaders are also learning.

“Even though you are thinking you are a leader, there’s not a day you’ll not have to learn new things,” he says. “Because everyone who’s coming into your team, whether they’re new, experienced, or super-seasoned, they are still going to come and teach you something that you would not have known.”

For Bala, leadership is about curiosity as much as guidance. Staying open to learning keeps him grounded and helps him create a culture where growth is mutual. This is especially important in a world where feedback is both more important and more challenging. 

“How do you constantly give feedback and have them receive the feedback so they can continue this growth journey?” he asks. “Investing in that skill specifically — giving feedback and receiving feedback — is a great thing for leadership growth.”

Balancing Empathy With Accountability

Bala is a leader who believes in high standards, delivered with empathy. This requires clear, consistent communication about the team’s goals and everyone’s role.

“Let everyone know what is important and why we are doing that,” he says. “That is going to bring everyone to the same page. And when challenges arise, everyone will rally instead of pointing fingers.”

Crucial to this philosophy is the mindset that no job is too small. “By doing something really tiny, small — let’s say, going and editing a presentation or going and doing some small adjustment to something — it’ll show the team that you are willing to go all the way for them to get things done,” he says.

Empathy isn’t about being soft for Bala. It’s about alignment. And alignment allows teams to deliver at a high level while staying connected to purpose.

By focusing on people, staying curious, and embracing humility, Bala shows how leaders can bring out the best in their teams and prepare them to thrive, no matter what challenges come their way.

Transcript

Bala Muthiah:

Even though you are thinking you are a leader, there's not a day you'll not have to learn new things. Because everyone who's coming into your team, whether they're new, experienced, or super-seasoned, they are still going to come and teach you something that you would not have known.

So that's the beauty of it. If you really want to stay fresh, really want to stay curious, leadership is the place to be because you are going to learn a lot.

Caleb Brown:

Hey everyone, and welcome to Keep Moving Forward, the podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. I'm your host, Caleb Brown. And in each episode, we'll dive into candid conversations with the tech industry's brightest minds, seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers, and visionary experts.

Today I'm joined by Bala Muthiah, director of engineering at Lyft. His leadership philosophy centers on one powerful truth: When teams have a clear sense of purpose, everything else falls into place. Bala has led engineering teams through complex challenges in high-growth environments, and he's seen firsthand how aligning people around a mission transforms both morale and results.

In this conversation, Bala shares how to build and sustain that alignment through trust, clarity, and a culture that celebrates ownership. We explore how to navigate uncertainty without losing momentum and why the best leaders focus as much on the “why’ as the “what.” And how to balance the pressure for delivery with the space for innovation. He also offers practical ways to ensure engineering excellence while keeping teams engaged, creative, and connected to the bigger picture. If you're leading technical teams or looking to navigate your own career towards high-impact work, this one's full of clarity and insight. Let's get started.

Caleb Brown:

So let's go ahead and just, with that being said, jump into things. And I thought we could start, obviously, by talking about your career journey. For one, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to do this. I really do appreciate it.

Bala Muthiah:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I have to go back to India in 2006 to start from. So I finished my school in 2006. That's when my career journey started. It's a pretty boring one. Like everyone else back in the day, jumped into tech because that was a thing back in those days. I'm still thinking that is a thing now.

Started working in an Indian company for three years, and then 2009 is when I moved to the United States. I came here for a three-month gig. And here I am, 16 years after, now calling it a home. And being in tech throughout this time, what brought me to tech wasn't very exciting, is a regular story, but what keeps me in tech is the challenges that it brings me every day.

So it's pretty much every day you wake up to a new challenge that was not solved for before, and the landscape is evolving. Like now with AI in the last two years, it's even more evolving and fast-paced. So that is the one that keeps me here and makes me enjoy what I do, being a leader in tech.

Caleb Brown:

That's awesome. I think it was on our prep call, you had mentioned your pivot to leadership was inspired by volunteering at a public school. So I wanted to dive into that a little bit more and just learn how that experience shaped your approach to tech leadership now.

