What we talked about
Manisha Sahni joins Federico Ramallo to unpack the real challenges of managing global engineering teams:beyond time zones and into the “hidden work” of leadership.
Manisha explains why distributed teams don’t run on autopilot: leaders must intentionally build unity, ownership, and belonging across cultures. She shares how trust is created through consistent connection:not only through work meetings, but also through lightweight social moments that turn “avatars into friends” and reduce friction in daily collaboration.
Show notes
Manisha Sahni grew an engineering organization from five to seventy globally distributed people at Pantheon, and the lesson she takes from that experience is not about tooling or process, it is about the volume of quiet, unmeasured human work that makes a distributed team actually function as one unit instead of a collection of people each doing their own thing.
What we covered
- The hardest part of managing global engineering teams is not time zones, it is the intentional cultural work of helping people from different backgrounds understand each other well enough to collaborate without friction. At Pantheon, teams spanned Eastern Europe, India, Mexico, the US, and Canada, all contributing to a single shared goal.
- A small group of two or three engineers across drastically different time zones set Manisha’s highest bar for async handoffs: their end-of-day messages were so detailed and specific that the team achieved a genuine 24-by-7 development cycle, each person picking up exactly where the last left off.
- Cultural differences in engineering teams are not abstract, some engineers from certain educational backgrounds excel at open-ended, ambiguous research problems, while others do their best work when the problem is clearly scoped and they are trusted to execute with precision. Treating these as weaknesses rather than different strengths is where managers go wrong.
- One concrete example: a senior engineer was delivering quick-fix solutions that frustrated his manager, but a one-on-one conversation revealed the engineer was new to the team and trying to show speed to make a good impression. The fix was coaching the manager to give this engineer ownership of a problem, let him research it, and present options to the team, which he did, and the manager said he did not recognize the same person.
- Anonymous feedback only works when trust is already established. Manisha described her own early-career experience of not trusting that anonymous surveys were truly anonymous, and therefore not giving honest answers. The solution is building enough of a relationship in one-on-ones that people feel safe saying what they actually think.
- Organizational changes need time to bake before results can be evaluated. Resetting team structures repeatedly in a fast-moving startup burns out both the team members and the leaders driving the change, and prevents any signal about whether the previous change was working.
About Manisha Sahni
Manisha Sahni is a full-time and fractional engineering leader with a track record of scaling globally distributed teams and improving platform reliability. She most recently led the data layer organization at Omni, where she cut integration delivery time from months to weeks, and previously spent several years at Pantheon building platform capabilities at scale.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishasahni
- Website: https://appomni.com
Episode 101 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.797) Welcome back to the pre-vetted podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today we are joined by Manisha Sani. She’s a full-time and fractional engineering leader focused on scaling organization, strategy, and operational excellence with a strong track record of building engineering culture, aligning execution to business outcomes, and strengthening
reliability, customer trust. Most recently, Manisha led the data layer organization at Omni, where she helped stand up a new SaaS integration platform, champion AI to accelerate delivery, and drove major reliability improvements, cutting integration delivery time from months to weeks, and reducing a large KTLO backlog dramatically. Before that, she spent several years at Pantheon building and leading platform capabilities at scale.
growing a platform organizer from five to 70 globally distributed team members while driving reliability, churn reduction, and cost goals. Manisha, welcome to the show.
Manisha Sahni (01:09.4) Thank you. How are you doing, Federico?
Federico Ramallo (01:12.359) I am doing great. It’s a beautiful day today and I’m looking forward to have a great conversation with you.
Manisha Sahni (01:19.488) me as well. Thank you for having me here.
Federico Ramallo (01:24.017) I’m honored to have you here today. So let’s start with what are the hardest part of managing a cloud engineering team that people underestimate?
Manisha Sahni (01:26.36) you
Manisha Sahni (01:36.96) my God, so many things. Sometimes people believe that you can just set up these teams and they’ll function automatically. But there is so much hidden work that I feel like a manager or a leader of a global organization or a global team needs to do. That spans beyond just the time zone differences, right? It’s the cultural differences. It’s making sure that everybody feels
a sense of ownership, a sense of belonging, and is able to move forward together as one unit, even though they might be in different locations.
