How to Recruit and Manage a Startup Engineering Team

Interview with Julia Grace, Head of Engineering at Tindie

Where do NASA, Google, Intel, and the world’s best makers go to create and buy gadgets? They head over to Tindie, the popular hardware marketplace. If anyone knows how to build great products and manage a top-tier engineering team, it’s Julia Grace, Tindie’s Head of Engineering.

I sat down with Julia to talk about her approach to building an engineering team and products. In this excerpt from our interview, you’ll learn about her journey from 8-bit video game programmer to Silicon Valley product guru and get tips on hiring technical talent.

Update: since the book published in 2014, Julia Grace has moved on to being an engineering manager at Slack, and has written a guide on recruiting at Slack, read it here.

Poornima: “Hi Julia! Thanks for taking the time to do an interview with me today. Let’s start by talking about your background. What got you into technology?”

Julia: “When I was very young (middle school age), my parents brought home an old Commodore 64. I played very rudimentary video games on it, then became curious about writing my own. I borrowed a BASIC programming book from school and the rest is history. I’d ride my bike to the library and check out additional books on programming throughout middle and high school. When I got to college, I majored in Computer Science with a focus on distributed systems at UNC [University of North Carolina Chapel Hill].”

Poornima: “Wow, it’s great to hear that you’ve stuck to your passion all these years. What did you do after college?”

Julia: “Right after college, I worked in consulting and ended up on a project at the Supreme Court of Virginia. At the time, all criminal records were stored locally (in databases at each police station). This meant that if someone committed in a crime in one county and then later in another, it would take some time before the courts figured it out. I worked on the first project that moved this system into the cloud, creating a centralized database to keep track of the criminal records online. This was way before AWS (Amazon Web Services) and other platforms that allowed for easy cloud storage.”

Poornima: “That was definitely a much-needed solution.”

Julia: “Yeah, it really taught me about the power of computing as it applies to other industries.”

Poornima: “What did you do next?”

Julia: “I went back to grad school at UNC, and after graduating I really wanted to move to Silicon Valley. I got a job at IBM Almaden Research in San Jose, where I stayed for several years, building systems, writing papers and filing patents. Then I caught the startup bug.”

Poornima: “What was your first startup and what did you do?”

Julia: “I worked at a small startup in the affiliate marketing space, VigLink, as their first product manager. After that I went to WeddingLovely (which was part of the 500 Startups accelerator), where I was the co-founder and CTO, and now I’m heading engineering at Tindie.”

Poornima: “Why did you decide to go the CTO route versus building your own product?

Julia: “In a startup, there are a lot of things you have to do that have little to do with engineering (sales, marketing, etc.), and you’ve gotta be really heads down and get them done. But I love engineering, and I wanted to go through the process of writing and scaling up an application.”

Poornima: “That makes a lot of sense. I know I decided against that role because I wanted to learn more about business.”

Julia: “Yeah, but I do also really enjoy engineering leadership, helping people of all levels develop in their careers, and in particular, I like to work with other very talented engineers.”

Poornima: “Now that you’re running engineering at Tindie, how do you go about recruiting? Do you look for things like balancing senior and junior engineers?”

Julia: “I look for smart, passionate people who can get things done with good attention to detail. What matters most is to find people who can build and ship features and who understand that done is always better than perfect. That being said, you have to be careful that the people you’re hiring are mature in their decision making to know when not to make unnecessary shortcuts. ”

Poornima: “And do you mind that, say, a junior engineer may take a little more time to get up to speed?”

Julia: “It takes people different amounts of time to acclimate, and it’s more important to have intuition to build. Some people take longer to develop that intuition. I’ve seen successful companies that have been built by people right out of college, and others built by all senior-level people.”

Poornima: “And how do you go about motivating people when you have deadlines or need to rework a code base?”

