▶︎ #174 | A-Players, Task Monkeys, and the AI Reckoning w/ Francis Brero (VP AI Strategy @HG Insights)

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Francis Brero: VP of AI Strategy at HG Insights and Co-Founder of MadKudu, a French-born engineer who swapped the grandes ecoles of Paris for Silicon Valley and has spent 15 years building AI-powered systems for some of the world’s leading B2B revenue organizations. Francis brings a mathematician’s rigour and a founder’s scar tissue to every conversation about teams - and this one is no exception.


What drives this episode is Francis’s deceptively simple framework for mapping any team: the task monkey who executes, the problem-solver who adapts, the system thinker who diagnoses root causes, and the rock star who spots the problem before anyone else named it. The conversation moves fast from there - to the hidden cost of keeping “okay” players on the roster, why brilliant jerks are rarely as indispensable as they think, and why the bar for what counts as a rock star has shifted dramatically with AI. 

If you are managing a team right now and quietly wondering whether you have the right people in the right seats - or whether you yourself are operating above or below the system-thinker line - this episode will give you a sharper lens.


✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

Radical Candor - Kim Scott
vast.ai (GPU rental platform): https://vast.ai

✉︎ FOLLOW FRANCIS ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @francisbrero
HG Insights: https://hginsights.com

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LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
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Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
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▶︎ #173 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Get My Team to Just Do Their Job Without Checking on Them Constantly?

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series with one of the most common struggles tech leaders bring to her: "How do I get this person to do their job without checking on them constantly - and how do I trust that it will be done as well as I would do it myself?"

Alex traces this straight back to contracting, specifically the contracting gap at the professional level. When scope, success criteria, decision-making authority, and ways of working were never explicitly discussed and agreed on, leaders are left guessing whether "good work" in their head matches "good work" in their team member's head. That gap, not a lack of trust, is usually the real root cause behind the urge to micromanage.

Alex’s concrete challenge for listeners is to check their own needs first, then schedule a recontracting conversation with at least one team member this week. If this question is one you - or someone you know - keeps asking, share the episode with them.


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▶︎ #172 | What Silicon Valley Taught a Tech Analyst About Marketing, Authority, and Never Burning Bridges w/ Mark Vena, @ex-Dell Technologies,  @SmartTech Research

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Mark Vena, CEO and Principal Analyst at SmartTech Research, a boutique technology research firm he founded after 25 years of senior marketing and leadership roles at companies including IBM, Dell, Compaq, Alienware, and Sling Media. For 18 of those years, Mark operated at the epicenter of innovation - seven minutes from the Apple campus in Silicon Valley - where he developed a rare ability to see through both the brilliance and the blind spots of founder culture.

The conversation opens with a question leaders rarely ask themselves out loud: do you actually need to be an expert in a field to lead it well? Mark's answer is clear and backed by a career that started with a history degree - and led to managing engineering and marketing teams at some of the biggest names in tech.

Mark shares a Steve Jobs story you probably haven't heard - a blind audio test during the original iMac development that revealed how much the post-NeXT Jobs had changed as a leader. It's a precise illustration of something Mark returns to throughout the conversation: the ability to evolve. To separate what's worth going to war for from what simply isn't.

The episode also covers the AI revolution from a marketing analyst's perspective - and it's more concrete than most takes. Mark describes how AI is shifting the entire content creation model, why the old agency-driven marketing playbook is collapsing, and what he believes will be the signal moment that AI has fully arrived (hint: it involves a Best Picture winner).

If you lead a team, are building something, or sit at the intersection of technology and go-to-market, this is a conversation worth your full attention.


✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

SmartTech Research podcast
TV series "John Adams" (HBO)

✉︎ FOLLOW MARK ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @markvena
X: @MarkVenaTechGuy

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LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
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X: @lemanskills
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www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #171 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Am I Actually Good at This… or Did I Just Get Lucky?

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska kicks off a new Q&A series, where she answers the questions tech leaders keep asking her in workshops, keynotes, and one-on-one conversations - the questions that often go unspoken. Today she tackles two that show up constantly with newer leaders: "Am I actually good at this leadership thing, or did I just get lucky?" and "Why do I miss writing code so much?"

