The fastest way to learn is to run two competing bets | Jay Parikh (EVP CoreAI, Microsoft)

In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Jay spent over a decade as Facebook's global head of engineering, scaling the company from a few hundred engineers to billions of users, then ran the cybersecurity company Lacework as CEO through its acquisition by Fortinet. In this conversation, he breaks down the five ingredients of great engineering leadership, discusses why he'd rather run two competing bets in parallel than forecast a winner, and explains why company culture remains more important than ever for teams to get right.

In today's episode, we discuss:

The five ingredients that separate excellent engineering leadership from the rest

How to protect your team from large shifts in public perception

The mindset shift organizations need to maintain speed at scale

How every layer of the organization needs to stay connected to the customer

Why Jay runs "brain trusts" of senior ICs with zero managers in the room

References

Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/

George Conrades: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeconrades/