The Engineering Leadership Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

We had a blast at ELC Annual 2024, so we wanted to bring our podcast listeners some of the best highlights from popular sessions! This episode features one of the ELC Annual sessions with Anupam Singh (VP of AI & Growth Engineering @ Roblox) & Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft), as they discuss building AI/ML models at a massive scale. Anupam shares how Roblox – an immersive 3D platform with more than 77 million daily active users – scaled from zero to nearly 200 different AI models. They discuss strategies for deciding when to use open source vs. creating proprietary models; how to operationalize your models for 24/7 use; the importance of data pipelines; current and future challenges to keep in mind when creating / scaling AI models; and answer some questions from the live Q&A.

Anupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution.

"The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'”

- Anupam Singh   

Maria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma.

• How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30)
• The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34)
• Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06)
• What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12)
• Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19)
• Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06)
• How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20)
• The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18)
• Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52)
• Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21)
• Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29)
• When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36)
• Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03)
• Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03)
• How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back in late September with new guests! We have some excellent sessions at the conference - check out the agenda here: https://sfelc.com/annual2024#agenda

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In today’s episode, we’re highlighting one of our favorite past conversations, featuring Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Included Health. We cover tools for increasing your capacity to win as an eng leader, getting unstuck in your career / moving forward, and applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity principles to the career. Wade shares stories of success – and failure – as an eng manager, best practices to measure success as an eng leader, and how to increase your team’s performance & potential.

Wade Chambers (@wadechambers) is the CTO and SVP of Engineering at IncludedHealth, a company that provides technology solutions to improve the way patients get healthcare matched to their needs. He has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, Proofpoint, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth.

“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   

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

• Wade’s background in building a habit of conscious growth & digging deeper (4:14)
• Overcoming early failures as a first-time manager (8:11)
• Why it’s hard to unhear the truth & how to incorporate feedback as a manager (13:08)
• How understanding neuroplasticity impacts career development (18:11)
• Moving along the spectrum of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence (19:30)
• Align your growth to impact your company AND move your career forward (24:37)
• Why eng leaders need to truly understand their org’s business needs (29:49)
• Strategies for both winning & increasing your capacity to win (35:30)
• How to increase the potential of individuals & your overall team (40:52)
• Factors that are keeping you stuck in career growth (44:39)
• Turning to books to maximize learning / growth (52:11)
• How to identify core principles & why they drive your behavior (55:37)
• Final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are & where you want to be (58:54)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They also reveal recommendations on filtering / assessing decisions & their go-to leadership styles!

Ali Littman is the Director of Engineering at Modern Health, where she leads product engineering teams that make it possible for people to receive online mental health services the moment they need and at no cost to the individual. Prior to her current role, she served as the Director of Engineering at Omada Health. Outside of her role, she is also a champion for diversity and inclusion, most notably leading a Women's ERG, serving on company-wide belonging councils, and providing imposter syndrome coaching.

Ali Littman is a passionate engineering leader specializing in healthcare technology both in traditional and digital healthcare settings. She currently serves as Head of Engineering at Modern Health where she gets to lead engineering teams on the exciting journey of evolving how people access and receive mental health care treatment around the world. Ali enjoys taking startups through their scale phase and has been an engineering leader on hypergrowth journeys at both Omada Health and Modern Health - leading them through organizational, market, and product expansion. Her background in business from Haas at UC Berkeley helps navigate these business challenges with the philosophy of having business strategy inform the engineering strategy.

At the end of the day, she cares most about being a great people leader who creates inclusive cultures and teaches managers how to be great managers for their teams. She also goes a step beyond her usual management duties to serve on Belonging Councils, lead ERGs, provides imposter syndrome coaching, and mentor individuals from under-represented groups in tech. Additionally, Ali's led external talks on navigating career growth, imposter syndrome, challenging leadership scenarios, and more!

"I view my relationship to people that I work with or people that I manage right now, as actually like a lifelong commitment and I think because of that, I end up with these really strong connections even beyond past opportunities."

- Ali Littman   

Ali's day-to-day passion is creating and being part of efficient and effective engineering organizations that are firing on all cylinders where team members can achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in a psychologically safe environment. He will continue to realize this passion by working at CommerceHub as their Vice President of Engineering.

