ABOUT JON HYMAN

Jon Hyman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Braze, the customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. He leads the charge for building the platform’s technical systems and infrastructure as well as overseeing the company’s technical operations and engineering team.

Prior to Braze, Jon served as lead engineer for the Core Technology group at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. There, he managed a team that maintained 80+ software assets and was responsible for the security and stability of critical trading systems. Jon met cofounder Bill Magnuson during his time at Bridgewater, and together they won the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Jon is a recipient of the SmartCEO Executive Management Award in the CIO/CTO Category for New York. Jon holds a B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science.

This episode is brought to you by xMatters!

xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times.

Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• Braze’s operating environment & key focus on product health / roadmap (2:58)
• What’s next for Braze: Research-driven innovation in the AI era (6:16)
• Ensuring customers utilize the full breadth of features (9:42)
• The "Swarming" strategy: Reducing engineering escalation tax through support collaboration (14:19)
• Shifting engineering leadership think like GMs: Moving from completion goals to business outcomes like revenue, growth rates & regional differences (17:29)
• How engineering leaders can increase business IQ by understanding margins and adoption (18:20)
• Deconstructing misalignment, the abstract nature of product vision, and connect teams to tangible business outcomes, goals, and specific releases (22:02)
• Management infrastructure: Quarterly product health reporting and trending metrics (23:20)
• Forming a mental model for company maturity, building a visionary roadmap, and more innovative engineering initiatives (25:34)
• Frameworks for AI Decision-Making: Identifying AI features that drive revenue vs. those that only improve stickiness (31:55)
• Reimagining your product based on different personas, new channels, “AI omniboxes”, and teams / skills of the future (35:44)
• Breaking down team silos, customer engagement as a shared responsibility, and the future of full-stack roles orchestrating outcome-based workflows & automations (41:50)
• Rapid fire questions (45:10)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green: A historical look at how the disease has shaped the world
• braze.com

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SEBASTIANO ARMELI

Sebastiano Armeli is an engineering leader currently at Meta. He has previously served as a Director of Engineering at Upwork and held leadership roles at companies such as Pinterest, PayPal, Snap, and Spotify. His work has spanned diverse domains including shopping, crypto, messaging, video creation, and ads.

Sebastiano is passionate about building healthy engineering cultures, mentoring the next generation of leaders, and supporting teams through periods of growth and change. He mentors engineering managers and senior engineers, enjoys speaking at conferences, and shares his perspectives on leadership in his Substack, The Healthy Engineering Leader. He also serves on the board of a community-owned grocery store.

In all his work, Sebastiano takes a pragmatic, people-first approach to leadership, focusing on clarity, continuous improvement, and long-term impact.

This episode is brought to you by xMatters!

xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times.

Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• Deconstructing company archetypes: A framework for product-led organizations (2:03)
• Strategic leadership practices for succeeding in product-first cultures (7:33)
• Leveraging data and business metrics to influence product strategy (9:35)
• Case Study: The story and leadership lessons behind building Spotify’s Ad Studio (11:12)
• Rapid prototyping: Applying a hackathon mindset to product development (13:16)
• How AI is reshaping product-led orgs: Clearing the feature backlog, scaling experimentation and velocity (16:01)
• Balancing iteration velocity and product quality with AI (18:12)
• Sebastiano’s observations on effective leadership in business led orgs (19:49)
• Design-led dynamics: Anticipating the impact of AI on creative-first orgs (23:24)
• Maintaining engineering excellence within design-driven constraints (25:40)
• Cultivating high-alignment, valuable design partnerships (27:01)
• The role of metrics and data in design-focused decision making (28:33)
• Emerging AI capabilities enhancing leadership leverage (31:16)
• Scaling management: The potential for 30-50 person teams via AI assistance (33:58)
• The ethical imperative: Adopting AI responsibility within engineering teams (35:53)
• Rapid fire questions (37:12)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT LINDSEY SIMON

Lindsey Simon is VP of Engineering at Vercel. Making the Web better has been his lifelong career ambition. Prior to Vercel, Lindsey spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch App Engine as an original core team member, and worked as a tech lead on the Google Translate and Web Performance teams. Lindsey has lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, and his creative hobbies (beyond coding) include writing music and hunting for wild mushrooms.

This episode is brought to you by xMatters!

xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times.

Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• The evolution of Vercel’s all hands to demo days: using live show-and-tell to maintain context and inspire the team (2:4p)
• Accountability for what’s real: Why live visual demos help engineering teams with real-time workflow adjustments (4:36)
• Strategies for creating a successful live visual demo without over-rehearsing (6:20)
• Lindsey’s career inflection point: Navigating the transition from a large ecosystem at Salesforce to a mission-driven startup (10:08)
• Career advice: Vote with your wallet and go somewhere with pre-existing PMF that feeds your ambition (12:33)
• The "Janitor" Mindset: Why prioritizing the company’s mission over a specific job title can lead to unique opportunities (14:36)
• How Lindsey’s open source hobby project led to a code-first interaction with @ Vercel (19:17)
• Vercel’s "Dig Deep" value: Breaking down the company culture and the importance of technical support for developers (21:26)
• Standing out in the interview process: Why managers must bring a strong "Point of View" on what a company should do differently (23:51).
• The Swiss Army Knife Manager: Why today's leaders must also be salespeople, PMs, and customer support engineers (24:46).
• The death of pure "people management": Re-centering on the IC craft and why managers must maintain AI competency (26:12).
• Adopting better IC skills: Building hobby projects for non-technical users to maintain empathy for the user experience (28:33)
• Management principles that remain true today (32:54)
• Combatting imposter syndrome: Building trust by being vulnerable and learning alongside your team (36:45).
• Interviewing trends: Assessing how candidates operate with and without AI tools (38:05).
• The return of "In Real Life" work: Why the Bay Area culture is refocusing on "sweating the details" in person (39:15)
• Rapid fire questions (41:33)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT CHRIS CHIU

Chris Chiu is a VP of Engineering at Salesforce, where he helps build Agentforce, a platform for building enterprise AI agents. Prior to Salesforce, Chris was Head of Engineering at Moonhub, building AI recruiting agents. He has experience building and scaling product engineering teams that consistently deliver great products through rapid growth and change. Earlier in his career, he led engineering teams across companies ranging from early-stage startups to late-stage growth companies, including Figma, Flexport, and OpenGov.

This episode is brought to you by xMatters!

xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times.

Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• How Chris navigated the transition from Figma to Moonhub (3:47)
• Energy alignment: identifying the mismatch between your role and your drives (6:27)
• Sidesteps aren't inefficiencies: Why it’s okay to not have a specific and/or linear career plan (8:26)
• Building a career “thesis” by balancing passions with industry shifts (11:18)
• The exploration phase: Strategies for a productive four-month “sabbatical” (14:07)
• Leveraging your network and venture capital relationships to understand the market (16:45)
• The utility of “status”: When the “logo” matters & when it’s overrated (19:18)
• The "Running" Framework: Why you shouldn't increase career "speed" and "distance" simultaneously (21:33)
• How Chris applied these ideas to his move from Figma to Moonhub (24:33)
• Avoiding "career injury": Why stretching too thin hinders your flow state (27:07)
• Developing technical depth and leadership in the AI space (29:15)
• Learning through imitation: Finding and emulating leaders five years ahead of you (31:20)
• Chris’s observations on the evolution of technical leadership (34:14)
• The shift from “peacetime” to “wartime” (37:58)
• The "Leaky Abstraction" litmus test: Why leaders must stay in the technical details (39:40)
• Now: Chris’ transition to Agentforce and the future of AI at Salesforce (41:38)
• Rapid fire questions: Growth mindsets and holding identity loosely (43:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• 99% Invisible: The design and architecture podcast Sulman has followed for over a decade.
• The Invisible Cow Tunnels of Chicago: A specific episode of 99% Invisible mentioned by Patrick.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SULMAN CHOUDHRY

Sulman leads ChatGPT Engineering at OpenAI, driving the development and scaling of one of the world’s most impactful AI products. He pushes the boundaries of innovation by turning cutting‑edge research into practical, accessible tools that transform how people interact with technology. Previously at Meta, Sulman founded and scaled Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Labs, and helped lead the early development of Instagram Stories.

He also brought MetaAI to Instagram and Messenger, integrating generative AI into experiences used by billions. Earlier in his career, Sulman was on the founding team that built and launched UberEATS from the ground up, helping turn it into a global food delivery platform. With a track record of marrying technical vision, product strategy, and large‑scale execution, Sulman focuses on building products that meaningfully change how people live, work, and connect.

This episode is brought to you by xMatters!

xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times.

Head over to xmatters.com to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• The Shift to AI-Native Engineering: How AI is collapsing the "Inner Loop" and reshaping engineering team composition (2:48)
• Mission-Driven Teams: Moving from traditional functional silos to integrated, problem-centric units (4:45)
• Vertical vs. Horizontal Team Architecture: How OpenAI structures specialized horizontal teams (ex. Infrastructure, RTC/Voice) with product verticals (7:04)
• Fluid org charts & blurring functional roles: AI-Native teams require proactive mission alignment and coordination over rigid structure (8:48)
• The Lifecycle of Problem-Oriented Teams: What happens when a "strike team" solves the problem (10:02)
• Maximizing cross functional collaboration between engineering, research, product and design (11:52)
• The DRI Framework: Implementing the "Directly Responsible Individual" model for high-velocity accountability (13:32)
• Thriving in the "Chaos Factory": Addressing bottlenecks in highly dynamic, high-volume environments (16:02)
• Prioritization & "Letting 1,000 Flowers Bloom": How OpenAI decides which AI bets to double down on (19:13)
• Scaling Decision-Making: Preventing leadership from becoming the bottleneck as volume increases (21:19)
• Knowing when to call it quits on a bet and reallocate talent for maximum impact (23:29)
• The Manager as "Systems Designer": Shifting the EM role from people logistics to technical orchestration (24:49)
• The Barbell Talent Strategy: Optimizing for innovation by pairing "super seniors" with "super juniors" (28:10)
• Mentorship in the AI Age: How to coaching junior engineers when the "cost of code" is approaching zero (30:19)
• Technical Intuition for Leaders: Sulman’s frameworks for staying "close to the metal" as a manager (33:17)
• Cultivating Judgment: Why "Problem Framing" is the most critical skill for the modern engineer (37:01)
• Rapid fire questions (38:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

• 99% Invisible](https://99percentinvisible.org/): The design and architecture podcast Sulman has followed for over a decade.
• The Invisible Cow Tunnels of Chicago](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/cow-tunnels/): A specific episode of 99% Invisible mentioned by Patrick.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT KIREN SEKAR

Kiren Sekar is the Chief Product Officer at Samsara (NYSE: IOT), where he has helped lead the company from a hardware-hacking startup in a basement to a global leader in Connected Operations with over $1.5B in ARR. An early leader at Meraki (acquired by Cisco for $1.2B) and an Apple veteran with multiple patents, Kiren specializes in the rare intersection of hardware, massive-scale data, and AI. He is the architect of a platform that now processes trillions of data points for the industries that keep the world running—trucking, construction, and logistics.

This episode is brought to you by Retool!

What happens when your team can't keep up with internal tool requests? Teams start building their own, Shadow IT spreads across the org, and six months later you're untangling the mess…

Retool gives teams a better way: governed, secure, and no cleanup required.

Retool is the leading enterprise AppGen platform, powering how the world's most innovative companies build the tools that run their business. Over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, Adobe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness use the platform to safely harness AI and their enterprise data to create governed, production-ready apps.

Learn more at Retool.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Real-world ROI The Intersection of Bits and Atoms: How Samsara supported customers through a once-in-a-century snowstorm using real-time AI insights (3:59)
• The Practicality Filter: Why low-margin, high-utility businesses are the best "BS detectors" for product builders (9:25)
• Deconstructing the compound product strategy: 10 years of feedback loops, scaling empathy, and technical capabilities (10:53)
• Accelerating your innovation flywheel, customer and product feedback loops (14:39)
• The New Bottleneck: Why writing code is no longer the constraint, and how to optimize for customer absorption of change (19:58)
• The Data Flywheel: Leveraging trillions of proprietary data points to solve new problems and expand your innovation engine into new capabilities (23:36)
• Embedding engineers in customer problems: Why there is no substitute for engineers seeing the frontline environment firsthand (29:56)
• How customer empathy and "taste" amplify the benefits of AI coding agents (33:26)
• Building a system of customer-driven innovation: Utilizing Advisory Boards and "Spark Sessions" to turn 10,000+ customers into co-creators (37:40)
• Rapid fire questions (47:50)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAMES BIRCHLER

James Birchler is an executive leadership coach and technical advisor who specializes in helping engineering leaders and founders develop greater self-awareness and build high-performing teams. He combines deep technical expertise with practical leadership development, making him particularly valuable for technical leaders scaling their organizations.

As both a founder and engineering leader, James has more than 20 years of experience leading teams at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Amazon, where his current role is Technical Advisor to the VP of Amazon Delivery Routing and Planning. Most recently, he founded NICER, a premium natural personal care company, and Actuate Partners, his executive coaching and technical advisory practice. He also held VP of Engineering roles at companies including Caffeine (backed by Greylock and Andreessen Horowitz), SmugMug (where his team acquired Flickr), and IMVU.

At IMVU, James implemented the Lean Startup methodologies alongside Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and creator of the methodology, literally the first company to apply these principles. His team helped pioneer the DevOps movement by building infrastructure to ship code to production 50 times per day and coining the term "continuous deployment." This experience in systematic experimentation and continuous improvement now informs his coaching approach through frameworks like CAMS (Coaching, Advising, Mentoring, Supporting) and the Think-Do-Learn Loop.

James completed his executive coaching certification at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Executive Coaching Institute. His coaching practice focuses on self-awareness, integrity, accountability, and fostering growth mindsets that support continuous learning and high performance. He writes the Continuous Growth newsletter and offers both individual executive coaching and peer learning circles for technical leaders.

Through his advisory work with growth-stage startups in the US and Europe, James helps leaders navigate common scaling challenges including hiring and interviewing, implementing development methodologies, establishing operational cadences, and developing other leaders. His approach treats leadership development like product development—with systematic feedback loops, measurable outcomes, and continuous improvement.

You can find James at jamesbirchler.com, LinkedIn, and Substack.

This episode is brought to you by Retool!

What happens when your team can't keep up with internal tool requests? Teams start building their own, Shadow IT spreads across the org, and six months later you're untangling the mess…

Retool gives teams a better way: governed, secure, and no cleanup required.

Retool is the leading enterprise AppGen platform, powering how the world's most innovative companies build the tools that run their business. Over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, Adobe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness use the platform to safely harness AI and their enterprise data to create governed, production-ready apps.

Learn more at Retool.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Why founders should seek coaching earlier rather than waiting for a crisis to occur (2:45)
• The high stakes of ignoring this critical advice & how this leads to communication & scaling problems (4:50)
• The importance of effective communication channels & leadership mechanisms before pressure increases (6:12)
• How investing a small amount in coaching early on can prevent hundreds of thousands of dollars in future costs (8:07)
• Frameworks for cultivating self-awareness / leadership blind spots (11:06)
• James's practice of "designing your day" around a desired identity, not just a list of tasks (12:30)
• Why designing your day is about intentionality (15:13)
• How this practice leads to better relationships & opportunities to reflect (17:44)
• Reflective listening & its impact on customer relationships (19:32)
• Strategies for improving self-awareness / uncovering blind spots (22:05)
• An example of how awareness can lead to better results  (26:03)
• Day-to-day rituals for improving self-awareness (28:14)
• Signals that your communication methods are effective & getting through (30:37)
• Reflect on & define the desired outcome you want to generate (33:26)
• The five-minute alignment loop for creating clarity & confirming ownership as a leader (35:21)
• Why creating clarity & finding alignment is key as a founder (37:02)
• How the same communication & leadership patterns recur as your org scales, from small startup to large enterprise (39:46)
• The increasing importance of human skills like emotional intelligence and reflective listening in an age of AI (42:03)
• Rapid fire questions (44:38)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAIKUMAR GANESH

Jaikumar Ganesh is an accomplished technology leader and the Head of Engineering at Anyscale. With a deep background in engineering and customer-facing roles, Jaikumar has a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations. He is passionate about pushing the boundaries of product and engineering innovation while ensuring customer needs are met, and is committed to building empowering organizations rooted in trust, respect, and growth. Jaikumar is excited about working with companies to harness the power of AI and distributed computing to achieve their goals. He previously co-started and co-led Uber's AI group—the central ML group at Uber—and was also on the early team at Android @ Google.

