Becoming a Fearless Leader with Smita Ojha (Podcast & Transcript)

"Fear is a manmade concept. You are not born with fear. Take risks. It's okay." - Smita Ojha

Smita Ojha is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Mindtickle, a market leader in enterprise sales software. Over the last two decades, Smita has led engineering teams at some of the largest tech companies - Microsoft, Meta, and Google.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How to say yes to new opportunities outside of your comfort zone

• The importance of developing a diverse skillset to become a well-rounded leader

• Adopting a fearless approach by identifying the excitement in challenges

• The key differences between leading engineering at a large company vs. a startup

• Leveraging sponsorship from unexpected places: team members, peers, and leadership

• How to build psychological safety on teams

Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Karen Ko: Hey there. Welcome to Engineer Your Career, a podcast brought to you by WEST, a learning community, empowering women technologists through mentorship. Join us as we hear from inspiring women tech leaders who are challenging stereotypes and paving the way for future generations. We hope their career journeys inspire you with new ideas to engineer your career. Let's get started.

Heidi Williams: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our latest episode of Engineer Your Career. I'm Heidi.

Karen: And I'm Karen.

Heidi: And we're excited to introduce our guest, Smita Ojha, Senior Vice President of Engineering at MindTickle, a market leader in enterprise sales software. Welcome, Smita.

Smita Ojha: Yes, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for hosting me.

Karen: So for our first question, can you please share how you got into programming? What did you want to be when you grew up?

Smita: Yeah, I think when I grew up, it was not specific to programming, but it was something about building and doing things on your own and controlling it, like more of the engineering path rather than just computer science. I never touched a computer until I joined my college first year, so that was the first time when I got to do the programming there.

Heidi: I was the same. I didn't code until college, and I always love breaking down that myth that to be a successful engineer, you have to have been coding since eighth grade. So thank you for sharing that.

Karen: Have you always wanted to lead engineering at a startup?

Smita: I think once I joined computer science, when I started, there was always the dream of like, okay, I'll be able to do more and more and more. I'll be able to learn more, I'll be able to do different things. I did want to become an organization leader, and I think that was there right from the beginning.

Even while taking on tasks, I never chose my tasks. I always said yes to anything and everything that came across so that I can get that variety of load. It was not about like, I'll not do front-end. I will not do deployment or DevOps. Relevance. That breadth really set me up well to take on the leadership roles as well. So I covered a lot in my first seven, eight years of my career, right from front-end developer to backend to relevance to machine learning to deployments, being the first DevOps person in Office 365. So it all helped me in growing as a leader.

Karen: And it sounds like you were saying yes to a lot of different opportunities and perhaps showing some fearlessness along the way. When we were chatting earlier, you mentioned a story from your childhood about building into your fearlessness. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Smita: Yeah, it is something that I've shared with other folks as well on what makes me so fearless, what makes me a big risk taker in my career, and that is something, a feeling that I grew up with and got support along the way from everyone around me, including my family members.

There's a story when I was a young kid, I was in gymnastics, and one day our coach decided that let's do something different. And he took a ring of fire, and when I'm saying ring of fire, it is literally a ring of fire. It was a bicycle tire with spokes removed, a cloth dipped in kerosene oil tied around it, and he just lit it, and there were two people holding it with some small handles around it and saying, do you want to jump through it? And I was like, sure, why not?

There was no sense of fear; there was just excitement. There was just a goal in front of you, and that's the feeling that fear is not something what a child is born with. It is something we acquire as we grow up, and I think if we can fight those fears in a positive way by seeing the excitement in the path, and whenever a tough thing comes in front of me, I see it as a ring of fire, and I feel like, oh, I can do it. And that has stayed with me for throughout my life.

Karen: What a story. How old were you at the time?

Smita: I was in fourth grade at that time. That was the time I was not a school topper or very good in studies, or I was pretty average in education, but I think that opportunity that the coach of gymnastics gave me has really helped me along.

Karen: Incredible. Thank you for sharing that.

Heidi: You've actually said yes to a lot of things over your career. You worked early on at IBM, and you've worked at Google and Microsoft and Facebook, I mean, some really amazing, impressive big names, and now you are leading a startup called MindTickle. Tell me a little bit about that journey of working at really large, big-name companies and what that transition has been like to now working at a smaller startup.

Smita: There was a lot of learning which came in across all the different companies that I worked in, just because of the variety of projects that I touched, whether it was doing something for the first time, I worked on streaming big data even before Storm and Kafka were a thing.

