How to Make Success a Habit: Leading Large-Scale Technical Initiatives

ABSTRACT

As an engineering manager and a technical lead, I was frequently tasked with leading large-scale, high-impact technical initiatives. Looking back, I remember struggling with organizational complexity and technical complexity of some of these initiatives.

Coordinating people, teams, and priorities while maintaining work-life balance can be a challenge. I have seen many engineers shy away from the opportunity due to the above challenges and I hope to share some strategies in this article to empower more women engineers to lead with confidence.

There are many wins when one embraces the opportunity. One’s overall confidence multiplies as challenges are successfully handled. My goal is to instill confidence in participants so they can make success a habit and advance in their careers.

1. Are you stepping up to lead complex initiatives?

Most of us lean towards opportunities where we have the comfort of domain knowledge and the opportunity to work with people whom we are familiar with. We tend to shy away from large-scale initiatives that are technically challenging, involve multiple teams and require us to own the end to end responsibility.

Originally, I was one of those people who walked away from many such opportunities. At one point, I thought through the reasons why I was not stepping up. Some of those reasons were the reluctance to take responsibility for others, uncertainty about handling continuous production issues and the necessity of 24*7 availability as a working mother. Added to this was the intimidation of having to deal with brilliant people who “knew it all”. Eventually, I stepped up and courageously took on a few opportunities.

These above-mentioned challenges exist in different forms. I started looking at them through a different lens. What is the big picture? What are we trying to accomplish? How do we enable others while we try to win? How do we collaborate? How do you spread accountability across the team? The following sections describe some of the strategies for dealing with these challenges.

2. What are we trying to accomplish?

Many times we get bogged down by mundane day-to-day responsibilities. Having clarity on what we are trying to accomplish is important. Maintaining the vision of the end goal is essential to the success of the project. As the project evolves, the goals and vision may change and expand. We should embrace flexibility in adapting to these changes.

3. Who are our customers?

We should have a deep understanding of who our customers are, both internally and externally. We need to ask, “Will this initiative adversely impact their current experience or will it be seamless to them?”. It is important to be customer focused and proactively partner with them.

4. How do we keep all stakeholders informed?

Consistent communication is key to success. Each initiative usually has stakeholders from engineering, product, program, and leadership. These days most of the teams are globally spread out. How do you keep all of these stakeholders in the loop?

Here are some things to consider:

• How often do the different stakeholders need progress updates?
• How do we highlight initiative wins?
• Should there be a constant flow of information?
• How do we communicate decisions made in product and technical design?

Having an established communication rhythm is important for success.

5. Who are your champions for this initiative?

When taking responsibility for a highly complex and critical initiative, you should also be aware of the organization structure and all those invested in the overall success. Work with invested parties on becoming your sponsors and keep them updated on risks and challenges. Projects of this scale thrive with the support of leadership and stakeholders.

6. How do we win as a single team?

Multiple teams are involved in complex initiatives. How do we win as a team? Strong partnership and collaboration with all those involved are critical to the success of projects of this scale.

7. What are the potential bottlenecks?

There are numerous things that can impact the success of an initiative. Perform due diligence to identify potential risks, both technical and non-technical, and come up with a plan to mitigate them. Some of the technical challenges include capacity, scalability, and availability of the infrastructure. Some of the non-technical risks include key folks leaving, personal emergencies, legal approvals, etc.

8. How do we handle setbacks?

Setbacks are part of large-scale initiatives. In the event of a setback, leaders must step forward and reinforce the morale of the team. It is important to celebrate every win — big or small. It is also important to embrace failures as an opportunity to learn.

9. How do we execute?

The key is to execute well every day and embrace a disciplined approach. On the engineering side, this includes clarity in design, development, test cases, continuous integration, release plan, production monitoring, and insights. It is important to consider the security, availability, scalability, reliability, maintainability, extensibility, and performance aspects of the infrastructure. We should invest in quality, monitoring, and leverage product and technical insights to understand the system behavior.

10. Can you develop a passion for what you do?

It is important to enjoy what you do while you try to balance the many things in your life. When you bring passion to the table, it is contagious. Your passion will be a catalyst for igniting passion in others and help the team rally to success.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

I want to encourage women to lead and drive strategic initiatives with confidence. The main takeaways are:

• Do not shy away from opportunities
• Establish clarity of vision
• Focus on your customer
• Effective communication is key
• Get sponsorship
• Invest in partnership and collaboration
• Understand the potential risks to success and develop plans to mitigate those risks
• Overcome temporary setbacks
• Strategic and disciplined execution wins
• Bring passion to the table

BIO

Srilatha has 17+ years of technical experience and 7+ years of leadership experience working with large e-commerce companies and small start-ups. She has successfully delivered several end-to-end initiatives playing different roles — lead for multiple domains and technical manager responsible for highly critical initiatives. These include high-volume systems where she built teams and mentored both engineers and professionals. One of the critical projects she worked on in PayPal has been published as a blog post here.

To know more about Srilatha’s work do check out her profile here or on LinkedIn!