In this episode, Brian Balfour (Founder & CEO @ Reforge) deconstructs the two core, interconnected challenges leaders face in the AI age: deciding what to build and evolving the Engineering, Product, Design workflow to deliver it. We cover why you should avoid “the local maxima trap” and siphon off "skunkworks" teams to take high-risk, AI-native bets. Brian provides the blueprint for the "Great Distribution Shift," detailing how to reshape your product from the ground up to avoid being left behind as platforms close, and how to emerge as a winner in the new AI landscape. Plus, learn how to rethink what to build, avoid commoditization, compress product discovery from weeks to hours, scale feature variations & prototypes, evolve products to solve harder classes of problems and shift specialist roles from "inboxes" to system builders.

Brian Balfour is the Founder & CEO of Reforge, which provides expert training and tools for AI-native product teams. Previously, he served as VP of Growth at HubSpot, spearheading launches like HubSpot CRM and building the growth team that propelled the company’s next chapter.

Span is the AI-native developer intelligence platform bringing clarity to engineering organizations with a holistic, human-centered approach to developer productivity.

If you want a complete picture of your engineering impact and health, drive high performance, and make smarter business decisions…

• Brian’s reaction to the 5:1 gap between AI coding usage and actual product quality challenges (1:57)
• Why your system only goes as fast as the slowest part, and how hyper-optimizing engineering moves bottlenecks elsewhere (4:53)
• The "Local Maxima" trap: Why turning designers and PMs into mediocre developers is a waste of opportunity cost (6:04)
• Siphoning off "Skunkworks" Teams for AI-Native Innovation (7:53)
• Moving from exploring two solution paths to ten by simulating "product reps" through AI prototyping (13:24)
• Reforge’s AI-native suite (Build + Research): Scaling prototypes, feature variations and compressing product discovery & validation from weeks to hours (15:43)
• Case Study: How Captions evolved to solve harder classes of problems, using a creator-tool wedge to fund custom AI emotion-models for the media studio market (19:54)
• Case Study: How Shopify reframed support agents as multimodal "Business Advisors" to provide outsized value (22:24)
• Navigating the great distribution shift: Understanding the lifecycle from open platforms to closed ecosystems (25:10)
• The lifecycle of distribution shifts: Navigating the "Open Phase" growth to "Closed Phase" monetization w/ examples from Facebook, Google, and Apple (29:30)
• OpenAI, memory & context as moat, and why you need to reshape your product from the ground up to win in this distribution shift (31:16)
• Strategic de-risking for EPD leaders: Building proprietary moats through memory, context, and specialized workflows (32:51)
• Optimizing EPD workflows and structures: Separate high-risk "skunkworks" from core product optimization, lean cross-functional teams for faster iteration / decisions, and avoiding too many specialized roles (35:25)
• Dissolving the "Octagon of Specialists": Shifting researchers and PMMs from "inboxes" to builders of self-serve systems (36:57)
• The five types of product work and why there is no "one-size-fits-all" system for EPD (41:25)
• Rapid fire questions (43:25)

• About Reforge: Expert training & AI-powered tools for product teams
• Reforge Build: The prototyping tool discussed for exploring multiple feature variations without designer constraints.
• Reforge Research: The AI-interviewer tool used to compress user discovery and validation from weeks to hours.
• Reforge Insights: The platform that aggregates qualitative customer feedback into a self-serve system for EPD teams.

Brian Balfour’s Research & Frameworks

• BrianBalfour.com: Brian’s personal blog featuring deep dives into growth and product strategy.
• The Next Great Distribution Shift: The foundational article explaining the lifecycle of open vs. closed platforms.
• The Four Fits Framework: A refresher on the system of Product-Market Fit, Product-Channel Fit, Channel-Model Fit, and Model-Market Fit.

Reforge Strategic Deep Dives

• AI Disruption Risk Assessment: A guide for engineering leaders to determine if their product is at risk of being commoditized.
• Product-Market Fit (PMF) Collapse: How to identify and avoid the risk of your core product losing relevance in the AI era.

