AI won't lead your team: The human side of engineering leadership

Nono is an engineering leader and certified executive coach with over 15 years of experience leading engineering teams across the tech industry. She has built and led teams at Airbnb, Slack, Pandora, navigating the unique challenges that come with high-growth environments. Today, she works with leaders at all levels, helping them build self-awareness, grow their skills, and show up fully in their roles. Her philosophy: The best investment you can make in your team is in the people leading it. 

Find out more at www.nono-guimbi.com

Drew McGahey is an Engineering Manager at Notion, where he leads the engineering team responsible for the web platform powering Notion's public-facing websites. With more than two decades of experience in software engineering, Drew has built platforms, grown teams, and helped organizations navigate technological change.

Drew believes that while AI is changing how software gets built, it won't replace the empathy, judgment, and trust required to lead great engineering teams. His work focuses on helping engineers grow, building healthy engineering cultures, and preparing leaders for an AI-enabled future.

Prerna Goel is an engineering leader with 24 years of experience building products, scaling organizations, and driving business growth at SaaS & B2B companies. She currently leads engineering for Inpatient products at Abridge AI, a leading clinical intelligence platform connecting health systems, payers and life sciences organizations.

Previously, Prerna led engineering for Vendor Risk Management at Vanta where she rapidly scaled her organization to deliver AI-powered products that automated complex enterprise workflows.

Prior to that, Prerna was a Director of Engineering at Slack, where she led teams across product-led growth, monetization, billing and enterprise sales enablement. She played a key role in Slack’s pricing and packaging transformation, drove initiatives contributing tens of millions in annual recurring revenue, and helped launch freemium experiences across features including Slack AI, Huddles, Canvas, Clips, and Workflow Builder.

Prerna is passionate about the intersection of technology, AI, business strategy, and people leadership; and about building high-performing teams that turn ambitious ideas into meaningful customer and business outcomes.

Caleb is an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, where he leads host provisioning and management across LinkedIn’s datacenter fleets. Prior to LinkedIn, Caleb led foundational platform teams at HashiCorp and durability teams within Meta’s Storage Infra org, protecting the exabytes of data that billions of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp users rely on every day.

Across his career, Caleb has been particularly interested in the intersection of technology, human behavior, and organizational systems that underpin high-performing engineering organizations. He believes that as AI reshapes how we do work, the hardest problems for engineering leaders will remain deeply human: building trust, fostering psychological safety, learning from failure, and empowering people to do their best work.

Caleb holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In his free time, you can find him traveling with his wife and building robots.