I think the hardest part of making that happen is for a manager to really understand and meet their team where they are, making space for them to connect, not just work-wise, but also socially, because I think that is what helps build the trust. And when you have a team that trusts each other, then they work well together, will be producing better outcomes together as one unit. So just, you know, I think
that building that culture, building that sense of unity and belonging is something that people underestimate because it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of conversations, and that’s something that a manager or a leader of a global organization needs to be ready to do.
Federico Ramallo (03:09.733) Right, right. It becomes a people problem where bridging cultures and making sure that everything is aligned, it’s a different challenge than when we’re talking about just code, right?
Manisha Sahni (03:19.705) yeah?
Manisha Sahni (03:27.909) yeah. I mean, it’s a lot of, you know, a…
things that we take for granted because we know the culture and context we are in. As a leader, you have to extend yourself and open yourself up to learning and understanding a completely new culture, a completely new group of people who operate differently, whose strengths and weaknesses might be different, and then coming up with ways to have all of these different people from different backgrounds and different contexts come together and understand
each other so not only you are understanding them that’s the first step but helping others in the team understand each other that’s a big challenge and that’s something that people don’t talk about they feel like okay you know we’ll just get these this group of engineers and things will just happen it doesn’t happen that easily it takes time it takes patience it takes a lot of effort intentional effort
Federico Ramallo (04:28.339) Right, I think that the key that you mentioned is integration. Regardless of the location of the team, being able to have a tight integration, it’s the most, it has the highest ROI that I’ve seen.
Manisha Sahni (04:35.949) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (04:47.926) Yeah, yeah, I think that, you know, at Pantheon, can give an example. A lot of our teams were geographically distributed, right? We had people in Eastern Europe, we had people in India, we had people in Mexico, and so, and they were all working with people in US, in Canada. So,
We had teams that were in literally multiple different time zones, multiple different countries, all working together as one. If they all just felt like, you know, if me as a manager or me as a leader did not put in the effort to help them connect with each other on a more personal, beyond work relationships, I think it would be very difficult for them to work as one unit because they’re ultimately responsible for delivering one goal, one mission.
one outcome. So if they’re not all moving together as one unit, as one team and just you know, this is my thing, I just do this and step back and I won’t, I don’t need to care about what other people are doing on the team. I don’t think we would have the results that we did and therefore for me that was one of the big focus areas of when we have people in different areas come together that they feel like they belong in the team, that they are part
of the team that they’re interacting as one team, not as this is my thing, I’ll just do that and forget about the rest.
Federico Ramallo (06:25.191) Right, right. So when teams spawn time zones, what operating rhythms have you found that work best?
Manisha Sahni (06:37.742) So a lot of things. I think definitely some things that work best are finding a balance between when we meet as a team, you know, in a live meeting versus when we work asynchronously. I think that right balance is really important to prevent burnout. First of all, right? You don’t want to have a team that’s constantly meeting every week, every day of the week and everybody has to, you
either wake up really early or work very late. Nobody wants to do that. So finding the right balance, identifying the very important meetings that need to happen live. And those meetings, again, the purpose of the meeting needs to be discussions, needs to be brainstorming, things that everybody needs to really participate in. It’s not just a listening thing. So the whole point of this could be an email or this could be a Slack message is really highlighted.
especially in a team that’s distributed in different time zones. But beyond that also, asynchronous handoffs, asynchronous communication really gets highlighted, right? The documentation of every little thing has to be really, really explicit. Assumptions, like you may think this is implicit, this is implied, but writing it down explicitly or mentioning it
explicitly becomes really critical in a team that’s distributed globally.
I think beyond all of that, it’s also, like I said, making time for the group to connect socially, right? Not just have meetings that are about work, but also making space very organically or sometimes intentionally to have the team connect on topics that are non-work related, you know, just like a water cooler hangout session at the end of the week or during a retrospective, just make a little bit extra space for
Manisha Sahni (08:43.929) people to get to know each other. That helps build trust, helps them work well with each other, helps them identify what works, what helps them connect with each other as a team, as a group. I think those are really, really critical. I’ll give you an example. I think for me, the bar is set so high. I this group of two or three engineers. They were all in different time zones, really spread apart, but their hand
Like I have used that as an example for a lot of my other teams as you should just see how they hand off at the end of the day. Like the amount of detail each one would leave and you know the specificity of their message to the other people in the team before they have signed out for the day was so good that we actually ended up establishing a 24 by 7 development cycle.
right? And they were super focused, super efficient as a group. And, you know, that was just that’s the high bar for me, because I know that that can be achieved. So I refuse to believe that a global team is difficult to work with or cannot be efficient as a group because I’ve seen it work really well.
