Career Journey 4: Product-Led & Customer-Obsessed | Bhavini Soneji

**Scott Carey** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Scott Carey, Editor-in-Chief at LeadDev, where we help software engineers become more effective technical leaders. The tech industry is going through some major changes right now, and the skills that engineering leaders need to navigate this shift will be fundamentally different to those that you've mastered over the last decade. LeadDev is here to help you identify emerging best practices and keep up with the pace of work in a world where you're going to have smaller teams and fewer resources to throw at problems. Our carefully curated conferences in Europe and the United States support engineering leaders at all levels of seniority, helping them adapt to the new normal, sharpen their leadership and management skills and be more impactful in their roles.
Join us in Berlin on the 4th, 5th and 6th of December to supercharge your career and improve the velocity of your teams as we take over the Estrel Congress Center for three days of world-class talks, practical learning and lots of opportunities to meet other engineering leaders and troubleshoot your biggest challenges.
On the 4th and 5th, we'll be hosting LeadDev Berlin, which helps engineering managers learn from the best in the business. And then on December 6th, Leading Edge Berlin will bring together senior engineering managers for a day of practical, hands-on learning and networking. Visit leaddev.com for more information and tickets are available now. Last year was a sellout, so get them before they're too late, and I'll see you there in December.

**Dan Lines** (1:15)
Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO, and we're thrilled to be continuing our series on the career journey of an engineering leader with Bhavini Soneji, former VP of Product Engineering at Cruise, also doing some amazing stuff on the consulting side now.
Bhavini, awesome to have you on the show today.

**Bhavini Soneji** (1:45)
Thank you so much, Dan. First of all, I just wanted to say thank you for Gleaner B and you for bringing this amazing outreach and helping all us engineering leaders and engineers to get better at a craftsmanship and to remove all the voodoo from driving execution efficiency by having it backed with data and tooling. So really appreciate what you and your team has been doing and continuously paving the way at it.

**Dan Lines** (2:14)
Well, thank you so much for saying that.
Right back at you, appreciate you being here because you're the perfect person to have on the show as part of our Career Journey series. You have over 25 years of experience in the software industry, an amazing track record of architecting these highly scalable software solutions that have reached literally billions of users before arriving at Cruise as the VP of Product Engineering. You've held roles at some of these really well-known companies like Headspace, which I was using all the time in LA, Heal, Microsoft. You have the various positions ranging from CTO to VP of Technology. And of course, through these roles, you've become an expert at building these customer-obsessed product-like companies.
And that's the type of stuff that we're going to dive into today. So of course, we really appreciate having you on the show. And I will move us into our first topic, which is like, I love the title of this. I'll just read it word for word. It says, Understanding Customer Obsession and Building It from the Ground Up. So Bhavini, what does that mean to you when you're thinking like engineering to be customer obsessed?

**Bhavini Soneji** (3:43)
For me, customer obsession in this context means a relentless commitment to solving customer problems and providing delightful experiences. It's all about understanding the customer's pain points, desires and needs so deeply that then you can use those insights to drive the execution towards business outcomes. And Dan, it's both right. It's quantitative as well as qualitative measurements of impact.
And the key over here is to avoid biases and be aware about the know-it-all bias, the conformational bias, the favoring of shiny technologies. And how do you be aware about those while keeping the customer in the forefront?

**Dan Lines** (4:32)
I totally think you nailed it there. And one of the things, like I've worked for a few different engineering companies, where some of them, I think, on the engineering side were more customer-obsessed. Some of them, I felt like it was really hard. I felt like disconnected, I guess, on the engineering team from the customer. We would never talk about it.
What are some of the ways to bring that customer-obsession culture into an engineering org, when sometimes it's like engineering is like, yeah, just go build this thing. But do you have any tricks that you use or when we can bring it into the life cycle for engineering?