Growth Through Transitions w/ Prachi Gupta and Chris Chiu #143

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if you're okay like handing it off to someone else, they can run with it. That's essentially being how I've operated in my career, not because I've had this grand vision in my mind of like, this is how I get to do like the thing I want to get to, but because I was just hungry to learn. I just gained this reputation of, oh, like if something's broken or something needs fixing or something needs figuring out, here's a flexible person that we can throw at.

Welcome back to the Engineering Leadership Podcast. ELC Annual 2023 is just around the corner. At this point, we're talking a couple weeks away. So you're listening right now to a special series featuring past sessions that capture some of the themes and topics that you'll see during the conference. Why? Because you're probably wondering, what can I expect from the conference? The answer is incredible speakers and content. In this

episode is just a little bit of a preview of what you'll be able to see. Speaking sessions will tackle some of the most critical challenges facing engineering leaders today. We're talking leadership challenges, how to grow and navigate your career. We're talking technology implications, all of them. Today's theme blends a little bit of career and a little bit of leadership. So if you haven't gotten your ticket yet, I'm telling you right now, you are missing out.

You absolutely need to be there. There was only a couple weeks left before the conference. You need to be there. You can grab your ticket and check out all of our speakers and topics at sfelc.com forward slash annual 2023 to introduce today's episode, Prachi Gupta, VP of Engineering at Discord and Chris Chiu, Director of Engineering at Figma, explore Prachi's best

strategies for growing your career and leadership skills through major transitions. They also discuss what tactics work well for building community and leading in a remote and hybrid environment. Frameworks for operating during wartime or crisis periods, recruiting with the whole person in mind and why you need to quote unquote, give away your legos in order to grow as an engineering leader. Let me introduce you to Prachi and Chris. Prachi Gupta is VP

of Engineering at Discord. She's an active supporter of diversity and STEM co-founded LinkedIn's Women in Technology initiative and is an alumnus board member of women's audio mission. Chris Chiu is a director of engineering at Figma. Chris's teams work on collaboration and community as well as Figma's mobile tablet and desktop platforms. Before

Figma, Chris led product engineering and platform teams at Fluxport and OpenGov. Again, if you're interested in topics just like this and beyond, you can get your ticket to join your peers. Check out all of our other speakers and explore additional topics at sfelc.com forward slash annual 2023. Enjoy this special episode with Prachi Gupta in Chris Chiu. Hey Prachi, thanks so much for sitting with us to chat about a few topics. I would love

to spend the time talking about org leadership and a little bit of career growth. So maybe we can start by talking about remote and hybrid. You joined Discord right in the throws of the pandemic where I feel like we were all getting a bootcamp lesson on remote work. And two and a half years later, it looks like a remote is here to stay. Hybrid work is here to stay. We'll love to hear what have you seen orgs and managers do that isn't as effective and what have you seen be really effective?

That's definitely the top of mind for most people I talk to in terms of, we are going to be a remote team and you know, oh, actually we're going to be a hybrid team now. How

does that actually work and does hybrid actually mean what we think? It means and some of the things that we all like kind of like tried and realized they're not probably the best things to do in the early days of the pandemic were things like trying to like do team morale things and like getting on a conference call together using whatever tool you like

and trying to like do in like remote environments and they felt forced right. There was no the only reason to be together was to like be doing this team activity together and didn't feel natural. Not everybody engages the same way on digital media. So it just didn't feel right over time. Like at least at Discord, we've evolved how we think about hybrid work forces and working together in a more environment. Like at Discord, we often say that you know,

our headquarters is discord and not like a physical space. And if you're not familiar with Discord, it's essentially a communication tool that you can use for communities and like small group communication. So all of our work happens on Discord like our CEO jokes that if you got an email from me, it's probably a scam. You're getting fished. You're not

going to get an email from me. So we found that like working on hard problems together, like finding opportunities to connect and wrong real problems is actually much better than forced team building activities or you know, trying to like create moments of connection and using things you actually care about like interest that you have in common. So a large part of our employee based at Discord, like really cares about games. And these are like

