ELC
+00:00 GMT

Cost-effective scaling & engineering efficiency

with Shailesh Kumar

March 21, 2023
Cost-effective scaling & engineering efficiency
Listen on

ABOUT SHAILESH KUMAR

Shailesh Kumar is the Sr. Vice President of Engineering at ClickUp, leading the Engineering, Security, and IT operations for the company. He has more than 18 years of experience in building large-scale organizations and cloud platforms for high-growth enterprise companies, including his role as VP of Engineering at Mulesoft (and Salesforce post-acquisition) and Head of Data Platform and Server teams at Tableau.

"You have to force yourself in having a discipline of asking the hard questions about all those ideas. What's the impact? What's the revenue goals? What's the target market? How much time are we talking about? The ideas are plenty. There are a lot of great ideas. You have to figure out which great idea is gonna turn into the highest revenue and that's a very hard exercise. I've seen many leaders know that they have to do that, but not do that very diligently and in a very disciplined way.”

<cite>- Shailesh Kumar    </cite>


Check out QA Wolf!

Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to.

QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping!

Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc

Looking for ways to support the show?

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at [email protected]


SHOW NOTES:

  • Shailesh’s paradigm shift regarding scaling / eng org efficiency @ ClickUp (2:32)
  • How Shailesh is navigating ClickUp through the current cost-sensitive market (4:46)
  • Cost-effective areas that eng leaders should consider (6:55)
  • Shailesh’s recent insights on how to better serve customers (8:43)
  • Strategies for identifying areas to invest in & navigating difficult conversations with customers (10:02)
  • Questions to assess challenging areas (16:44)
  • Optimize your software & perform a software audit (18:49)
  • Tips on building teams to optimize engineering efficiency (20:07)
  • How to balance headcount and team efficiency (22:37)
  • Shailesh’s approach to challenges around team efficiency (24:22)
  • Frameworks for creating clarity of a problem / vision & refocusing a team (25:59)
  • What makes an EDP flywheel run smoothly (27:39)
  • Tactics to help increase the net output of your eng org (28:48)
  • Strategies for hiring without losing efficiency & identifying where to add them (30:36)
  • Frameworks Shailesh uses before adding a new function to the eng org (33:32)
  • The story behind building out the TPM function (35:18)
  • Rapid fire questions (38:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

  • Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity - Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world’s most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

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/

Dive in
Related
podcast
Maximizing the shift to engineering efficiency
May 16th, 2023 Views 1.1K
podcast
Maximizing the shift to engineering efficiency
May 16th, 2023 Views 1.1K
37:16
video
How Engineering Teams Can Use AI to Improve Productivity
By Noah Olberding • Oct 18th, 2023 Views 335
podcast
Optimizing & Scaling Your Hiring Process
Jul 27th, 2021 Views 993