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My name is Sai Emani (he/him), and I am currently an Engineering Manager @ Yelp supporting the Biz Mobile Foundations Team.

This post is a guide to my leadership philosophy and a little about me.

Outside of work, I enjoy yoga, meditation, and F1. In addition, my wife and I are foodies, and we love to cook and eat out at new restaurants. I like to spend my free time playing tennis, photography, hiking, and reading. One does usually find me contemplating metaphysical questions around the meaning and source of life.

Here is my 2022 reading list if you are interested.

My 2022 goals are 🎯

• Learning to be a dad to my newborn son 👶🏽
• To become a more effective, empathetic and impactful people manager.

In 2021, I successfully completed the following goals: 🎯

• To read 15 books 📚
• To get better at portfolio management and building a diversified growth + dividend portfolio 💰
• To practice Hatha Yoga for at least five days a week 🧘🏽

I graduated from the North Carolina State University with a Master's in Computer Science and started my professional career as a Software Engineer on the mobile team at Citrix Systems. Subsequently, I joined the mobile team at DocuSign in San Francisco, where I led a couple of exciting projects like document scanning and auto-tagging using Machine learning.

In 2019, my wife and I moved to Canada 🇨🇦 from the US 🇺🇸 to pursue new experiences and opportunities and joined Flipp as an Engineering Manager. I also led the Android guild and was also the founding member of the Diversity and Inclusion committee.

As an engineering manager, I categorize my responsibilities into the following three pillars:

• People 🙍🏽
• Product 📱
• Engineering 🛠
  And the foundations that support these three pillars are Culture & Values .

Although cliched, I strongly believe in being people first. What that means to me is:

• Creating the necessary psychological safety and trust on the team promotes an inclusive and collaborative environment that enables all team members to feel safe, ask questions, challenge ideas, and take risks. I genuinely believe that risk-taking and making mistakes is a prerequisite for innovation.
• The thing that I enjoy the most is supporting people to grow in their careers. I approach this through effective coaching, timely feedback, and regular 1-1s.
• Lastly, hiring a diverse team is something that I am super passionate about and feel is crucial to the team's long-term success.

Make sure to read my post on how I like conducting 1-1s.

• As an engineering manager, the next most important aspect of my role is to support the team in delivering complex, robust, and engaging products to our users.
• I love to partner with product, design and UX research leaders to ensure that we are building what is most useful to our users in a sustainable and timely manner.
• I am also a strong advocate of "building it right the first time" (where applicable) to avoid piling up tech debt.

• As an engineer, I am always looking at ways to improve the team's efficiency, quality, and processes.
• I enjoy seeing engineers on the team taking ownership and paying down tech debt, writing unit tests, automating our regression tests, etc.

One of the, if not the most important things for me as a manager is building a culture that we can be proud of as a team. A couple of my focus areas to achieve this are:

• To create a safe environment for people to collaborate.
• Overdo appreciation.
• Building trust through expressing vulnerability.

To create a learning environment by promoting psychological safety, autonomy, and transparency. Additionally, teams should have a clear purpose, a growth mindset, and focus on delivering customer value.

Everything starts and ends with psychological safety. Without that, people will lack caring, be disengaged, or be scared. I strongly feel this is a prerequisite for collaboration, innovation, and diversity of thought. Tools I use:

• Express vulnerability.
• Ask many questions.
• Encourage discussions from all team members.
• Hire for diversity and inclusion.

Enabling individuals to take ownership of their personal goals and development plans is one of the best ways to promote autonomy. Additionally, trusting team members to make the right decisions around system design and technical solutions.

As an engineering leader, one is usually the information gateway, and I feel information is not something to be hoarded or shared in pieces. Instead, transparency involves sharing data, good or bad, discussing issues openly, and inviting people to work together to solve them.

Setting a purpose and having a vision of what you want is essential. It provides people with a sense of direction and serves as a guidepost on what you should and shouldn't be working on.

One powerful way of promoting a growth mindset is not just by allowing people to fail but also to gather learnings to do better and more the next time. A growth mindset comes with its investments, and it requires patience and perseverance. Tools I use:

• Use retrospectives to diagnose issues and learn from them.
• Monthly team health checks to build awareness and prioritize issues.

• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungey Steiner
• Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
• Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt
• Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
• The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier
• The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
• Powerful by Patty McCord
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Measure what Matters by John Doerr
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Netflix Culture Memo - People over process, freedom and responsibility, be candid and encourage independent thinking.
• What google learned from its quest to build the perfect team - Psychological safety is the powerful force to drive great teams.

• My Calendly - Feel free to grab 30 mins if you would like to chat about Technology, Leadership or Metaphysics.
• My Pet Peeves - Meetings without agendas, Using Slack during a Zoom call / meeting.
• My favorite food: Biryani, Sushi, Burritos. Always open to hearing vegetarian/vegan recommendations 😀