just hardcore games, right? It could be like I solved my word a little this morning. Like how many tries to take you? So just create using those common interests as a way to like connect teams together and just building spaces around it works quite well for us. Another thing that we do at Discord is we have a one person one screen policy. So for hybrid teams, there will always be one person who's like on the screen, even if like five of you are

in the room. So what we try to do is like if one person is on the call with you, then everyone should at least have like their own face on a single screen as well. So they have this feeling of they're all in the same space together versus a room full of people talking to each other and like one person out on the screen who's feeling like really left out of the conversation finds really difficult to like step into the conversation.

So system mix of mindset changes and like tactical things that we've implemented to make hybrid work feel more real. One other thing that we realize is that all of our physical spaces are really social spaces. So don't think of them as work spaces. The virtual workspace is the actual workspace and the physical office is where people come to like do group thinking together or like spend time together. We've set aside budget to make sure people and like

travel back and being the same physical location once a quarter. So every team has a travel budget set aside and like every quarter like they'll do things like planning activities together in the in the physical space together, etc. versus you know trying to always be in this like distributed world. Yeah, you and I were just talking about how like off sites often happen in the office now and they're really on sites. I just went through

one and it seems like it happens at this court too. Yeah, like we've actually literally we took away desks from an A&D office and we just are planning on reorganizing that as a social space. So a place where people can do a breakout session like this or like have a stage or have like soft seating around it. So really like the purpose of the office is a standing so the way before a nation has also changed. That makes a lot of sense.

I think one of the challenges of remote and hybrid work is like creating teams that are cohesive and have a strong sense of belonging to all kinds of people. And I know this is something that you're passionate about. I would love to hear any advice that you might have around how to create a team that has a strong sense of community. Yeah, that's a

hard problem. Like I'm not going to pretend I like have that completely solved. But one of the things that used to be you know sage advice or like well believed to be their tried interested bills running teams in the past. I believe that doesn't work anymore. So in the past when you needed to make decisions for a team, the way to do that would be you know, just take a poll and like majority wins and like me go with whatever you know is

the majority decision. So things like what is the team building activity we should do or you know how should be like structured the team or like what are the operating processes that we should use on a team. We're mostly you know either they were like top down driven. So you know some leader decides this is how they want it to be and like everyone else follows suit. Or you know the next best version was do a poll on the team and like we'll do whatever

most people agree is the best thing to do. But I actually think that's an incredibly like isolating thing and actually opposite to like creating belonging for teams or like creating a sense of community because even if like majority of our team like pick something like the two people who didn't pick that inner your board environment your choice might

end up being incredibly isolating for that person who didn't pick that choice. So a common example that might be easy to like understand is like team building activities happening in the evenings. My work's on most people but you know there's definitely people who that doesn't work for right. So shifting that to okay if you're going to do a team building activity it's not going to be a dinner it's going to be a lunch or we're going to like go out and like watch

a game together is more inclusive. Another thing that we do quite often is they just have these always on hangout spaces right. So it's not like you're not calling someone but you just have co-working spaces in the virtual environment on discord these are just voice channels that we have available on like every team server and people can just hang out and like work together on things or we just have like chill times like blocked off on people's calendars like if you want

you can just go and hang out with people and you just spend time with them. There's a fine balance between like doing nothing and like making sure you pick the common ground that works for most people and I think creating belonging depends on finding the common ground that at least on like some cycle lets everyone participate right you don't leaving someone out of the decisions that

you're making. Does I mean that you think that like engineering managers and team leaders in general just have like a higher responsibility to kind of think inclusively about the team as opposed to delegating that out to like a poll or like really creating these spaces. Yeah I think it's cultivating that sense of I'm responsible towards each and every person on my team and not just trying to

maximize the outcome for myself. So often what we find is even if a manager forgets to account for someone's need like someone else on the team will chime in and say oh by the way like so and so actually like prefers not playing board games or like prefers uh prefer to do breakfast meetings so

