Vaz is an engineering manager for the Pages product at LinkedIn, where he helps organizations establish their presence and connect with professionals at a global scale. In this episode, we discuss Vaz's journey as a software engineer into leadership positions, and I get a great new perspective on performance management of individuals. Vaz has over 15 years of experience as an engineering manager in places like Stripe, Google and his own company. In his ten years at Google, Vaz held many external...
May 09, 2022•37 min
Another episode where I speak with a fellow author! Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You - a practical guide for navigating one's career that is packed with real-life skills they don't teach in college. Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals a...
Apr 18, 2022•35 min
As the Vice President of Data Management at Castlight Health, Lauren Bui leads a diverse and dynamic team that delivers insights and modernization to 20+ million patient datasets through Castlight's suite of applications. That in and of itself is impressive feat, and in this episode of manager.flow, Lauren discusses her journey and growth into the highest levels of technical leadership over a several-decade period. Notably, in 2018 she was presented the Dallas Business Journal - Women in Technol...
Apr 11, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Does your daily work involve a lot of time on Slack? If you're anything like me, it can sometimes feel like we live and die by Slack messages - and especially in the modern, remote-first workplace, it's become a critical part of how we communicate and collaborate at work. This week, I have a conversation with one of the former sales leaders at Slack who grew the mid-market team for a portion of the Americas, and hear about his journey to management by initiating a new division within the overall...
Jan 24, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 22
In this week's episode, I chat with a sales leader at BetterUp, a platform for coaching teams and people - very needed in today's uncertain world. A few weeks ago, one of Matt's posts on LinkedIn went viral and caught my eye - it was a raw, candid reflection of his growth as a leader and as a human over the past decade or so, and so I asked him to share more about his journey, the highlights and the lowlights - and all the lessons he's gleaned from both. Matt Kennedy's career spans a few years, ...
Jan 17, 2022•32 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Emily Sander has an impressive rap sheet. Among her achievements: being on the testing team for the first Kindle device, working on a 6-person startup team, building a global client management team from scratch, serving as a Chief of Staff for a CEO, and most notably (in my book - no pun intended!), an author. In our conversation today - she shares her own career story and what she learned the hard way as she was suddenly thrust into a management position with zero training, and had to get scrap...
Jan 08, 2022•36 min•Season 1Ep. 20
As a new people-manager, one of the most critical peer relationships to establish and nurture from day one is that with your recruiting team. Together, your recruiting partner and you will collaborate to create a hiring strategy, execute the process to build a hiring pipeline, and in the final moments of a hiring process - sweat through the candidate closing process with every finger crossed. In this episode, I speak with a people-leader in the recruiting function at Stripe. Casey is a recruitin...
Jan 04, 2022•48 min•Season 1Ep. 19
In this episode, I have an insightful conversation with Alex Black. Alex is a Leadership and Team Development Coach for new managers and founders, and is a firm believer in providing coaching for first-time managers and founders to help them and their teams succeed and avoid the many trap doors that exist in the first few months in these roles. Alex (and I) believe strongly that executive level coaching shouldn’t be exclusively for C-Suites, and that everybody deserves to have a terrific manager...
Dec 13, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Naz Irani is a PreSales leader who has spent the past decade building Enterprise PreSales teams at companies including Akamai and Stripe. Her true passion lies in building high performing user-focused teams in high growth environments, and more importantly, playing a role in helping people build successful careers. As president of the PreSales Leadership Collective (PSLC) council, she has made significant contributions to the PreSales function and she is currently focused on building a team to e...
Dec 07, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Emily VerMeulen is a customer service professional, a rescue dog enthusiast, an introvert, and a Gemini. She is currently working at Vineti, a cell and gene therapy logistics start-up, doing one of her favorite things- building a support department from, more or less, the ground up. But - she didn't start her career in tech...it was a chance encounter with a YC founder she met while waiting tables that got her wheels turning in the tech world. This episode covers her early learnings from managin...
Nov 23, 2021•41 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Robert Kipp is a construction legend - and happens to be a thoughtful people leader with a unique perspective of having served in the armed forces as a Captain in the United States Army. His two tours of duty in Iraq taught him quite a few lessons about leadership and life - and in this week's special Veterans Day episode, we talk about his journey over the years. "Kipp" - as he is known amongst friends - is currently the Senior General Superintendent responsible for all aspects of on-site coord...
Nov 01, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 15
In this episode (recorded about a year ago) I speak with Lorrin Blair - a former Woman in Construction turned Woman in Tech. A Civil Engineer by training, she spent the first part of her career supporting construction jobsites all over North America. It was on construction sites where Lorrin first developed her leadership skills and styles - uncovering inefficiencies, leaning in on hard work, and finding ways to improve the worklives of people around her. Lorrin pivoted into a career in technolo...
Nov 01, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In today's episode, I converse with William A. Adam - an award-winning D&I innovator, engineering trailblazer, and global philanthropist. We cover many topics, but with a focus on how people managers can gain confidence and become influencers at their companies for diversity and inclusion topics. William and I also chat about his earlier professional experiences. Over the course of his 30-year career in software engineering, he was one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and w...
