Ani Mishra: Effective Cross-functional Collaboration

Our guest, Ani Mishra – engineering manager at DoorDash – unpacks what it really means to drive cross-functional collaboration as an engineering manager. Ani’s core message: shipping products isn’t just about writing code, it’s about orchestrating diverse disciplines—product, design, data science, operations, and business strategy—so that together they deliver real customer and business value.

Ani frames the engineering manager’s role as a conductor of an orchestra: engineers, PMs, designers, and analysts each play their part, but the EM coordinates, empowers, and ensures harmony. Beyond predictability and productivity, EMs must remove engineering bottlenecks, expand experimentation capacity, and balance feature delivery with tech debt and internal tools.

When conflicts arise, Ani emphasizes prioritization—customer first, business second, team and partners third, and self last. He stresses that change requests should be seen as learning opportunities, with proactive communication as the key to managing shifting priorities. Escalation, too, is reframed: not as failure, but as a professional tool, especially when done jointly with product partners to present transparent trade-offs.

Looking ahead, Ani sees AI transforming collaboration. As non-engineering partners gain the ability to prototype and experiment independently, EMs will shift toward building enabling platforms, treating PMs, designers, and analysts as their direct customers.

Ani closes with a practical checklist for managers: hold regular one-on-ones with cross-functional partners, maintain a single prioritized roadmap, translate tech debt into customer and business terms, run plan reviews with all stakeholders, and invest in informal relationship-building. His takeaway: trust and alignment across functions are the true force multipliers for engineering managers who want to lead beyond their team.