Stripe on Treating Dev Bandwidth as Your Most Valuable Resource w/ Stripe’s Head of Engineering, Smruti Patel

**Smruti Patel** (0:00)
Having led teams and people for 14 plus years, the most important lesson that I personally live by is understanding what makes each of us tick.
And we know engineers don't lack motivation, they are here to do their best work. So then how do you take this collective team of individuals who are operating in that synchrony and then drives that force multiplier message in the values they can deliver? So here's where, imagine if all of this awesome people were heading in the wrong direction or destination.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:35)
Want to know how the world's smartest engineers are proving their dev team's connection to the business bottom line? Or how they keep a lead cycle time while minimizing dev burnout and maximizing retention? These are just two of the topics leaders from Slack, Shopify and Stripe will tackle at Interact on October 25th. A free, virtual, community driven engineering leadership conference. Interact is a one day event with more than 25 of the most respected minds in software engineering. All selected by the thousands of engineering leaders in the Dev Interrupted community. If you are a developer, team lead, VP or CTO looking to improve your team, this is the conference for you.
Go to devinterrupted.com/interact to register free today.
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your cohost, Conor Bronsdon. And today I'm joined by Smruti Patel. She is the head of engineering for data platform at Stripe, which is one of the most exciting companies in my opinion. Welcome to the show, Smruti.

**Smruti Patel** (1:32)
Thanks, darling. Thank you for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:34)
Yeah, I'm really stoked to talk to you. I've wanted to have someone on from Stripe and you're such an incredibly interesting leader. Stripe's obviously a mega unicorn. I think everyone in the audience knows a bit about who Stripe is.
It's one of the most valuable startups on the planet. You've been at the company almost five years now, correct?

**Smruti Patel** (1:51)
Yes, getting there.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:53)
Okay, how did you end up at Stripe?

**Smruti Patel** (1:55)
Wow, okay, that's a really good question. I will have to take you a wee bit whirlwind-ing into my past.
So I grew up in Mumbai. I was very fortunate to be raised by parents who had two daughters who taught us that if you worked hard and didn't take any shortcuts to success, the sky was the limit. And that in many ways has sort of determined my career choices, there I am, who I am. I loved to step from the beginning, solving puzzles, asking questions, just basically being curious about what why. And so got into engineering.
Here I did my bachelors, my masters in computer science, and had a few offers from the financial world in New York, the cities and the goldmins. But I came to Palo Alto for an interview with VMware, which back then was at the helm of a virtualization wave. Blue skies, white stuffy clouds, rolling legacy, even had horses.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:45)
Oh, they fooled you.

**Smruti Patel** (2:46)
Exactly, it felt like a paradise on Earth, but with either or not, my 20-year-old self decided to move for that.
I worked on the hypervisor, I worked on the control plane, I built out the disaster recovery solution for VMware. And by the time I left, I was working on data protection for the cloud. And so along the way, I had seen that I loved bringing the right set of people together to solve these complex, ambiguous distributed systems problems. However, my career, looking back, was very methodical in some ways and structured from the straight A's to engineer to masters to management to senior management.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:23)
Yeah, you mentioned no shortcuts.

**Smruti Patel** (3:25)
Exactly, no shortcuts. You got to work with the steps. And in large part, my choices were affected by what the environment around me supported. And sometimes due to my own financial means and responsibilities. And so I was always one foot in front of the other and sometimes maybe even feeling too safe for my sake.
And in my early thirties, I came across this book, Mindset, The Growth or the Fixed. And that completely blew my mind. And so my expectations of myself since drastically changed. And there in my decision to try out since Stripe was motivated largely by that. I took a step down so to speak, but I have learned so much more since. And I'm proud to say that it was the best decision of my professional life.
I absolutely love working at Stripe and we are hiring. So please reach out if you want to learn more. But that in a nutshell is how I got to Stripe.