Decoding Leadership

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.

Matt Otis has spent his career around building effective training programs. Training is one of the most important aspects of building a successful organization, but it's often not well understood. Matt had a ton of insights on how to make training really land, and set up people with what they need to succeed. This is useful not just if you're doing training programs (for example, how do you train someone on something you don't know?) He also digs into how training is evolving in modern organizations, especially with the advent of AI.