Promoting Engineering Leadership & Learning in Remote Times
By: Vibhor Sharma, Vice President of Engineering at Chegg
Over the past few years, Chegg has seen steady growth. That has been possible due to a dedicated focus shown by all the departments working in unison towards Chegg’s common mission statement of putting Students First. Chegg as an organization keeps adapting to student needs, and we have not slowed down on experimenting with offerings that align with the ever-changing needs of the global student community. Chegg is dispersed around the world, and each region is working toward the same mission statement. It’s a loosely coupled and a highly aligned, well-oiled machine where there is clarity over the strategy and the outcomes.
As an organization scales, some things are more important than others — its culture and its ability to execute. Culture, or the underlying beliefs and values that shape an organization, can indeed be difficult to manage when a company scales from 10 to 1,000 employees. A brilliant strategy, blockbuster product, or breakthrough technology can put you on the competitive map, but only solid execution can keep you there. Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own self-interest.
An organization has to put in effort for both of these important aspects. If not done well, it can bring down the best of organizations.
One of the common requirements for these important aspects is the ability to disseminate the information across the organization in a seamless manner. This becomes quite important when we are operating in multiple regions. Though there are common values, beliefs and frameworks, they continuously have to evolve based on the local geographic realities and ever-changing context. Learning, collaboration and sharing information with each other becomes a very important aspect of such high growth organizations.
Chegg’s Learning Services engineering team continuously strives to share information transparently through internal events. These are events conducted by employees, for employees. Recently, we hosted an event we called the Leadership Summit, where engineering leaders across regions came together and shared their learnings on some interesting topics, such as:
- How to build organizations for scale
- Decision making models
- Traits of successful teams
- Owning the roadmap
- Traits of successful Engineering Managers
- Mentoring
- Positive intelligence
- How various functions collaborate to create value for the organization
These sessions were attended by global engineering leadership, along with some participation from executives as well. The topics were well researched, and a great amount of knowledge was shared to help leaders learn from each other. The sessions also included some practical tips around the tools required to work in a hyper-growth organization like Chegg. Bringing geographically dispersed leaders together helped us realign on our common mission statement of putting Students First as well. In order for organizations like Chegg to thrive and maintain our values, our culture has to be reinforced time and time again through various channels like this, especially as we continue to embark on the journey of helping students around the world.
We look forward to hosting many more Leadership Summits in the future!
For more great content, check out Chegg Engineering and learn more about our Chegg India team.