maybe this time around me do a breakfast meeting instead or you know so and so person is an Amsterdam they can't make the breakfast meeting let's do something in the afternoon so that shared responsibility of who's on my team who am I working alongside with it's definitely helpful. On the topic of community and you know creating a sense of belonging obviously diversity and inclusivity is a huge sort of part of it. On the topic you've talked about the importance

of assessing the whole person. I would love to look forward to hear you expand on that. What does it mean to assess the whole person when it comes to recruiting when it comes to daily management and like any stories that you can share related to that. So I feel like assessment is actually the second step of any relationship and in a business setting the first step is actually value. So

what do you value about a person? So I think if you start take a step back and start way what do I want to value about the people that are on my team or in my company and if that definition is broader than you know the skill that they bring or you know the specific job function they have that's where your you know basis for am I going to be assessing them as a whole person starts.

So for example discord is an incredibly incredibly diverse set of like user base like people use discord for all kinds of things from just hanging out with their friends and the evenings doing things together to like incredibly like deep interest-based communities like just the other day.

I needed food surgery and I like ended up talking to my my doctor and we got to talking and like she told me that the way she picked the major that she paid was because she got connected with the community of like medical students and like basically they helped her figure out like what's the right right right specialization for her. Not something that I think of and I think about

the typical like user I have. So one of the things that we really value in the people that we bring to discord is what is your background like what are your life experiences outside of the job function that you have and I think that allows people to bring their passions to work for them and

you know I see teams move mountains because it's something that they care about like Savannah and I sitting here like she she's on our she works on like safety for us and all the policies that are like incredibly hairy and I can't imagine anyone like sitting all day thinking through like

tough choices around like how do we how do we make internet a safe place for all people from all walks of life across all ages but she does and like we have an incredible team that does that all day and it's because in a huge part because of they care about it personally right it's like it's a

choice you can't look at the kind of information that these teams have to look at and you know do it just because it's a job like it's you just it's gonna value out so we have a lot of gamers in our employee base and we actually have like official gaming gaming servers in and like after hours gaming server and it's it's okay like I expect that my engineers are probably like we're up until one in the night you know reading something somewhere and that's okay so you know I kind of expect I'm not

gonna do meetings before 10 a.m. in the morning and that's fine and it's important like they understand a part of our user base and are like our cornerstones and around our strategy so parents again I'm a parent I know that I'm gonna like have a split schedule so I stop at a certain time in the

evening I'm like gone I'm not responding to anything and then I know I'm gonna like log back on later at night when I have more thinking time and my team understands that they'll see a flurry of messages from me but they don't have to respond to them at night so just knowing what you value about a person definitely needs to go beyond like this specific job function like how good are you at writing code you can be like amazing at writing code but not understand who you're

writing for and you know your output will not be optimal. Yeah on the topic of transitions I think that a lot of us are dealing with it you know like economic transition right now where the market just isn't as I don't know fluffy as it used to be cost of capital is higher and you're hearing about layoffs you're about hiring freezes your air about company shutting down as somebody who kind of grew up in engineering leadership and these peace times what's your advice for transitioning

to like operating and executing and like a relative war time now. Yeah that's how it's definitely timely question and I get that question a lot from my teams and honestly something that I'm trying to help my team's transition to right now at the end of the day I think it's important

to continue to keep the mindset of abundance so when you're making decisions when you decide how you want to operate with your teams if you take away that sense of abundance and like the sense of we're sending on solid ground for teams to just hit a wall of like analysis paralysis like every

decision they make will feel so incredibly important to them that they might actually earn the side of not making decisions or you know try to look for security blankets like make every decision based on data versus like you know hey this is a strong intuition I have like going back to you

know you're looking for like the whole person your intuition is probably right when you when you increase the weight of every decision we will slow down decision making and honestly in more times it's incredibly important to be like testing your hypotheses and like making decisions and like

