Why This General Manager Credits a Prototyping Genius for Transforming His Team’s Success

That's a great question. Um, So I'll share an example from when I ran the largest team so far in my, in my career. This was uh for a couple of years in the enterprise side of HP. Um, I ran an organization which, uh, you know, by its very design was supposed to be the first of its kind, um, uh, to, uh, you think of it as a customer experience studio, OK, so I had to build a customer experience studio that would, um, take the best of all of HPE's technologies, the software, the hardware, the apps, everything else, manage services, and then target it at travel and transportation, telecom, healthcare, and all these verticals, um.

was a showcase type theater, uh, and it was like one of my bosses was, of course, the engineering side, which was, well, you know, if these things, um, uh, can connect our portfolio with towards a higher margin offering, uh, then we want you to kind of be that innovation, uh, studio. But then the other side was, it had, I had a pre-sales. Um, if you will, um, audience where the, uh, account owners and account managers who were, you know, working the $300 million American Airlines deal and things of that sort, they were like, you know, show me what we got that we can build, not slideware, right? So, so part of the customer experience studio was I had to hire three kinds of people, so I had to hire the people that knew the domain. Um, I had to hire the people that could do the design and the imagineering, if you will, uh, of the user experience end to end, and then I had to hire an engineering team and, um, build a team that would be at the intersection of prototyping and front-end engineering so that we could connect these experiences that we were designing in real code, you know, and that they could connect with actual back ends and so on. I had had experience with the first two, Brandon, you know, I've done this in, in previous roles at the time, but I'd never hired, um, like a prototyping and front-end engineering grader, and, you know, though I studied computer science way back when, um, I'd certainly become closer to the product and design side than to the engineering side. I hired this individual at the time who um has had tremendous success since then, um. This person in their first few months, you know, it became clear to me that what they were doing with regards to owning and building the front-end engineering and the um and the prototyping function that. One, not only could they understand that and scale it, um, far better than I would if I were running just that part of the team, but also as they started showing their skill sets and their, uh, knowledge with all these other areas which were closer to design, closer to, you know, product, closer to the, the domain, I was like this person, um, could do my job in a couple of years. This person, in fact, I. I need to think differently about this person. They're not just a front end and prototyping leader. They're actually a potentially a full stack product leader, a full stack genetic leader as well, um, uh, so, and, uh, you know, this person, um, uh, has, uh, since then, you know, done a lot of what I've just spoken about, but, um, in my 1st 3 months, I realized that I had to take a very different approach to like helping this person grow their career so that I could help the organization as well as both, uh, uh, you know, them as well.

Um, so the first thing I, I did, uh, was that, you know, I knew that they had just transitioned from like an architect role into a, you know, like a director of front to front end engineering role, and, uh, that they were new to managing people, setting expectations, especially managing managers of teams, because as they started building the team, they came up to me one day, uh, after two months, um, and you know, this guy said, um, although I remember saying. By the way, I've just hired a manager. I've never managed a manager, you know, I need to talk to you about that. I said, OK, let's talk a little bit about, you know, growing you, um, as a people leader. So the first thing I did was, and I, um, I mean, I knew that, you know, there would be some training and resources available at HP, but I was like that's, I, I need to take a personalized approach to this. So I started setting them up. With two kinds of conversations. One, conversations with me, of course, about individuals and their team to get that support as leaders, but I also started connecting them to other leaders inside the company as well as leaders I knew outside of HP in the ecosystem who I felt had a similar kind of background and had made that major transition from being an architect to being a people leader. Um, the second thing I did with them was I knew this person, uh, always felt that there was like a technical side and a business side. Right, and they were like, Ahmed, I'm not the domain guy. I don't wanna know. I mean, I don't wanna get into this ARR and, you know, pipeline, all these conversations that you're having with the, with the sales team, and I kind of changed their mindset on that a little bit, right? So I said, they look, um, if you have to be a successful leader and you're gonna be in a lot of those conversations that I'm Hoping you can represent the team and I need to educate you a little bit about kind of how these cycles work, right? It's a 5 year deal, it's a 3 year deal, you know, here's how the renewal side works and so on and so forth. So I helped them understand enough about the business and the domain that they could be, you know, seen as kind of a more, you know, per second. And then the third weirdest gambit that I took with them was I was like this person needs to be closer to HQ. So at the time, Brandon, the studio that I was running, uh, of, which eventually became about 50 people out of it, 15 people were under, I'm

Closer to HQ exactly.

geographically proximal, because, so I, um, had, uh, you know, I studied in the US, lived in the US, and then I'd lived in India for a while, and I built this machine out for HP in India. This is why it was the first because they didn't have anything like this outside the US. So now I have a 50% team or they have a 15 to 20% team, and I can see as they're growing that, you know, they're, um, they're really starting to perform well and now they're starting to think about what their next stage in their career is gonna be and I remember having this kind of conversation with them and saying, um, you know, have you had an opportunity yet to work outside India in, in other geographies and they're like, look, you know, this is the first time I've actually worked at a company this large and, um, you know. I would absolutely welcome the opportunity to like benchmark myself against kind of what HP considers peer leaders in other geography. So then I worked with my then boss and started exploring if there were leadership opportunities that were slightly bigger for this individual in a US organization and actually helped them over the next 9 months. Hire sort of like train one of their managers to take on their role and this person ended up moving to the Bay Area um and taking on a bigger responsibility with HP um kind of over the next year.

absolutely.

Number 1, I was always there. Number 2, I gave them the advice that helped them at that stage of problem that they were facing. And number 3, let me tell you this, this person then became head of product after they left HP at the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Then after that, today this person um leads a 70% engineering team and product and, you know, design team um out of uh Minneapolis somewhere and every single job that they've taken on, you know, since the time they, they left HP, which was actually a long time ago. I mean both of us left HP like 7 years ago, um, what they always, you know, tell me is that the reason they call me is because. You know, I'm always challenging themselves them to imagine something that they haven't yet imagined and, you know, still give them a path towards that. It's not like an imaginary path that I'm like, hey, that tomorrow you should be a film director, um, so if you call them up right now. They will tell you that part of the reason why uh They've continued to see me as a participant in their work life is because. I was probably one of the first people that told them and said, why are you seeing these boundaries around you? You could be an engineering leader, a product leader, a design leader, all three of those, and one of the three of those, even though you're 35, and now they're, you know, obviously much, uh, much older than that. So, I'm, absolutely saying this with most humility, but this is one of those people I would count in like the. The 5 or 10 people who've who've stayed with me over the years, even if we haven't had a chance to work together, but where, you know, they trust me enough to ask me based on something that I helped them kind of breakthrough and reimagine their career in a slightly different way at a different time in life.