Career Journey 2: Essential Skills & Key Attributes | Thiago Ghisi

**Thiago Ghisi** (0:00)
Anything becomes easier if you have that mentality, right?
You know what to do, you know who to talk to, and you usually have a path forward. You might not be able to solve every single problem, but you become accountable for that, and you take at least one, two steps forward on that.

**Dan Lines** (0:16)
I think it's really important if you're interested in career growth, as you go from a manager to a director and then to a VP or an SVP. What I've seen is the characteristic that you are describing is a common characteristic in folks that are getting promoted.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
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**Dan Lines** (1:36)
Hey, what is up, everyone? Welcome back to Dev Interrupted.
I'm Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO, and we're thrilled to continue our series on the career journey of an engineering leader with Thiago Ghisi, director of engineering at Nubank. Thiago, great to have you back on the show.

**Thiago Ghisi** (2:00)
Thanks, Dan. Glad to be here, man.

**Dan Lines** (2:04)
Awesome to have you again. So this is our second installment in our series of engineering leadership. So if you all haven't listened to Thiago's first episode, highly recommend it. Everyone in the audience, definitely go and check it out. There's a lot of great advice in there. Definitely don't want you to miss it. So to kind of dive in here, last week we discussed the beginnings of an engineering manager's career journey. But today we're gonna go even a little further, digging into what it takes to lay a strong foundation as a leader and how to learn the skills that will make you successful throughout your career, as well as make you a good person, both at home, but especially to work for.
And as leaders, I think we should always strive for that. So let's jump right in our first topic today. Actually, I love this title. The title of our first topic is when a bad decision is better than no decision.
So Thiago, you've delivered hundreds of large features during your career as an engineering manager, a director. You have a lot of lessons that you've learned along the way.
One lesson that really stands out is that a bad decision is often better than no decision at all. So what does that mean? Walk us through.

**Thiago Ghisi** (3:30)
I remember once our CTO, when I was at America Express, and he said a phrase that I kind of thought to the heart, that it was like, for 99% of things in life, a bad decision is better than no decision, right? And what that means in reality, especially in engineering, when you are trying to deliver big things, is remind everyone, remind yourself, remind your managers, remind your engineers that sometimes a really small decision that is holding, let's say, the deliver of a thing, will be better off if you just move forward with whatever you feel is the best option at the time, and then iterate if needed, then try to kind of like stay focused on research, doing POCs, all that, right? One idea that I started during early in my career, especially when I became a director, was to start to time how long it was taking to unblock those decisions and those projects, right? Especially when there was, let's say, conflicts between two engineers.
The decision point is, one staff engineer and one principal engineer, they could not agree on a topic, right?
Sometimes they would usually get to an option before that. I have seen so many projects, so many things slowing down the delivery of large initiatives because of those things that just get stuck. And no one has the... I don't know if it's the process or the courage to actually go and say, guys, this is not the thing that's going to break or make this project. Let's move on and let's see how reality is actually going to treat us. Because a lot of times what is going to cause problems is not that particular point. It's other things that we have not seen that we're only going to see if we make progress and if we move forward. So I'm a really big fan of walkie skeletons, getting that shape of the project working end to end and then iterating on that over time. But overall, I think this process of trying to document the blocking point and trying to time, okay, we have this time to make the best decision we can, no matter what, we're going to move forward, is a process that works really well and avoids a lot of frustrations, because I also noticed that a lot of times what drives engineers to be super frustrated is that they cannot move forward because there is some decision that needs to be made and often if you're not, let's say, actively managing the team or you don't have a good engineer manager there to take sides or to move things forward, those things tend to hold for days, weeks, if not months, right?