The Engineering Leadership Podcast

ABOUT PRASHANT RAMARAO

Prashant is a hands-on technology executive with extensive experience in software engineering, leading large organizations, specializing in AI / ML, and large-scale systems architecture. With advanced degrees in computer science and engineering leadership, he excels at defining technical strategies that align with business goals, delivering results, and fostering high-performing, cross-functional teams. He cares about engineering excellence, leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve complex problems and scale operations for long-term growth. He has a lifelong passion for learning and looks for opportunities to challenge the status quo to drive change. He loves the outdoors and is a self-proclaimed podaholic - going on long hikes in Bay Area while listening to his podcasts is one of his favorite activities.

This episode is brought to you by Side – delivering award-winning QA, localization, player support, and tech services for the world’s leading games and technology brands.

For over 30 years, Side has helped create unforgettable user experiences—from indies to AAA blockbusters like Silent Hill 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Learn more about Side’s global solutions at side.inc.

SHOW NOTES:

• Behind Prashant’s rapid leadership evolution (3:26)
• Transitioning from IC to management: early steps and surprises (5:51)
• Navigating the mindset shifts from tech expert to people leader (7:31)
• Friction points in moving from informal to formal leadership (11:00)
• Skills for communicating with less technical audiences (13:46)
• Learning to talk with GMs & other non-technical leaders (16:32)
• Frameworks for effective meeting planning (19:03)
• Examples of communicating technical work to execs (20:08)
• Learning the impact of the “observer effect” (21:59)
• Incorporating feedback gathered by observing (27:03)
• Strategies for maintaining technical credibility as a senior leader (29:29)
• Why personal projects and experimentation matter for leadership growth (32:21)
• How Prashant’s personal projects enhance technical credibility & leadership skills (36:59)
• Rapid fire questions (37:57)

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/

AI is reshaping the fundamental economics of startups—lowering product development costs, compressing GTM cycles, and rewriting the rules of competition. In this episode, Craig McLuckie (Co-Founder & CEO @ Stacklok, co-creator of Kubernetes) unpacks “the epoch of the startup,” a moment of massive disruption where fast-moving founders have a unique edge over incumbents. We explore how Craig is navigating this new era from rethinking cost structure, value capture, and defensibility to leveraging open-source, community, and asymmetric advantages as core pillars of Stacklok’s strategy. Craig shares lessons from pivotal product shifts, frameworks for identifying moats, and the broader societal implications of AI-driven disruption. Whether you’re leading a startup, pivoting in the face of AI, or thinking about your next big move, this conversation offers a strategic playbook for thriving in today’s shifting landscape.

How do you see AI reshaping the startup landscape? Join the discussion on our forum and share your insights, questions, and takeaways.

ABOUT CRAIG MCLUCKIE

Craig is the CEO and co-founder of Stacklok, where his team is working to tip AI code generation on its side, from vertical, closed solutions to horizontal, aligned systems. Craig was previously CEO and co-founder of Heptio, which was acquired by VMware in 2018; he has also led product and engineering teams at Google and Microsoft. Craig is a co-creator of Kubernetes and he bootstrapped and chaired the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. x

This episode is brought to you by Side – delivering award-winning QA, localization, player support, and tech services for the world’s leading games and technology brands.

For over 30 years, Side has helped create unforgettable user experiences—from indies to AAA blockbusters like Silent Hill 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Learn more about Side’s global solutions at side.inc.

SHOW NOTES:

• Why this moment is “the epoch of the startup” (2:03)
• How AI shifts startup economics: from cost structures to value capture (4:18)
• Why incumbents struggle during disruption—and how startups can win (8:17)
• The origin story behind Stacklok & lessons from Craig’s pivot (11:04)
• Frameworks for identifying asymmetric advantages as a founder (14:48)
• How to map your unique asymmetric advantages to new opportunities and secure stakeholder buy-in (16:34)
• Rethinking defensibility & value capture in the AI era (16:29)
• How Craig applied cost, GTM & product perspectives to strategic pivots @ Stacklok (18:07)
• Building investment theses: Aligning cultural strengths & asymmetric advantages with evolving opportunities (20:05)
• Determining your startup’s investment themes (22:53)
• Structuring experiments & validating opportunities (24:15)
• Defensibility & building community-driven moats in early ideation phases (26:54)
• Signals of early community-product alignment (31:24)
• Conversation frameworks to assess asymmetric advantages (32:22)
• Societal implications of AI disruption & the “startup epoch” (35:14)
• Rapid fire questions (38:12)

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/

ABOUT ANUSH ELANGOVAN

Anush Elangovan leads the Artificial Intelligence Group (AIG) as Corporate Vice President of AI software and solutions.

