Episode description

Prachi Gupta, VP of Engineering @ Discord, shares her best strategies for growing your career & leadership skills through transitions, moderated by Chris Chiu, Director of Engineering - Collaboration @ Figma. Prachi and Chris also cover what tactics work well for building community & leading in a remote / hybrid environment, frameworks for operating during wartime, recruiting with the whole person in mind, and why you need to “give away their legos” in order to grow as an eng leader.

Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023

Prachi Gupta heads engineering at Discord. With close to two decades of experience in consumer technology companies, she is responsible for leading the strategy and execution of a highly scalable and distributed technology stack that powers millions of conversations. Prachi enjoys building engineering teams and defining culture and processes that enable teams to grow and succeed in a repeatable and predictable manner. As an entrepreneurial engineer at heart, she enjoys prototyping ideas and conceptualizing, designing, and delivering impactful software. Prachi is an active supporter of diversity in STEM, co-founded LinkedIn's Women in Technology initiative, and is an alumnus board member of Women's Audio Mission.

Prachi holds a Master's in Computer Science and has significant experience in working with startups to explore innovative solutions to real-world problems, from socially-driven consumer websites to enterprise business intelligence & analytics software.

"You have to learn how to build something, get it to a point that's satisfactory enough to you and be okay handing it off to someone else so they can run with it. That's essentially been

how I've operated in my career, not because I had this like grand vision in my mind of this is how I get to 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 it.'”

- Prachi Gupta   

Chris Chiu is a Director of Engineering at Figma. Figma is a web-based design tool, and Chris’s teams work on Collaboration & Community as well as Figma’s mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms. Before Figma, Chris led product engineering and platform teams at Flexport and OpenGov.

Chris was born in Brazil and has lived in the Bay Area for 14 years. He loves e-bike rides with his kids and reading fantasy & sci-fi novels.

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• What doesn’t work in a remote / hybrid work environment (2:42)
• Tactics Discord utilizes to enhance the remote / hybrid workspace (4:39)
• Strategies for building teams w/ a strong sense of community & belonging (7:13)
• Defining what it means to assess the whole person (10:58)
• How Discord applies the “whole person” assessment to recruiting (12:42)
• Prachi’s advice for operating / executing during wartime (14:54)
• Why understanding the “giving away your legos” philosophy is important (18:09)
• Prachi’s defining inflection points in her leadership journey (21:15)
• Balancing your career & parenthood (23:43)
• The best career advice Prachi has ever received (26:21)
• Audience Q&A: building trust w/ a new team that is more technically proficient than you are in their domain (28:55)
• Tips for empowering individuals to their full potential (31:12)
• How senior eng leaders can help frontline EMs handle their tasks (32:42)
• Strategies for being the unseen hand vs. seen hand in an org (35:50)
• Practices Prachi kept & discarded during her pivotal transitions (38:35)
• Navigating where to allocate your time w/ direct reports (41:50)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/