Decoding Leadership

George Sudarkoff is an experienced engineering leader who has made a consulting business out of coaching leaders with ADHD. We had a fascinating discussion relevant for leaders of all types: those who are neurodiverse, and those who work with them. We discussed his leadership journey, how to support ADHD employees, some of the challenges people with ADHD face at work, self-disclosure, focusing on your strengths vs covering for your weaknesses, and how to handle when a coworker is undiagnosed. I learned a ton, and hope you do too!

Damon and I worked together a few years ago, and he conducted a fascinating practice called experience mapping. He goes over the practice and why it can make such a big difference in how a company coordinates its activities to offer exceptional experiences. We also discuss how to build resilient work cultures.

Ankit Jain is CEO of Aviator, and veteran of many companies. He's active in the developer experience space and maintains several online communities. He's in the middle of the conversation about where software is heading, and building some of the developer tooling to support it. We had a fascinating discussion where he covered:

• How to kill the code review.
• How to verify intent and validate at machine speed.
• Why he thinks all businesses are becoming developer tools companies.
• The paradox of automation and how it applies to increasingly automated systems.
• Will AI reinforce existing practices or explode them?
• Advice for building and supporting online communities.

Jason is a veteran of the technical advocacy and developer advocacy space. I thought it would be useful for people to better understand these roles. He shares how advocacy roles have shifted over the years, where in the organization they belong, and teaches about how to do storytelling well. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D. is a world expert on meetings. She's released a new book on the topic (Your Best Meeting Ever), packed with ideas for how to improve the way your organization focuses, communicates, and works together. We discussed incentives, mechanisms for shaking up ineffective use of time, how to build a culture of effective meetings, and power dynamics.

Todd Etchieson and I were counterparts at New Relic. Of all the people I've worked with, he is one of the best at getting people radically aligned. This is often a huge challenge for product leaders -- the CEO and product leader alignment is notorious for being problematic. He breaks down how he does it, and how he learned to do it so well. We also discuss great product strategy and what it really looks like. We also talk about a new product we canceled because it was off strategy.

Seth Engelhard has worked at some of the more interesting companies in the world: GitLab, Netlify, New Relic, and now Observable. He goes into a lot of detail about what practices he learned from these companies, and what the transition to being the head of engineering has been like. We cover topics like building a support network, transparency, career transitions, running meetings well, and being in an async and remote by default company.

Matt Otis has spent his career around building effective training programs. Training is one of the most important aspects of building a successful organization, but it's often not well understood. Matt had a ton of insights on how to make training really land, and set up people with what they need to succeed. This is useful not just if you're doing training programs (for example, how do you train someone on something you don't know?) He also digs into how training is evolving in modern organizations, especially with the advent of AI.

Diana was a delightful and insightful guest. She is a well-known expert on agile retrospectives, team liftoffs, agile fluency, and building resilient learning teams. She's probably the best in the world at these topics, so learn from her perspective!

Elaine May joined Decoding Leadership for a conversation on how to effectively make change as a leader. Elaine was an early agile practitioner, using it in very non-agile environments! She wrote about using agile methods five years before the agile manifesto. She taught me about a concept she calls change budgets. And shared how to deal with critics and naysayers. And then we talked about SCRUM and some of the downsides in the way it's practiced.