40% Better - Engineering Leadership

Yu Dong went from IBM engineer to leader at Alibaba and now PingCAP, a global startup with teams across the US, Europe and Asia. Every time he inherited a lost team, the missing piece was the same: a vision. In this episode he shares the one-sentence vision that energized his observability team: “Make no problem difficult to diagnose.” Bill and Yu talk about handling conflict through direct, open...

Lee Atchison never set out to be a leader. He went from reading paper stack dumps at Hewlett-Packard and posting on Usenet in 1984 to naming himself “chief architect” when a startup’s lead engineer walked out. Later, at Amazon, he learned that the right data can change anyone’s mind. Bill and Lee talk about why accidental leaders often do best and why you don’t have to be the boss to lead. They al...

Leaders say failure is a learning opportunity. Their teams watch what they actually do when something breaks. Rachel Franco, founder of Fail Smarter, spent years in innovation enablement at Optum and researched the barriers leaders face in learning from failure. She explains what makes it truly safe to fail, how to measure psychological safety instead of guessing, and how to use innovation tools t...

Jason Hamilton was leading a team in Hong Kong by his second week out of grad school. In this episode he explains how that trial by fire taught him to lead with humility. He also shares why a good leader wants their people to outgrow them, and a mentor’s line that changed how he thinks about decisions: “You’re not paid to be right, you’re paid to get to right.” Bill and Jason dig into the operator...

“If you’re not serving a customer, you’d better be serving somebody who is.” Bill talks with Marc Haine, a hospitality leader, culture builder and author of Lights, Camera, Action, who went from police training to owning three Montreal restaurants to turning around casinos and hotels. They dig into leading with love and kindness, the employee journey, why treating people as a labor expense backfir...

"You won’t automate yourself out of a job. You’ll automate yourself into a better one." Bill talks with Jackie Teran, VP of Engineering at Forerunner, whose path ran from class president to a layoff, the Peace Corps, a coding bootcamp and a rise from IC to senior manager at Coinbase. They dig into aligning teams with relentless retros, breaking deadlocks by treating ideas as experiments, inviting...

“You don’t report to me. You work with me.” Bill sits down to talk with Nir Valtman, co-founder of Arnica, whose leadership began when the Israeli Air Force told him the only way to teach was to become a commander. They dig into leading by example, inviting people to challenge you even at town halls, aligning leaders with conflicting goals, and knowing which disagreements are worth having. Plus: t...

A failure that didn’t happen is worth zero, at least to most companies. Bill talks with Jeremy McEntire, a former Army officer candidate turned engineering leader and the author of The Cage and the Mirror. They dig into why companies reward what they can see instead of what’s good for them, why the engineers who prevent disasters rarely get promoted, why big companies default to safe decisions, an...

“Rather than asking for permission, say ‘I intend to.’” Bill talks with Emilie Schario, a product and engineering leader whose company was just acquired by Anaconda, about leading without a title, why a company is a team and not a family, and what customer obsession looks like when leaders race to answer support tickets. They dig into matching people to roles that fit their strengths, being decisi...

If you step up and volunteer, you’ll get noticed. Bill talks with Barry Moline, a former pro hockey referee, two-time CEO of statewide utility associations, and author of Connect. They dig into how one raised hand at 16 led to NHL referee camp, how volunteering for a holiday party nobody wanted to plan led to a CEO job, why every conversation is practice, and why asking questions beats talking abo...

Being great isn’t enough. It’s just the baseline. Bill talks with Uma Subramanian, founder of Limitless Leaders, author of The Sought-After Leader, and a 20-year Microsoft veteran. They dig into the mistakes she made as a new manager, her SOAR framework for becoming the leader people seek out, how listening tours reveal opportunities nobody else sees, and how she helps quiet introverts find their...

You don’t have to command the room to lead. Bill Lennan talks with Todd Gower, co-founder of personal finance app Hiatus, who was leading a band at age 10 but later convinced himself he wasn’t leadership material. They dig into learning management fast when a key leader leaves, getting the right people on the bus, why assertiveness can be learned, creating career growth on a tight budget, and fixi...

