The unofficial first rule of engineering: When the minds behind the world’s most valuable startup, Stripe, want to talk about making better dev orgs, you listen.

In this episode of Dev Interrupted, Stripe’s Head of Engineering Smruti Patel joined us to talk about the daily, weekly and yearly engineering decisions that have engineered the company’s meteoric success.

Smruti has a gift for making the logic behind make-or-break strategic decisions digestible for every engineer, regardless of where they are on the company ladder.

With a breadth of wisdom on what it takes to make tough decisions based on tradeoffs, opportunity cost and developer bandwidth, Smruti Patel’s insights can be applied to any org – even ones worth less than $100 billion!

Episode Highlights Include:

  • (1:53) Smruti's road to Stripe
  • (4:49) Engineering resource & bandwidth decision making
  • (9:37) Opportunity cost checklist
  • (15:03) Framework checks & balances
  • (20:28) How to think about tradeoffs
  • (30:38) Current macroeconomic environment 
  • (34:29) What motivates teams at Stripe?
  • (39:01) Smruti's self-evaluation initiative 

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