On the first question, Alex is direct: feeling unprepared as a new leader is not a sign that you don't belong, it is a sign that you are doing a completely different job than the one you were promoted for. She shares a bold claim from her years of working with tech leaders: roughly 90% of leaders were never properly prepared for leadership, and that is a systemic failure, not a personal one. Most people get promoted into leadership as a reward for being great individual contributors, with no real training in the new skill set, mindset, and tool set that the role actually demands.

The second question - why leaders miss writing code, building, or doing the hands-on work they used to be great at - gets reframed too. According to Alex, this isn't nostalgia. It's a contracting problem, both with yourself and with your organization, because nobody has defined what "winning" looks like in your new role.

Alex closes with a concrete exercise: write down everything you were great at and got promoted for, and next to it, write down what your role actually requires of you today. Compare the two lists - they will look very different, and that difference is the real shift you are navigating. If either question hit home, share the episode with a tech leader who needs to hear it too.



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www.lemanskills.com
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▶︎ #170 | From Startup Garage to Microsoft MVP: How Continuous Learning Builds Unbreakable Tech Leaders w/ Amit Chandak, @ex-Oracle, @Kinerika

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Amit Chandak, CTO and Data & AI Lead at Kinerika, a Microsoft Fabric Featured Partner operating at the forefront of cloud data engineering. Amit's career spans three distinct environments: a 10-year co-founder journey building a BI tool from a two-person apartment startup to a 50-person product company, senior engineering leadership at Oracle, and now heading data and AI strategy at a fast-scaling services organization. In 2022, he became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his exceptional contributions to the Power BI community - a recognition earned through over 17,000 community solutions and years of relentless self-directed learning.

The episode opens with a question that shapes the entire conversation: what actually separates the leaders who compound their impact over time from those who plateau?

Amit and Aleksandra dig deep into the IC-to-leader transition - one of the most structurally underestimated challenges in tech organizations. Amit is precise about what gets lost in that shift: the identity of being the best individual performer becomes a liability when your actual job is to build an environment where the team outperforms what you ever could alone.

For anyone navigating the tension between lifelong learning and burnout, building a tech team from scratch, or making the mental shift from individual contributor to people leader - this episode delivers the kind of practical clarity that only comes from someone who has lived every stage of that journey.


✉︎ FOLLOW AMIT ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @amitchandak
YouTube: Amit Chandak

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www.lemanskills.com
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▶︎ #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska makes an official announcement she has been building toward for over a decade: her first book, "From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For", is done. The premiere is July 30th, 2026 - and this episode is her way of celebrating it with the people who have been part of the journey.

Alex is candid about what drove her to write it. After 10-plus years of working with tech leaders, engineering teams, data science, cybersecurity, and AI organizations, she kept seeing the same patterns repeat. The same breakdowns. The same blind spots. The same moment where a brilliant individual contributor gets promoted to team lead and loses themselves within months. She wanted to give leaders a single, practical resource they could reach for - not another abstract leadership theory, but a blueprint grounded in real case studies and the frameworks she uses every single day.

If you have ever had the thought "I know what I should be doing, I just don't have a clear way to do it all at once," this is the episode - and the book - for you. The book will be available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover. An audiobook is planned for later in 2026. A book launch Masterclass, book tour events, and fireside chats are all in the works. Alex's Leadership Pulse newsletter will be the first to know everything.


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www.lemanskills.com
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▶︎ #168 | From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management, Strategic Simplicity, and the Networking Muscle You Never Built w/ Iryna Lambrianides @ClarityPoint Consulting

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Iryna Lambrianides: fractional strategic advisor, COO, and Chief of Staff, and Founder of ClarityPoint Consulting. Iryna's career story is one of radical reinvention: arriving in the US from Ukraine with no network, taking a $7/hour restaurant job, and systematically building expertise across project management, change management, Lean Six Sigma, and organizational strategy until she was restructuring international organizations spanning 60 countries. She's been laid off twice, narrowly escaped two more, and watched her salary nearly triple in five years. Her conclusion: institutions are unstable. Skills are not.