Mentions

• Invest Like the Best podcast

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rajeev Rajan (CTO @ Atlassian) shares the leadership playbook he used to transform Atlassian’s engineering culture, and how that cultural foundation directly powered the build and launch of Rovo (Atlassian’s new AI powered app). We cover how they reduced ship time from 120 days to zero, why “developer joy” is the metric that matters, and how to create a community of developer productivity champions to scale DevEx transformation. Rajeev also breaks down his principles for systematizing autonomy and empowerment, including frameworks for giving direct reports more ownership. Plus, a look at the future of Atlassian’s “Systems of Work”!

Rajeev Rajan is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Rajeev joined the company in May 2022 and is responsible for Atlassian Engineering, IT, Security and Trust, and the Engineering Operations teams. His focus areas include the company's continued transformation to Cloud, Developer Platform, and Product lines. Additionally, he is passionate about continuing to develop Atlassian’s world-class engineering organization and making it a top choice for aspiring engineering talent worldwide.

A long-time resident of Washington state, Rajeev previously acted as the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Facebook and Head of Office for Meta in the Pacific Northwest Region. Prior to Meta, Rajeev spent more than two decades with Microsoft, first joining as an intern in 1994. During his time there, he worked on many products, culminating in Office 365 where he built and led the team responsible for all of the Cloud Infrastructure for Office 365.

Rajeev is married with two children and a spunky yellow lab named Rayna. He is very involved in and passionate about a number of efforts that uplift the local community, ranging from the arts to STEM programs.

• The "Listening Tour": Grounding leadership in reality and identifying friction points (3:52)
• The Confluence Editor story: Reducing ship time from 120 days to 0 (6:26)
• Moving beyond productivity: Why "Developer Joy" is the metric that matters (8:45)
• Creating a community of Developer Productivity Champions and the power of a Productivity Summit (13:44)
• Elevating productivity to a company-level OKR and measuring qualitative sentiment (17:12)
• Leadership framework: Deciding when to "manage through people" vs. "manage through process" (19:05)
• How to give more direct ownership / responsibility to a DRI (23:03)
• Alignment conversations about prioritizing developer joy & productivity (24:22)
• Challenges faced during Atlassian’s developer joy transformation journey (26:23)
• How the "Developer Joy" foundation enabled building Rovo in just 6 months (30:02)
• The "System of Work": Expanding Jira's utility beyond engineering to finance, marketing, and legal (33:22)
• Rapid Fire Questions (40:48)

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/5

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Daniel Lereya (Chief Product and Technology Officer @ Monday.com) shares how they are evolving their engineering roles from developers to builders & system designers, where the lines between product, engineering, and design are intentionally blurred, and developers manage AI Agents as team members, tackling an ever-expanding list of projects. We explore the shift from "developer" to "system designer" and why managing AI agents requires the same skills as managing people. Plus, a case study where the Monday.com team leveraged AI agents to decompose a monolith, autonomously manage the project board and assign strategic / high-risk tasks to humans.

Daniel Lereya has served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at monday.com since 2023. In this role, he focuses on advancing monday.com’s multi-product vision and operational efficiencies while driving execution to support company growth. Previously, he was Vice President of R&D and Product, leading global teams in shaping and executing the company’s product strategy through innovation and technology. Before joining monday.com, Daniel held leadership and engineering roles at IBM and SAP.

• The three core principles of monday.com’s culture: Ownership, Transparency, and Speed of Execution (3:59)
• How AI acts as an accelerant to implement these cultural principles at scale (8:36)
• Why the “Developer” role is evolving into a “Strategic Builder” and “System Designer” (13:47)
• Breaking silos: How the “Builder” role blurs the lines between product, engineering, and design (17:13)
• Real-world example: A designer using AI to submit code and fix UI issues independently (19:09)
• Case Study: The “Agent Factory” & how a weekend prototype by one leader shifted the product roadmap (21:25)
• Operationalizing transparency: Using internal tools (“Big Brain”) to align every builder on daily business impact (25:58)
• The “Kickoff Meeting” framework: A strict protocol for falling in love with the problem, not the solution (32:26)
• The new management paradigm with AI agents as team members (37:31)
• Rapid fire questions (42:09)

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is a special episode, highlighting a session from ELC Annual 2025! The true promise of AI isn’t in replicating human intelligence. It’s in developing entirely new forms of non-human intelligence that perceive and understand the world in fundamentally different ways. Jamie Lien (Co-Founder and Chief Scientist @ Archetype AI) and Rashi Agarwal (Head of AI Engineering @ GoodLeap) explore the emergence of "Physical AI" - machines that sense the world through modalities beyond human biology to form internal representations free from our biases and then translate that understanding back to us in human terms.