This episode is brought to you by Retool!

What happens when your team can't keep up with internal tool requests? Teams start building their own, Shadow IT spreads across the org, and six months later you're untangling the mess…

Retool gives teams a better way: governed, secure, and no cleanup required.

Retool is the leading enterprise AppGen platform, powering how the world's most innovative companies build the tools that run their business. Over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, Adobe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness use the platform to safely harness AI and their enterprise data to create governed, production-ready apps.

Learn more at Retool.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Reflecting on scaling patterns across the 2000s, 2010s, and the AI era (03:27)
• Why "copy-pasting" scaling strategies from other companies leads to failure (5:56)
• How to define a scaling thesis by mapping revenue projections to infrastructure strategy (7:52)
• Infrastructure shifts: From Android’s OS abstractions to Uber’s on-prem data centers (9:56)
• The "Build vs. Buy" dilemma in the age of AI agents and third-party solutions (12:09)
• Why "Knowing What to Build" is the new long pole in engineering productivity (20:17)
• Developing "Product Thinking" within engineering and infrastructure teams (23:10)
• The emergence of Context Graphs and "Source of Truth" platforms for AI agents (24:46)
• How to avoid data & context graphs becoming bottlenecks (27:05)
• Lessons from GM leadership: Bridging the gap between engineering, product, and sales (29:06)
• The "6-20" Initiative: Uniting cross-functional teams around specific customer wins (32:45)
• Training engineers to empathize with customer pain and translate technical wins into the language of sales (33:48)
• Utilizing cross-departmental daily standups and leaderboards to drive aggressive "block and tackle" execution (36:18)
• Tracing execution failures back to early decision-making and judgment gaps (38:42)
• Rapid fire questions (45:28)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT VINEETA PURANIK

Vineeta Puranik serves as Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at SmartBear, where she leads the company’s global technology and product strategy to empower developers and enterprises worldwide. A seasoned technology executive with over two decades of experience, she combines strategic vision with hands-on leadership to drive innovation, growth, and operational excellence.

At SmartBear, Vineeta oversees development, cloud engineers, AI, and architecture, and has been instrumental in scaling centers of excellence in India and Poland, launching the Developer Academy, and advancing the company’s hub-based product strategy – Swagger suite for API capabilities, Test Hub, and Insight Hub. Recognized for her collaborative, people first leadership and commitment to inclusion, she was named a 2024 Women Worth Watching in STEM by Profiles in Diversity Journal.

This episode is brought to you by Retool!

What happens when your team can't keep up with internal tool requests? Teams start building their own, Shadow IT spreads across the org, and six months later you're untangling the mess…

Retool gives teams a better way: governed, secure, and no cleanup required.

Retool is the leading enterprise AppGen platform, powering how the world's most innovative companies build the tools that run their business. Over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, Adobe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness use the platform to safely harness AI and their enterprise data to create governed, production-ready apps.

Learn more at Retool.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• SmartBear’s evolution from individual tools to a connected ecosystem (3:34)
• The cultural shift toward vendor consolidation and avoiding context switching (5:39)
• Why "Jobs-to-be-Done" must drive the workflow, not just the tool capabilities (9:35)
• The shift in testing: Moving from "does it crash?" to "does it match intent?" in an AI world (14:26)
• The architectural difference between "AI Bolt-On" and "AI Native" products (20:44)
• The levels of autonomy: A framework for moving from manual control to autonomous testing (24:10)
• Designing for different customer personas: Addressing security, policy, and AI readiness (30:01)
• Rapid Fire Questions (32:50)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Books Mentioned

• Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence by Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins.
• The Leader You Want to Be: Five Essential Principles for Bringing Out Your Best Self--Every Day by Amy Jen Su.

SmartBear Tools & Products

• SmartBear
• [**Reflect**](https://reflect.run/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=smartbear.com&utm_campaign=prodnav&_gl=1*4gpwr4*_gcl_au*MTAzOTk0MjM2LjE3Njk0NjU4NTA.) – Mentioned as their "AI Native" product for autonomous testing.
• Zephyr Scale – Mentioned regarding the Atlassian ecosystem integration.
• [**QMetry**](https://www.qmetry.com/?_gl=1*1d5sv56*_gcl_au*MTAzOTk0MjM2LjE3Njk0NjU4NTA.) – Recently acquired test management product.
• [**Swagger**](https://swagger.io/product/?_gl=1*gtu348*_gcl_au*MTAzOTk0MjM2LjE3Njk0NjU4NTA.) – Mentioned as the suite for API design and compliance.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT TYSON SINGER

Tyson Singer is the SVP of Technology & Platforms at Spotify, where he leads technology infrastructure, developer experience, cybersecurity, and finance IT. Tyson is the executive behind Spotify’s internal developer portal, Backstage, and Spotify’s experimentation system, Confidence, which are now both commercially available. He has a background as an engineer, architect, and product lead, and he holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University. Tyson is also an avid outdoor adventurer.

This episode is brought to you by Retool!

What happens when your team can't keep up with internal tool requests? Teams start building their own, Shadow IT spreads across the org, and six months later you're untangling the mess…

Retool gives teams a better way: governed, secure, and no cleanup required.

Retool is the leading enterprise AppGen platform, powering how the world's most innovative companies build the tools that run their business. Over 10,000 organizations including Amazon, Stripe, Adobe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness use the platform to safely harness AI and their enterprise data to create governed, production-ready apps.

Learn more at Retool.com/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Tyson’s 9-year journey @ Spotify: From the "crucible" of hyper-growth to leading Tech & Platforms (3:46)
• The pivot from "localized speed" to "systematic speed" (7:27)
• Core principles of Spotify’s Platform org: Partnering with customers & "Taking the pain away" (10:37)
• The "Think it, Build it, Ship it, Tweak it" lifecycle framework & why the industry obsession with "Build It" (coding agents) is missing the bigger picture (14:57)
• How Spotify is investing in the "Think It" phase: AI prototyping with deep business context (16:49)
• AiKA (AI Knowledge Assistant): Context engineering for humans and bots (18:47)
• "Honk": Spotify’s internal framework for large-scale automated code changes (22:17)
• Addressing the decline of code quality and the bottleneck of human PR reviews (25:50)
• Probabilistic vs. Deterministic code reviews: A new approach to quality checks (29:43)
• Identifying bottlenecks to company value outside of R&D (Legal, Licensing, etc.) (32:12)
• Why systems change is fundamentally about people and identity shifts (35:57)
• Rapid fire questions (38:49)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAMES TYACK

James Tyack leads the Learner Success and Visual Experience teams at Coursera, creating engaging and personalized learning experiences for millions of learners worldwide. An avid user of Coursera and a lifelong learner himself, James is passionate about leveraging technology, including AI, to transform lives through education. Prior to Coursera, he led integration and growth teams at PagerDuty, driving innovation and adoption of incident response tools and best practices.

Beyond his professional work, James is the chapter lead for the South Bay Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) group, fostering collaboration among tech leaders. He is also a proud dad to a one-year-old, balancing his career and personal life with a deep commitment to growth and connection.

This episode is brought to you by Span!

Span is the AI-native developer intelligence platform bringing clarity to engineering organizations with a holistic, human-centered approach to developer productivity.

If you want a complete picture of your engineering impact and health, drive high performance, and make smarter business decisions…

Go to Span.app to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• The results of ELC’s first-ever hackathon: 14 leaders shipping fully functional apps (2:21)
• The “Scrappy” beginning: Extending the invitation and early community engagement (4:50)
• The most surprising insights: Problem solving for “life outside of work” and micromanaging AI agents (5:42)
• Navigating the shifting boundaries between product, engineering, and management roles (8:43)
• James’ personal journey: Building 5 apps in 5 hours to stay relevant and relatable (10:05)
• Deconstructing the Hackathon structure: The “Take-Home Assignment” approach (16:16)
• The Hall of Fame: Creating artifacts to recognize contribution (18:00)
• Iterating on the format: Pivots made for the next hackathon iteration at Coursera (18:47)
• The importance of a 2-week ideation period for alignment (20:59)
• A recap of the playbook: Seeding ideas, easy tooling, and safe deployment (22:15)
• The future of hackathons: Cross-functional participation beyond engineering (26:46)
• Rapid Fire Questions (28:15)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT BILL COUGHRAN

Bill Coughran works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security.

ABOUT BRET RECKARD

Bret Reckard is Talent Partner at The General Partnership (TheGP), a hands-on venture firm working alongside ambitious founders in talent, engineering, go-to-market, and product. He leads TheGP’s Talent vertical, matching foundational leaders, early engineers, and key specialists across the portfolio. Before this role, Bret spent over a decade at Sequoia Capital leading Talent and Network, where he helped hundreds of founders at companies like Stripe, Confluent, Retool and DoorDash build their early teams.

This episode is brought to you by Span!

Span is the AI-native developer intelligence platform bringing clarity to engineering organizations with a holistic, human-centered approach to developer productivity.

If you want a complete picture of your engineering impact and health, drive high performance, and make smarter business decisions…

Go to Span.app to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• Introduction and Bill Coughran's background at Sequoia and Google (1:36)
• Hiring pitfalls and the biggest mistakes made as a leader (3:49)
• Managing crises: Acting as a dictator during the 2010 Google hack (5:25)
• Building for the AI world without chasing "shiny objects" (7:09)
• Developing context: How to learn AI without relying on LLM summaries (9:02)
• Identifying enduring companies and real value capture in the AI era (10:53)
• The debate on coding assistants and the future of junior engineering talent (13:23)
• Transitions: Making the leap from large organizations to early-stage startups (15:59)
• Staying curious and finding excitement in the next professional challenge (18:23)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Link to the video for this session
• Link to all ELC Annual 2025 sessions

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SULMAN CHOUDHRY

Sulman leads ChatGPT Engineering at OpenAI, driving the development and scaling of one of the world’s most impactful AI products. He pushes the boundaries of innovation by turning cutting‑edge research into practical, accessible tools that transform how people interact with technology. Previously at Meta, Sulman founded and scaled Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Labs, and helped lead the early development of Instagram Stories.

He also brought MetaAI to Instagram and Messenger, integrating generative AI into experiences used by billions. Earlier in his career, Sulman was on the founding team that built and launched UberEATS from the ground up, helping turn it into a global food delivery platform. With a track record of marrying technical vision, product strategy, and large‑scale execution, Sulman focuses on building products that meaningfully change how people live, work, and connect.

ABOUT SAMIR AHMED

Samir is the Technical Lead for ChatGPT at OpenAI, where he currently leads the Personalization and Memory efforts to scale adaptive, useful, and human-centered product experiences to over 700 million users. He works broadly across the OpenAI stack—including mobile, web, services, systems, inference, and product research infrastructure.

Previously, Samir spent nine years at Snap, working across Ads, AR, Content, and Growth. He led some of the company’s most critical technical initiatives, including founding and scaling the machine learning platform that powered nearly all Ads, Content, and AR workloads, handling tens of billions of requests and trillions of inferences daily.

ABOUT LAWRENCE BRUHMELLER

Lawrence Bruhmuller has over 20 years of experience in engineering management, much of it as an overall head of engineering. Previous roles include CTO/VPE roles at Great Expectations, Pave, Optimizely, and WeWork. He is currently leading the core query compiler and serving teams at Sigma Computing, the industry leading business analytics company.

Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership (https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time.

Lawrence holds a Bachelors and Masters in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and their three daughters.

This episode is brought to you by Span!

Span is the AI-native developer intelligence platform bringing clarity to engineering organizations with a holistic, human-centered approach to developer productivity.

If you want a complete picture of your engineering impact and health, drive high performance, and make smarter business decisions…

Go to Span.app to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• From research lab to record-breaking product: Navigating the fastest growth in history (4:03)
• Unpredictable scaling: Handling growth spurts of one million users every hour (5:20)
• Cross-stack collaboration: How Android, systems, and GPU engineers solve crises together (7:06)
• The magic of trade-offs: Aligning the team on outcomes like service uptime vs. broad availability (7:57)
• Why throwing models "over the wall" failed and how OpenAI structures virtual teams (11:17)
• Lessons from OpenAI’s first intern class: Why AI-native new grads are crushing expectations (13:41)
• Non-hierarchical culture: Using the "Member of Technical Staff" title to blur the lines of expertise (15:37)
• AI-native engineering: When massive code generation starts breaking traditional CI/CD systems (16:21)
• Asynchronous workflows: Using coding agents to reduce two-hour investigations to 15 minutes (17:35)
• The mindset shift: How rapid model improvements changed how leaders audit and trust code (19:00)
• Predicting success: "Vibes-based" decision making and iterative low-key research previews (20:43)
• Hiring for high variance: Why unconventional backgrounds lead to high-potential engineering hires (22:09)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Link to the video for this session
• Link to all ELC Annual 2025 sessions

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT BRIAN BALFOUR

Brian Balfour is the Founder & CEO of Reforge, which provides expert training and tools for AI-native product teams. Previously, he served as VP of Growth at HubSpot, spearheading launches like HubSpot CRM and building the growth team that propelled the company’s next chapter.

This episode is brought to you by Span!

Span is the AI-native developer intelligence platform bringing clarity to engineering organizations with a holistic, human-centered approach to developer productivity.

If you want a complete picture of your engineering impact and health, drive high performance, and make smarter business decisions…

Go to Span.app to learn more!

SHOW NOTES:

• Brian’s reaction to the 5:1 gap between AI coding usage and actual product quality challenges (1:57)
• Why your system only goes as fast as the slowest part, and how hyper-optimizing engineering moves bottlenecks elsewhere (4:53)
• The "Local Maxima" trap: Why turning designers and PMs into mediocre developers is a waste of opportunity cost (6:04)
• Siphoning off "Skunkworks" Teams for AI-Native Innovation (7:53)
• Moving from exploring two solution paths to ten by simulating "product reps" through AI prototyping (13:24)
• Reforge’s AI-native suite (Build + Research): Scaling prototypes, feature variations and compressing product discovery & validation from weeks to hours (15:43)
• Case Study: How Captions evolved to solve harder classes of problems, using a creator-tool wedge to fund custom AI emotion-models for the media studio market (19:54)
• Case Study: How Shopify reframed support agents as multimodal "Business Advisors" to provide outsized value (22:24)
• Navigating the great distribution shift: Understanding the lifecycle from open platforms to closed ecosystems (25:10)
• The lifecycle of distribution shifts: Navigating the "Open Phase" growth to "Closed Phase" monetization w/ examples from Facebook, Google, and Apple (29:30)
• OpenAI, memory & context as moat, and why you need to reshape your product from the ground up to win in this distribution shift (31:16)
• Strategic de-risking for EPD leaders: Building proprietary moats through memory, context, and specialized workflows (32:51)
• Optimizing EPD workflows and structures: Separate high-risk "skunkworks" from core product optimization, lean cross-functional teams for faster iteration / decisions, and avoiding too many specialized roles (35:25)
• Dissolving the "Octagon of Specialists": Shifting researchers and PMMs from "inboxes" to builders of self-serve systems (36:57)
• The five types of product work and why there is no "one-size-fits-all" system for EPD (41:25)
• Rapid fire questions (43:25)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• About Reforge: Expert training & AI-powered tools for product teams
• Reforge Build: The prototyping tool discussed for exploring multiple feature variations without designer constraints.
• Reforge Research: The AI-interviewer tool used to compress user discovery and validation from weeks to hours.
• Reforge Insights: The platform that aggregates qualitative customer feedback into a self-serve system for EPD teams.