“How you do the work is so much more important than the work.” Bill talks with Maria Colacurcio, CEO of a growth-stage company building AI-powered pay software, whose first management job meant suddenly being the boss of her roommate and friends. They dig into why clear is kind, how to give direct feedback, what your body tells you when you’re getting defensive, and how AI is reshaping product tea...

“You can build a case and fix blame, or you can build a relationship and fix the problem.” Bill meets with Sam Imperati, a former trial lawyer and part-time judge who has been a full-time mediator since 1992. They dig into why people fight at work, why clearly defined expectations prevent so much conflict, how to ask questions instead of making statements, and how two-week trials can break a deadl...

You don’t find happiness. You create it. Bill chats with Basel Yandem, a civil engineer and life and leadership coach who started leading at age 10 in the Scouts and was running engineering teams by 26. They dig into how taking initiative gets you promoted, why you should always bring a solution with your problem, why five efficient hours beat eleven exhausted ones, and why you should only retire...

There are only three things people want: to be seen, heard, and understood. Bill listens to wisdom from Aaron Streeton, an operations consultant and executive coach who was running 13 schools in Japan at 27. They dig into the difference between management and leadership, why leadership starts with understanding yourself, why an organization is an ecosystem rather than a machine, and why values tha...

“I never once raised my hand and said I want to be a manager. I just led.” Bill talks with Dave Saunders, who joined an internet company in 1989 and has been building ever since, through dial-up’s boom, Lucent Bell Labs, surgical robotics and now waste-to-diesel. They dig into understanding the why behind customer requests, Covey’s workers-managers-leaders “wrong jungle” story, plan-do-check-act a...

“If you’re already good at what you do, AI is great. If you’re not, don’t expect it to do everything for you.” Bill talks with Kam Low, a self-taught technical founder who left school early, started and exited several startups while traveling the world, and only became a leader when a team of juniors was handed to him. They dig into why you can’t lead people like machines, staying lean with AI, wh...

Rank and authority aren’t the same as respect, and you don’t need a title to lead. Bill talks with Chad Harris, a software engineering leader from Melbourne, Australia, whose first leadership lessons came from the Australian Air Force Cadets. They dig into leading as an individual contributor, running weekly experiments backed by data, building allies instead of blindsiding people, and getting pas...

Success is what you build; significance is who is better because of you. Bill talks with Chris Sund, a healthcare staffing leader and author of You Are Capable of More. Chris started leading in his early twenties at a restaurant where everyone was older than him.  They dig into why recruiting is a leadership role, how to stand out when hiring is competitive, what really holds people back, and why...

You can wait for the waves to stop, or you can just jump in. Bill sits down with Harshit Omar, co-founder and CTO of cloud cloning platform Fluid Cloud. They talked about what the CTO role really demands, why failed startups are stepping stones, and Harshit's belief that success is a matter of time. They dig into how AI shortcuts can wear down engineering skills, why culture is caught rather than...

Ever notice that one coworker who drives you crazy? It might have less to do with them than you think. Bill talks with Kenny Whitelaw-Jones, co-founder of infrastructure finance firm Gridlines and now a shadow work therapist, about his upcoming book The Shadow at Work. They explore how the parts of ourselves we hide show up as triggers and projection, why leading a team is its own kind of shadow w...

What if the standard startup playbook is just a pattern someone else invented? Bill talks with Joseph Martin, a Marine Corps veteran and anti-money laundering expert who founded a regtech company for the gaming industry after finding an $8 billion casino company fighting financial crime on spreadsheets. They dig into learning anything new by being willing to be uncomfortable, why Joseph skipped “s...

Every time you speak, you create an emotional response, so why not do it on purpose? Bill Lennan talks with communication coach and The Follow-Up Code author Ely Delaney, who learned leadership running crews for major-label rock shows. They dig into why intentional communication is the first step of leadership, how recording yourself reveals your real voice, why AI-written content often doesn’t st...

What if the thing holding you back as a leader isn’t a missing skill, but a belief you can’t see? Bill Lennan talks with leadership coach and licensed professional counselor Marilyn Rosa-Green about identity, burnout, and her Pressure Paradox approach, including the “internal audit” she uses to help clients observe their own behavior without judgment. Bill shares how DBT skills he learned by accid...