Sidu Ponnappa, CoFounder of Realfast.ai and former Managing Director at Gojek India, chats with Peak XV’s Ajey Gore about building and scaling engineering teams. Sidu takes this opportunity to dive into why product engineering teams shouldn’t be treated as feature factories. Picked from Surge archives, this conversation also touches on product development and good hiring practices.

00:00 Introduction
02:54 Product to process: Redefining success metrics
06:03 Feature fallacy: Rethinking the role of product engineering
11:43 Navigating the black box: Why decisionmakers need to be in sync
16:31 The people paradigm: The human factor in hiring strategies
22:58 Why you should treat employees as customers
30:43 Even potential employees can be your brand ambassadors
34:14 On candidate segmentation: One size doesn’t fit all
40:53 On metrics and scaling data engineering teams
51:26 Optimizing collaboration: A developer's perspective