Julia: “Being transparent about what’s going on in the company is really important. When everyone has a general idea of the state of the business, no one is surprised when things take a turn for the worst, or the best. It also takes a great amount of emotional intelligence (so called “EQ”) to know when someone is feeling down. Sometimes employees are distracted for personal reasons, but as a boss you want to ensure they are fulfilled and challenged in their job while also respecting their privacy. I like to hold up a mirror and start with things like, ‘I see that you are feeling this way…’ No one can really argue with your assessment because it’s your assessment, but the key is to get the other person to open up a little and self-reflect. The key is to be to be empathic but not sympathetic.”

Poornima: “That is a pretty powerful technique; I’ve learned to use it too, and it gives people the benefit of the doubt. You acknowledge that something else is going on that is distracting them or impacting their productivity, rather than assuming they’re just being slackers. I also know that a lot of engineers get demotivated by founders who change direction. How do you deal with that?”

Julia: “The person who yearns for stability isn’t going to be right for a startup. You need to find people who are OK with change, but still want to work toward a big purpose. You also want to encourage your team to voice their concerns.”

Poornima: “Yeah, I highly recommend postmortems at least once a quarter, where people get a chance to talk about what is and isn’t working for them. It doesn’t mean we can resolve all the issues, but we can pick at least one or two and see if we can resolve them as a team.”

Julia: “Founders also need to learn to understand engineers they are recruiting, rather than changing them. They need to ask questions to understand the engineer and their motivations.”

Poornima: “Completely agree. I think people too often feel like engineers are commodities, when they are humans. They have their preferences and passions for what they want to do, and it’s important to find a fit when recruiting. What about deadlines? I know a lot of people are moving away from setting hard deadlines and shipping when things are ready. What is your take on that?”

Julia: “Deadlines make you put your stick in the mud. People want direction, want to know what role they are playing, and when they will land. I like to focus on having internal deadlines.”

Poornima: “And what about those aggressive founders who want things done fast?”

Julia: “Founders need to understand the technical process. You obviously give them some padding when you estimate how long things are going to take to get built. They might ask you why. You need to be able to give them a high-level reason for why something takes as long as it does.”

Poornima: “Let’s switch gears now and talk a little bit about your current startup, Tindie. What was your first contribution?”

Julia: “The first version that was built was a little shaky. I rewrote it and engineers I hired did as well, under my guidance.”

Poornima: “How did you prioritize technical debt and how do you deal with it going forward?”

Julia: “Taking shortcuts in the beginning is OK to get your MPV out the door and test it. Even today as we do tests we’ll start with a hypothesis like, ‘We think this feature will drive more sales or engagement.’ If we’re wrong, we rip it out. If we’re right, then we need to build it out and clean up any shortcuts we’ve taken. Otherwise, it will be hard to maintain the code base. You don’t want to have a situation where no one wants to touch the code base.”

Poornima: “That’s a great approach. I wish more people realized the importance of refactoring. Thanks again, Julia, for taking the time to share your approach on recruiting and heading an engineering team. I wish you and Tindie continued success!”

Just to recap, here’s what we learned from Julia Grace:

1. You can take shortcuts when you’re building your MVP to test it, but you need to revisit it later on and refactor it. The last thing you want is a fragile system, where things are constantly breaking.
2. You want to hire people based on their ability to get things done, rather than the number of years of experience they have under their belt. It’s also important that over time they develop a good intuition for how to build something.
3. You can to keep your engineers motivated by being transparent, acknowledging when you’ve noticed a change in their behavior, and giving them a chance to voice their concerns.
4. You want to make sure there is a good fit when you are hiring an engineer. This means understanding their motivations, rather than trying to change someone to fit your needs.

Read additional interviews from engineering leads, early employees, and founders from startups like Shopify, Pardot, and more in  How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products.

“Poornima’s comprehensive book will teach you everything you need to know about getting a business from the earliest idea generation phase to practical launch strategies and beyond. A resource I wish I had when I was starting out.”

Hiten Shah, Co-Founder of KISSmetrics

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