About

Why this playbook

When I first stepped into engineering management, I went looking for a single source of truth that would help me think about the job from first principles. I never quite found one. What was out there fell into two buckets. Blogs where people posted thoughts as they came, often good, but scattered. And books and courses built around a specific lens, sprints or delivery or agile, useful in narrow ways but not the thing I was after.

So this playbook is my attempt at the missing thing: engineering leadership broken down from first principles, in one place, by someone still in the work. It also happens to be getting written as we enter the AI era, when a lot of the field's fundamental assumptions are quietly being challenged. That made going back to first principles feel less like a stylistic choice and more like the only honest one.

It is opinionated on purpose. I would rather be precise and wrong than vague and unfalsifiable.

Career

I started building software in 2016 as a full-stack developer, and joined FloBiz three years later on the web team. What followed was a long string of "someone needs to step into this" moments. I moved to Android during a bandwidth crunch, was asked to lead it once I'd found my feet, then asked to lead web when it was struggling, then asked to hold engineering together through two mass layoffs. Each step was a promotion I hadn't asked for, into a problem I hadn't solved before. The pattern, in retrospect, is the only career plan I've ever really had.

A few things from along the way:

• Built and rebuilt the engineering team three times across two layoffs. It sits at 30 to 35 today.
• Shipped a lot of what myBillBook is: offline-first sync, themes, payments, handling the kind of data volumes that quietly break naive client code, plus the company's first GenAI service, OCR, and AI reconciliation of bank statements.
• Rewrote the product end-to-end twice. First on Android, then in large pieces on web.
• Worked across most of the stack: backend, web, native and cross-platform mobile, and AI. C#, Node, Angular, React, Kotlin, Flutter, Flask.

Outside of work

I live in India. I read books that change how I think; the ones I keep are the ones that leave me with a different default than the one I came in with. I'm also a long-running One Piece fan, less for the pirates and more for the conviction it quietly insists on: people's dreams have no end.

Contact

If anything here lands, or doesn't, I'd like to hear about it. Reach me at sarthakxyg@gmail.com, or via the links below.