The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Conscious Career Growth (part 2) with Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds #21 Aug 16, 2020

Show notes

Your job as an engineering leader is to win and increase your capacity to win. In Part 2, Wade Chambers discusses how to measure success for engineering leaders, what great looks like, AND how to increase your team’s performance and improve their potential! You’ll also hear how to get unstuck and move your career forward.

"And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a great manager? Or what does it mean to be a great leader? Answering those questions for yourself and actually getting to the point where you have confidence and are willing to stand behind it because it's well-reasoned and like it's a principled point of view... will help you improve" - Wade Chambers

Wade oversees all aspects of engineering and technology innovation as the CTO & SVP of Engineering at Grand Rounds. With more than 25 years of engineering leadership experience, he has deep technical domain expertise and a successful track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth for companies of all sizes including Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, and Opsware. Before Silicon Valley, Wade served in the military and the White House Situation Room.

SHOWNOTES

How to measure success, “win, and increase your capacity to win” (2:32)
How to increase the potential of people on your team (8:24)
How to get unstuck in your career (12:31)
The 3 “buckets” to help identify where your career growth is stuck (16:53)
How to maximize learning and growth from the books you read (21:23)
How to get to the core principles that drive your behavior (25:52)
Wade’s final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be (29:38)
Takeaways (31:41)

Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com

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Conscious Career Growth (part 1) with Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds #20 Aug 10, 2020

Show notes

Wade Chambers discusses how to learn anything by applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity to your career. You’ll learn how to get unstuck, and move your career forward. Plus Wade also shares stories about his early failures as an engineering manager, and what he wished he knew when he first became a manager.

"The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward." - Wade Chambers

ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS

SHOWNOTES

How Wade formed the habit of being conscious, thoughtful and digging deeper (4:37)
Wade’s early failure as a first-time manager (8:25)
Neuroplasticity as the foundation for conscious growth and getting unstuck in your career (15:01)
How to learn and become competent in almost anything with conscious growth (23:06)
How to align your growth to both impact your company AND move your career forward (28:54)
How to predict your company’s needs by applying an anthropological perspective (36:06)
Takeaways (41:12)

Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com

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Operationalizing Values and Principles with Andrew Fong, VP of Infrastructure @ Dropbox #19 Aug 02, 2020

Show notes

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

"If we can operationalize this, the micro decision making on the ground becomes much more powerful and it doesn't force us into a command and control environment." - Andrew Fong

ABOUT ANDREW FONG

Andrew is the Vice President of Infrastructure at Dropbox. In this role he oversees all infrastructure engineering and operations efforts which are responsible for scaling Dropbox’s infrastructure stack in order to support hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Prior to Dropbox, he was at YouTube, Google, and AOL in various infrastructure capacities

SHOWNOTES

What it means to “operationalize values” and why it matters (2:12)
How to operationalize values in OKRs (4:45)
How to identify values in your team or organization (8:01)
How to reinforce values in your organization in meetings, all-hands, and personally (14:35)
How to operationalize values in recruiting (18:52)
How operationalized values impact projects: Dropbox’s data center migration story (20:41)
Lessons learned from Dropbox’s “Magic Pocket” project (26:09)
How to make values endure beyond people in projects with long time horizons: be explicit with your decision making process (29:27)
How to operationalize values in small teams and start ups (34:46)
How Andrew operationalizes his personal values (40:31)
Takeaways (48:11)

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Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 2), with Jean-Denis Greze, Head of Engineering @ Plaid #18 Jul 26, 2020

Show notes

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

"The thing that I think makes over a 10 year period, a really good engineering organization is that at any one moment in time, it has very few spikes, but over a long period of time, it has all the spikes." - Jean-Denis Greze

ABOUT JEAN-DENIS GREZE

Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid.

Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams.

Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School.

