Decoding Leadership

In this episode, we delve into the concept of task forces and their crucial role in addressing organizational challenges. Discover when and how to employ task forces effectively, and learn from real-life examples, including a case at New Relic to rapidly deliver a complex feature in six weeks, and another involving a complex merger that spanned every department. I share actionable tips on how to set up a successful task force, including the importance of a solid kickoff meeting, selecting the right team members, and how to leverage the power of other leaders. 

Upscale was a large scale agile transformation at a 50 team software company. Brent and I were on the leadership team. The aim of Upscale was to address the gridlock problem with cross-team projects. Jade brought in James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development, and he led us through a massive amount of change. Upscale was extremely successful, but there were missteps and challenges.

Katie Wilde is an accomplished leader from Snyk, Ambassador Labs, and Buffer. She shares how she learned to be an effective director (and how challenging the transition was), and shares tons of insights into why it's hard to build a culture of reliability in engineering organizations. And she shares a bunch of wonderful approaches to make reliability fun and desirable. This episode was a delight, and I learned a bunch from it.

We often don't prioritize the tiny things that make exceptional products. I share a practice we adopted recently that helps us ship lots of little things every Thursday.

Ben is an experienced talent acquisition leader. We discussed how leaders can work effectively with recruiting, how he coaches recruiters to work better with their stakeholders, how to stand out in the current job market, and what he's learned about leadership himself. He also gives the controversial advice to not jump to hiring a recruiter!

I loved this conversation with Alex Kroman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LivePerson. We dive into the topic of how to craft great leadership teams, balancing vision with execution, overcoming the hub-and-spoke management model, leveraging diverse skill sets, and improving decision-making quality. Alex is someone I've learned a great deal from, and I invite you to do the same in this podcast!

What can we learn from Paul Graham's "founder mode"? Mostly that it describes a poor way of thinking about delegation. It's not just for founders, and it can be dangerous for founders. But it's a useful tool to have in every leader's toolkit.

I interviewed the founders of Reclaim.ai, a successful startup that was recently acquired by Dropbox. Learn the unusual approaches they took to build a radically customer focused company. We cover how they gave up planning, selected leaders with unusual backgrounds, and kept their technology simple. And they share some of the decisions they made that helped them iterate on their approach and build a product I use every day.

We delve into the concept of "piles", and why it can be a useful tool for seeing how to optimize flow.

We cover a simple process change that is the most impactful way I've seen to prioritize reliability work. It's a rule called the "Don't Repeat Incidents" rule. In this short episode, we cover how we developed this rule, and why it made such a difference.