Bala Muthiah:

Yeah, totally. Definitely. It's almost 10 years now, 2015. In the US, as you know, the schools are rated based on how much funding it gets, how much staffing and teachers. So 2015, I was volunteering at a school. We just went to paint the tarps. The playgrounds, you go and paint as a corporate social responsibility activity. And while doing the activity, I had a chance to chat with the principal of the school, and she was talking about, "Hey, we have quite a few Chromebooks lying around, but we don't have teachers who are equipped to teach with those books and put it in use."

So this school is in the heart of Silicon Valley, very close to the YouTube office, so YouTube gives them all the Chromebooks that no longer are good for them, but it's really great for the school. So she showed me, walked me into the room, and showed me this pile of Chromebooks.

Then I told her, "Yeah, I don't mind coming and teaching, as long as you're OK with that."

She was like, "Yes."

Then I started doing this for a couple years. I do Wednesday and Friday morning. So before I go to work, like 8:00 to 9:30, I was teaching third, fourth, and fifth grade. So that was really an eye-opening experience for me, and that pivoted me into leadership. Because when you see people grow, that gives you a lot of gratification. So when you teach something, and they pick it up, and they are able to do that and create an impact, that really made me rethink what I'm doing at my work and what I want to do at my work.

And that's my “pivot to leadership” journey. Now within the org, it's the same thing. You work with your team, you help your team grow, you invest in them and see them go do great things, from the time where you are individually hands-on, doing great things. So leadership is more gratifying and a high impact because of the people.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, that's awesome. That's a very cool story and just a very cool way to get into leadership. You've worked at various companies, Photon, SAP, to Lyft. How has your leadership philosophy evolved over that time?

Bala Muthiah:

Again, every day is different in tech, so every company is different, culture is different. One thing that has not changed is the focus on people. So that is what brought me to a leadership role, and that is something that every leader I have personally interacted with, learned from, always emphasized, that people is the key. That is the one common factor.

What has evolved is, when I started as an IC 20 years ago, it was all about getting things done. Just focus on the work, about outputs. Then it slowly started getting into, “Oh, build your skills. It's not just the job you are doing, it's impact what you're creating out of it, not just the company but to the community, to yourself.” 

And then now, it's even more people-focused because the tools are sophisticated and advanced. It becomes a lot of focus on relationships, empathy, communication. That's what leadership is becoming. Because you want to bring the best out of the talent you have, and the only way to do that is investing in the people and helping them connect to the problems.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, I love that. And I definitely want to dive into that a little bit more as we go on. But I was curious about the most challenging transition you experienced from moving from an IC, from an individual contributor, into a leadership role.

Bala Muthiah:

The challenging experience from that transition was from doing things to getting things done through other people. And why it was challenging is initially, you grow up by doing things you know how to do, you have a specific way of doing. And you know that works. Maybe it doesn't work in some cases, but you have figured out, you know you are a master of the skill at that point.

And then there comes this period where now we need to let other people do. The outcome is still going to be the same, but they're going to put their own spin to it. They're going to bring their own touch and flavor to it. As a leader, you need to understand that this is going to come to an end. This is going to be done, this is going to be delivered. But if they're not doing it in the way that you assumed should be done, you are going to freak out.

That's what happened to me when I started delegating, and people were not going from point A to point B to point C. I was freaking out. And then it took me a while to understand that A to C is my goal. I should not worry too much about A to B to C. That is something that they can themselves figure out. That was the hard part, delegating and trusting the team to take your hands off the wheel. Assuming that, yes, it's all going to work out, that took me a while. First couple of years, was battling with that. I tapped into a lot of mentorship to understand, to let go. And the books that I read helped me really see and realize what's important to focus on and what's not important to focus on.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, that's interesting. I appreciate you sharing that because I talked to some of the engineers that I know that do tune into this podcast, and they've talked about that, about just wanting to understand the journeys of others in those types of situations. A lot of engineers, thinking about maybe wanting to be in a leadership role and being a little scared about that. And so I think it's helpful to hear your lived experience, your journey through that. So I appreciate you sharing that with us.