Brian Balfour’s Research & Frameworks

• BrianBalfour.com: Brian’s personal blog featuring deep dives into growth and product strategy.
• The Next Great Distribution Shift: The foundational article explaining the lifecycle of open vs. closed platforms.
• The Four Fits Framework: A refresher on the system of Product-Market Fit, Product-Channel Fit, Channel-Model Fit, and Model-Market Fit.

Reforge Strategic Deep Dives

• AI Disruption Risk Assessment: A guide for engineering leaders to determine if their product is at risk of being commoditized.
• Product-Market Fit (PMF) Collapse: How to identify and avoid the risk of your core product losing relevance in the AI era.

Mentions

• Invest Like the Best podcast

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT RAJEEV RAJAN

Rajeev Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Rajeev joined the company in May 2022 and is responsible for Atlassian Engineering, IT, Security and Trust, and the Engineering Operations teams. His focus areas include the company's continued transformation to Cloud, Developer Platform, and Product lines. Additionally, he is passionate about continuing to develop Atlassian’s world-class engineering organization and making it a top choice for aspiring engineering talent worldwide.

A long-time resident of Washington state, Rajeev previously acted as the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Facebook and Head of Office for Meta in the Pacific Northwest Region. Prior to Meta, Rajeev spent more than two decades with Microsoft, first joining as an intern in 1994. During his time there, he worked on many products, culminating in Office 365 where he built and led the team responsible for all of the Cloud Infrastructure for Office 365.

Rajeev is married with two children and a spunky yellow lab named Rayna. He is very involved in and passionate about a number of efforts that uplift the local community, ranging from the arts to STEM programs.

SHOW NOTES:

• The "Listening Tour": Grounding leadership in reality and identifying friction points (3:52)
• The Confluence Editor story: Reducing ship time from 120 days to 0 (6:26)
• Moving beyond productivity: Why "Developer Joy" is the metric that matters (8:45)
• Creating a community of Developer Productivity Champions and the power of a Productivity Summit (13:44)
• Elevating productivity to a company-level OKR and measuring qualitative sentiment (17:12)
• Leadership framework: Deciding when to "manage through people" vs. "manage through process" (19:05)
• How to give more direct ownership / responsibility to a DRI (23:03)
• Alignment conversations about prioritizing developer joy & productivity (24:22)
• Challenges faced during Atlassian’s developer joy transformation journey (26:23)
• How the "Developer Joy" foundation enabled building Rovo in just 6 months (30:02)
• The "System of Work": Expanding Jira's utility beyond engineering to finance, marketing, and legal (33:22)
• Rapid Fire Questions (40:48)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/5

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT DANIEL LEREYA

Daniel Lereya has served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com since 2023. In this role, he focuses on advancing monday.com’s multi-product vision and operational efficiencies while driving execution to support company growth. Previously, he was Vice President of R&D and Product, leading global teams in shaping and executing the company’s product strategy through innovation and technology. Before joining monday.com, Daniel held leadership and engineering roles at IBM and SAP.

SHOW NOTES:

• The three core principles of monday.com’s culture: Ownership, Transparency, and Speed of Execution (3:59)
• How AI acts as an accelerant to implement these cultural principles at scale (8:36)
• Why the “Developer” role is evolving into a “Strategic Builder” and “System Designer” (13:47)
• Breaking silos: How the “Builder” role blurs the lines between product, engineering, and design (17:13)
• Real-world example: A designer using AI to submit code and fix UI issues independently (19:09)
• Case Study: The “Agent Factory” & how a weekend prototype by one leader shifted the product roadmap (21:25)
• Operationalizing transparency: Using internal tools (“Big Brain”) to align every builder on daily business impact (25:58)
• The “Kickoff Meeting” framework: A strict protocol for falling in love with the problem, not the solution (32:26)
• The new management paradigm with AI agents as team members (37:31)
• Rapid fire questions (42:09)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAIME LIEN

Jaime Lien, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Archetype AI, a pioneering startup advancing Physical AI, artificial intelligence that understands the real world through real-time sensor data fusion.

With over a dacade of experience in radar-based sensing, signal processing, and hardware engineering, Jaime’s career bridges cutting-edge research and consumer-ready innovation. Before Archetype, she led radar sensing development for Google ATAP’s Project Soli and contributed wireless communication and localization expertise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

ABOUT RASHI AGRAWAL

Rashi Agrawal is Head of AI Engineering at GoodLeap, where she leads enterprise-wide AI initiatives that deliver real business impact. An accomplished speaker, she covers the latest in AI, including context engineering, evaluations, and multi-agent collaboration, while driving Applied AI innovation in the enterprise. Previously, she scaled engineering teams at Yahoo, advancing its multibillion-dollar advertising business. A passionate world traveler to 40+ countries, Rashi brings global perspective and energy to her leadership and storytelling.

SHOW NOTES:

• Archetype AI’s mission: Building a foundation model for physical reality (0:24)
• The potential for discovery: Using AI to observe phenomena humans cannot perceive (1:36)
• Augmentation vs. Replacement: Giving humans "superpowers" rather than automating them away (2:48)
• The "Perfect Storm" for Physical AI: Transformers, self-supervised learning, and commodity sensors (4:04)
• Defining “Non-Human Intelligence” and removing the constraints of human labels (6:34)
• Why language is inherently lossy and insufficient for true physical understanding (8:28)
• Real-world application: How Physical AI aids safety decision-making in the solar industry (9:35)
• Use case: Improving pedestrian safety and traffic signaling in Bellevue (12:51)
• The biggest engineering leadership challenge: Embracing the “messiness” of real-world data (14:21)
• Q&A: Why we shouldn't teach AI physical laws, but let it discover them (16:50)
• Q&A: Validating models when there is a defined ground truth vs. subjective language (18:49)
• Q&A: Compute requirements and the future of active learning at the edge (20:05)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Video version of Jaime and Rashi’s session at ELC Annual 2025

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT RUSLAN BELKIN

Ruslan Belkin joined Inflection after co-founding Jelled.ai—acquired by Inflection in 2024—and previously served as CTO of Nauto. Earlier in his career, Ruslan held senior engineering roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, Netscape, and other pioneering Silicon-Valley companies, bringing more than two decades of experience at the intersection of data platforms and machine learning.

SHOW NOTES:

• How leading engineering teams is evolving: Moving from code as the source of truth to specs/documentation as the source of truth (2:44)
• Why an eng org’s good hygiene / health will create better output (5:12)
• A framework for product vision: Envisioning the future "viscerally" like a sci-fi novel, stress-testing assumptions, and focusing smart people on the problem (9:04)
• Hiring in the modern era: Why software engineering is becoming "tooling and data engineering" and the importance of hiring for openness to new research (18:20)
• Gen Z vs. Millennial engineers: Ruslan’s observation that Gen Z is more outcome-oriented and has a lower tolerance for "corporate euphemisms." (22:24)
• Ruslan’s favorite frameworks for effective decision making: Using an "investment deck" to validate projects, avoid disbelief and lack of focus. (25:19)
• Keeping up with the velocity of change: How to curate research inputs and determine when a new paper (like DeepSeek) requires a strategic pivot. (32:57)
• The new burden of leadership: Why the velocity of AI requires leaders to be "right more often" and how to use models to increase research rigor. (36:27)
• The "Data Wall" and Synthetic Data: Why we have hit the wall for text data and how synthetic data generation loops will drive the next wave of defensibility. (41:35)
• The "March of 9s": Analyzing the trajectory of the AI market and why increasing agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead. (46:25)
• Rapid fire questions (48:18)
•  

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Ruslan’s Talk at ELC Annual 2025
• The War of Art - Steven Pressfield’s guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.
• A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains - Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAMES REGGIO

James Reggio is Brex’s Chief Technology Officer. James is a forward thinking technology leader who currently oversees Brex’s entire Engineering org. James joined Brex in 2020 as Principal Engineer and has played a vital role in building the company’s mobile app and AI capabilities. Prior to Brex, James had an extensive career as a Software Engineer at leading companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, AirBnB, Stripe and more. Additionally, James founded two companies: Altair Management and Banter, a social discovery platform for podcasts that was later acquired by Convoy in 2018. James received his B.A. of Science from The University of Texas Austin.

SHOW NOTES:

• The birth of Brex 3.0: Using a layoff as a "moment to refound the company" (3:38)
• Moving from a Series E to a Series C operational mindset (5:28)
• The problem with a GM model: How siloed OKRs and roadmaps created "deadlock" (6:07)
• New rituals: Why the CEO became "chief editor of the roadmap" (8:16)
• The impact on morale: "Folks just knew how their work fit into the bigger picture" (11:16)
• The challenge of the new model: Who do you hold accountable when you "win and lose as a team"? (13:43)
• The lesson for reintroducing systems: "Less is more" (15:43)
• The "Startup within a Startup": Launching an internal team to disrupt Brex (16:49)
• “What if we were founding Brex again today?” The 4 constraints for the "Hacker House" experiment (17:58)
• Questions eng leaders should ask when running a similar experiment to Brex (21:02)
• Aha moment: "With agentic coating, code is so cheap" (22:35)
• Managing the two narratives: "compounding" the core biz vs. “innovating" with AI (26:01)
• A surprising dynamic: Why the AI team struggled to see their impact (while the core team didn't) (29:38)
• Building alongside your customer to iterate / experiment faster (36:06)
• The turnaround is over: Brex hits 50% YoY growth and cash-flow positive (38:45)
• Rapid fire questions (42:10)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JONATHAN RAYMOND

Jonathan Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Ren, an AI agent for managers and teams that helps them give and receive feedback, have meaningful 1:1s, and access real-time personalized coaching. He is also the author of the award-winning book Good Authority and was named one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Previously the CEO of EMyth, Jonathan has led transformation projects across technology, renewable energy, and coaching. He’s a half-decent barista, a mediocre-but-enthusiastic surfer, and will never give up on the New York Knicks.

SHOW NOTES:

• Jonathan’s perspective on the impossible cognitive load & colliding pressures of modern managers (2:31)
• The complicated workflow it takes to be a great manager (6:05)
• “Field Intelligence” and the need to ingest non-technical data such as (mood, sentiment, and alignment) to make better leadership decisions (9:52)
• The managerial matrix: high/low performers and the 10-person team that feels like 50 (12:46)
• The cost of mismanaging your team & why it’s so easy to get it wrong (16:02)
• What’s uniquely human vs. where AI provides leverage (18:01)
• AI’s role: detecting signal and prompting human reflection (21:04)
• The “Growth Loop”: a 3-part system for effective leadership (27:20)
• Incorporating AI tools to enhance the manager / employee relationship (31:20)
• The future vision: an “in-ear” AI coach that closes the gap between learning and applying (33:09)
• Closing the gap between learning a new skill & it becoming an unconscious habit (35:59)
• Product Principle: Building a “Relational System,” not just a task manager (37:49)
• Product Principle: Why an AI coach must ask questions, not provide answers (40:50)
• How to harness AI tools for better emotional articulation / processing (45:11)
• A simple behavioral change to try this week (47:58)
• Rapid fire questions (49:57)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For - Jonathan’s book in which he brings together what he has learned over a twenty-year journey as an executive, entrepreneur, team leader and leadership trainer.
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures - Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems.
• Jonathan’s session at ELC Annual 2025

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT LAURA TACHO

Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She previously led teams at companies like CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit. She’s an expert in building world-class engineering organisations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance.

SHOW NOTES:

• Downsides to approaching organizational outcomes from an individual task level (2:59)
• Why individual product gains don’t always equate to systems-level improvements (4:56)
• How the quality of existing systems impacts the improvements AI can foster (7:26)
• Strategies for shifting mental models from the individual to systems level (9:09)
• Implement training & enablement techniques as an organizational lever (11:22)
• Common workflows that can unlock new problem-solving methods (14:46)
• Understanding what impact you want to see / getting the most ROI from AI (18:40)
• How to interpret the data when it comes to AI & its true ROI (21:22)
• AI data literacy for engineering leaders (23:06)
• Interpreting the meter study & what it means for engineers using AI (25:49)
• Quality vs. quantity when it comes to AI implementation on the org level (28:43)
• Characteristics that high-ROI companies possess when it comes to AI (30:35)
• Strategies to invest in that may lead to higher ROI (32:29)
• Laura’s observations on time & money budgeting / investments for 2026 (35:28)
• Embracing cost savings & opportunity generation as an eng org (38:08)
• Tackling fear / uncertainty when it comes to AI adoption, budgeting, & ROI (40:01)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Previous Episode with Laura Tacho
• Introducing the AI Measurement Framework from DX
• Atlassian State of DevEx Report
• METR Study
• DORA Report (2025)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT MIRIAM AGUIRRE

Miriam Aguirre is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ingenimax, the company behind StarOps, an AI-powered platform engineering engine that helps teams deploy and manage kubernetes and other cloud-native systems in minutes, not months. Before Ingenimax, Miriam served as CTO and engineering leader at two startups that successfully scaled from early stage through IPO. Her career spans deep expertise in high-throughput, scalable systems and machine learning, with a focus on building the technical and organizational foundations for hypergrowth. Miriam is passionate about engineering leadership that turns complex technology into intuitive, reliable platforms, and about helping teams scale without losing their soul.

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

SHOW NOTES:

• The Origin Story of Ingenimax (3:05)
• The recurring scaling problem: Why "scaling teams" means scaling systems first (5:23)
• How the age of AI forces platform strategy to evolve earlier in a company’s journey (8:48)
• The decline of vendor lock-in and the rising appetite for experimentation with tech (10:56)
• The paradigm shift that breaks the old model: natural language as the new interface (14:11)
• Why deep knowledge of fundamentals is now more important than syntax (16:56)
• Shifting requirements conversations from tactical inputs to strategic outcomes (20:22)
• Balancing standardization and flexibility with guardrails in an AI-driven environment (22:58)
• The challenge of getting from an AI prototype to a polished product (26:42)
• How platform team roles will evolve to focus more on curation (29:32)
• How to become a great technology curator (37:30)
• Rapid Fire Questions (39:56)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Book of George - From the author of the critically acclaimed Laura & Emma comes a The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. for our times: Kate Greathead's razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity.
• Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?: A Dialogue - This is a dialogue about the notion of a person, of an entity that thinks and feels and acts, that counts and is accountable. Equivalently, it's about the intentional idiom --the well-knit fabric of terms that we use to characterize persons. Human beings are usually persons (a brain-dead human might be considered a human but not a person). However, there may be persons, in various senses, that are not human beings. Much recent discussion has focused on hypothetical computer-robots and on actual nonhuman great apes. The discussion here is naturalistic, which is to say that count and accountability are, at least initially, presumed to be naturally well-knit with the possession of a cognitive and affective life.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT CHRYSTAL HENKE BALL

Chrystal Henke Ball a seasoned engineering leader, currently serving as VP of Engineering at Yahoo, where she leverages her experience to accelerate product development across core products such as Yahoo.com and the Yahoo News app. Prior to Yahoo, she led engineering organizations at Google Search, Pandora, Pachama, and Arcadis, building highly available systems, guiding architectural transitions, spearheading novel solutions, and delivering delightful user experiences. Chrystal excels at designing purpose-driven, scalable architectures, streamlining development processes, and mentoring teams to work effectively and openly together.

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

SHOW NOTES:

• Navigating the challenge of balancing constraint vs. innovation (3:05)
• Considerations for balancing current capabilities w/ your roadmap to change (4:34)
• Frameworks for categorizing what’s fixed vs. in flux to aid decision-making (6:14)
• Conversation points for checking your assumptions (7:36)
• The new leadership challenge: vision as a bottleneck (14:45)
• Evolving feedback loops to address a more fluid product lifecycle (19:43)
• Defining product vision in today’s fast-paced, fluid landscape (23:57)
• Defining grit as an essential trait & ways to cultivate it as an eng leader (31:57)
• Building AI-incorporated products with trust as a foundational principle (40:46)
• Rapid fire questions (43:01)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know - Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers -- and why they often go wrong.
• Terrestrials - A show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SIMONE KALMAKIS

Simone Kalmakis is the VP of Engineering at Viam, a platform unlocking AI, data, and automation for devices in the physical world. She has deep experience applying AI and machine learning to big data and big missions, and is known for building healthy engineering organizations that drive business value and real-world progress.

