"I think the hardest [habit to unlearn] is just the 'I'll do it myself' mentality, right? Fast in the short run, but then you're kind of stuck doing it forever."
What's the hardest habit for a top engineer to unlearn in a leadership role?
For Minh Nguyen, VP of Engineering at Transcend, it was breaking the "I'll do it myself" mentality. In this episode, she shares her impressive journey from individual contributor to VP at the same high-growth startup, offering a rare and honest look at this challenging transition. Drawing on her background in philosophy, Minh details the hard-won lessons of reorienting from hands-on coding to high-impact leadership, from learning to delegate to setting a clear, communicable strategy.
The conversation then shifts from personal growth to organizational design. Minh dives into the practicalities of scaling, revealing why Transcend structures teams around customer problems instead of technical stacks. She candidly discusses her experience pivoting away from a "catchall" platform team to a more effective, product-focused model. This episode is a deep dive for any leader on building a resilient, high-fidelity engineering culture that thrives under pressure, packed with invaluable insights for navigating the challenges of growth.
Show Notes
- Learn more about Transcend: Transcend.io
- Connect with Minh on LinkedIn
Transcript
(Disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)
[00:00:00] Andrew Zigler: Joining us today is Minh Nguyen VP of Engineering at Transcend. A Company tackling automated data privacy and compliance at scale. Minh's been on a unique journey growing from an IC to a VP at a startup on the rise.
[00:00:14] Andrew Zigler: And today we're unpacking the playbook that Minh use the Lead Transcend engineering team through scale compliance and managing cognitive load.
[00:00:22] Andrew Zigler: Minh, welcome to the show.
[00:00:24] Minh Nguyen: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:27] Andrew Zigler: We're real excited to dive into your journey, so let's go ahead and jump in and talk about this transition that you've gone through from being a staff level engineer into being a engineering leader, someone who's interacting with executives and setting engineering goals and expectations. And that's not just about delegation, you know, it's about reorienting.
[00:00:45] Andrew Zigler: How you as the individual think and communicate and support your teams. So how did you approach the challenge of letting go of your more technical roles to assume a leadership one?
[00:00:57] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Uh, it's a great question because I [00:01:00] don't know if I've ever fully let go of all my past roles, to be honest. Things move quickly to be impactful. I think I need to be really flexible. Sometimes my biggest impact means uh, pro providing clarity in terms of strategy. doing a lot of pair programming or whiteboarding providing feedback. Sometimes it means just getting in there and writing a lot of code and usually it's a mix of all of these things. Uh. I love coding, so I definitely have to be you know, doing too much of that and just being an ic. fortunately, I I also really love writing strategy I think it's because of my, my philosophy background, which is what I study in, in undergrad. Um, I love thinking through open-ended problems, through and, uh, it's really satisfying to see the impact of a well-written document. So, uh, I think it helps. Teams adopt the same vocabulary when speaking about problems and then get on the same page about how to solve it. So yeah.
[00:01:58] Andrew Zigler: That's a really great approach. Um, that's [00:02:00] actually fascinating to learn about your philosophy background. I bet you can find a lot of ways to apply that in engineering, writing out problems, especially getting people on the shared sentence about what it is that y'all are doing. Right.
[00:02:12] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. I think sometimes it's just like a semantics thing, like you just need to share vocabulary. Just define then get really clear about what you mean by when you say a certain word.
[00:02:21] Andrew Zigler: I, I completely agree. You know, I have a classics background myself, and I find myself constantly bringing that kind of, uh, classification knowledge and like labeling and understanding logically how these things relate to each other into engineering. And I think it, it really helps set those expectations.
[00:02:35] Andrew Zigler: I. And it sounds like in your journey, you know, you've had to, you know, of course, still be in the hot seat sometimes and and, and push the code out and play a lot of roles. Wear a lot of hats. But in, in doing, in, in changing, uh, the way that you interact with those types of outputs, what's been like the hardest habit for you to unlearn?
[00:02:54] Andrew Zigler: Um, and what are some like hard habits for you to learn anew?
[00:02:58] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, I [00:03:00] think the hardest one is just the, I'll do it myself mentality, right? Like fast in the short run, but then you're kind of stuck doing it forever. And, especially hard to break if you're, you stay at the same company as I did 'cause you have so much context and you could just easily slide back into it and, and do it yourself.
[00:03:16] Minh Nguyen: so that's definitely the hardest one in terms of new, new habits and new muscles, I've learned. Um, I All the basic people management stuff I learned the job, delegation, time management, direct, honest feedback. on on that last one, I feel like it took me some time to get it right. And funny enough, it was watching the movie Moneyball that really helped me. I don't know if you've seen movie.
[00:03:40] Andrew Zigler: No. Why so why did Moneyball help you?
[00:03:43] Minh Nguyen: Uh, well, there's just like one particular scene in it where Jonah Hill, it's about a
[00:03:47] Minh Nguyen: baseball team, and he is helping this
[00:03:49] Minh Nguyen: baseball team turn it around and Jonah Hill has to deliver some bad news to a ball player, and he's practicing it with Brad Pitt and he's dressing it all up in this corporate speak. [00:04:00] Pitt's like, they're professional man. Just, just be straight with them. No fluff, just facts. And he's really cool about doing all this. And, Anyway, John Hill takes that feedback and delivers it straight and it really worked. And I don't know, like seeing that play out like that, um, really clicked for me and I learned, okay, like that's how you do it. try to be really direct and, and fast. You know, it's, it's important to have timely feedback. So like instead of just spinning your wheel and like crafting the perfect message, what's more important is just to say it.
[00:04:28] Andrew Zigler: That's a really great highlight. And do you, do you find that that's something that you've really been applying as you work more with like leadership teams too? you know, it's good to be direct with like the people that you work with and that are building like the product that you're doing. You probably have to interface the, a similar way with like executives, right.
[00:04:45] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. does play and so I, yeah, I think being direct is just how I, I default to my manner of speaking. So I think in the beginning I was actually kind of self-conscious that I would come off like unpolished. But I've, uh, yeah. Learned now that it's fine. The [00:05:00] style of communication is fine. It's more than fine. I think it saves time. And people like believe you when you're, you're, just kind of being straight with them.
[00:05:07] Andrew Zigler: Right.
[00:05:09] Minh Nguyen: yeah, it's
[00:05:09] Minh Nguyen: more the, the content I think that needs to be
[00:05:11] Minh Nguyen: tailored, right?
[00:05:11] Minh Nguyen: Like knowing what detail to leave out and what to include is 90% of the challenge. and I think. To know what's relevant. You have to know your audience, know the people, and there's no better way to do that than just to work with them a lot. So even before I became vp, I worked cross-functionally. I joined sales call customer calls. I would read the other team Slack channels, you know, if, that's one of the great benefits of remote work too, is we're a fully remote company. but if you were in office, you know, sales and marketing sits on completely different floors, engineering would never see them. but because we're remote, I can just very easily check in and. you know, I feel like I'm a little bit like terminally online, not in the sense that I know every meme, but I, I on Slack a lot and I hit send, like after every sentence, which is kind of annoying, but I think it resembles like a live conversation more.
[00:05:59] Minh Nguyen: [00:06:00] And I, I love that I love remote work and that, there could be a real like culture to it. And, you can really learn about their people and their job even in a remote setting. And that's helped me with communication a lot.
[00:06:12] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, absolutely. We're really big fans of remote work here on Dev Interrupted me and my co-host, Ben, we talk about it almost every week it feels like about the remote work culture within tech. 'cause we're also fully remote company. and it does allow you to kind of have these unique impacts on your organization and to really build connections in ways that you are sometimes restricted from in person.
[00:06:31] Andrew Zigler: Um, and I, I want, I wanted to. I wanna look closer at your, at this insight that you've given us. It's really helpful playbook about how you've evolved your communication style to become an engineering manager and it, the actual problems y'all are solving at Transcend are also really fascinating around data privacy, compliance and it.
