Mythili Devineni, Sr. Business Director at Twitch, Talks on Leading During Covid
Mythili Devineni started her career as a software engineer and now leads business strategy for Twitch's Video Platform team. Prior to Twitch, she was at Boston Consulting Group where she advised Fortune 500 media and consumer companies on building new businesses and growth strategies. In this blog profile, Mythili shares her insights to leadership and how to support teams in the times of COVID-19.
Journey to leadership
As a former software engineer, what interested you in getting into the business side of things? What ultimately led you to move from a technical role to a leadership role?
Upon graduation, although I had an electrical engineering degree, I found myself gravitating toward application level software programming to get closer to understanding the end customer. This same desire drove me to join management consulting after business school. I made the transition into business and product strategy, where I got to solve center of plate consumer focused issues for consumer and media companies. Now I lead business strategy for a highly technical software and infrastructure engineering team that is responsible for the core video service that powers Twitch. What I like most about this particular role is that I’m able to draw on both my technical knowledge and business/product strategy expertise in this role.
How do you balance people management and individual work?
I’ve been managing people for several years now. I started out as front line manager of a small team (typical of managers early in career in strategy consulting and was also true at BCG), in what we call a “player-coach” role. In such roles, it is easy to get too involved in individual output or to take on work designated for the direct reports thinking “I’ll just do it myself” which short-changes time for people development. To be effective, I’ve had to project plan well in advance to share the big picture with team members, set priorities, and delegate. As a new manager at BCG, I’d spend Sunday evenings organizing my plan for the week so that I could set priorities for the team. As team sizes have changed over the years, with skip level management roles where I’m not directly working with some or all of the individual contributors, my focus has shifted more to leadership development, and less about individual work product. Even today, I invest a lot of time in sharing the big picture and in project planning to provide clarity and align team priorities. This enables me to help team members prioritize, get them unstuck, and to create opportunities for them to work on their development goals and/or professional interests.
“Setting expectations upfront on working styles, understanding what matters to each of the team members, and determining where each member falls on the skill-will matrix is probably the most useful toolkit that I’ve found to help set up each employee (and my team overall) for success.”
What is important for you in a company culture? What made you decide to work at Twitch?
Twitch puts the community first. Without the community of streamers or viewers, there is no Twitch. To me it is really important that my employer be obsessed about its customers. While many companies recognize the importance of customers, few align their ways of working to match this value. Companies that put the customer first create audiences and customers that are passionate about the company and the brand. I’ve had the good fortune of working at such companies, and I was attracted to Twitch for the same reason, apart from the opportunity to bring my streaming engineering and media business experience.
What is your typical work day like? What has been your favorite project that you worked on at Twitch?
As we would say in consulting, “there is no typical day”. Some days are more heavily focused on meetings as my sphere of influence is cross-functional, and requires collaboration with a wide swath of individuals across teams. Other days, I spend writing documents elaborating a strategy, and/or decisions to be made. I have weekly team meetings, and individual 1-on-1s with each team member, and several other folks in the organization. Currently I’m leading a customer discovery effort to identify their pain points around a particular topic, and that means doing a bunch of customer interviews. Overall time spent is probably split 40% on collaboration/meetings, 30% on content development or review of team output, and 30% on team/relationship building.
My favorite project at Twitch is my current project. I, along with my team, am developing the Working Backwards document or PR FAQ, a popular approach at Amazon, to define customer needs and the ideal end state for an important aspect of live streaming. I enjoy talking to customers, going deep into their issues, to define and validate one or more product concepts based on the synthesized learnings across customers, either through qualitative and/or quantitative studies.
What advice would you give to someone considering moving from being an individual contributor to a management role?
I have learned that one cannot apply the management style that is most appealing to you in managing your direct reports. In other words, don’t manage how you expect to be managed. Setting expectations upfront on working styles, understanding what matters to each of the team members, and determining where each member falls on the skill-will matrix is probably the most useful toolkit that I’ve found to help set up each employee (and my team overall) for success.
Leading During the covid-19 crisis
How would you describe your leadership style in general?
Setting the vision or big picture goal to motivate the team, and letting each member own their initiatives end-to-end is central to my leadership style. I aspire to be a socratic leader, letting team members self-discover through systematic questioning. It is not always easy, as I tend to have a strong point of view. I’m continually working on it as I believe that it enables the most creative thinking in the organization vs one that is more top-down or command-and-control style.
What adjustments have you made in leading during this public health crisis?
I’ve had to tailor 1-on-1s for team members, moving to daily 1-on-1s for those that prefer and miss the daily interaction. Beyond the team, the water-cooler conversations where actually a lot of useful info is exchanged are missing. So I have to be more proactive in setting up 1-on-1s with folks that I might have more likely run into in the office and have had informal conversations if we were not remote. It has been great to have other people reach out and set 1-on-1s with me for the same purpose, but arguably I could be doing more.
“At work I tend to share the big picture more often with team members, and ensure I disseminate information fast, so that the team doesn’t feel left out. ”
What are some tools you’ve used to keep your team motivated during this time?
At work I tend to share the big picture more often with team members, and ensure I disseminate information fast, so that the team doesn’t feel left out. On the personal front, I sent a small gift home to each team member to let them know that I’m thinking of them. There’s definitely more to do here, especially as we onboard new team members that will be joining virtually until the office reopens.
What tools/strategies have you used to lead your teams or projects remotely?
It hasn’t been too difficult to work remotely, as I have a small team of experienced people. A few folks that we work with regularly are in distributed locations, so we were already working remotely with them. More frequent check ins have helped, as well as more structured calendared meetings in advance during the course of a project vs ad hoc scheduling. Only downside is the number of meetings has gone up.
DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
What aspects of Twitch’s company culture do you believe fosters diversity and inclusion?
Twitch has a very collaborative culture. In my time here, I’ve seen people of different backgrounds, experiences, personalities and with different perspectives all thriving in the organization. The desire to do better and the recognition that we have lots of room to improve on this front is also there. I’m happy to observe that we have executive leadership sponsorship and several champions within the organization that are actively collaborating and taking ownership to increase diversity and inclusion.
What are your thoughts on diversity in the tech industry? What has worked well in your experience and what needs to be improved?
There is room for improvement across the board. It starts with building a robust pipeline of incoming recruits, fostering an environment to let diversity of thought, styles and personalities be heard and to thrive, and ensuring yardsticks are not narrowly defined that limit who can succeed. I found that the latter was one of the hardest needle movers in management consulting. There, the pipeline problem was fixed by expanding/ changing how/where from candidates are sourced. However, retention and promotion is still challenging as the metrics or traits that were considered for leadership disproportionately impact women and other minority groups. I still think focusing on recruiting, retention, and promotion are all important areas. I’ve found that setting explicit goals around each of the areas creates the impetus and incentives for the organization to improve diversity and inclusion.
Mythili will be sharing more about her experience at ModelExpand’s upcoming #WomeninTech Leadership Breakfast: Leading During Covid-19. The ModelExpand #WomeninTech Leadership Breakfast Series provides a space for women to connect, inspire and uplift one another. Check out our upcoming events here or learn more about our sponsorship opportunities.
ModelExpand: ModelExpand is a diversity recruiting strategy firm that supports teams through strategic consulting, workshops, and events.
