The Engineering Leadership Podcast

We discuss the differences between building a platform versus a product with Oksana Kubushyna, Head of Operations, Entertainment @ Riot Games! She shares about her leadership journey building the Riot Platform Group and transitioning from a technical lead to management role, tips for empowering your team, how to utilize cross-discipline thinking, the importance of internal measurement metrics, and...

Shadi Rostami, SVP of Engineering @ Amplitude, joins us to discuss key insights and strategies to increase your engineering orgs capacity to win in an economic downturn. We cover cultivating a founder’s mindset and increasing product ownership in engineering. Plus prioritization strategies, determining where to invest resources, and shifting your team’s perspective from skepticism to optimism. ABO...

We cover resilience engineering & learning from incidents with John Allspaw, former CTO @ Etsy and current Founder & Principal @ Adaptive Capacity Labs! Co-hosted by Kenji Kiuchi (Head of Quality and Performance @ Postman) this episode also addresses common unintuitive perspectives within resilience engineering, strategies for effective incident response / problem solving, how to identify current...

Ryan Graciano, Co-Founder & CTO @ Credit Karma, shares with us what it’s like to start a company during an economic downturn, how his leadership style had to evolve alongside Credit Karma’s growth, advice for running lean operations, bridging the gap between engineering & business, how to scale the business as the company matures, and identifying & correcting team/org dysfunctions. In addition, Ry...

Being a woman in a predominantly male industry can be challenging at times – and seeking the advice of successful women eng leaders can help inspire you to be bold! In this episode, we feature three women who shared their leadership stories & advice at ELC Annual: Annie Cheng, VP of Engineering @ Waymo; Claire Hough, CTO @ Carbon Health; and Lisa Gelobter, CEO and Founder @ tEQuitable. They discus...

In this episode, Cal Henderson (Co-Founder & CTO @ Slack) and Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft) discuss strategies for how to be a force multiplier within your organization! They cover Cal’s leadership journey & the early days of Slack, how to identify lateral inflection points, aligning your people throughout periods of change, tips for personal retrospectives on where you invest your time,...

As eng leaders, there are many things outside of our control – however, Megan Kacholia (VP of Eng @ Google) believes being deliberate can help you realize the many factors you DO have control of. Megan provides real-life lessons from her own leadership journey on how to take ownership of your time/calendar, tips for saying “yes” & knowing when to say “no,” and strategies for communicating with aut...

Reorgs are never easy, often impacting eng teams – and that’s why they should always be a last resort. However, sometimes they are necessary for an org’s success! Mike Tria (Head of Eng @ Atlassian) joins Aaron Erickson (Co-Founder & CEO @ Orgspace) to discuss frameworks & strategies for implementing a successful reorg, why eng leaders should be involved throughout the entire reorg process, altern...

This is a special episode from our new show “Engineering Founders” - Should you build B2C or B2B? What about implementing a top-down or a bottoms up sales strategy? How do you think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs and cons...

We cover building community & digital transformation with Yvette Pasqua, CTO @ Exos! She shares her leadership journey from MeetUp to Exos and how her experiences shaped her views on the importance of community and effective networking. We also discuss principles for creating authentic meetup experiences, how Yvette navigated her Head of Eng search without a recruiter, the importance of asking oth...

In this episode, we discuss frameworks & strategies for building a “startup-within-a-startup” with Heidi Williams, Head of Engineering for Grammarly Business @ Grammarly! She shares stories about her leadership style while revealing the benefits of & considerations for creating a startup-within-a-startup, sourcing ideas & hosting knowledge-sharing meetings, identifying adjacencies in your user bas...

We cover how to sustain long-term transformational projects with Paul Dix, CTO & Founder @ InfluxData! This high-energy conversation reveals the history behind InfluxDB and its multi-phase, long-term transformation over the past 10 years. Plus we discuss how to know when it’s time to take your company to the next level, identifying the right people for your eng teams, integrating multiple teams in...

