How to handle hypergrowth like Grammarly

**Heidi Williams** (0:00)
I joined Grammarly about a year ago. The whole company was about 270 employees. We have since doubled.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
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**Dan Lines** (0:26)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted.
I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Heidi Williams, Head of B2B and Platform Engineering at Grammarly. Heidi, thanks so much for joining the pod today.

**Heidi Williams** (0:41)
Thanks a lot, Dan. I'm excited to be here. It's always fun to do these kinds of things.

**Dan Lines** (0:44)
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome to have you on. Now you've been an engineering leader for several years now. I always like to get into this a little bit in the beginning. What made you decide to make the transition from being an individual contributor, developer to take a leadership career path?

**Heidi Williams** (1:03)
Yeah, it's a great question. And I know it's one a lot of folks struggle with and they wonder if you go there, can you ever go back? And so it's definitely been an interesting journey. First of all, I've been in the industry 25 years. So when I got into management, it was quite a long time ago, but I really haven't looked back. I've loved it. I think it started as an engineer. I started getting more and more curious, not just about what we build and how we build it, but why we build it. And so I wanted to get into more opportunities of helping connect engineering and product management, connecting to customers. And so that sort of naturally led to a management and eventually engineering leadership role so that I can be more involved in why we do what we do and not just the mechanics of how it went.

**Dan Lines** (1:42)
Yeah, I was gonna ask if you remember when you got your first opportunity, you're an individual developer, you're coding, you're doing all that fun stuff. Do you remember what it was when there was someone like, hey, we need someone to manage a team of people, or was it more like you really know the product and the customer?
Was there like a tipping point for you that you had to decide, should I do this or not?

**Heidi Williams** (2:05)
You know, it was a little easier transition than that. I think I was probably annoying how many questions I was asking you about, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And we did have a construct of team leads. And so I became a team lead, not officially having people report to me, but just working with Dev and QA pairs and helping lead a theme of our product forward. And I was back on Dreamweaver back in the day to totally date myself.

**Dan Lines** (2:26)
I remember Dreamweaver, yeah.

**Heidi Williams** (2:29)
So there were just a handful of features that were all similar to each other around a particular product theme. And so I helped those Dev and QA teams do their planning and collaboration and figure out how to stay on schedule. And eventually I did, having done that, got tapped to become a manager on a different team, a brand new team that we were starting since I had shown interest in wanting to be on the management track.

**Dan Lines** (2:50)
That's how it happens most often. I had an interesting situation for myself. It was at the last company that I was at, it was called CloudLock. I was the second employee hired there in a development position. Like individual, I was doing like front end development. And I started doing really well. I was understanding the customer, therefore creating really good UI. And then I was also, it was a small company at that time. I was also doing our support and like our customer success. And I remember I had a sit down conversation with the founders and they were like, okay, you can either keep being an individual developer, or we would like you to be like an engineering team leader because it seems like you work well with people. And of course you understand the customer, which we really appreciate. Your technical skills are good.
Or do you wanna make a switch and move organizations and come join us in the sales organization and start doing customer success in sales or technical sales? I thought about it for a long time, talked with my father about it. I decided to go the engineering leadership path. I didn't want to completely go to sales and lose like all of my technical skills. But I also decided I'm not gonna be like an individual developer or some, I forget what they call it, that distinguished an engineer at some big, I wasn't that path. So that's how I decided the leadership path is for me. That's awesome.