Federico Ramallo (10:09.923) I think that this, well, what I call this idea of from avatar to friend, right, is this idea of building this personal relationship because then you can have a much better communication, right? It’s different when you have an email address or a…
Manisha Sahni (10:17.677) Yes.
Manisha Sahni (10:28.74) for sure.
Federico Ramallo (10:34.565) avatar, right, a photo or whatever versus I play mini golf with a product owner and she beat me. So now we have this mutual understanding or we can joke about it, right? So…
Manisha Sahni (10:35.597) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (10:42.519) Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Manisha Sahni (10:49.306) Yeah.
It builds that rapport, builds that trust, it builds that relationship. mean, you know, we see now a lot of people going back to work and a lot of people advocating for returning to office. And the reason for that is because you do need to create space for your team to connect at a personal level, because that is, like I said, and I’m probably repeating myself here, that is what builds trust. That is what builds relationships. And when the
team trusts each other, they work better with each other. They value each other’s opinion more. They feel more comfortable talking to each other, brainstorming with each other, coming to each other with questions. That hesitation goes away because now you know this person and you feel comfortable with them. you know, even if you don’t go back to work five days a week, like we used to before COVID, but having those opportunities to connect is really important.
And obviously, I think if COVID has taught us anything that we can still, despite being remote, despite being online and behind these screens, we can still create those relationships. And it’s just making sure that we take the time to do it.
you know, especially now when things move very fast, like startup culture, that’s what it is, right? You want to move quickly, you want to just get stuff done. There’s so much work to do. I think as a leader in that environment, we have to be intentional and we have to make that space and time to make those, to build those connections, to provide the team that ability to build those connections despite the speed, because it’s going to pay dividends later on, right?
Manisha Sahni (12:40.025) It may feel like a burden right now, but in the future, it is going to have a lot of benefit. It is going to help you move even faster. The cliche word, slow down to speed up. This is a different take on it. Yes, you do slow down maybe slightly to build those relationships among people so that they can speed up and do better work and achieve those outcomes more efficiently and as one group.
Federico Ramallo (12:49.906) Right.
Federico Ramallo (13:08.583) Right, and I think that the keyword that you use intentionally, because when we go to the office, we develop naturally those personal relationships.
Manisha Sahni (13:20.547) Yeah, you don’t have to make space separately, right? Like you’re going to be sitting next to each other. You’re going to run into each other in the cafeteria. You’re going to run into each other at lunchtime. But yeah.
Federico Ramallo (13:32.957) But with a remote team, you have to intentionally build those relationships. And I think that that’s the key differentiation. And that happens whether they are in the same city, working remotely, whereas they are globally distributed. Just the time zone becomes a scheduling, a better planning for scheduling. That’s it.
Manisha Sahni (13:49.583) Absolutely,
Manisha Sahni (13:56.143) Yep.
And more often than not, everybody once in a while is open to adjusting their routines, right? As long as it’s not every meeting is going to be a certain time and that’s not going to be workable for that one engineer on your team because they’re in a different time zone. Once in a while, everybody is open to making adjustments and you can always rotate, right? If you have a team, let’s say in India versus US, there’s a night and day difference between their time zones.
There’s always and you we’ve done this a few times where we have some meetings for a few weeks where you know, India team will stay back late and we have some meetings where the US team will wake up early just to help adjust and it’s not a burden on one or the other. that’s as a you know, as a culture we have to make these adjustments and we have to get people on board and more often than not we may we assume. I’ll tell you so many times I’ve had these conversations
with my engineering leaders and partners and they’re like, no, they’re not going to be okay with that. But how do you know if you haven’t asked? We are making these assumptions that they’re not going to be okay. Let’s stop and ask and see and we might be surprised and guess what? We were surprised, right? People are more willing to make these adjustments in order to go that extra mile, in order to stay focused on what they’re doing and they can see that they’re all smart individuals, right? They’re all mature.
individuals, professionals who’ve been doing these things for years, right, in a lot of cases. And so they understand the benefits of making these small adjustments once in a while for the overall betterment of what our work is, what our goals are in delivery.
Federico Ramallo (15:45.459) Right. And I think that a little deviating of…
Manisha Sahni (15:50.733) Hey.
