Building Autonomous Teams & Engineering Career Ladders with Sri Viswanath #65

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Sri Viswanath (CTO @ Atlassian) shares Atlassian’s approach to building autonomous teams, the story behind Project Pascal & how Atlassian built their engineering career ladder! You’ll learn Sri’s 3 key areas to creating autonomy (principles, priorities & process), creating transparency at scale, and common & counter-intuitive process changes. Plus the key elements to build/launch a successful engineering career growth plan!

ABOUT SRI VISWANATH

Sri is the chief technology officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Sri joined the company in January 2016 and is at the helm of Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri served as CTO and senior vice president of engineering at Groupon, the vice president of R&D for mobile computing at VMware, and the senior vice president of engineering at Ning – where he was instrumental in the company's acquisition by Glam.

He also led the development of a number of very successful open-source and B-to-B products at Sun Microsystems, served on the Board of Directors for SendGrid, and has a number of patents. Sri currently serves on the Board of Directors for Splunk and holds a M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Atlassian's Engineering Handbook: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/handbook
• Atlassian's Project Pascal: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/career-framework

SHOW NOTES

• Sri’s people-first approach to leadership (1:50)
• Why “putting people first” is key to building autonomous teams (3:17)
• How Sri operationalizes his approach to leadership (4:35)
• What processes should you prioritize first, to build autonomous teams? (9:31)
• Common & counter-intuitive process changes for engineering leaders to assess (15:32)
• How Atlassian leverages pre-mortems for major projects at Atlassian (20:29)
• How Atlassian’s engineering culture creates transparency at scale (22:22)
• Where to start with building your own engineering handbook: principles, prioritization, & process (24:29)
• Atlassian’s approach to engineering career growth & “Project Pascal” (32:20)
• How Atlassian defined each role in it’s engineering career ladder (39:48)
• How Atlassian formed cross-functional working groups to define different roles (42:23)
• How different opinions were included in Project Pascal (43:38)
• How Atlassian incorporated feedback to improve it’s career framework (46:08)
• Rapid Fire Questions (48:15)
• Takeaways (54:15)

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