Ancestry’s Suresh Teckchandani on Non-Negotiables, Innovation, and the AI Shift

Strong leadership requires knowing where to adapt and where to stand firm.

For Suresh Teckchandani, vice president of product and engineering at Ancestry, success comes from defining non-negotiables, keeping technology tied to business outcomes, and embracing innovation in every part of the work — from product features to how teams operate. Today, that includes preparing for the impact of AI on engineering.

With more than 25 years in technology, Suresh has seen the industry evolve through waves of change. What hasn’t changed is his belief that clarity, discipline, and trust are the foundations of strong teams. By combining those foundations with openness to new tools and methods, leaders can scale effectively without losing focus.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Suresh shares why leaders must set clear principles, how to balance innovation with discipline, and why AI represents both efficiency and opportunity for engineering organizations.

  • 32 min

Ancestry’s Suresh Teckchandani on Non-Negotiables, Innovation, and the AI Shift

Keep Moving Forward

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Define and Defend Your Non-Negotiables

Suresh believes the first job of a leader is to create clarity about what truly matters. Some practices can flex and evolve, but values and principles cannot. Leaders who blur that line risk losing the trust and alignment of their teams.

“There are things that you can negotiate and you can discuss… and there are non-negotiables,” he says. “I make sure that anybody you’re hiring into my organization, no matter what level, you share those values with me.”

For him, compromising on principles may create short-term gains, but it weakens relationships in the long run. He has seen that when teams don’t share a foundation of values, misalignment eventually slows down delivery and creates frustration. By being upfront about non-negotiables, Suresh creates a baseline of trust that guides decision-making at every level of the organization.

Innovation as Everyday Discipline

When Suresh talks about innovation, he doesn’t limit it to big product launches or flashy features. He defines it as solving problems in smarter ways wherever they appear. This perspective keeps engineering teams engaged in continual improvement, rather than treating their work as a series of tasks to be completed.

“My view on innovation is very simple,” he explains. “I think innovation can occur even when you're trying to maintain a piece of software that has already been written… You can come up with really creative ways to solve a maintenance problem, for example. That's innovation in my book.”

This approach reframes operations, security, and upkeep as opportunities to innovate. Instead of just fixing bugs or applying patches, teams can ask: how could this be done more effectively? Where can we introduce automation? How can we simplify complexity for long-term stability? For Suresh, discipline and innovation go hand in hand. Teams must keep systems running smoothly, but how they do it is where creativity comes in.

Preparing for the Impact of AI

Suresh sees AI as the next major lever for efficiency in engineering. He believes it will reshape how teams spend their time and where leaders focus investments. In his view, AI is not a distant trend but an active shift that engineering leaders must engage with today.

“Anything that can be automated should be automated in this AI age,” he says. Large language models, he notes, can reduce repetitive cycles in coding, testing, and documentation. This frees teams to focus on customer-facing value.

This doesn’t mean AI replaces the engineer. Instead, it allows engineers to devote more energy to designing, problem-solving, and collaborating. For leaders, the responsibility lies in experimenting with these tools, understanding where they add value, and creating guidelines for their effective use. By setting expectations, leaders can ensure that AI amplifies creativity instead of creating new risks.

Suresh sees this moment as similar to other major shifts in technology: those who adopt thoughtfully and early will shape the direction of their organizations, while those who hesitate risk being left behind.

Transcript

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, being super clear about what your non-negotiables are and what your negotiables are. So, I make sure that anybody you hiring into my organization, no matter what level you shared those values with me. What I found is that if you compromise on the things that you cared about as part of your core principles, those relationships don't go very long.

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 dive into candid conversations with the tech industry's brightest minds, seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers and visionary experts. Today I'm joined by Suresh Teckchandani, vice President of product and engineering at Ancestry. Suresh has built a career at the intersection of engineering and product leading teams through transformation while keeping them grounded in clarity and focus.

In this episode, Suresh shares how to scale engineering organizations without losing sight of fundamentals. We talk about balancing innovation with operational discipline, creating alignment across product and engineering, and why prioritization is one of the most important leadership skills. He also explains how trust and transparency fuel collaboration across teams and why growth is about focus, not just doing more. If your leading technical teams are looking to make your own leadership more impactful, this conversation is full of practical insight. Let's get started.

Thank you so much for joining me. Obviously, I've been able to check out your background to check out your experience and you've done a ton and you have an impressive background and I'm super excited to dive in today.

Suresh Teckchandani:

Yeah, good to be here, Caleb, thanks for inviting me to your show.