Federico Ramallo (15:51.047) topic but one thing that I also have seen work a lot is this idea of purpose, right? I mean if you explain the team and the team members why this is important for them, why this is important for a team, then you build a purpose and then they are more willing to go, you know, above and beyond to work towards the team goal, right?
Manisha Sahni (16:02.987) Absolutely.
Manisha Sahni (16:13.289) Absolutely.
Absolutely, I 100 % agree with that. think that as a leader, whether you’re an engineering leader, product leader, whatever, as a leader, you need to approach your team with this is what we need to be doing. And this is the reason why we are wanting to do this. You have to get the buy-in from the team in order to help them really commit and be motivated about doing this with you.
shouldn’t be, I said so, right? I feel like that is such a detrimental way of leading sometimes is we decided this, you go and do it. No, let’s bring the team along. Let’s help them understand. Sometimes it also, I’ve had engineers who are veterans in the industry, right? They know so much more than I ever will because they’ve had that much experience more than me.
helps to bring them on board into the decision making, regardless of whether they’re in the same time zone as you or they’re from a different time zone, but they have that experience that they can voice and then they become champions for the rest of the team. Because a manager or a director has a little bit of some cultures, some teams, some individuals do feel like, because they said we have to do this, sometimes they react a certain way of, okay,
we’re just going to do it, we’re not going to question it. But really to get buy-in, to get people on board, to help them understand why they are doing what they are doing and how they’re making an impact overall to the company, to the business, to the goals that we are trying to achieve as an organization, they need to understand the reasons and they need to be a part of that decision-making.
Manisha Sahni (18:16.337) sometimes and you know that’s I feel really really critical and sometimes missed opportunities when people make decisions at the high level and forget there’s you know a whole group of people who have to execute.
Federico Ramallo (18:30.727) Right, right, yeah. Yeah, I completely agree, yes. So what cultural differences show up most often in engineering teams?
Manisha Sahni (18:45.933) boy, I mean, I can only tell you based on the few cultures, different cultures that I’ve worked with. But what I’ve learned from that is that I have to, every time I meet somebody from a culture or from a background or context that I have not been exposed to before, I have to start from scratch. I have to learn first and understand where they’re coming from and then meet them where they are. Like I know some cultures,
They are very open to taking feedback and then challenging the status quo or challenging the discussion from somebody senior who might be talking or dictating how things are going or should go. Other cultures don’t feel comfortable doing that. So they may disagree with something but may not be comfortable voicing their opinions. That’s a pretty common thing.
because it’s considered rude in their culture, it’s considered just not an acceptable professional behavior. In other cases, I know some people, some cultures, and I may be generalizing this, but I will preface this by saying, of course, ultimately it’s the individual and you have to connect and work with each individual and it’s not a generic thing. But in general, in some places, just because of their
how their education system is set up, how their context is in their culture and location. Some people are really good at, from a certain location, really good at give them an ambiguous problem and let them go do deep research and they’ll come back and give you a really solid solution. Others don’t.
do well with ambiguous situations. They need, this is the problem we need to solve. This is the solution you need. You just go execute and they’ll do a really good job, high quality execution and delivery. Right. So I think that these are these differences, culturally that we have to be aware of and then meet people where they are. Like, for example, I’ll tell you one team which had actually people like this, right? We had somebody who was really good at leading.
Manisha Sahni (21:09.777) because in their culture, leadership is something that is very natural. They’re encouraged to be leaders. So they’re very naturally inclined to it. There’s another person who, this leader were just from a different culture, different location. This leader was just getting frustrated about, my God, I’m telling this person to do this and this person is just not delivering. And I was like, okay, let’s take a step back and understand why this person is not able to deliver.
right? Let’s have that one on one conversation. So I ended up having that one on one conversation with them. And in that one on one conversation, I found out that this person’s strong suit and ability is to do research, like give him a problem and let him lose.
The minute you start dictating of this is what it is, sort of, you know, in some cases he has to do that, but it became a pattern where the leader of the team was constantly just, you know, making the decisions and telling the team, go execute this. So this person was just not motivated anymore to participate and engage in the team within that, you know, in that sort of setting. So when I realized this during my conversations, I had to coach the leader.
to adjust his style and engage with this engineer in a way that helps him do his best work. So the next project we had, I sort of gave him the ownership of, okay, let’s give him the problem. This is what needs to be solved and have the leader, you know, I coach the leader to work with him in that way. And then let him give him the time, you know, whatever a few days in the sprint to go do his research, come up with
solutions and tell the team, present to the team of these are the different options he explored. And then this is why he believes recommends this is the best solution. And he did that. And it was amazing. In fact, the leader, the one who was who I was coaching, he mentioned this like, like, I’m amazed. Like, I didn’t recognize this. I didn’t understand this pattern. So it’s these small little things that we have to be aware of. And, you know,
Manisha Sahni (23:27.291) We all learn. Nobody has learned everything and started working. We all learn sometimes on the job and sometimes we make mistakes. But as long as we’re ready to adjust our pattern and our work behavior, I think it’s all good.
Federico Ramallo (23:45.105) Right, right. Yeah, leader by giving specific instructions on how to do the work, they are depriving the individual contributor of the passion, of the purpose, right? Because now…
feels more of a chore, right? And takes immediate gratification of the task, right? Without realizing, as you describe it, right? Without realizing that that was happening, right?
Manisha Sahni (24:07.691) exact.
Manisha Sahni (24:14.095) They don’t realize it, right? They just didn’t realize it. So in that case, my role as the leader was to just help coach and adjust that working relationship between them.
Federico Ramallo (24:28.211) I’ve seen the same pattern with engineers in Latin America where they don’t push back, right? And the best way that I describe this is, and I’ve seen the same with developers from India, they, the best way that I can describe it is they say yes out of love because they want to please, right?
Manisha Sahni (24:35.438) Mm.
Manisha Sahni (24:54.159) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (24:56.605) which is a cultural difference, right? Let me give you an example. If somebody invites you Mexico to a party, you say yes, right? You don’t say no. It is rude to say no, right?
But in the US, it’s more common for people to say, sorry, have my RSVP. No, because I have a scaling conflict. People are more comfortable doing that in the US. But in Mexico, you don’t say no. You say yes, and then you don’t show up. And that’s culturally acceptable. So I understand the frustration from an American manager.
Manisha Sahni (25:16.515) you
Manisha Sahni (25:21.699) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (25:26.703) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (25:33.849) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:38.087) having that experience and that frustration. But that’s why I describe it out of love, because it comes from the best intentions.
Manisha Sahni (25:49.549) Yeah, I think that that’s such a great example, right? Like one of the things that.
I really promote as a culture, especially when there are conflicts or these sort of disagreements between team members is first of all, assume positive intent, right? Be curious about why somebody is behaving a certain way. Because if you don’t have that curiosity, you’re not going to put yourself in a position to learn about what might be there. You might make assumptions and might make the situation worse and unknowingly.
right? So I think that having that one, positive, that assuming that the person you’re dealing with just having a positive intention, has a positive intention and then showing curiosity about what their context and what they might be going through is so relevant and it’s so important. I’ll give you another example actually of, you know, these differences, I can tell you so many, but I had
Federico Ramallo (26:55.916) You
Manisha Sahni (26:56.369) another, it was a first time manager and they had somebody on their team who was a pretty senior leader or I think mid to senior level engineer on their team from a different country, different time zone everywhere, right? And anytime there was an issue that, you know, a bug or something that was assigned to this engineer, it would be like a quick fix sort of
and aid solution.
right? And this was really frustrating, manager who was a first time manager. So, you know, obviously they are in their learning phase as well. It was really frustrating them and they just couldn’t understand what what was happening and you know. And so again, then the curiosity part, I encouraged him to be curious and understand what is the context? Where is this? Why is this thing happening? And when I started digging in again, one on one with each of them, that’s when I realized that
the expectation that this manager had was like do the research really do a deep dive and then solve this problem use it as a learning experience because this engineer was also new to the team and was still on boarding on the team and From the engineers point of view they’re like I’m new on the team. I want to make a good first impression So I want to show speed and you know, how quickly I solved the problem. So
as long as it’s like a problem is solved, it really doesn’t matter if it is like the really deep researched thing that I have done. So it was a miscommunication and missed expectation setting that was happening and that led to these sort of differences. Now, was it a cultural thing? Maybe, maybe not, but also these sort of differences will always pop up. feel like regardless of culture, regardless of
Manisha Sahni (28:57.871) of where we are for people on the team. And as leaders, we have to encourage everyone to understand the context of where somebody is coming from before we jump to conclusions about their abilities, right? And go, this is a bad performer on the team and we need to do something about it. Like, no, let’s understand. let’s take just one step back and give it a minute to understand it. And yes, sometimes it is.