learning from them and like pivoting versus like standing still because this will end right and when this ends like where you're standing when the world starts beating up again will really really depend on what are the kind of decisions you made and how did you use this time to grow and

so let us find the the hypotheses you had or the ground that you're standing on the worst thing you can do right now is be afraid of making decisions or you know be afraid of like just telling your teams that actually you know this is a time where you'll be making tough choices or not be transparent

with them or you know that tell them that the speed at which they work is important so like having real conversations becomes much more important when you know that there may be uncertainty in the future the other thing that's really important during war time is making sure you have clarity of

vision so what you can do as a leader for teams that are operating in times of hey I don't know what's going on around me and how do I react to it is give them the clarity of vision of like if this is what our true north is these are the things that we want to be true over the next two years and

tell me what are the steps you're going to take to make these things true if you have that clarity of vision people will be less afraid of like owning the decisions that they're making because otherwise they'll be like oh my god like what if I make this turn this test on and our

numbers dropped by 10% that's okay it's a task like in most cases you can revert that in an hour or you know you can revert that in two hours it's not going to like destroy the company I think operating a war time often means a little bit less abundant abundance and yeah a

little bit less growth on teams and for engineering leaders like sometimes I can feel like like kind of a career growth suppression um you know Molly Graham introduces to this term of like giving away your Legos and I know they used kind of mentioned it in the past like what does that

mean to you and why do you think that's important for those of you who haven't heard that metaphor I'm sure everyone has it's pretty popular like giving away your Legos essentially the idea is as you work on passion projects or like the thing that you identify with that this is my thing you get

incredibly attached to that thing right and it's really difficult for you to um give up whatever you're working on to like work on something else when in reality like in an startup environment especially like right now and you might try a lot of different things and see what sticks um and

like what gives you the hockey stick growth um you're trying so many different things out that you getting attached to like one thing is actually incredibly harmful like you you you sit there and wonder like oh if you did a re-art like why did we do it like what does this mean for me like how does my role compare to like this other role and that's not what it's about like you have to learn how to like build something get it to a point that satisfies you enough to you and be okay like handing it

off to someone else and they can run with it um because in doing that what you've done is like you've created space for yourself to like go learn something new like take on something more challenging and that's essentially been how I've operated in my career like not because I was like this you know

had this like grand vision in my mind of like this is how I get to do like the thing I want to get to but because I was just hungry to learn um over time because of those diversity of experiences and like all the different things I just kind of like gain this reputation of oh like if something's

broken or something needs fixing or something needs figuring out you know here's a flexible person that we can show at and you become this like really indispensable like resource for the organization where you know if there's a hole they know they can just rely on you and like going and closing that hole versus here's the one person we can go to like when we need to solve all the database problems like you could be an expert like there's definitely like roles where going really really like deep

and be an expert on something is valuable but it's a choice right what kind of a t-shaped do you want to be um it's it's kind of like depends on how you want to set up your trajectory yeah I feel like that applies even if you aren't pivoting to a new area I feel like oftentimes kind of growing

your career means giving up some of the things that you're doing today to people who are in your team instead um so that you can go on to do other things yeah absolutely like I think setting up delegation like you're you're goal in any role whether you're an individual contributor or

um or or people leader is to be making yourself redundant as quickly as possible right like that's how you get to go do something else or like do more of what you are doing as a US company hiring remote engineers can be time consuming expensive and frustrating

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learn more visit revello.com forward slash ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire on that topic I find that careers often have some pretty specific inflection points or tipping points that precede an incredible kind of era of growth what was some of your kind of tipping points and inflection points in your career that you felt like we're really defining for you?

