We sat down with Claus Moberg to discuss his career trajectory, from meteorology student and hardware CEO to current VP of Eng @ Roblox! We also cover how to overcome obstacles when scaling leadership, leading teams outside of your technical depth/knowledge, attracting & recruiting top talent, finding “diamonds in the rough,” and how to communicate effectively between business functions & eng teams. Claus also shares his best frameworks for navigating complex conversations and taking measured risks while scaling eng functions.

Claus Moberg leads engineering for the Roblox User Group. His teams are responsible for the applications and experiences through which over 58.5 million users explore and experience the Roblox Metaverse every day. Claus has worked at Roblox since the summer of 2016, leading teams across multiple engineering and product disciplines (VR, Consoles, Mobile, Social, Personalization) and geographies (San Mateo, CA and Shenzhen, CN).

“The key mistake to avoid is to think that a lack of domain experience is an excuse to not engage at that level of depth, right? It's not.

It's actually an obligation to engage at the maximum level of depth that's necessary to solve the problem, but it's an opportunity to engage, avoiding buzz words, and using plain English, and sort of doing it in a way that makes communication more clear as opposed to less clear throughout the organization.”

- Claus Moberg   

• How Claus transitioned from meteorology student to VP of Eng at Roblox (2:17)
• Utilizing a maximization function for career strategy & decision-making (6:25)
• Claus’s early days at Roblox (9:03)
• Looking to the team & product space when facing uncertainties (12:56)
• Strategies for scaling leadership & building eng teams (14:52)
• The correlation between an amazing team & an amazing product (17:48)
• Techniques for building technical depth within eng leadership (19:09)
• Frameworks for effective communication between eng teams & business functions (21:24)
• Best practices for navigating complex conversations (25:37)
• Learn to delegate & let go of responsibilities (26:45)
• How Roblox recruits/attracts talent outside of typical hiring patterns (29:24)
• Claus’s advice on identifying competitive advantages in order to attract talent (34:46)
• Why you should take measured risks while building out eng teams (36:33)
• How to weigh trade-offs/concessions during the start-up phase (38:57)
• Lean into asking “stupid” questions & aim to participate in conversations at the deepest level possible (41:33)
• Rapid fire questions (42:44)

• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed - Leo Janos and Ben R. Rich’s memoir detailing their nearly two decades of work in Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works program.

We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back to regularly releasing episodes November 15th with a couple great guests! Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering @ Roblox joins to discuss his journey scaling his leadership impact & org size 10x in 6 years! Elaine Zhou CTO @ Change.org joins to discuss upleveling your team and helping them become more self-sufficient. Plus we’re launching new episodes of Engineering Founders! Email us at [email protected]

And to stay involved, join the community at elc.community!

We sit down with Kit Colbert (SVP and CTO @ VMWare) and discuss his experiences, lessons, and approaches to leading across different orders of magnitude PLUS his approach to high leverage, high ROI communication at different scales. We cover his perspectives on lessening execution risk and creating stability through change, letting go of being a “technologist,” navigating the dilemma between macro and micro granularity in leadership, and building an innovation system.

Kit Colbert joined VMware in September 2003 (following an internship in 2002) and currently serves as senior vice president and chief technology officer. He is responsible for ensuring VMware’s long-term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers. As CTO, Colbert will shape the technical vision for the company, and the transformation to a cloud and subscription-centric R&D organization. His oversight includes advancing research and development efforts, overseeing the VMware Engineering Services team, the Design/UX team and the company’s ESG commitments.

Prior to September 2021, Colbert served in multiple roles, including VMware’s Cloud CTO, General Manager of VMware’s Cloud-Native Apps business, CTO for VMware’s End-User Computing Business, and as the lead architect for the VMware vRealize Operations Suite. Colbert joined VMware as the technical lead behind the creation, development and delivery of the vMotion and Storage vMotion features in VMware vSphere.

"What I try to focus on is, what's the outcome or the benefit that I'm looking for? And, you know, leaving the “how” as much as possible up to them. But I'm also open to being challenged and I find oftentimes that I don't really fully understand the space and the way that they do. And so I'm saying, ‘Here's kinda what we want and here's how I think we should do it.’ But then they'll say, ‘No, that doesn't make sense here. You know, here's how we should be really be thinking about.’ And so that back and forth actually creates a better solution in the end.”