He previously worked at rocketship start-ups funded by some of the top VCs in the world including a16z, SoftBank, Microsoft Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures to name a few. Ali was the Vice President of Engineering at WorkBoard, a strategy and results enterprise SaaS platform helping large organizations align quickly for results, leading product delivery as well as accessibility, application security, release engineering, platform, and infrastructure teams. Previously, he was the Vice President of Engineering at ALICE Technologies working on revolutionizing the construction industry with an artificial intelligence-powered enterprise SaaS product.

Ali also created and managed the advanced products group at Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) for 8 years while working as an adjunct professor at UC San Diego. His team worked on creating innovative industrial vision systems and software to help companies improve their product quality, eliminate production errors, and lower manufacturing costs. Examples of the products he worked on were the world's first vision system on chip and the world's fastest 3D scanning system to name a few.

Where Ali is today is quite different from where his journey began. Born and raised in Istanbul, I graduated from the Turkish Naval Academy and served as an officer in the Turkish Navy. After leaving the Navy, he earned Master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics at UC Santa Barbara, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and an MBA at UC Berkeley.

"In a grander scheme, I think people should be always looking for opportunities at all times. There's a famous saying... 'The best time to eat hors d'oeuvres are... they're being passed around. The moment that if you're not ready to eat, now you're gonna miss that!’"

- Ali Irturk   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today…

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

As a gift, we’ll send you a copy of one our favorite books AND you’ll be entered to win a free ticket to the 2022 ELC Summit!

• Frameworks for navigating new internal & external opportunities (3:36)
• Three steps for determining which opportunities you should prioritize (5:21)
• Ask this question to validate your assumptions (8:08)
• Reflecting on your personal values & how they align with opportunities (9:02)
• Why growth & interpersonal connection matter to Ali Littman (10:08)
• Ali Irturk’s recommendations for great networking (11:13)
• View your professional relationships as life-long commitments (13:09)
• Book recommendations for frameworks on the job search process (14:29)
• How the right manager can provide the best opportunities (16:47)
• Use a decision-grid to help filter & assess decisions (20:06)
• Analyzing your energy level & trusting your gut while making decisions (21:52)
• How your priorities evolve over time (23:49)
• The hedgehog & outliers concepts (25:45)
• Balancing your current strengths with opportunities you can grow from (29:29)
• Why there’s no such thing as a singular leadership style (30:47)
• Vulnerable leadership & creating a culture of trust (34:10)
• Rapid fire questions (36:42)

• The 2-Hour Job Search - Steve Dalton’s instructional book on how to conduct a job search in the most efficient way possible.
• This Is Day One - Drew Dudley’s guide to cultivating the behaviors that will help you succeed and empower those around you.
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson’s book on attaining and operating in staff engineering roles.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Dr. Robert B. Cialdini’s book on the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles in everyday situations.
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine’s book on how the insights and wisdom of Stoic philosophy are still applicable in our modern lives.
• Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership - Dr. Alan Watkins’ book on the challenges that take a toll on a leader's effectiveness and the solutions designed to improve physiological factors that impact on core competencies.

We discuss the challenges with leading eng orgs through unpredictable global events (like the covid-19 pandemic) & pivoting product strategy with Bridget Frey (CTO @ Redfin). We also cover the challenges & successes of building out AI/ ML products in your engineering org, creating an “uncertainty” algorithm, incorporating mental health best practices in your teams, and addressing data bias & systemic racism in your product’s features! Featuring guest co-host Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health).

As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget Frey (@SVBridget) leads the software engineering and analytics teams. Her mission is to build technology that makes the process of buying and selling a home less complicated and less stressful. She is a leader on issues facing traditionally underrepresented people in technology, and 36% of Redfin’s technology team are women while 10% are Black or Latinx. Prior to Redfin, Frey was the director of analytics and business applications at Lithium Technologies. In addition, she has held management positions at IntrinsiQ Research, IMlogic and Plumtree Software. Since 2019, she has served on the board of directors for Premera Blue Cross. Bridget holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She was recently recognized as a Seattle CIO of The Year award winner.

"One of the things we built was this concept of virtual touring. So you could stay on your couch, but have an agent visit a home, but we could only get a very small number of people to hit that button. Despite all of our trying, we only had 1% of our tours happening virtually and then the pandemic hit and almost overnight, it jumped to about a third of our tours being virtual."