[00:06:48] Andrew Zigler: Puts you in this position of building a product that's like wrestling with privacy controls and legal requirements. So there's a lot of very specific things that you have to hit in standards, right? People are [00:07:00] paying you to, uh, ultimately meet these compliance burdens that, that, that they have. And so how does that influence your engineering team's culture?
[00:07:09] Minh Nguyen: well, yeah, I think privacy is just fundamentally an engineering problem. and so yeah, when companys accumulate petabytes of user data across hundreds of thousands of services, manual compliance becomes impossible. So you do need to solve it with engineering. the catch 22 is like to protect the user data you need to handle it, but handling it and all in one place, all in transcend put it, puts it at risk. So that's, uh, a puzzle that we have to solve. And, in terms of like how it impacts our culture, I think lot of people end up at Transcend because they care a lot about privacy. So it's just kind of embedded directly into our culture. Naturally, privacy principle will come up during architecture discussions or product requirement reviews and. I suspect that maybe at other companies you would, may have a harder sell to, uh, to pitch than at Transcend. Like it's just kind of taken for granted. Like, oh yeah, that's a [00:08:00] concern. Like, oh yeah, we should be minimizing data.
[00:08:02] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think that's unique. And so does that, does that influence how y'all approach like a, a lot of different things within your organization as a whole?
[00:08:10] Minh Nguyen: yeah, like I mentioned, it's more around like
[00:08:13] Andrew Zigler: I.
[00:08:14] Minh Nguyen: We build, how we build it to
[00:08:16] Minh Nguyen: like, not make, you know, we don't want to become the problem as well. So we, we need to make sure that we're building our features with, privacy principles in mind.
[00:08:24] Andrew Zigler: Right,
[00:08:25] Minh Nguyen: then beyond that, I think we, you know,
[00:08:28] Minh Nguyen: we make sure that we're not like being careless about employee data as well.
[00:08:33] Minh Nguyen: You know, there's not like a easy way for anyone at the company to look at anyone's phone number, for example.
[00:08:39] Minh Nguyen: Privacy
[00:08:39] Minh Nguyen: concerns are just taken very seriously at
[00:08:41] Minh Nguyen: Transcend
[00:08:42] Andrew Zigler: And
[00:08:42] Andrew Zigler: privacy aside too. We all take automation very seriously because building an automation, a solution, a service you, you rely a lot on, on having repeatable workflows and, and taking advantage of engineering to do more work than a single person can. Right. And so are y'all also applying um, like technology [00:09:00] is, like AI as part of your developer experience your, uh, engineering program to create the software y'all are doing what does, that look like inside of an organization like yours?
[00:09:08] Minh Nguyen: uh, we have a couple of different AI tools internally. for the engineering team. We use Cursor and GitHub. Copilot have Gemini to help with deep research. We've also built a few Slack bots on top of like just Amazon Bedrock to help. Automate certain or engineering tasks. And overall I think it's been very helpful for knowledge discovery and, and knowledge sharing between teams.
[00:09:31] Minh Nguyen: You know, we move fast, so it's nice to have a way to like a chat interface to ask questions and learn about what other teams are working on.
[00:09:38] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, absolutely. So it's helping with like knowledge sharing,
[00:09:41] Andrew Zigler: getting information out of silos.
[00:09:43] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then engineers also use, you know, the, code gen tools and all of that. It's great for brainstorming.
[00:09:50] Andrew Zigler: Totally. I, I've been having a lot of fun using Cursor and having a lot of luck with it too, actually. Uh, on output on things that I work on day to day. And so how do, how are, how's your team [00:10:00] like measuring the impact of those tools as you would start to adopt them? what matters, uh, to you?
[00:10:05] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, I think, I mean, measuring engineering, productivity is something you guys know. You should tell me about how, how to do it, I guess. But, uh, we're, I think what matters today is just that we. make sure that the tools we're introducing actually help the developer that people report, know, a positive experience.
