The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Doug Gaff and Emma Tang discuss high-bandwidth communication, innovation accounting, preventing developer burnout, influencing teams, and communicating priorities. They’ll help you move from frustration and survival in remote work, back to optimized productivity! “Personal stuff is totally in bounds and people just listen. And they don't try to solve a problem for you. And I might be like, I'm red...

Martin Casado and Sonal Chokshi explore what makes a great VP of Engineering at startups! You’ll hear how successful VPEs are evaluated, the ideal experience and success criteria. You’ll hear rapid-fire responses covering how to scale yourself, KPIs, the ideal VPE hiring time for startups, and what VPEs should definitely NOT do.   MARTIN CASADO, GENERAL PARTNER @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ He was previou...

Your job as an engineering leader is to win and increase your capacity to win. In Part 2, Wade Chambers discusses how to measure success for engineering leaders, what great looks like, AND how to increase your team’s performance and improve their potential! You’ll also hear how to get unstuck and move your career forward. "And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a gre...

Wade Chambers discusses how to learn anything by applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity to your career. You’ll learn how to get unstuck, and move your career forward. Plus Wade also shares stories about his early failures as an engineering manager, and what he wished he knew when he first became a manager.  "The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable’ and you can just...

Andrew Fong shares how to identify, operationalize, and reinforce values in your organization as well as his strategies to scale organizations through values-based decision making and in cultivating values-based environments. You’ll also hear stories about the massive role values had in the outcomes of several large-scale infrastructure projects at Dropbox. "If we can operationalize this, the micr...

Organizational change is hard. In part 2, Jean-Denis Greze explores how you can adapt and transform the strengths, capabilities or “spikes” of your organization by intentionally using the strategies of “Isolation”, “Outlets” and “Shocks.” He shares a ton of great real-world examples and case studies to help you apply these strategies in your org. "The thing that I think makes over a 10 year period...

Organizational change is hard. Jean-Denis Greze shares how he thinks about building organizations that can adapt in a way that preserves strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities or “spikes” through periodical “forced changes.” He’ll explore what those forced changes are and what they’ve looked like at Plaid and other companies. "You're asking me what makes us different. I thi...

Eisar Lipkovitz shares the value of being direct as well as other insights on leadership. You’ll hear how to practice the art of direct communication, how to prepare for difficult conversations, and overcome the fear of being direct. Plus Eisar’s insights on where engineering leaders get stuck in their career and how to help them grow. "At the end of the day, the main reason I think direct is effe...

Vidhya Srinivasan shares her framework for how she’s navigated her career and operated under high pressure. You’ll learn the practices she uses to deal with and diffuse pressure plus how to coach and create opportunities for engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk. "one question that I often ask myself is... 'Given how I feel right now if I, were to fast forward five years...

Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "when someone c...

Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "You should be...

David Silverman ( @dksilverman ) shares how to prioritize effectively, regain productivity, compartmentalize pain, and accelerate your rate of learning to succeed through a crisis. You’ll also hear how to apply his lessons to real case studies shared by engineering leaders from our community. “When you're dealing with uncertainty, the main thing you're trying to drive and change as the leader, is...

How do you have an effective performance conversation during a pandemic? Jonathan Raymond (@jonathanrefound) will introduce us to a super-easy to use and effective framework to provide critical feedback. You’ll learn how to apply the framework using real community challenges and tease out the actual language you can directly use to initiate those conversations. “That's what feedback is about. It's...

Farhan Thawar ( @fnthawar ) , VP of Engineering @ Shopify shares the hiring framework he’s built where 15-minute interviews result in both faster placements AND better fits. You’ll hear how to find talent in non-traditional ways, what happens when you leverage creativity, and how speed in hiring is a massive competitive advantage. “The problem with interviews in general are they're very biased to...

Max Levchin shares lessons and stories that have been critical to his development as an engineering leader. He shares stories from the early PayPal days and foundational insights for leading Affirm as a mission-driven, values-based company. He also shares essential principles for building and hiring, and how the hardest problems are almost never about code. “I should just solve the thing that matt...

What should be the role of engineering leaders in recruiting? What levers do they have at their disposal? In this fireside chat, you'll hear the perspectives of two recruiting heavy-hitters, Aditya Agarwal & Dan Portillo, on how engineering leaders can optimize for successful hiring outcomes.   ADITYA AGARWAL - Former CTO Dropbox; Partner-in-Residence @ South Park Commons ( @adityaag ) Aditya Agar...

Alyssa and Chanda share stories and mental frameworks about how to strategically think about and accelerate your career journey. You’ll hear examples of how to navigate between large and small companies, how to level the playing field by strategically leveraging emerging tech fields, intentionally harnessing skip-level managers, and establishing a growth mindset. Alyssa Henry - Head of Seller & De...

While you don't jump out of bed excited about it, you know how powerful it is for morale when you make the choice to tackle technical debt. Learn a framework for how to do the same thing with organizational debt, and unlock untapped energy, creativity and connection on your team in the process. “As organizational leaders, when it comes to organizational debt, we know that we take shortcuts. We mak...

Jason Warner (@jasoncwarner), CTO @ Github shares management principles fundamental to how he leads remote engineering teams. He shares how to scale leadership by applying the right tools and frameworks for effective communication. Jason also tells us the structures and strategies he applies to build & maintain trust throughout an organization. “Every leader in an organization should make THE SET...

The hardest business problem has a soft solution. Scientists and engineers display a (well-deserved) skepticism toward touchy-feely ideas such as leadership. Fred shows there's a very technical way to understand why most organizations, from couples to multinational corporations, die a premature death... and what can be done to extend their lifespan.   FRED KOFMAN - Advisor, VP of Leadership Develo...

In an interview between Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo, they discuss “Blitzscaling” and how companies achieve massive scale at incredible speed. Reid shares insights and lessons on how to prioritize speed and efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, the benefits of intense collaboration found in Silicon Valley, and non-obvious rules needed to succeed.   REID HOFFMAN - Co-Founder of LinkedIn, Partn...

Facebook’s James Everingham shares about his early leadership and management experiences and the secrets he learned from quantum mechanics to manage creative teams. You’ll hear insights about how to unleash creativity by focusing on outcomes and environments instead of process and key differences between optimizing for efficiency and invention.   James Everingham - Head of Engineering, Calibra @ F...

Difficult conversations for engineering leaders range from telling someone they have lettuce in their teeth to delivering life-changing bad news. Learn to level-up your ability to handle difficult conversations with a few techniques, practice and hopefully a little humor from Sarah Clatterbuck's personal experiences.   SARAH CLATTERBUCK - Director of Engineering, YouTube @ Google ( @girodchatterbo...