- Bridget Frey   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today…

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

• How Bridget lead a real estate tech org through a pandemic & tumultuous housing market (1:05)
• COVID-19’s impact on the healthcare tech space (2:02)
• How to adapt product strategy based on customer patterns (5:02)
• Leading with transparency & decisiveness in uncertain times (7:20)
• Redfin’s transition to digitizing traditionally in-person experiences (10:58)
• The pandemic’s unexpected influence on employee mental health & burnout (16:14)
• How your org can implement a company-wide “no meeting” / wellness week (19:43)
• Set your org up for faster decision making & implementation (23:52)
• Challenges & solutions when building out AI/ML home buying products (25:06)
• Incorporating human needs, desires & perspectives in automated recommendation products (27:40)
• Engineering best practices for uncovering deeper customer needs (30:06)
• The inside scoop on modeling an “uncertainty” algorithm (31:12)
• Prioritization conversations & product strategy at Redfin (34:31)
• Addressing data bias & systemic racism within product features (36:33)
• How hiring diversely leads to reduced data bias (39:06)
• A framework for reducing biased data outputs (40:20)
• What hiring practices lead to a more diverse team (43:43)
• How tech orgs can cultivate a culture of inclusivity & diversity (46:08)
• Rapid fire questions (48:51)

We cover why locked-in cloud commitments are bad for eng teams & how your org can take advantage of elastic pricing models instead! Leon Kuperman (CTO @ Cast.ai) explains the dilemma of locked-in cloud spend, cost planning strategies for SaaS orgs, how to minimize egregious cloud egress cost and drive better cloud utilization through consistent analysis & debates in your eng org. Also learn why Leon is betting on container deployment as the future of software delivery & what that means for Cast.ai!

Formerly Vice President of Security Products OCI at Oracle, Leon’s professional experience spans across tech companies such as IBM, Truition, and HostedPCI. He founded and served as the CTO of Zenedge (acquired by Oracle). Leon has 20+ years of experience in product management, software design, and development, all the way through to production deployment. He is an authority on cloud computing, web application security, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

"So you're literally committing to a three year deal where you know, in those next three years, the probability of computing power increasing is VERY high and the probability of cost decreasing for those same computers is very high. So you're not really getting the 30, 40, 50% discount. 

So I call these reservations or these look forward commitments a necessary evil because... customers HAVE to do it in many cases. They don't have an alternative. But at the same time, it's not good for the business!”

- Leon Kuperman   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Want to learn where engineering teams are investing their time and resources? Or how they’re operating, performing, and managing today?

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry, data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

• Why Leon cares about cutting cloud costs (3:05)
• Economic & financial models for eng leaders (6:56)
• Cloud economics & its impact on cloud cost (8:18)
• The dilemma of locked-in cloud commitments (11:35)
• Why eng companies opt for locked-in cloud services (14:47)
• How container deployment will impact the current cloud model (16:01)
• Moving from a locked-in model to an elastic pricing model (19:39)
• What eng teams need to take advantage of an elastic cloud pricing model (22:07)
• Cost planning opportunities for SaaS companies (24:57)
• The best utilization debates for evaluating cloud spend (28:40)
• Three architectural planning principles to keep in mind (30:26)
• Drive better cloud utilization through consistent cost analysis & recurring debates (31:59)
• Defining egress & its cost for eng teams (33:05)
• Healthy methods for escaping egress costs (35:27)
• What “cloud-flation” means for eng leaders & cloud macro-economics (38:55)
• Rapid fire questions (43:06)

• (article) “Why Your Cloud Expenses Are Rising: Blame Cloud-flation” by Leon Kuperman
• (article) “Snapchat Earnings and the Case of Runaway Cloud Costs” by Leon Kuperman

We discuss the dynamics & challenges behind building out your data engineering function with Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data @ Meltano). Taylor also shares his recommendations for collaborating in multi-stakeholder environments, the relationship between the data team & engineering, why you should run your data team like a product team, gaining buy-in around the ROI of data, and what it’s like being a company’s first data eng hire. Featuring guest co-host/community member John Wang (Director of Engineering @ Petal)!

Taylor Murphy (@tayloramurphy) is the Head of Product and Data of Meltano, an open-source data platform that enables collaboration, efficiency, and visibility. Taylor has been deeply involved in leading and building data-informed teams his entire career. At Concert Genetics he scaled the Data Operations team to enable the management of hundreds of thousands of genetic tests and millions of claims records. At GitLab, he was the first data hire where he focused on building and scaling the data organization as the company headed towards its IPO. Taylor has been involved with Meltano since its inception, acting as the primary customer with whom the team engaged to understand the needs of modern data professionals.

