We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
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We cover resilience engineering & learning from incidents with John Allspaw, former CTO @ Etsy and current Founder & Principal @ Adaptive Capacity Labs! Co-hosted by Kenji Kiuchi (Head of Quality and Performance @ Postman) this episode also addresses common unintuitive perspectives within resilience engineering, strategies for effective incident response / problem solving, how to identify current sources of resilience, and practical tips for implementing these resiliency tactics in your ...
Ryan Graciano, Co-Founder & CTO @ Credit Karma, shares with us what it’s like to start a company during an economic downturn, how his leadership style had to evolve alongside Credit Karma’s growth, advice for running lean operations, bridging the gap between engineering & business, how to scale the business as the company matures, and identifying & correcting team/org dysfunctions. In addition, Ryan shares some of his favorite successful & failed leadership experiments that helpe...
Being a woman in a predominantly male industry can be challenging at times – and seeking the advice of successful women eng leaders can help inspire you to be bold! In this episode, we feature three women who shared their leadership stories & advice at ELC Annual: Annie Cheng, VP of Engineering @ Waymo; Claire Hough, CTO @ Carbon Health; and Lisa Gelobter, CEO and Founder @ tEQuitable. They discuss their career moves, along with strategies for combating disrespect in the workplace, finding w...
In this episode, Cal Henderson (Co-Founder & CTO @ Slack) and Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft) discuss strategies for how to be a force multiplier within your organization! They cover Cal’s leadership journey & the early days of Slack, how to identify lateral inflection points, aligning your people throughout periods of change, tips for personal retrospectives on where you invest your time, and more. Additionally, Cal & Maria share plenty of frameworks for both identifying if y...
As eng leaders, there are many things outside of our control – however, Megan Kacholia (VP of Eng @ Google) believes being deliberate can help you realize the many factors you DO have control of. Megan provides real-life lessons from her own leadership journey on how to take ownership of your time/calendar, tips for saying “yes” & knowing when to say “no,” and strategies for communicating with authenticity. Megan also covers why it’s important as an eng leader to feel comfortable with feelin...
Reorgs are never easy, often impacting eng teams – and that’s why they should always be a last resort. However, sometimes they are necessary for an org’s success! Mike Tria (Head of Eng @ Atlassian) joins Aaron Erickson (Co-Founder & CEO @ Orgspace) to discuss frameworks & strategies for implementing a successful reorg, why eng leaders should be involved throughout the entire reorg process, alternative solutions to reorgs, who is accountable when a reorg goes poorly, how to improve commu...
This is a special episode from our new show “Engineering Founders” - Should you build B2C or B2B? What about implementing a top-down or a bottoms up sales strategy? How do you think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs and considerations behind building for consumer vs. B2B, pricing, early sales and product adoption strategie...
We cover building community & digital transformation with Yvette Pasqua, CTO @ Exos! She shares her leadership journey from MeetUp to Exos and how her experiences shaped her views on the importance of community and effective networking. We also discuss principles for creating authentic meetup experiences, how Yvette navigated her Head of Eng search without a recruiter, the importance of asking others for help, and how Exos navigated the opportunities & challenges through their digital tr...
In this episode, we discuss frameworks & strategies for building a “startup-within-a-startup” with Heidi Williams, Head of Engineering for Grammarly Business @ Grammarly! She shares stories about her leadership style while revealing the benefits of & considerations for creating a startup-within-a-startup, sourcing ideas & hosting knowledge-sharing meetings, identifying adjacencies in your user base, communicating challenges between individuals & teams, developing leading indicato...
We cover how to sustain long-term transformational projects with Paul Dix, CTO & Founder @ InfluxData! This high-energy conversation reveals the history behind InfluxDB and its multi-phase, long-term transformation over the past 10 years. Plus we discuss how to know when it’s time to take your company to the next level, identifying the right people for your eng teams, integrating multiple teams into an org re-architecture, and building open-source products/communities! ABOUT PAUL DIX Paul (@...
We cover how to uplevel your eng team with Elaine Zhou, CTO @ Change.org ! She shares some of her favorite frameworks and strategies for creating self-sufficient teams, amplifying high-performers, performing self-assessments, and hosting prioritization conversations. Plus Elaine shares the story behind how she got involved with Change.org , navigating different operating constraints in your business model (from non-profit to VC-funded contexts), and what it’s like investing in high-impact areas ...
We sat down with Claus Moberg to discuss his career trajectory, from meteorology student and hardware CEO to current VP of Eng @ Roblox! We also cover how to overcome obstacles when scaling leadership, leading teams outside of your technical depth/knowledge, attracting & recruiting top talent, finding “diamonds in the rough,” and how to communicate effectively between business functions & eng teams. Claus also shares his best frameworks for navigating complex conversations and taking mea...
We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back to regularly releasing episodes November 15th with a couple great guests! Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering @ Roblox joins to discuss his journey scaling his leadership impact & org size 10x in 6 years! Elaine Zhou CTO @ Change.org joins to discuss upleveling your team and helping them become more self-sufficient. Plus we’re launching new episodes of Engineering Founders...
We sit down with Kit Colbert (SVP and CTO @ VMWare) and discuss his experiences, lessons, and approaches to leading across different orders of magnitude PLUS his approach to high leverage, high ROI communication at different scales. We cover his perspectives on lessening execution risk and creating stability through change, letting go of being a “technologist,” navigating the dilemma between macro and micro granularity in leadership, and building an innovation system. ABOUT KIT COLBERT Kit Colbe...
We cover reinventing your role and refocusing your eng team in the face of the unknown with Maher Saba, Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta! He discusses his leadership history from IBM to Microsoft to Meta and how he took on IC roles to gain credibility as an eng leader. We also cover how to productively channel & embrace emotions to drive improvement, frameworks for motivating eng orgs, how to incorporate personal feedback into your product, how the pandemic offered opportunitie...
