In this episode, Rukmini Reddy (SVP of Engineering @ PagerDuty) shares invaluable leadership lessons on navigating transition, uncertainty, and fear. We cover actionable strategies like the five essential questions to lead your team through change, “hugging the elephant” to overcome fear, approaching org change from first principles, shifting from “informed pessimism” to “curious optimism,” and building high-trust peer support! If you're looking to strengthen your leadership and build more resilient engineering teams, this episode is packed with essential insights to help you navigate the toughest challenges with confidence.

ABOUT RUKMINI REDDY

Rukmini Reddy is the Senior Vice President of Engineering, responsible for managing product and platform delivery, infrastructure, and data science. Reddy joins PagerDuty from Slack where she guided the vision, strategy, and execution of a comprehensive re-architecture, transforming the messaging software into an automation platform that empowered users to streamline their work.

Additionally, Rukmini spent over a decade in senior executive roles at various enterprise companies, where she built a strong track record in driving engineering and product strategy during periods of hyper-growth and product transformation across SaaS, B2B, and B2C business models.

Rukmini has a master of science degree in computer engineering from the University of Arkansas and earned a bachelor’s degree from Osmania University in computer science and engineering.

SHOW NOTES:

• How the role of engineering leadership has evolved from 2021 to 2025 (2:35)
• The rising importance of financial acumen & enduring importance of resilience in engineering leadership (5:28)
• Key questions to ground and align your team with mission, vision, customer impact, and position to win the market (7:04)
• What it means to become the leader your business needs (9:31)
• “Hugging the elephant” and overcoming fear & uncertainty in 2021 vs. today (12:26)
• Five questions to help you lead your team through transitions and change (16:03)
• How to incorporate this framework to drive org change with empathy (18:10)
• How to address questions about job security and future roles within an organization (20:21)
• Strategies to guide your team through unspoken fears & unknowns (23:47)
• Rukmini’s advice to create high-trust, high-impact sources of support through fear, uncertainty, and doubt for the first time (25:19)
• Navigating org change from first principles (27:21)
• How to move from the “informed pessimism” dip to “curious optimism” as a team & org (30:00)
• Using evangelism & experimentation to tackle common adoption fears (34:07)
• Examples of enablement & skill development / delivery (37:32)
• The role of enforcement in the adoption transformation curve (39:07)
• Rapid fire questions (42:33)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters -Richard P. Rumelt clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/