- Kit Colbert   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Kit's Leadership Leap from 150 to 2300 People (2:05)
• How guardrails lessen risks and create stability through change (4:24)
• How to prepare to increase your scope and lead larger teams (8:21)
• Identifying existential opportunities and getting ahead of foundational industry changes (12:38)
• Letting go of being a “technologist” & relying on others for technical insight (16:08)
• How clear communication is one of the highest leverage, highest ROI things you can do as a leader (18:27)
• Framework to prepare your communication plan at big team moments (21:56)
• Balancing the dilemma of micro and macro granularity in leadership (26:11)
• Strategies to guide and influence people to your desired outcomes (28:18)
• How to operationalize innovation and build an innovation system (33:23)
• Rapid fire questions (37:53)

• Atomic Habits - This breakthrough book from James Clear is the most comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day.

We cover reinventing your role and refocusing your eng team in the face of the unknown with Maher Saba, Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta! He discusses his leadership history from IBM to Microsoft to Meta and how he took on IC roles to gain credibility as an eng leader. We also cover how to productively channel & embrace emotions to drive improvement, frameworks for motivating eng orgs, how to incorporate personal feedback into your product, how the pandemic offered opportunities to pivot into the unknown, refocusing eng teams after challenges/periods of uncertainty, and more!

Maher Saba is the Head of Remote Presence and Engineering at Meta and is responsible for creating rich social, real-time video and audio experiences that connect people while they’re physically apart. Saba has held numerous Engineering leadership roles at Meta, and during his time at the company he launched Video on Newsfeed, Facebook Live, Facebook Watch, Messenger Rooms and Live Audio Rooms. Before Meta, Saba worked at IBM and Microsoft as a developer and software engineering lead, eventually becoming a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Saba has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.

“He goes, ‘Have you ever written an endpoint?’ I said, ‘I'm actually curious to know what an endpoint is.’ And he goes, ‘Have you written anything in Ruby?’ I'm like, ‘No, I've never seen the language before.’ He goes, ‘How about Go Language?’ I'm like, Rob Pike just came up with Go Language. Nobody knows it.’ And he's like, ‘So, you know nothing.’ I'm like, ‘I know nothing. I just wanna be in a place where either I sink or swim and the best way for me to know this is to jump with both feet into the deep end.’”

- Maher Saba   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Maher Saba’s transition from Microsoft to Meta (01:54)
• Why Maher restarted as an IC to gain credibility before moving back into eng management (7:08)
• Embrace emotions in order to gain focus & drive improvement (12:14)
• How Maher refocused his work at the start of the pandemic & what it’s like jumping into the unknown (16:48)
• Frameworks for motivating eng teams to focus on execution (22:28)
• Maher’s favorite experiences from his team’s show-and-tell sessions (26:59)
• Incorporating feedback into your product from personal sources – like your mother! (28:29)
• Post-pandemic challenges & how to address them (31:27)
• How to refocus eng teams after periods of uncertainty (36:16)
• Do’s and don'ts for inspiring teams to be part of a turnaround (39:35)
• Why Maher is excited for the unknowns surrounding the metaverse (42:00)
• Rapid fire questions (43:51)

• The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt’s book on how the discovery of an Ancient Greek poem changed the course of human thought and shaped the world as we know it today.

We discuss product innovation with Saumya Bhatnagar (CPO & Co-Founder @ involve.ai), who shares her passion for the product trio and how it enriches problem-solving! We cover how to best optimize the product trio, implementing empathy into your communication practices, the importance of the value priority score, frameworks for healthy & energetic discourse between the product trio, and improving the experience of telling users “no” while pursuing potential “yes” opportunities.

Saumya Bhatnagar is the CPO and Co-founder of involve.ai, an AI-driven Early warning system that helps companies predict churn and revenue growth opportunities using customer data.

Before starting involve.ai, Saumya co-founded a startup right out of high school in New Delhi which focussed on using technology to reduce gender-based abortions in India. She did her undergrad in Computer Science and went on to earn her Masters's in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a focus on Natural Language Processing.

She is a Forbes 30 under 30 alum, winner of the Stevie Gold Entrepreneur of the Year award, recognized as the 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech by the National Diversity Council, and is on the list of Top 100 Women in Technology by AI Technology magazine.

Saumya is a strong advocate of more representation for women in tech and is the founder of a nonprofit in India for women empowerment.