I think of I'm like inherently lazy so that applied to my career planning too so I'd never like never ever like sat down and said okay this is what my next five years need to be in my career read Hoffman talks about this escarbo of learning so when you're trying to learn something new

you have this phase of like incredibly hard like painful phase of like learning something new then you see like this upward curve of okay now I'm getting good at it like that's the phase where you're like getting proficient enough in what you're doing and then you kind of like have this

like the top half of the curve which is a little bit of a plateau you've gained mashing whatever you were trying to learn and now it feels like you're doing more of it so I kind of feel like for me my trajectory was more like a series of escarves you know I started started working for a startup

by that was still doing my masters so technically I was working part time at a startup but really I was ignoring all my classes and just spending all my time at work and I really enjoyed that because you know the problem space was unbounded and I could do whatever I wanted and this was like real

application of skills that I was trying to acquire and by the time I graduated from a master's I found myself in a position where there were like seniors who were graduating from my from my college and you know they were going to be like reporting to me because I'd already spend like a

couple of years like building up the skills and within the organization I decided to move to US in 2017 so that was like another like learning curve for me I was traditionally a backended in the year when I moved to the US I was like I'm going to learn how to be a more full stack and

learn more about how to build technology top to bottom it was like the web 2.0 time so my escarve then looked like acquiring all of those skills and like a small team I worked on variable devices for Garmin so took some of my experience around like working with large data sets and then

learn how to apply that to building finance so every time I learned something new I was like okay what's the one axis that's going to be my anchor point what do I know really well and then what do I want to like extend in you from that my next big jump was actually right after I had my kid

like I was going to come back to work and you know my I got an opportunity like go lead a larger team I was at LinkedIn at that time and I was like okay like let me give this a shot trying to like come back from leave where now I had these like dual roles where I was like trying to learn how to be

a parent but also learn learn how to like run a different team a different part of the business that told me where I could stretch myself and that was an inflection point for me the data sites is like taking up the role of like leading into name at discord which is a very different environment

from any environment I've been at before then and you know just the problems faces very different the kind of problems I think about every day are very different then figuring out how to write code well like that's that's a very different problem you mentioned being a parent a couple of times

you and I both have young kids at home how do you balance you know family responsibilities with career aspiration I'm I mean it takes a village well I you know whether you want to like recognize that or not like you can't do it alone like I don't know how single parents do it like I have such

incredible respect for anyone who's who's a single parent but you kind of have to figure out support structures like today for example like I have my daughter is sick at home so like my husband is like watching her probably gonna like take her to the doctor and stuff but like get to like come here

I almost didn't I was like should I but then I decided that you know what it's okay like I can let go of this for a couple of hours do this other thing and then you know I can go back and re-engage so setting your boundaries having people around you that you can depend on I feel like

that's the only way I found to make it work I don't know if you have tips I don't but I was this reminds me I'm reading Cheryl Sandberg's book and she talks about how important it is to have that real partnership so that like you don't have one parent who has all of the childcare

responsibilities and you know it would have limited your options today if that was I guess. I mean honestly I see I feel like it I don't know if it's like just one parent it's like I don't think even just the two of us could do it I think it takes more than two it's in my opinion and you know how you made that two more than two happen there's gonna be different but I that's the one thing you

shouldn't ignore don't try to do it alone like it's not gonna happen. And lastly what is the best piece of career advice that you received what was the context in which you received it and how did it impact you. Yes I was actually started talking about this a little bit in my previous answer but that time when I had my first kid I have two so when I had my son that was the time when like I was like a week away from coming back to work from my maternity leave and my manager called me

and he was like hey Prachi like I have this team he was he was he was asking me to run all of LinkedIn's home page and the and the feed team and I was like what are you talking about I don't even know how to do my old job like can you're like asking me to do like this like new job which is

literally like the face of LinkedIn and I come like screw it up there's like bail in room for error and and I and I was the one who was like stepping back and I was like no I don't want to do this like let me come back and let me go back to my old team and let me do that and at that point

like he told me like hey Prachi like I I think this is a good opportunity for you I think you can do it so it's just saying no right away like why don't you tell me think about it like spend some time with the team and tell me like what do you need around you like again talking about support

structure and like like what do you what kind of support structures do you need around you is it like stronger managers under you is it like different like product partners whatever like tell me what you would need to really like you don't do your best job in this role instead of