What makes this conversation stand out is Iryna's operational precision about the things most tech leaders wave at rather than actually do: translating vision into concrete roadmaps, embedding change management into every initiative before it goes off the rails, and building the networking muscle that most engineers were never told they'd need. She is direct about why change fails: not because people resist change, but because leaders don't plan for it, communicate about it, or measure it. And she has frameworks for all three.

If you're a tech leader drowning in simultaneous changes, struggling to make your vision land with your team, or quietly aware that your network is thinner than it should be, this episode will give you both the understanding and the tools to change that.


✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

Create an MBA by Justin Welsh: https://www.justinwelsh.me/
Reinvention Academy — change management certification frameworkMcKinsey & IBM research on organizational change and disruption speed

✉︎ FOLLOW IRYNA ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @irynalambrianides
ClarityPoint Consulting: https://claritypointconsultants.com/

✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #167 | Your Best Engineer Is Your Biggest Leadership Problem - Now What?

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska addresses one of the most uncomfortable dilemmas tech leaders face over and over again: what to do when your technically brilliant engineer is also destroying the team around them.

The problem is painfully familiar. Their output looks great on paper. Confronting or removing them feels risky - what if they quit? And yet every other person on the team is paying a daily cost for this person's behavior. Most leaders know it's a problem. Almost none of them know what to actually do about it.

Alex identifies three layers that make this harder than it looks. The first is structural, the second is the leader's own ambivalence, and the third is the absence of contracting. In most teams, the technical bar was clear from day one. The relational bar was implied, and implied contracts are what allow destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.

From the CQ Leadership Method perspective, Alex walks through how to diagnose what is actually driving the behavior - and why the intervention looks completely different depending on the root cause. This is not a personality problem. It is a systems and leadership problem that a personality is simply exposing.

If you've been avoiding this conversation, this episode gives you the diagnosis and the tools to stop.


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X: @lemanskills
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www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI: How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w/ Jordan Cutler @Pinterest

In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Jordan Cutler: Staff Engineer at Pinterest, where he leads web platform initiatives supporting over 200 engineers. Jordan's career moved from junior to senior in just two years at Gusto, then through Qualified (recently acquired by Salesforce), and into the kind of cross-functional, multi-team leadership that defines the Staff Engineer role today: a role many leaders still don't fully understand.

What makes this conversation stand out is Jordan's unflinching clarity about how AI is not just changing what engineers do, but raising the bar at every level of the career ladder. The mid-level engineer is now expected to do what seniors did three years ago. Juniors entering the market face a job board that has shrunk to under 10% of all engineering listings. And the engineers who will thrive are not the ones who write the most code by hand: they're the ones who can recognize high-ROI opportunities, delegate implementation to AI-powered systems, and build things that compound impact over time.

Jordan also shares what the Staff Engineer role actually means: not just leading within a team, but expanding scope across teams, connecting strategic company goals to concrete technical initiatives, and selling ideas in ways that bring people along.

If you're leading engineering teams, thinking about what to expect from your engineers in 2026, or navigating your own transition from code-first to strategy-first thinking, this episode will give you a new lens on what the role actually demands now.


✔︎ Mentioned in the episode:

"Radical Candor" by Kim Scott”

✉︎ FOLLOW JORDAN ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @jordancutler1


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
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www.lemanskills.com
Join Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

#165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska takes on a transition that happens constantly in tech - and almost always without the support it actually requires: promoting your best engineer to team lead, tech lead, or principal engineer.

The pattern is familiar. Six months after the promotion, the engineer is frustrated, the team is frustrated, and the person who was your most reliable individual contributor has become your most complicated leadership problem. They're still heads-down executing, ignoring everything else the new role requires - or if you're that engineer, you're working harder than ever, uncertain whether you're doing it right, unsure who to even ask.

Alex starts with the question nobody asks out loud: what did nobody tell them about this new job? The job description lies. A principal engineer or tech lead sounds like a more senior version of the previous role. It isn't. It is a categorically different role, and the skills that made someone exceptional before - speed, precision, independent depth of work - can actively work against them now.

If you've recently promoted someone or are thinking about doing it, this episode is the conversation that should happen before the announcement.


✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎
LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanska
TikTok: @aleksandra_lemanska
X: @lemanskills
Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scp
www.lemanskills.com
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