The conventional path for senior engineers often presents a stark choice: stay hands-on with the code or move into a leadership role and leave it all behind. But what if this is a false dilemma? Minh Nguyen, VP of Engineering at Transcend, has built her career on a more flexible and impactful approach, proving that it's possible to balance deep technical work with strategic leadership.
Her journey from staff engineer to executive reveals a refreshing philosophy on what it truly means to be an effective engineering leader. This article explores Minh's key insights, from her Moneyball-inspired communication style to her product-centric approach to team organization, offering a practical guide for leaders navigating their own transitions.
The flexible leader: a new leadership transition
For Minh, the transition to leadership hasn't meant completely letting go of her technical roots. Her philosophy is to contribute where she can be most impactful, whether that means crafting strategy documents, pair programming with her team, or even getting in and writing code herself. She credits her philosophy background for her ability to write effective strategy documents that help teams "adopt the same vocabulary when speaking about problems and then get on the same page about how to solve it."
The hardest habit to break on this journey? The "I'll do it myself" mentality. While faster in the short term, this approach creates long-term bottlenecks. The challenge is especially acute when transitioning within the same company, as deep context makes it tempting to jump into execution mode rather than empowering others.
Direct communication inspired by Moneyball
Minh’s communication philosophy is built on directness and simplicity over corporate speak, a style she refined after watching the film Moneyball. She recalls a pivotal scene where Jonah Hill is struggling to deliver bad news to a player, dressing it up in jargon. Brad Pitt’s character cuts through the noise with simple advice: "They're professionals, man. Just be straight with them. No fluff, just facts."
This straightforward approach has proven incredibly effective. "I think it saves time," Minh says. "And people... believe you when you're just kind of being straight with them." While her style is consistent, she emphasizes that the content must be tailored to the audience, requiring a deep understanding of cross-functional teams.
A remote work culture built on visibility and async conversation
As the VP of Engineering at a fully remote company, Minh has found unexpected advantages in distributed work, particularly greater visibility into other departments. In an office, "sales and marketing sits on completely different floors, engineering would never see them," she notes. To bridge these gaps in a remote setting, she actively reads cross-functional Slack channels.
She has also developed a communication style that mimics live conversation, sending frequent, short messages rather than lengthy paragraphs to maintain a natural cadence. This remote culture has been further enhanced by AI tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and custom Slack bots built on Amazon Bedrock, which help automate tasks and break down information silos.
Structuring teams around products, not specialties
When it comes to team organization, Minh is a strong advocate for structuring teams around products rather than technical specializations. "If there's a distinct set of problems to be solved, then that should be solved by the same team," she explains.
This product-focused approach evolved after an early experiment with a platform team proved challenging. The platform team quickly became a catch-all for miscellaneous projects, blurring its focus. By organizing around customer problems, teams develop deeper domain expertise and maintain clearer ownership. This structure also favors product engineers who can work across the full stack, rather than being limited to a specific technical domain.
For leaders facing similar challenges, Minh stresses the importance of maintaining high-fidelity information as they grow. The key is to find ways to validate information and avoid the "telephone game" that can happen across management layers.
A blueprint for pragmatic leadership
Minh Nguyen’s journey offers a powerful blueprint for the modern engineering leader: one who is pragmatic, direct, and deeply focused on impact. Her philosophy dismantles the rigid archetypes of the past, proving that effective leadership isn't about choosing between being technical or strategic, but about flexibly applying the right skills to the right problem at the right time.
By building teams around customer problems, communicating with straightforward clarity, and refusing to be constrained by traditional role definitions, she has cultivated a culture of clear ownership and high-impact execution. For any leader navigating the complex transition from individual contributor to strategic guide, Minh's experience shows that the most effective path is often the most direct one.
Listen to Minh Nguyen’s Dev Interrupted episode:
