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NEW - EPISODE 218
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Empowering Teams & Cultivating True Ownership in Engineering Orgs

with Wade Chambers


Wade Chambers, Chief Engineering Officer @ Amplitude, joins us to discuss what it looks like to empower individual engineers & overall engineering teams and recommendations for creating a culture that cultivates ownership! First, Wade defines what true ownership looks like – and what it doesn’t look like. We cover frameworks for identifying & cultivating high ownership in individuals & across teams, implementing systems that encourage ownership, communicating shared vision / goals, and coaching engineers when passing the baton of ownership. We also discuss navigating difficult conversations around empowerment / ownership – or lack thereof – and Wade shares examples of impactful questions to ask.
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On this show, we uncover stories and examples of great leadership in software engineering, explore the experiences of industry leaders, as well as share actionable insights from leadership and management thought experts artful and skilled in the application of leadership.
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ELC
NEWSLETTER
EVENTS, PODCASTS AND MORE
FEATURED STORY
Apr 22, 2025

Building partnerships w/ complex stakeholders, aligning tech debt w/ business value & decisive vs. thoughtful decision-making

with Funmi Oludaiye, Ketan Gupta, and Sasha Hall

In this episode, we’re back with more insights from our local community leaders — discussing leadership insights on strategic decision-making, managing technical debt and fostering true cross-functional partnerships! Funmi Oludaiye (New York City) shares strategies for building strong cross-functional relationships between eng & business leaders. Ketan Gupta (London) breaks down the STIR framework for managing tech debt & aligning it with business value. And Sasha Hall (Toronto) works through examples of how to balance decisive (fast) vs. thoughtful (slow) decision-making. You’ll also learn some of these leaders’ best tips for diving in & getting involved with your local ELC community!
FEATURED STORY
Apr 15, 2025

Recalibrating leadership priorities, leveraging your time & empowering senior leaders

with Vinod Marur

In this episode, Vinod Marur (SVP of Engineering @ Databricks) shares his approach to recalibrating leadership priorities as organizations scale. Vinod breaks down his personal recalibration framework—why he does it every 3–6 months, signals that it’s time to reassess, and how to design communication and collaboration structures that reduce information asymmetry during periods of rapid growth. We dive into rewriting hiring playbooks, tailoring recruitment pitches, and the impact of AI on hiring. Plus actionable strategies for onboarding and empowering senior leaders, identifying the highest-leverage problems to solve, and finding champions to carry key initiatives forward.
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A breath of fresh air in a category that can have a lot of BS. Keep up the great work!
- Rudest Buddhist
Sept 1, 2020
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LATEST

Episode 218: Empowering Teams & Cultivating True Ownership in Engineering Orgs

with Wade Chambers

Wade Chambers, Chief Engineering Officer @ Amplitude, joins us to discuss what it looks like to empower individual engineers & overall engineering teams and recommendations for creating a culture that cultivates ownership! First, Wade defines what true ownership looks like – and what it doesn’t look like. We cover frameworks for identifying & cultivating high ownership in individuals & across teams, implementing systems that encourage ownership, communicating shared vision / goals, and coaching engineers when passing the baton of ownership. We also discuss navigating difficult conversations around empowerment / ownership – or lack thereof – and Wade shares examples of impactful questions to ask.
Apr 29, 2025

Episode 217: Building partnerships w/ complex stakeholders, aligning tech debt w/ business value & decisive vs. thoughtful decision-making

with Funmi Oludaiye, Ketan Gupta, and Sasha Hall

In this episode, we’re back with more insights from our local community leaders — discussing leadership insights on strategic decision-making, managing technical debt and fostering true cross-functional partnerships! Funmi Oludaiye (New York City) shares strategies for building strong cross-functional relationships between eng & business leaders. Ketan Gupta (London) breaks down the STIR framework for managing tech debt & aligning it with business value. And Sasha Hall (Toronto) works through examples of how to balance decisive (fast) vs. thoughtful (slow) decision-making. You’ll also learn some of these leaders’ best tips for diving in & getting involved with your local ELC community!
Apr 22, 2025

Episode 216: Recalibrating leadership priorities, leveraging your time & empowering senior leaders

with Vinod Marur

In this episode, Vinod Marur (SVP of Engineering @ Databricks) shares his approach to recalibrating leadership priorities as organizations scale. Vinod breaks down his personal recalibration framework—why he does it every 3–6 months, signals that it’s time to reassess, and how to design communication and collaboration structures that reduce information asymmetry during periods of rapid growth. We dive into rewriting hiring playbooks, tailoring recruitment pitches, and the impact of AI on hiring. Plus actionable strategies for onboarding and empowering senior leaders, identifying the highest-leverage problems to solve, and finding champions to carry key initiatives forward.
Apr 15, 2025