[00:10:25] Minh Nguyen: Like they feel like they are more productive, that we're not introduced in a way that just creates an imbalance of work. You know, like one common Use cases if you don't check the work that the AI is giving you and you just put up a PR and now you're just transferring all the burden of work to the code reviewer.
[00:10:41] Minh Nguyen: And,
[00:10:41] Minh Nguyen: you
[00:10:41] Andrew Zigler: Right.
[00:10:42] Minh Nguyen: no, better
[00:10:42] Minh Nguyen: off. so I think we try to be mindful of all of the dynamics and be thoughtful about introducing these tools. I think, you know, one of the dynamics is just that like, it's very uneven, the, Productivity boost. I think for a senior engineer who knows how to use it well then you can see a big boost.
[00:10:58] Minh Nguyen: But then for a junior [00:11:00] engineer, if you're using it to like for lack of expertise or, or a gap in skills, then that, I think it just really hurts you and organization the long term.
[00:11:08] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, those are key distinctions. And I wanna go back
[00:11:11] Andrew Zigler: to what you said at the beginning too. 'cause it's, it's not, you know, it developer productivity and what, what we know about it from talking about it. It only happens from having conversations and frankly, the. the. folks that are within engineering teams and, building this stuff right now, like, you know, better than anyone because at the end of the day, it's about taking that advice these concepts, but applying them to the unique footprint of your organization, you know, transcends own footprint is, or fingerprint is very unique.
[00:11:36] Andrew Zigler: And so you have to think about how does this impact my team? and what you've shared is, is I think, really impactful, um, about understanding how it shifts. the burden of what you're doing up or down the pipeline. Um, we've had guests on the show, like when we had recently Thanos, uh, Diacakis on the show, and he talked about this in depth, you know, don't treat your, uh, software engineering like a conveyor belt, right?
[00:11:58] Andrew Zigler: It's not a factory. [00:12:00] And you're gonna create bottlenecks in places where you don't expect. And so, um, it's a really good call out to understand like, did this save us time or did it just shift it to someone else's plate?
[00:12:10] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. I think the main thing we try to just focus on when we introduce these tools now is like, we want the team to be familiar and to have like, you know, to be curious about and to be in the loop. Because even if you don't find it, helpful now, I think things are changing so fast that you, you should learn about it and stay informed.
[00:12:29] Andrew Zigler: Oh, I agree. It's just about, you know, just practicing stuff every day, picking up new tools, which it sounds like y'all are doing. but along the way too, it's about, um, you know, battling what you were calling out like this in increase, in like cognitive burden, right? On your developers. You don't wanna introduce too many factors, too many things they have to do or remember to follow because you're gonna create a mess.
[00:12:48] Andrew Zigler: Within like your engineering culture and, being, you know, within a an engineering led company, you're at its heart solving a, an engineering problem. And, and so you've had to intentionally design teams with like [00:13:00] boundaries of ownership in that space, you know, what's been your approach on you managing those teams and scaling them?
[00:13:07] Andrew Zigler: How do you ultimately organize, uh, your engineers?
[00:13:11] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of a. Simple answer in that we organize our teams in terms of the products. Like in terms of the user problems. Like if there's a distinct set of problems to be solved, then that should be solved by the same team. So we don't organize by stack or like sort of code skills.
[00:13:29] Minh Nguyen: I think, you know, we look at a problem and see like, okay, to solve this problem like is it, you know, if it's our data discovery and classification product, then we need some folks who know AI and infra on that team. but pretty much everyone, most people at Transcend are generalists. Some people prefer backend or front end or whatever, but we, we want everyone to become, let's just be like product engineers and solve customer problems Uh, and so we've also organized the teams that way. I.
[00:13:54] Andrew Zigler: Is it an evolution that y'all have gone through or, or were you always there from like, we're gonna create a pool [00:14:00] of generalists and be customer obsessed, uh, in our problem solving,
[00:14:04] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, that's an interesting
[00:14:05] Minh Nguyen: question
[00:14:06] Minh Nguyen: We started as just a single product. Uh, so maybe it was kind of there already. And then, we try with like, you know, a platform team that, but then it just ended up being a catchall. So we, there was like a few different iterations, and then I think landed on this one where, okay, clearly we have privacy is a very wide feel with lots of related problems, but not the same problem.