Like I said, I wanted to shift a little bit into, I think it was again on our prep call. You had mentioned that you see leadership similar to parenting, seeing people grow and nurturing that talent. How does that perspective influence your day-to-day interactions with your team?

Bala Muthiah:

I am not a parent myself, but I often give this example to people who are getting into management for the first time. Parenting, teaching are the closest example you could think of when it comes to leadership. From a day-to-day, the gratification is the first one. Starting with the great things. You'll feel a great sense of accomplishment even though the work is not done by you. And you can really brag about stuff that your team did.

If I come to you and say, "Hey Caleb, I did this amazing thing, I gave a great speech," you are going to be like, “What is this guy talking about himself so much?”

If I come and tell you, "Hey, my team did this amazing thing. They built this amazing thing. They won this stuff," you are not going to be frowning upon me. You're going to be more curious. “Wow, how did he get this done? How did his team get this done?” So there is, I would say, a brag element to it, which I really like. That you can brag about your team without having people frown upon.

And the third one, or the most important thing, I would say, is learning. Even though you are thinking you are a leader, there's not a day you'll not have to learn new things. Because everyone who's coming into your team, whether they're new, experienced, or super-seasoned, they're still going to come and teach you something that you would not have known. So that's the beauty of it. If you really want to stay fresh, really want to stay curious, leadership is the place to be because you are going to learn a lot.

It's counterintuitive. As a leader, you are expected to teach a lot, but that is not the case. You are going to learn a lot as a leader, and that's my day-to-day, what I go back to bed with.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, I love that. I love that, the bragging about your team part of it. Like, all the team, I'm imagining all of the team accomplishments up on the refrigerator with magnets.

Bala Muthiah:

Totally.

Caleb Brown:

Actually staying on that, leapfrogging a little bit on that one, I want to know how you identify and even develop leadership potential within your engineering teams.

Bala Muthiah:

Identifying is more, it has evolved over time. Back in the days, people would not come and tell you what they want. They were not clear, at least when I started. I wasn't clear if I want to be a manager or if I want to continue to be in an IC path. So there were multiple conversations with different people that helped me discover.

These days, people coming in, the talent, they're really smart and sharp, and they have a clear perspective on what they want. They want to do a certain thing in a certain way, which is good. The discovery part is, in a way, easier from a leader's perspective because they come in with a goal that, “I want to be a manager in X years” or “I want to be a leader in Y years.” So that's easier to start when they have that aspiration. Then you go into where they are today. What are their strengths, and then what are the gaps that they need to fulfill to achieve that?

One of the things that is harder even today is feedback. How do you constantly give feedback and have them receive the feedback so they can continue this growth journey? So investing in that skill specifically, giving feedback and receiving feedback, is a great thing for leadership growth.

Caleb Brown:

I want to piggyback on that a little bit. You mentioned strengths and weaknesses in developing themselves. Again, we had mentioned on our initial call, you emphasized looking for strengths rather than a lack of weaknesses. And I thought maybe you could share an example of how this approach has helped build a stronger team over time.

Bala Muthiah:

Yeah, totally. So the story, just for everyone's sake, is a manager, when hiring, should always say that. Look for strengths, don't just look for a lack of weakness. Interviewing for strengths is really important. The goal of an interviewer is to understand the real strength with the candidate, not to say where they are failing or falling back. That's not the goal of an interview.

So I've taken that to my heart. And there was this case where a person was a really good engineer. She was really strong at what she was doing, but she couldn't really figure out whether they want to get into management path or into IC path. They were halfway in between. So we have tried different techniques, but nothing was really clicking. They like both, which is in a way a good thing, but one thing they did not have clarity on is whether they can be successful as a leader. Because they know they have done IC path, they can be successful, but as a leader, they were not able to find out if they can be successful in that path.