Anush has 23 years of industry experience in AI, computer science, compilers, network security, operating systems, math, and its materialization on complex hardware systems. This co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nod.ai oversaw product strategy and the overall business until AMD acquired Nod.ai (see related article here) today.

Anush will lead the acceleration of deploying AI solutions optimized for AMD products while aligning with AMD’s AI growth strategy centered on an open software ecosystem. In the near term, he and his team will introduce the code generation (CodeGen) capabilities from the Nod.ai flagship software, Shark, to unlock customer engagements via the ROCm™ and Vitis™ AI platforms. Over time, Anush will lead the contributions of the Nod.ai team to the AMD Unified AI Stack.

Before starting Nod.ai, Anush was instrumental in the graphics stack on the first ARM Chromebook. He led the movement of the Chrome operating system from Debian to Gentoo Linux to enable Google to gain full control of the shipping software. Previously, he was Principal Engineer for Agnilux, which Google acquired. The Agnilux team became crucial to the Chrome OS team, building a fusion of Android and Chrome OS.

Previously, Anush was a technical lead at Cisco Systems in its Datacenter Group, creating the first distributed virtual switching platform. He has also been an early member of FireEye, where he led in-memory taint-check analysis for networking and security in virtualized environments. He started his career in an earlier stint at Cisco, contributing to metro Ethernet initiatives.

Anush holds a Master of Science in computer science from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from the Mepco Schlenk Engineering College at Madurai Kamaraj University in India. He has earned 10 patents. In his spare time, he enjoys skiing, mountaineering, and trail running. Anush lives with his family, including three children and two dogs, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.

This episode is brought to you by Side – delivering award-winning QA, localization, player support, and tech services for the world’s leading games and technology brands.

For over 30 years, Side has helped create unforgettable user experiences—from indies to AAA blockbusters like Silent Hill 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Learn more about Side’s global solutions at side.inc.

SHOW NOTES:

• AMD’s AI hardware + software strategy, explained (2:24)
• From startup founder to leading AI software at AMD (3:50)
• How AMD is unifying hardware through a shared AI stack (6:01)
• What the VP of AI Software @ AMD owns across software & customer enablement (7:17)
• AMD’s daily standup and real-time prioritization rituals (10:32)
• Strategies for building a unified AI ecosystem from first principles (13:06)
• How to approach building for complex technical workflows (15:38)
• Navigating hardware ecosystem requirements & aligning AI software (17:48)
• Challenging legacy software assumptions & why AI requires a new mindset for software development (19:38)
• AMD’s integration of community contributors into product cycles (21:21)
• AMD’s approach to cultivating an open-source ecosystem & community experience (22:48)
• Open-source & AMD’s ecosystem strategy: Building trust by building in public (26:57)
• How AMD collects and acts on user feedback fast within a community ecosystem (29:24)
• AI’s impact on everyday human experiences (32:15)
• Rapid fire questions (34:50)

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/

ABOUT FARNAZ AZMOODEH

Farnaz is the CTO at Linktree, the leading social platform for creators and small businesses. Linktree enables its users to unify, curate, and monetize their online presence. Farnaz started her career at Google, focusing on the ad tech space. Farnaz then joined Snap, leading Snap's AR monetization team before scaling to run Snap's Platform and product engineering. Farnaz earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from Sharif University of Technology before moving to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Southern California. After fulfilling the credits for a master’s degree, she decided to enter the tech industry where she could contribute to human progress by bringing products to millions of users.

Build AI Voice Agents with ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.

Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.

Get started for free at elevenlabs.io/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Taking on product & design 3 months into a new role (3:01)
• Going from delivery to discovery: mindset shifts for eng leaders (5:58)
• Identifying the current state of engineering, product & design (10:59)
• Decision-making based on anecdotes vs. data (12:50)
• Pivoting strategies to optimize for small, fast teams to improve cross-functional collaboration (15:04)
• Signals to pivot your product approach & ****make different bets (16:59)
• Complementary skill sets for rapid iteration (19:14)
• How to avoid silencing critical input & transform team frustration into product insight (20:41)
• Applying the 80/20 rule to complex product surfaces (23:46)
• Case Study: Reprioritizing the LinkTree product w/ 80/20 approach (25:46)
• Bringing on a strategic product partner & kicking off org change (27:28)
• Be honest about your knowledge gaps (29:09)
• How Farnaz’s experiences at Snap inform her leadership as CTO (33:21)
• When pattern matching fails: frameworks for checking assumptions (35:22)
• Where EPD Is headed: cross-functional evolution in the age of AI (38:10)
• Rapid fire questions (38:58)

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/

ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS

Wade Chambers will be leading Engineering at Amplitude. Amplitude is the leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Wade has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Included Health, Twitter, TellApart, Proofpoint, Yahoo, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams, leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth.

Build AI Voice Agents with ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.

Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.