Oct 25, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 13
On this episode, I discuss the unique journey of Mitzi Yue, a finance and culture leader in the healthcare technology sector. Mitzi's early experiences as an Asian-American female in the workplace were formative and shaped her leadership perspective today, and her discussion about the journey to unpack identity is fascinating and important. Today, Mitzi currently serves as the Vice President of Financial Planning for Genome Medical. While her professional training is squarely in finance, Mitzi h...
Oct 18, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Amy Buechler has worked with thousands of the world’s best startup founders as Y Combinator’s first Batch Director and only embedded Founder Coach. Founders are often in an awkward position to not only build their companies but quickly transition to people-leaders as they start to hire and grow their teams. In this episode, we discuss some of the common challenges her clients face and muse about why millennials have a unique opportunity as we begin to step up as leaders in the workplace. Before ...
Oct 11, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 11
If you're a people-manager and you think of "marketing" -- do you just think "advertising?" If so - you'd be wrong. Marketing has become a huge strategic growth lever in tech, and leaders of all types would be well served to understand some of the fundamentals. In this episode, we chat with Dorian Stewart, a marketing leader, about this topic as well as his experience in people-management in marketing organizations, as well as some discussions on how people-managers can help support people of co...
Sep 28, 2021•38 min•Season 1Ep. 10
How could an experience at a teenager's after-school-retail job shape the future leadership style of an Engineering Director at a unicorn in Silicon Valley? And what *really* is the career path of a young software engineer at a startup? Buckle up, listeners - Elizabeth Leddy doesn't hold back in answering these and many other inquiries. Elizabeth has over 15 years of experience in the software industry working in a variety of domains including healthcare, athlete management, government contracti...
Sep 20, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Formally transitioning genders in the workplace can be a tricky process to navigate, and a supportive manager and team can make all the difference in the world. But what happens when you ARE the manager and are ready to come out as trans? This is one of some great topics we discuss with seasoned and sassy QA manager Tayler Knight. Tayler is a multifaceted creator, speaker, learner and internet troll. After a decade-long career in tech growing small startups into successful giants, she is now pur...
Sep 13, 2021•40 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this special Labor Day episode, we chat with a corporate-manager-turned-blue-collar-people-manager Leslie Caccamese about her pivot from a 15 year stint in corporate America to her role today in farming, and why tech workers should to remember why labor day matters in today's hyper-connected modern age. Leslie is a registered Farm Labor Contractor responsible for managing labor safety and compliance for Oak Noll Farming Corp, a Napa Valley vineyard management company. Support the show...
Sep 06, 2021•34 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Jo Halstead believes that people managers can make or break a company - and that new managers rarely get any real training on how to take care of their team, themselves, and the company. Let's change that! Jo currently manages a team of client success individuals for a large digital health company, but over her life her work has been varied - spanning 40+ years in hospitality, nonprofits, and wellness/digital health. Across all of those fields, she's managed teams of people with the goal of help...
Aug 30, 2021•39 min•Season 1Ep. 6
This is a historic moment in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as the FDA just fully approved the Pfizer vaccine for individuals 16 and over. In this episode, I am thrilled to speak with Miya Gray, who leads the Customer Experience and Engagement department at Pfizer, about her experience and journey into leadership. Miya's role today is fascinating and especially relevant in the pandemic where leadership in healthcare has never been so important. We discuss her approach to leading her tea...
Aug 23, 2021•27 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Drew Register is the Director of Epic Support and Staffing at Tegria, a healthcare services group focused on enterprise support and operational transformation. In this role, he manages 65 remote consultants and provides strategic direction to the team to keep them successful in the volatile healthcare IT consultant market. Drew and I discuss his journey into management via a number of hybrid "player-coach" roles and the unique challenges of coming out in the workplace over and over as minority L...
Aug 16, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 4
David Salinger is the co-founder and CEO at EyeLevel.io, the private social network for managers and their teams to build productive and engaging team culture. Prior to starting EyeLevel, his career has focused on building sales organizations from the ground-up at companies like Tableau and Parallels. David's core belief is that people-managers are the heart and soul of any organization, and helping them reach their potential as leaders and advocates is his mission! Support the show...
Aug 09, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Nicole Patterson is a seasoned leader of customer support operations at a Castlight Health - a health tech navigation company. Two years ago, her entire support center uprooted from Charlotte, NC to Salt Lake City, UT and Nicole was tasked with maintaining business continuity while establishing the new campus. Just as the dust had settled, COVID hit, and her new Utah-based team had to not only ramp up but pivot quickly into responding to the COVID crisis and economic uncertainty of the pandemic....
Aug 03, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Pat Copeland has been building software for over 25 years and has worked at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He is currently a Vice President in Amazon Advertising, responsible for the products, science, and engineering of Brand Advertising and Shopping Experiences programs. When you shop on Amazon, you will see and use the experiences his team creates. More: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcopeland/ Pat and I have a great conversation about his career over the years and his reflections on team...
Jul 26, 2021•42 min•Season 1Ep. 1
