Anna McDougall is very recent to her new role as Director of Engineering Operations at Blinkist and offers a forward-thinking perspective on the evolving role of the technology leader.
As will be familiar to many new into a leadership role, she is currently focused on scaling and empowering the engineering team, supporting the career development and growth of the remote working engineers who have an office base in Berlin.
Security: An Overlooked Imperative
Anna identifies security as a crucial consideration for technology over the next 5 years. Something that many are either overlooking or don’t fully appreciate the significance of. “I think that security is still to this day, one of the things that is most often overlooked. I think people are underestimating the capacity that we’re going to need there … I don’t think it’s quite clicked with everyone yet, just how much an average software engineer will need to be onboarded into cybersecurity.”
As attacks become more automated and frequent, she believes the role of security will have to be integrated into the work of every software engineer, requiring a significant cultural and skill shift within teams. Anna also highlights the increasing importance of compliance and user privacy as global regulations and user awareness continue to grow.
“I think people are underestimating the capacity that we’re going to need there.“
On the subject of AI, Anna provides a nuanced view. She explains, “The difficult part of software engineering for me is rarely … about the actual writing of the code, when you think about the role of a software engineer, that’s not actually the hardest part of their job.” She continues, “The hardest part of their job is working out where to write the function, what the function should do, and how it connects to other systems. And that doesn’t work with AI. Not yet. It doesn’t have the capacity to bring that in.” Therefore, McDougall predicts, “we might see in the next five years less of a focus on programming skills and more of a focus on system design, system thinking, DevOps, these kinds of things that impact the bigger code base because the actual generation of code will become less important for an individual.”
Focus and Agility
Anna’s leadership philosophy is built on two core principles. The first is to maintain an agile, low-ego leadership style, recognising that solutions from one company may not work in another. The second is an emphasis on focus: “Focus is the currency of an engineering department. It’s not money. It’s not even time. It’s focus. If your engineering team does not have the ability to focus on specific tasks… it’s never going to work.” To answer that, Anna is a keen advocate for building processes around protecting engineers’ time and concentration, and that that every interruption costs the business in both time and money.
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