So we started experimenting with a few things, like giving them some test projects, giving them some small assignments. But nothing really gave the real-world taste. So one thing we did was, like, close your eyes and jump. So I put them in a team where they had full context around the team, what the team was doing. And this was a time where I had to go on a break. So it was more like a forcing function for them, because I was not around, and they had to step in to stretch and do.

And they were really able to master it during that time. She was really able to understand, what was she looking for and what was missing? And I asked her to do this one exercise, which is called a “like or don't like check,” meaning every day after her task, I would ask her to write things that she really enjoyed as a manager that day and the things that she did not like at all as a manager that day. I asked her to write that list. The goal was, when we come back to look, which side is longer? If you have too much “don't like thing” versus too much “like thing.” That was an easy analysis for us. When we came back, fortunately, the “like thing” list was longer than, “Oh my god, I don't like this thing as a manager.” That helped us navigate it. 

So sometimes it is the basics where, go really tactical, like you would do any other tasks. Go break down things. They say that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So take it one bite. Understand, flag your emotions, what you like about a job, what you don't like about a job.

That is the most important part. Skills and other things you can always develop. It's not about the skills, it's about the will. So this exercise helped us take her to a leadership journey. Now she's a really successful leader managing other leaders and growing in the org.

Caleb Brown:

That's awesome. That's awesome. So I actually want to expand on that a little, because I think that's a good setup story to my next question, which is just how do you — because I imagine it's difficult in some instances — how do you balance being empathetic on that kind of level while also maintaining high performance standards for an engineering team? How do you balance that?

Bala Muthiah:

It is hard. It's a hard balance, especially when you have a target. Especially when a company's in a tough spot. You have to not let go of anything. There's no ball to drop. You have to keep doing it. And oftentimes there's no luxury of time. 

So what has helped me is communication. Let everyone know what is important and why we are doing that. So that is going to bring everyone to the same page. And when challenges arise, everyone will rally instead of pointing fingers and stuff. Oftentimes, it’s the human aspect that is the hardest part. I never worried about a technical solution, never worried about a process change. I'm always worried about people involved. How do they operate? How do they evolve? Because we are all organisms. We grow, so many things happen in work and outside work. We carry those things inside.

So great communication and alignment is going to be the key to unlock success. And the balance is going to be where, set the goal, set the expectations. It is all right if you don't get to all the goals, but let the people know what you're going after and what you're not going after.

I read a famous quote from a Lego CEO. It was something like, "Blame is not for failure, but blame is for failing to ask help or to give help."

So that is the mindset I try to instill in my team. We are, end of the day, a team, and that is the most important thing. Everything else comes after, and then we can get things done.

Caleb Brown:

You had mentioned a little bit earlier, just briefly, about the shift to a more remote world and a more distributed world. I wanted to cover a few topics around that. And the first one to kick things off, I was interested in how you ensure that those remote and distributed team members feel heard and included in team communication.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about how that team communication has evolved or changed in this slightly different landscape.

Bala Muthiah:

Totally. It is new to the industry, definitely. Last few years, we have been more and more adopting this. But if you really think deeply, it's not new to our personal life. Back in the days, we were all in the same place. Same city, even families lived in the same village or town or the city, very close by. At least coming from India, you, your parents, grandparents. And then as you moved on, you took it all to remote communication. You were still able to maintain the relationship. You were still able to talk to your family, your friends, and keep it going.

So it's not something humans are new to. It is just in workplaces, it all of a sudden becomes very new and stuff. Remote work is here to stay, and hybrid is also going to be staying because people are social creatures and we want to see each other. We like the connections and stuff. So how to solve this? It's still a very difficult problem to solve, because it's not one thing that is not going to be efficient. There are quite a few angles. There are emotions involved.

So tactically, again, building trust is another foundation here. When you have that trust layer built in, these things become even easier. So on a day-to-day, if I want to really go super-tactical, one of the things we do is always remote first. Meaning when we're in a meeting, when we are discussing something, especially folks are in the room. Like if we are three or four people sitting in a room and a couple of folks are dialing in, we all look at the camera and talk. Even though I'm talking to someone here, I still talk to the camera because I can see the person on the monitor, and they can see me talking to the camera there.