Prior to Viam, Simone was Senior Director of Engineering at Arcadia, a climate tech company building an API platform for residential utility data to power solutions that fight climate change. Before that, she served as Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health, where she helped accelerate the development of cancer treatments through real-world data.

Simone began her career at Microsoft, developing machine-learned relevance algorithms for Bing. She’s also a successful founder––after Microsoft, she built and sold Symbi, a roommate-matching startup. She holds a degree in Mathematics and Economics from Yale University.

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Simone’s eng leadership journey from health-tech to climate to robotics (3:25)
• Lessons from being a founder & how it led to Viam (5:27)
• Co-founding lessons that Simone continues to apply (7:22)
• Navigating the transition from Flatiron Health to Arcadia (9:20)
• Transitioning from Arcadia to Viam (12:06)
• Use cases of physical devices impacting the environment through data / AI (14:28)
• How Simone sees Viam potentially working in a day-to-day capacity (15:42)
• How to structure your time when entering a new industry (17:51)
• Onboarding with a personal project to build user empathy, alignment & motivation (20:34)
• Finding where your expertise is the highest-leverage for your org (22:34)
• “The goal is not to maintain the same level of depth in each of your teams” (24:18)
• How to decide which teams get your deep focus (27:15)
• Building trust through transparent communication about your priorities (29:19)
• The lifecycle of a leadership “deep dive” from start to exit (32:20)
• Advice for leaders adopting this hands-on, flexible approach (36:15)
• Key questions to ask when seeking a more mission-aligned industry (38:01)
• Rapid fire questions (40:33)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Viam - a full-stack solution for the kinds of devices that exist anywhere from your home, your office, in cars or boats, in warehouses or factories, at arenas, or other public places.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT BEN KUS

Ben Kus is the Chief Technology Officer at Box, where he leads technology and AI strategy to help enterprises securely unlock insights from their unstructured data. Ben’s career spans engineering, product leadership, and startup innovation—including co-founding Subspace (acquired by Box) and being an early employee at BigFix (acquired by IBM), where he later served as Chief Architect of Mobile Security. Ben holds a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• How Generative AI sparked Box’s reoriented vision, by unlocking the value of unstructured data (3:29)
• Using GenAI to create structure out of unstructured data (5:28)
• Internal & external conversations that inspired Box’s new direction (7:18)
• Box’s “platform first” approach to building a secure and scalable foundation for all future AI features (10:02)
• Why security and compliance must be built in from "day negative one" not added on later (12:40)
• How to set a technical vision that can respond to future developments you can't yet predict (14:46)
• The “multi-speed” business model: Using a small, fast-moving internal group to test ideas before they enter the normal, slower development cycle (17:47)
• Example of a successful project: AI-driven data extraction & the evolution to critical feature (20:26)
• The story of an abandoned project and the challenge of knowing which ideas are revolutionary versus which aren’t worth continuing (22:17)
• Ben’s long-term vision for AI agents and why he believes they are an incredibly powerful technology paradigm (23:58)
• State diagrams & the journey behind building Box’s initial agentic AI systems (26:50)
• “Context Engineering”: The new paradigm of programming and the mental model shift required for engineers to adopt it (29:07)
• The future of AI benchmarks: Measuring what a person can accomplish with an agent, not just the agent’s performance alone (31:03)
• How to balance development speed with security risks, especially when agents can take actions and change the environment (34:00)
• Key questions to ask to determine the right guardrails for AI agents, including thinking about the worst-case scenario (36:41)
• Enterprise technology trends to watch, and why multi-agent systems will become the new “org chart” (37:56)
• Rapid fire questions (39:03)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Eliezer Yudkowsky’s alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Get a preview of tactical takeaways from deep operational dives into companies like OpenAI, Amplitude, and HeyGen. Discover how the conference will help you redesign your innovation engine, transform your team's workflows, and blur the lines between engineering, product, and business to drive impactful change. Through a unique mix of tactical sessions, peer-led roundtables, and curated mentorship, you'll learn how to find the community and coaching needed to lead through uncertainty and invest in your own career growth.

To learn more & get tickets, go to sfelc.com/annual2025

Use code podcast15 for 15% off tickets - group tickets / discounts available.

ABOUT ELC ANNUAL

The playbook for engineering leadership is being rewritten. ELC Annual 2025, happening September 10-11 in San Francisco, is where you'll gain the insights, strategies, and deep connections needed to lead in this new era. 50+ speakers, 50+ peer-led roundtables discussions, 1:1 matching to expand your network. Insights, connections & support.

Join the community of engineering leaders who are co-creating the future of our field.

Listener Discount → Use code podcast15 for 15% off

Group Tix → For teams looking to attend together, special group discounts can be found under the 'Tickets' section of our website!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2025

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• The ground is shifting: Why the old playbooks for engineering leaders are being rewritten (0:55)
• Moving beyond AI hype to harnessing its real power in your products and workflows (2:44)
• How are teams & workflows changing? Redefining roles and upskilling your team for the AI era (9:06)
• Why the smartest insights don't come from the stage, but from deep, honest conversations with peers in roundtables (13:36)
• How curated one-on-one matches help you build a trusted network to rely on for years to come (16:08)
• ELC Annual isn't a tech conference; it's a career conference to invest in yourself and your leaders (17:49)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT MICHAEL GRINICH

Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.

ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Marketing technical products exclusively to other tech companies (2:39)
• Building products end-to-end without PMs (6:36)
• How WorkOS utilizes fun, user feedback, and cohesive storytelling in their product-building process (9:31)
• Hiring engineers for curiosity & comfort operating in ambiguity (12:48)
• How engineers owning product discovery & directly engaging w/ users improve product insights (16:31)
• Using Slack for real-time integrated support & rapid product iteration (19:38)
• The complexities of creating simple, elegant products and marketing messaging (21:54)
• Cut scope ruthlessly to ship faster and better (26:20)
• Small, simple, deeply useful features make the biggest impact (30:30)
• The weekly cadence that keeps engineering aligned (32:52)
• Behind the scenes of MCP Night: A protocol party for devs (38:20)
• Rapid fire questions (41:29)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• MCP Night
• **WorkOS Launch Week**
• WorkOS AuthKit
• The Business Value of Computers: An Executive's Guide - Paul A. Strassmann addresses the practical needs of executives responsible for planning, budgeting and justifying information technology expenditures. It shows that there is no direct relation between spending on computers, profits or productivity.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SRINATH KURUVADI

Srinath Kuruvadi is a globally recognized cybersecurity executive and cloud security leader with over two decades of experience driving security innovation at some of the world’s most influential technology companies, including Netflix, Meta, Google, Lyft, and JPMorgan Chase. Currently serving as Managing Director and Head of Cloud Security at JPMorgan Chase, he leads the enterprise-wide security strategy across APIs, containers, and cloud platforms, shaping the future of banking technology.

Srinath’s approach blends deep technical expertise with executive-level risk management. At Netflix, he headed cloud security for one of the largest AWS environments globally, pioneering scalable governance and identity systems that supported massive data throughput. At Meta and Google, he led the development of custom infrastructure security systems protecting billions of users, including Facebook’s Blackbird SIEM+SOAR platform.

Beyond his executive roles, Srinath is a strategic advisor and angel investor, with five successful startup exits including Bridgecrew, Lightspin, Oxeye, Gem Security, and Kivera. He is also a trusted advisor to venture capital firms like YL Ventures and Glilot Capital Partners, and served on Amazon’s Global CISO Advisory Council.

He holds multiple patents in web application security, database protection, and abuse detection, and has authored research on algorithmic solutions in industrial systems. Srinath is also multilingual and committed to lifelong learning, exemplified by a sabbatical that took him to over 35 countries for cultural, linguistic, and creative growth.

With a Master’s degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University and a Bachelor's from BITS Pilani, Srinath is known for transforming security from a blocker into a business accelerator.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• The hidden art of influencing without authority in security leadership (3:29)
• Why influencing remains an underestimated skill (5:08)
• Shifting from accidental to intentional influencing (6:53)
• Frameworks for aligning problems from other stakeholder’s POV (8:40)
• How to effectively influence without formal authority (11:14)
• Common pitfalls in identifying & aligning shared outcomes - and how to avoid them (14:10)
• Srinath’s strategy for clearly defining and aligning on shared outcomes from the start (15:42)
• Making a compelling case when immediate ROI isn’t clear (17:47)
• Practical prioritization frameworks for assessing security needs (20:55)
• Insights on personal time management for engineering leaders (22:53)
• Navigating current trends and potential pitfalls in AI for security (26:29)
• Inside the Innovation Lab: Operationalizing curiosity and AI experimentation (29:57)
• Rapid fire questions (33:47)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• FAIR methodology risk assessment - a research-driven not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline of cyber and operational risk management through education, standards and collaboration.
• The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels - Michael D. Watkins gives you the keys to successfully negotiating your next move—whether you’re onboarding into a new company, being promoted internally, or embarking on an international assignment.
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein’s compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Dr. Robert Cialdini explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.
• How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie’s timeless bestseller, packed with rock-solid advice that has carried thousands of now famous people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JOHN AMARAL

John Amaral, CTO and co-founder of Root.io, is a veteran cybersecurity leader with a proven track record of scaling and exiting successful companies. At Cisco, he led Product for Cloud Security—its fastest-growing Security and SaaS business. Before that, he ran product and engineering at CloudLock through its acquisition by Cisco in 2016. Earlier, as SVP of Product at Trustwave, John led its industry-leading security portfolio, culminating in a strategic acquisition by Singtel. Today, he’s building Root.io—a next-gen cybersecurity platform pioneering Agentic Vulnerability Remediation (AVR) to automate and eliminate software vulnerabilities at scale.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• The evolving role of engineering leaders (2:13)
• “Shift Left is Dead” - Why it’s time to “Shift Out” (5:59)
• Applying Jobs-To-Be-Done & offloading toil with AI (11:00)
• Root.io’s AI-driven approach to security (15:03)
• Vision First Leadership (22:36)
• Empowering developers & shipping daily (27:38)
• Rethinking product & engineering orgs and building your vision muscle (30:47)
• Unlocking creativity through hobbies (36:37)
• Rapid fire questions (41:14)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The All-In Podcast - When the pandemic prevented four friends from convening their weekly poker game, they took to the airwaves to socialize and discuss the news of the day. What started on a whim has quickly become one of the top-ranked podcasts in the world.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT DHRUV PARTHASARATHY

Dhruv Parthasarathy has spent the last 8 years focused on applying modern software and machine learning techniques in healthcare. Dhruv currently serves as the CTO of Commure, HATCO, and Augmedix. In the role of CTO, he leads product, engineering, and design teams. Prior to this, Dhruv helped found Athelas which eventually merged with Commure.

In these roles, Dhruv has designed and developed end-to-end solutions for revenue cycle automation, ambient documentation, patient engagement, and at-home diagnostics for oncology.

Before this, Dhruv was the Director of Machine Learning Programs at Udacity, where he led the development of the AI, Self-Driving Car, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning Nanodegree programs.

Dhruv also worked as a Product Engineer at Udacity, where he rebuilt the main signed-in experience and was responsible for the backend development. Dhruv obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013. Following this, they pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence at MIT from 2013 to 2014.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• How the Commure team moves with speed & momentum (3:26)
• Commure’s operational strategy / key leadership principles (4:57)
• Hiring & cultivating multi-talented individuals (7:16)
• How to optimize decision-making, push decisions down & minimize risk (8:40)
• Why speed is a core principle for building successful eng orgs (11:36)
• Getting unstuck in your decision-making as an eng team (13:07)
• Challenges faced while building a high-performing eng team in healthcare (15:47)
• Tactics for hiring less experienced engineers & bringing them up to speed (18:22)
• Customization as a product principle and how it manifests in EPD (20:55)
• Why the polymath style approach to engineering is more vital now than ever (23:47)
• Lessons learned around scope & using it to create leverage (26:06)
• Frameworks for assessing areas most likely to create a compound win (28:22)
• Rapid fire questions (30:35)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Cinema Speculation - The long-awaited first work of nonfiction from the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a deliriously entertaining, wickedly intelligent cinema book as unique and creative as anything by Quentin Tarantino.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT LOÏC HOUSSIER

Loïc Houssier is an engineering executive with 20 years of leadership experience spanning startups, scale-ups, and global enterprises. He specializes in helping high-growth companies scale with speed and discipline, combining technical depth with a strong operational mindset.

He currently leads engineering at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made, where he joined at a pivotal moment in the company’s growth. Loïc brought a new level of executional rigor — embedding a culture of speed not just in the product (where every interaction happens in under 100ms), but in how the team ships, scales, and makes decisions.

Previously, he held senior engineering roles at Productboard, Firstbase, and DocuSign, where he led global teams through platform expansion, org design, and M&A. With a background in cryptography and early experience as a security researcher, Loïc is also a frequent mentor and speaker on engineering leadership and building resilient, high-velocity teams.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• How Loïc built a reputation for building high-velocity engineering orgs (2:14)
• The underweighted value of board member continuity (4:58)
• Defining velocity in the AI age (6:23)
• Loïc’s evolving playbook that drives velocity (9:10)
• Implementing the velocity playbook @ Superhuman (11:04)
• An example of incorporating domain focus effectively within an eng team (12:49)
• Strategies for changing core principles / managing culture shock (16:17)
• Knowing when you made the correct change vs. signals it’s not working (19:06)
• Tools & tactics to promote a velocity mindset in engineering orgs (21:10)
• Build credibility with influential eng leaders in your org (23:37)
• Frameworks for cultivating product thinking within an eng org (27:03)
• How to cultivate great product taste inside engineering orgs (30:24)
• The importance of having a strong leader who sets the product taste standard (32:20)
• Key elements of exceptional product experiences @ Superhuman (34:34)
• Loïc’s perspective on navigating product complexity & quality expectations w/ AI (36:28)
• The future of productivity tools: paradigm shifts in AI & productivity (39:29)
• Rapid fire questions (41:20)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa’s moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading.
• Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption - Geoffrey A. Moore’s high-powered tool for driving your company above and beyond its limitations, its definitions of success, and ultimately, its competitors.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT NISSIM LEHYANI

Nissim Lehyani is the Vice President of Product at Life360, where he leads product strategy for the family safety platform used by over 60 million users worldwide. With more than two decades of experience across startups, global tech companies, and entrepreneurial ventures, Nissim is known for scaling impactful products that blend technical depth with business strategy.

Prior to Life360, he was Senior Director of Product at Indeed, where he oversaw a portfolio of 13 consumer products reaching 300M+ monthly users, and led a team of 40+ product managers across global markets. Nissim previously held leadership roles at GoDaddy, where he helped 18M+ SMBs grow their businesses through strategic partnerships with Facebook, Yelp, and Google.

As a founder, he built and led two ventures: Shopial (acquired by Magento) and Urban Place, raising millions to support small businesses and entrepreneurs. He also brings deep technical roots from his engineering leadership at Cisco and early career in Israeli Military Intelligence.

Nissim is a 2024 Product Leader Award winner and active mentor in the startup ecosystem through roles at Mixpanel and SV101 by ICON. He’s passionate about user-centric innovation, data-driven growth, and the intersection of AI, engineering, and product management.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• How Nissin & Patrick got connected (2:19)
• Nissin’s light bulb AI moment (4:03)
• Building first & defining later (5:33)
• How AI accelerates product iteration from months to hours & fills skill gaps (6:49)
• Recognizing your AI aha moment (9:44)
• Why it’s time to drop the “M” from MVP (11:21)
• New expectations for the first iteration of a product (13:37)
• Nissim’s #1 product principle (15:56)
• Why prototyping is replacing PRDs (17:57)
• Strategies for socializing a prototype-first workflow in your org (19:54)
• Tactics for inspiring AI adoption: find one annoying thing & show vs. tell (22:22)
• Rethinking product cadence and how product rituals are evolving (24:08)
• Defining the “lightning pod” model (25:29)
• How “lightning pods” change the dynamic between engineering, product & design (27:20)
• A live AI product demo: recreating Nissim’s original aha moment (29:10)
• Iterating product in real-time (31:06)
• How Nissim evaluates code & product outcomes (33:38)
• Rapid fire questions (34:15)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Click here to explore the forum, ask questions, & share insights and takeaways!

https://elc.community/home/forum

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT PRASHANT RAMARAO

Prashant is a hands-on technology executive with extensive experience in software engineering, leading large organizations, specializing in AI / ML, and large-scale systems architecture. With advanced degrees in computer science and engineering leadership, he excels at defining technical strategies that align with business goals, delivering results, and fostering high-performing, cross-functional teams. He cares about engineering excellence, leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve complex problems and scale operations for long-term growth. He has a lifelong passion for learning and looks for opportunities to challenge the status quo to drive change. He loves the outdoors and is a self-proclaimed podaholic - going on long hikes in Bay Area while listening to his podcasts is one of his favorite activities.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Behind Prashant’s rapid leadership evolution (3:26)
• Transitioning from IC to management: early steps and surprises (5:51)
• Navigating the mindset shifts from tech expert to people leader (7:31)
• Friction points in moving from informal to formal leadership (11:00)
• Skills for communicating with less technical audiences (13:46)
• Learning to talk with GMs & other non-technical leaders (16:32)
• Frameworks for effective meeting planning (19:03)
• Examples of communicating technical work to execs (20:08)
• Learning the impact of the “observer effect” (21:59)
• Incorporating feedback gathered by observing (27:03)
• Strategies for maintaining technical credibility as a senior leader (29:29)
• Why personal projects and experimentation matter for leadership growth (32:21)
• How Prashant’s personal projects enhance technical credibility & leadership skills (36:59)
• Rapid fire questions (37:57)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT CRAIG MCLUCKIE

Craig is the CEO and co-founder of Stacklok, where his team is working to tip AI code generation on its side, from vertical, closed solutions to horizontal, aligned systems. Craig was previously CEO and co-founder of Heptio, which was acquired by VMware in 2018; he has also led product and engineering teams at Google and Microsoft. Craig is a co-creator of Kubernetes and he bootstrapped and chaired the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. x

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Why this moment is “the epoch of the startup” (2:03)
• How AI shifts startup economics: from cost structures to value capture (4:18)
• Why incumbents struggle during disruption—and how startups can win (8:17)
• The origin story behind Stacklok & lessons from Craig’s pivot (11:04)
• Frameworks for identifying asymmetric advantages as a founder (14:48)
• How to map your unique asymmetric advantages to new opportunities and secure stakeholder buy-in (16:34)
• Rethinking defensibility & value capture in the AI era (16:29)
• How Craig applied cost, GTM & product perspectives to strategic pivots @ Stacklok (18:07)
• Building investment theses: Aligning cultural strengths & asymmetric advantages with evolving opportunities (20:05)
• Determining your startup’s investment themes (22:53)
• Structuring experiments & validating opportunities (24:15)
• Defensibility & building community-driven moats in early ideation phases (26:54)
• Signals of early community-product alignment (31:24)
• Conversation frameworks to assess asymmetric advantages (32:22)
• Societal implications of AI disruption & the “startup epoch” (35:14)
• Rapid fire questions (38:12)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT ANUSH ELANGOVAN

Anush Elangovan leads the Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG) as Corporate Vice President of AI software and solutions.

Anush has 23 years of industry experience in AI, computer science, compilers, network security, operating systems, math, and its materialization on complex hardware systems. This co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nod.ai oversaw product strategy and the overall business until AMD acquired Nod.ai (see related article here) today.

Anush will lead the acceleration of deploying AI solutions optimized for AMD products while aligning with AMD’s AI growth strategy centered on an open software ecosystem. In the near term, he and his team will introduce the code generation (CodeGen) capabilities from the Nod.ai flagship software, Shark, to unlock customer engagements via the ROCm™ and Vitis™ AI platforms. Over time, Anush will lead the contributions of the Nod.ai team to the AMD Unified AI Stack.

Before starting Nod.ai, Anush was instrumental in the graphics stack on the first ARM Chromebook. He led the movement of the Chrome operating system from Debian to Gentoo Linux to enable Google to gain full control of the shipping software. Previously, he was Principal Engineer for Agnilux, which Google acquired. The Agnilux team became crucial to the Chrome OS team, building a fusion of Android and Chrome OS.

Previously, Anush was a technical lead at Cisco Systems in its Datacenter Group, creating the first distributed virtual switching platform. He has also been an early member of FireEye, where he led in-memory taint-check analysis for networking and security in virtualized environments. He started his career in an earlier stint at Cisco, contributing to metro Ethernet initiatives.

Anush holds a Master of Science in computer science from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from the Mepco Schlenk Engineering College at Madurai Kamaraj University in India. He has earned 10 patents. In his spare time, he enjoys skiing, mountaineering, and trail running. Anush lives with his family, including three children and two dogs, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• AMD’s AI hardware + software strategy, explained (2:24)
• From startup founder to leading AI software at AMD (3:50)
• How AMD is unifying hardware through a shared AI stack (6:01)
• What the VP of AI Software @ AMD owns across software & customer enablement (7:17)
• AMD’s daily standup and real-time prioritization rituals (10:32)
• Strategies for building a unified AI ecosystem from first principles (13:06)
• How to approach building for complex technical workflows (15:38)
• Navigating hardware ecosystem requirements & aligning AI software (17:48)
• Challenging legacy software assumptions & why AI requires a new mindset for software development (19:38)
• AMD’s integration of community contributors into product cycles (21:21)
• AMD’s approach to cultivating an open-source ecosystem & community experience (22:48)
• Open-source & AMD’s ecosystem strategy: Building trust by building in public (26:57)
• How AMD collects and acts on user feedback fast within a community ecosystem (29:24)
• AI’s impact on everyday human experiences (32:15)
• Rapid fire questions (34:50)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT FARNAZ AZMOODEH

Farnaz is the CTO at Linktree, the leading social platform for creators and small businesses. Linktree enables its users to unify, curate, and monetize their online presence. Farnaz started her career at Google, focusing on the ad tech space. Farnaz then joined Snap, leading Snap's AR monetization team before scaling to run Snap's Platform and product engineering. Farnaz earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from Sharif University of Technology before moving to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Southern California. After fulfilling the credits for a master’s degree, she decided to enter the tech industry where she could contribute to human progress by bringing products to millions of users.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Taking on product & design 3 months into a new role (3:01)
• Going from delivery to discovery: mindset shifts for eng leaders (5:58)
• Identifying the current state of engineering, product & design (10:59)
• Decision-making based on anecdotes vs. data (12:50)
• Pivoting strategies to optimize for small, fast teams to improve cross-functional collaboration (15:04)
• Signals to pivot your product approach & ****make different bets (16:59)
• Complementary skill sets for rapid iteration (19:14)
• How to avoid silencing critical input & transform team frustration into product insight (20:41)
• Applying the 80/20 rule to complex product surfaces (23:46)
• Case Study: Reprioritizing the LinkTree product w/ 80/20 approach (25:46)
• Bringing on a strategic product partner & kicking off org change (27:28)
• Be honest about your knowledge gaps (29:09)
• How Farnaz’s experiences at Snap inform her leadership as CTO (33:21)
• When pattern matching fails: frameworks for checking assumptions (35:22)
• Where EPD Is headed: cross-functional evolution in the age of AI (38:10)
• Rapid fire questions (38:58)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS

Wade Chambers will be leading Engineering at Amplitude. Amplitude is the leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Wade has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Included Health, Twitter, TellApart, Proofpoint, Yahoo, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams, leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Why empowering engineering teams to own their mission matters (3:16)
• Common traps that prevent eng leaders from empowering teams (5:15)
• Understanding the “why” behind ownership & systemizing individual ownership (7:09)
• Systems change for empowerment: Aligning company vision, outcomes, competencies & behaviors (9:48)
• How to bring someone from low ownership back to high ownership (13:49)
• Developing trust & having tough conversations around ownership (15:17)
• Nonobvious factors to that erode ownership over time (17:42)
• Empowering teams through meaningful missions, clear expectations, defining success, & ongoing check-ins (20:55)
• Identifying engineers w/ competencies & behaviors that align w/ your org’s vision & goals (24:00)
• When having too much ownership becomes a problem (27:22)
• Wade’s process for officially transferring ownership (28:47)
• Coaching and navigating conversations around ownership (32:01)
• Impactful questions to ask during the coaching / check in process (34:08)
• Closing gaps in leadership competencies & behaviors (37:27)
• Coaching leaders to align personal growth with org goals (39:25)
• Rapid fire questions (41:34)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT FUNMI OLUDAIYE

Funmi is a Managing Director and the Head of the Digital Risk Office for Enterprise Partnerships at Goldman Sachs, where she is pioneering a first-of-its-kind global initiative to embed critical business, security, and engineering risk practices within the engineering organization. With nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer, architect, and engineering manager, she has a proven track record of leading high-performing teams, delivering innovative technology solutions, and championing best practices in developer experience and productivity across large-scale engineering teams. Most recently, she was the Head of Engineering for Consumer Deposits at Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and prior to that, she led the product engineering teams that built and launched the firm's award-winning credit card partnerships with Apple and later, General Motors. Funmi is a passionate advocate for underrepresented groups in the technology industry and is committed to mentoring the next generation of engineering leaders. Her wealth of experience and dedication to driving positive change make her a sought-after speaker and advisor.

ABOUT KETAN GUPTA

Ketan is a seasoned engineering leader with 13+ years in software development, cloud, architecture, product delivery, and organizational leadership. He excels at building high-performing engineering teams and driving strategic initiatives. As an active community builder, he contributes to the Engineering Leaders Community and champions software craftsmanship.

ABOUT SASHA HALL

Sasha Hall is an Engineering Manager at Planitar Inc, makers of iGUIDE. A University of Waterloo graduate with over 5 years of leadership experience at Pegasus Aeronautics and Deep Trekker, Sasha brings valuable insights on decisive leadership, effective communication, and strategic vision in growing organizations. Their career path through underwater robotics at Deep Trekker, aerial drone systems at Pegasus Aeronautics, and spatial mapping technologies at Planitar showcases a passion for innovative hardware and sensing solutions. This diverse technical background, combined with consistent leadership dedication, has equipped Sasha with a unique perspective on navigating today's complex engineering challenges.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Funmi discusses why successful eng leaders build true partnerships between engineering & business stakeholders (1:58)
• Navigating the dynamics of engineering & cross-functional team partnerships (3:00)
• Creating alignment / building relationships through fostering trust & curiosity (4:42)
• How engaging w/ curiosity is key to building cross-functional relationships (7:21)
• Funmi’s framework to help identify gaps in understanding (8:56)
• Recognizing knowledge gaps and relying on subject matter experts (10:15)
• Tips for navigating partnerships with multiple stakeholders (13:14)
• What’s going on with ELC New York & the power of connecting with eng leaders (14:45)
• Ketan discusses cloud transformation and AI integration (17:08)
• Considering challenges w/ security, scalability, cost, flexibility & AI in cloud vs. hybrid migrations (18:05)
• Explaining the impact of technical debt on organizations (20:04)
• The STIR framework for managing tech debt during cloud migrations (21:17)
• Translating tech debt into business value w/ STIR (24:16)
• Separating continuous improvement / performance from tech debt (27:00)
• Understanding team strengths & bolstering team motivation (29:21)
• Ketan’s experience with ELC London (30:55)
• Have fun with decision-making (33:17)
• Sasha discusses optimizing team processes amid company growth & new hires (34:06)
• Effective decision-making - balancing being decisive & thoughtful (37:36)
• Examples of balancing quick decision-making w/ thoughtfulness (39:05)
• How to refactor repetitive tasks to improve efficiency (40:32)
• Balancing time, risk & impact in decision-making processes (42:06)
• The value of building a network & finding mentors outside your own company (45:03)
• Advice for jumping into ELC community events (47:41)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT VINOD MARUR

Vinod Marur is the SVP of Engineering at Databricks. He was previously at Rubrik where he served as SVP Engineering and established a mature engineering organization geared for rapid product development and innovation with a deep focus on product quality and organizational development. Prior to that Vinod spent nearly 15 years in leadership roles across some of Google’s most critical business units, including Search, Ads, and Payments as well as tapping into his passion for developer platforms to create and lead the Actions on Google platform, used by third parties to develop for Google Assistant and other Google products.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• Vinod’s process for recalibrating his leadership focus / priorities (2:25)
• Why routine can be dangerous & the mental shift required to prioritize impact (4:17)
• Examples of pivoting & how Vinod’s leadership priorities adapted (7:57)
• Strategies for assessing core priorities when scaling (9:39)
• Identifying where the most leverage is for your time (11:05)
• Signals that it’s time to recalibrate your organization’s priorities (13:27)
• Solving for information asymmetry: designing communication and collaboration structures (16:20)
• Rewriting hiring playbooks & tailoring recruitment pitches in a shifting market (18:56)
• Hiring tactics that worked five years ago that don’t anymore (21:21)
• The impact of AI on hiring practices (22:55)
• Current factors impacting hiring engineering leaders (25:30)
• Vinod’s framework for identifying the right problems to solve when transitioning to a new role (27:14)
• “The best leaders often start small, and progress to tackle larger problems” (28:33)
• Strategies for accelerating the impact of senior cross-functional partners (29:40)
• Obsessing over a single organizational goal & identifying champions to carry initiatives forward (31:25)
• Vinod’s latest obsession: the implementation and evolution of operational reviews (33:48)
• Rapid fire questions (36:36)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• ACQUIRED - Acquired tells the stories and strategies of great companies, hosted by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Acquired is a depth-first show. Episodes are 3-4 hours long, and are better described as "conversational audiobooks" than "podcasts." Episodes occasionally feature guests, such as the founders/CEOs of NVIDIA, Berkshire Hathaway, Starbucks, Meta, Spotify, Uber, Zoom, CAA, Sequoia Capital, and all five Benchmark partners.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JON HYMAN

Jon Hyman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Braze, the customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. He leads the charge for building the platform’s technical systems and infrastructure as well as overseeing the company’s technical operations and engineering team.

Prior to Braze, Jon served as lead engineer for the Core Technology group at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. There, he managed a team that maintained 80+ software assets and was responsible for the security and stability of critical trading systems. Jon met cofounder Bill Magnuson during his time at Bridgewater, and together they won the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Jon is a recipient of the SmartCEO Executive Management Award in the CIO/CTO Category for New York. Jon holds a B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science.

ABOUT BRAZE

Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.™ Braze allows any marketer to collect and take action on any amount of data from any source, so they can creatively engage with customers in real time, across channels from one platform. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered experimentation and optimization, Braze enables companies to build and maintain absolutely engaging relationships with their customers that foster growth and loyalty. The company has been recognized as a 2024 U.S. News & World Report Best Companies to Work For, 2024 Best Small & Medium Workplaces in Europe by Great Place to Work®, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces for Women™ by Great Place to Work® and was named a Leader by Gartner® in the 2024 Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024.  Braze is headquartered in New York with 15 offices across North America, Europe, and APAC. Learn more at braze.com.