Federico Ramallo (29:15.154) Right.
Manisha Sahni (29:27.771) that some people are just not engaged or this is just not the right fit for them. And that’s a whole other conversation. But we have to make that despite the geographical differences within team members.
Federico Ramallo (29:41.863) Right, right. I’ve seen the same thing happen with Latin American engineers, where there is a pride of fixing things without the proper tools, right? Because it shows resourcefulness, right? You know.
Manisha Sahni (29:58.915) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (30:04.743) And I understand the context. I used to live in Argentina where we would buy cars, right? But then the economic situation would change. The import was impossible. So you would have a beautiful BMW, but you could not get the spare part for a car. Or it would be super expensive.
Manisha Sahni (30:22.634) Federico Ramallo (30:28.423) we were able to, okay, we can get this other part from this other car, and then we would put together other parts to make the car work again, right? And that for us was resourcefulness, right? But…
in the American culture that could become a liability because if you don’t fix a car properly then the mechanic has a liability issue. And the same thing happens in engineering. If the expectation of the manager is to spend the time doing the research and find the best solution possible, whereas the engineer has this expectation or intention
speed over quality because that way it can show resourcefulness and being fast, right? Then you have a mismatch expectation that can cause conflict.
Manisha Sahni (31:17.739) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (31:25.071) you
True. you know, it’s not that you’d always want to like a manager will always want you to do that research, right? Like there are like, for example, we had like a KTLOT where it was critical to the success metric was how many bugs have we fixed, right? And how quickly, because the backlog was just enormous. And in that case, yeah, sometimes you have to take shortcuts because the number of bugs that are incoming is so many that if we do deep
Federico Ramallo (31:45.447) Right.
Manisha Sahni (31:56.149) research in every single one, we’re not going to make it will always be underwater. So in some cases, it makes sense to take on that tech debt a little bit. And then, you know, come back when you have some breathing room to go solve the deep rooted issue. And that’s the right context. And that’s the right thing there. But in other cases, you know, no, you want to do the correct fix at the right time, because you have the time and you have the bandwidth. But I feel like the
The onus is a little bit, maybe it’s unfair, I don’t know, but I think the onus is definitely on the leader of the team, whether it’s the tech lead or the manager or the director, whoever is leading the team has to be very clear and set those expectations from the get-go.
Right? You cannot not set expectations clearly with your team and then get upset that, you didn’t meet my expectations. It’s like, no, you have to communicate that. You have to write it down. And especially in a remote team, you have to write down all these things so that, you know, it, it, there is one source of truth that everybody can refer to. And one of the things that I used to do very diligently and encourage my team
to do also when sort of I wasn’t able to scale at a everyday operation level is every quarter just do a reset with your team. Every quarter, you know, we had a quarterly cycle and every quarter just go back and review your team’s working documents. What are the decisions? Do you need to adjust? Because even one person new on the team or one person leaving, it’s going to change the dynamic of the team and you have to adjust and you know,
make tweaks and refresh your expectations and remind yourself sometimes, these are the decisions we made three months back. Are these still relevant in the context we are operating in? Have things changed so drastically we need to throw this whole thing out and reset and redo everything? Or here, just these couple of things can change and we can still largely operate in the same way. But I think setting that transition
Manisha Sahni (34:15.249) and sort of doing the retrospective every quarter or whatever cadence works for the team, of course. If it’s a well-oiled machine, the team hasn’t changed much. Yeah, you probably don’t need to do it every quarter, maybe six months. But yeah, think that it’s something that I’ve found a lot of value from with my teams at least.
Federico Ramallo (34:37.299) And I think that the reason most of, or when globally distributed teams fail is because of this mismatch expectation. Yeah. One of the things that I do work with my, the teams that I build up is I teach them about these differences of approach.
Manisha Sahni (34:47.777) 100%. 100%.
Federico Ramallo (35:02.663) The way that I describe it is there is no right or wrong. It’s simply different cultures. We’re coming from different places. So I teach them how to proactively validate the manager’s assumptions. Because we try to work on both sides. But there are possibilities for mismatch expectations. So we can…
Manisha Sahni (35:08.151) Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (35:31.923) we can work it out on the leader side, but also on the individual contributor side by proactively stating what they’re planning to do and then explain the why’s and then say, well, I can fix it quickly. I can fix it not so quickly, or I can spend hours researching and then make it a super great solution. And then validating what are the expectations of the manager. And then based on that,
understanding that there’s going to be a discrepancy and then either negotiate it or follow the manager’s expectation. And then from there, that makes a huge difference on the productivity of the team.
