Why You Need to Take Risks as an Engineering Leader | GitHub’s VPE Neha Batra

**Neha Batra** (0:00)
As we work in organizations over time, we accrue social capital. I like to think of that as actually a risk budget, right? Where you can spend some of that risk budget on different bets that you want to make. The tech world is very forgiving, right? And they reward people who take those risks and try to make those improvements. And so when they don't work out, right, you just want to react really quickly, you wanna clean it up, you wanna fix it. But if it works really well in your favor, you're able to do things that you could never do before.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:30)
How can you build a metrics program that not only measures, but improves engineering performance? What's the right metrics framework for your team?
On May 2nd and 7th, Linear B is hosting their next workshop where you will learn how to build a metrics program that reduces cycle time by 47% on average, improves developer experience and increases delivery predictability. At the end, you'll receive a free how-to guide and tools to help you get started. You can register today at the link in the description. Hope to see you there.
We are back on Dev Interrupted and I am your host, Conor Bronsdon, live from the Dev Interrupted Dome with Neha Batra. Neha is the VP of Engineering for Core Productivity at GitHub. Welcome to the show.

**Neha Batra** (1:11)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:13)
It's my pleasure. I've actually heard about you from multiple folks here today who are like, oh, you're talking to Neha. End of the day, that's gonna be amazing.

**Neha Batra** (1:19)
Yeah, and that's absolutely terrifying.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:21)
Yeah, I'm just building the hype for the audience, so that really when we crash and fall, it's a lot more funny.
But I actually think you have a really unique take to here, which is that you've noted that senior leaders often find themselves as this kind of in-between person who is matching business needs to talent, to product execution. And because of this, I know that you've developed a framework that you apply to help senior engineering leaders strengthen that company alignment piece, which can be really challenging sometimes while you're focusing on engineering efficiency. And it sounds like you do this through establishing communication paths, forward planning and driving accountability through your teams. All things that are important, but sometimes hard. Can you break down how that framework works and kind of introduce us to us?

**Neha Batra** (2:04)
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, just to kind of take a step back, right? I think that it can be really frustrating when you feel like you're caught in between a bunch of different people and no one's really communicating towards each other. And I felt like that for a very long time in my career.
And it felt like a puzzle, right? Why is this so hard for me? And ultimately, what I came out with is this framework, which is pretty simple, right? Like as you start to identify consistent conversation patterns that you're in, right? And I think the product one is the most simple one, right? You get a request, you have to pass that on to the team. The team says no, or the team says yes.
And then you know that you can't pass that to the exit, like your leadership team, right? And so you kind of cajole them to give you some updates and then you turn that into like a progress update for the execution team or the leadership team.
And so I started to find that we were doing this over and over and I was like, if I have to do all the work to do this translation, how do I lower that barrier? How to make things easier? And that's where you start to take ownership of this process and drive that accountability. I can go to my team and get them a little bit more used to some of the vernacular that we might be using with the leadership team, give them the exposure and transparency, which is a growth opportunity for them. And then when it comes to updating my management team, how do I have an easier way to give them those updates in a form that they like and also in a form that the team can give?
How do I just automate this process and connect the two pieces? And that was the big insight for me. And that's what I wanted to share back with the audience.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:35)
I love that because I think a lot of folks here framework, and unless you're in leadership, you definitely think of it as a buzzword, another framework, space framework, this framework, Neha's framework, okay, another one. Yeah. But when you really think about it, what frameworks are, is there a way for us to reduce the cognitive load of doing a task that we're gonna have to apply multiple times? And about maybe that's hiring, maybe that's how you pour it out.