What if your engineering team didn’t just write code, but owned product discovery, wrote the launch messaging, and handled early sales? In this episode, Michael Grinich, CEO and founder of WorkOS, deconstructs their playbook for collapsing the product/engineering stack: no design leads, only one PM, and engineers who own product end-to-end. Michael breaks down how they teach product thinking, build with deep customer insight, and why his most important job is often to "cut scope." You’ll learn how to remove the "lossy translation layers" between teams, build a culture of curiosity and customer obsession, and ship higher-quality products, faster.

Influencing without authority is the hidden superpower of security leadership—and a crucial skill every engineering leader must master. In this episode, Srinath Kuruvadi (Head of Cloud Security @ JPMorgan Chase) breaks down how to influence without formal authority and advocate when ROI isn’t immediately clear. We cover tactics for shaping problems from the POV of other stakeholders, Plus, strategies to establish shared outcomes, insights on optimizing your time, emerging AI x security trends, and how his team is operationalizing curiosity & experimentation through The Innovation Lab.

John Amaral (CTO and co-founder @ Root.io) joins us to discuss the evolving role of engineering leaders and why vision-first leadership & building your “vision” muscle is more critical than ever. We dive into why “shift left” is dead and why SaaS is being replaced by “do-it” as a service. John also unpacks how to think in outcomes, apply the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework to eliminate toil, and reimagine product experiences. Plus, we look inside Root.io’s approach to building AI-native security products that ship daily. Whether you’re rethinking your org design or exploring the frontier of AI-powered engineering, this episode will reshape how you think about building, leading, and scaling teams.