manager.flow

Vaz is an engineering manager for the Pages product at LinkedIn, where he helps organizations establish their presence and connect with professionals at a global scale. In this episode, we discuss Vaz's journey as a software engineer into leadership positions, and I get a great new perspective on performance management of individuals.

 Vaz has over 15 years of experience as an engineering manager in places like Stripe, Google and his own company. In his ten years at Google, Vaz held many externally facing engineering roles, both as an individual contributor and manager for different teams across the Americas region both in their Ads business and at Google Cloud.

Prior to Google he was the co-founder and CTO of a company that develops software and provides infrastructure for financial institutions and security agencies.

Since 2013 he has been based out of the San Francisco Bay area after relocating from Mexico where he is originally from. Outside of work he enjoys playing with his 4yr old son, biking,  watching movies with his wife and consuming any post-apocalyptic media that is produced. 

He holds a Computer Science degree from U.N.A.M. where he also helped others get theirs working there as a Professor and Developer. 

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Another episode where I speak with a fellow author! Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You - a practical guide for navigating one's career that is packed with real-life skills they don't teach in college. 

Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s “Career Success Accelerator”, where he’s taught for twenty years. Mark also serves on the boards of non-profits Techie Youth and Plant a Million Corals.

Mark and I have a great conversation about what inspired him to write this book and some of the career development advice he has for aspiring and new managers - and some lessons he learned the hard way so you don't have to!

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As the Vice President of Data Management at Castlight Health, Lauren Bui leads a diverse and dynamic team that delivers insights and modernization to 20+ million patient datasets through Castlight's suite of applications. That in and of itself is impressive feat, and in this episode of manager.flow, Lauren discusses her journey and growth into the highest levels of technical leadership over a several-decade period. 

Notably, in 2018 she was presented the Dallas Business Journal - Women in Technology Leadership award, served as the 2019 keynote speaker at the Health Innovations Summit and has served on the MIT CISR committee.  Lauren is also published in Health Tech and Digital Health and also the HCI Digital Health magazines. 

Lauren and I also discuss some shared experiences in being children of immigrants as her family escaped from Vietnam during the conflicts in the 20th century, and how these identities interplay and affect leadership styles. She's got a fascinating story and an important perspective on people-management and identity.

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Does your daily work involve a lot of time on Slack?  If you're anything like me, it can sometimes feel like we live and die by Slack messages - and especially in the modern, remote-first workplace, it's become a critical part of how we communicate and collaborate at work. 

This week, I have a conversation with one of the former sales leaders at Slack who grew the mid-market team for a portion of the Americas, and hear about his journey to management by initiating a new division within the overall department. Prior to coming up as a leader at Slack, he was also an early member of the sales team at Dropbox,  where he was the founding account executive of a global media vertical, and, before that, worked in finance at Northern Trust and at UBS. 

Today, Ryan leads portion of the sales team at Stripe that focuses on enterprise customers. We actually work together frequently, so it was fun to have a conversation about management outside of the daily grind of our current roles. Ryan tells me a great story about his first "really bad day" as a people-leader and what he learned from it. There's a great lesson in there for all of us, so please tune in and enjoy!

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In this week's episode, I chat with a sales leader at BetterUp, a platform for coaching teams and people - very needed in today's uncertain world. A few weeks ago, one of Matt's posts on LinkedIn went viral and caught my eye - it was a raw, candid reflection of his growth as a leader and as a human over the past decade or so, and so I asked him to share more about his journey, the highlights and the lowlights - and all the lessons he's gleaned from both.

Matt Kennedy's career spans a few years, as he's worked as a SaaS GTM leader with over a decade of experience in hyper growth SaaS startups. During this time, Matt has made all the mistakes and cherishes those as his biggest areas for growth and reflection. He has found a lot of passion with improving the human condition in the workplace, and has developed a belief that the best way to run businesses is to take care of your people. Matt believes the future of successful business lies in knowing how to help your people thrive, and has made it his mission to bring this concept to the masses. 