Join us at ELC Annual 2025

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

🔗 Get your ticket now → https://sfelc.com/annual2025

SHOW NOTES:

• What Jon learned from being the only person on call for his company’s first four years (2:56)
• Knowing when it’s time to get help managing your servers, ops, scaling, etc. (5:42)
• Establishing areas of product ownership & other scaling lessons from the early days (9:25)
• Frameworks for conversations on splitting of products across teams (12:00)
• The challenges, complexities & strategies behind assigning ownership in the early days (14:40)
• Founding Braze (18:01)
• Why Braze? The story & insights behind the original vision for Braze (20:08)
• Identifying Braze’s product market fit (22:34)
• Early-stage PMF challenges faced by Jon & his co-founders (25:40)
• Pivoting to focus on enterprise customers (27:48)
• “Let’s integrate the SDK right now” - founder-led sales ideas to validate your product (29:22)
• Behind the decision to hire a chief revenue officer for the first time (34:02)
• The evolution of enterprise & its impact on Braze’s product offering (36:42)
• Growing out of your early-stage failure modes (39:00)
• Why it’s important to make personnel decisions quickly (41:22)
• Setting & maintaining a vision pre IPO vs. post IPO (44:21)
• Jon’s next leadership evolution & growth areas he is focusing on (49:50)
• Rapid fire questions (52:53)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut’s fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rukmini Reddy is the Senior Vice President of Engineering, responsible for managing product and platform delivery, infrastructure, and data science. Reddy joins PagerDuty from Slack where she guided the vision, strategy, and execution of a comprehensive re-architecture, transforming the messaging software into an automation platform that empowered users to streamline their work.

Additionally, Rukmini spent over a decade in senior executive roles at various enterprise companies, where she built a strong track record in driving engineering and product strategy during periods of hyper-growth and product transformation across SaaS, B2B, and B2C business models.

Rukmini has a master of science degree in computer engineering from the University of Arkansas and earned a bachelor’s degree from Osmania University in computer science and engineering.

SHOW NOTES:

• How the role of engineering leadership has evolved from 2021 to 2025 (2:35)
• The rising importance of financial acumen & enduring importance of resilience in engineering leadership (5:28)
• Key questions to ground and align your team with mission, vision, customer impact, and position to win the market (7:04)
• What it means to become the leader your business needs (9:31)
• “Hugging the elephant” and overcoming fear & uncertainty in 2021 vs. today (12:26)
• Five questions to help you lead your team through transitions and change (16:03)
• How to incorporate this framework to drive org change with empathy (18:10)
• How to address questions about job security and future roles within an organization (20:21)
• Strategies to guide your team through unspoken fears & unknowns (23:47)
• Rukmini’s advice to create high-trust, high-impact sources of support through fear, uncertainty, and doubt for the first time (25:19)
• Navigating org change from first principles (27:21)
• How to move from the “informed pessimism” dip to “curious optimism” as a team & org (30:00)
• Using evangelism & experimentation to tackle common adoption fears (34:07)
• Examples of enablement & skill development / delivery (37:32)
• The role of enforcement in the adoption transformation curve (39:07)
• Rapid fire questions (42:33)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters -Richard P. Rumelt clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Eliot Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of Viam, an engineering platform unlocking AI, automation, and data for devices in the physical world. With a deep commitment to advancing technology, Eliot leads Viam in helping companies build solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate, marine, industrial manufacturing, and more.

A career software developer and technology leader, Eliot co-founded MongoDB in 2007, writing the core code base for the pioneering database and leading the engineering and product teams for 13 years as CTO. MongoDB, which went public in 2017, has since reached a market cap of over $20 billion. Before MongoDB, he co-founded the ecommerce company ShopWiki and served as CTO, and he began his career in software development in the R&D group of adtech firm DoubleClick.

Eliot is passionate about using technology to address pressing societal issues, including working with WAVS to protect marine life in the North Atlantic and supporting Billion Oyster Project’s work to help restore New York Harbor’s ecosystem.

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of founding Viam (2:56)
• How Viam can be a game-changing platform, accelerating robotics software & hardware 10x to 100x (4:33)
• The ideation journey behind Viam: Building a platform that simplifies the integration of hardware and software development (6:11)
• Solving challenges with seamless APIs, a modular system, the right abstraction layers, and a comprehensive platform (9:54)
• Key questions for identifying the right abstraction layers at Viam (11:32)
• Optimizing your platform for flexibility and ease of use (13:32)
• The evolution of product building, from first-hand experience to customer-driven (16:33)
• How Eliot’s MongoDB Experience shaped Viam’s user-centric approach, open-source strategy, business model & ecosystem approach (18:48)
• Cultivating developer communities & leveraging community insights at MongoDB & Viam (23:01)
• Frameworks for deciding on your business model & pricing (24:52)
• Eliot’s approach to building developer tools & products used by engineers (26:23)
• Aligning your eng team & stakeholders on the product vision (29:51)
• What it means to deeply understand engineers and how they interact with your product (31:10)
• Strategies for eng leaders to better connect with customers (34:38)
• Viam’s real-world applications & what’s next (36:31)
• Rapid fire questions (39:31)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Viam - At Viam, we believe in the power of technology to make our world smarter, happier, and more sustainable. We're building a revolutionary engineering platform for problem-solving in the physical world, so that innovators from all disciplines can address humanity's most complex challenges with practical solutions. Together with our partners, we're committed to making a lasting positive impact on industries, communities, and the planet.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Kevin Stewart is an engineering executive focused on building teams to build products. He has helped shape the engineering culture at a number of startups, digital agencies and cloud companies. Kevin is particularly experienced in leading remote and distributed teams to consistently deliver quality products. Although he currently resides in Seattle, Kevin is a lifelong New Yorker with dreams of relocating to a sunny island in the Caribbean.

SHOW NOTES:

• Determining what you think is broken vs. what is actually broken (2:57)
• Focusing on the root issues around leadership & decision-making (4:46)
• Strategies for identifying the root cause of what is broken (9:08)
• A framework for diagnosing issues, making a compelling case to stakeholders, and driving high-impact change (10:59)
• Factors that impact decision making authority on your teams (13:53)
• Signals that your org faces learned helplessness & how to override it (16:13)
• Kevin’s advice for leaders who realize they contribute to a fearful environment (18:26)
• Kevin’s journey @ Splice and aligning personal values with the company mission (21:02)
• Challenges behind new strategy rollouts and the need for a customer-centric “north star” (26:26)
• Witnessing the emotional impact of your product on customers (29:44)
• Repetition is key when it comes to reinforcing your org’s vision (30:48)
• Prioritizing your time & resources between strategic and tactical work (32:32)
• Frameworks for aggressively auditing your calendar (35:47)
• How to empower your team and delegate. so they can operate autonomously and you can shift your focus to strategy and business objectives (37:37)
• Rapid fire questions (41:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant - Tae Kim’s deeply reported business history of the chip-designer Nvidia—from its founding in 1993 to its recent emergence as one of the most valuable corporations in the world—explaining how the company’s culture, overseen by cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang, has powered its incredible success.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maher Hanafi is a seasoned technology engineering leader, driving digital transformation and delivering impactful SaaS solutions. As Senior Vice President of Engineering at Betterworks, he leads the AI vision and applications for their AI-powered performance management software, overseeing the integration of AI tools that enhance HR functions like performance reviews, goal setting and employee development.

Maher's passion for technology centers on the transformative potential of AI, particularly Generative AI. He views it as a powerful tool capable of learning, adapting and solving real-world problems, and champions its responsible development to empower individuals.

Maher's vision extends beyond technology, aiming to revolutionize tech workplaces by fostering human potential alongside cutting-edge solutions. He employs a people-centric leadership style, building collaborative environments that empower teams to excel. This commitment to empowerment extends to mentoring fellow engineering leaders and sharing his knowledge through public speaking.

ABOUT COREY COTO

Corey Coto is a creative, data-driven, and innovative executive. He founded Kaizen Insights to help enterprises create business intelligence with their people. Corey was SVP of Product, Design and Engineering at a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company and held engineering leadership roles at Amazon, CoStar Group, and Liberty Mutual. He is a Founder Institute Mentor, an ELC Seattle Chapter Lead, and a startup advisor. Software is his favorite artistic medium because of its power to quickly move the needle on big ideas that can benefit people and the planet. He believes there has never been a better time to build. The future is bright!

SHOW NOTES:

• When Maher realized he needed to rethink his approach to AI & upskill quickly (3:38)
• Milestones across Maher’s AI knowledge progression (7:42)
• Set aside time for your eng team to experiment & apply AI learnings (11:09)
• Why intentionally building different use cases leads to better outcomes (14:22)
• The importance of revisiting AI decisions as a team (16:53)
• Frameworks for determining how deep to go into each learning area (19:37)
• How to navigate the challenges of going from proof of concept to production (22:43)
• Evaluating the ROI of AI applications (26:47)
• Strategies for deciding which resources / operating expenses go toward AI use cases (29:24)
• Tips for developing stakeholder confidence in your AI strategy (32:36)
• How non-technical experts can build AI awareness & confidence (36:22)
• Betterworks’ AI roadmap for 2025 (38:48)
• Rapid fire questions (40:58)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Daniel H. Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jim Palmer is the Chief AI Officer at Dialpad. Previously he was CTO and Co-Founder of TalkIQ, a conversational intelligence start-up with expertise in real-time speech recognition and natural language processing, acquired by Dialpad in May of 2018. Prior to TalkIQ, he was the founding engineer on the eBay Now local delivery service.

SHOW NOTES:

• Tips and cheat codes for navigating AI governance (3:30)
• Breaking down red teaming & adversarial testing in AI governance (8:02)
• Launching and scaling adversarial testing efforts (11:27)
• Unexpected benefits unlocked with adversarial testing (13:43)
• Understanding data governance and strategic AI investments (15:38)
• Building resilient AI from concept to customer validation (19:28)
• Exploring early feature validation and pattern recognition in AI (22:38)
• Adaptability in data management and ensuring safe, ethical data use while adapting to evolving legal and governance requirements (26:51)
• How to prepare data for safe and sustainable long-term use (30:02)
• Strategies for compliant data practices in a regulated world (32:43)
• Building data deletion systems with model training in mind (35:14)
• Current events and trends shaping adaptability and durability in the AI ecosystem (38:38)
• The role of a Chief AI Officer (41:20)
• Rapid fire questions (44:35)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World - With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

James Campbell is the co-founder and CTO at Great Expectations, the leading open-source data quality product. Prior to his life at a startup, James spent nearly 15 years working across a variety of quantitative and qualitative analytic roles in the US intelligence community, ultimately serving as Chief Data Scientist at CIA. He studied Math and Philosophy at Yale, and international security at Georgetown. He is passionate about creating tools that help communicate uncertainty and build intuition about complex systems.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Great Expectations & James’ founding journey (3:28)
• Pitching / validating your idea through community (6:24)
• Transitioning from federal government to co-founder of a company (9:20)
• Recommendations when considering the founder / collaboration path (11:30)
• James’ experience starting with open source & getting 10k stars on GitHub (13:15)
• Engaging with your audience to drive growth & share your product’s message (15:17)
• How open source impacts Great Expectations’ marketing / communication (16:58)
• Navigating the tension between product vision & product roadmap (19:21)
• Where that tension showed up in Great Expectations’ early days (22:11)
• Capturing & synthesizing insights from your users (23:54)
• Strategies for removing biases from product-related decisions (25:37)
• Finding the balance between your perspective & community insights (27:13)
• James’ perspective on different levels of product analysis (29:54)
• Lessons learned from Great Expectations’ phase changes (31:22)
• Takeaways from the org’s latest experience / transition (34:51)
• Defining the “Heilmeier Catechism” & how it impacts James’ leadership style (37:07)
• Rapid fire questions (40:40)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• CIA Guide to Analytic Tradecraft - Primer published by the CIA to assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence.
• American Prometheus - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. is Field CTO and Head of Strategy at VAST Data and has 20+ years of experience in data, analytics, engineering, and consulting. Adept at assisting organizations in deriving value from a data-driven culture, she has successfully led diverse data, engineering, and analytics teams through the development of complex global data management solutions and architecting enterprise data systems. Her demonstrated excellence in data, engineering, analytics, and diversity leadership makes her a trusted senior advisor among executives. An experienced speaker, author, valued mentor and startup advisor, Colleen holds degrees in astrophysics and lives in Massachusetts.

ABOUT JIM LIU

Jim Liu is an accomplished engineering leader with a track record of driving business outcomes at companies like StockX and Nordstrom. He is also an active community builder with Engineering Leader Community and Angel Investor communities. Jim and his family reside in Seattle, WA.

ABOUT DIVYA ALAVARTHI

Divya Alavarthi is an experienced engineering and business leader with 14+ years of expertise in architecture, engineering, product delivery, pre-sales, professional services, and organizational leadership. She developed Salesforce Platform architecture standards, best practices, and minimal viable architectures. She supported a talent pool of 5000+ architects and developers resulting in improved strategic agility, speed to market, and business value in large-scale multi-cloud implementations.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• The importance of leadership in hiring (1:29)
• The Tartow Method Explained: Key aspects of a successful hiring practice (3:57)
• How to build out the interview process & ask the right questions (6:14)
• Behavioral Interviews and good responses: Tips for gaining clarity from interviewees on abstract skills (7:52)
• Where eng leaders can start building their hiring skill set (9:16)
• Colleen’s experience co-leading ELC Boston & advice for 1st time event attendees (10:36)
• Understanding how to model problems as engineering challenges (14:41)
• How to use an engineering mindset to tackle personal problems (16:35)
• Jim’s process for deconstructing problems & solving them like an engineer (18:38)
• Tips for building / applying your skill set around abstracting problems (21:27)
• Jim’s perspective on getting involved with a local ELC community (24:36)
• Ways to help make the most out of your first ELC local experience (27:05)
• Divya shares about the power of storytelling in engineering leadership (30:07)
• Build the narrative about your product’s business impact (32:24)
• An example of bringing different demos & storytelling together (34:09)
• Frameworks for effective storytelling: build a narrative around a product / demo (36:16)
• How to start improving your storytelling today (37:35)
• Divya’s favorite moments with the ELC Seattle chapter & how to get involved (39:42)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Check out all of our local chapters & get involved here: elc.community/home/clubs

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A dynamic approach to tech innovation, security, sustainability, and developer empowerment can be seen in everything David Mytton touches. As co-founder of Console and host of the Console DevTools Podcast, he delights in keeping developers ahead of the curve with the tools they need the most. As the founder of Server Density (acquired by StackPath), he created a product that helped organizations manage mission-critical IT environments. As a sustainable computing researcher at Oxford and a global green tech speaker, he’s brought much-needed attention to the impact of cloud emissions and the water and energy consumption of the data centers that fuel our online lives. Now, as founder and CEO of Arcjet, he’s helping developers and businesses protect their apps with just a few lines of code. His professional career is a direct reflection of his relentless pursuit of making tech smarter and greener. How he invests his spare time showcases his unwavering commitment to mentoring developers and building the communities they need to succeed.

SHOW NOTES:

• David’s founder journey, starting with Server Density (3:20)
• Behind the early decision to start a company & start building a product (4:50)
• Key lessons from bootstrapping, raising funding, and being acquired (8:30)
• How those early lessons shaped Arcjet & Console (10:30)
• Why VC money can make finding experienced engineers easier (13:16)
• Strategies to help early teams build their first product / prototype (14:56)
• Considering company outcomes: Should you build a company just to sell it? (16:23)
• Signals that it’s the right time for a sale / acquisition (18:14)
• The story behind Arcjet (20:30)
• “What makes a great DevTool company” & strategic insights that shaped Arcjet (23:37)
• Key practices that helped shape Arcjet’s GTM plan (25:36)
• David’s approach to experimentation and discovery (27:36)
• The impact of documentation on dev tool companies (31:35)
• How discovery pathways for dev tools impact sales (33:28)
• Making the decision-making process easier for users & buyers (35:01)
• Translating dev tool benefits for finance teams vs. developers (39:56)
• The impact of design on dev tool companies (42:37)
• Rapid fire questions (46:02)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• David’s reading list
• a16z Blog
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
• The Lessons of History - In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of "The Story of Civilization." The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Melody Meckfessel is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Jasper.ai, the world’s leading AI marketing platform. In her role, Melody shapes the technical vision of the company, oversees product delivery, and spearheads AI research to develop new capabilities that accelerate business outcomes for enterprise marketers.

Before joining Jasper.ai, Melody co-founded and served as CEO of Observable, a data visualization platform that empowers teams to understand their businesses through data. She also spent over a decade at Google as Vice President of Engineering, where she led core infrastructure, Search, and DevOps teams for Google and Google Cloud Platform, impacting millions of users worldwide.

