Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sat down with Jon Kern, aerospace engineer turned software architect and co-author of the Agile Manifesto. Jon shares his fascinating journey from testing jet engines for the Defense Department to pushing back against heavyweight, bureaucratic software processes. We explore the original intent behind the Agile Manifesto, the misconceptions t...

The old playbooks for leadership? They aren't just gathering dust. They’re being rewritten in real-time. We’re moving away from command-and-control and toward something much more human, agile, and, frankly, much more exciting. This is Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I’m your host Alexis Monville. In each episode, I sit down with the visionaries, the quiet disruptors, and the bold thinkers...

Agile transformed how small teams build software. But what happens when organizations grow to hundreds or thousands of people? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CTO of Theodo and co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto . Fabrice explains why the four values of the Agile Manifesto have inherent scale limits, and how Lean th...

Some leadership lessons are best learned far from meeting rooms and org charts. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes Francelina Amaral , a hospitality leader shaped by service excellence, attention to detail, and deep respect for people. Together, they explore what leaders in any industry can learn from hospitality: Why onboarding is not a checklist but i...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I welcome Teresa Torres , product discovery coach and author of the influential book Continuous Discovery Habits . Teresa shares how product teams can move beyond sporadic research and embed continuous customer discovery into their weekly routines. Drawing from years of coaching, teaching, and hands-on practice, she explains how teams can buil...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville speaks with Manuel Pais , organizational design practitioner and co-author of the influential book Team Topologies (with Matthew Skelton). Together they explore how modern organizations can improve flow , reduce team cognitive load , and evolve structures without relying on disruptive “big reorgs”. You will learn: The four fund...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes back Gojko Adzic , renowned author and speaker in modern software delivery, named an AWS Serverless Hero (2019) , and author of Impact Mapping , Specification by Example , and his latest book Lizard Optimization . Gojko shares a practical method for turning unexpected user behavior into product growth and better decisi...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes Héloïse Rozès and Nikolai Fomm , first-time founders and co-founders of Corma , a startup building the “cockpit of truth” for software access and license management — helping companies control their SaaS stack, reduce waste, and improve employee experience. From their day-to-day reality at Station F to the intensity of...

What if the future of user experience wasn’t about smarter AI — but better human judgment? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes Sebastian Cao , a technology and user experience leader who has held key roles at Red Hat and Tesla , and who recently designed and taught a course at Stanford University on the future of User Experience . Drawing on his experien...

What if helping people think seriously about their future made them more committed today? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , Alexis Monville welcomes Russ Laraway — former senior leader at Google and Twitter , co-founder and former COO of Candor Inc. (with Kim Scott), and author of When They Win, You Win . Russ shares lessons drawn from decades of leadership experience and from...

Most leaders think they’re good communicators, until the stakes rise and the conversation derails. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I speak with Jeffrey Fredrick , VP of Engineering at Ion Analytics and co-author of Agile Conversations , about how leaders can deliberately practice better communication, especially under pressure. Jeffrey shares the moment that changed his lead...

What happens to leadership when you can’t simply write a roadmap and “hand it to engineering”? In open source, influence replaces authority, and outcomes depend on communities, collaboration, and trust. In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sit down with Maria Bracho , Chief Technology Officer for LATAM at Red Hat , to explore leadership through the lens of open source, global c...

What does engineering leadership look like when your platform serves tens of millions of users and stores one of the largest content repositories on the web ? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sit down with Tamar Bercovici , VP of Engineering at Box , to explore what it takes to lead engineering organizations at scale while navigating constant change. Tamar shares her journe...

What does it really take to build and sustain excellence in engineering, especially inside a high-performance company? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sit down with Bruce Wang , Director of Engineering at Netflix and two-time founder, to explore leadership in tech through a simple but demanding philosophy: build trust, seek excellence, and drive customer delight . Bruce sh...

What does it take to lead with outcomes without turning goals into top-down control? In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sit down with Tim Beattie and Bella Bardswell , co-founders of Stellafai , to explore outcome-focused leadership, collaboration, and how teams can turn goals into a living way of working. We discuss why OKRs often fail in the real world (and what to do inste...

Michael Galloway has spent 20+ years building and leading cloud infrastructure and platform engineering teams across Yahoo, Netflix, and now HashiCorp. In this episode, we go beyond tools and buzzwords to unpack what modern infrastructure leadership really takes: understanding what sits beneath abstractions, setting the right defaults instead of hiding complexity, and building trust through predic...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I talk with Ioanna Mantzouridou , Co-founder and CEO of Dextego , an AI-powered coaching platform designed to reduce top talent attrition through personalized leadership development. Ioanna shares her journey from HR and organizational psychology to building an AI coaching product that addresses one of today’s biggest leadership challenges: de...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I’m joined by Ali Schultz, co-founder of Reboot.io. Reboot has spent the last decade coaching CEOs and leadership teams with a simple belief: better humans make better leaders, and better leaders create more humane organizations. Ali shares what it took to build a brand bigger than its founders, why Reboot intentionally brings together coaches...

Remote work is often framed as a technology problem. Lisette Sutherland sees it differently: the hard part is remote collaboration, and the real challenges are human. In this episode, I’m joined by Lisette, founder of Collaboration Superpowers, host of the Collaboration Superpowers podcast, and author of Work Together Anywhere . We explore what remote work makes visible: personality clashes, misal...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I speak with Anne Caron, People Strategy consultant and former Google HR leader, about what it takes to build organizations that scale, without losing what makes them work. Anne draws on her decade at Google and her experience advising founders to explain why many startups wait too long to design the people side of the company. We explore her...

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership , I sit down with Radhika Dutt, author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter . We explore why “iterate until something works” often becomes a trap, and what it takes to build products more deliberately. Radhika shares the idea of “product diseases”, from Hero Syndrome to obsessive sales disorder, and explains how Ra...

Open source won at the level of code. But the cloud changed the game. In this conversation, Daniel Riek explores why cloud computing creates a new kind of threat for free and open source software: the software may be open, but the way it is operated becomes the proprietary differentiator. When “how to run it” is locked behind a service, control and freedom erode, even if the license is still open....

What if leadership growth was not about doing more, but about seeing more? In this episode, we explore the BEPS framework, a simple model built around four axes that shape a leader’s effectiveness: Business, Execution, People, and System. The framework helps leaders step back from a default focus on execution and broaden their impact by developing clarity on the business, growing people, and impro...

Open source has moved from a niche practice to a default foundation for how software is built. In this episode, I’m joined by Joseph Jacks, founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a venture fund focused exclusively on early-stage commercial open source companies. We explore what makes open source companies different from proprietary software businesses, why Joseph built a focused fund in a wor...

Complexity is rising, and collaboration is one of the few ways we can match it: diverse minds working together, with intention. In this episode, I’m joined by Philippe Coullomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots, co-authors of Collaboration by Design . They describe their work as designing collaborative journeys to help groups solve complex problems and make complex decisions, often in multi-stakeholde...