Manisha Sahni (36:10.905) Yeah, absolutely.
Manisha Sahni (36:19.037) absolutely, absolutely. And I think that this is why, you know, a lot of people, you know, now we’re talking about one-on-ones in the past, like I think a couple of years of the focus towards being intentional about one-on-ones between managers, skip levels, even among engineers in the team. That is really important. Like this is the reason because…
That is the space where you have these conversations. Yes, one-on-ones, you check in and you do status updates, but guess what? All of those status updates can be async. That can be a message you can send without narrating something. But use your one-on-one times. That is something that I’ve my managers and team leads to do is use those one-on-one times too.
address these questions, ask pointed questions about, what’s working? Do you understand how to do this? If you’ve set expectations or you have certain expectations, make sure that, you know, you’re the person you’re having that one-on-one conversation with is on the same page as you, right? Build that alignment and those…
One of the things that I’ve also noticed and maybe true more in engineering than in some of the other departments in a company is a lot of people are hesitant or reluctant to voice their opinions or say something in a group setting.
right? But they might feel more comfortable in a one-on-one setting to share their feedback. So I think that, you know, that is why also I value skip level one-on-ones. Like I still do them. Always I try and make time for those conversations because I can get a lot more out of somebody in a one-on-one conversation than in a group setting. So like we have to use those one-on-ones very, very intentionally.
Federico Ramallo (38:19.858) Right.
Federico Ramallo (38:23.731) I’ve seen the same thing. And one of the things that I’ve been doing for that is to do this indirect anonymous feedback, collecting anonymous feedback, because the team are afraid to speak up. But they would do it anonymously, or they would do it on one-on-ones, depending on the situation. But I’ve seen that work. I think that that’s
Manisha Sahni (38:34.201) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (38:52.813) that cultural difference, at least in Latin America, is rooted to the… So in Argentina we had dictatorships, had abusive governments, so you really don’t have a lot of freedom of speech, right? So I’m maybe here and projecting, I don’t know, but I feel that that experience that people in Latin America have…
Manisha Sahni (39:16.915) you
Federico Ramallo (39:22.523) and Latin America have translates to being afraid to speaking up in a group setting, right? Because you’re exposing yourself to becoming the next target, right? As happened with government.
Manisha Sahni (39:30.829) Yeah.
Manisha Sahni (39:35.063) Yeah, no, I, yeah, 100%. And I feel like, you know, again, I might be projecting as well, right? Just like you, I feel like
being a woman and being a woman from India in a certain generation. Like I’ll also put the generational context into it because I don’t think this is true for the more younger generation and I’m like completely dating myself. But it is harder, even like anonymous feedback. I know that a lot of people
there was a time when I was in the same boat. I relate to this very personally is I didn’t trust that the anonymous feedback was really anonymous, right? So I wouldn’t even then in that situation be comfortable giving my true opinion about something.
So it was only when I built that trust with people, with my seniors or the people that I felt close to and I trusted, it took me a long time to get there. But when I got there, then I felt comfortable voicing my opinion and sharing more of actually what I think about certain situations and talking about it in group settings sometimes.
Federico Ramallo (40:49.331) Yes, yes, we had the same situations and yeah, we had to build the trust with the team and make a commitment that we will not share that information directly with the manager. We would process it internally, summarize it internally and then share the conclusions, which is probably less efficient on time, but…
the quality of the information was much better because people would feel more comfortable sharing their experiences.
Manisha Sahni (41:25.763) shit.
I think, you know, in general, I feel like a lot of things that we do as leaders is it requires a lot of time. It requires a load of time commitment from ourselves because there’s, know, especially as you’re the size of your team grows, it is going to take that much more time and effort to connect with everybody individually to have to build those relationships, to put in that extra effort to
build that trust and culture within the organization that nobody talks about that, right? Everybody’s like, yeah, you become more more busy. It’s like, yeah, but the busy work is, you know, you don’t see busy work on a sheet or, you know, it’s move the needle on the, you know, the metrics and all. It’s a lot of time commitment towards the people and helping build those relationships, which is very quiet, hidden work that nobody
talks about.