[00:14:27] Minh Nguyen: And so really capture this market, we need, to sort of have dedicated domain owners who can like, execute and make decisions on their own without trying to like centrally coordinate. yeah, I guess that was like a, a decision I remember making making at one point after like writing of those long strategy talks where I think through no
[00:14:44] Minh Nguyen: problem.
[00:14:44] Andrew Zigler: You applying your philosophy mind to the, to the problem and, and getting it all out on paper. Right.
[00:14:49] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:50] Andrew Zigler: And so I wanna double click on what you mentioned there, that you tried out like a platform team and it became a catchall. Like what was that like? And could you maybe walk us through when [00:15:00] you came to that realization?
[00:15:01] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. so I think platform is just a little bit too two. I think that the, the problem with that team is just, we had like one product team that was working on DSR automation and then another team that was not working on that. And we call ourselves the platform team. And the idea was that we would work on, you know, things that were cross product. But then I think naturally if you have a platform team, any new projects that seem urgent to the company could easily end up in your purview because you're kind of defined by like. Oh, I'm not doing this one product thing, so therefore any new projects end up on your plate. and I mean, I think in general, like we try to sort of build teams from existing teams. So, pattern that happens often is you'll have one team. maybe high performing and has some slack they can take on a new like R&D project, and then that becomes a new product and then you can split into a new team. and so like, as I realized, okay, we're we, we have one team here that's juggling two different products. You know, the platform team is now like doing consent and data [00:16:00] discovery. Like this doesn't scale. These things have nothing to do each other. And like, I love having multiple plates spinning, but may maybe not my engineers. And so, okay, let's, let's split the team now.
[00:16:11] Andrew Zigler: Okay, so then you make the decision like, we're gonna split them out. We're gonna have the dedicated product teams for these individual solutions. And in doing so, you just found that it didn't make sense for platform engineering to become this catchall, at least in an initial way that like you cleave things off of became more sense to build this pool of generalists who were all gonna be obsessed about solving these problems.
[00:16:31] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
[00:16:33] Andrew Zigler: And as you've been building that team um, how have you made dec decisions to, okay, we need to bring in more engineers, or, okay, we need to apply more automations to save more time. Like, how do you actually think about growing and scaling your team and how are you thinking about it, especially now in the age where you have like.
[00:16:52] Andrew Zigler: Companies that are even making like AI mandates, like.
[00:16:55] Andrew Zigler: you know, Shopify and Duolingo have had these recently about like, prove that a job [00:17:00] can't be done by AI before you open a headcount. Like how are y'all looking at it?
[00:17:04] Andrew Zigler: Um, in terms of scale?
[00:17:06] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, I think how I think about it, I mean, I have the benefit of, again. Being an IC here first. So I think I know the job that needs to be done quite intimately well. And then when I consider what needs to happen, like at the engineering level, I think it's still easier and more sensible for us to hire than to automate. I think the other challenge with like how some companies have been approaching it is like, it's kind of like a. They're setting it up as a carrot or a stick problem, and they're choosing the, the stick, like, use AI or we won't approve your headcount, which I think is, know, it's just not like a, it's not, it's not my style, I guess.
[00:17:41] Minh Nguyen: Like, I think, I think adoption will come if the, the work can speak for itself. If there are people who are using AI and like producing great high quality work, then I think other people will be naturally curious and want to adopt that. I think we're, we are doing that, we're trying to encourage people to use AI and we like to think about developer [00:18:00] productivity, but I think that only goes so far. in terms of like any framework, I think it's like pretty specific to the work. You just have to look at it and think like, is this something where the work that it takes to automate makes sense. You know, it's just all about whether you think it, that investment makes sense. versus hiring, uh, because. Yeah, it still takes work to automate something, right? Like you can't, AI isn't in the part where you just bring it in as a new employee and then it can just start doing work. You still need to put down the glue code, test it out, all these things.