Heidi: Wow.

Smita: And trying that out, working on Office 365, first SharePoint cloud deployment, multi-tenant deployment. I was leading that effort as an engineer.

So a lot of firsts which happened and a lot of scaling work that happened, and at that point in the career, when you have done a lot, you want to see how to bring it all together. How can you work on a project that will help an organization even more?

So while I've been at the big companies, I think I also got the opportunity to work on all the legacy products as well as some of the new products that started from zero to one in these efforts.

In Facebook, I started a project cache library, which started from zero to one. In Microsoft, I started a project in Office 365 telemetry, which was zero to one. I also took care of some of the legacy products there.

Same thing happened in Google as well. We started some new projects as well as I took care of some legacy. So that balance was always there in me of starting something new, working with something new, partnering with the product.

So that spark of working in a startup-like culture in a big company always was the fun part for me. So when the right stars aligned and I would say the right opportunity showed up, I couldn't say no. And I would say the journey for the last two years at Mindtickle has been fantastic. I have grown so much in these two years and able to use my skills that I acquired in the last two decades and put it into use. I think that's also a very fantastic feeling to have.

Heidi: That's awesome. I often feel like...I know for my career journey, I'll often talk about, I didn't realize I had a theme until I looked backwards, and it sounds like yours has actually been very intentional about acquiring these skills and having an opportunity to be entrepreneurial, but also understand how the older software worked and things like that. So I actually love that you've intentionally gathered all of these pieces of knowledge and experiences around you to help set you up for this amazing experience.

Maybe one question, just thinking about, it can be intimidating, folks who need to learn something new and sort of be the first to do a thing. How is it that you like to learn? I mean, I know I like to just go ask other people, well, how did you do it? But if no one's done it, there's no one to ask. So how did you learn? Were you just sort of curious and explored and tried stuff, or what was your approach to learning some of these new things that people hadn't done before?

Smita: One thing that came to me naturally is, I never said no to an opportunity. If the right folks are there, the right intention is there, it is helping the company I'm part of, then I felt like I'll say yes, yes, I want to try. Yes, I want to do, yes, I can try, or finding things on my own also helped me along the way.

For example, for almost 15 years, I always had a pet project besides my assigned things. I would always have a project just for me, and it is related to the work. That's how I learned a lot of machine learning stuff. That's how I learned a lot of DevOps or deployment or managing clusters, work that I would write my own scripts and do some things on my own. I would prepare my own monitoring or deployment stuff.

So I always had a pet project for me. I did not expect any output of it, but it often gave me a good stepping stone to the next thing that I wanted to do. For example, probably 15 years back, when I decided to take the [inaudible] machine learning course, I just wanted to learn, and then my next project was entirely machine learning. So it just happened that it set the right stepping stones for me to move forward, and it felt like a connected link to me.

Heidi: That's fantastic. Yeah, I can tell you're a very curious kind of lifelong learner, and having that tactic of curiosity and picking things up on your own makes a lot of sense. That's awesome.

Maybe one last question about going from a big company to a startup. Are there things that you wanted to bring along to the culture at MindTickle or to the way that you operated that turned out actually just didn't quite fit because it was a smaller company?

Smita: Yeah, there were a few surprises. When you go there from a company like Google, where everything is magical, everything in engineering is done before. All the tools are set up for you, how the deployment happens behind the scenes, you don't even know because you push a button in there.

And here you come and you're like, oh, where is the, oh, there are three ways to do this. Oh, okay. Oh, there are three different products in the different product lines, and they have different ways of doing things.

I would say some things, which I expected because the engineering in a startup is not as mature as engineering in Google. I mean they're just two different extremes which are there. But I think bringing it down to being customer-focused and putting in the necessary engineering excellence in place. If you come in in a startup culture, if you come and say, I'm going to do all clean up all the tech debt, I mean, what is the purpose of the cleaning of the tech debt?

You have to understand that. It's not about bringing the best engineering practices hundred percent. You have to pick and choose which engineering practices that work in your past. Will you bring it here? Because you cannot bring it all.

I think for me, that selection of what should I bring in, what should I change? Because the list of changes that I wanted to bring in was huge, and that's where I think I did have a brainstorming session with all my networking with my past friends, with even Heidi, to understand that, hey, when you moved, when you changed, what is one thing that you took with you?

