The Engineering Leadership Podcast

We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making! Tom & Viraj share formative startup experiences that shaped their careers as a Principal Engineer & Eng Leader. Plus insights shaping their new company on assessing risk, dealing with open-ended problems, being decisive, & removing non-coding time for engineers VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOMViraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOMTom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages. SHOWNOTESThe Beginning - How Tom & Viraj first met over 15 years ago (3:48)The Early Days - Microsoft, Tom’s start-up jump to Audiogalaxy, and why Viraj followed (8:55)Lessons in hiring and assessing risk at an early stage startup (15:07)”Yo, I don’t even know how to use a Mac…” + other strong opinions & mantras from their early start up experience (24:07)What happens when you remove decision-making delays & non-coding time from an engineer’s schedule (29:03)What principal IC’s & engineering leaders have in common... “Your job is to be decisive!” (34:08)Takeaways (39:17) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Harpaul Sambhi, Founder & CEO @ Magical reveals the tools he uses to accelerate his personal and professional growth. You’ll learn how to engineer successful outcomes with your goals through accountability mechanisms, how to build a personal board of directors or leverage friendly competitions like the “master of the universe award” to learn, pivot, & grow faster."When we do our goal setting, especially if you're trying to compete with someone... is to do the personal side just as much as the professional side. And you get that layer of intimacy that is often not necessarily shown in these types of meetings. And as a result, they become an exceptionally vital part of your life.” HARPAUL SAMBHI, FOUNDER & CEO @ MAGICALHarpaul Sambhi is a serial entrepreneur and life optimizer. His current company Magical is reinventing copy and paste, automating mundane, soul-crushing tasks.He previously sold his company, Careerify, to LinkedIn in 2015 and joined the product management team. SHOWNOTESThe origin story of Harpaul’s hunger for personal growth (2:47)Introducing the “Personal Board of Directors” as a tool to accelerate your personal & professional growth (4:25)Accountability as a mechanism to achieve your goals (7:38)How a personal board of directors works and impacts your thought process (10:07)How to identify your gaps and leverage your personal board of directors (14:31)Increase the richness of your discussion and reduce “off the cuff thinking” with “prep notes (20:47)How to curate and build your personal board of directors (25:33)Where to start building your personal board of directors (33:32)How to use “friendly competitions” like the “Master of the Universe Award” to accelerate your growth (37:14)Focus on your goal’s inputs vs. outputs (43:22)How the “Master of the Universe Award” impacts your relationships (45:34Takeaways (48:50)Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alexis Rask, Executive Coach & Partner @ Sweat Equity Ventures shares how to ask powerful questions. You’ll hear simple tactical ways to increase the power of your questions, what the most powerful question is, common failure modes of open-ended questions, how to get over your fear of silence, plus stories of the most powerful questions we’ve ever been asked."When I say a powerful question, I'm saying 'What's the really right question, for this right moment, that is going to TRULY unlock someone's thinking, in a way that gets at new information.'" ALEXIS RASK, EXECUTIVE COACH & PARTNER @ SWEAT EQUITY VENTURESNamed 40 under 40 by Silicon Valley Business Journal, Alexis is an experienced business operator turned Executive Coach to Silicon Valley's top founders and VCs. Prior to founding her coaching firm, Future Consulting, Alexis founded the Marketing Solutions team at LinkedIn in 2006. She opened offices, hired out the sales and customer success teams, and developed the go-to-market plans. She has also served as COO/CRO at Shopkick which sold for $250million in 2014. She is also a faculty member of UC Berkeley's Executive Coaching Institute. SHOWNOTESWhat’s the most powerful question you’ve ever been asked? (4:40)Failure-modes of open-ended questions & how to use powerful questions to get to “the heart of the matter” (11:54)The impact of a more powerful question (18:55)Emotional intelligence & how to get the best from people (25:40)Why “WHY” is the perfect follow up question (31:24)How to use powerful questions in your 1 on 1’s (38:49)How to get over the fear of silence… (41:40)Identify opportunities to ask more powerful questions with the “mental review” (48:18)Takeaways (54:19)Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wendy Shepperd, GVP Engineering at New Relic, leads large-scale strategic programs with a focus on precision and teamwork. She shares her experiences navigating the challenges of multimillion-dollar cloud migrations, emphasizing the importance of effective communication and stakeholder alignment. Wendy reveals insights into project planning, execution, and the significance of celebrating team successes. Her mantra of making memories during tough times highlights the value of learning and collaboration in achieving project goals.