In this episode, Saumya Bhatnagar discusses the product trio model and its importance in product innovation. She shares insights on optimizing communication and empathy within the trio, using frameworks for healthy discourse, and prioritizing value. The conversation explores practical examples, such as the development of a trust score feature, and emphasizes the importance of measuring outcomes over vanity metrics.
Customer narratives are a transformative tool to help you build successful products! Marco Argenti (CIO @ Goldman Sachs) explains how to develop these narratives as your team’s guiding vision and help eng orgs better understand “the business” side of software. Plus we cover best practices for investing in developer experience, Goldman Sachs’ transition to prioritize external developers, and the signs, signals and trends Marco’s used to navigate his career across tons of different emerging techno...
Today’s episode marks a special occasion – 100 episodes of The Engineering Leadership Podcast! To celebrate, we’ve compiled some of our favorite moments from the past hundred episodes, featuring a wide range of high-energy guests and compelling topics. We cover tension points while scaling eng & product orgs, why you should seek existential issues, how to get unstuck in your career, helping engineers outgrow their positions, hyper-growing your eng org/career, identifying burnout, understandi...
We speak with Vinay Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Loom, about his experience balancing three high-level exec roles and living out his personal values at work while prioritizing his mental & physical health! Scaling up is never easy, but Vinay shares tips and systems that have worked for him, including utilizing timetables, building good habits despite emotions, and triply verifying decisions. We also cover the stigma surrounding paternity / parental leave in the tech industry, how knowing...
We cover how psychology, neuroscience & mindfulness tools can help eng leaders overcome challenges, communicate successfully, and foster a culture of empathy! Our guest is Luther Kitahata, an Innovative Executive Leadership Coach & Interim CTO/VP of Eng – he’s also described by Chip Conley as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of Silicon Valley.” We also chat about identifying personality types, uncovering unconscious traits/patterns, shifting from the comfort zone to the growth zone, and how to be a t...
If you’ve ever wrestled with technology choices & navigated the consequences of the wrong path… this conversation is for you! Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas) defines the dilemma of the “aspirational mismatch” & shares real-life examples of how it affects a tech org’s processes, architecture, and metrics. She dives into the frameworks & tools that have helped her work through mismatches, her golden rule regarding “innovation tokens,” choosing the right sized technology for your company...
We’re taking a few weeks off to celebrate Patrick’s wedding! We’re going to be mostly unplugged in the mountains… but when we return, we have some fantastic conversations planned with folks like… Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas), Luther Kitahata (Founder, Executive Leadership Coach & Fractional CTO/VPE @ Integral Response), Vinay HIremath (CTO @ Loom), Maher Saba (Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta) & more! Email us if you have ideas for episode 100 at hello@sfelc.com Looking f...
We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They also reveal recommendations on filtering / assessing decisions & their go-to leadership styl...
We discuss the challenges with leading eng orgs through unpredictable global events (like the covid-19 pandemic) & pivoting product strategy with Bridget Frey (CTO @ Redfin). We also cover the challenges & successes of building out AI/ ML products in your engineering org, creating an “uncertainty” algorithm, incorporating mental health best practices in your teams, and addressing data bias & systemic racism in your product’s features! Featuring guest co-host Ali Littman (Interim Head...
We cover why locked-in cloud commitments are bad for eng teams & how your org can take advantage of elastic pricing models instead! Leon Kuperman (CTO @ Cast.ai) explains the dilemma of locked-in cloud spend, cost planning strategies for SaaS orgs, how to minimize egregious cloud egress cost and drive better cloud utilization through consistent analysis & debates in your eng org. Also learn why Leon is betting on container deployment as the future of software delivery & what that mea...
We discuss the dynamics & challenges behind building out your data engineering function with Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data @ Meltano). Taylor also shares his recommendations for collaborating in multi-stakeholder environments, the relationship between the data team & engineering, why you should run your data team like a product team, gaining buy-in around the ROI of data, and what it’s like being a company’s first data eng hire. Featuring guest co-host/community member John W...
Building growth & mobile eng teams from the ground up is never easy – but the right frameworks, guardrails, & strategic conversations will set your org up for success! We cover the intersection of growth & mobile engineering with Atish Das Sarma (Head of Growth Engineering @ Patreon ) & Shannon Ma (Director of Engineering, Mobile @ Patreon) discussing how to balance short & long-term growth demands, strategically aligning new features & growth, and what it’s like making t...
Greg Czajkowski (SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake) shares some of the secrets he’s learned about great teams! We discuss the power of eliminating hierarchy, “going direct,” reducing energy dissipation in your team, removing friction in your org, and creating “higher innovation per time unit.” Plus dilemmas balancing velocity & quality, what to do when team size is used as proxy for power, and how to know your eng org is operating at peak output! ABOUT GREG CZAJKOWSKI Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski...
We discuss why alignment is key to delivering great digital products & team outcomes, how to recognize & navigate misalignment, and create better alignment with Jonathon Hensley (CEO @ EMERGE, Author of "Alignment"). We cover a couple of community case studies exploring dilemmas like navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict, transforming grand product visions into clear execution, AND shifting toward a customer-centric engineering culture! ABOUT JONATHON HENSLEY Jona...
We discuss operational & organizational innovation with Zhichun Li (Director of Engineering @ Scale AI)! We explore the early days of Rapid at Scale AI, different organizational design experiments Zhi’s tested, and many of the principles behind their operational practices. You’ll hear about merging engineering & ops, designing orgs for autonomy, scaling into multiple products, and leveraging different org structures for innovation. ABOUT ZHICHUN LI Zhichun Li ( @zhichun_li ) is Director ...