Caleb Brown:

100%. I appreciate you being here. And so yeah, maybe I think the best way to kick things off, like I said, I have been lucky enough to have a sneak peek into your experience and your background, but maybe we could kick things off with having you kind of walk us through your career journey starting all the way back in the early days in India into your current role at Ancestry.

Suresh Teckchandani:

Sure. So, to start off, my name is Suresh Teckchandani, and just a quick intro about myself. I'm a technology leader who helps companies build and operate large-scale customer-facing SaaS products and services, technology platforms, and the cloud infrastructure so that they can deliver the value that they want to deliver for their customers and grow their business. I've been in Silicon Valley for 25 years now. Started off my career back in the late nineties with a startup company called InterTrust Technologies. They operated in DRM space, which stands for Digital Rights Management.

Went through dot com boom and bust cycle like many of us did at the time, landed at eBay after that. Worked there for a few years. Then I worked for PayPal for some time. Then I spent some time at Intuit before I landed at my current company, which is Ancestry. I lead their platform team, which is comprised of e-commerce, smart tech stack, and a lot of infrastructure in the backend such as CRM systems, experimentation platform, chatbots, and things of that nature. Prior to coming to US I worked for an Indian outsourcing company called Infosys Technologies in Bangalore. I spent a few years there, and prior to that I did my undergrad from IIT BHU..

Caleb Brown:

Nice. Very cool. So, again, by looking back at your background and then hearing a little bit about your journey, what would you say is the biggest challenge from transitioning from a hands-on individual contributor to developer for I think what 12, 13 years before becoming a technology leader? So, what was that biggest challenge from that transition from developer writing code into a tech leader?

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, I would say the journey for me has been very natural, going from a heads-down programmer, which is something that I always enjoyed doing. I build software. I build software for the longest time, like 12, 13, 14 years of my career, and that is all I wanted to do. I never opted or applied for an engineering management or leadership position, but I was at a company, as I mentioned earlier during my intro, I worked for PayPal for a few years and a company was going through a steep growth phase at the time, and I just happened to be at the right place in the organization where they were looking to have leaders who can lead an engineering team.

And I was trusted with that responsibility and I started kind of work as a tech lead for that team and sort of slowly started to take more people's responsibilities and I would say I was surrounded with some great leaders there. I learned a ton just by seeing them from a distance, how they carried themselves, how they carried conversations, how they worked with other leaders across the company, and that sort of paved the way for me to the leadership roles that I had later on in my career.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense that you had a couple of places you've worked with. So, major tech companies, eBay, we just talked about PayPal, Intuit, Ancestry. Now, how has moving through these kind of different environments influenced your leadership style throughout the years?

Suresh Teckchandani:

The one quality or a characteristic that has really helped me is keeping an open mindset towards learning. So, I'm always viewed my job as a learning experience. So, I've never walked into a job or into a role into an organization thinking that, hey, I know everything. I know the best. That has never been the case. I've always looked up to others to see, even if there were people who were working for me or reporting to me, I've always took the time to understand where they were coming from, what they knew about the system or the product because they were there before me. So, certainly it takes time to ramp up and understand where they were coming from and what are the key challenges that they were facing. Whoever the customer was. Like I mentioned before, everything starts with the customer.

So, taking the time to understand the landscape is extremely critical for you to be successful as a leader in any organization. And that I think one quality I would say has helped me a lot over the years. I have worked at Intuit as an ops leader, engineering operations leader. I have no background in that role, so I learned a lot of that on the job. Before that, I was with PayPal where I oversaw the development of payments platform and many other products that we serve to our customers in the assembly space. So, in my current role, we are a direct-to-consumer business where we build experiences that we present to our customers and requires different mindset and knowing what their challenges are and where the friction points may be going and resolving those. But I would say that one quality has always served me well is just keeping the open mindset and learning the most from the job.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. That's a very good takeaway. There are plenty of developers as well as developing engineers and managers that tune in and listen. It's always, I try to ask those kinds of questions because I think it's helpful to hear those things and just kind of approach. So, yeah, I think approaching things with an open mind is certainly the best way to do it. On our intro call or prep call, I believe it was, you mentioned the importance of moving beyond prescriptive leadership and creating frameworks that best practices become default behavior. I thought that was fascinating. I wanted to see if you could elaborate a little bit on how you've really implemented that approach.

Suresh Teckchandani:

I think every leader leaves their mark in the organization. Everybody has their own style, how they want to lead, how they work with folks they are surrounded with. In most cases, you join a company, you already have a team, you don't have the luxury to build the team that you call dream team, and you want to build from ground up. In some cases you do, but in most cases you have already a team in place that you have to lead or work with. So, it's important for you to make sure that you speak openly about your core principles. What is your thinking around either if you're building software or you're trying to run an ops team or whatever your job function may be, but it's important to speak openly about your leadership principles. So, for me, so has been about the end customers. Having the customer focus has been important to me, and if you talk to any of my team members, they will tell you the same thing.