When not working, Saumya enjoys binge-watching Netflix, photography, and traveling.

"A good relationship is not about how well you work with each other, but how well you fight with each other and how well can you disagree with each other. That's the entire goal of a product trio. They shouldn't agree. They should look at it from different lenses, but then how do you have that argument and come to a consensus is like the hardest part of managing it."

- Saumya Bhatnagar   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Why it’s valuable to always consider the context of a problem first (2:07)
• How Saumya became passionate about the product trio (5:47)
• Optimize the product trio by exercising empathy & good communication (10:39)
• Why designers & front-end eng should be connected from the start (14:36)
• The five components of the value priority score framework (16:59)
• Improving the experience of telling users “no” (20:16)
• The role of recency bias in prioritization conversations & how to get to “yes” (24:16)
• Determine a product’s success by measuring what will impact the outcome (26:36)
• How the product trio gained alignment regarding the trust score feature (30:54)
• Saumya’s tips for knowing when the product trio is working well (34:20)
• Frameworks for healthy discourse within your product trio (36:17)
• Incorporating a bottom-up decision-making process (39:28)
• Rapid fire questions (42:43)

• Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors - Michael E. Porter's book that has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.
• Dopamine Nation - Dr. Anna Lembke’s book that explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain.

Customer narratives are a transformative tool to help you build successful products! Marco Argenti (CIO @ Goldman Sachs) explains how to develop these narratives as your team’s guiding vision and help eng orgs better understand “the business” side of software. Plus we cover best practices for investing in developer experience, Goldman Sachs’ transition to prioritize external developers, and the signs, signals and trends Marco’s used to navigate his career across tons of different emerging technology fields.

Marco Argenti is the Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs. He is a member of the Management Committee, the Firmwide Technology Risk Committee, the Client Business Standards Committee, the Enterprise Risk Committee and the Global Inclusion and Diversity Committee. Mr. Argenti joined the firm as a Partner in 2019.

Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mr. Argenti served as Vice President of technology of Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2013, overseeing all aspects of the product lifecycle of Cloud Services, including strategy, business planning and developer engagement, and leading several AWS technology areas, such as mobile, serverless, Internet of Things, messaging, and augmented and virtual reality. Before that, Mr. Argenti spent several years at Nokia Corporation, where he was Senior Vice President and Global Head of Developer Experience and Marketplace from 2011 to 2013, with responsibility for Nokia’s developer ecosystem and app store across the company’s entire product portfolio.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Argenti was a board member and Chief Executive Officer of internet and mobile company Dada S.p.A., as well as a board member, executive vice president of strategy development and chief technology officer of Canadian e-commerce solutions provider Microforum Inc., where he founded Internet Frontier Inc., an internet publisher and e-commerce retailer. He previously founded and sold Dreamware S.r.l., a software development firm, to Microforum Inc.

Mr. Argenti serves on the Board of Directors of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, also known as PanCan. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Hall.

"Today, the world is so complex that it's almost like an asteroid field and when you navigate an asteroid field, if you don't turn often, you're gonna be having some surprises and so that's why iteration is so important. You need to release sometimes multiple times a day because the world is changing in front of you and there are opportunities and obstacles that come all the time."

- Marco Argenti   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Marco’s leadership journey – as a CTO, VP of Tech, and beyond (2:39)
• Questioning biases & observing signals when predicting opportunities (8:41)
• How Marco used intuition & data when deciding to work with Goldman Sachs (10:10)
• Why engineers must understand business principles (13:46)
• Using customer narratives to create a guiding vision for eng teams (17:47)
• How to help eng orgs better understand the business metrics of software (22:01)
• Why Goldman Sachs transitioned to prioritizing its developer clients (25:39)
• Shifting the focus from internal developers to external developers (31:34)
• How the tech team navigated challenges during this transition (33:34)
• Rapid fire questions (36:43)

