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At Mcgraw-hill, I manage diverse engineering teams spread across multiple locations and some are remote. Last year, I noticed one of our remote team members, Maggie has great potential. She is a senior engineer, an exceptionally talented individual whom I hired in 2020. And during my regular 1:1’s also, she had also expressed frustration during our regular 1:1s when I was discussing and probing about her career plans. because he felt her remote status limited her career advancement opportunities."

Recognizing Maggie’'s potential and understanding that every team member's growth contributes to the success of the whole team, I made it my goal to mentor and coach her to get her to the next level.

I initiated a series of actions tailored for Maggie's situation. First, I increased the frequency of our one-on-ones and used video calls to establish a stronger connection. I also introduced her to key projects that required cross-team collaboration, ensuring she had a high-visibility role with increasing complexity and scope. Moreover, I matched her with another senior remote mentor who had successfully climbed the career ladder.

Stretch goals

• More 1:1 facetime and frequency for remote members - It’s a great tool for me and my reports to get better alignment, strengthen relationships, build and earn trust. It enabled and taught me to improve my coaching and active listening skills with empathy, and to provide feedback.

I want to ensure the person is successful and are ready for the next role and level

• Leverage Communication and collaboration tools

• Remote Networking opportunities / Matched to a remote mentor as part of our DEI WLI

• Advocated her to Visibility and inclusion in important projects and creating stakeholder opportunities - GoReact Video assignment project which involved multiple teams across locations, is a high-visible critical initiative for our customers before the new semester starts / stretch goals

• Created opportunities for bi-monthly travel for in-house meetups with team and stakeholders

As a result of these initiatives, In about a quarter and half, Maggie's performance improved dramatically—she led the critical GoReact Video assignment project that succeeded on schedule, and also increased system integration efficiency by 25%. Within five months, she was promoted to EM role, despite the remote geographical barriers. And happy to say that she is thriving and doing great in her new role.

In my role leading the launch of that new customer onboarding system, the pressure was really on. We had that tight three-month window and a lean team to build something that would be the first impression for all our new users. One specific hurdle we faced was integrating our legacy customer database with this brand-new system. The data structures were quite different, and initially, the data migration process was proving to be much slower and more error-prone than anticipated. This threatened to push our launch date.

To tackle this head-on, I didn't just delegate. I dove into the technical details with the lead engineer. We mapped out the data fields meticulously, identified the key transformation rules needed, and actually prototyped a more efficient data migration script using Python. This allowed us to automate a significant portion of the process that was previously manual.

Furthermore, to ensure we were building the right thing quickly, we implemented very short feedback loops. We'd build a small piece of the onboarding flow, get immediate feedback from a small group of internal users, and iterate based on their input. For example, early on, users found a particular step in the registration process confusing. Based on their feedback, we completely redesigned that screen within a couple of days, leading to a much smoother experience.

By getting into the technical weeds to optimize the data migration and by relentlessly focusing on user feedback through rapid iterations, we not only overcame the risk of a delayed launch but also delivered an onboarding experience that was significantly more user-friendly than initially envisioned. It was incredibly rewarding to see new customers move through the system so smoothly right from day one. That success really underscored the power of combining technical problem-solving with a user-centric approach

I believe my biggest achievement is building a high performing team amongst a lot of chaos. I started as an engineering manager for replenishment team, soon due to restructuring I was asked to lead a different BU called Parcel and I was given the team from scratch, 8 months into this I heard the leadership is deciding to put Parcel on KTLO and give me a new tier 1 service called channels. This service was highly unstable with a lot of issues and tech debt. This service was transitioned among 4 engg manager in past three years (4th me). 

TASK

My job was to do a successful transition of this service and keep the team motivated

Actions

- When I got to. know about Parcel KTLO and having a new product under me, I wanted to ensure this is communicated to the team clearly with empathy and I wanted to ensure the team that this will only benefit their growth

- I started with a team meeting, shared a couple of wins that we did in parcel, shared even though we did so much, Parcel is being put on KTLO for various xyz reasons.

- I told them every crisis situation is an opportunity and by channels coming under us, we can showcase that even the toughest of the services can be maintained if the tech debt is continuously addressed

- Post team meeting I kept 1:1 with every member and listened them, helped answer their questions

- A couple of team members did share that they felt proud about what they developed in Parcel and were feeling sad that it was going in KTLO.

- I shared that products coming in KTLO happens sometime and this in no way reflects the teams performance, infact our teams reputation is very good amongst the leaders thats why they have given us the most important service (which is also in the worst shape)

- Under previous engg managers there was minimal to no improvement in the service on tech and product side because they were busy fixing on call issues

- I worked with the team to fix this by assigning ywo people to on call and rest two on fixing the issues from root cause. 

- In a couple of months this gave us brwating space since the oncall issues reduced directly impacting reduction in customer queries

- We got appreciated by leadership for this

Result

- Team members were highly motivated

- Learnt a lot

- Got appreciated by leadership for this hard works

I was working on the large scale entrprise wide program that included multiple teams and stakeholders .During the initial phase of the program on discussion with Business stakeholders , Product Management team , PO , Tech SME to determine the scope of program , prioritization & aligning on the business objectives  and tech objectives there was multiple discussion and it was tough to get the agreement due to multiple people having conflicting agenda and need .  I received the feedback that there was lot of time being wasted and people are not aligning on the subject . This led me to reflect back and breakdown the work and structure of how we were approaching  the topics to be discussed & limiting to the required audience and building a steering committee that will be a small set of devision makers representing from business stakeholders , Product management , Technology team additional I also prepped the teams offline on the discussion topics and things they need to come prepared so that our meeting agenda is clear an we can effectively discuss and prioritize on the scope due to the initial prep work done offline . This helped me in always being open for feedback and being adaptive to the ongoing situation and doing initial ground work so that there is clear and effective communication transparency

When buildling the next generation instance, during the planning phase I budget the amount of servers we will launch the product with. Given each server cost was over 2 million dollar I biased to towards frugality and provided a bare minimum number of server we could launch with. But what I completely missed was during the developement some servers will end up in bad state and the engineering team will short of servers to test the software and firmware getting built which made meeting the project timeline riskly and heavily dependent on delivery schedules of servers and them staying healthy. This quickly became a bottleneck that I realized. I quickly put togther a plan to request adittional server and provide a detailed breakdown on where and how these would be used during and after developement. Synced with the hardware and ODM team and executives to get a approval and ordered the parts to get the servers and racks build at ODM.