Kinshuk Mishra - Leading engineering teams in a strategic way while your startup is on a hyper-growth trajectory

Highlights of my conversation with Kinshuk:

• Bell curve of seniority on the team
• Monitoring the manager to engineering ratio; targetting 1:5
• Promoting people into management roles leads to internal credibility to lead the team
• Building an engineering program to give back to the organization
• Many times career frameworks are introduced too late in the hyper-growth phase

Cedar’s Distinguished Engineer Program (DEP): https://decode.cedar.com/our-engineering-growth-framework/

Meet: Kinshuk Mishra leads the product engineering and data teams at Cedar in his role as VP, Engineering. Cedar is a healthcare financial engagement platform that addresses all of the challenges consumers face when paying for care.

Kinshuk started his career as a backend engineer in Seattle working for Expedia and Amazon for the first few years of his career. He then joined as one of the founding engineers of Spotify’s Ads Engineering team in NYC, and witnessed the hyper-growth of Spotify’s product and the organization during his stint leading the Ads Engineering team—learning the strategies one needs to navigate a rapidly scaling company. He then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to lead engineering for a small startup in the video communication space, Houseparty. And just prior to Cedar, Kinshuk led teams at YouTube in the music streaming space.

Through his experience of managing teams at companies large and small, he has learned valuable management lessons through both successes and failures.

If you have any questions for Kinshuk, please feel free to reach out via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kinshukmishra/

I hope you enjoyed the episode, the best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you would like me to cover certain topics with future guests.