Jaime Lien, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Archetype AI, a pioneering startup advancing Physical AI, artificial intelligence that understands the real world through real-time sensor data fusion.

With over a dacade of experience in radar-based sensing, signal processing, and hardware engineering, Jaime’s career bridges cutting-edge research and consumer-ready innovation. Before Archetype, she led radar sensing development for Google ATAP’s Project Soli and contributed wireless communication and localization expertise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Rashi Agrawal is Head of AI Engineering at GoodLeap, where she leads enterprise-wide AI initiatives that deliver real business impact. An accomplished speaker, she covers the latest in AI, including context engineering, evaluations, and multi-agent collaboration, while driving Applied AI innovation in the enterprise. Previously, she scaled engineering teams at Yahoo, advancing its multibillion-dollar advertising business. A passionate world traveler to 40+ countries, Rashi brings global perspective and energy to her leadership and storytelling.

• Archetype AI’s mission: Building a foundation model for physical reality (0:24)
• The potential for discovery: Using AI to observe phenomena humans cannot perceive (1:36)
• Augmentation vs. Replacement: Giving humans "superpowers" rather than automating them away (2:48)
• The "Perfect Storm" for Physical AI: Transformers, self-supervised learning, and commodity sensors (4:04)
• Defining “Non-Human Intelligence” and removing the constraints of human labels (6:34)
• Why language is inherently lossy and insufficient for true physical understanding (8:28)
• Real-world application: How Physical AI aids safety decision-making in the solar industry (9:35)
• Use case: Improving pedestrian safety and traffic signaling in Bellevue (12:51)
• The biggest engineering leadership challenge: Embracing the “messiness” of real-world data (14:21)
• Q&A: Why we shouldn't teach AI physical laws, but let it discover them (16:50)
• Q&A: Validating models when there is a defined ground truth vs. subjective language (18:49)
• Q&A: Compute requirements and the future of active learning at the edge (20:05)

• Video version of Jaime and Rashi’s session at ELC Annual 2025

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ruslan Belkin (Head of Platform Engineering @ Inflection AI) joins us to deconstruct fundamental shifts in engineering leadership. We explore the future of user interfaces, his “sci-fi” approach to establish & test product vision, & how to leverage “investor decks” for better decision-making and project validation. Ruslan also dives into the complexities of building emotional intelligence into AI systems, cultivating an outcome-oriented engineering culture & avoiding process traps. Plus, we discuss how to keep up with the velocity of change (including when new research necessitates a major pivot), synthetic data & the future of data as a defensibility strategy, & why agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead.

Ruslan Belkin joined Inflection after co-founding Jelled.ai—acquired by Inflection in 2024—and previously served as CTO of Nauto. Earlier in his career, Ruslan held senior engineering roles at Twitter, LinkedIn, Netscape, and other pioneering Silicon-Valley companies, bringing more than two decades of experience at the intersection of data platforms and machine learning.