Will Larson CTO @ Calm shares with us how to focus your time on what actually matters. You’ll hear about many of the common traps engineering leaders fall into and his frameworks to help you better target your time to focus on long-term, high-impact work."A lot of times they'll be like, 'Oh no one's working on this... I can make a huge improvement here!' But then they'll get signals from leadership that 'Actually this isn't valued...' And so I think it's really important to understand what SHOULD be valuable, and then understand what IS actually valued, and then make your own decisions based on that in terms of where you want to put your time." WILL LARSON, CTO @ CALMWill previously working at places like Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He's been writing on his blog, Irrational Exuberance, since 2007 with 600+ different posts covering tons of topics on engineering leadership, management and career.He is also the author of “An Elegant Puzzle” and his *NEW* book “Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” Follow Will on Twitter @LethainHere is the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs (engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’) SHOWNOTESWhen Will confronted the existential question “Am I actually working on what matters?” (3:56)Where most people go wrong when evaluating how they spend their time (8:52)How to focus on long-term impact and avoid short-term “snacks” & “preening” (10:12)How to navigate a company that recognizes high visibility work over high-impact work (13:12)How to mitigate & reduce status-chasing in your teams (16:09)What high-visibility, low impact work looks like with engineering leaders (18:20)“Chasing Ghosts” and the trap of projecting familiarity onto problems (20:59)How to catch yourself “chasing ghosts” (27:31)Focus on what really matters by seeking the “existential issues” & where there’s “Room AND Attention” (32:10)How to identify and anticipate future existential issues with the “Iterative Elimination Tournament” (35:28)Creating “Room and Attention” & identifying your unique capabilities as an eng leader (38:20)Get projects unstuck and prioritized fast by “Lending Privilege” (42:11)Why Will wrote his new book - “Staff Engineering: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” (45:42)Takeaways (48:40) LINKS & RESOURCESWill's blog Irrational Exuberance: https://lethain.com/Here’s the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs on engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’: https://staffeng.com/stories/aaron-suggsWill's book An Elegant Puzzle: https://lethain.com/elegant-puzzle/Will's *NEW* book - "Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track": https://staffeng.com/book Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Edward Kim, co-founder & CTO @ Gusto shares the different forms that “fear of failure” can take in your engineering org. Eddie shares incredible stories to help you spot the different signs of “fear of failure”. And you’ll hear different ways you can change your team culture, process and operations to reduce fear of failure.“But as you continue to scale and you grow... that thing that you optimized for starts to become a disservice to you and the company. Because what happens is this fear of failure, if you take it too far, it starts to change a lot of things about the business.” ABOUT EDWARD KIMPrior to Gusto, Edward was the CEO and co-founder of Picwing, a Y Combinator startup and photo-printing platform. Before Picwing, Edward worked as a senior project engineer at Volkswagen Group of America Electronics Research Lab, where he led research and development for cloud-based navigation and speech recognition systems for Volkswagen and Audi.Edward is also the developer of several award-winning Android apps that have generated more than $1 million in revenue. Edward holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. SHOWNOTESWhat it means to “remove fear of failure” as you scale (2:25)Signs that indicate your company is optimized around a fear of failure (6:19)How to know when “healthy management” actually means your company has a fear of failure and is holding you back (10:54)Other forms “fear of failure” can take in your organization (14:20)MTTR over MTBF - Why you should prioritize recovering from failure over avoiding failure (17:40)“Rage-fixing” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment confronting fear of failure at Gusto (23:43)“Kicking the flipchart” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment #2 (27:52)How to maximize unplanned or unintended crucial conversations (33:54)How to decide when you need to abandon the agenda and “kick the flipchart” (37:37)How psychological safety can make your team more resilient to fear of failure (40:17)Takeaways (44:07) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erica Lockheimer shares with us her imperfect path to engineering leadership, why the unconventional path matters, and what you can do as an individual leader & organization to empower engineering leaders with unconventional backgrounds. Plus you’ll also hear how to overcome self-doubt and launch an apprenticeship program!