SHOWNOTES

How to mitigate weaknesses in your organization using the strategies of Isolation & Outlets (2:47)
How to use “Isolation” in your business units as an org building strategy: examples from Plaid and Xbox (8:44)
How to use “Isolation” in recruiting & product strategy: examples of apprenticeships to hire, roles you've never hired for, and incubator programs (12:17)
How to use "Outlets" to create different conversations, adopt different values, and set new priorities (16:38)
The “Portfolio Theory of Time Allocation” (19:41)
How to introduce "Shocks" proactively to change and adapt your organization (28:32)
How to intentionally use Acquisitions to “Shock” your organization (33:35)
How to intentionally use Reorgs to “Shock” your organization (36:06)
The power of peer groups and re-reading (45:19)

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Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 1), with Jean-Denis Greze, Head of Engineering @ Plaid #17 Jul 16, 2020

Show notes

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

"You're asking me what makes us different. I think it's that we've been really deliberate about building what I would call a ‘spiky org’ as opposed to a very balanced organization. The reality is when you're in a fast-growing company, it's much easier to do a few things well than to try to do everything.” - Jean-Denis Greze

ABOUT JEAN-DENIS GREZE

Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams.

Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School.

SHOWNOTES

What you should focus on when building an organization: Be a "spiky" org (2:31)
How to change and adapt your organization that preserves your strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities: force yourself to adapt your “spikes” (7:01)
Recruiting, Growth and Performance Management as “spike” examples in organization building (and why it's NOT useful to be good at all three of them) (8:15)
The org design dilemma between "Hiring Well" vs. "Firing Fast" (12:01)
The org design dilemma between business impact vs. craft and quality (18:27)
How you know when you should change your strengths, values and build a new "spike" (24:48)
The dilemma of building an organization with bottom-up vs. top-down decision making (27:47)
How to develop new strengths, capabilities, or “spikes” in your engineering organization (32:20)
Jean-Denis's process to create space for questions, creativity, and problem-solving (36:33)

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The Value of Being Direct with Eisar Lipkovitz, EVP of Engineering @ Lyft #16 Jul 09, 2020

Show notes

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

"At the end of the day, the main reason I think direct is effective is you actually sort of get to the core of the issue where a lot of people dance around the details and they're conflict-averse" -Eisar Lipkovitz

ABOUT EISAR LIPKOVITZ

Eisar is Executive Vice President of Engineering at Lyft. Prior to Lyft, Eisar spent 15 years at Google in various leadership roles, overseeing the tremendous growth of that business while streamlining operations and reducing product complexity. Since 2014, his team of several thousand engineers built Google’s Display, Video, and Apps Advertising products.

Previously, Eisar worked on the infrastructure behind Google Search, driving many innovations during a tremendous increase in scale and a transition from web to structured data. Prior to that, he worked for four years at Akamai during the explosive growth of the Internet. Eisar began his career at Israeli Air Force after graduating from Tel Aviv University with B.Sc and MBA.

Shownotes

Why being direct is more effective and how to practice the art of direct communication (2:27)
How to overcome conflict aversion and the fear of being direct (9:16)
How to prepare yourself for a direct, difficult conversation (13:14)
How to balance communicating vision and strategy vs. the details (16:42)
How to navigate conversations when people don’t understand you (20:31)
How to make your conversation more direct when someone is speaking ambiguously or in code (26:07)
How to help junior engineering leaders grow (28:29)
Where people typically get stuck in the engineering leadership career track (32:59)
How inclusion creates environments for more direct conversations about real world challenges (36:26)
What has brought you the greatest amount of joy as an engineering leader? (38:00)

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Operating under High Pressure with Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM @ Google Ads #15 Jul 02, 2020

Show notes

Vidhya Srinivasan shares her framework for how she’s navigated her career and operated under high pressure. You’ll learn the practices she uses to deal with and diffuse pressure plus how to coach and create opportunities for engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk.

"one question that I often ask myself is... 'Given how I feel right now if I, were to fast forward five years and I look back, would I feel the same level of pressure or anxiety about the situation?' And I've yet to come across a situation where it would still be that relevant five years out" -Vidhya Srinivasan

ABOUT VIDHYA SRINIVASAN

Vidhya is the VP/GM at Google Ads responsible for engineering and product for Measurement & Analytics @ Google Ads. Previously, she led engineering, operations & product management for Amazon Redshift and other analytics services at AWS. Before that, she was an engineering leader for 10 years at IBM.

