People and Organization Flashcards
What did your team look like when you inherited it?
Small teams, lacked senior leadership on Fraud
Brought in engineer leaders who could become tech leads
I was still developing as a manager, we were still figuring out fraud and payments
My focus: continue whittling down the fraud rate
What are other teams or functions your team works with?
Initially, it was eng, product, with embedded Research Scientists. The Ops was a key cross functional customer, but at that time still distant
What were the interactions like?
Initially, pretty choppy. We didn’t have much alignment. We didn’t do planning together, it felt like each function was doing its own thing. Not a lot of cross-communication.
Everyone was heads down in our own little area:
- Ops was reviewing tickets manually, and would give us insights when available
- RS focused on building ML models, but there was limited communication between RS and Ops, and even Eng
- Eng was focused on building out the basic building blocks, had some high level conversations with ops, but built off of intuitions developed at another company.
No centralized leadership
How did you overcome this?
The most critical thing we did was centralize our KRs. I don’t remember what finally broke our back. I think it was actually after the deployment of our decision engine, when we were like, let’s partner with our ops friends to really get their insights and
Lots of mistakes back then
Thinking about your org, when it was short handed - How did you have the most amount of change in the shortest amount of time?
Starts with culture. Heavy emphasis on engineering ownership
- Develop product sense, analytics sense, etc
- Empower engineers to make change
When I had gaps in my headcount, when possible seed the team from existing folks around the company.
If i had high urgency projects, beg and borrow from other teams
Thinking about your org, when it was short handed - How did you have the most amount of change in the shortest amount of time?
Starts with culture. Heavy emphasis on engineering ownership
- Develop product sense, analytics sense, etc
- Empower engineers to make change
When I had gaps in my headcount, when possible seed the team from existing folks around the company.
If i had high urgency projects, beg and borrow from other teams
Finally, invest from within
(*) Tell me about a borderline case where you decided or declined to hire. How did you make the call?
Codruta
(*) Tell me about the worst mistake someone on your team made. What happened after that?
Hao Yi - turned off a ML model
What core values do you bring to your team? (Can follow up by asking how they’ve improved the culture on their team(s) if it doesn’t come up naturally).
Make it happen
Unblock yourself. Find ways to make shit happen
Engineering Ownership
Be an Analyst, be a PM, be a scientist. Don’t make excuses, but seek help when needed
Be yourself
Diversity and Inclusion
Openness and Transparency
It’s okay to be vulnerable
Uplift others
Team wins > Individual wins
We all grow by teaching others
Tell me about your onboarding process for new hires.
Find a mentor / Buddy
- Mentor: Help onboard them to the codebase. Their first point of contact for help (esp technical)
- Create a list of people this individual should definitely talk to, outside of the team
- New hire lunch! Get to know each other
- 1:1 - set expectations
- Use our onboarding docs, READMEs. Leave it in a better place!
- Bugs / Tech debt
- Have them go through the tech debt list, get familiar with the systems
(*) Tell me about a time you’ve delegated work to someone on your team. How did you ensure this work is done on time and correct? How do you decide who to delegate to?
Aakash - GDPR
Tell me about a time you’ve delegated work to someone and they weren’t able to complete it. What was the impact? What did you learn from it?
Navid - Rules UI
(*required) Tell me about the biggest (either in impact or in scope) conflict you had with another team. What was it about and how did you handle it?
Mark Kinsella (Auth service)
Tell me about the most tricky cross-functional conflict that you had to mediate (PMs, Designer, non-engineering stakeholders)
GDPR
(*required) Tell me about a difficult organizational resource tradeoff decision you were involved in. Why was it difficult, what were the options, how did you gather required information, what was the outcome?
Example: Data team vs Fraud