Similarly with other leaders of Confluent, with [inaudible], with Databricks, when I talk with people, I learned more on what are the things that you should change because it's all about managing the tech debt or managing the engineering excellence, which is impactful to your customers. Because you can't do it all. You have limited resources, you have limited time, and you have to show the progress in your business as an enterprise software.

Heidi: Very smart. Yeah, definitely with limited resources, you have to make hard decisions for sure. Yeah, thank you.

Karen: And it sounds like you also had to be really strategic in which projects you decided to move forward with and which ones you needed to hold off on for now. I know that for the WEST community, there are a lot of women who are ambitious about being able to grow into those leadership roles at their organizations as well. And I'm curious, as you've been elevating in your career, I'm curious how you've cultivated your leadership style for you.

Smita: My leadership style includes a few things, like first of all, being respectful of the opportunity that you have, being grateful of that, being respectful to the people around you, hearing them out. That's one of the core principles as well as the common culture in all the companies that I have been part of. That's one of my core leadership principles is be respectful.

The second is, have the right balance of setting the vision and execution. You always shoot for the stars, even if you fall short, you'll land on the moon. So always dream high, set the vision high, set some unachievable goals if you have to, and then focus on the execution. It's only 10 or 20%. Setting the vision, 80% is execution. Then deep diving into the flawless execution.

Third, I think as an organizational leader, there's nothing you can do alone. It's always how you bring the team along with you and how do you create that level of psychological safety and trust with all your direct reports, with all your team members. I think that allows you to set higher. So I would say that is the foundational piece on which you need to stand in order to make a big bold vision and then execute flawlessly on it.

Karen: Yeah, I love that. Along the lines of bringing your team along with you, you talked about sponsorship being something that was very important to you and also important for leaders to make sure that they're sponsoring others, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your take on that.

Smita: Sponsorship, and I would say especially for women leaders, sponsorship is more important than mentoring. In mentoring, you get the support, you get the coach.

In sponsoring, your efforts are recognized. Sponsorship is about somebody identifying your strength, identifying your talent, identifying a perfect match, and keeping you in mind for the right opportunities that will come up, and it could be in the company, it could be outside the company, and everywhere.

I would say the other important part of some things that helps you grow is your relationship and network with your peers, as well as your direct reports. They're the ones sometimes pushing you to take bigger opportunities. I've had team members who would say, Smitha, come on, we can do it. Let's figure it out. This might get tricky, folks. Let's flesh it out. But the confidence and the support, if you get it from your team members, then I think you feel like, oh, I can capture the whole world. I have the right team with me, and then you dream even bigger.

So for me, the support from my immediate team always has been a very critical part of my leadership growth, I would say. And even the support from peers. I think in big companies, there might be a myth or something where peers are seen as competitors, but I think if you build the right relationship, they are your biggest champions, trusting each other because you work together. You enjoy the work more when they become your champions, and you become their champions. So for me, that peer group is very important.

The other part, very important is my product counterparts and my product leaders. I feel like directly working with them in setting the vision, in setting the product roadmap, for me, that has really elevated my product thinking as well, and at the same time, I'm able to give them confidence that, hey, you can trust engineering can deliver this.

And finally, of course, it's your leadership team as well, and they see that if you have a strong team which is championing you, if you have peers championing you, if you have your product management championing you, then of course the leadership will also support you.

Heidi: I like that you talk about your direct reports being your champions as well. I think that's not something folks talk about, but definitely if you're building trusted relationships with them and they feel like they can say to you, come on, you can do more, you can push us harder. I challenge you in some way. That's amazing. So thank you for sharing that.

Karen: Along those lines, actually, I'm curious about how you build psychological safety on your teams so that they feel that it's okay to ask and to share feedback like that.

Smita: I think as I have changed to my teams or roles or companies, I think I do give myself time to learn about things and not jump into action immediately.

The book First 90 Days is something that I've read probably twice now, but something I think it talks about the same principles. To be honest, when I first came out of Microsoft after a decade in Microsoft, I felt like I will jump in into Facebook and I'll get everything done immediately. I'll ramp up immediately and take an action.

But the Facebook culture, the leadership of Facebook, they all were very good in setting the right expectations, and I learned from them saying it's not about taking action or it's not about fixing things in your first three months, you will see a lot of broken things. It's okay.