Today’s episode marks a special occasion – 100 episodes of The Engineering Leadership Podcast! To celebrate, we’ve compiled some of our favorite moments from the past hundred episodes, featuring a wide range of high-energy guests and compelling topics. We cover tension points while scaling eng & product orgs, why you should seek existential issues, how to get unstuck in your career, helping engineers outgrow their positions, hyper-growing your eng org/career, identifying burnout, understanding workplace injustice, confronting your fear of failure, and much more!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• How to focus on what really matters... seek the "existential issues" & find where there's "Room AND Attention" - Will Larson (3:23)
• The Portfolio of Time Management - Jean-Denis Greze (8:50)
• How to get unstuck in your career - Wade Chambers (13:04)
• “Crashing” your way to a seat at the table - Melody Hildebrandt (15:51)
• The fundamentals of managing up - Jan Chong (17:12)
• Common tension points while scaling engineering and product organizations - Jeremy Henrickson (19:31)
• The story of Amazon Apollo, solving the right problem & pitching the right stakeholders - Melissa Binde (24:43)
• "Hero Developers don't scale" - Andrew Lau & Eli Daniel (30:09)
• How to increase your pool of potential candidates - Farhan Thawar (34:48)
• Why you should help engineers outgrow their positions & how to discuss career growth with your team members - Tara Ellis (39:45)
• How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth - Samir Naik (43:32)
• Move as fast as long as - Richard Wong (47:41)
• Lessons from leading large-scale, complex, strategic projects - Wendy Sheppard (49:38)
• How to operationalize your approach to leadership - Sri Viswanath (52:55)
• How to detect & identify the early signs of burnout in your engineering team - Erica Lockheimer, Sabry Tozin & Lori Allen (55:50)
• The root causes of workplace injustice & the roles we can play to prevent it - Kim Scott & Trier Bryan (59:29)
• Conflict optimizations vs. conflict resolution & why eng leaders need to embrace conflict - Jordan Adler (1:04:14)
• How to get over the fear of silence - Alexis Rask (1:07:22)
• Leading through uncertainty - David Silverman (1:13:50)
• "Rage-fixing" & Eddie's breakthrough moment confronting fear of failure at Gusto - Eddie Kim (1:20:05)

• Episode 30 - Spend Time On What Matter w/ Will Larson
• Episode 18 - Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 2) w/ Jean-Denis Greze
• Episode 21 - Conscious Career Growth (part 2) w/ Wade Chambers
• Episode 72 - Why Engineering Needs a Seat at the Negotiating Table w/ Melody Hildebrandt
• Episode 43 - Managing Up w/ Jan Chong
• Episode 38 - Align & Scale Engineering AND Product w/ Jeremy Henrickson
• Episode 47 - Building Technology That Endures w/ Melissa Binde
• Episode 79 - Translating engineering to the CEO w/ Andrew Lau and Eli Daniel
• Episode 10 - Speed & Creativity in Recruiting w/ Farhan Thawar
• Episode 75 - A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Career Growth & Internal Mobility w/ Tara Ellis
• Episode 77 - How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth w/ Samir Naik
• Episode 63 - Speed vs. Quality w/ Richard Wong
• Episode 31 - How to Lead Large Scale Projects w/ Wendy Shepperd
• Episode 65 - Building Autonomous Teams & Engineering Career Ladders w/ Sri Viswanath
• Episode 66 - Addressing Burnout in Your Engineering Org w/ Erica Lockheimer, Sabry Tozin & Lori Allen
• Episode 44 - “Just Work” w/ Kim Scott & Trier Bryant
• Episode 74 - Conflict Optimization w/ Jordan Adler
• Episode 32 - Ask Powerful Questions w/ Alexis Rask
• Episode 12 - Leading Through Uncertainty w/ David Silverman
• Episode 29 - Remove Fear of Failure From Your Org w/ Edward Kim

Noah Olberding, Producer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding-49138a19b/

Have strong movie opinions? Send Noah a message with your hot cinema takes!

Dan Overheim, Audio Engineer

IG: @doverheim

Are you also an avid 3D printer? Check out Dan’s 3D printing work here: bnd3d.com

Ellie Coggins Angus, Copywriter

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliecoggins/

Love books? Check out Ellie’s bookstagram: @ellieturnsthepage

We speak with Vinay Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Loom, about his experience balancing three high-level exec roles and living out his personal values at work while prioritizing his mental & physical health! Scaling up is never easy, but Vinay shares tips and systems that have worked for him, including utilizing timetables, building good habits despite emotions, and triply verifying decisions. We also cover the stigma surrounding paternity / parental leave in the tech industry, how knowing your values inspires better health, and journaling frameworks for identifying values & goals.

Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth) is Co-Founder & CTO at Loom - Check out Vinay’s video bio on Loom here

"I'd lost a sense of direction because I just took on so much work. Direction became something that was a luxury for me to think about which is an incredibly dangerous place to be as an executive and it's really easy to fall into it especially when there's a fire hose of work that's coming at you all the time.

