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In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, staying ahead requires more than just innovation; it demands foresight and adaptability. Recently, we brought together over 100 leading technologists in the Bay Area for our third annual Engineering Summit: Future Proof. This year’s theme centered around preparing engineering organizations to embrace the future, focusing on critical topics such as engineering innovation under constraints, scaling teams effectively, and harnessing the power of AI.
The following are some highlights from our conversations:
Innovating Under Constraint
For the past few years, tech companies have entered a new reality of hyper-efficiency; engineering budgets are under increased scrutiny and each hire needs to be justified. However, unlike other functions which can trace investments back to a clear ROI, engineering can sometimes feel like a black box. So how do you lead and operate engineering organizations in the current macro environment where there is a constant need to do more with less?
Matt Eccleston and Mike Curtis, members of the ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board, shared their experiences leading engineering organizations at Airbnb, Dropbox, and vmWare. They emphasized the importance in today’s reality of understanding customer needs, setting clear boundaries for project timelines and resources, and encouraging out-of-the-box thinking to boost efficiency.
It's also vital to invest in developer tooling. Most organizations do not pay attention to development tooling as a way to make themselves more efficient, and even those that do underestimate the leverage it can provide. Panelists argued that we should actually be utilizing ~15% of the engineering team to do work that can make the other 85% more efficient. In fact, people often underestimate how early you can get started; even at 10 engineers, two people can devote half of their time to thinking about how to streamline the toolchain and enable the team to move faster.
“Investing early is important as the pace of technology development will outpace the growth of an organization. It sucks to work in a codebase where you have unexplained bugs, you don't know how abstractions work, etc. You want a code environment where it is fun and easy to write code. The harder it is to do that, the more frustration and unhappiness there will be.”
- Matt Eccleston (ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board)
The Secrets of Scale
Each stage of growth raises new considerations and challenges for technical leaders. Anantha Kancherla, VP Advanced Driving Automated Systems at General Motors, and Ben Smith, Former Technical Advisor to Google CEO, delved into unconventional strategies for scaling engineering teams. They debated the merits of building teams with generalists versus specialists, and the importance of investing early in tools that can help scale engineering efforts.
Above all, they emphasized the importance of aligning organizational structure and teams to the product.
“You ship your org chart. At Dropbox, we used to say let’s align organization structure to the roadmap for the next year. Let’s not be afraid to have different leaders step up. This allows people to not get tied to egos or certain responsibilities. “
- Aditya Agarwal (Chair of ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board)
It is also important for engineers to build empathy with end users. In the early days at Google, engineers would do one-week rotations with customer support, sales, etc. to get exposure to other roles and understand how what they are building is being sold and used by the world.
As the engineering organization evolves, so does the role of engineering leadership. As teams grow, it’s critical that engineering managers are well-rounded and able to talk to other teams like product and sales. Once the organization moves past 100 engineers, engineering leaders need to be thoughtful about communication. Everyone has a different style—maybe they are good at writing, communicating to the rest of the org, etc.—and this is when the role of an engineering leader transitions to focus on aligning the happiness of people with business priorities. Engineering can often feel like a mysterious black box, especially to non-technical leaders like the CFO or even the Board. An engineering leader’s responsibility is to understand where leverage points and inefficiencies exist in the technical organization and clearly articulate that in non-technical language to the rest of the organization.
You’ve Heard the AI Hype, Now Here’s the Reality
Of course, the impact of AI was top-of-mind at our summit. Keith Adams (ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board), Anantha Kancherla (ICONIQ Growth Technical Advisory Board), Vishwanath TR (Glean Co-founder), and Nikita Shamgunov (Neon CEO) led our closing panel on the practical applications and realities of AI in engineering. The discussion revealed a variety of perspectives on the utilization of AI tools like GPT models and the strategic decisions companies must make regarding cloud services and GPU acquisitions.
"We are betting there will be multiple capable models, and we allow customers to specify models they want to use. We will likely see open-source fine tuned models used for specialized tasks and foundation models for general reasoning tasks."
- Nikita Shamgunov (CEO of Neon)
The panelists also debated AI’s potential to significantly reduce code production time and enhance productivity, even as they recognize the challenges of integrating AI into traditional engineering roles. The machine learning space is still viewed as a specialized field and panelists agree that it is not feasible for software engineers to build ML models from scratch. As a company matures, it will be important to bring in ML researchers who can explore new ideas and approaches that the rest of the engineering team can productize.
"We don't want an exclusive AI team, we want everyone working with AI. The goal of the ML team is to create a platform so the rest of the product and engineering team can infuse the core product with different AI and ML features."
- Vishwanath T.R. (Co-founder of Glean)
Our Future Proof Summit not only provided tactical solutions to current engineering challenges but also sparked broader discussions on the strategic and philosophical aspects of technology's future. We invite you to explore our latest research on the state of engineering in 2024 that further explores these issues and more, including building R&D teams, enhancing developer productivity, and hiring top technical leadership.
Join us on this journey as we navigate the future of engineering together.
Published:
June 17, 2024
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