Learning to lead, building developer flow, embracing AI change | Subbu Allamaraju, VP of Engineering, BILL
Yassine Kachchani
I publish Exec Engineering, a weekly digest on Engineering + Talent | Co-founder & CEO at Gemography
Subbu Allamaraju is VP of Engineering at BILL , a leading provider of cloud-based software that simplifies, digitizes and automates back-office financial processes for small and mid-sized businesses.
With over two decades of experience in the software industry, Subbu brings deep expertise from roles spanning engineering leadership at major technology companies, like 雅虎 , eBay and Expedia Group .
Through his writing and coaching, he helps engineering leaders develop frameworks for effective technical leadership and organizational design.
Highlights
Yassine: You've written extensively about the human aspects of technical leadership. What sparked your interest in the psychology of leading engineering teams?
Subbu: I came across a fascinating statement by Paul O’Neill several years ago: “With leadership, anything is possible, and without it, nothing is possible.” Let’s zoom out for a minute and consider all the big positive things in recent history. We can’t name many that happened without strong leadership. But, to appreciate this statement, we must know what leadership is. Leadership is nothing but influencing others to follow you. Most of us get that point, but how do you influence others? That question prompted my interest in the psychology of leadership.
Influencing is a serious business. It takes intense self-development, learning about others, and perspective-taking. To influence others, you need to recognize and accept that we are all motivated by different things. You have to model the right behaviors and set the standards for excellence so that others will follow you. It takes inspiring others to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. You have to have a track record of past outcomes to have the credibility to inspire others. You have to have the tenacity to stick with ambiguous situations. You must have the backbone to take a position and fight for what you believe is right and the humility to let go and yield to others. Above all, you must learn to manage your attitudes and emotions better daily. These are all aspects of human psychology.
Y: Throughout your career, you oversaw major technical transformations that changed how hundreds of engineers worked. What have you learned about leading teams through significant technical change?
Subbu: I was lucky to have dealt with a few technical transformations over the last 12-15 years. Most of those were complex and required naivete, patience, and humility. Once I got a taste of the first few, I pursued more such opportunities as I found such work incredibly rewarding. Those experiences taught me two good lessons.
First, care enough and then build the courage to put your hands into ambiguous problems. Every company has such issues. These are complex and depend on multiple teams to agree, with many unknowns and no clear path forward. Most organizations struggle and rot when not enough people care and dare to stand up and say, “I’m going to give it a try and get it done.” You also need to build that capacity and culture in your organization.
Second, most technical transformations are not technical at all. They appear to have a technical problem at the core, but once you begin to peel the layers, you will stumble on structural, cultural, and leadership issues. For example, one of the messy transformations I dealt with involved aligning several leaders and their teams over a sustained period. In another example, it took a few organizational tweaks to give space for a few teams to work differently and have the right goals. There were technical components in these transformations, for sure, but those were less significant when compared to driving and managing the change. So, the lesson is to look at problems that require a transformation as change management or adaptation problems, not technical ones.
Y: As both a builder and leader of developer platforms, what patterns have you found most valuable for improving developer productivity?
Subbu: In my experience, the most useful and successful developer platforms focus on creating the flow state. How do you get to a flow state? You typically get into the flow state when your goals are clear, most steps to realize those goals are clear, and the tools you use give you clear feedback and guide you to move code from your keyboard to a live environment where you can experience the output of your work. In this process, how various tools work well together is more important than the popularity of individual tools. But if most things you need to do force you to pay attention to things outside your goal accomplishment and get lost into rabbit holes to make things work, you won’t reach the flow state.
So, here is my message to teams building developer platforms: focus on simplifying choices, providing clear feedback, and offering a friction-free end-to-end experience to facilitate the flow state. Don’t get distracted by popularity wars like this tech vs. that tech. Engineer your approach to create the flow. Look at your code structure, build systems, test environments, release pipelines, and infrastructure choices, and engineer those to enable a smooth flow. That will help you allow a higher throughput of work.
Y: From your experience building teams of different sizes, what have you found essential for building high-performing engineering teams?
Subbu: I once made the mistake of imagining that I must do such and such to build high-performance teams. I thought of a prescriptive approach based on what I saw other leaders do and tried to follow. My approach failed miserably. That’s when I realized that what helps drive performance needs to be situational. Many factors go into building high-performing teams, but what works in one situation may not work in another. You have first to diagnose the current situation to determine what may be blocking strong performance. It varies from team to team and organization to organization. Could it be goal setting? Could it be cultural norms? Could it be a structural issue? Could it be politics? Based on your diagnosis, determine what needs to happen to improve team performance.
Y: Many of our readers are leaders running small engineering teams. What advice would you share with leaders who are trying to balance staying hands-on while building their leadership capabilities?
Subbu: In such cases, you should be ready to wear multiple hats, like managing projects, reviewing code, reviewing or even documenting designs, triaging bugs, etc. To be effective at these, you have no option but to balance being hands-on while acting as a manager-leader for the team. You can’t just do one or the other.
On this note, allow me to refer to a reproduction of a 1950s article in the Harvard Business Review — Skills of an Effective Administrator. The author, Robert Katz, a management Guru from that era, wrote about three skills for managers: technical, human, and conceptual. Even though that article is over 70 years old, his recipe still holds good.
Y: Following your recent one-day AI coding experiment, what aspects of engineering leadership do you think will become more crucial, not less, as “AI coding” becomes the norm?
Subbu: Driving and managing change is the most essential skill to sharpen to accommodate this AI disruption. The landscape has been rapidly changing and will continue to change for a while. It is also going to be very noisy. The barrier to entry is lower, and the required skills are less specialized than a couple of years ago.
Companies are going to have to figure out how to derive value from this disruption. There are many hypotheses to be tried out, which will require a lot of experimentation across the board. While most experiments will likely fail, those that succeed might alter how people work. This is no longer a technology problem but a change management problem. To be successful, you have to find comfort in letting go of stability to let teams learn, experiment, and be comfortable failing fast.
Thank you Subbu for your time and insights!
This interview is part of the “Exec Engineering Dialog” series where I interview seasoned tech leaders on the topics of talent, product, management and culture.
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Yassine.