I drive results through innovation and discipline execution. Continuous learning is important to me and investing in people, like I said before, making sure that you understand the organizational dynamics, the people who you are working with, what their ambitions are, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, and working with them every day on the job to make sure that they are growing, you're giving them projects that align with their long-term growth aspirations, and last but not the least, always looking for ways to optimize things and doing more with less. Something that I have always embraced as a principal, optimizing our footprint on cloud or just how we have designed our organizations, the functions that I defined and by organization over the years. So, I think those how I have always led my teams.

Caleb Brown:

Very interesting actually. I wanted to talk a little bit more about building those teams. For your approach, for hiring for your teams, what key characteristics or qualities are you looking for? And that's of course, I'm talking beyond the technical skills.

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, being super clear about what your non-negotiables are and what your negotiables are. I think that has been super clear, super critical for me to build the right teams and non-negotiables for me have been the code quality, delivering value to the customers, defining what those KPIs are. So, I make sure that anybody you hired into my organization, no matter level, you share those values with me.

So, making sure that you're super clear about your non-negotiables and then you can come to an agreement on the personalities and how you work with people, what their preferences are. You work remotely in the office or different styles and things like that. I think those things certainly can be discussed. They timelines of the projects, depending on the complexities and the design considerations, can we make this trade off, that trade off? Those things we can work through. But what I've found is that if you compromise on the things that you cared about as part of your core principles, those relationships don't go very long.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Just prior a question or two ago, you had mentioned that you do typically inherit teams, but you have both lead teams that were inherited as well as built them from scratch. So, I was interested in your strategies, I guess, for each scenario to create high performing engineering organizations. And I'm just curious how your approaches are different, whether it is an inherited team versus one from scratch, and just how you at the end of the day make sure that team is high performing engineers.

Suresh Teckchandani:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say if you're fortunate enough to build the team from scratch, then I think it makes your job much easier. You can hire the people with the right skills, hard skills, soft skills, those who align with your company culture, your business objectives, things of that nature. But more often the jobs that we do, you already have a team in place, et cetera. 

In most cases, that is, in my experience, I've not had much resistance. I've never had anybody saying, "Oh, I don't want to do load testing, I don't want to do performance testing, I don't want to do unit testing." Most people want to do it. It's just that they need more clarity from the leaders as to what we expect of them. And there sometimes can be people who maybe are not as passionate about some of these values that we're discussing here, and in those cases, I offered them opportunities to work elsewhere in the organization if those things align better with their ambitions and what they wanted to do in their careers.

So, I'm fairly open about those conversations and these are important conversations to be had as a leader because it does nobody no good if you have misalignment within your organization. So, yeah, that's been sort of my approach.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, I mean that's excellent to hear. I think any of that support that someone could give for someone who is misaligned, they're an amazing worker, I'm sure, but we're in the wrong spot in support for finding the right spot for them, is you don't always see that. Luckily, a lot of times you do, but you don't always see it. So, it's a nice thing to hear happening. You've worked at organizations where I think this is just a really, it would be an interesting window to look into. I'm curious how you balance the need for innovation. So, staying on the top really in terms of competitors and things like that. So, how you balance innovating, building new things with maintaining the stability of the existing platform that the business depends on. Always curious how folks manage that and foresee it even when planning. And so curious if you have some insights there.

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, my view on innovation is very simple. I think innovation can occur even when you're trying to maintain a piece of software that has already been written. Innovation can occur at the level of the product where you're creating new experiences for your customers, or it could be how you even do your operations or you do security patches and upkeep, maintenance and things like that. You can come up with really creative ways to solve a maintenance problem, for example. That's innovation in my books. Of course, if you can find a more economical, better way, more efficient way to accomplishing a task, you've done innovation in my books.

What I talk to my team about is how can you use these new tools, this new framework that are launching almost every week or every month now. With AI, all the advancements that are taking place. I mean, how can we leverage the innovation that's happening outside of our four walls to drive innovation within our organization?

But the innovation can come from within the organization in terms of how you solve complex problems and allows you to scale up fast. So, that's sort of my view, and I've had lots of success in my current organization. We are starting to use all these AI tools and it's less about what new feature we can develop for the customers. Of course, that's something that we have teams thinking about, but from purely engineering perspectives, and this is an engineering conversation, I have tried to inspire and encourage people to view these tools and frameworks as a means to bring more efficiencies.

We have the tools now, the large language models that we have available today, these were not known like four or five years ago. So, I think there is a image room for growth for these organizations to start to use these tools that can solve some of the long-standing problems that actually require a lot of manual effort. And those cycles could be used to deliver more customer-facing features or could be used better. Same investment could yield better results if you were not to spend as much time maintaining and just keeping up with your operational work, if that makes sense.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely does. Yeah. No, that's well said. That's a good way to look at it. On this podcast I make sure that I talk at least to some degree about managing global and remote teams. It's something we even post-COVID still hear a ton about. Some organizations thriving with it and not doing as well and just still trying to kind of figure it out. I'm curious what specific challenges you've faced when managing these globally distributed engineering teams and how you've addressed that over the years and things have looked for you in that department.

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, I've managed global teams for a long time. It's been at case 10, 15 years now. I don't even remember when I started doing that. It's a stark difference between those teams that actually struggle and the teams that have gotten so much value out of their remote teams.

And the key difference, Caleb, that I've seen is, of course, apart from the hard skills, finding the right people, and that goes without saying. So, making sure that there is enough collaboration happening, no matter where the teams are situated, the more face time, the better.

I know it's hard for people here to have phone calls every night and just because the time difference, it's hard to do. It's not easy, which is why you see some teams or some folks going to shy away from that, it's not their fault. It's just very demanding on your personal life to spend a couple of hours every night or early morning on remote teams. But if you do that, you see amazing outcomes. You see teams more engaged, they deliver more value, as I mentioned earlier. And I've had experiences where my remote team actually operated much better in some cases than the team here. It's just for some reasons, just that team really took that to their heart. It's like, "I want to make it work. Leadership cares." I would show up every two, three months and we would go out, talk to them at a more personal level so they feel more engaged. And that is when you see amazing outcomes from these remote teams.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. Yeah. So, the company I work for X-Team, fully remote always has been, but, and when we do the morning calls for some of us and evening calls for others, but just what, a week or two ago, the whole kind of core team met up in Hawaii for a few days, and not only was it nice to be in Hawaii, but the energy of seeing folks and getting dinner and having drinks hanging out was the amount of business related conversations that came from that. And just now that we're all back home and working, the amount of ideas and things we were talking about then that we followed through on are now acting on is it's really energizing.

So, you can do it 100% remote, but yeah, if it makes sense for the team, this team size, I know a really large team can be tricky, but for us to get together even once a year truly, I mean, noticeable changes. Yeah, actually it's fascinating. Wanted to move on a little bit and talk about tech strategy of innovation. At Ancestry you're responsible for e-commerce in the marketing tech systems that deliver super personalized customer experiences. And you talked about AI briefly earlier. I'm curious how you approach integrating AI and machine learning into these platforms?

Suresh Teckchandani:

So, look, at Ancestry we've had AI before most people even knew that. So, we are a business that offer a product that's deeply personal to people. We allow people, bring people onto our platform to create their family trees. We send them hints We've had this business for a long time and some of these capabilities that are now labeled as AI have existed. Of course, the technology has changed, has evolved, and things have gotten better on that front. With the advent of these large language models, things have gotten more streamlined, structured on how we find these matches and deliver that to our customers.

So, we've been on this journey for a long time and now of course we're seeing the new tools becoming available in the marketplace that are allowing our customers to perform these tasks as we call them more efficiently. But also it allows us to do more innovation and bring more features to our customers so that they can benefit from all these technology innovation that's happening in the AI space to do the same task, maybe in a more efficient manner, but also perform new tasks that weren't doable before. So, we have had a pretty good success with lots of new features that would roll up the customers, but also we are using a lot of the AI tools to, like I said before, to improve the operations, how we operate as a company and bringing more efficiency in how we build software and like most tech companies out there.

Caleb Brown:

It's a wild time. Like you said, there's something AI related that's significant, truly feels like daily. It's fun to see different organizations, different companies that solve different problems and they have different problems and implement these things in a way that, like you said earlier, five years ago that wasn't even ... There was machine learning and things like that of course, but the very current landscape is pretty interesting. I wanted to talk a little broader, a question I always find fascinating. How do you evaluate when to build a custom solution versus leveraging third party services?

Suresh Teckchandani:

Caleb, that's a hard question to answer.

Caleb Brown:

It is a hard question to answer.

Suresh Teckchandani:

And the reason is it depends on the context. It depends on what you're looking at. So, the rule of thumb that I use is that if something is core to the company's business, for example, something that a company is going to benefit from, usually by building it in-house so that we can add new features to it, enhance it to our needs, and it's going to be very hard for us to customize things that we buy off the shelf and take all those things into consideration. I would say that's a starting point, but beyond that, you have to assess how complex of an undertaking that will be.

And if you feel in your judgment, that's something for the company to pay for if you want to build in-house versus buying something off the shelf. And I've done both over the years, as you would imagine. So, there are systems that we've purchased from outside that work well with some customizations and things like that. Only things like CRM, you're not going to build a customer relationship management platform. It is just not our core strength. So, we buy it off the shelf. Customer data platform, for example, there were ideas on building it in-house versus buying software. We said it's not our core of strength, so we would rather buy from outside. And that's worked well.

And there are things like e-commerce work flows that we are continuing to scale up to other geos and locales. It's much easier, in my opinion, to have that done in-house and all the incremental changes that we've been making for the software over the years. So, that's more aligned to the company's strategy where we've been driving our customers. It's certainly more beneficial for us to do in-house. So, I think it's some of those considerations that you have to give to this topic and make sure that you're making the right decisions, and sometimes you make mistakes and you sort of learn from that and then go back and fix it.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, that makes sense. As we've talked about, and especially we're kind of wrapping up here, so I do like to have the last few questions be a little kind of future outlooky looking into the future. And as we've said, you've witnessed the evolution of Web 1.0 all the way to kind of today's AI driven landscape. What technology trends do you think will be most significantly impact engineering leadership in the next five years, given everything you've seen and now the AI world that we're in now?

Suresh Teckchandani:

Yeah, so AI is here to stay. I think that is probably one of the biggest shift that we've seen in the technology landscape, at least in my experience, in the industry. So, I think we are at the early stages of that. We are still assessing what can be accomplished with AI versus something that requires more human intervention. I think the landscape is going to be fundamentally different in a few short years. So, as we sort of peel the onion on that one and understand the power of gen AI, what's capable of, we also have to make sure that we are using it in a way that is not going to be harmful to our customers and the mankind. With more flexibility comes more responsibility, something that we all know and got to make sure that it's reflected in our strategy as we adopt these tools.

But I would say we have had good success in the earlier adoption of that as I'm seeing it in the company, and not just my company, but I have folks who work at other companies and are pretty much heard the same thing from them. The technology has a lot of upside to it, but there's also things that we have to manage, the error rates and just presenting false information to the customers or users out there that could be very damaging to the company's brand, and ultimately it can also hurt customers. So, making sure that we walk into this with eyes wide open and taking steps to ensure that none of those things happen. Or if they do happen, you have protocol in place and procedures in place to be able to sort of revert and course correct.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. Yeah. No, very well said. And so yeah, we'll wrap on my final question here, and I do usually like to end the podcast with a question like this. If you could sort of wave a magic wand, if you will, and change one thing that would positively impact technology leadership culture across the industry, what would you do? What would you use your magic wand on?

Suresh Teckchandani:

At a super high level, I would say sharing that view or that understanding that technology exists to solve the specific real world problem, I think will certainly be helpful to make sure that the technology investments are going to the right place.

And if certain investment is not producing the desired outcome, you'll be quick to roll back or sort of course correct or not keep going in because you know it's not going to yield, I think good results for the business or the company. So, yeah, I would say that's one aspect that I have not heard people talk about enough. People get real excited about that piece of technology, and before you know it, they spend years and millions of dollars and there is not much to show other than some excitement that you get along the way. I mean, look, don't get me wrong, I'm an engineer by profession. That's what I've done all my life. I love engineering solutions. I've enjoyed writing code and building customer-facing products like I said before, but ultimately it is there to serve a specific need. And you should keep that at the forefront, knowing your customer and making sure that you're delivering value to the business. And that is what would make you successful. That'll make your business successful.

Caleb Brown:

Incredibly well said. Well, like I said, that was the last question. So, Suresh, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. It was cool to go through your history, your career, and learn a bit from it. So, thank you so much.

Suresh Teckchandani:

You are welcome, Caleb, and thanks for having me on your show. Appreciate it.

Caleb Brown:

That was a thoughtful conversation with Suresh on what it takes to scale both teams and impact as a technology leader. One thing that stood out to me was his focus on clarity, making sure people know what matters most and why. His approach to prioritization, cutting through the noise and keeping teams aligned on outcomes is a powerful reminder that less can often be more. I also found his perspective on building trust across product and engineering, especially valuable. He's not just talking about process or ceremonies. He's talking about creating an environment where people feel ownership, accountability, and support to do their best work. Thank you, Suresh, for sharing your journey and lessons on how to lead with focus, balance, innovation with scale, and keep teams connected to purpose. 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.