Melody is recognized for her hands-on approach to engineering leadership and her expertise in building large-scale distributed systems. Her work is crucial in solving complex problems at scale for enterprise companies. She is passionate about defining the future of work with AI, where humans come first.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• Melody’s perspective on the tech industry’s rapid rate of change right now (2:53)
• Critical questions to guide investment decisions on “what to build & how“ in a rapidly evolving market (5:57)
• Strategies for navigating rapid change internally within eng teams (10:07)
• What it means to be an AI-first engineering organization (12:30)
• Changes in goals, metrics, and processes to shape your org and guide you through rapid change (15:33)
• Developing agile communication processes (18:39)
• Navigating ambiguity as a learned skill - practical ways to strengthen your ability to navigate uncertainty (20:09)
• Implementing a framework of curiosity & openness within eng teams (22:40)
• Why great things can’t be planned (26:21)
• Becoming dynamic and resilient - how to thrive amid uncertainty and constant industry shifts (28:57)
• How to shift from prescriptive to inspirational - using illustrated inspiration to empower teams (32:00)
• Breaking through self-imposed limitations - understanding where eng leaders may limit themselves (33:48)
• Melody’s perspective on fostering a culture of creativity within eng teams (35:06)
• Rapid fire questions (37:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO - John McMahon shares valuable lessons for sales leaders and sales reps selling enterprise software solutions. In a conversational and easy to read narrative style, this must-read book provides learnings on how sales leaders can help their reps sell more for higher average deal sizes to executive level buyers.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Andy Kortz is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Integra Testing, where he leads technology transformation and drives operational efficiency in aggressive growth organizations. Andy also is a co-lead for the ELC Local Chapter initiative in Chicago. With over 20 years of experience in enterprise architecture and software development, Andy has consistently delivered innovative solutions while reducing IT expenses and improving application value. Drawing on his expertise in cloud technologies, data solutions, and integrations, Andy focuses on fostering a culture of continuous learning, building and empowering high-performing teams, and delivering customer-centric solutions in fast-paced environments.

ABOUT JAMES TYACK

James Tyack leads the Learner Success team at Coursera, creating engaging and personalized learning experiences for millions of learners worldwide. An avid user of Coursera and a lifelong learner himself, James is passionate about leveraging technology, including AI, to transform lives through education. Prior to Coursera, he led integration and growth teams at PagerDuty, driving innovation and adoption of incident response tools and best practices.

Beyond his professional work, James is the chapter lead for the South Bay Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) group, fostering collaboration among tech leaders. He is also a proud dad to a one-year-old, balancing his career and personal life with a deep commitment to growth and connection.

ABOUT JOHN ROSS

John Ross is the Director of Infrastructure and Cloud at KUBRA, expertly navigating IT infrastructure and cloud solutions. Based in Toronto, John's career showcases a diverse range of experiences from large corporations to dynamic startups. He has a knack for aligning technology with business objectives, building robust teams, and managing platform migrations to the cloud. With experience in leading industry names like Ingram Micro and Symantec, as well as in the telecommunications sector, John combines strategic insight with a personable approach. His passion for sailing mirrors his love for innovation and precision in professional pursuits.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• Scaling communication practices in parallel with scaling your org with Andy Kortz (1:18)
• Tools for bridging communication gaps between groups & building trust (2:49)
• Use humor strategically to break tension / build trust (5:16)
• Andy’s introduction to ELC Chicago & the best parts of that community (8:57)
• Engineering challenges / conversations from ELC Chicago (10:24)
• What engineering leaders can learn from the best online courses - making a “Day One” commitment with James Tyack (12:28)
• Frameworks for putting the “Day One” commitment into practice (14:49)
• What making a “Day One” commitment looks like @ Coursera (17:59)
• Why the commitment needs to be made explicit (19:25)
• Practical exercises to encourage innovation & foster creativity (21:06)
• Strategies for getting hands-on with your learning (23:10)
• James’s experience with ELC South Bay & connecting with leaders in a specific space (25:05)
• How to make the most out of attending your first ELC event (26:27)
• How to level up your teams through servant leadership with John Ross (27:52)
• Realizing you’re the bottleneck & tips for stepping back / increasing team trust (30:49)
• John’s experience with ELC Toronto & what ELC means to him (33:12)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Check out all of our local chapters & get involved here: elc.community/home/clubs

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create, and build together.

With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early-stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information.

Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family.

SHOW NOTES:

• A current update on Google Workspace (2:46)
• Strategies for getting teams to faster iteration & execution (4:41)
• Prioritizing the right problems & how to set a unified vision to work toward (7:11)
• Questions to ask to help rationalize during prioritization conversations (10:48)
• Components of streamlining the decision-making process (13:33)
• Anurag’s recommendations for facilitating decision-making conversations (15:00)
• How to encourage your team to ask the right questions & push back (16:55)
• Frameworks for identifying areas of inefficiency / friction (20:17)
• Steps for increasing confidence on the front end for an AI product experience (23:38)
• Filtering insights for faster iteration on AI product concepts (25:59)
• Measure user impact & make adjustments quickly based on that feedback (27:38)
• Reducing barriers to feature discovery (29:33)
• Enabling discovery & engagement of new product experiences (32:05)
• The role of pilots when testing different product experience changes (35:17)
• The future product launches Anurag is most excited (39:10)
• Rapid fire questions (40:36)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Google AI is now included, with no add-ons required or usage limits, in Workspace Business and Enterprise plans. Find out more: https://goo.gle/3PsIwf1
• How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen - Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, David Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to helping readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT KATHRYN VANDIVER

With over 30 years of experience as a global engineering leader, Kathryn has guided companies ranging from agile startups to Fortune 500 enterprises toward growth and scalability in both B2B and B2C technology areas. She has held leadership roles at VMWare, HPE, NetApp, and Quanata, a State Farm Company. Specializing in engineering and team culture turnarounds, she frequently steps in to provide decisive leadership during periods of transition. Kathryn is committed to valuing every team member's unique contributions, actively seeking the perspectives of both influencers and naysayers to foster positive change. Her collaborative approach has consistently helped teams double or even triple business growth, significantly enhancing company value through successful turnarounds.

Passionate about 'paying it forward,' Kathryn mentors, teaches leadership skills, and supports young women in tech on their career journeys. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking the trails of the Bay Area and spending quality time with her family.

SHOW NOTES:

• Shifting from projects to people - dissecting the mindset shift from IC to engineering manager (2:21)
• What makes the transition from IC to EM challenging (5:05)
• Taking on informal EM responsibilities vs. a formalized role (8:13)
• Frameworks for building trust through early conversations (10:13)
• Tips for approaching the scenario of a resistant / combative team (12:15)
• Transforming teams during an M&A, from competition to collaboration (14:20)
• Why listening is key to changing hearts & minds as an eng leader (17:34)
• Practices to help people get unstuck in their perspective (20:50)
• Questions to help people uncover where they’re stuck & think critically (23:13)
• Kathryn’s approach to identifying criteria for success (24:30)
• How to determine what the endpoint looks like (26:27)
• Processes for creating collective agreements of how people operate (28:18)
• Identifying the expectations your team has of you as a leader (31:58)
• Common areas of friction when creating these collective agreements (33:46)
• Steps leaders can take to resolve friction within the agreement process (35:13)
• Signs that your collective agreement practice is successful (36:38)
• Rapid fire questions (40:01)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Super Psyched: Unleash the Power of the 4 Types of Connection and Live the Life You Love - Connection is everything. Let Adam Dorsay, the leading therapist to Silicon Valley’s top executives, help you become super psyched by discovering your personalized formula for more energy, higher performance, better relationships, and a more meaningful life.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT JAMES BIRCHLER

James Birchler is an engineering and product development leader, technical advisor, and an accredited Executive Coach from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Executive Coaching Institute.

In his coaching practice, James focuses on self-awareness, integrity, accountability, and fostering a growth mindset that supports continuous learning and high performance.

He focuses his technical advisory practice on common mechanisms and playbooks required at different phases and inflection points of startup growth and scaling: Hiring and interviewing, product development methodologies including Lean Startup and Agile, operational meeting cadence and communication flow, people management, technical leadership, vision/mission development, alignment, and execution.

James implemented the Lean Startup methodologies with Eric Ries at IMVU (literally the first Lean Startup), where his team helped start the DevOps movement by building the infrastructure to ship code to production 50 times a day (which was a lot at the time!) and coining the term “continuous deployment.”

He has more than 20 years of experience leading high-performance teams in growth environments, including startups and scaled organizations, including Amazon. He has delivered great consumer software products and implemented product development and innovation processes based on continuous learning and improvement.

Presently James advises and coaches Series A+ startups in the US and Europe, and leads innovation practices in hyper-growth areas of last mile delivery technology for Amazon. Previously my roles included VP of Engineering & Operations, VP of Engineering, and Founder at several technology startups including IMVU, Caffeine.tv, SmugMug, iCracked, The Arts Coop, and Letters & Science.

You can find James at jamesbirchler.com, LinkedIn, and Substack.

SHOW NOTES:

• Highlights from James’ recent coaching & mentoring workshop (2:41)
• Shared challenges around building trust in eng teams (5:25)
• The differences between coaching vs. mentoring (7:01)
• Building trust in order to best support your team members as a manager (9:38)
• Defining the advising mode of coaching (11:54)
• How supporting differs from advising (14:29)
• The story behind James’ technical leadership journey (16:55)
• Transitioning from a PhD program & environmental planning career into tech (20:19)
• The dilemma of career growth: linear leadership growth vs. exponential company growth (23:53)
• Why organizational challenges are more complicated than technical puzzles (26:49)
• Navigating career growth during company contraction from the employee perspective (28:02)
• Preparing for uncomfortable conversations as a coach / manager (31:50)
• Strategies for actually having those tough conversations (35:36)
• Frameworks for helping others identify what they want (37:58)
• Rapid fire questions (42:44)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Stop 'Coaching' Your Tech Team (And What To Do Instead) - James’ substack post on the four modes of development breaking down the core differences of coaching, advising, mentoring, and supporting roles and explaining how trust is the secret ingredient to all four.
• jamesbirchler.com - James’ website where you can find info about his executive coaching and resources for engineering leaders and founders.
• How to lead with radical candor | Kim Scott - NYT bestselling author, Kim Scott, has cracked the code on giving valuable feedback in a way that builds genuine relationships, drives results, and creates positive workplaces.
• What Are People For? - In the twenty-two essays collected here, Wendell Berry conveys a deep concern for the American economic system and the gluttonous American consumer. Berry talks to the reader as one would talk to a next-door neighbor: never preachy, he comes across as someone offering sound advice. In the end, these essays offer rays of hope in an otherwise bleak forecast of America's future. Berry's program presents convincing steps for America's agricultural and cultural survival.
• New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That's Got It Wrong - Happiness expert Stephanie Harrison draws upon hundreds of studies to offer a life-changing guide to finding the happiness you have been looking for, all based on a decade of research and brought to life with beautiful artwork.
• Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations - Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance—and what drives it—using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance.
• Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour - Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick--a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT NATALIE GLANCE

Natalie is a lifelong learner and seasoned leader with extensive experience at startups and established companies. She’s currently the Chief Engineering Officer at Duolingo.

At Duolingo, Natalie ensures engineers can help set product direction and strategy. She’s championed a culture of extensive A/B testing, and is excited about the ways generative AI can both build new features and accelerate content creation for these features. She oversees many of the efforts dedicated to scaling Duolingo’s technology to new subjects, like Math and Music.

Natalie is passionate about mentorship and education. She co-founded the Int’l AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), which offers an annual Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award for a promising young independent researcher in the field of computational social science in the early stage of their career.

SHOW NOTES:

• Natalie’s eng leadership background & journey scaling Duolingo (2:41)
• Duolingo’s approach to eng leadership & passion for unleashing potential (5:42)
• Implementing a mentoring program to improve eng development / retention (6:42)
• How the mentoring process changes as an org scales (8:51)
• Duolingo’s onboarding process & tips for building an onboarding program (10:12)
• Ways Duolingo has crafted a successful internship program (12:43)
• Frameworks for intern hosts to collect meaningful projects for interns (15:38)
• Behind the Thrive intern program (HootCamp) for rising juniors (17:44)
• How Duolingo’s guiding principles drive Duolingo University (21:08)
• Strategies for upskilling new grads into strong technical contributors (22:13)
• Best practices for unlocking potential & contributing to people’s growth (25:40)
• Natalie’s approach to balancing meaningful work with measurable impact (26:44)
• Practices for creating alignment within your org (28:30)
• Duolingo’s thought process for role training & growing leaders (30:44)
• Breaking down the formal & informal steps for building leaders within the org (32:41)
• Essential skills for role managers to develop (34:22)
• Addressing challenges faced by managers of managers (36:47)
• Rapid fire questions (38:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership - Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy.”

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT RONG YAN

Rong Yan is HeyGen’s Chief Technology Officer. He brings the company's technological mission of making visual storytelling accessible to everyone, to life. Rong has nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience from companies including IBM, Facebook, Square, Snap, and HubSpot.

Most recently, Rong was the VP of Engineering at Hubspot where he led the Data Intelligence and Automation product line and spearheaded the development of an intelligent CRM platform using data and AI. He was also the Director of Engineering turned Senior Director of Engineering at Snap, where he led a product engineering team of over 250 engineers across six locations, responsible for developing, optimizing, and maintaining core Snapchat features, including Camera, Messaging, Stories, Discover, Memories, and Identity.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

SHOW NOTES:

• Introducing HeyGen’s interactive avatar & what this means for eng leaders (3:40)
• How a visual layer for AI agents could scale your leadership & build alignment in your teams and orgs (5:58)
• The different levels of communication flow within a company (8:17)
• How interactive avatars can enable interactions and coaching at scale (10:46)
• The possibilities of interactive avatars for personalized coaching, habit building, and behavior change (14:02)
• Insights on building an AI-first company (20:29)
• What the structure of an AI-first company looks like (22:05)
• How leading with speed works within an AI-first company (24:10)
• Navigating the balance between product velocity & quality (27:23)
• The impact of the “leading with speed” paradigm on hiring (30:34)
• The role of an engineering leaders is to be a productivity multiplier (32:40)
• How AI impacts productivity as an eng leader (34:43)
• Where to start when it comes to improving productivity (36:38)
• AI’s role in blurring the lines between IC & management (39:48)
• Spend more time on your top people (42:45)
• Rapid fire questions (44:21)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• HeyGen - With HeyGen, businesses can simply write their script and generate their video. No camera, no budget, no headaches. We've helped over 45,000 companies and millions of people create, localize, and personalize videos at scale.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT RAJASHREE PIMPALKHAREE

Rajashree is the VP / Engineering leader for Unified Builder platform and experiences - the world's most flexible customer engagement platform, that powers customer facing sales and service teams with the context, data, and channel flexibility they need to turn ordinary conversations into opportunities to drive repeat sales.

Previously, Rajashree led product development at Quizlet - the popular student application that helps over 60 million learners worldwide every month study, practice and become an expert in whatever they are learning. Prior to Quizlet, Rajashree led engineering for Intuit’s 3rd party Developer Platform and app store – enabling a thriving ecosystem of thousands of small business applications that connect to Intuit’s QuickBooks Platform. Prior to Intuit, she held several engineering leadership roles at PayPal building innovative global payment products for consumers and merchants. Rajashree started her career at Intel as a design engineer and subsequently worked on industry changing software solutions for semiconductor chip design at Synopsys.

Rajashree is passionate about building purpose-driven teams that exhibit engineering excellence, customer-first thinking and an inclusive culture. She is a strong advocate for women and under-represented minorities in technology; and takes a personal interest in coaching and mentoring talent at all levels to balance the playing field and help them grow in their careers.

Rajashree received a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland, Baltimore.