• How leading engineering teams is evolving: Moving from code as the source of truth to specs/documentation as the source of truth (2:44)
• Why an eng org’s good hygiene / health will create better output (5:12)
• A framework for product vision: Envisioning the future "viscerally" like a sci-fi novel, stress-testing assumptions, and focusing smart people on the problem (9:04)
• Hiring in the modern era: Why software engineering is becoming "tooling and data engineering" and the importance of hiring for openness to new research (18:20)
• Gen Z vs. Millennial engineers: Ruslan’s observation that Gen Z is more outcome-oriented and has a lower tolerance for "corporate euphemisms." (22:24)
• Ruslan’s favorite frameworks for effective decision making: Using an "investment deck" to validate projects, avoid disbelief and lack of focus. (25:19)
• Keeping up with the velocity of change: How to curate research inputs and determine when a new paper (like DeepSeek) requires a strategic pivot. (32:57)
• The new burden of leadership: Why the velocity of AI requires leaders to be "right more often" and how to use models to increase research rigor. (36:27)
• The "Data Wall" and Synthetic Data: Why we have hit the wall for text data and how synthetic data generation loops will drive the next wave of defensibility. (41:35)
• The "March of 9s": Analyzing the trajectory of the AI market and why increasing agent reliability is the massive opportunity ahead. (46:25)
• Rapid fire questions (48:18)
•  

• Ruslan’s Talk at ELC Annual 2025
• The War of Art - Steven Pressfield’s guide to inspire and support those who struggle to express their creativity. Pressfield believes that “resistance” is the greatest enemy, and he offers many unique and helpful ways to overcome it.
• A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains - Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

James Reggio (CTO @ Brex) shares the story of "Brex 3.0", an 18-month journey behind their operational evolution. We explore how they rewound their org from a Series E to a Series C mindset, and replaced siloed OKRs with seasonal "marquee initiatives." James deconstructs the “Brex Hacker House”, an AI-focused startup within a startup experiment aimed to disrupt their core business. This conversation is all about evolving operational rhythms, layers of management, product building, and culture change!

James Reggio is Brex’s Chief Technology Officer. James is a forward thinking technology leader who currently oversees Brex’s entire Engineering org. James joined Brex in 2020 as Principal Engineer and has played a vital role in building the company’s mobile app and AI capabilities. Prior to Brex, James had an extensive career as a Software Engineer at leading companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, AirBnB, Stripe and more. Additionally, James founded two companies: Altair Management and Banter, a social discovery platform for podcasts that was later acquired by Convoy in 2018. James received his B.A. of Science from The University of Texas Austin.

• The birth of Brex 3.0: Using a layoff as a "moment to refound the company" (3:38)
• Moving from a Series E to a Series C operational mindset (5:28)
• The problem with a GM model: How siloed OKRs and roadmaps created "deadlock" (6:07)
• New rituals: Why the CEO became "chief editor of the roadmap" (8:16)
• The impact on morale: "Folks just knew how their work fit into the bigger picture" (11:16)
• The challenge of the new model: Who do you hold accountable when you "win and lose as a team"? (13:43)
• The lesson for reintroducing systems: "Less is more" (15:43)
• The "Startup within a Startup": Launching an internal team to disrupt Brex (16:49)
• “What if we were founding Brex again today?” The 4 constraints for the "Hacker House" experiment (17:58)
• Questions eng leaders should ask when running a similar experiment to Brex (21:02)
• Aha moment: "With agentic coating, code is so cheap" (22:35)
• Managing the two narratives: "compounding" the core biz vs. “innovating" with AI (26:01)
• A surprising dynamic: Why the AI team struggled to see their impact (while the core team didn't) (29:38)
• Building alongside your customer to iterate / experiment faster (36:06)
• The turnaround is over: Brex hits 50% YoY growth and cash-flow positive (38:45)
• Rapid fire questions (42:10)

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In today’s technology landscape, management as a skill is becoming more complex as teams become larger & managers must navigate the balance between relationships and strategic execution. So how can AI tools help managers level up their game? Jonathan Raymond (Founder & CEO @ Ren) shares insights that can help managers navigate their modern-day invisible cognitive loads. We cover how AI can be used to enhance – not replace – inherently human skillsets, the three components that make up an effective manager / employee relationship, product-building principles for building relational systems, and using AI to guide rather than provide concrete answers.

Jonathan Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Ren, an AI agent for managers and teams that helps them give and receive feedback, have meaningful 1:1s, and access real-time personalized coaching. He is also the author of the award-winning book Good Authority and was named one of Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. Previously the CEO of EMyth, Jonathan has led transformation projects across technology, renewable energy, and coaching. He’s a half-decent barista, a mediocre-but-enthusiastic surfer, and will never give up on the New York Knicks.

• Jonathan’s perspective on the impossible cognitive load & colliding pressures of modern managers (2:31)
• The complicated workflow it takes to be a great manager (6:05)
• “Field Intelligence” and the need to ingest non-technical data such as (mood, sentiment, and alignment) to make better leadership decisions (9:52)
• The managerial matrix: high/low performers and the 10-person team that feels like 50 (12:46)
• The cost of mismanaging your team & why it’s so easy to get it wrong (16:02)
• What’s uniquely human vs. where AI provides leverage (18:01)
• AI’s role: detecting signal and prompting human reflection (21:04)
• The “Growth Loop”: a 3-part system for effective leadership (27:20)
• Incorporating AI tools to enhance the manager / employee relationship (31:20)
• The future vision: an “in-ear” AI coach that closes the gap between learning and applying (33:09)
• Closing the gap between learning a new skill & it becoming an unconscious habit (35:59)
• Product Principle: Building a “Relational System,” not just a task manager (37:49)
• Product Principle: Why an AI coach must ask questions, not provide answers (40:50)
• How to harness AI tools for better emotional articulation / processing (45:11)
• A simple behavioral change to try this week (47:58)
• Rapid fire questions (49:57)

• Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For - Jonathan’s book in which he brings together what he has learned over a twenty-year journey as an executive, entrepreneur, team leader and leadership trainer.
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures - Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems.
• Jonathan’s session at ELC Annual 2025

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Businesses are spending millions on AI tools hoping to accelerate time-to-market but aren't seeing organizational-level results. Laura Tacho (CTO @ DX) explains why an "individual productivity" mindset fails and how AI merely accelerates the condition of the system it enters. She provides a framework for leaders to shift to a systems-level approach, find high-leverage ROI by looking outside the 20% of time spent coding, and understand what sets high-ROI orgs apart. Plus Laura shares data literacy tools to cut through the "whiplash" of conflicting AI reports and provides key considerations for 2026 budgeting, detailing where and how companies are planning to strategically invest.

Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She previously led teams at companies like CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit. She’s an expert in building world-class engineering organisations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance.

• Downsides to approaching organizational outcomes from an individual task level (2:59)
• Why individual product gains don’t always equate to systems-level improvements (4:56)
• How the quality of existing systems impacts the improvements AI can foster (7:26)
• Strategies for shifting mental models from the individual to systems level (9:09)
• Implement training & enablement techniques as an organizational lever (11:22)
• Common workflows that can unlock new problem-solving methods (14:46)
• Understanding what impact you want to see / getting the most ROI from AI (18:40)
• How to interpret the data when it comes to AI & its true ROI (21:22)
• AI data literacy for engineering leaders (23:06)
• Interpreting the meter study & what it means for engineers using AI (25:49)
• Quality vs. quantity when it comes to AI implementation on the org level (28:43)
• Characteristics that high-ROI companies possess when it comes to AI (30:35)
• Strategies to invest in that may lead to higher ROI (32:29)
• Laura’s observations on time & money budgeting / investments for 2026 (35:28)
• Embracing cost savings & opportunity generation as an eng org (38:08)
• Tackling fear / uncertainty when it comes to AI adoption, budgeting, & ROI (40:01)

• Previous Episode with Laura Tacho
• Introducing the AI Measurement Framework from DX
• Atlassian State of DevEx Report
• METR Study
• DORA Report (2025)

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens to platform engineering when natural language becomes the primary interface to infrastructure? Miriam Aguirre (Co-founder & CEO @ Ingenimax) joins us to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping platform strategy, team structures, and the very role of the platform engineer. We deconstruct the shift from tactical "how" to strategic "why" and explore what it means to lead and build resilient systems in this new paradigm.

Miriam Aguirre is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ingenimax, the company behind StarOps, an AI-powered platform engineering engine that helps teams deploy and manage kubernetes and other cloud-native systems in minutes, not months. Before Ingenimax, Miriam served as CTO and engineering leader at two startups that successfully scaled from early stage through IPO. Her career spans deep expertise in high-throughput, scalable systems and machine learning, with a focus on building the technical and organizational foundations for hypergrowth. Miriam is passionate about engineering leadership that turns complex technology into intuitive, reliable platforms, and about helping teams scale without losing their soul.

