Vikram Kone

A Decade at Amazon - Reflections After a 10-year journey at Amazon, I recently transitioned from a yellow badge to the red corporate employee badge. While there is room for improvement at Amazon, I'm struck by how much I've learned and grown, thanks to Amazon's culture and leaders. In my last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to work across different organizations in stores, AWS, and Alexa as an individual contributor and as a manager in technical program management and engineering disciplines. Some of the most profound lessons that will stick with me include: 1. Following leadership principles unifies a company's culture and boosts productivity. 2. The importance of deep understanding, practice, and insisting on the highest standards. 3. Driving outcomes over empires and being strategically patient yet tactically impatient in pursuing customer obsession. 4. Having an insatiable curiosity and beginner's mindset. 5. Every customer issue represents an upstream process deficiency that needs to be identified and resolved urgently. 6. Prioritizing and tackling the hottest, highest impact items first. 7. Being "green-lighted" doesn't mean risk-free, and transparently calling out risks with projected issue dates. 8. Prioritizing input goals you can control before output goals, and optimizing inputs relentlessly. 9. Goals are directional, not dogmatic, and undershooting or overshooting can be acceptable if customers are delighted. 10. While off-the-shelf solutions can cover 80%, investing in tailored solutions for the remaining 20% is critical. 11. Simplicity, incremental progress, and smart automation are core philosophies. 12. Transparency in prioritization rationale and openness to adjusting the roadmap based on new inputs. 13. Sticking to your strongest points persuades better than attempting to discuss everything. 14. Removing blockers is your responsibility, not someone else's, and committing 100% once a group decision is made. 15. Embracing failures as learning opportunities in complex operations. This enriching decade has been about customer obsession, frugality, ownership, never stopping learning, highest standards, and delivering robust solutions. I'm grateful for the growth I've experienced here.

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For years, I've led and mentored diverse teams of software engineers, and one gripe consistently surfaces, irrespective of team makeup or project nuances: "Why do I have to resolve conflicts when cherry-picking commits from the master branch?" 🤔 This complaint hits home. Engineers crave independence to innovate and deliver swiftly, yet software development thrives on collaboration, demanding robust code management and teamwork. 🚀💻 Cherry-picking commits can be an efficient way to incorporate specific changes or bug fixes into a hotfix branch or release candidate, but it often triggers conflicts as changes collide with ongoing developments. This conflict resolution process can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating for engineers, detracting from their productivity and morale. 😫⚔️ The absence of a structured cherry-picking process exacerbates the problem. Here's a simple fix to avoid conflicts: 1️⃣ Track the last merged PR number into the base branch when cutting release/hotfix branches. 2️⃣ When receiving a cherry-pick PR, confirm its base branch PR number. 3️⃣ Ensure all PRs between the last merged and new ones are cherry-picked before merging, preventing conflicts. 4️⃣ Once merged, update the base PR number of the last merged cherry-pick for the next cherry-pick PR review can be verified. Yes, adopting this process entails a bit of change, but the dividends in smoother workflows and happier engineers are well worth it. Let's make life easier for our fellow coders! 💪🛠️ #SoftwareEngineering #CodeReview #Collaboration #ConflictResolution #Teamwork #DeveloperLife #CherryPicking #CodeManagement #ProductivityTips #EngineeringCulture #TechTips #Mentorship #WorkflowOptimization #CodingCommunity

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The products team's fixation on milestones tends to divert their attention from the broader perspective. They hop from one feature to another, enamored by each glowing aspect. Individuals work in isolated bubbles, fixated on ticking off one milestone after another, sometimes without significant displacement. Read More - https://lnkd.in/dxEvS6Yg #products #productmanagement #milestones

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Ever wonder why some companies can ship software at lightning speeds while others seem stuck in the mud? 🚀⏳ . . . . . . . . . Daksh Gupta of Greptile collected real-world insights from engineers at many of the world's largest tech companies, unpacking the intricacies that either propel or impede the speed of shipping code. The big reveal? Older and larger companies tend to move more slowly because the costs of missteps become greater. In some cases, those costs are fairly non-negotiable (e.g. ensuring software for customers in production remains secure) while in other cases, the costs are more optional and cultural (e.g. wanting a lot of accurate estimates, forcing a manager's vs. maker's schedule, etc). #SoftwareEngineering #Tech #DevelopmentVelocity #Innovation #Productivity