This way everyone feels involved instead of me turning my head around and talk to this person. That's making it more inclusive. And when we're opening up for questions or anything, we always start from remote first. Take questions from the remote so they feel more engaged and driven as much as possible. We try to stay away from laptops while having those conversations. So we are all looking at the screen, looking at the monitor and camera. That's one of the things. 

And many things are also going async now. Similar to how technology is evolving in video conferencing, there are so many async tools now. You don't have to real-time chat and distract people, because the tool is powerful, but it distracts you. So communication is also getting work done. It is not just talking with two people. So we relay a lot of async activities. Have a document and leave your comments there. You engage when you can. Things like that.

So it's not real time zone, regardless. So you can engage and come in and contribute and respond to questions or feedback. So those are quite a few techniques we do to keep this going because it's, again, nothing can replace human emotions. So it's going to be a hard challenge. We have to be very intentional about it.

Caleb Brown:

Want to talk a little bit, shift gears just a bit. And again, I think it was on our prep call that you had mentioned being a fan of goal systems theory, focusing on goals rather than means. And I wanted to know how you implement that approach in practical engineering leadership?

Bala Muthiah:

Something I've been fascinated about recently, after reading the book, and how do I apply in practice, most of the things we have been doing before. I started thinking about how do we plan our workouts? Exercise workout, it's pretty much everyone's goal, at least on January 1, everyone wants to do that as a goal. And we start with that. We always have a goal, and then we don't think about a lot of stuff. But the learning there is, hey, create a system around it. Don't think about going to the gym every day. That's not your goal. Going to gym every day is a means. That's not your goal. Your end goal is to have a healthy lifestyle. 

So similarly, if you want to translate that into your day-to-day, producing high-quality code, for example. That's top of the mind things for every engineer. Producing high-quality code is not a goal. That's more a means to have a great product that has greater impact. So think about that, and why is a high-quality code important? It is because it'll be easy to do, it is easy to maintain, and easy to build on top of again. So focus and understand.

I do this classification question when people come and talk to me. Or when I talk to my team, they often talk about, oh, this is a KR we want to achieve. This is a result we want to achieve. And sometimes those KRs, like OKR framework, objectives and key results, they come up with a KR. Sometimes those KRs are actually not a result, it's just a measure. They talk about, “I want an uptime to be 90%” or “I want the number of defects to be lower than XY number.” So that's not your goal. Having 10 defects is not your goal, and that's not going to give a customer satisfaction. So that's just an indicator. That's a performance indicator.

So I asked them whether it's a result, is it a KR or a KPI? Like, ask this question. That's very tactical. Everyone understands that KPI is a key performance indicator, and KR is a key result. So you are talking about a KR or a KPI, that will help them classify and put that into the right bucket. So that is one way to do.

And coming back to goal at the actual objective. Be more, I would say, quantifiable, as much as possible. “I'm going to increase customer satisfaction” is a very vague goal. Oftentimes, if the goals are not clear and quantified, then it comes to impact the means. So that is the pollution happening there. So if you have a clear goal, your means would be clear, and vice versa.

So classify these, whether it's an indicator or a result you want to achieve. What is your thing that you want to achieve is important. And a real world example like weight is a great example for exercise and fitness. Weight is not your goal. Your fitness is something else. It's not just a number on the weight scale. So those exercises we do, and it comes with practice, it’s very different for every team, every domain, every context you are in.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah. Yeah. So perhaps zooming out a bit here. When you're faced with a complex cross-functional challenge, what framework do you use to approach the problem-solving there in general?

Bala Muthiah:

I always tend to go to people. I always start from people. And what is the motivation? It could be cross-functional, it could be cross-company, could be dealing with a different company. So always start from, what is a win-win? What do they want? What do we want? That's the first step. If you understand, if you empathize what they want and what you want, it's very easy to connect the dots and explain why it is important.

