Operating under High Pressure with Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM @ Google Ads #15

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Vidhya Srinivasan shares her framework for how she’s navigated her career and operated under high pressure. You’ll learn the practices she uses to deal with and diffuse pressure plus how to coach and create opportunities for engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk.

"one question that I often ask myself is... 'Given how I feel right now if I, were to fast forward five years and I look back, would I feel the same level of pressure or anxiety about the situation?' And I've yet to come across a situation where it would still be that relevant five years out" -Vidhya Srinivasan

ABOUT VIDHYA SRINIVASAN

Vidhya is the VP/GM at Google Ads responsible for engineering and product for Measurement & Analytics @ Google Ads. Previously, she led engineering, operations & product management for Amazon Redshift and other analytics services at AWS. Before that, she was an engineering leader for 10 years at IBM.

SHOWNOTES

• How Vidhya has approached and navigated her career (2:04)
• Vidhya’s framework she uses to deal with high pressure (7:20)
• How to diffuse pressure (12:55)
• How Vidhya’s dealt with and diffused pressure personally and professionally (15:44)
• How Vidhya learned to operate out of hunger vs. fear (19:35)
• How to coach engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk (28:28)
• How to create opportunities for your team to fail and take on more risk (33:38)
• When you should step in and help your team (36:23)
• Who is someone who’s most inspired you to be a better leader? (38:39)
• What’s brought you the greatest joy as an engineering leader? (40:01)

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