“Whether you're a manager or whether you're an individual contributor, you are a leader in your role. Use the voice that you've earned in the seat that you own. What can you personally do to create a different outcome. And all of us have that power in a role that we have.” - Erica Lockheimer ABOUT ERICA LOCKHEIMERPrior to LinkedIn Learning, Erica served as the VP of Engineering heading the Growth Engineering team, where her focus was on increasing growth in new members and deepening engagement with members across LinkedIn's products. She started the Growth Team from the ground up to now a high-performing 120-person team.She is also responsible for LinkedIn's Women In Tech (WIT) initiative that is focused on empowering women in technical roles within the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering, In 2014 and 2015, Erica was also voted amongst the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider. Erica is a San Francisco Bay Area native, has 2 kids, loves to run and is a graduate from San Jose State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. RESOURCESAbout REACH: https://careers.linkedin.com/reach/AboutReachShalini Agarwal, LinkedIn REACH Lead & Eng Leader https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-agarwal-5b735b2/ SHOWNOTESErica’s first experience on a hiring committee (2:28)Erica’s imperfect path to engineering leadership (6:51)Erica’s career decision-making criteria (12:01)How to overcome self-doubt (13:32)Jerry’s personal story of the “imperfect path” (16:25)Other "unconventional paths" to engineering leadership (17:27)How Erica evaluates potential in people (25:03)What type of support to provide when you’re pushing people outside their comfort zone (27:44)How to create more opportunities for unconventional candidates in the hiring funnel through LinkedIn REACH (30:20)About apprenticeship programs (35:41)How to start launching your apprenticeship program (39:25)How diverse teams impact product and change outcomes (41:12)How to have a conversation about bias in your algorithm (43:44)Final words of wisdom for those with “unconventional” backgrounds (45:07) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Craig Martell shares the biggest mistakes leaders of ML teams make, what to do if you have no experience leading an ML team, key skills your ML team needs, plus different models/approaches to building an ML team. You’ll hear the most expensive and time-consuming parts of ML, how to estimate timelines, unique tech debt, and how to manage expectations.“If I had to give one piece of advice about starting AI in your company, one of the first people I would hire is a really great data scientist, even if they can't code. Just so they're the one who's going to start training you and helping you think about, how to gather data, how the modeling is going to work, what you're going to need, whether that feature that you want to build is even modelable in the first place..." - Craig Martell ABOUT CRAIG MARTELLCraig is Head of Lyft Machine Learning. He’s also an adjunct professor of Machine Learning for Northeastern University’s Align program.Prior to joining Lyft, he was Head of Machine Intelligence @ Dropbox, and led a number of AI teams and initiatives at LinkedIn, including the development of the LinkedIn AI Academy. Before LinkedIn, Craig was a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specializing in natural language processing (NLP). He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and is the co-author of the MIT Press book Great Principles of Computing. RESOURCES(ML training) Galvanize: https://bit.ly/3ckF6Gz(website) Andrew Ng: https://bit.ly/3cgerdU(courses) ML: https://bit.ly/3iNB9gf | AI for Everyone: https://bit.ly/2HeZKwl(course) Fast.AI: https://bit.ly/35SPwMD(book) "Hands-On ML with Scikit" : https://amzn.to/35SbGyh SHOW NOTESAn overview of the machine