Embracing Failure and Leading with Values in Engineering With Balki Kodarapu
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Welcome back to the Uncharted Podcast. Today's guest is Balki, someone I've had the pleasure of knowing over the last couple of years through a couple of communities I'm a part of. He's a fan turned guest. I hope you enjoy today's episode of Engineering Values after a quick advertisement by our sponsor, NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 different answers. Bull market, bird market, inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball?

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When you're closing the books in days and not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. I use this product with one unified business management suite. This gives you the visibility and control you need to make decisions quickly and the opportunity to grow your business. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com forward slash scale. The guide is free at netsuite.com forward slash scale.

I'm excited to have a friend. I've formed a pretty good relationship over the last year. Balki joining us from Portland, Oregon. Balki, welcome to the show.

I'm so glad to see your smiling face here on Zoom and talk about engineering values and anything else we want to share with our audience. I love it. Before we get to the business side, give everybody a little context on who you are, personal business side, but give us a little bit about who Balki is. I grew up back in India, did my college there, wanted to come on a student visa, but because of financial resources, I could not make it here as a student.

So a couple of years later, I kept trying and came on my H1 work visa. A typical story, but my career here lasts about 20 years in the US, all in engineering. But it's like smack dab in the middle, divided into two major parts. The first part, I worked in larger companies,

as an individual contributor entirely in the Microsoft ecosystem. I call it closed source. Back then it was closed source.

But then I did my MBA and the entrepreneurship bug bit me during that MBA program, came out of the large company, built a startup, had a lot of fun. At the end of it, realized that I would be a better match as an engineering leader, helping other founders grow versus building my own. So the last 10 years, I've been doing exactly that. I work for bootstrap and VC-backed

startups, high growth startups, wake up with a smile every day knowing that I make an impact to both my teams as well as our customers. Currently, I'm a VP of engineering for a health tech company

For pregnant and postpartum moms, we provide support virtually. So enjoying that ride so far. I'm in that age group where a lot of my close friends are having kids. And I always find it cool when tech addresses a need that's not AI for go to market or something. I wasn't going to ask this question, but as you got talking earlier this week, the founder and president of DevRev on the show, and he said he grew up in India village, India.

very hard childhood, but got educated, left. I'm an immigrant, right? I moved here when I was 13, so 20 years ago. I know the childhood or the upbringing my parents had and I've had is going to be different than what my kids are going to go through. And I have a feeling that's similar in your case as well. And what I'm trying to basically ask is,

Sometimes I actually think it's a good thing to go through hardship because it teaches you a lot of things. How are you trying to do that to your kids now that you're in Portland? And not that Portland doesn't have its hardships, but it's different than growing up, let's say, in a village in India. It's a great question. And as parents, we have 15-year-old and a 13-year-old. It's

top of mind, pretty much like more important than anything else for us who grew up in India through the hardship and very strong values. They are privileged by a thousand X compared to what we, you know, just because of how the technology helped, but we provide everything for them. So there's no question they're privileged, but

But one of the ways we are helping them is this could be a whole other topic. When they were 13 and 11, we guided them to start a nonprofit.

So they started a chess-based nonprofit and we taught them that how can you think about others more than yourself? And it's been a blessing, not just for them, but also for us. It's a whole other topic, but this year they're on track to give away $40,000 worth of services and cash to children and other chess organizations. They've trained up hundreds of students, helped many kids get into chess and advance in chess.

That selfless feeling, I wish my parents taught me more than anything else. So I feel lucky that I'm able to do that for my kids. I love that. I've asked this question a few times and I've been told create hardship, put them in team sports. But I actually think like this is a really unique one, which is, hey, acts of service, allow them to pay it forward.

Let me provide some context on why I had invited you to come on the show. One of the things I found it fascinating as I started following you on LinkedIn, and you have this post about engineering values and the importance of having values within your engineering team. What I found fascinating is...

I'm a huge believer of having a set of values for the organization, for the company, for the startup. But you have gone a little deeper, which is like department specific value. Why should you have department specific, in your case, engineering values? Yeah, I mean, no knock on company values, but I've seen over and over engineers have a hard time connecting to company values.

They're usually broader, a little bit harder to connect for lack of better explanation. I also felt they can be derived. So engineering values are not like company says one thing, we're saying something different. It's almost like a bridge value for me. So company might say we are transparent and open. As typical engineers, I don't know what to do with that. That's the main reason I created these engineering values like a typical recovering engineer.

bridge those values into what engineers can understand and put into action and what I can reinforce on a daily basis. Another small reason which we could

use the company values as well. This is where Amazon does a fantastic job, right? They actually, in their interviews, their focus is on their leadership principles. So my goal here with these engineering values is reinforce that value so much and incorporate them into our interview process. So anyone coming into the company, we know they're aligned with those values. They'll thrive in a system where we have those engineering values.

What are five common standards every engineering team needs to have in terms of their values from your perspective? I'll quote a couple of them from what I created for this organization. One of them is my favorite is about communication, right? So almost every company has a value of we are transparent and open, but we flip out when we talk about implementing those or putting those in execution. So at this company, I said, we always operate in public.