The next one is communication. This is, again, building a relationship. Building context and having an ongoing system between the parties involved is very key. Otherwise, it becomes very transactional. When something goes wrong, that is when you go and knock on the door, and that's not what you want to do. Go build a relationship proactively before even the need arises. 

There's Adam Grant's book on, it's something like “Give Before You Take.” That's the mindset I ask people. Don't go into a conversation thinking what you're going to get or what you're going to take. Go into a conversation with what you're going to give. So “give before you take” is a very simple framework I've used to tell people. So it'll be a win-win, and you might lose a small one, but you'll get later, the interest will be more when you get back later. So give before you take is a simple framework for any relationship. Personal, professional, anything.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. I believe Gary Vaynerchuk calls that “jab, right hook.” Yeah. But I like that. And that makes a lot of sense. And then perhaps, now, zooming in a bit, I was wondering if you could share an example of a particularly difficult, either technical or even organizational problem, that you've solved and then the approach that you took to solve that.

Bala Muthiah:

Yeah. Talk about an organizational problem because that's the most, I would say, interesting. And often we don't get to read about this in books. Technical problems these days are just one, probably a ChatGPT query away.

Caleb Brown:

True.

Bala Muthiah:

So there was a situation where, again, this is more external market conditions are not in the favor. We need to move people to different teams. So there is a central team, which is more like a marketplace team. They wanted more resources to get things done. So from where we are sitting, which is more on the product side, like where the features and customers are going to come and use and interface with. So we still had our roadmap, too. But end of the day, someone got to give, and there's a trade-off. So who has to give?

The organizational mandate is get things done. You figure out, they're not going to come and tell you exactly what to do. That is what we are hired for as leaders. That is what we are supposed to be doing. So there was this situation where we had to give people to a different team in order to move our organizational goal forward. There was no clear framework around it. There was no clear conditions on how long this is. Is it a permanent transfer? Is it a temporary transfer? There are quite a few unknowns.

And also there's the people aspect. You can't just go and tell someone, "OK, starting tomorrow you're going to be working on a different team.” So in your current team, you have a role, you have established relationships, you need to rebuild everything.

So we came together as leaders with the goal of, “How do we share resources to make this happen?” Which in this case, it's more than give before take. It's more a loan going from us to go to them. So we went and had a conversation, understood their needs and requirements, and what are they looking for? How many people? How much time they want? And what is the kind of people they're looking for?

So we laid it out. I used the same framework of what are the goals here, principles, and constraints? There are people who we cannot give. There are people who we cannot give for a certain number of time or beyond a certain number of time. So we aligned on that framework, and we took it to the team because it cannot be a forced move. So we offered it to people on, “This is the need, and this is the ask. Who is up for it? Who's looking for such a change?” And if there are any opportunities for someone, say, who is going to go for a promo, but they did not have a path forward within the team.

So we tapped into those things and put together a plan with a set of people who will be willing to move. And then we offered them that. So until we did that, it was looking like, OK, this Team A has to give X people to Team B. So that's a very hard problem to solve. But once you sit with it, once you put names to it, once you put problem definition to it, it becomes much easier.

So always put principles, and go by that. Everything else will fall back. Everything will fall on your way. If you just start with a generic, "I'm going to move X people, these are the X people I'm going to move," it's not going to work. You need to bring people along. It's not a lone journey. They say if you want to go far, you have to bring people along.

Caleb Brown:

Wanted to talk a little bit about emerging tech and trends, as well, that you're excited about. So I was initially going to ask about transportation and advertising space, but we can actually open that up, truly.

I'm excited to hear just about what you are looking forward to in tech and trends that you see — really, just in general in the space.

