I wanted to become a team lead for a very specific reason: I wanted to get into a privileged position. I wanted a role where I would no longer have to constantly explain the need for what I was doing, and where I actually had the leverage to influence culture.

Power dynamics are very real. When you are shouting from below, nobody hears you, no matter how loud or right you are. It is entirely about how people perceive you. If you truly want to influence a company’s culture, sometimes you first have to do the work to get to the level where people can actually see you. Aspiration alone is never enough. First, you have to prove you can get the job done; then, you build the skill set to lead.

The Illusion of Inclusion

My perspective on this was forged years ago. In 2016, I moved from a startup in Bangalore to my first job in Germany at Zalando. As an immigrant, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) was a concept I was introduced to primarily from an employer branding perspective. I was giving sponsored talks; for a time, I was literally labeled the “face of Zalando.” I enjoyed that privilege back then. But looking back, I would tell my younger self one thing:

Know your worth. If you use a free product, you are the product.

Internally, the team had absolutely no clue about DEI. Behind the scenes, it was chaos. “Diversity” essentially meant: We are being asked to interview more women, so we are going to have to compromise on the quality of candidates. I actually overheard that being said. Equity and inclusion were not even in the picture.

A senior engineer who joined my team assumed I was a junior for months purely because I was a woman and felt he had to constantly explain everything to me. When I finally went to my manager about the friction, he suggested that maybe I was just going through “mood swings.” Months later, I found out just how severely underpaid I was.

I left because I tried to fix it bottom-up, and I learned that real change has to come top-down. People were personally supportive; they agreed I was underpaid. But in a massive corporation, there is only a certain budget each year for adjustments, and fixing my situation required alignment at a level I simply could not reach. Today, sitting in a leadership role, I understand the mechanics of that. But back then, the reality was stark: I could not influence the system. So, I moved on.

The Self-Evaluation Framework

Because of these experiences, I developed a strict self-evaluation framework for knowing when a situation is no longer serving me. I check my environment when the signal-to-noise ratio becomes intolerable against my core values:

• Do I show up to work motivated every day?
• What is my baseline happiness level at this job?
• Can I bring my authentic self to work?

If those answers are constantly declining, the problem is usually not you, it is the system.

Then comes the second stage of the framework: Do I want to influence this culture? And practically, can I? At Zalando, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Years later at Anaconda, the answer was the same, though for different reasons. The company was transitioning from a startup to a scale-up. The resulting chaos ate all my time, I wasn’t learning anything new, and the AI revolution was happening outside my window without me. My motivation dropped, I couldn’t influence the change I needed, so I moved on.

Now, before I join any company, I evaluate the culture first: What are the company’s values, and do they align with mine? Do I feel safe? Do I feel accepted? I don’t ask, “Do I fit in?” I ask, “Do these people understand this?” Flipping that criteria changed everything for me.

Building Culture at the Pipeline

When I do have the position to drive change, the first thing I overhaul is hiring, because that is where your culture is actually built.

Biases are deeply ingrained. I have seen brilliant candidates dismissed immediately because a panel decided she was at a phase in her life where she was “likely going to be a mother.” Women were being kept out of the pipeline for reasons exactly like that.

My approach wasn’t to preach that whiteboard interviews are inherently bad for women. Instead, I changed the system to give candidates the option to choose their preferred format – whiteboard or take-home, irrespective of gender, so everyone could bring their best self. I started paying close attention to who was interviewing when a woman was sitting in front of a panel of men. I overhauled the language in our job descriptions.

Suddenly, women were in the pipeline. I brought four or five in just from my own network. Today, when I screen candidates, I place a higher influence on the cultural side than the technical bar: How do they communicate? Are they humble, or are they stubborn? Do they align with our values, and what diverse perspective do they actually add? The interview room is where I drive influence, which is why I am in every single one of them. As a lead, you have the privilege to step up and say, “We do not want a person with this behavior on our team.”

Conflict, Authenticity, and the Bias for Action

I have worked across Asian, European, and US cultures, and I’ve learned that conflict is not a gender thing; it is entirely about communication style.

If you bring your authentic self and create an environment where others can do the same, nobody needs to sugarcoat anything. Hard, necessary feedback becomes possible. But you have to give that feedback at the right time, rather than waiting for the “perfect” moment. Feedback delivered after the context has lapsed is simply not understood.

When it comes to broader conflicts, you have to do the groundwork. You go to a meeting prepared. You drive influence beforehand, bring your allies into the call, and ensure the person who carries weight is in the room. In a 25-minute meeting, there is no time to hash out a conflict—that is where you present a decision.

If I sense conflict brewing, I actually think that is a good thing, provided I’ve ensured the environment is healthy enough for it to be articulated safely. Respect their point, absolutely. But as a leader, sometimes you just have to take the decision. People tell me I have a strong bias for action. That doesn’t come from recklessness; it comes from experience. It is about trusting your gut feeling regarding when to jump in and when to step back.

Writing as Therapy and the AI Safety Net

I write a lot about these topics on my blog. I don’t do it for employer branding, and I’m not trying to build a hiring pipeline. I do it because I love writing. It is therapy for me; I reflect by writing. I took an SEO course once and immediately realized I had zero interest in chasing clickbait titles or gaming the LinkedIn algorithm. My blog is my personal collection of logs: the day-to-day life and challenges of a manager.

Maybe someday it will be a book.

But I also use it practically internally. When a recurring question comes up in the team, I turn my answer into a post. The next time it’s asked, I can just say, “I already wrote about this,” and share the link.

Writing also serves as a diagnostic tool for my mental health. A year ago, it showed me that something was deeply wrong. At Anaconda, I was so consumed by work that I had stopped writing entirely. At the same time, the AI wave was passing me by. The frustration built up until I finally stopped all my meetings for a full week and went heads-down to catch up on what I was missing.

I realized my core values are curiosity and learning, and I had left no time for either. That single week was enough to bring both back. Since then, I have written consistently, using AI as a safety net. It connects my raw thoughts without changing my tone or my voice. A post that used to take two or three days now takes a few hours. It’s an amplifier. More importantly, taking that week gave me the absolute clarity I needed to make the decision to leave that job.

Clarity as the Ultimate Burnout Prevention

When we talk about mental health in engineering teams: burnout, stress, anxiety; these issues almost always surface when clarity is missing and expectations are muddy.

As a middle manager, my fundamental job is to drive that clarity. It is not about looking upward and demanding, “Give me clarity.” It is about actively managing down and managing up: This is what the business needs, this is the ground reality of the tech today, and this is exactly where we can help. I level-set that reality on a daily basis.

If I am not acting as the bridge between how my team is feeling and what management wants, I am doing a bad job. It boils down to effective change management. Right now, with AI shifting the ground beneath us, people are associating this change with their very identities. The fear is a daily reality. I can only take that fear away for my team if I have achieved clarity for myself first. Will the manager role evolve? Yes. Am I ready for it? Yes. If I am blind to the future, I cannot help the person next to me see it.

My role allows me to swing across the pendulum. I can be hands-on when needed, because I have enough coding experience to differentiate good architecture from bad, and I can bring deep empathy when the human side is what matters most.

What remains irreplaceable is judgment. The human bias for action, knowing exactly when to execute. AI will give you the research and lay out the options, but the final decision is yours. I once wrote that fast cars are completely useless without an autobahn. That is our job now as developers and managers: to build the infrastructure, and figure out exactly what the team and the organization need to run fast and safe.

I am a builder. I love having an idea and seeing it live minutes later. Because of that, I am not scared for my job. The only question that remains is how long you are willing to stay curious.