And a specific example I include as part of the value is how we communicate on Slack. For example, by default, you should communicate in the most open channels

channel on Slack that you're comfortable with. If that's too broad, go to a private channel purpose-built for that project. If that is too much for you, then do a group chat. If that's too much for you, do a direct message. I'm saying don't go to the direct message level. Communicate at the most broadest level. I got this idea from a company a couple companies ago.

We were like obsessed with how open we were. And every week we tried to increase the number of conversations that happened in public. And that was a huge inspiration and it changed everything.

how we were transparent, how we fought a lot with each other, had a lot of conflicts, but we got to the solution much faster when we were communicating in public. Another subtopic under communication is we celebrate our wins in public.

along with sharing our failures also in public. Every month at my last company, we openly did a demo to the entire company. I was very afraid to do in front of 150 people. Why would they care about the product we're building?

But over time, we refined and made it very valuable. Those meetings were the most attended, even compared to the company all hands run by our CEO. People loved seeing the product, that we were vulnerable. And I was like ready to be punched in the face. They would say, this is stupid, bulky. Why did you build this? I'm like, okay, that's the feedback I'm looking for.

The process we built here, we can iterate and go back and change that. It was a very transformative experience for me and the engineering team. They were like an open book, share everything we're building all in the public for the entire company.

That's awesome. I see the benefit of what you're sharing when it comes to the engineering team specifically, right? But selfishly, as someone that usually didn't go to market in a customer facing role, why do I care? Like, is there any impact? Yeah, I'll refer to the one value I talked about. Is the engineering team building secretly behind dark curtains or are we building in public? So that directly impacts go to market, right? As I mentioned earlier,

Folks from marketing, sales, customer support, everybody would be at the meeting raising their hands to ask questions like, no, tomorrow they want to know what we're building. That's one obvious example. Another more subtle example is also how we build. So one of our values here is we build in iterations always.

And we think about the value we're adding today at the same time, not letting go of the long-term architecture. So that, in my opinion, very directly impacts my stakeholders. At the end of the day, my stakeholders, business side, GTM side, care about what's going into the market. And if you're doing it in a waterfall fashion,

they won't see the value often. Us working in iterations and getting feedback from the market impacts the GDM side very much. The go-to-market side. Of course, you need that back and forth. I think it's critical to have. One thing I've always been curious, and you can answer this as it pertains to the engineering values or the overall company values, but how often...

How often should you reassess? In an ideal setting, values should be durable, that they should last the lifetime of the company, but that's an ideal situation, right?

B2B SaaS company in this market is nothing but normal. So the world is expecting us to change every month, if not. I would be more opportunistic, create values that are durable as much as possible. And one of the advantages I have here is

I shared the value, but also go one level deeper as to how to put those values into practice. When we talked about communications, I gave the example of how we communicate in Slack. If Slack goes away, then we can talk about how this would look in a different system that operates differently. I would likely change that one layer deeper, how we implement, embrace those values, but the overall values should endure, in my opinion.

The other example I can share is I have a value that says our only mission for engineering is that we help pregnant and postpartum moms have healthy and joyful period, that 18-month period, right? That mission is unlikely to change, but there's a possibility that we may expand that in

into other segments of the market. And then I would adopt that value accordingly. Love it. This has been fantastic. One question I'd love to ask, if you could go back to any time, what's one piece of advice your older, wiser Balki would give as a younger self? Embrace failure, not just accept, but embrace failure. I grew up and we talked briefly about my childhood. I was raised in a family family

where failure was looked down. It's common in many families. I grew up afraid of rejection and failure, but only in the last few years I realized how beautiful failure is if you accept it and embrace it.

assume that you will fail more often than not. I teach my kids, talking about kids, you should get at least one rejection per day. Get rejected once per day. So the other day, I asked them to go into an ice cream shop and they bought some ice cream, but our dog was outside. I'm like, our dog is outside. We don't have money. Could you give us some ice cream? I was expecting them to be rejected, but they just gave them...

That's awesome. I don't know if you ever watched the TED talk about the 100 days of rejection, where this guy does every day something random. And one time he just shows up to a Super Bowl party with a bag of chips. He's like, can I just join your Super Bowl party? Expecting to be turned away. But they let him in. I grew up in a very similar household where it took me a really long time to embrace that, hey, it's actually a really good thing to be rejected, especially in sales. Like,

For every 50 no's, you get one yes. So you got to just have that mindset. Look, this has been a fantastic episode. Again, I want to thank you for being a friend. Thanks for coming on the show. For everybody listening, I will put Balki's contact information and whatnot in the show notes. He's very approachable and very kind. So reach out. Thank him for coming on the Uncharted podcast. And until next time, be well, be safe, and we'll catch you on the next episode. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 different answers.

answers. Bull market, bird market, inflation's up or down, can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform.

When you're closing the books in days and not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. I use this product that you should do. One unified business group. This gives you the visibility and control you need to make decisions quickly and the opportunity to grow your business. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com forward slash.

The guide is free at netsuite.com. Download the free guide at netsuite.com.