First, we want you to absorb. First, we want you to learn. As an organizational leader, you get into technical things, you get into business, you get into people, and you have to feel comfortable with all three of them

In Google also, I took that time. Of course, when I came to MindTickle, it's like you have to jump into action as soon as possible because it is moving at a different pace, and your input is needed.

But I would say at that time also I relied on my peers and, of course, our founders to make the right calls, but relying on them on their knowledge and respecting their knowledge and their background and not just bringing in my view. This is what I think, but I think I need your background to be applied as an applied filter on top of it before we make any decisions.

And I think that combination helped that you don't know it all. Talk with people, spend time, don't be judgmental. I think that is so critical. Don't be judgmental about the tech stack. There was a reason it was brought in. Let's understand those reasons first before we propose a change. And same for people that when you come across the new people and [inaubile] lot of new people, I think keeping your judgmental side aside is very, very important.

Heidi: I love your example. I can just sort of envision the environment that would create by coming into a new organization, being asked to make a decision, but doing it collaboratively and asking for input to show that you're learning and you're open to suggestions and ideas, but maybe you do have an initial opinion, but you're going to test it. I think it just sets such an amazing example for how you are going to lead and then also how you expect others to operate after that as well. So I love that you were, even though you were thrown right into it, you still managed to do it in a way that kind of set an example for how you expect others to lead as well, which sounds fantastic.

Smita: I learned one more thing about decision-making in different environments. I think one thing is common in leadership and decision-making. You always make decisions with the data points that you have today, and most of the time, you will never have a hundred percent of the data points. You will have to make decisions with whatever is there in front of you at that point, and then you have to be open about it. I am making a decision based on certain things, and those data points might change in the future, and then your decision may not be valid as well, and people have to respect that as well. And that's what I also respect in others, that you made a certain decision at a certain point because you had certain data points. Now that the decision is not right, let's go and fix it. Well, this decision turned out to be awesome. Let's build on top of it.

Heidi: I love that. Yeah, I think transparency goes a long way into helping people understand. You don't end up with that, what the heck were they thinking? Well, I told you exactly what I was thinking, and it was based on this input, and maybe they can say, oh, I have another input so before it's final, let me make sure you have all the data that is available, et cetera. So I love that transparency is so critical.

You had mentioned, maybe just one more question about psychological safety. You had mentioned earlier about obstacles you've overcome early in your career that actually made you really appreciate psychological safety and sort of center that in your leadership style going forward. Would you mind sharing that example?

Smita: There are many obstacles that come in your career. So there are many, but I'll choose this particular one on Google while I was there, and Google Workspace was the new brand that was coming out, and it was G Suite before. From G Suite, we were moving to Google Workspace.

And Google Workspace was not just about changing the brand, it was about changing the architecture of how the packaging is done, how the pricing is done, how the licensing is done, how the upgrades and downgrades work. And that was the entire platform that one of my team owned here in Google Bangalore.

And this came in right during COVID in March when the COVID came in 2020. And this launch was supposed to be December or January of the next year. But because Google Workspace was being adopted so much, so much collaboration was happening. So much of business of Google Workspace and every collaborative software was just evolving that there was a request, can we launch this sooner than later?

So here I am with my team in the midst of COVID, and even the leadership [inaudible] of the opinion of putting pressure on people at that point. But we wanted to know what is possible, what is not.

And I think that's the time when all the foundations of psychological safety and the trust with my direct reports came into action. And even with the stakeholders, with my product stakeholders, with some of the GTM stakeholders, with leadership. I think having that open conversation that, come on, Bangalore team, do you think we should take this on? Should I commit to the leadership that we can do it? I will be there with you through and through, but I do want to make sure that it'll come together. And there was a unanimous yes, that let's do this.

We will figure out a way. We will prioritize things hard and give this a priority, and as long as we make it a priority across the org, we'll do it. And we did it. I think it was a very, very proud moment for Google Bangalore that a project of this scale got done with flawless execution, with precision with high quality, and delivered from Bangalore.

So there was Thomas Kurian going out on stage to announce it, and there were activities of engineering activities and all the activities that were planned in order to make sure that it launches right at that particular moment, and everything has to work. So it was a great effort built on that strong team of psychological safety and trust.

Heidi: That's amazing. That is always such a great feeling when the team really bonds together and supports each other for a common goal, and with a fantastic outcome that benefits everyone. So that's fantastic. Well, congratulations on that one. That's great.