We cover how to uplevel your eng team with Elaine Zhou, CTO @ Change.org ! She shares some of her favorite frameworks and strategies for creating self-sufficient teams, amplifying high-performers, performing self-assessments, and hosting prioritization conversations. Plus Elaine shares the story behind how she got involved with Change.org , navigating different operating constraints in your busine...

We sat down with Claus Moberg to discuss his career trajectory, from meteorology student and hardware CEO to current VP of Eng @ Roblox! We also cover how to overcome obstacles when scaling leadership, leading teams outside of your technical depth/knowledge, attracting & recruiting top talent, finding “diamonds in the rough,” and how to communicate effectively between business functions & eng team...

We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back to regularly releasing episodes November 15th with a couple great guests! Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering @ Roblox joins to discuss his journey scaling his leadership impact & org size 10x in 6 years! Elaine Zhou CTO @ Change.org joins to discuss upleveling your team and hel...

We sit down with Kit Colbert (SVP and CTO @ VMWare) and discuss his experiences, lessons, and approaches to leading across different orders of magnitude PLUS his approach to high leverage, high ROI communication at different scales. We cover his perspectives on lessening execution risk and creating stability through change, letting go of being a “technologist,” navigating the dilemma between macro...

We cover reinventing your role and refocusing your eng team in the face of the unknown with Maher Saba, Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta! He discusses his leadership history from IBM to Microsoft to Meta and how he took on IC roles to gain credibility as an eng leader. We also cover how to productively channel & embrace emotions to drive improvement, frameworks for motivating eng org...

We discuss product innovation with Saumya Bhatnagar (CPO & Co-Founder @ involve.ai), who shares her passion for the product trio and how it enriches problem-solving! We cover how to best optimize the product trio, implementing empathy into your communication practices, the importance of the value priority score, frameworks for healthy & energetic discourse between the product trio, and improving t...

Customer narratives are a transformative tool to help you build successful products! Marco Argenti (CIO @ Goldman Sachs) explains how to develop these narratives as your team’s guiding vision and help eng orgs better understand “the business” side of software. Plus we cover best practices for investing in developer experience, Goldman Sachs’ transition to prioritize external developers, and the si...

Today’s episode marks a special occasion – 100 episodes of The Engineering Leadership Podcast! To celebrate, we’ve compiled some of our favorite moments from the past hundred episodes, featuring a wide range of high-energy guests and compelling topics. We cover tension points while scaling eng & product orgs, why you should seek existential issues, how to get unstuck in your career, helping engine...

We speak with Vinay Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Loom, about his experience balancing three high-level exec roles and living out his personal values at work while prioritizing his mental & physical health! Scaling up is never easy, but Vinay shares tips and systems that have worked for him, including utilizing timetables, building good habits despite emotions, and triply verifying decisions. We al...

 We cover how psychology, neuroscience & mindfulness tools can help eng leaders overcome challenges, communicate successfully, and foster a culture of empathy! Our guest is Luther Kitahata, an Innovative Executive Leadership Coach & Interim CTO/VP of Eng – he’s also described by Chip Conley as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of Silicon Valley.” We also chat about identifying personality types, uncovering unco...

If you’ve ever wrestled with technology choices & navigated the consequences of the wrong path… this conversation is for you! Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas) defines the dilemma of the “aspirational mismatch” & shares real-life examples of how it affects a tech org’s processes, architecture, and metrics. She dives into the frameworks & tools that have helped her work through mismatches, her golden...

We’re taking a few weeks off to celebrate Patrick’s wedding! We’re going to be mostly unplugged in the mountains… but when we return, we have some fantastic conversations planned with folks like… Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas), Luther Kitahata (Founder, Executive Leadership Coach & Fractional CTO/VPE @ Integral Response), Vinay HIremath (CTO @ Loom), Maher Saba (Head of Remote Presence and Enginee...

We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They...