The Art of Letting Your Devs Step Up w/ Equinix’s Rajah Kalipatnapu

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (0:00)
I believe this model, the feature lead model, she would help us to retain talent, and we didn't go out to hire next generation of leaders. We groomed them internally.
And my team members realized that they have multiple options to grow within the organization, and they don't need to go out for the next level of growth.

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**Dan Lines** (1:02)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Rajah Kalipatnapu, Global Head of Product Engineering at Equinix. Rajah, welcome to the show.

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (1:17)
Hey, Dan, glad to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:19)
Awesome to have you.
Now, a little bit about Equinix. Equinix is a digital infrastructure company with over 220 data centers in 60 or more markets on five continents, thousands of employees working across many, many time zones. So obviously, you know, it's a big company. You probably have a large organization.
In dealing with scale on that level, I know you've learned a lot about not just how to manage teams, but how to manage managers and how to find talent within your existing org. We're going to dive into all of that type of stuff, but I want to give our audience an opportunity to know you a little bit better. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your career background?

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (2:08)
Certainly, yeah. So my name is Rajah Kalipatnapu, and I lead the product engineering at Equinix.
And Dan, like you mentioned, I do have teams spread across three continents, Singapore, Poland, and Silicon Valley. And before Equinix, I worked at GE Digital, Cisco, and a few other startups. Then I started my career as a developer and always been a developer at core. But I'm also very passionate about building and growing teams. And I've been leading teams for the last 12 years.

**Dan Lines** (2:43)
What was your first program that you developed or coded that you can remember?

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (2:50)
I started my career in India. And the first program I wrote is a, we were not calling at the time a SAS, but a compiler for C, the Fujitsu compiler, if I remember right, that we SAS enabled.
And it's developed in Java. I'm talking about 1995, by the way. 1995, 1996

**Dan Lines** (3:15)
Yeah, that's awesome. It's always nice to hear where people came from.
Now, you've worked, it sounds like you've worked at some smaller companies. You also worked at bigger companies. Equinix is big.
Give us some orientation about your team. How many people are on your team and what type of size? We know it's across at least three time zones, but what's the size of the team?

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (3:38)
So we have a typical Scrum team of size about eight to 10
And I have three product portfolios. And across these three product portfolios, we are talking about 10 Scrum teams.

**Dan Lines** (3:52)
So very sizable team. And within your career, you've had these kind of prestigious or nice roles.
Is there anything that happened in your career that you think was a major milestone or something that was able to kind of accelerate you, starting from being a developer and then going in to the track that you're on today?

**Rajah Kalipatnapu** (4:18)
Yeah, specifically while I was at Cisco. And I'm always, as I mentioned earlier, passionate about mentoring and growing teams. And when I got an opportunity to take a leadership role, I immediately jumped on it.
And what helped me at Cisco is the structure that they have in growing someone as a manager. And the basic management 101, leadership 101 that I learned at Cisco is what I see is something that continuously I take with me to my career and how I help others.

**Dan Lines** (4:56)
That may lead us very well into our first topic. We're gonna talk a lot about leadership in this episode.
And we're gonna start with a model that I know you use at Equinix that you say you really benefited your entire organization. And that's the feature-led model. What is the feature-led model and what does it mean to you?