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Excited to share that I have migrated my blog to Github pages using the Jekflix theme from thiagorossener/jekflix-template! It's been a breeze publishing new content and I highly recommend checking it out. Head over to itmusings.com to take a look at some of my old but still relevant blog posts. #githubpages #blogging #webdesign . By the way, this post is written using Linked In AI which is pretty cool :) By the way if you have cached my previous blog in your browser you may get a 404. This is because I had used a 302 redirect before in the old blog. You may want to check this article to remove the 302 from your browser cache. https://lnkd.in/g2-QzUeq

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Weekend PM musings.. If I was a PM at Rivian, I would not have done what they are doing. I like Rivian as a company - they were able to build a high quality product with well-defined identity in a competitive emerging market. They have (had?) a great partnership in Amazon who allowed them to springboard into the market, so they had an excellent start. What they are doing now though, I think is going the wrong way. Instead of continuing on the *adventure vehicle* path, they are now trying to fill the product line-up with smaller, lower end options with R2 and R3. Yes, I understand their desire to expand their market as the high-end EV buyers are drying up, but expanding it down is 1) a cop out to their adventure brand, 2) will get them into a very competitive space where they will have to compete on much thinner margins. What makes this R2/R3 strategy even more suspect is the fact that it will take them 2+ years to ramp up the new vehicles, and I don't think they have the sales volume now to sustain themselves for that long. On top of which, they have just last week upgraded their R1 line, with great advancements I must add, but by doing so all but killing the resale market for the R1. Let's hope there are enough new R1 buyers who will step in to purchase the new model. What I think they should have done instead is expand into adjacent market in the adventure category. (By turning their existing van into a "Van Life" platform perhaps?) I'd be a buyer, and I think they would do very well in the category where EV's haven't entered yet, it allows for the price point and higher margins, would keep them on an adventure vector, and would earn them lots of love and affection from public. (image is an AI generated rendering)

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I had read about the Zeigarnik effect and its application in products. However, it only recently dawned on me that it very well explains the calm and joy writing posts on my blog has given me over the years. Many professional and personal gurus have advocated writing to bust stress and drive clarity. This psychological explanation helps reinforce it. So, I wrote a blog post about it. What else? Check out link in the comments.

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I have known Avni for almost ten years and I am super glad (and not surprised) that her customer-focused approach remains unchanged. We were fortunate to have Avni Savant speak to our teams at G2 India. The session was inspirational, and we learned a lot from her. Avni has a wealth of experience, and we are grateful for the valuable insights she shared with us. During the session brilliantly moderated by Aravind Raj, we discussed several topics and gained a few key takeaways: ⚡ Creating an environment that supports a "fail fast" mindset fosters innovation, and consistent leadership support is essential. Interestingly, this is something that Roger Valade aligns with strongly, and we are just in the middle of an innovation sprint. :) 🧠 We explored areas where AI can be implemented to solve product use cases. Avni stressed that we don't need to reinvent the wheel; instead, we should learn from companies that have successfully adopted AI. The most doable areas for AI implementation are to improve developer productivity and summarize insights and discoveries. 📊 We discussed how squad-specific goals (OKRs) can be integrated with the company's larger goals. For example, we can analyze if improving our product's onboarding experience impacts the adoption rate, and understand if the release was successful. Avni emphasized the importance of using data to make feature iterations and prioritization decisions. 💬 We discussed the significance of product development teams being close to the customers and leveraging customer interviews, and feedback from pre-sales, sales, and support teams. 💗 Lastly, Avni highlighted the importance of self-drivenness and having a clear point of view in one's career. She noted that this proactive approach is valued and appreciated. We are truly grateful to Avni for her time and lessons!

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I have a love hate relationship with #observability space. The hate is mostly all self-inflicted, e.g. misreading docs, misreading configurations, debugging polyglot services and dealing with idiosyncrasies of otel sdks in multiple languages. It’s mostly love though! It’s powerful when it works! I think community is coming along way when it comes to documentation and resources. It still feels early. You have to be very self sufficient and be comfortable ditching/trying/demoing/hacking on many different tools in various languages and various environments. All in all, despite its warts and problems, it’s mostly all gravy! #opentelemetry is one of the best things to have happened in tech that gets under appreciated! Embracing it allows you to be a lot more freer than just to be tied to a single vendor. That being said…love and proud customer (across multiple companies) of honeycomb.io ! Not only are they great vanguards of #opentelemetry, their product (at least for tracing) is till my favorite across all oss/commercial products..and I’ve tried most all of them!