Episode 215: From early days to IPO: Scaling leadership, enterprise growth, product ownership, & outgrowing your failure modes

with Jon Hyman

Jon Hyman (Co-Founder and CTO @ Braze) shares the pivotal moments that shaped the company - from being the only person on call in the early years to identifying (and pivoting) product-market fit. Jon discusses how they navigated early-stage failure modes, carved out areas of product ownership, and made the shift to enterprise customers. Plus how leadership priorities evolve pre- vs. post-IPO and the next evolution of Jon’s leadership growth after almost 14 years at Braze.
Apr 08, 2025

Episode 214: Essential questions & leadership principles to navigate change, fear & uncertainty

with Rukmini Reddy

In this episode, Rukmini Reddy (SVP of Engineering @ PagerDuty) shares invaluable leadership lessons on navigating transition, uncertainty, and fear. We cover actionable strategies like the five essential questions to lead your team through change, “hugging the elephant” to overcome fear, approaching org change from first principles, shifting from “informed pessimism” to “curious optimism,” and building high-trust peer support! If you're looking to strengthen your leadership and build more resilient engineering teams, this episode is packed with essential insights to help you navigate the toughest challenges with confidence.
Apr 01, 2025

Episode 213: Building platforms, ecosystems & open-source communities: Lessons from Viam & MongoDB

with Eliot Horowitz @ Viam

How do you build a platform that accelerates innovation by 10x-100x? Eliot Horowitz (CEO & Founder @ Viam) shares how insights from building MongoDB are shaping Viam’s approach to platform ecosystem development, user-centricity and open-source strategy. We explore the origin story behind Viam, principles for platform design for hardware/software development, modular systems, seamless APIs, and finding the right abstraction layers for your product. Plus we cover cultivating developer communities, and frameworks to anchor your business-model and pricing. This episode is packed with insights on platform building, fostering ecosystems, driving user-centric innovation.
Mar 25, 2025

Episode 212: Leading transformation, inspiring vision & empowering teams to operate autonomously

with Kevin Stewart

Kevin Stewart (SVP of Engineering @ Splice) joins us to discuss organizational transformation, inspiring vision, and empowering teams! We break down how to tackle root issues in leadership and decision-making, diagnose and prioritize org problems, make a compelling case for change to stakeholders, and override learned helplessness. Kevin also shares how Splice’s concept video became a catalyst for alignment, motivation, and a shared north star for their strategy rollout. Plus, we discuss strategies for empowering teams to operate autonomously—freeing you to focus on business objectives and strategic work.
Mar 18, 2025

Episode 211: Accelerating & upskilling your AI learning journey

with Maher Hanafi

In this episode, we explore how to accelerate your AI learning journey with Maher Hanafi, SVPE @ Betterworks! Maher shares his progression from using LLMs as a proof of concept to tackling real-world use cases and complex challenges like data governance, data flow, enterprise AI, and AI agents. Maher also dissects the importance of team experimentation with real use cases, revisiting AI decisions with your team, when to go horizontal vs. vertical with AI learning, overcoming POC-to-production challenges; and evaluating the ROI of your AI decisions. Special thanks to our guest co-host Corey Coto, a local leader of ELC Seattle!
Mar 11, 2025

Episode 210: Data governance, adversarial testing & more - Essential strategies to scale AI responsibly in a shifting regulatory environment

with Jim Palmer

Jim Palmer (Chief AI Officer @ Dialpad) discusses the current state and future of data governance, scaling AI responsibly, and practical strategies for companies at different stages of AI adoption. We break down the impact of red-teaming / adversarial testing on AI governance, mitigating risk, unexpected positive outcomes from red-teaming, and how to launch and scale adversarial testing efforts. Plus investments in data & governance you should be focusing on, structured data as a cheat code to durability & adaptability, building in data deletion systems and other essential tips & strategies for an evolving AI regulatory and governance environment.
Mar 04, 2025

Episode 209: Capturing & synthesizing unbiased insights from users, your open source community & yourself

with James Campbell

We sit down with James Campbell, CTO & Co-Founder @ Great Expectations, to discuss his founding journey, considerations for starting open source, making community-driven decisions, and navigating the tension between your product vision & product roadmap. We also cover the phases that Great Expectations has cycled through, balancing the role of personal biases when making product / business decisions, how making an open-source product impacts marketing decisions, and James’ best recommendations for building out the product function as a product-involved founder.
Feb 25, 2025
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