#19 - Scaling Collaboration Across the Globe - Ranganathan Balashanmugam

“With machines, you know there are limitations. You can’t go beyond that. You have to upgrade your machines. Or the technology changes. But with people, the interesting part is: if you get all the parts right, the sum of the parts will be definitely greater than adding them together."

Ranganathan Balashanmugam is the co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams, where most of us can relate to with the remote working becoming a norm nowadays. I had a pleasant conversation with him in this episode to discuss many strategies and thought leadership on how to lead a distributed team by taking parallel from distributed system, overcoming challenges of building a team with different culture, and how to nurture a team. We started with him sharing his career journey and interesting story of him conquering the Mount Everest Base Camp, where he gained some insights and inspiration throughout the trek. Ranga then shared what led him to take his first management role and developed strategies around scaling distribution teams over the years. We then discussed about hiring and onboarding, the concept of orchestration vs choreography when managing a team, and the qualities of an excellent leader. At the end, Ranga also shared about EverestEngineering and its differentiators to ensure good engineering quality for their clients.

Listen out for:

• Ranganathan’s career journey - [00:06:16]
• Trip to Mount Everest - [00:08:19]
• How Ranga took management role - [00:12:55]
• Scaling distributed teams - [00:14:43]
• Onboarding new joiner - [00:26:23]
• Orchestration vs choreography - [00:31:01]
• What makes a good manager/leader - [00:36:41]
• EverestEngineering - [00:43:13]
• Ensuring good engineering quality - [00:47:09]
• Ranga’s 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:52:27]

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Ranganathan Balashanmugam’s Bio
Ranga has worked with globally distributed teams for the last fifteen years. He graduated as a civil engineer and became a developer for nearly eleven years. He worked on web, mobile, and distributed technologies to scale software. Later he picked up operations and engineering management at Aconex, where there were teams distributed in four different time zones.

He is currently co-founder and CTO of EverestEngineering, which he scaled the organization to 80+ people in the last two years, in three other regions. He is passionate about scaling and leading distributed teams.

• Microsoft MVP for Data Platform - 2016, 2017.
• Experience in building two startups.
• Speaker at many international conferences and meetups
• Experience in building distributed high-performance teams and offices.
• Organizer of one of the top technology meetups - Hyderabad Scalability Meetup.

Follow Ranga:

• Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ranganathanb
• Twitter – https://twitter.com/ran_than
• Medium – https://medium.com/@ran_than
• SlideShare – https://www.slideshare.net/techmaddy

Follow EverestEngineering:

• Website – https://everest.engineering

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/19.