Decoding Leadership

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.

Diana was a delightful and insightful guest. She is a well-known expert on agile retrospectives, team liftoffs, agile fluency, and building resilient learning teams. She's probably the best in the world at these topics, so learn from her perspective!

Elaine May joined Decoding Leadership for a conversation on how to effectively make change as a leader. Elaine was an early agile practitioner, using it in very non-agile environments! She wrote about using agile methods five years before the agile manifesto. She taught me about a concept she calls change budgets. And shared how to deal with critics and naysayers. And then we talked about SCRUM and some of the downsides in the way it's practiced.