"What next? I put this in a dashboard. What are you gonna do with this? I think a lot of people are like, ‘I wanna be more data-informed and I wanna build up a robust data organization.’ 

And that's where they stop. They think, ‘Okay, I'm gonna get the data, and then I'm gonna make a decision.’ 

And that's not good enough because there's always gonna be more work to do than you can accomplish. And every time you deliver a dashboard, they're gonna go, ‘Oh, this is great. What if we did this, this, and this?’ 

And that's fun for data people and you enjoy that, but you kind of wanna help them think through these things.”

- Taylor Murphy   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

• Taylor’s early days at GitLab as its first data eng hire (2:23)
• How Meltano evolved out of a GitLab business intelligence project (4:21)
• Using data eng to discover problems & iterate solutions (6:01)
• Why having data teams under finance can be detrimental to product strategy (7:22)
• The importance of data eng representation at the VP level (10:01)
• The ideal time to build your data eng team (12:57)
• Communicating the ROI of data eng functions (14:53)
• How to gain stakeholder buy-in (17:04)
• Prioritizing qualitative data in a solution’s early stages (18:54)
• Taylor’s recommendations for the early stages of building your data org (20:05)
• Roadblocks when building data teams – and solutions for success (22:42)
• The “run your data team like a product team” thesis (25:52)
• Best practices for applying product team principles to your data eng functions (27:57)
• The hand-off between data engineering & the broader engineering org (29:08)
• Navigating company politics from a data eng perspective (33:02)
• Prioritization conversations between data eng & other stakeholders (36:25)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (38:31)

• (blog) “Run Your Data Team Like Product Team” by Emilie Schario & Taylor Murphy
• (follow) @josh_wills - https://twitter.com/josh_wills

Building growth & mobile eng teams from the ground up is never easy – but the right frameworks, guardrails, & strategic conversations will set your org up for success! We cover the intersection of growth & mobile engineering with Atish Das Sarma (Head of Growth Engineering @ Patreon ) & Shannon Ma (Director of Engineering, Mobile @ Patreon) discussing how to balance short & long-term growth demands, strategically aligning new features & growth, and what it’s like making the transition into an established company with room for impact!

Atish (@atishdassarma) leads the Growth Engineering team at Patreon. The Growth team at Patreon is responsible for holistically improving the product surface to help creators build and grow their businesses. Specific areas of focus include working across the full funnel to drive member acquisition, member retention, and creator acquisition.

Previously, Atish led iCloud subscriptions growth initiatives which is part of the broader Services organization at Apple. In addition to accelerating revenue growth for iCloud, Atish was also responsible for various data and ML initiatives across Cloud Services. He also held roles at Twitter and Google. Atish is passionate about working in areas with a broad opportunity & scope from the early stages, defining long-lasting themes, and building the corresponding teams to execute on them. He particularly enjoys leading organizations that are directly accountable for key business outcomes.

"For growth, you need to sort of think holistically in Patreon’s world, both from creators’ and potential members’ side and truly understand what is perhaps preventing some creators from getting started. So how do you sort of think about that holistically and then start building solutions that will empower them longer term.”

- Atish Das Sarma   

Shannon (@shannonma) is the Director of Engineering for Mobile at Patreon. Shannon and the entire team are diving in to create a world-class mobile experience built to best serve creators, so they can showcase what they do best. He previously supported consumer product teams at Instagram and Facebook for nine years. Prior to this, he got started in mobile at Apple helping build iOS.

"Our goal as a company is to be the best memberships product for creator. Our hypothesis about how we can get there is by really kind of like coupling content around community. In order for us to do this really well, the community almost has to feel like it's part of the content, like it helps kind of like elevate the content.

- Shannon Ma   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

• Patreon’s major strategic transformation (2:30)
• The role mobile plays in Patreon’s vision (5:27)
• Integrating a growth strategy holistically throughout your product (6:11)
• What it’s like transitioning into an already well-established company (7:48)
• Defining a framework for an early-growth organization (11:41)
• Guardrails to balance short-term and long-term growth demands (14:16)
• Habits & rituals to inspire strategy-focused conversations in your team (18:00)
• Shannon’s decision-making process – and why the focus is on mobile (19:22)
• The intersection of growth and mobile engineering (22:07)
• Why being a “ruthless” prioritizer is key (24:28)
• Prioritization conversations between mobile and engineering (27:05)
• A sneak-peek into Patreon’s next big bets (28:32)
• The implications of new features on growth engineering (32:07)
• Start with targeting your high-intent users (34:08)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (35:05)

Greg Czajkowski (SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake) shares some of the secrets he’s learned about great teams! We discuss the power of eliminating hierarchy, “going direct,” reducing energy dissipation in your team, removing friction in your org, and creating “higher innovation per time unit.” Plus dilemmas balancing velocity & quality, what to do when team size is used as proxy for power, and how to know your eng org is operating at peak output!

Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Greg spent 13 years at Google, where he was VP of Engineering responsible for a broad portfolio of Google Cloud data analytics and machine learning products and for internal services addressing data analytics needs of all of Google’s businesses. Before Google, Greg spent six years at Sun Microsystems, working on Java runtime environments and operating systems. Greg has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree from AGH Krakow, Poland. He holds over 50 patents.

"What I learned at Snowflake is  really practicing "Go Direct."  If there's something you don't like, you'd like to fix, you have to go to the person who made the decision.

Usually you learn much more about the decision. There's a good conversation. Sometimes you convince the owner of the decision to do something different.

I think nothing beats going direct, because any other means of trying to change a certain decision, certain point of view indirectly, is ineffective causes, frictions, and ultimately energy gets dissipated.

- Greg Czajkowski   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity.

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

• Qualities and characteristics Greg's observed in great teams (2:02)
• Why Greg joined Snowflake (3:46)
• “Go direct” and other secrets to great teams (5:27)
• Balancing "go direct" and the chain of command (7:35)
• Eliminating hierarchy (9:21)
• Creating higher innovation per time unit in engineering teams (11:21)
• How do you know your eng org is operating at peak output? (13:41)
• Balancing business expectations and removing the dilemma between velocity & quality (15:36)
• Energy dissipation (18:21)
• Removing team friction at scale (21:20)
• How Snowflake’s small team units optimize for intimacy, learning & dev happiness (23:50)
• How small teams scale up & interact across the eng org (25:56)
• How to address when team size is used as proxy for power & career progression (28:35)
• Rapid Fire Questions (30:37)

We discuss why alignment is key to delivering great digital products & team outcomes, how to recognize & navigate misalignment, and create better alignment with Jonathon Hensley (CEO @ EMERGE, Author of "Alignment"). We cover a couple of community case studies exploring dilemmas like navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict, transforming grand product visions into clear execution, AND shifting toward a customer-centric engineering culture!

Jonathon Hensley (@jonathonhensley) is co-founder and CEO of Emerge, a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience. For more than two decades, Jonathon has helped startups, Fortune 100 brands, technology leaders, large regional health networks, non-profit organizations, and more, transform their businesses by turning strategy, user needs, and new technologies into valuable digital products and services. Jonathon writes and speaks about his experiences and insights from his career, and regularly hosts in-depth interviews with business leaders and industry insiders. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys.

Originally from Silicon Valley, Jonathon got into the digital product space inspired by the incredible people developing new technologies all around him and the possibilities they unlocked. This fueled his curiosity to understand how technology transforms the ways in which people live and work.

Today that curiosity continues to drive him, as he works to help businesses harness technology. His work focuses on alignment, helping leaders define the value they want to create in a succinct and tangible way; where to focus, why, and what it will take to achieve that outcome. His favorite part is going beyond the idea but reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes so that a client can succeed.

"We hear a lot of times about the execution gap - This gap that, you know, we have this idea, or we have this outcome we want to achieve… We start building something and then it doesn't have the outcome we intended.

And that execution gap is because no bridge was ever built. You're making a leap of faith that somehow if we do this, that this will happen. And it's not grounded, most often, in its execution and process.

And so, without a clear direction how do you know what resources, or people, or process, are even needed to achieve the intended outcome that you're working towards?

- (Jonathon Hensley)   

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• Why alignment is the key to deliver great products & outcomes (2:22)
• What does alignment actually mean? (4:10)
• How do you recognize when you're misaligned? (7:51)
• How do you create alignment? (10:48)
• Navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict (15:09)
• Transforming your grand product vision into clear actions (18:58)
• Making a shift to a more customer-centric engineering culture (23:27)
• Operationalizing customer empathy within your engineering org (28:05)
• How to gain clarity on the right intended outcomes (30:32)
• Measuring alignment (36:04)
• Rapid Fire Questions
• Takeaways

• (Jonathon’s book) Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure