Phases of Growth in Engineering Management

As companies grow, the role of an engineering manager can change. EVP of Engineering Shruthi Murthy shares her insights on this.

Or listen on

Phases of Growth in Engineering Management

As companies grow, the role of an engineering manager can change. EVP of Engineering Shruthi Murthy shares her insights on this.

Or listen on

Description

In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand speaks with Shruthi Murthy, the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Modern Treasury. Amir and Shruthi discuss the various phases of growth that companies like Modern Treasury and WhatsApp experience. They also discuss how businesses and entrepreneurs can choose the right growth strategies for their specific needs.

Show Notes

01:47 – Shruthi breaks down her role and responsibilities as the Head of Engineering at Modern Treasury.
04:53 – What were the phases of growth for Modern Treasury? How can an organization determine the right approach for itself?
09:25 – Shruthi discusses her time working at WhatsApp and how the company adapted to an incredibly uneven user-to-employee ratio.
13:46 – Can the same strategies that large companies use be applied by smaller businesses and start-ups. If so, how?
23:04 – How can organizations make better decisions as they transition through different phases of growth?

Shruthi Murthy

EVP of Engineering at Modern Treasury

Meet our guest

Shruthi Murthy is EVP of Engineering for payments operations software provider Modern Treasury. Modern Treasury’s platform automates each step of the money moving process, enabling companies to instantly close books with continuous accounting, manage payments via dashboard or API.

Episode transcript

Amir Bormand: [00:00:00] On this episode of the podcast I have with me at Truthy Murthy, she’s the head of engineering at Modern Treasury. We’re gonna be talking about product and team building at different stages and different phases of the company. Truth’s been at fantastic companies at different growth stages, and I’m excited for her to kind of share her perspective on, you know, engineering management and team building.

I’m sure thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you, Amer. 

Shruthi Murthy: Thanks for having me here. 

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. All right, let’s start off at the top. Let’s do two things. One, let’s find out what Modern Treasury does, and then you know, as the head of engineering, what are some of your responsibilities? 

Shruthi Murthy: So, you know, let me start off with a modern treasury.

Modern treasury provides payment operations software for companies to move and track money. We have both a B as well as an api, you know, that provides standardized APIs to talk to banks for businesses to move money over the bank [00:01:00] rails. We provide various different payment types such as ach moving money over wire, transfers over.

Et cetera. We also provide payment at decent software like ledgers, as well as payment compliance software to provide identity verification and transaction fraud monitoring. 

Amir Bormand: Awesome. And then as the head of engineering, I, I mean, it’s a pretty broad title. I, I guess what, what are you responsible for? 

Shruthi Murthy: So, as head of engineering, I lead and run all of the engineering teams within the company.

Most of my work, you know, as an engineering lead, kind of like falls into three pillars. I would like to say it’s around, you know, building the product, working with the product teams to come up with the product strategy and execution methodology. As well as the processes that we need to build around, you know, optimizing for a streamlined product execution strategy, and also on the people [00:02:00] management side, you know, the day-to-day people management as well as, you know, putting together the team, building, hiring strategy, and executing on those as well.

Amir Bormand: Awesome. I mentioned we’re gonna be talking about, you know, team building, engineering manage. Your background’s kind of interesting in the sense that you’ve worked for some really big companies, companies that have grown to become big, and you have a, you know, unique perspective of seeing these companies grow and mature.

I guess kind of to start off at the top, you know, and just kind of, you know, work our way back in terms of modern treasury. Just give us a sense of, you know, where you guys are at in terms of just size and scope so that we have some context. I 

Shruthi Murthy: would say we are not like a very small company at this point, but we are still small for all practical purposes.

We are about 200 people on the team right now, and yeah, it’s been an interesting ride. We have gone through some really fast growth over here. And on the product side as [00:03:00] well. It’s been quite a wild ride in the past year or so. On the product side, one of the metrics that we track is the reconciliation volume.

This is the amount of money that we reconcile on the payments platform, and that is around 2.7 billion per month. 

Amir Bormand: Oh, maybe it sounds like things are taking off, and I guess as you’re looking to scale there and grow the team, you’re gonna start looking at some of. Past experience you’ve had in seeing companies within, you know, different phases grow.

Let’s talk about, you know, different phases, right? And I think this might be, you know, more art than science. There’s no right way. There’s probably a billion ways to do it. But when you’re kind of looking at a company and you’re evaluating the phase that they’re in, at this point in your career, you have a lot of tools in your toolbox.

