Two years ago, VP of Engineering Andrew Baptist faced a challenge: he’d never led a team this large before. Sure, he’d been chief architect and a distinguished engineer at his previous tech company, and sure, he’d bounced back and forth between management and technical roles while he was there, but this was a challenge of a new order.
Baptist was working at Ocient, a SQL compliant, exabyte-scale database platform that enables rapid analysis and management of the world’s largest datasets. The company’s talent and technology has garnered intense investment interest in previous years, including $15 million raised in 2020 thanks in part to In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA. In early 2021, Ocient had a $40 million Series B and moved to double their headcount.
In other words, engineering talent and confidence at Ocient was strong — but that talent and confidence posed a set of its own unique hurdles.
“One thing that surprised me is the complexity of managing a team of such competent engineers from various backgrounds,” Baptist said. “So many people are not aware of their weaknesses, and, at times, the most senior people can be the hardest to deal with.”
Even decisions that Baptist thought would be simple devolved into spirals of delay and dissent. “An initiative I worked on early during my time at Ocient was to achieve consistent code style and formatting conventions across the codebase,” Baptist said. “Something I thought would be a quick decision without any dissent turned into a month-long process with countless hours wasted trying to get it implemented.”
Thankfully, Baptist cracked the leadership code, and said he discovered how to lead his engineering team on a variety of levels. To learn more, Built In Chicago sat down with Baptist to hear about three important tips for success.
Advice for Engineering Team Leaders
1. Understand Team Values
Baptist’s take: I think that looking back, a better understanding of the motives and the values of the team could have helped us achieve an end result to that early challenge quicker and a lot more smoothly.
2. Cultivate a Technical Background First
Baptist’s take: I think that the best leaders in technical management roles are those with a successful technical background, where they have experience leading people through informal authority. From there, moving into management roles, they possess the credibility of having done the job their team is doing as well and the ability to empathize with them on the problems they encounter.
3. Educate Yourself
Baptist’s take: There is an abundance of good technical leadership books that are helpful in creating a healthy culture — I’d personally recommend “How Google Works” and “No Rules Rules.” If you can learn from others rather than make mistakes yourself, you will be much more successful in the long term.