Karen: So, along the lines of the last obstacle that you shared with us, in our prep call, you'd mentioned that there was another obstacle that you had to deal with around a knee injury, I think. Could you share a little bit more about that?

Smita: Yeah, so I was pretty active all throughout, especially after two kids, you feel like you need to do more workouts, you need to be more fit. And during one of those exercises, I injured my knee, and that resulted in a lot of discomfort and pain while you are working, while you are taking care of two young kids, running the family. So it was a little bit draining for me during that period.

And then I had finally, I think the knee surgery was one of the options, one of the only options that was there. And the recovery was supposed to be fast. And I think I misunderstood that part, that recovery after surgery is very, very important, and you have to keep that your focus at that particular time.

So here I was after the recovery, and I was in that work maniac mode where I wanted to do more. I felt like I have to be there for the team, I have to be there for the company, I have to be there for the product, and I have to be there for the kids. And somehow my recovery took a backseat there. So, the recovery, which was three weeks, even after three months, I was not seeing the recovery.

And that became a wake-up call for me because then I would find myself like, oh my God, what is happening to me? Right? I'm not able to walk properly. So I think somebody told me a very important thing that, Smita, at this particular time, you're juggling three balls. One is your health, one is your relationship, and one is your career, and one of the balls is made of rubber, which will bounce back. But two of your balls are crystal, and you cannot juggle all three, which is very clear at this particular time of your life. So you have to drop one and decide which one will you take forward.

So that decision was pretty obvious that I need to pause at work and I need to take a break, and I need to focus on my recovery because working with young kids, as well as recovery, as well as work got a little bit too much for me at that time. It takes a toll on you as a person that there's so many things happening, and when your body is not with you, your mind is not with you at that point.

So I took the much necessary break for a couple of months so that I gave a lot of time, and then I bounced back pretty strong. So I think that was a pretty important learning that I learned the wrong way. And I hope people who are listening, they understand the importance of health in their life and take that very, very seriously and keep that as your main thing.

Heidi: That's such an important lesson because careers are long, and if you're in the industry for 30 years, then three months is really such a small blip and so such an important lesson to learn.

Karen: Thank you so much for sharing that story. I'm curious if there are things that you do now to help maintain your health, whether it be physical or mental.

Smita: Yeah, since then, I did start regular yoga because at some point, when you're very young, you feel like yoga is for old people. So that misconception was removed, and I was like, stretching and this thing is for everybody. So I took up yoga and stretching, and especially a regular workout schedule, which I had before, but it took a pause. I think I did add yoga and pranayam as part of yoga, which I continue till today. So that was the change that has carried with me.

Heidi: Well, maybe just for one last question. I just want to say you have had such amazing insights, and you are such a great role model for women in tech. Is there anyone that you look up to in the industry, maybe someone we could host in the future on our podcast?

Smita: I had amazing opportunities to work with many amazing women leaders in my career. I would like to call out two specifically. One is Elissa Murphy, who was VP of Engineering when I joined Google. And I was just inspired by her vision. I was just inspired by what she wanted for in the organization and how she built the organization, how she took over a legacy product and developed the right team for it.

The other person whom I also had the opportunity to work at Google is Aparna Pappu, who is now GM of Google Workspace. She's leading the whole engineering as well as the business as well as the product of Google Workspace. And I think when I joined, she was new to Google Workspace and seeing her ramp up in Google Workspace, make the right decisions, make the right product calls, take the team forward, this rebranding of Google Workspace experience, which I talked about, was under her leadership. So I mean, these are two of the amazing women leaders in the industry that I really admire.

Heidi: Fantastic. Well, we will look for an introduction and see if we can get them on our podcast in the future. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Karen: Yeah, so we're curious. So if there's one thing that you would like people to take away from our conversation from today, what would you like for them to remember?

Smita: Fear is a manmade concept. You are not born with fear. Take risks. It's okay. Make sure you have the right foundation to take the risk. So focus, if you have the right foundation, I would say go ahead and take the risks. Pays off. It hones your career, it hones you as a person in different ways. And even if you fail, it's okay. And that's why I'm saying first have the right foundation and then go and take the risks.

Heidi: Thank you. Super inspirational. I am inspired to go jump through a ring of fire now, so I can't wait. So thank you so much, Smita, it's been a true pleasure. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you so much.

Karen: Thank you, Smita.

Smita: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be on the host with Heidi and Karen. Thank you.

Karen: And that wraps up another great episode of Engineer Your Career, brought to you by WEST.

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