Picking the right tool for the right environment for the right. That seems to be tricky. I guess maybe walk us through in terms of just when you started at Modern Treasury, kind of how you [00:04:00] evaluated, you know, the phase that you joined and kind of some of the initial thoughts of, all right, well I need to build a team.

This is kind of the strategy that I, I need to come to the table 

Shruthi Murthy: with. That is a great question. I think one of the reasons that I joined Modern Treasury was that I really like working at early stage companies where you kind of like, you know, start off small and you get to build the team, get to build the product, and you know, you grow alongside the product and the team.

You get to know the people pretty quickly and you, it’s easy to build relationships when the team is small and that, you know, has an immense impact on the kind and quality of the product that we. So that was one of the reasons why, you know, I started at Modern Treasury at the stage that we started, and one of the important things that I think about when building a team is, you know, whether the product has achieved product market fit or not, right?

So that is a very important like, you know, turning point in the phase of product building as well as [00:05:00] in the stage of team building as. Before the product market fit is achieved, it’s very difficult to, you know, the product is in the incubation or prototyping phase and it’s very difficult to like, you know, to actually say that you will invest in team building, invest in like, scaling the product before product market fit.

So, you know, it’s almost like you are kind of like winging it before that. But once the product reaches product market fit is when you kind of like decide you have a better, like, you know, more predictable processes and like, you know, more of like a well-developed strategy around scaling the product as well as scaling the team.

So I would suggest that, you know, before product market fit, you keep the team really small. You keep the team really small so that you don’t have too much overhead in terms of like, you know, communication, in terms of management, in terms of like all of the other, you know, even collaborative processes that are needed in team building.

So you keep all of that [00:06:00] overhead small so that you can entire. Focus on achieving product market fit by having that single-minded and laser chart focused. And after you achieve product market fit is when you kind of like, you know, come up with actual team building and product scaling strategies.

Absolutely. 

Amir Bormand: I guess when you were looking back at, you know, your time at WhatsApp, for instance, what stage, I guess, I mean you were there for eight years, but what stage did you join in terms of the size of the company at that? 

Shruthi Murthy: I think we were about 20 engineers when I joined, and yeah, it was an immensely impactful product, right?

I think it is one of those products that had the highest. In a number of users to employee ratio was like crazy at that time. And I think it continues to be that way. I mean very, very comparable between the number of users to all of the large, like, you know, the largest products out there like YouTube or like, you know, like Instagram, et cetera.

But then the employee size was so [00:07:00] small that, you know, the ratio of like number of users to employees was like one of the largest in the industry has ever seen. That was a very 

Amir Bormand: interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess when you mentioned, you know, product market fit and keep teams small and then you have a situation like WhatsApp where you’re saying, you know, you could have a very lean engineering team, but then crazy user adoption in that case where, you know, work on product market fit, but then you’ve realized that it’s just growing gang busters.

I guess when you’re looking at your time at WhatsApp and kind of that philosophy of that market, you know, fit first, how did that work at that time? Because obviously, you know, you mentioned the ratio was kind of incredible. Was it something that you were like, Hey, you know, at some point we’re gonna have to hire rapidly to keep SA supporting this?

Or was it just, you know, what, what, what, what was the phenomenon to be able to keep the engineering to use the ratio? 

Shruthi Murthy: I think, you know, we entirely focused the team on building the consumer product, and that was extremely important. You know, we [00:08:00] also focused extremely well on the quality and reliability and security of the product.

What that meant was our, you know, velocity in terms of building features. Was not very high. I don’t know if you remember Amer, but like, this is like 20 early 2010s, right? And there were so many messaging apps out there that were building all kinds of crazy features from like, you know, social features of course, but also gaming and other, you know, opening up the platform, opening up the app to be more like a platform so that, you know, you can build other apps on top of messaging bots and all of that.

But if you look back and you’ll notice that WhatsApp did not do any of that, right? We entirely focused on end-to-end encryption and you know, improving the messaging, quality and reliability and you know, voice calling and video [00:09:00] calling quality and reliability. And it was a different strategy that WhatsApp took us compared to other messaging products out.

The other messaging products, like I was saying, kind of like focused on feature building, right? Whereas WhatsApp focused entirely on the quality and reliability and that kind of like helped in keeping the focus of the team. And you know, we were extremely popular globally. Right? A lot of like. Millions, hundreds of millions of users in Asia, in India, in Latin, Brazil, Mexico, et cetera.

And yeah, we really, really optimized the app to work in a poor network conditions on low end devices. And all of that, you know, came at the, it came at a cost that is like, you know, we didn’t move that fast on the feature building side, but I think that really, really helped in user option and growth and also keeping the team size.