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Thought I would share a personal milestone today. I reached 25 blogs on medium https://lnkd.in/dJc3YsKE This is a short blurb on my journey and process. I had started blogging in 2020 and actively from 2021 partly inspired by people I met along the way and also as a way to express my thoughts better. I changed my focus and approach multiple times, from org design, promotion processes and tech frameworks to in depth content on specific areas like cryptography. Sometimes all it took for me to go past a writers block was to just pen down my thoughts even if it doesn't form a cohesive whole and refine it as I continued writing. I decided I would always put in links to the articles or blogs of the articles I had been inspired by. Most of them have better content than mine. I realised that if I had to explain something complex I had to build concepts around it brick by brick so when I started writing about OPAQUE PAKE, I made sure I had covered cryptography in ample depth even if it meant repeating commonly known concepts. I also wanted to focus on the why rather than the what so that my detailed blog doesn't end up like an abstract white paper with references. I wanted the blog to focus on my own interests instead of clickbait. So I kept it free of prophetic albeit popular articles like AI doomerism. So what's your excuse for not blogging?

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Tennessee, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York. What do these 9 states have in common? . . . . . . . . . In order of magnitude, they all grew their infotech sectors by a higher percentage than California since 2019. This has led to California's share of all US tech jobs dropping from a high of 19% to a more modest 16%. This trend continues today. We can no longer make believe this is a temporary COVID-related anomaly. Which emerging tech hubs are you most excited about? Why? #California #SiliconValley #Tech #TechIndustry #Jobs

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AlloyDB provides 2x better price-performance than self-managed PostgreSQL. See how in this article from Sridhar Ranganathan and Shesh Ranganath.

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Now we have two first class data catalogs integrated with MS Fabric now available in Azure. Of course DataBricks is the heavy heavy favorite in the enterprise lakehouses as well as AI (as of the conference that just finished 🤓)

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When I first got to Amazon, one of the things that stood out as different from my past job experience is that Amazon has a strong written document culture. Meetings typically start with documents <= 6 pages and everyone reads the document for the first part of the meeting before starting discussion -- because who has time to read documents before the meeting? Starting the meetings with a read means that everyone gets the time baked into their schedule to actually read the doc, and then you can have a productive discussion with everyone starting at the same place. This simple tweak has a few powerful impacts, but the one that has had the most impact on me personally is the page length constraint. When you require everyone to read the doc at the start of the meeting, that imposes a time constraint on how much content you can expect them to read before discussion. This constraint puts the burden on *you*, the author of the doc, to make sure that you are: 1. Concise, highlighting only the important info. The details that don't make the cut can go in an appendix for reference. 2. Prioritizing the actual decisions that you want to get out of the meeting. You asked these people to meet for a reason! To help them help you, you have to organize the information in a way that makes it as simple as possible for them to grok and contribute/decide. 3. Actually understand your own problem! Size constraints force us to distill complexity and find the right conceptual abstractions to communicate at the right level. I started using the size constraint trick in my design documents as well for these reasons as I found it made it simpler for others to understand my docs - regardless if we're speed reading in a meeting or reading on their own. Happy Writing! ✒

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Here is how I use ChatGPT and LLMs to be a better Engineering Manager. 1. Whenever there is a birthday or work anniversary (we call them Yelpiversaries) I will hop over to ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion and generate a card catered to that person. It's a small investment from me, and usually sparks some joy! I might generate a few to get something interesting. Almost everyone else will search for gifs or memes, which are a great alternative. In either case, I will also try to write something meaningful and personal (I don't use ChatGPT for this, but you could ask for ideas if you feel stuck. Tell the LLM a bit about the person and ask it to construct a concise message. Use that as inspiration, don't copy paste, it will come across cheap). 2. Understanding new concepts quickly. I had never heard of RAPID before, and when I did a Google Search I had to deal with a bunch of really weird websites and bad explanations. I asked ChatGPT to explain RAPID to me, and then I asked it to be explained for a software engineer. It was fantastic. For deep research and understanding I wouldn't just use an LLM, and I'd be careful to double check, but for well known concepts it does really well. I didn't need to be a grand master at RAPID, I just wanted to know what the heck these Product Managers were talking about. 3. Helping format data. Sometimes I want to invert a table. Passing ChatGPT a markdown table and asking it to invert it has worked out really well. I usually carefully scan to make sure it didn't change values, but so far hasn't failed and saves me a bunch of work. 4. Helping me quickly write bash or python scripts to do different tasks. As a manager, I don't write production code. But sometimes I pull down data and want to process it. For example, looking over all of our incoming support requests we have on Slack (we support a lot of internal teams). I can use an internal API to take someones slack handle, and determine their team or department. In that way I can see how much support requests we had this month from a particular area which is useful data to see how we can better support the organization. 5. Rubber ducking. Talking through problems. In general I prefer to get feedback from a human, but mentors are busy creatures, and our schedules don't always mesh up. If I'm working through a difficult problem, chatting it through with an LLM has been very helpful. I keep out personal details because paranoia, but I describe the situation and how I'm thinking about it. That's the important part that helps; forming my thoughts. Rarely is the actual output from the LLM helpful, although I can't say it never has been. People get really hung up on LLMs/ChatGPT not just solving things for them 100%, and I think these people are going to be left behind. It doesn't need to be perfect, it can even give you the wrong answer and you still benefit. But it can help get your brain looking at lots of answers.

