3 lessons from engineering leader Blaga Lund

During our second “Great Careers in Engineering” speaker series, Blaga Lund, the VP of Engineering at Kustomer, offered insights from her career ranging from building the right process for the right team to scaling existing technologies into new verticals. Relevant to what many are experiencing right now, Blaga kicked off the conversation by sharing lessons from being a virtual candidate job searching during COVID. She advised the group to be ready for many more scattered calls in an interview process. Before the pandemic, it was easier to meet your teammates faster, like having lunch together, which now can turn into multiple Zoom conversations. But after three months of interviewing, the outcome proved well worth the time for her, and she began her new role at Kustomer in August. We are appreciative that she took the time to chat with us, and we captured some core takeaways from our conversation below.

Investing in mentorship

Blaga credits her career growth to seeking mentorship in multiple channels and continuous learning. Her sage advice? “Continue to and make time to learn. Invest in that because it will keep pushing you forward.” She clarified that you should not think of mentorship as strictly a 1:1 relationship, and not to put pressure on yourself to acquire all relevant information from a manager or one mentor. There does not need to be one track. “You have to know how you like to learn,” Blaga shared. She positioned the mentorship she has received as being shorter-term and from many different people, seeking people she admired and people’s work she found interesting and focused on understanding how they approached decisions.

Right Process with the Right Team

Communication between teams is a critical focus for an engineering leader. Blaga has been in environments where her voice was instrumental in getting other functional leaders to understand that developers needed to slow down so that they could eventually speed and scale up. Blaga works to provide autonomy to her teams and understands the value of selling a value proposition to her stakeholders. Engineering leaders should be very comfortable with selling their perspectives with others in the business. In Blaga’s career, she learned how important it was to build for the customer but also that when entering a less-than-tech-friendly industry ready for disruption, there is constant iterating. An Engineering leader’s job is to make sure the things being built are systems for all customers and steering other functional leaders away from quick solutions.

As a team grows, Blaga referenced the growing tension for Engineering leaders when and if they move away from IC work and choose management. If an engineer chooses the management route, as Blaga did, she spoke to the benefit of working on side projects and hack days as two ways to keep those coding muscles fresh.

Scaling Technologies into New Verticals

Building trust was a consistent theme throughout our conversation. As an Engineering leader, Blaga mentioned the importance of not drowning your team in metrics and avoiding individual metrics. Instead, aim to track a larger set of metrics and uncover what teams are struggling with and where the bottlenecks are. Blaga positions herself and her teams to have multiple people problem solving because the solution is not always obvious in creating better code and better product. As an early engineer, Blaga made sure to have herself on emergency calls during the regular rotation so she could help fix and learn about risks if they arose. “Care and be genuine” with your team are things Blaga stresses.

Thank you to all who attended this event. We are thankful to have learned more about Blaga’s story and the decisions she’s made in her career, and we are grateful Blaga did not follow her high school career counselor’s advice telling her not to go into software engineering because “all of those jobs will be outsourced.”

We have plans for another “Great Careers in Engineering” discussion in early October, so please email richard@primary.vc if you would like to join. Interested in chatting about early days Engineering opportunities or considering starting something new? Shoot over a note and we can schedule a time to chat.

— Richard Hughes, Primary Director of Talent

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