Amir Bormand: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I, you’re actually right. I, I actually was gonna comment, I know you’re not at WhatsApp now, but I think [00:10:00] I just noticed WhatsApp update that you could, you know, add, you know, memes and stuff like that, whereas before you, I think an emoji was all you had. So even then, it’s interesting, as you kind of said, I was just kind of paralleling to, yeah, you’re right.

It was, there’s a lot of apps out there that I was, you know, using and WhatsApp was like, oh, okay, well it’s super reliable. Does this thing great, but it’s kind of missing these things. But in the. That was part of the, I guess, the core of its success and you kind of, you know, were mentioning the ability to keep the team lean.

I guess as you’re kind of looking at that and, you know, kind of forward thinking to your next opportunity, you take a job at like, you know, modern Treasury. You’re entering the company, you know, less than 200 people at the time or whatever. But when you’re starting to look at your experience at WhatsApp as a, as a, you know, man engineering leader and you’re going into modern treasury, you obviously have seen that tremendous growth.

Coming with that right approach of making sure I don’t bring too much process, I’m focused on product fit. When you’re kind of evaluating, you know, your first 90 days [00:11:00] in a job, when you’re making that transition from massive scale to let’s say company that’s just on the uptick, what do you start looking for to evaluate in terms of how you wanna, you know, work with the team and maybe your plan of what you’re hoping to accomplish?

Shruthi Murthy: would say the first 30 days, I think now it’s almost. You’re kind of like drinking from the fire hose. You’re getting to know people. You’re getting to know, like the infrastructure, at least from an engineering point of view, right? Like you need to get to know the infrastructure that is already in place.

And the court base to a reasonable level. So it’s almost like you are going on a listening tour of the systems at hand and the people that have been there at the company for the first 30 to 60 days. That’s, that’s kind of what you’re doing. And then after which you kind of like, you know, come up with a strategy for like what you would like to do in the next six months to 12 months, right?

Like that’s kind of like the basic first step that you would want to. Your question I think was about the first 90 days, correct? Yeah. 

Amir Bormand: I, I guess really the questions about kind of [00:12:00] looking at your toolbox and after you, you know, you spent those 30 days here and your listening tour, you know, trying to take in what the business is doing.

You have a lot of tools at your disposal, picking the right one or picking the ones you think are the best fit for the product at that time is kind of, I guess the question of how do you go about evaluating 

Shruthi Murthy: that? Yeah. Yeah. So you know, I have a very simple mechanism for this that is quite easily repeatable.

So I think all engineering management, right? Like depends on three axis. Product, process and people. And it’s very easy to remember because they’re kind of like three piece, right? Like product process and people. Those are the, the tools in the toolbox that you would use kind of like align on those three axis.

So the questions that I would ask myself is like on the product side, like what are the things that I need to evaluate on the product side, you know, to assess the state of the system. And then, you know, what are some things that I need to put in place on the product side. This could be in terms of like building a roadmap or, you [00:13:00] know, coming up.

The right level of collaboration with the product teams and the design teams and the engineering teams and also, you know, coming up with setting metrics. What are the engineering metrics that you wanna put in place or what are the gaps that you see in the engineering or product metrics, Indico from there on the product side.

On the process side, it’s more about, you know, what do you wanna see within the team that would help the daily day-to-day Execut. As well as, you know, more at a quarterly level, what would you like to see in terms of processes? Do they have the right on-call processes, for example, right? And how good is that on-call process?

Does it have good signal to noise ratio, for example? You know, does it involve the right people, the right format of like, you know, coming up with the, investigating an incident when it happens, so on and, and so forth. On the people side, you kind of like look at the. You cannot decide whether the, you know, the team is working as [00:14:00] it should, and what are some of the team building on the growth side?

Like what do you, what would you like to see? Because, you know, you need to have a, like the right team structure for not like tomorrow or day after, but you kind of like need to have a team structure that is more forward looking so that you know. It will work not just for tomorrow or day after, but like 3, 6, 9 months down the line.

At the same time, you want to also be little flexible and make sure that the team structure is nimble enough and agile enough to be able to take on any changes of priority, any changes of like, you know, product strategy, things like that. Keeping those three access product, process people in mind and building your tools and methodologies around those three access and constantly evaluating against those three accesses has been extremely useful to me at different, like, you know, points in the the past few years.

Amir Bormand: Absolutely. How are you, I guess, changing in terms of like [00:15:00] when you’re looking for growth, is your philosophy around what metrics that you should be evaluating at different phases change? How do you adjust 

Shruthi Murthy: that? Yeah. So, you know, I think the framework that I have in mind there is to, you know, understand if the product is in the zero to one phase.