[00:18:31] Andrew Zigler: And when you automate something, then you have to maintain it. So you have to think about the longevity of what you're
[00:18:36] Andrew Zigler: actually automating. So there's so many things to consider and I, I really like how you highlight. Having been a ic, you know, as we've talked about in, in our conversation today, and you've had this journey into your role, that gives you a really valuable perspective because you understand very closely what your engineers are experiencing at every part of that level and journey. 'cause you've been there yourself and, Is there any advice maybe you would give to [00:19:00] engineering leaders who maybe haven't had the opportunity to go through those same chains, at least within the same company, and accumulate that, that domain knowledge of growing within our org? What are some techniques you would give to them or some strategies, advice on how to better empathize with their engineering teams and, and help them solve problems without getting in their way?
[00:19:19] Minh Nguyen: What's been most helpful for me in my job is just making sure that I have high fidelity information. I think the larger the organization, the more the lower fidelity of information you have about what's actually happening to the people who are building the feature on the front line. Right? You have like layers of middle management. Everyone's filled acting as an information filter and So your information may not be as, as high quality as it was when. The org was smaller when you were on the frontline yourself. and so having ways to, you know, validate that, just like how we would validate, you know, an an AI output.
[00:19:54] Minh Nguyen: Like how do you know it's true? And then, you know, when you receive an information from your, your [00:20:00] being bubble up or whatever, like, do you have ways to verify the information? Can you like. a deep dive and inspect what's going on and come up with your own perspective of the problem rather than just, you know, think it's very easy to get caught playing games of telephone or just reacting because other people are reacting in the same way and getting all that trap.
[00:20:18] Andrew Zigler: Yeah. Or having like an outdated mental model for how something works. Like just go check in on like how things are really done. Right. Especially um,
[00:20:24] Minh Nguyen: Right.
[00:20:25] Andrew Zigler: it, it's like just take advantage of the resources and communicate, direct like you've, like you've highlighted. I
[00:20:30] Minh Nguyen: Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, mental models definitely have their uses, but at least check to see that they do apply rather than coming in and thinking like, no, this must be, this is the way we must do things.
[00:20:42] Andrew Zigler: Yeah, absolutely. You know, this has been a really fun exploration about some of the problem space in which you work, but it's also been really cool to go and, and look a little closer at like your journey and your career and how, how you've built yourself into your role and also how you empower other engineers to do their best work. [00:21:00] I think you've accumulated a lot of really effective best practices that are a lot of folks can learn from. Um, and so I, I myself learned a lot about how modern teams are being, as scaled and, and the opportunities available for them. and, I know our audience is gonna want to go and learn more about Transcend and, and what y'all are building.
[00:21:18] Andrew Zigler: And so I wanted to ask, you know, where can people go to learn more about, you Minh and, and what you're working on?
[00:21:23] Minh Nguyen: Yeah, so Transcend.io is our website and then uh, you can find me on LinkedIn.
[00:21:28] Andrew Zigler: Well, I'm also on LinkedIn. You should definitely come and ping us
[00:21:31] Andrew Zigler: both. Uh, You know, give us a holler because we want to hear your thoughts on today's conversation, hear things that work for your engineering team. I also would love to hear if there's other folks that use a written approach and having a design document with a high fidelity high.
[00:21:45] Andrew Zigler: Quality of information they share with folks. I use this strategy a lot too. Um, Minh and myself, we both have this humanities background. It's a really strong core skill that I recommend folks try out um, especially as we're, you know, entering an age of having really strong communication. So if you are, if you're [00:22:00] communicating with an engineering team like this, we'd love to hear that.
[00:22:02] Andrew Zigler: Maybe you swap our own best practices on how to share this. Stuff. give us a ping on socials and um, be sure to check out our substack where we release episodes like this every Tuesday. Uh, we also include news that's going on in tech world right now. So if you're only listening to this podcast, you definitely should go over to Substack and check out the other half of the story.
[00:22:20] Andrew Zigler: 'cause we'll be covering Minh there as well. So that's it for this week's Dev Interrupted. See you next time.