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Emily Sander has an impressive rap sheet. Among her achievements: being on the testing team for the first Kindle device, working on a 6-person startup team, building a global client management team from scratch, serving as a Chief of Staff for a CEO, and most notably (in my book - no pun intended!), an author.

In our conversation today - she shares her own career story and what she learned the hard way as she was suddenly thrust into a management position with zero training, and had to get scrappy, adjust her perfectionist tendencies, and figure out a way to uplevel, fast.
Emily now has a leadership coaching practice and serves clients around the world and at various stages of their growth: from seasoned executives to first-time managers, and motivated individual contributors who are ready to level up. 

Emily's book is called Hacking Executive Leadership and helps new leaders execute from a place of confidence and humility. You can pick up your copy on Amazon or wherever books are sold. 

Learn more about Emily's coaching practice at https://www.nextlevel.coach/

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As a new people-manager, one of the most critical peer relationships to establish and nurture from day one is that with your recruiting team.  Together, your recruiting partner and you will collaborate to create a hiring strategy, execute the process to build a hiring pipeline, and in the final moments of a hiring process - sweat through the candidate closing process with every finger crossed.

In this episode, I speak with a people-leader in the recruiting function at Stripe. Casey is a recruiting manager supporting the Go To Market function, and has spent years growing his craft and building recruiting teams. In this role, he marries his deep passion and love of technology with guiding people to their dream careers.

A South Carolina native, Casey received his bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University prior to moving to the Bay Area where he resides with his wife and two sons. When he is not engaging in the broader technology community you can find him working on his golf swing at many of the Bay Area's beautiful courses, or watching Golden State Warriors basketball games with friends and family.

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In this episode, I have an insightful conversation with Alex Black. Alex  is a Leadership and Team Development Coach for new managers and founders, and is a firm believer in providing coaching for first-time managers and founders to help them and their teams succeed and avoid the many trap doors that exist in the first few months in these roles. 

Alex (and I) believe strongly that executive level coaching shouldn’t be exclusively for C-Suites, and that everybody deserves to have a terrific manager, which can be life-changing. Alex believes that investing in personalized development for new managers is key to the health and success of an organization.

Alex has a Bachelors in Communication from Boston University and a Masters in Nonprofit Management from NYU. She is a certified MBTI practitioner.

When she isn’t working with new managers, you can find Alex teaching dance cardio classes, officiating weddings or hanging out with her daughter and husband in South Orange, New Jersey.

Work with Alex: https://themanagercoach.co/work-with-me/ 

Free Meeting Planning Guide: https://themanagercoach.co/a-guide-to-leading-meetings-that-matter/ 

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Naz Irani is a PreSales leader who has spent the past decade building Enterprise PreSales teams at companies including Akamai and Stripe. Her true passion lies in building high performing user-focused teams in high growth environments, and more importantly, playing a role in helping people build successful careers. As president of the PreSales Leadership Collective (PSLC) council, she has made significant contributions to the PreSales function and she is currently focused on building a team to enable and innovate with Stripe’s Enterprise users. 

Naz and I have conversations about how she discovered her "North Star" in her career many years ago, and that led her to realizing she wanted to be a team manager and focus her career on growing and developing teams and individuals into their own successes.

Naz has had a long journey and is committed to empowering those like herself, with DEI being a key focus as she builds for the future with her team. Her family of 4, including 2 kids (1 and 4 year old), inspire her and she believes spending time with them is what helps her get better everyday.

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Emily VerMeulen is a customer service professional, a rescue dog enthusiast, an introvert, and a Gemini. She is currently working at Vineti, a cell and gene therapy logistics start-up, doing one of her favorite things- building a support department from, more or less, the ground up.  But - she didn't start her career in tech...it was a chance encounter with a YC founder she met while waiting tables that got her wheels turning in the tech world.

This episode covers her early learnings from managing a fast-paced team at a startup and learning the ropes while navigating a tricky management situation of her own, and her unique way of coping with imposter syndrome.

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