January 27, 2022 by Alex Phillips and Radhesh Gupta

Talk Summary: Joining an established team as a new leader is a big undertaking that can have a long-lasting impact on your people. It’s essential to be intentional about your actions in the first few weeks and months. Each transition experience can be different, and varies on the team’s current priorities and initiatives. Join us as we chat with Alex and Radhesh, two Yelp Engineering Managers who have gone through similar leadership transition experiences—both at Yelp and other tech companies. During this virtual chat, we’ll hear more about what they learned during the transition into their new teams and the steps they took to lead their teams’ priorities successfully.

Speaker: Radhesh Gupta

Radhesh is an engineering leader at Yelp with 10+ years of experience in the tech industry. Radhesh currently supports a group of teams in the Experimentation and Product Analytics space. Prior to joining Yelp in Toronto, he has worked in SF, NY and Bangalore in different roles at startups and larger companies. He has a passion for building impactful products and effective, happy teams. Outside of work, he enjoys time with his kids and has a special love for all racquet sports.

Speaker: Alex Phillips

Alex has been at Yelp for just over six years. She joined as a backend engineer and is now an engineering leader for the Ad Product group which is responsible for building valuable advertising capabilities in the suite of advertising products Yelp offers. In her spare time, she loves to travel (pre-pandemic and hopefully more soon!), cook, and play RPGs.

Moderator: Tenzin Kunsal

As a part of the Technical Talent Events and Partnerships team, Tenzin works on events and partnerships for Yelp Engineering and Product—everything from Meetups to Hackathons to conferences. Before joining Yelp in '17, Tenzin was in the nonprofit sector and has worked with education and community building nonprofits in San Francisco and Minneapolis. She is passionate about cultivating diversity and is actively involved in Yelp Employee Resource Groups, such as ColorCoded and Yelp Asian Pacific Islanders.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelpers from engineering and product and will focus on themes such as career development, technical skills, workplace challenges and Yelp’s response to COVID-19.