Bala Muthiah:

Yeah. I want to start with one thing, which is: If at all I have learned one lesson in the last 20 years in tech, it’s, no prediction is going to be true. Because the tech and everything is much faster than what we think are. So I'm going to start with that caveat, that the predictions are only as good as today and now in this moment. I'm very excited about what's happening in the AI space. Of course, there are some shades of different sentiments, optimism, pessimism, and stuff. But in general, the capabilities that it is bringing to the table is huge.

So far, we humans are thinking about how to use tech and technology, how to use, let's say, AI and those capabilities. But very soon, there's going to be a time where AI and technology is going to think about how to use technology. So this is beyond exponential, and that's something we cannot fathom today.

And I'm being an optimistic in the core. I'm hoping it's going to be for the good, and that's where we humans come in. Because we are very resilient. We are the only species who have survived so many billion years, and we can handle no matter what. I'm not talking about a Terminator kind of scene, but I'm talking about much smarter ways to do. So, tools will make our lives easier. Technology will make our lives easier. 

And then we get to spend time on what we really want to spend, like family, personal. I see a lot of people talking about priorities like family, personal stuff, which I like. It's coming back full circle probably 200 years ago. More family and culture and things together. We are coming back there. That will make this transition faster and easier. So that's my trend prediction.

But very tactically speaking, how we interact is going to change. Like VR, like AR, those things are going to change how we interact with, how we communicate, how we understand things together, how we solve things. Those are going to be changing. The problems will still be the same, but how we solve will change. So that's what I'm more excited about as an engineer. That's the thing, right? How is this done? The “how” part is the most exciting part.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. And yeah, I just want to wrap up with one last question, which I think is an important one. Like I said, I have spoken to many engineers here at X-Team that do tune in and listen. And feedback that I've got is they do typically like to hear from folks like yourself that started as an individual contributor, moved into that leadership role, and they like being able to learn about the lessons you've learned and things like that.

So I was curious about the most valuable lesson you've learned as a leader and something that you wish that you had known early in your career. I think that would be helpful, perhaps, to listeners that want to follow a similar career trajectory as yourself.

Bala Muthiah:

Yeah. One thing was, I talked about the fire stuff. But I'm going to maybe give another example, which is, “no job is too small.” You could be a leader. You could be a CEO. But do not think any job is too small. The reason for that is twofold. One is, as a leader, by doing something really tiny, small — let's say, going and editing a presentation or going and doing some small adjustment to something — it'll show the team that you are willing to go all the way, extra mile, for them to get things done. And you also can use this as an opportunity to show how to do something really in a great way. It's more like show-and-tell.

Number two, it gives you a lot of empathy. You'll understand the problem. You might have solved this thing maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago as a leader. But now, when you go back and solve the same thing, it gives you new perspective about the problem space. It will tell you what an engineer is facing today that you, as an engineer 20 years ago, maybe did not have to face. So that gives you a lot of empathy, and it'll change your perspective as a leader. So “no job is too small” is a great thing that I keep close to my heart. When I see leaders do that, I get really impressed. And I constantly tell my team and tell myself, no job is too small. Do it and you'll learn more.

Caleb Brown:

100%. I think that's great advice and a good one to end on. So yeah, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this chat. I really do appreciate it.

Bala Muthiah:

Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me. It was a really good conversation. Looking forward to watching all the episodes and stuff. And yeah, very excited. Thank you.

Caleb Brown:

Talking with Bala was a powerful reminder of how much leadership starts with clarity of purpose. He showed us that when teams understand the deeper “why” behind their work, they not only deliver, they grow more resilient, collaborative, and inventive.

Bala's approach blends the discipline of engineering excellence with the human side of leadership, trust, ownership, and genuine connection to a shared mission. That combination doesn't just help teams perform better in the moment. It sets them up to adapt, learn, and thrive over the long term. He also reminded us that leadership isn't about having all the answers. It's about creating the space where others can find the answers together, even when the path forward is uncertain. That's what transforms teams from simply getting work done to truly shaping the future.

Join us next time for more insightful conversations with tech leaders who inspire us to grow, lead, and innovate. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And don't forget to share this episode if it resonated with you. Until next time.