The Engineering Leadership Podcast

The Engineering Leadership Podcast is brought by The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC).

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Latest Episodes

Recalibrating leadership priorities, leveraging your time & empowering senior leaders w/ Vinod Marur #216

Recalibrating leadership priorities, leveraging your time & empowering senior leaders w/ Vinod Marur #216

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.

 

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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/

From early days to IPO: Scaling leadership, enterprise growth, product ownership, & outgrowing your failure modes w/ Jon Hyman #215

From early days to IPO: Scaling leadership, enterprise growth, product ownership, & outgrowing your failure modes w/ Jon Hyman #215

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.

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/

Essential questions & leadership principles to navigate change, fear & uncertainty w/ Rukmini Reddy #214

Essential questions & leadership principles to navigate change, fear & uncertainty w/ Rukmini Reddy #214

ABOUT RUKMINI REDDY

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

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/

Building platforms, ecosystems & open-source communities: Lessons from Viam & MongoDB w/ Eliot Horowitz @ Viam #213

Building platforms, ecosystems & open-source communities: Lessons from Viam & MongoDB w/ Eliot Horowitz @ Viam #213

ABOUT ELIOT HOROWITZ

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/

Leading transformation, inspiring vision & empowering teams to operate autonomously w/ Kevin Stewart #212

Leading transformation, inspiring vision & empowering teams to operate autonomously w/ Kevin Stewart #212

ABOUT KEVIN STEWART

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/

Accelerating & upskilling your AI learning journey w/ Maher Hanafi #211

Accelerating & upskilling your AI learning journey w/ Maher Hanafi #211

ABOUT MAHER HANAFI

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/

Data governance, adversarial testing & more - Essential strategies to scale AI responsibly in a shifting regulatory environment w/ Jim Palmer #210

Data governance, adversarial testing & more - Essential strategies to scale AI responsibly in a shifting regulatory environment w/ Jim Palmer #210

ABOUT JIM PALMER

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/

Capturing & synthesizing unbiased insights from users, your open source community & yourself w/ James Campbell #209

Capturing & synthesizing unbiased insights from users, your open source community & yourself w/ James Campbell #209

ABOUT JAMES CAMPBELL

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/

Upskilling: practices to improve hiring, storytelling & structuring personal/leadership problems with engineering principles #208

Upskilling: practices to improve hiring, storytelling & structuring personal/leadership problems with engineering principles #208

ABOUT COLLEEN TARTOW

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

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/

Bio of The Engineering Leadership Podcast

The Engineering Leadership Podcast is brought by The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC). This podcast is designed to provide valuable insights, habits, and examples of great software engineering leaders, with the aim of evolving leadership in the tech industry.

In each episode, the podcast delves into the stories and experiences of industry leaders in software engineering. Listeners will gain firsthand knowledge and perspectives on what it takes to be a successful leader in this field. The podcast explores various aspects of leadership, including effective management practices, team dynamics, decision-making, and more.

The Engineering Leadership Podcast also features interviews with leadership and management thought experts who share actionable insights and strategies for aspiring and current engineering leaders. These experts bring their expertise and experience to the table, providing listeners with valuable guidance and practical advice on leadership and management practices in the tech industry.

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The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, a podcast hosted by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

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