Decoding Leadership

Ankit Jain is CEO of Aviator, and veteran of many companies. He's active in the developer experience space and maintains several online communities. He's in the middle of the conversation about where software is heading, and building some of the developer tooling to support it. We had a fascinating discussion where he covered:
How to kill the code review.
How to verify intent and validate at machine speed.
Why he thinks all businesses are becoming developer tools companies.
The paradox of automation and how it applies to increasingly automated systems.
Will AI reinforce existing practices or explode them?
Advice for building and supporting online communities.

Jason is a veteran of the technical advocacy and developer advocacy space. I thought it would be useful for people to better understand these roles. He shares how advocacy roles have shifted over the years, where in the organization they belong, and teaches about how to do storytelling well. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D. is a world expert on meetings. She's released a new book on the topic (Your Best Meeting Ever), packed with ideas for how to improve the way your organization focuses, communicates, and works together. We discussed incentives, mechanisms for shaking up ineffective use of time, how to build a culture of effective meetings, and power dynamics.

Todd Etchieson and I were counterparts at New Relic. Of all the people I've worked with, he is one of the best at getting people radically aligned. This is often a huge challenge for product leaders -- the CEO and product leader alignment is notorious for being problematic. He breaks down how he does it, and how he learned to do it so well. We also discuss great product strategy and what it really looks like. We also talk about a new product we canceled because it was off strategy.

Seth Engelhard has worked at some of the more interesting companies in the world: GitLab, Netlify, New Relic, and now Observable. He goes into a lot of detail about what practices he learned from these companies, and what the transition to being the head of engineering has been like. We cover topics like building a support network, transparency, career transitions, running meetings well, and being in an async and remote by default company.