Past year
Team-of-the-Year recognition (selected from 320+ teams)
Engineering Manager
Led a team that earned a top-tier company-wide team recognition program award — selected from 320+ nominated teams across Salesforce Technology. 37 winning teams total, recognized for impact across Customers, Innovation, Business, High Performance, People, and AI.
- Selected from 320+ nominated teams in a top-tier company-wide team recognition program
- 37 winning teams total — recognized by Cloud and Org leaders
- Team morale & retention sustained through a high-pressure delivery cycle
The bar
The recognition criteria spanned six dimensions: customer impact, innovation, business outcomes, high performance, people leadership, and AI-readiness. You had to be excellent on all six — being elite on three and average on three would not clear it.
What we did
- Picked one bet that would move three of the six dimensions at once.
- Said no to four other adjacent bets that would have been comfortable but unmemorable.
- Wired in customer feedback at the design stage, not after launch. The customers ended up co-authoring the eventual recognition narrative.
- Made the team’s people-development story visible — promotions, mentorship, internal mobility — alongside the technical wins.
What this case is really about
Awards are downstream artefacts of choices made eighteen months earlier. The recognition was the receipt — the work was the year of small, unglamorous decisions about what to focus on and what to ignore.
What I carry forward
The hardest decisions in engineering leadership are not “what to build” — they are “what to consciously not build” while everyone else is building it.