A Day in the Life: Maria Gutierrez (Director of Engineering, Intercom London)
As Director of Engineering at Intercom’s London office, Maria has three main focus areas. She leads the rapidly expanding London Engineering team responsible for some of Intercom’s biggest and most ambitious products and features. She leads and drives global engineering scaling and improvement initiatives. And, last but not least, with her Product Management partner, she acts as co-site-leader for the London office.
What has been your journey in tech so far?
I’ve been a software engineer for 19 years. My first degree is in Journalism but in 2000, after finishing my degree, I moved to Edinburgh to improve my English. I decided to stay in Scotland and go back to university to do a Masters conversion course in Software Engineering. Halfway through I got an internship in a financial company. At the end of my internship, they offered me a graduate job. I took the job and finished my degree part-time.
I was at that company for three years building software to manage pensions online. It was a great first job but I quickly realised that I wanted to get more exposure to all aspects of building software. My second job as a software engineer was at a small mobile games company where I worked with a very talented team of engineers and got a chance to gain experience in all phases of product development (from gathering requirements and designing solutions to implementing and supporting production systems).
After four years, I joined the Developer Technologies team at Adobe in Edinburgh. At Adobe I worked as part of a group building the extensibility platform for all Creative Suite products and the SDKs third-party developers use to extend them. At Adobe I worked for the first time in a very distributed environment. I used to regularly collaborate with teams in the US, Germany, China and India.
After having my son Ethan, I joined LivingSocial as a full-time remote engineer and from there quickly transitioned to an Engineering Manager role. After a few years, I became the Director of Engineering responsible for all of LivingSocial’s Merchant systems. Two years later, as Senior Director of Engineering, I was leading our Product Platform group and managing an 80-people organisation with team members all over the world.
After nearly five years at LivingSocial, I joined FreeAgent as the VP of Engineering to help grow their engineering team. During my time at FreeAgent, we tripled the size of the engineering team, had a successful IPO in the London stock market and were eventually acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Eight months ago I had the opportunity to join Intercom as Director of Engineering and co-site lead of their new London office.
What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced moving into your current role?
The biggest challenge has been making sure Intercom London successfully continues to grow and collaborate with our other R&D offices in Dublin and San Francisco while delivering great products for our customers.
My priority has been getting to know the teams in London and their challenges and building an inclusive culture where everyone can do their best work. London is responsible for very strategic projects for Intercom so I’ve had to also quickly gain a deep understanding of our business strategy and how we execute to be able to support my teams.
And how you’re working to overcome the challenge?
I’ve approached this in three different ways. First, by building a strong relationship with my co-site lead and Director of Product in London, Jane Honey. Together we’ve worked closely with the teams to understand their challenges and make sure they are supported and set up to deliver on their commitments successfully.
Secondly, by building strong relationships with my manager, peers and other leaders in the organisation. This has helped me better understand our company history, culture and values and the expectations of the role. By looking outside London, I’ve been able to contribute to org-wide initiatives and quickly build trust across the company.
Finally, by setting very clear goals both for the long-term (12 months) and short-term (weekly and every 6 weeks). This is to make sure I focus my efforts and make consistent progress.
Briefly describe your stack and workflow
We are generally biased towards building in our monolithic Ruby on Rails application and our Ember.js front-end application. Our Messenger is built using React. We are all-in on AWS as our physical infrastructure provider. Datastores are mostly MySQL and some DynamoDB and ElasticSearch. Engineers continuously deploy changes 300–400 times per day across all services through GitHub and our in-house deployment tools.
In our day-to-day work, we follow our engineering principles. We shape the solutions we build, we are technically conservative, we build in small steps, we keep our solutions simple and we build with positivity and pride. We consider shipping our heartbeat and we invest heavily in making sure getting code to production is as easy as possible. We ship early and often, and iterate rapidly. An Engineer can get their latest change into the hands of all of our customers in minutes.
Each team owns the areas of the code they are developing and are responsible for on-call support during working hours. We have a virtual team of volunteers who take all out of hours on-call work from every team.
What does your typical day look like?
I try to keep each day focused so that I don’t have to switch context too often. Mondays and Tuesday I try to create as much focus time as possible to do deep work and sync with my manager, peers in Dublin and SF and my People Ops business partner. Wednesday to Friday I mostly focus on supporting the London teams.
My week tends to be divided into 4 areas of focus:
● Supporting my team and the London group
○ Regular 1:1s with the Engineering Managers and Principal engineers that report to me.
○ Tactical team meetings with Engineering Managers or the Principal Engineering group to discuss topics that impact all the teams or to cascade communications from the leadership group.
○ Regular London All Hands or other site events.
● Product and engineering strategy and execution
○ Work with my teams as well as product and program management on the strategic plans for the programs we run in London
○ Sync with all teams to define our roadmaps and goals and to discuss product and technical plans, rollout plans, team health and capacity concerns
○ At the end of the week, we have company-wide and engineering specific Show and Tells to showcase the progress we make.
● Aligning and moving forward engineering and company-wide initiatives
○ Meet weekly with other product, design and engineering leaders to align work across sites, move forward group initiatives and agree on priorities across all groups.
● Hiring and awareness
○ Intercom is growing fast and as a result, I spend a fair amount of time working with our recruiting team to attract new candidates and in interviews
○ I’m also always working on a talk to present at a conference or organising an event in our office to share how we build software at Intercom. I also collaborate with other community groups in tech.
What’s the best and worst part of your job?
The best part of the job, by far, is seeing teams and individuals grow and achieve goals that have a great impact on the business and personally. I can never get enough of seeing our customers use and get excited about the work we are shipping and teams feeling proud of what they’ve achieved.
The worst part is when we’ve let someone down. It might be a serious outage that has a considerable impact on our customers or a decision or action that will unsettle some people.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve received?
Get some perspective. Don’t place too much focus on what is going wrong and don’t forget to celebrate the wins. When you’re in a difficult situation it’s easy to feel that you just can’t see a way out. I always remember this advice from a previous manager when I’m struggling to cope with a difficult situation. It really changes my attitude to the problem and ultimately my wellbeing and how quickly I can move forward.
What is your most useful resource?
There have been many books that have influenced me during my career. But the one that I’ve gotten the most out of for the last 6–7 years has been The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. It came at a time in my career when as a leadership team, we were struggling to work as a team and support our organisation successfully. That book completely changed my understanding of the role of a leader and the importance of organisational health.
The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier is a great book that I always recommend managers and senior engineers to read to get a good understanding of the Tech Lead and Manager role.
What’s one thing you’d like to learn, develop or work on in 2019?
A big part of my focus in 2019 is going to be continuing to invest in learning about Intercom: our business, product and customers.
As a manager, I want to continue to push myself to create opportunities for others to grow and build a more inclusive workplace.
I always like to learn something completely unrelated to work. This year I’ve started to learn to play the piano with my 9-year-old son. It’s a skill I’ve wanted to learn since young and it’s a great opportunity to disconnect and share something special with my son.
