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In this episode, Vinod Marur (SVP of Engineering @ Databricks) shares his approach to recalibrating leadership priorities as organizations scale. Vinod breaks down his personal recalibration framework—why he does it every 3–6 months, signals that it’s time to reassess, and how to design communication and collaboration structures that reduce information asymmetry during periods of rapid growth. We dive into rewriting hiring playbooks, tailoring recruitment pitches, and the impact of AI on hiring. Plus actionable strategies for onboarding and empowering senior leaders, identifying the highest-leverage problems to solve, and finding champions to carry key initiatives forward.
We explored practical AI tool adoption strategies, addressed team upskilling challenges, and examined how engineering managers' roles are evolving in response. Key takeaways included the critical importance of continuous learning frameworks, heightened value of emotional intelligence in leadership, and maintaining a problem-solving mindset while navigating technological disruption.
# Roundtable
# AI
# Engineering Leadership
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Jon Hyman (Co-Founder and CTO @ Braze) shares the pivotal moments that shaped the company - from being the only person on call in the early years to identifying (and pivoting) product-market fit. Jon discusses how they navigated early-stage failure modes, carved out areas of product ownership, and made the shift to enterprise customers. Plus how leadership priorities evolve pre- vs. post-IPO and the next evolution of Jon’s leadership growth after almost 14 years at Braze.
During this session, we discussed automating delivery pipelines, managing technical debt, driving change with new technologies, demonstrating engineering’s business value, and developing future leaders who prioritize operational excellence.
# Engineering Leadership
# Leadership
# Roundtable
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In this episode, Rukmini Reddy (SVP of Engineering @ PagerDuty) shares invaluable leadership lessons on navigating transition, uncertainty, and fear. We cover actionable strategies like the five essential questions to lead your team through change, “hugging the elephant” to overcome fear, approaching org change from first principles, shifting from “informed pessimism” to “curious optimism,” and building high-trust peer support! If you're looking to strengthen your leadership and build more resilient engineering teams, this episode is packed with essential insights to help you navigate the toughest challenges with confidence.
How do you build a platform that accelerates innovation by 10x-100x? Eliot Horowitz (CEO & Founder @ Viam) shares how insights from building MongoDB are shaping Viam’s approach to platform ecosystem development, user-centricity and open-source strategy. We explore the origin story behind Viam, principles for platform design for hardware/software development, modular systems, seamless APIs, and finding the right abstraction layers for your product. Plus we cover cultivating developer communities, and frameworks to anchor your business-model and pricing. This episode is packed with insights on platform building, fostering ecosystems, driving user-centric innovation.
We explored metrics, business stakeholder partnerships, data processing reliability, chaos engineering, and the importance of continuously measuring and improving system performance.
# Roundtable
# Reliability
# Bridging Teams
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Kevin Stewart (SVP of Engineering @ Splice) joins us to discuss organizational transformation, inspiring vision, and empowering teams! We break down how to tackle root issues in leadership and decision-making, diagnose and prioritize org problems, make a compelling case for change to stakeholders, and override learned helplessness. Kevin also shares how Splice’s concept video became a catalyst for alignment, motivation, and a shared north star for their strategy rollout. Plus, we discuss strategies for empowering teams to operate autonomously—freeing you to focus on business objectives and strategic work.
We explored the complexities of scaling high-performance engineering organizations, diving deep into creating autonomous, trust-driven teams that can adapt and excel.
# Roundtable
# Scaling
# High-Performance
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In this episode, we explore how to accelerate your AI learning journey with Maher Hanafi, SVPE @ Betterworks! Maher shares his progression from using LLMs as a proof of concept to tackling real-world use cases and complex challenges like data governance, data flow, enterprise AI, and AI agents. Maher also dissects the importance of team experimentation with real use cases, revisiting AI decisions with your team, when to go horizontal vs. vertical with AI learning, overcoming POC-to-production challenges; and evaluating the ROI of your AI decisions. Special thanks to our guest co-host Corey Coto, a local leader of ELC Seattle!