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Lessons in Leadership, Delegation, and Team Growth

Lessons in Leadership, Delegation, and Team Growth

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 Richard Moot: Welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard. I am the lead for Developer Relations here at Square. Today I'm joined by Dina Spitzer, who is an engineering manager at Square, has been with the company for coming up on 11 years now, has seen a lot of changes over time. Dina, I'd love for you to just give us a little bit about you. What did you do before you joined Square, and then let's talk a little bit about your journey as you've been here.Dina Spitzer: We can start back in 2010. So 2010, I graduated with my degree in computer science. Was really interested in the startup world in the Bay Area, and so kind of always knew that I wanted to go from Champaign, Illinois, glamorous Champaign, Illinois to San Francisco. And so I found a startup willing to relocate me out to the Bay Area, joined them, was super excited. And then I saw firsthand how chaotic startups could be and how for a while, every single year I was shopping around for a new job. Either I was laid off or was about to get laid off or the company was kind of flatlining. And so when I joined Square back in 2013, they were my very large stable company and I think we were at about 600 people when I joined. So still pretty small. Pretty small. Different world.And yeah, I've been on three teams at Square. First team was around building internal tooling for risk management. Second team was the team management team. And so I got the opportunity to work on the Labor API, which is one of our public APIs on that team. And then I kind of got pulled into this world of APIs and I'm like, oh, there's a lot of improvements I want to make with our Square developer platform. And so after building Labor API, I moved over to the developer platform to one of the infrastructure teams to help actually improve the platform for internal developers to be able to build APIs at Square.Richard Moot: And that's basically why I joined. I mean I think it was like Carl Perry who almost seven years ago and sort of convinced me with joining this team because it was very much, at least the way that it was pitched was it's a little startup within a larger company. And so it was very exciting, lots of new things being built, trying to figure out a lot of things like taking an existing product and how do we create APIs for it. And the team that you were part of is very critical to making that possible, building out the framework that was going to allow people to be able to expose the different parts of the Square point of sale system to transform into APIs and allow people to build on top of it. In that time, so you joined as a software engineer and then you evolved over time to being a lead within your team, becoming an expert in what it is that you were working on. And then more recently in the past couple of years, you transitioned to an engineering manager. So I'd love to chat a little bit more what the evolution has been and how at what point it felt like this felt like more of the same and then the point where it goes, okay, this is totally different.Dina Spitzer: Yeah, sure. Great question. So I joined the team that I'm currently managing, I think five or six years ago as an IC, individual contributor software engineer. Just joined wanting to make the world a better place. And then I had a vision, had a drive, really studied our platform from the ground up. And I guess I can't say specifics about our internal tooling or internal infrastructure, but let's see, I identified some improvements I wanted to make to our internal architecture, internal infrastructure, got the team on board and we really started building in that direction. And then a little over two years ago, my manager departed the company and literally overnight asked, Hey, do you want my job? You have 24 hours to decide.Richard Moot: Oh my goshDina Spitzer: And I'd always been like, it was kind of crazy and I had just had a baby too. I'd been back for two months after coming back from maternity leave and I'm still catching up and I'm like, okay, let's do this. Let's just try out this whole engineering manager thing. Never looked back and it's been an adventure. Every day is a different adventure. It's a fun job. Yeah.Richard Moot: Yeah. I mean, one thing that is, I similarly had gone through that transition from being an IC to being a manager. Granted, I know that I have had a very different role. I don't do traditional software engineering. It's a blend of things. But one thing that really stuck with me in that transition of IC to EM or management is I remember something that Carl Perry said to me before he had left when I was really thinking about whether or not to go into management is the difference between leadership and management. And that it's very easy for us to start to believe that in order to be a leader, you need to be a manager. And I think it's a very common misconception that just because somebody's a manager doesn't necessarily mean that they're a leader and ...
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