Engineering Execution is a Strategic Weapon w/ Bill Coughran & Melody Meckfessel #84

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

In this episode, Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital, Former SVP Engineering @ Google) and Melody Meckfessel (Co-Founder & CEO @ Observable) discuss ways to make your engineering org a strategic advantage to your company. They cover how to leverage feature/system “simplicity,” how to implement product instrumentation, when to bring in SREs, and how to balance tech debt and refactor work.

ABOUT BILL COUGHRAN

Bill Coughran (@BillCoughran) works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security.

"If a leader comes in and talks about, 'I did this and I did that' rather than talking about the teams that they worked with in the past... The reality is the work got done by others.

And so, I think it's critical for more senior people to recognize the importance of an overall team. And part of their job is to help mentor and develop people on the team.

- Bill Coughran

ABOUT MELODY MECKFESSEL

Melody (@mmeckf) is the CEO / Co-founder of Observable, where she is building the future of data collaboration. She is passionate about helping humans thrive through collaboration, inclusion, and insights. Before Observable, she was a VP of Engineering at Google, leading systems with a team of 1,000+ where she created the DevOps practice for Google Cloud.

Melody was responsible for large-scale systems delivering successful outcomes for millions of users. Melody instills passion around data innovation - improving exploration and insights from data. She is an expert in tools and systems for productive teams to thrive, and that's exactly what she is bringing to the future of data collaboration on Observable.

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register

Check out Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• The challenge of keeping enterprise engineers close to the end user (3:26)
• Product instrumentation vs product intuition (8:22)
• Why it’s critical for eng teams to interact with customers as a company scales (11:31)
• How long should dev teams handle site reliability before bringing in dedicated SRE (12:35)
• What attributes Bill looks for in eng leaders (18:13)
• Why a tolerance for failure is key to innovation (22:01)
• Should early stage companies deal with tech debt? (24:17)
• The value of mentor-first engineering leaders (31:15)