Get started for free at elevenlabs.io/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Why empowering engineering teams to own their mission matters (3:16)
• Common traps that prevent eng leaders from empowering teams (5:15)
• Understanding the “why” behind ownership & systemizing individual ownership (7:09)
• Systems change for empowerment: Aligning company vision, outcomes, competencies & behaviors (9:48)
• How to bring someone from low ownership back to high ownership (13:49)
• Developing trust & having tough conversations around ownership (15:17)
• Nonobvious factors to that erode ownership over time (17:42)
• Empowering teams through meaningful missions, clear expectations, defining success, & ongoing check-ins (20:55)
• Identifying engineers w/ competencies & behaviors that align w/ your org’s vision & goals (24:00)
• When having too much ownership becomes a problem (27:22)
• Wade’s process for officially transferring ownership (28:47)
• Coaching and navigating conversations around ownership (32:01)
• Impactful questions to ask during the coaching / check in process (34:08)
• Closing gaps in leadership competencies & behaviors (37:27)
• Coaching leaders to align personal growth with org goals (39:25)
• Rapid fire questions (41:34)

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/

ABOUT FUNMI OLUDAIYE

Funmi is a Managing Director and the Head of the Digital Risk Office for Enterprise Partnerships at Goldman Sachs, where she is pioneering a first-of-its-kind global initiative to embed critical business, security, and engineering risk practices within the engineering organization. With nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer, architect, and engineering manager, she has a proven track record of leading high-performing teams, delivering innovative technology solutions, and championing best practices in developer experience and productivity across large-scale engineering teams. Most recently, she was the Head of Engineering for Consumer Deposits at Marcus by Goldman Sachs, and prior to that, she led the product engineering teams that built and launched the firm's award-winning credit card partnerships with Apple and later, General Motors. Funmi is a passionate advocate for underrepresented groups in the technology industry and is committed to mentoring the next generation of engineering leaders. Her wealth of experience and dedication to driving positive change make her a sought-after speaker and advisor.

ABOUT KETAN GUPTA

Ketan is a seasoned engineering leader with 13+ years in software development, cloud, architecture, product delivery, and organizational leadership. He excels at building high-performing engineering teams and driving strategic initiatives. As an active community builder, he contributes to the Engineering Leaders Community and champions software craftsmanship.

ABOUT SASHA HALL

Sasha Hall is an Engineering Manager at Planitar Inc, makers of iGUIDE. A University of Waterloo graduate with over 5 years of leadership experience at Pegasus Aeronautics and Deep Trekker, Sasha brings valuable insights on decisive leadership, effective communication, and strategic vision in growing organizations. Their career path through underwater robotics at Deep Trekker, aerial drone systems at Pegasus Aeronautics, and spatial mapping technologies at Planitar showcases a passion for innovative hardware and sensing solutions. This diverse technical background, combined with consistent leadership dedication, has equipped Sasha with a unique perspective on navigating today's complex engineering challenges.

Build AI Voice Agents with ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.

Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.

Get started for free at elevenlabs.io/elc

SHOW NOTES:

Funmi discusses why successful eng leaders build true partnerships between engineering & business stakeholders (1:58)

Navigating the dynamics of engineering & cross-functional team partnerships (3:00)

Creating alignment / building relationships through fostering trust & curiosity (4:42)

How engaging w/ curiosity is key to building cross-functional relationships (7:21)

Funmi’s framework to help identify gaps in understanding (8:56)

Recognizing knowledge gaps and relying on subject matter experts (10:15)

Tips for navigating partnerships with multiple stakeholders (13:14)

What’s going on with ELC New York & the power of connecting with eng leaders (14:45)

Ketan discusses cloud transformation and AI integration (17:08)

Considering challenges w/ security, scalability, cost, flexibility & AI in cloud vs. hybrid migrations (18:04)

Explaining the impact of technical debt on organizations (20:04)

The STIR framework for managing tech debt during cloud migrations (21:17)

Translating tech debt into business value w/ STIR (24:17)

Separating continuous improvement / performance from tech debt (27:02)

Understanding team strengths & bolstering team motivation (29:24)

Ketan’s experience with ELC London (31:07)

Have fun with decision-making (33:29)

Sasha discusses optimizing team processes amid company growth & new hires (35:11)

Effective decision-making - balancing being decisive & thoughtful (37:36)

Examples of balancing quick decision-making w/ thoughtfulness (39:05)

How to refactor repetitive tasks to improve efficiency (40:32)

Balancing time, risk & impact in decision-making processes (42:06)

The value of building a network & finding mentors outside your own company (45:03)

Advice for jumping into ELC community events (47:41)

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/

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.

Build AI Voice Agents with ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.

Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.

Get started for free at elevenlabs.io/elc

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/

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/

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

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters -Richard P. Rumelt clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world.

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/