stepping back and I think I to this day I think that's probably being the most meaningful advice of her as yeah you know instead of like just saying no do an opportunity like think about what is the support structure you would need to succeed in it and you know ask for it and what's the

worst that could happen you can still get your old job like no one thinks you can't do your old job if you can't do your new job so don't lead with a no I think you know just give it a shot was the advice like it said differently our currency F.O. like said said this in reference to like

you know why he chose to come to discord he was like yeah you know at the end of the day I decided I want to like choose adventure that's the one thing I keep in my mind like you know why not choose adventure you know we'll figure out how it goes I love that idea I think as engineering

leaders it's easy for us to think like we just have to fill all of the roles all of the needs right to be this sort of perfectly executing leader but the realities we can build teams around us that shore up some of the things that we are you know as capable of doing that's great

well we'd love to open up the time for questions that folks might have Hi Prachi thank you for sharing your get your insights something that was on my mind was how do you trust with a new team where maybe the existing people are technically more proficient

in that domain than you were yeah that's a great question you know I you know I'm responsible for a bunch of teams or I'm not the subject matter expert I think it all starts with you know acknowledging what you know and what you bring to the table with the team like be real don't try to like

gloss over where you don't have expertise and just have that mindset of I'm here to learn from you but here's the perspective I could bring so you know I for example right I have AI teams under me I have I understand most of like what it takes to take a team from like zero to one to build a great

AI team but I have not read an AI paper in like I don't know the last one year at least right so I don't know what's the latest I'm not up to date with the academic knowledge but the value I bring is the understanding of the product and understanding of what's important to the business and how can

we use it a field like AI to advance the needs of the business and that's the insight where I like this is the role I'm going to play on the team and here's where I need you to like tell me where I'm like talking about something that I don't understand or like I'm asking you to do

something impossible there's different kind of leaders like some leaders will actually attempt to get better at the at the core skills as well but it really depends on the situation and in your personal like preference of whether you want to acquire the core skills as a manager I do believe

you always need to be able to you know at least have enough sensibility about the work that the team is doing that you can call bullshit on it because it's one way to make sure you're helping the team make the right decisions but being transparent and acknowledging the fact that you are

not the subject matter expert is the basis of trust and doing that consistently right like don't jump into a thread and like start with making an assumption start start talking by making an assumption about a decision the team made that's like the fastest way you lose their trust like you don't have

the context like what are you making this judgment on when when you're inheriting a new team for a team that already exists what do you do if the people you're inher some of the people you're inheriting aren't as empowered as you would like them to be or as proactive like when do you draw the line

between coaching them versus finding another place for them I think the easiest way to do that is essentially exit with them like do the problems all the way with them and show them that you're giving them the permission to either like make the decisions or you know make the mistakes

so it's honestly like this is like very close to home for me right now like I'm this is something I'm going through with a couple of teams right now and you know they'll they'll come to me and say things like shares in a like I think we're doing experimentation too slow we could be moving

faster here but they're coming to me with the mindset of I'm bringing this problem to you and I'm gonna drop it at your feet and walk away and I'm like okay like shares the thing like I agree with you like why don't you go talk to like x y and z tell them this is how you think and let me know

how that goes so you know I give them step by step instructions of like how to go and like acquire not the the voice that they need cultures is tricky right it's not something you write up on a wall and like expect me will follow it it's essentially what you do every day so if you're like talking to

your teams in like small groups like just keep asking questions versus giving answers and that's gonna like change their mindset gradually hi thank you for the talk I think one thing you called out was adding the responsibility of fostering culture and belonging onto the engineering

managers plate onto what wasn't already really hard job how as a senior engineering leader are you helping the frontline EMs handle all of the tasks they're being asked to do I think the answer is honestly it's not a blanket answer right they teams have different kind of people every manager is

different like what they like to do and what they don't like to do is different right one of the things that I always tell people is like it's actually better for you to figure out what someone is really good at and like help them like succeed by like spending most of their time in there like