Federico Ramallo (42:28.307) Yes, and it’s hard to put it on metrics because you know, how do you measure people’s trust, right?
Manisha Sahni (42:35.553) Absolutely. you know, I’ll pivoting completely from our original topic. I’ll tell you the number of times we’ve changed organizations, right? Like there’s a huge cost to changing, bringing about any organizational change, whatever the reason may be. And, you know, it’s important, like, especially in a startup culture where you have to be aware of the industry trends and you have to move quickly, which means you have to reset your, your teams, you have to reset
said the way you’re working and that change management has to be propagated throughout the company, throughout the teams.
Nobody sits to think about how much work it is on the leaders of these teams that have changed, that have been impacted by this change. And then three months later, they’d be like, yeah, let’s change again. Like, no, let this settle. Like, let people get comfortable and adapt because, you know, it takes time. Change takes time. It takes a lot of work. People need to adjust to it. It needs to bake.
before you get any results out of it. And then you can evaluate whether the change that you made worked or not. But without giving it that time and not accounting for the effort, if we just keep making changes, it’s just going to burn out not only the team, but the leaders who are trying to make that happen. And then of course, the company is not going to get the effect and impact that they were hoping to make with that change.
Federico Ramallo (44:10.141) Right.
Manisha Sahni (44:11.37) I’ve experienced and have a strong opinion about.
Federico Ramallo (44:17.707) Yet every time you change a team member, either goals or aims, then the whole dynamic of the team changes. The impact is significant.
Manisha Sahni (44:31.553) It is, it is.
Federico Ramallo (44:33.511) So changing topics, what led you to become a fractional engineering leader? And are you still open to full-time positions?
Manisha Sahni (44:44.943) Yeah, so last year, 2025, I sort of was thinking about what I want to do next. And there’s so much I could be doing. When I look back at my career, one of the things that I noticed was I really enjoyed, or I was at my happiest when I was learning new things. And when I look at the industry today, there are a lot of startups, there are a lot of scale-ups.
early state startups that are there that need sort of strong senior leadership to help them get to whatever next phase or hit their milestones or get into the transition and get to the other side, but really don’t have either the resources or the long-term vision yet of how they want to set their organization to hire somebody full-time. So I think that that became
sort of what I latched on to is with a fractional engagement, I would be able to get the benefit of both worlds. I’d be able to not only learn a lot of the new things and new technologies and new domains and products with multiple organizations, but also be able to help and provide my leadership and experience, apply some of the lessons
that I’ve learned over the years, helping the organizations that I’ve been with go through these transitions, achieve these goals and make a quick impact. Ultimately, my goal, whether I’m in a full-time role or in a small short time commitment in a fractional capacity is to make impact for the business, is to make impact for the company and get outcomes.
I think that a fractional setting allows me to get more outcomes in number in a short amount of time, very focused amount of time. But full-time roles also, I think that if the role is exciting enough, I see myself growing with a particular team, with a particular organization. I’m still open to doing both.
Federico Ramallo (46:47.121) Right.
Federico Ramallo (47:06.643) Amazing.
Manisha Sahni (47:06.711) It depends on which one takes more of my time.
Federico Ramallo (47:12.05) Right.
Amazing. So we’re running out of time, but I truly appreciated you being here today. Yeah, I think we had a great conversation. Any final remarks before we wrap it up?
Manisha Sahni (47:20.431) Thank you for having me.
Manisha Sahni (47:26.157) Yes, I…
I really enjoyed my conversation with you. Honestly, when you reached out and we should do this podcast, I connected with you, Federico, on a really deep note. our thought process is very, very alike. So I enjoyed talking with you now and even earlier. And you, through this conversation, made me think about all of these things, right? About global teams and what works,
doesn’t work because in the fast-paced world we’re living in there isn’t a lot of time to stop and think about these things right and be intentional about it. So 2026 for me is about a lot of intention and growing with intentions so I just hope everybody else is whoever is listening to it has found something that they can take away that they can use and apply even if for a little bit but yeah if anybody wants to reach out
me as well. I’m available on LinkedIn. I think you have all of that information posted.
Federico Ramallo (48:35.415) Yes, we’re going to leave your LinkedIn URL at the bottom of the description of this episode so people can reach out and connect with you. Yes.
Manisha Sahni (48:46.475) I appreciate this conversation. Thank you again, Federico.
Federico Ramallo (48:49.907) Thank you.