I think, you know, zero to one is more like before product market fit. I know we’ve been talking a bit about product market fits. I’ll, I’ll stick to the same terminology. So, you know, the, a product can be in the zero to one phase where it is pre-product market. Or it can be in the one to 10 phase where you know, you know the product has product market fit, but you’re kind of like still figuring out the needs of the initial few customers and you’re also figuring out your, like the weight that you wanna scale.

Or the third phase is like 10 to 100, right? That is, you have kind of great product market. You have like a hundred customers or [00:16:00] so that you know that are extremely happy and want to expand into the product. And then you are in the 10 to 100 phase where you’re really, really scaling the product in, both from a product point of view, but also from an infrastructure point of view.

Kind of like running into scalability problems, challenges, and so on, so on and so forth. These are all like great problems to have. And your traffic is going through the roof, things like that. And you are also building the team. So, you know, that’s kind of like the three phases that I think it, it’s good to, you know, evaluate where the product is at at any point of time.

And then the engineering metrics and product metrics kind of like flow from that understanding. I think actually 

Amir Bormand: that’s actually, yeah, I think great, great points. I think, you know, as, as you’ve been kind of talking and we’ve been talking about that, you know, product market. I can only imagine, you know, when your time at WhatsApp or even out at Modern Treasury, I can imagine that you have this breadth of, you know, [00:17:00] experience seeing a company scale and you have a very good idea of what you’re trying to see in kind of the frameworks you mentioned so that you can make that change.

And that’s why I always think this is a lot more art than science. Cuz you know, everyone has a different background. Everyone that has different, you know, experience. And the tool sets are different and it’s amazing how one, you know, everyone’s looking at the same things, but how you’re interpreting is a little bit different, I think.

It’s really interesting to hear you 

Shruthi Murthy: talk about it. It is super interesting, but I think like, you know, it’s also important to like not get stuck in this analysis, para analysis situation. I think it is very important to make decisions and like, you know, make progress to unblock the team. You know, I think like Bezos and Amazon have this.

Like a great theory about, you know, not walking through one way doors, evaluating whether you’re like, you know, what is the cost of like, you know, walking back through that door. That way you know that even though you might be making a [00:18:00] decision without enough data or without like, you know, annoying checking off all the boxes, because many times when you’re working at a startup, it’s not like you are in the industry, you’re in the startup because you want to disrupt stuff.

And what that means is you don’t have all the data because you’re kind of like moving through uncharted waters and you don’t have all the data in front of you to like actually make and have the surety that you have making the perfect decision, right? And many times in startups there’s no such thing, or even at large companies for that matter.

There is no such thing as a perfect. But as long as you know that, you know, you are not walking through a one-way door, or the cost of like walking back is not extremely high, I think, you know, making the decision and building stuff is more important than, you know, making the perfect decision. Absolutely.

Amir Bormand: I think that’s great insight. I, I, I definitely appreciate it. I know we’re coming to the end of our time together. I was gonna ask you, you know, if you could ask a future leader, a future guest, a a topic or have them speak to, you know, a particular question. Is there anything you’d like to hear? [00:19:00] 

Shruthi Murthy: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the questions that you have been asking have been super interesting.

I think one of the questions that I would like to ask a future leader, especially, you know, on the enterprise SaaS product side, is the collaboration between product and and sales. Right? Like, how do you envision or plan or strategize for that? I think is, it’s been kind of like top of mind for me. That’s a very 

Amir Bormand: good.

And then what’s a good way of getting hold of you? If somebody wants to kind of just talk to you about anything you mentioned on the podcast, as you know, LinkedIn, email, social, what’s a 

Shruthi Murthy: good way? LinkedIn works or, you know, you can also reach out at sh at Modern Treasury. 

Amir Bormand: Okay. Awesome. We’ll include those in the show notes.

Sruthi, thanks for being on. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate it. Thanks 

Shruthi Murthy: for having me, Amber. Really enjoyed the conversation. Awesome. 

Amir Bormand: That’s it for this episode. We’ll be back again. Different guests, different topic. Until then, two things. If you can speak to the topics, truth you mentioned, and now the collaboration between product and [00:20:00] sales and how you plan for and strategize that.

I think that’d be great to have you on. Reach out to me. Let me know. Also, if you’ve enjoyed the podcast, if you found it useful, please share it with somebody else. Please put a review up there on your favorite podcast listening app. That’s how the podcast grows, and I appreciate that. That’s it for this episode.

Until next time, thank you and goodbye.

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