in in what they're good at versus like constantly trying to make everyone like a completely holistic like 360 like rounded out person that's like a perfect employee like that never works so there will be manager on the team who can naturally like think about how to do a culture building

and doesn't have to be your direct manager like might be some manager within like the team might be a line manager might be an engineer might be like anyone else in the matrix organization what's important is like for whatever unit you're calling a team is there a person who's thinking

about how do you bring the team together how do you like bring cohesion and like ask them to do it so that goes for like every single problem that you're trying to solve so I don't think there's like one single formula of here's the mix shift that like works for like every manager and here's a

rulebook that I'm going to give and this is what it means to be a good manager it's actually an individual conversation in my mind some of the things that I do try to like provide is like a menu of options for example right like so if you're going to like set up team communications like here's

some best practices you can follow for example like one of the things that be found helpful was because everyone was working remote and there wasn't like as much you know looking over the shoulder and seeing what someone else was getting working on and like getting excited about it

what we decided wasn't we created a progress like progress it's a plan on progress progress progress channel in our team servers where you were basically like anyone could post in their showcase saying here's what I did in the last hour and like here's the output of my work and like

people like rally on they just find these like fueling moments of like oh look this isn't create animation I just build and like someone posted in the channel and everyone else like appreciates it so you get that sense of like communities so that's kind of stuff like goes and do like a runbook that hey here's some rest practices you can use for like setting up your servers we have like a many of options for like here's the kind of team building things you can do that people can

like pick and choose from so they're not thinking from scratch um similarly like there's like just a few different like playbooks around um you know team management career management like you know building culture um etc that we have that people can read and adapt however they want versus here's

what everyone must do sort of guides thank you so much for the talk there's something to be 70 industry about being the unseen hand observing and having observability and what the teams are doing versus being in the details and maybe interrupting and disrupting where you may not have

the context as you suggested I'm struggling with this because I have a variety of security engineering teams that we look after and there's very high context between those organizations what's some practical advice that you've seen for being the unseen hand or the seen hand depending on your

perspective thank you my management style is like I'm usually like high level and hands off if I'm not in the details you should see that as a sign that you're doing what you should be doing the team is operating well but when you see me start leaning in and like trying to understand the

details of the words that's happening on the team that's either because you know it's something I'm trying to learn or because I suspect there's something that's going going wrong um and I I try to be transparent about like why I'm leaning in like hey I'm trying to learn here or I actually think

there may be something going on here so then I'm gonna like try and observe a little bit and figure out what's going on I mean for better for worse like being hybrid and online has the advantage of like communication is always there for anyone like reading consume you can be the

invisible hand and like trying to observe things but you need a method and system in your own head to do it so you don't drown um I try to look at um team progress and quality of decision making and quality of output as like my three big rubrics of okay like if these two things are okay I'm going to

like the net things be I'm gonna like spend time with the teams understanding on like what's their high level vision are they breaking that down into reasonable chunks and then like let them go do their thing but definitely there are parts where I'm like okay I'm just gonna be here I'm

gonna like look at what you're doing and my goal here is to like make you um get to a place where you're like gonna make the right decisions uh and there will be a point where I'll like step back again but for now I'm in here um and one of the best ways is like knowing how that's going

is also making sure you're not just talking to other managers like you have to make sure you're spending time with your tech leads uh and make sure that you have team skip levels so so you know like what's actually happening on the ground and like what's worrying because often like your team will observe what's going on but they feel like going back to your question they feel like they don't they're not empowered to like raise their hand and say like actually there's a fire here like go do

something about it I think that's spot on I think it's also important to explain why you're stepping in to observe because sometimes folks see it as like oh the VP's here the managers here like oh it was something wrong and by doing something wrong so you should be intentional about am I

stepping into observe or am I stepping into potentially a fixation issue. Rachi you talked a sorry you talked a lot about the culture and like best practices so let's say when you transition from a giant like LinkedIn to you know a new relatively newer player like disco right like what are the things that you brought in versus what are the things like you know left out because I assume that LinkedIn probably has like carrier ledger things like like all of those figured out versus