And then I had morphed my life around work versus around my health and I realized the thing that had led me to have so much mental clarity before was my health. And so I started taking health incredibly seriously again.”

- Vinay Hiremath   

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Vinay’s experience taking on three exec roles at Loom (3:51)
• Why creating a daily timetable is crucial for busy eng leaders (6:02)
• The intersection between mental health & living by your values (9:14)
• What Vinay’s personal values are & ways he identified them (10:35)
• Incorporating the value of freedom within your eng org (11:35)
• How your goals & competencies act as gatekeepers to your values (16:25)
• Tips for building out your schedule to expand your working capacity (19:02)
• The importance of understanding your systems (20:11)
• As you scale your eng functions, set up delegation systems (21:49)
• Why eng teams should utilize budgets & triple verification (25:48)
• How triple verification works in people systems (27:07)
• What the CEO role taught Vinay about leading engineering (31:40)
• How Loom tackles the stigma surrounding parental leave (33:40)
• Prioritize mental & physical health to live out your values (35:48)
• Journaling frameworks to contemplate values (40:28)
• Vinay’s process for building – and keeping – new habits (43:03)
• Recognize your emotions & act despite them (47:07)
• Rapid fire questions (48:28)

 We cover how psychology, neuroscience & mindfulness tools can help eng leaders overcome challenges, communicate successfully, and foster a culture of empathy! Our guest is Luther Kitahata, an Innovative Executive Leadership Coach & Interim CTO/VP of Eng – he’s also described by Chip Conley as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of Silicon Valley.” We also chat about identifying personality types, uncovering unconscious traits/patterns, shifting from the comfort zone to the growth zone, and how to be a transformative leader!

Luther Kitahata is an Executive Leadership Coach known for his expertise in innovation, C-Suite roles leading global organizations, and as an entrepreneur building companies from the ground up. Luther draws on his deep understanding of the patterns that drive human behavior as well as his own corporate leadership experience to provide individuals and organizations with a transformative and pragmatic approach to their most complex challenges. He is described as a "Silicon Valley Obi-Wan Kenobi" in Chip Conley's bestselling book Wisdom at Work.

Luther works with high-growth companies led by senior executives who are committed to their own growth and transformation. Having been a C-level executive himself, he knows their challenges from the inside out. His methodology is designed to uncover hidden strengths and blind spots. He encourages leaders to experiment with new behaviors and actions. This results in transformations at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Luther draws on his 20+ years as a C-level operating executive, as well as entrepreneurial expertise starting 8 companies, enabling him to bring practical and actionable guidance to his clients. He has grown new teams from 0 to 100+, taken over large existing teams, and successfully handled turnaround situations. Luther also serves as a Fractional CTO or VP of Engineering to fill a recruiting gap; mentor founders growing into their leadership roles; or upgrade product development methodologies to drive agility, maturity, and scalability.

“We make these patterns for ourselves all the time and particularly early in life, we learn patterns of how to navigate the world. The problem is that the modern-day world has a lot of stimulus and input that can throw us into that survival state, that fight flight freeze state very easily. So if you understand that that's what's happening, that we have all these patterns and they're mostly unconscious or barely conscious, then you start to think, ‘Well, okay… What are the patterns that are serving me and what are the patterns that aren't?'"

- Luther Kitahata  

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

• Luther’s journey from eng leader to executive coach (02:33)
• The relationship dynamics between executive coach & fractional CTO (4:58)
• Using Enneagram results to assess eng leader’s response to challenges (6:16)
• Why you should be self-aware of your personality type (8:54)
• How to coach eng leaders to talk in ways that others will listen (10:58)
• Mindfulness techniques to foster a state of empathy & curiosity (12:32)
• What unconscious traits & patterns hold eng leaders back at work (15:42)
• How to recognize & address unconscious patterns (20:03)
• Tools to help you uncover areas where you experience resistance (21:43)
• Overcoming unconscious patterns by identifying your tendencies (22:49)
• Shift from the comfort zone to the growth zone (25:28)
• How to transition away from the high-stress zone (27:38)
• Transformative leadership starts with self-awareness & a growth mindset (30:10)
• Rapid fire questions (33:56)
• Luther’s method for tackling to-do lists with tools like Trello (35:51)
• Rapid fire questions continued (38:38)