SHOWNOTES

How Vidhya has approached and navigated her career (2:04)
Vidhya’s framework she uses to deal with high pressure (7:20)
How to diffuse pressure (12:55)
How Vidhya’s dealt with and diffused pressure personally and professionally (15:44)
How Vidhya learned to operate out of hunger vs. fear (19:35)
How to coach engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk (28:28)
How to create opportunities for your team to fail and take on more risk (33:38)
When you should step in and help your team (36:23)
Who is someone who’s most inspired you to be a better leader? (38:39)
What’s brought you the greatest joy as an engineering leader? (40:01)

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Part 2 - Coaching, Delegation and Trust with Darian Shimy, Engineering Lead @ Square #14 Jun 25, 2020

Show notes

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

"when someone comes to you from a management standpoint says, 'is this okay? Can I do this?'They're implicitly removing the accountability and responsibility from that decision" - Darian Shimy

ABOUT DARIAN SHIMY

Darian Shimy is the Engineering Lead @ Square. As an engineering leader who scales teams and products, Darian Shimy is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience. He is currently at Square with prior leadership positions at Weebly, Attensity, and eHarmony.com. He received an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and continues to code as a hobby. Outside the professional setting, Darian is a softball coach for various age levels from the recreation to competitive level.

SHOWNOTES

How to scale leadership through effective delegation (1:40)
How to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability (5:25)
The power of repetition in communication and how to get feedback on your message (13:11)
How trust saves you time and creates leverage to scale (15:26)
Improve communication by adjusting your style and asking more engaging questions (22:15)
How to reduce fear and increase team input in large meetings (27:37)
How to read the room: what cues and signals you need to pay attention to (33:11)
The leader who most inspired and impacted Darian (36:20)
The simple power of smiling (38:31)

Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com

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Part 1 - Coaching, Delegation and Trust with Darian Shimy, Engineering Lead @ Square #13 Jun 18, 2020

Show notes

"You should be a coach, not a referee. And the coach is the person who is there to help you improve. The referee is the one who is there to point out all the problems. They're not there to make you better." - Darian Shimy

SHOWNOTES

Darian's lessons from coaching sports applied to engineering leadership (1:29)
How to communicate when someone is doing well but can still improve (9:20)
How to leverage your time to create more productivity and value for your team (13:08)
How to elevate and scale productivity and learning in your junior “players” (18:22) (20:47)
How to handle the risk of failure when delegating (21:39)
Create consistent, good management by modeling the way (25:14)
The impact when you treat your team as humans (30:36)
Our key takeaways from the episode (33:20)

Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

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Leading Through Uncertainty with David Silverman #12 May 22, 2020

Show notes

David Silverman (@dksilverman) shares how to prioritize effectively, regain productivity, compartmentalize pain, and accelerate your rate of learning to succeed through a crisis. You’ll also hear how to apply his lessons to real case studies shared by engineering leaders from our community.

“When you're dealing with uncertainty, the main thing you're trying to drive and change as the leader, is you're trying to increase the rate of learning.”

ABOUT DAVID SILVERMAN

Leadership expert and best-selling author David Silverman has paved the way in transforming groups into high-performing, agile, and adaptive teams that drive success. David continues to bring out the best in people as CEO and Founder of CrossLead. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served in the US Navy as a SEAL Officer for 12 years. Building off of his collective leadership experiences, David created CrossLead as a holistic performance management solution for today’s environment. CrossLead is designed to empower leaders, teams, and organizations to scale the adaptability of elite small teams to the entire enterprise.

David previously co-founded the McChrystal Group and led the company as CEO from 2011 through 2015. During his time at McChrystal Group, David laid out the framework for CrossLead as a co-author in the New York Times bestseller Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.

If you want to learn more about David Silverman and CrossLead, connect with him on LinkedIn or check out CrossLead.

SHOWNOTES

David’s experience with uncertainty from the Navy SEAL’s (1:15)
How to compartmentalize and deal with physical and mental pain (5:16)
How to restore and improve your productivity (13:11)
How to increase your rate of learning to succeed when things are changing fast (16:26)
The difference between “wartime” and “peacetime” leaders (26:10)
How to prioritize effectively in a crisis applying the framework “Ship, Shipmate, Self” (29:33)
How you can build trust in a crisis (34:29)
Applying Dave’s lessons in a company trying to find product-market fit (38:11)
How to apply the tools to deal with uncertainty to support your family (40:55)
How to deal with uncertainty when you’re not the decision-maker (45:23)
How you can boost team morale in the short and long term (48:41)
How to create trust and camaraderie remotely (51:56)
How to deal with cross-team or cross-organization issues and negotiations (54:06)

Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com

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