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

• The Origin Story of Ingenimax (3:05)
• The recurring scaling problem: Why "scaling teams" means scaling systems first (5:23)
• How the age of AI forces platform strategy to evolve earlier in a company’s journey (8:48)
• The decline of vendor lock-in and the rising appetite for experimentation with tech (10:56)
• The paradigm shift that breaks the old model: natural language as the new interface (14:11)
• Why deep knowledge of fundamentals is now more important than syntax (16:56)
• Shifting requirements conversations from tactical inputs to strategic outcomes (20:22)
• Balancing standardization and flexibility with guardrails in an AI-driven environment (22:58)
• The challenge of getting from an AI prototype to a polished product (26:42)
• How platform team roles will evolve to focus more on curation (29:32)
• How to become a great technology curator (37:30)
• Rapid Fire Questions (39:56)

• The Book of George - From the author of the critically acclaimed Laura & Emma comes a The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. for our times: Kate Greathead's razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity.
• Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?: A Dialogue - This is a dialogue about the notion of a person, of an entity that thinks and feels and acts, that counts and is accountable. Equivalently, it's about the intentional idiom --the well-knit fabric of terms that we use to characterize persons. Human beings are usually persons (a brain-dead human might be considered a human but not a person). However, there may be persons, in various senses, that are not human beings. Much recent discussion has focused on hypothetical computer-robots and on actual nonhuman great apes. The discussion here is naturalistic, which is to say that count and accountability are, at least initially, presumed to be naturally well-knit with the possession of a cognitive and affective life.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we’re addressing one of the biggest challenges current eng leaders are facing – balancing yesterday’s constraints with tomorrow’s potential! Chrystal Henke Ball (VP of Engineering @ Yahoo) shares insights on why it’s important to constantly challenge your assumptions and how vision can sometimes work as a bottleneck for your organization. We dissect how the traditional product lifecycle is evolving to become more fluid and what that means for the collaborative relationship between product, eng, and design. Additionally, Chrystal defines grit, why it’s important for leaders to model it, and strategies for cultivating the trait within your eng team in order to move past short-term challenges and focus on long-term goals!

Chrystal Henke Ball a seasoned engineering leader, currently serving as VP of Engineering at Yahoo, where she leverages her experience to accelerate product development across core products such as Yahoo.com and the Yahoo News app. Prior to Yahoo, she led engineering organizations at Google Search, Pandora, Pachama, and Arcadis, building highly available systems, guiding architectural transitions, spearheading novel solutions, and delivering delightful user experiences. Chrystal excels at designing purpose-driven, scalable architectures, streamlining development processes, and mentoring teams to work effectively and openly together.

So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.

ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.

Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.

• Navigating the challenge of balancing constraint vs. innovation (3:05)
• Considerations for balancing current capabilities w/ your roadmap to change (4:34)
• Frameworks for categorizing what’s fixed vs. in flux to aid decision-making (6:14)
• Conversation points for checking your assumptions (7:36)
• The new leadership challenge: vision as a bottleneck (14:45)
• Evolving feedback loops to address a more fluid product lifecycle (19:43)
• Defining product vision in today’s fast-paced, fluid landscape (23:57)
• Defining grit as an essential trait & ways to cultivate it as an eng leader (31:57)
• Building AI-incorporated products with trust as a foundational principle (40:46)
• Rapid fire questions (43:01)

• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know - Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers -- and why they often go wrong.
• Terrestrials - A show for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. In each episode, host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) will introduce you to a creature or earthly phenomenon that will defy your expectations of how nature is supposed to work. Along the way, you'll encounter a chorus of experts, including scientists, surfers, hip hop artists and…a "Songbud" named Alan (indie punk musician Alan Goffinski) who creates original songs for key moments of confusion, discovery or awe. New episodes drop Thursdays. Listen in with your whole family. Or all alone.

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/

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