The leadership strategy about shaping engineering culture for speed, autonomy, and impact.
During discussions about productivity in tech companies, the velocity of building and shipping quickly is often discussed. However, Mohit Agrawal, a senior engineering leader in Silicon valley thinks that shipping without a clear ownership can lead to bad outcomes and is more short term thinking
Agrawal claims, "The best engineering teams aren't those who work at the fastest pace; they are the ones who care the most about the outcomes the ones who behave like owners, not just operators."
Agrawal's career through years of managing growth and product development teams in the areas of fintech and enterprise software has resulted in a management philosophy based on high agency, autonomy, and craft. The use of his method has been the reason for the turning point of teams from mere reactive executors into the responsible decision-makers who have the ability to produce high-impact work consistently.
The Foundation: Agency Over Assignment
Agrawal characterises agency as "the ability and confidence to influence people around you."
"Those engineers who possess high agency do not wait for others to tell them when something is wrong," he comments. "They find it out on their own, diagnose it and then fix it sometimes even before others can see it."
His method of building this atmosphere is by assigning teams the right ownership of projects rather than feature tickets. The engineers are not given only very specifically defined tasks, but rather, they are trusted with the business outcomes and they can decide how to achieve them.
Impact as the Core Metric
Agrawal's teams always give impact more priority than volume. He motivates his team to think, "If we ship this, what would be the impact? If we don't ship this, what would actually break?"
"Engineers could often slip into an illusion of productivity where they start measuring their output in lines of code or story points burned" he says. "True progress is reflected in impact and outcomes that matter to the customers or to the business." For maintaining that focus, there is a success metric correlated with every project - better experience, snappier performance, or measurable growth. The teams would not only think about what they have shipped, but also think about why they shipped it.
The Quality Multiplier
Quality, to Agrawal, is not the opposite of speed; it is the speed multiplier of it. He asserts that, "Teams that thing short term in terms of their thinking often spend a lot of time in cleaning up later," and adds that, "On the other hand, if a team builds with high focus on quality from the start, they would eventually be reworking less, thus getting faster compounded." A clear method that is suggested by him "Every line of code written should be written as writing for production, if it is not ready for production, it's not ready for prime time". Engineers are expected to include monitoring, automated tests and post-launch stability. Agrawal states, "The principle is, "If you build it, you run it." He goes on to say that this is the ultimate example of ownership.
Hiring for Curiosity and Courage
In response to the question about what differentiates his most capable new employees, Agrawal did not bring up academic background or fluency in languages.
"I look for people constantly curious about the world around them. They're constantly asking why certain things are like this and how they work. Another thing I look for is courage and willingness to challenge assumptions"
Creating a Culture of Ownership
Agrawal's teams conduct regular "ownership reviews" to make sure that engineer who is going to "own" the project has required skills, ownership mindset and proven track record.
"He says, if a person thinks that he is responsible for something he cannot control, then we change the structure. The feeling of ownership should be empowering, not burdensome."
He additionally puts the power of narrative and story telling: every project starts with the story of impact.
"He comments, when the engineers are shown where their work fits in the broader vision or business outcomes, motivation follows ."
The Manager as a Force Multiplier
Agrawal thinks that engineering management is a design discipline, one that shapes human systems with the same care as that of the systems of code.
He explains: "My role consists of building an environment that empowers smart individuals to work with minimum friction to deliver their best." "This entails removing obstacles, driving clarity, and standardizing things that make scalable quality."
In reality, this translates to making decision-making easier, setting clearer goals, and making it possible for feedback to move unrestrictedly among and between different positions and levels.
The Long Game
Agrawal thinks that the future of engineering leadership would rely more on teaching teams "How to think critically rather than giving them a series of steps to follow". He predicts, "AI will take over some parts of the execution." "But decision making, critical thinking, creativity and ownership, these are still the qualities that are unique to humans. The leaders who can foster those qualities will form long lasting teams." Mohit Agrawal's perspective seems to be very human in nature in an industry where the focus is on frameworks and metrics. He prefers to put it this way; it isn't about the pace of scaling the company it's a matter of scaling conviction, their craftsmanship, and taking after them.
Ultimately, those are the qualities of not only great products but also world class engineers.
About Mohit Agrawal: Mohit Agrawal is an engineering leader based in Silicon Valley. Mohit Agrawal has led Growth Engineering and Mobile Engineering teams at various healthcare, enterprise and financial companies. He has worked on various fast growing startups and has also been mentioned in major publications like Forbes where he talks about Product Led Growth and Growth Engineering.
Disclaimer: IBT does not endorse the above content.