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From Astrologer's Whispers to Real Connections: Reclaiming Belonging in a Lonely Age Have you ever consulted an astrologer, their predictions swirling in your head, only to feel empty when your day takes a different turn? The emptiness might not be about the details themselves, but about seeking outside approval for your happiness. This same feeling can creep in even when you achieve success. Remember climbing the career ladder, landing that dream apartment, only to find yourself lost in a quiet emptiness? In India's bustling cities, it's a familiar, painful emotion. We're surrounded by people, yet there's a little loneliness at the edges of our lives. Thinking back to Mrs. Deshmukh, your friendly neighbour with the legendary Til Gur Barfi's, who brought the whole neighbourhood together with tea and friendly chats. Those evenings of shared stories and laughter, a web woven by simple human connection, feel like a distant memory in our super-connected yet broken world. We chase success with thumbs glued to screens, building online bridges that leave us feeling more alone than ever. The pressure to create a perfect online self-drowns out the whispers of our own desires. But here's the real deal, that shiny designation and fancy car can't fill the hole left by genuine connection. There's hope, though! We can rewrite this story. Let's ditch the small talk and chase deeper connections. Share your fears and worries, break free from feeling isolated in this sea of ambition. Remember the warmth of family gatherings, the joy of shared childhood games? Revive those small traditions. Pick up the phone for a real heart-to-heart conversation rather than What's Apping. Every act of connection, no matter how ordinary, how small, builds a more satisfying life. Imagine hearing back from an old friend, reliving an old laugh, and being surrounded by people who truly see us, where we belong. Isn't that what life is all about? Together, one conversation, one meal, and one act of kindness at a time, we can tear down the walls of loneliness. We can rewrite the narrative of modern society, where connection becomes the foundation of a life well lived. It's not too late, or is it? #HumanConnections #BelongingMatters #OvercomeLoneliness #RealConversations #MeaningfulRelationships #CommunityOverConnectivity #AuthenticLiving #SocialWellbeing #RedefiningSuccess #TraditionsRewoven #FightIsolation #VulnerableAndReal #KindnessRevolution #SmallActsBigImpact #ReconnectingHumanity #IndianSociety #UrbanLoneliness #DigitalDetox #QualityOverQuantity #ConnectionCures Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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Embracing real-time analytics to gain actionable insights? Here are three common challenges and solutions which I faced in my 17 years of experience 1.    High Data Ingestion Rates: Managing the constant flow of large volumes of data can be overwhelming. Solution: Use scalable data streaming platforms like Apache Kafka or Apache Pulsar to handle high throughput. These tools ensure reliable and efficient data ingestion, allowing you to process and analyze data in real-time without bottlenecks. 2.    Low-Latency Processing: Ensuring low-latency data processing to provide timely insights can be challenging. Solution: Implement real-time processing frameworks like Apache Flink or Apache Spark Streaming. These frameworks are designed to handle low-latency data processing, allowing you to analyze and react to data in milliseconds, providing timely insights for decision-making. 3.    Maintaining Data Quality: Ensuring the accuracy and consistency of data in real-time analytics is crucial. Solution: Use data validation and cleansing techniques during the ingestion process. Implement data quality tools and frameworks like Apache Beam to enforce data quality rules and ensure that only accurate, consistent, and reliable data is processed and analyzed. Please let me know in comment and let us engage to discuss more. ********** DM | Follow Nageswara Rao Korrapolu for Building a Better Technology for a Better Future. Thank you very much.  #microservices #DigitalTransformation #Migration #TechnologySolutions #cgm

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Looking to get started with in-database machine learning with MySQL HeatWave? This guide will help get you on the right path. https://lnkd.in/gPjuJU9g

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