learning lifecycle (2:49)The most expensive and time-consuming aspect of the machine learning lifecycle (6:07)The key skills of a machine learning team (7:21)How do you build an AI/ML Team and what are the different models? (8:41)What to do If you’re an engineering manager with no AI/ML skills or experience (15:19)How deep does your understanding of AI/ML have to be in order to lead effectively? (18:48)How do you estimate project timelines for AI/ML teams? (19:15)What are the biggest mistakes engineering leaders make managing AI/ML teams? (20:52)How do you manage expectations in an organization that’s in the early days of AI/ML development? (21:33)What are sources of technical debt unique to AI/ML systems? (22:13)How do machine learning teams interface with product teams? (23:55)AI/ML resources for executive engineering leaders (25:44)When’s the right time to invest in AI/ML? (26:10)Can you apply the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) to AI/ML development? (26:40)Takeaways (28:12) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“Giving up control” is about empowering other people to scale yourself, and scale your effectiveness. Maria Latushkin shares with us why you need to give up control as an engineering leader and what holds people back. Plus you’ll learn tons of different ways to influence and manage your performance when it’s dependent on other people’s effectiveness.“You are responsible for the delivery of the team. At the end of the day, nobody really cares like how much YOU work. You can be working around the clock. And it's not how great you are or what you produce. It stops being about you and it starts being about the function that you lead.” - Maria LatushkinABOUT MARIA LATUSHKINMaria is responsible for leading Omada Health’s technology vision and team. Prior to joining Omada Health and moving to the healthcare space, Maria has spent over 15 years in eCommerce, retail, and enterprise SaaS companies ranging from series B startups to large companies, such as Walmart. SHOW NOTESWhy you need to give up control as a senior engineering leader (2:07)What holds people back from giving up control? (9:27)The impact and trade-offs you make when you avoid or resist giving up control (15:31)How to influence and manage your performance now that it’s dependent on your team’s effectiveness (23:49)How to make sure people heard you, so that you know you’re on the same page (29:04)Does the discomfort of “giving up control” happen at every transition to a new leadership level, or is it a one-time thing? (32:44)How to regain “control” and empower your team (39:40)The Impact - how you feel when you give up control (41:25)Takeaways (43:36) ---Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A dynamic conversation between 4 current and past VPs of Engineering who cover tons of patterns and anti-patterns about being a VPE! You'll hear how leadership is different in large vs. small companies, mental models to determine your greatest leverage, why you DON’T need to act like an owner, how to put trust into practice when you’re transitioning into a new role, and about the imperfect path to become a VPE. SPEAKERS:CATHY POLINKSY CTO @ Stitch FixJERRY KRIKHELI VP of Engineering @ HouzzRICHARD WONG SVP of Engineering @ CourseraERICA LOCKHEIMER VP of Engineering @ Linkedin LearningAnd CLAIRE LEW CEO @ Know Your TeamSHOWNOTESWhat Cathy means by “the best leaders spot patterns, understand problems, then build systems to solve them” (3:55)Jerry’s view on how the practice of leadership is different at large companies vs. small companies (7:30)Erica’s perspective on how the transition to VPE is different than other eng leadership roles and how to put trust into practice (12:27)Why Richard resonates with “act like an owner” and what it actually looks like in practice as VPE (16:40)Cathy’s top 3 priorities as VPE that determine how she spends her time and how to refocus your team (23:50)Richard's mental model to determine where he has the most leverage for impact and why being technical isn't always about writing code (26:16)Jerry's 3 key hiring traits and how to create an environment where you're the first to know when something's wrong (30:10)The imperfect path to become a VPE and Erica’s advice for engineering leaders with an “unconventional” background (34:01)The common struggle to balance being a problem solver and being the bottleneck as a VPE (39:11)How they cope with and manage stress (42:55)Takeaways (45:00)---Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.