SHOW NOTES:

• Why engineering’s role in the business varies across industries (2:21)
• Finding a seat at the business table & elevating the strategic role of engineering (5:32)
• How Rajashree’s experiences shape her approach as an eng leader (8:54)
• Strategies for unlocking product / business leaders’ creativity (11:53)
• Shifting from a “no, that won’t work” to “yes, and here’s how” mindset (14:13)
• Rajashree’s experience in her global services role (16:46)
• Lessons learned on solving problems for different customers (19:52)
• Insights on scaling & productizing (21:17)
• Deconstructing the concept of learned helplessness in eng orgs (23:13)
• Frameworks for helping overcome learned helplessness (26:29)
• Communication practices for eng leaders to frame their decision-making (28:53)
• Improve your ability to ask better questions & improve dialogue bandwidth (32:16)
• Rapid fire questions (35:20)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - Colin Bryar started at Amazon in 1998; Bill Carr joined in 1999. These two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT GOKUL RAJARAM

Gokul Rajaram is an investor and company helper. He serves on the boards on Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. Most recently, he was an executive at DoorDash, a food ordering platform. Prior to DoorDash, he worked at Block as Product Engineering Lead, where he led several product development teams and served on Block’s executive team. Prior to Block, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook, where he helped Facebook transition its advertising business to become mobile-first. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch the product and grow it into a substantial portion of Google’s business. Gokul is also on the board of The Trade Desk and Coinbase. Gokul holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he received the President's Gold Medal for being class valedictorian. He also holds an M.B.A. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he received the MCD University Fellowship.

SHOW NOTES:

• Why it’s critical for eng leaders to drive business outcomes (2:04)
• How to shift your leadership to impact organizational changes (4:18)
• Facilitating conversations around setting numerical / time-driven goals (6:56)
• Navigating the shift to a customer-centric structure & approach (9:18)
• Recommendations for building around this customer-oriented model (12:04)
• Decision-making strategies when approaching customer outcomes (13:25)
• Understand the role of confidence in the decision-making process (15:40)
• Challenges faced by eng leaders when making this customer-centric shift (18:06)
• How eng leaders can introduce / reinforce accountability in eng orgs (20:11)
• Bridging the gap between PMs & eng leaders (23:07)
• Challenges / dysfunctions that prevent product & engineering alignment (25:01)
• Establishing trust, open dialogue, and mutual respect from the get-go (26:39)
• Communication frameworks that increase alignment between product & eng (32:39)
• How eng leaders can better approach “move fast & break things” demand (35:37)
• Rapid fire questions (40:19)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Gokul’s website - Contains a collection of Gokul’s writing that covers a wide range of topics related to product development, hiring, strategy, leadership, and more!
• The Mistborn Saga - Brandon Sanderson’s high fantasy saga which chronicles the efforts of a secret group of Allomancers who attempt to overthrow a dystopian empire and establish themselves in a world covered by ash.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT RYAN FOX

Ryan Fox is the CTO at Super.com, an all-in-one app that has helped millions of customers save, earn and put over $150 million back in their pockets. Previously, Ryan worked as both a SWE and SRE at Google.

SHOW NOTES:

• Ryan’s background / experience with Super.com (2:04)
• What sparked his transition from VP of Engineering to CTO (3:40)
• How Ryan tackled creating his own job description (5:50)
• Strategies for prioritizing responsibilities & developing a “not to do” list (8:20)
• Process for defining what not to do (9:32)
• Examples of building buy in for a “not to do” responsibility (11:45)
• Insights on prioritizing company wide outcomes vs. departmental outcomes (13:33)
• Transitioning from a department head to coaching other department leaders (15:26)
• Components of a successful coaching conversation about strategic thinking (18:48)
• Frameworks for instilling accountability & autonomy in department heads (21:25)
• Understanding situational leadership & S3 / S4 definitions (23:08)
• Incorporating mission-aligned teams into the engineering organization (25:37)
• Why the MAT leader focuses on business, not people aspects (27:52)
• Elements that contribute to the MAT model’s success (29:32)
• The intersection of MAT & functional leadership (32:04)
• Ryan’s advice to leaders new to the MAT approach (34:20)
• Rapid fire questions (36:29)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• MAT Resource Guide - A guide to understand the Mission-Aligned Team organizational structure, how Super.com rolled out MATs, and how such a structure may be able to help your organization.
• All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, the show features insider takes on business, technology, and society and interviews with the world's most influential thinkers.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT NICK HURLBURT

Nick Hurlburt is the Executive Director of the Aselo program at Tech Matters, a nonprofit with a mission to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity. Aselo is an open source contact center platform used by crisis helplines in over 15 countries. After completing an MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Nick began his career developing early, large-scale AI software at Amazon. He then spent six years overseas working on conflict relief efforts in Burma and South Sudan before returning to the U.S., where he managed software teams at a San Francisco machine learning startup before building the initial version of Aselo as Tech Matters’ first engineer. He gets excited about systems thinking, understanding different cultures, and walking through forests reminiscent of his rural Wisconsin childhood.

ABOUT MANJU ABRAHAM

Manju Abraham was VP of Engineering for Primary Storage products at HPE. She has over 25 years of experience leading Engineering organizations to deliver enterprise products of high quality, building, scaling and leading transformation, as an effective change catalyst, across companies like HPE, Delphix, NetApp, HP etc.

ABOUT BHUPESH BANSAL

Entrepreneur and technical leader passionate about making a positive impact in the world. 18+ years track record of building teams, large-scale distributed systems, and consumer products scaling to 100M+ users.

SHOW NOTES:

• Why it’s important to incorporate non-eng principles into engineering (1:52)
• Don't run if the people can't run (4:20)
• The importance of iterating & identifying patterns that work (5:57)
• Nick’s ELC Annual 2024 highlights (7:35)
• Advice for first-time attendees to get the most out of ELC Annual (8:10)
• Challenges around cultural transformations (9:33)
• How transformations incorporate structure & order (11:35)
• Manju’s experience at / takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 (15:14)
• Advice for folks on how to get the most out of an experience like this (18:19)
• Bhupesh’s roundtable on managing yourself & learning to let go (20:17)
• When Bhupesh started to embody the principle of managing yourself (21:52)
• Frameworks for making the shift to identifying yourself as a leader (24:17)
• Top ways you can invest in yourself & final takeaways (26:27)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT SCOTT SWEDBERG

Scott Swedberg is CEO & Founder of The Job Sauce, a boutique recruiting firm for high-growth companies. He founded The Job Sauce as a career coaching company, and partners with ELC to support engineering leaders in their careers and talent acquisition. He and his wife, Lauryn, live in Denver with their daughter and cat.

ABOUT ERIC FETTNER

Eric Fettner is co-founder of The Job Sauce, a high-touch recruiting firm serving Seed through pre-IPO startups. After helping launch the most successful vertical at Eventbrite (IPO September 2018), Eric was ready to take on something new. He began by building The Job Sauce as the premier provider of career services for tech workers. This focus on candidate experience revealed the horrible experience most recruiting firms provide, leading to the birth and success of The Job Sauce Recruiting, trusted by top startups funded by top VCs.

ABOUT LAWRENCE BRUHMULLER

Lawrence Bruhmuller is currently the SVP of Engineering at Great Expectations, the open-source data quality solution used by thousands of data engineers in the industry. He has over 12 years of experience as an overall head of engineering, mostly focused on growth-stage startups. Previous roles include CTO roles at Pave and Optimizely, and VPE roles at WeWork, ClearSlide, and Symantec.

Lawrence has been a part of small startups and also larger companies, and has developed products for individual users and also the world’s largest enterprises. In particular, he has focused on delivering cloud-first products in the B2B application and developer tooling spaces.

Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership (https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time.

Lawrence holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Amy, and their three daughters.

SHOW NOTES:

• What brought Scott Swedberg to ELC Annual 2024 & how he supports eng leaders (3:12)
• Summarizing Scott’s ELC Annual roundtable discussion on career growth (5:39)
• Understanding how trends shift as technology evolves & investor priorities pivot (9:01)
• Final takeaways on exploring career growth & next steps (11:26)
• Eric Fettner & Lawrence Bruhmuller explain their recent partnership (14:19)
• Questions eng leaders should ask to aid calibration / alignment between partners (17:21)
• Ensuring new candidates reinforce the eng culture you’re aiming to build (18:29)
• Strategies for adopting / adapting cultural practices while hiring & onboarding (20:33)
• Effective communication between eng leaders & talent partners (22:49)
• Lawrence explains Great Expectations’ team structure (25:04)
• Recommendations for providing feedback between partners (26:37)
• The importance of timing when it comes to the hiring process (28:00)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT ALI LITTMAN

Ali Littman is the Vice President of Engineering at Modern Health, a mental health technology company with a global workforce of both full-time and contracted staff. She has 15 years of experience in health tech and a business degree from Haas at Berkeley. She specializes in scaling organizations and has a track record in taking companies through hypergrowth, navigating major strategic product development pivots, as well as running major department reorganizations to optimize for current delivery and future-state architecture needs.

ABOUT TARIK KILIC

Tarik is an engineering leader who loves building products and teams that love building products. Currently @Booking.com, previously at SurveyMonkey and Heineken.

ABOUT MEHMET SENCER KARADAYI

With 15+ years of experience in the tech industry, Mehmet has worked both as an individual contributor and a manager in big-tech(Booking, Meta) and as a software consultant in both the private and public sector. He likes to call himself a "failed serial-entrepreneur"(0 to 1) 😅 and nowadays is focusing on scaling tech startups(1 to 100). Outside of work, Mehmet has a diverse set of hobbies 🎱🏀♟️🥽🏓🛹🤹 and likes adding new ones to the set every now and then.

ABOUT LIZ SINK

Liz Sink is currently a Director of Engineering at Amount, a digital origination and decisioning SaaS platform for deposits and lending. Liz also spearheaded the ELC Local Chapter initiative, collaborating with ELC to establish the inaugural chapter in Chicago, where she is working to build a community and leadership culture. Drawing on her diverse background in software engineering, education, and social work, Liz focuses on building cohesive, empowered teams, developing high-quality products, and driving progress and innovation in engineering leadership.

SHOW NOTES:

• How to sell your ideas & gain buy-in from senior eng leaders (1:37)
• Strategies to help someone start building this skillset (3:05)
• Why building ELC San Diego is meaningful to Ali (6:58)
• How to discover which metrics are most relevant for direct-to-consumer (8:26)
• Learn to manage yourself as a leader (10:21)
• Leveraging curiosity to make tough conversations collaborative (12:14)
• Tarik & Mehmet’s perspective on the Amsterdam ELC community (14:09)
• Creating psychological safety & trust for eng leaders (18:42)
• Why this topic is important for employee retention, satisfaction & innovation (19:19)
• An invitation to ELC Chicago (22:29)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT ANURAG AGARWAL

Anurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create and build together.

With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information.

Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family.

" One of the things we sort of tried to do from very early on is to make sure teams see their success in terms of overall workspace success, in terms of more users actually being able to accomplish their work more effectively using all of Workspace's tools, right? It's not about the individual tools, it's really about the whole together.”

- Anurag Agarwal   

ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV

Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.

SHOW NOTES:

• Anurag’s career at Google & what he’s currently working on (2:38)
• The evolution of Google Workspace & incorporating GenAI (4:31)
• Diving into internal AI use within Google / across teams (6:37)
• Challenges faced while creating alignment (9:47)
• Frameworks for setting goals & aligning KPIs more effectively (11:57)
• How Google ensures its team feel safe to fail & allow autonomy (14:03)
• Strategies for maintaining alignment across a large org (16:09)
• How Anurag’s leadership has evolved through technology transformations (18:07)
• Strategies for helping teams accomplish tasks & be continuously learning (20:33)
• Anurag’s favorite rituals / changes from this transition (24:09)
• Audience Q&A: What has been your biggest challenge shipping AI? (25:26)
• Defining Workspace’s corpus for the individual vs. the enterprise (27:29)
• How do you ensure content moderation when using AI features? (28:13)
• Build guardrails for LLMs depending on the context (29:18)
• How the center of excellence team distributed its knowledge across various orgs (30:48)
• Strategies for drawing a line where Gemini responds & ensuring determinism in the response (32:15)
• Quotient’s processes for QA & automation (34:02)
• Understanding the ethics / responsibilities behind AI usage (35:11)
• The evolution of developmental practices with deterministic code vs. apps written with AI (36:43)
• Anurag & Lizzie’s key takeaways (38:28)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT MARCEL WEEKES

Marcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect.

"A trait of product engineers that I have found to be successful in predicting positive outcomes is they view code as a tool to get something done. Engineers on the other end of the spectrum who might be more elite code engineers or more like, ‘I got this algorithm to go like .005 percent faster,’ frankly that's not what's going to get your product to product market fit. If you're not focused on the end goal here, you're going to make suboptimal decisions the whole way.”

- Marcel Weekes   

ABOUT ARQUAY HARRIS

Arquay has held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. Following her most recent role as VP of Engineering at Webflow, Arquay is currently enjoying retirement. She fills her days with occasional mentoring and speaking engagements as well as pursuing her many hobbies.

SHOW NOTES:

• Marcel’s definition of effective team collaboration (2:36)
• How Figma’s dev mode is reducing collaborative tension (5:42)
• Processes & rituals that increase productivity early on (7:12)
• Marcel & Arquay’s collaboration example: success with Slack Connect (9:44)
• Why collaborative teams are ultimately more productive teams (13:21)
• Audience Q&A: Frameworks for diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate (14:25)
• How to avoid over collaboration / communication (17:09)
• Strategies for creating collaboration standards early on in a project (19:33)
• Navigating the balance between collaboration & preserving autonomous teams (22:23)
• Encouraging engineers to care about broader outcomes & collaboration (26:54)
• Tips for measuring the success & productivity of collaborative tools (29:11)
• How to foster cross-collaborative respect between design & engineering (32:19)
• Building relationships across teams / functions to promote smooth operation (34:27)
• Recommendations to help developers & design to share more work in progress (36:52)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT ANUPAM SINGH

Anupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution.

"The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'”

- Anupam Singh   

ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVA

Maria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma.

SHOW NOTES:

• How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30)
• The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34)
• Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06)
• What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12)
• Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19)
• Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06)
• How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20)
• The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18)
• Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52)
• Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21)
• Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29)
• When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36)
• Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03)
• Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03)
• How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT DAVE RHODES

Dave Rhodes is CEO of Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing and software quality solutions to deliver digital confidence to enterprises. He has a proven track record as a strong operational leader with success in building and scaling growth businesses. Previously, Dave held key leadership roles at Unity, where as Chief Revenue Officer he grew the company’s revenue from $160M to $640M (4x growth) and navigated its public market debut in 2020. He then created and oversaw Unity’s AI-powered business, Digital Twins. He has also held leadership roles at Paradigm and Autodesk. Rhodes holds an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of San Diego and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

This episode is brought to you by Revelo!

Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:

• A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fit
• A payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and compliance
• A team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hires

With Revelo, you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team.

Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire.

SHOW NOTES:

• The Crowdstrike / Microsoft news & how bugs affect the bottom line (2:31)
• Understanding the stakes & complexity of the Crowdstrike issue (5:05)
• Dave’s perspective on & passion for digital experiences (7:50)
• The impact of cloud computing, high-speed connectivity, AI / ML, and COVID on software innovation (10:10)
• Examples of how digital experiences drive a business’s bottom line (13:45)
• How the quality of a product impacts developer velocity & motivation (17:31)
• Connecting the bottom line with product quality / bugs (20:31)
• Strategies for communicating the business benefits of developing for scale (24:51)
• Addressing quality issues that impact top OKRs, like customer churn (26:48)
• Highlights of the “Every Experience Counts” report (31:51)
• Best practices for eng leaders looking to evolve their current testing strategy (35:13)
• What it means to think about the impossible & reverse engineer it (38:05)
• Frameworks for instilling this mindset into your eng teams (41:18)
• Rapid fire questions (44:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Every Experience Counts - Sauce Labs’ report exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue.
• Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life - The seven rules to follow to realize your true purpose in life—distilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own journey of ceaseless reinvention and extraordinary achievement, and available for absolutely anyone.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

ABOUT MARCEL WEEKES

Marcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect.

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

This episode is brought to you by Revelo!

Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:

• A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fit
• A payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and compliance
• A team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hires