discord is still probably trying to you know go through that phase right now. Yeah so like one of the first things I learned very very quickly when I first came to discord was it doesn't matter if it's like super obvious in my head what's that here's the thing that needs to happen and that needs

to get fixed I have to frame it as first principles thinking and that's important because you're sharing your thinking and you're you're sharing like why and why now like any change that you're trying to make make sure like just making a change so like concrete example of that at discord like

about two years ago like we would the way we would like talk about who we want to hire is like everyone like we would do the interview loop and then we would do a round table and it would be like a verbal discussion around how the candidate did like whether they fit for their fit fit for

the goal that we are hiring for etc and the hiring decision was made on the spot and I was like we so if you don't write any of this feedback so when you're like yeah no like it's working like you know people understand and we make a decision and we move on I was like okay that's good but I'm

pretty sure there are times when you're like in that discussion you identify things that this person should like work on once they're here and we're gonna like support them in that learning how do you document that or the worst scenario is like you go to an interview on the candidate like

has some objection with the experience they had and now you have like no written evidence of like how we interviewed that person that we didn't have any bias in the decision making etc right so there's no way for us to like backtrack the decisions we made it made so much sense for me to like

just go to start writing feedback but I wrote up a document about like why and you know why this was the right time like if you were gonna like go through accidentally and get hired and you were gonna like double the team we'd move out of much faster pace of hiring than we had ever in the past

and it was important for us to like make this change and people read that I was like oh yeah that makes sense versus like just saying let's make this change all the hiring managers were like up and arms like why do you want me to do more work like this is not adding value like we're making

the right decisions like how does this help me make better decision there are definitely like steps to like there were like versions of improvements across the board of like here's what makes sense for us and our like point in diamond scale and depending on the impact we're trying to drive

there was never like a blanket of let's do everything the same way and like let's start writing promotion dogs or like start writing rfc's for every decision that we're making like it was all mostly an evolution like sit and observe how are the teams operating like what decisions are

we making well which ones aren't we making well and for the decisions we're not making well like what structures we need to put in place but the thing that was helpful was like knowing like the best in class versions of how to do this and then you can pick a point and like okay do

I want to go to 100% of this solution or do you want to go to like do some sort of like 80-20 thinking on it so you know it's a balance hey Prachi thank you so much for giving us tips and showcasing that you're very intentional in your conversations this is not a trick or an interview question

but I just wanted to know your perspective you have five director boards let's say and then you have only certain time in your day and week and those five director boards are performing at different levels how do you sort of think about balancing the time and how much I just wanted to get your

perspective I think one of your key skills as a leader needs to be assessing people's strengths and potential right potential is probably like more important than current skills and the decision essentially you have to make very quickly for a team is their potential or not

like if there's potential you should absolutely be like spending your time like bringing that potential out if there isn't then you need to like have a real conversation with the person like hey this is my point of view like tell me what I'm missing like what what's what's your

special sauce that I'm not seeing and I'm missing and like how do I help you like showcase that special sauce more in terms of like spending my time like I meet with all of my directs every week it's incredibly important like the way I think about it is like my my immediate management

layer is how I generate leverage for myself there's a part of like organizational design philosophy as well that's part of this question I feel like if at any given point of time I don't have a 50-50 like makes of people like in your lion to like just throw a problem at them and they

leave run with it and people that are like actively investing and coaching and like my organization design is not right if it's like everyone is working independently then I've done something wrong like I should be thinking about how to get them like makes space for them and get

out of their way versus like continuing to be their manager because they're at least some of them are probably like ready to do the role I'm doing right now and if it's the other way around like it's too junior a team like I'm not doing myself a favor I'm not definitely not doing the business

of a bar so I think the time balances itself out the fear of design is right I think we're at time but thank you so much it's gonna panel around applause don't miss out on ELC annual our community's flagship conference happening in San Francisco

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