Engineering Leadership Excellence Podcast

In the seventh episode of our podcast series, Joshua welcomes Ramona Shaw, his BetterManager leadership coach. Ramona works with both emerging and experienced technology leaders to help them achieve their fullest leadership potential.

In this inspiring episode, Joshua and Ramona explore the function and value of coaching, revealing actual examples of challenges they worked on together as catalysts for Joshua’s growth.

Ramona, who spent years working in a corporate setting before transitioning to full-time coaching, shares the patterns she has identified that lead to success for leaders in all fields. She highlights and explains the need to cultivate open-mindedness, to prioritize long-term growth over short-term gains, and to take regular time to self-reflect. She further explores the most important thing for leaders: to use those methods to tune their leadership style to each new situation and challenge.

To learn more about Ramona and her work, visit www.ramonashaw.com, listen to her podcast The Manager Track, or find her on LinkedIn or Instagram.

To learn more about how BetterManager could help you become a stronger leader through an evidenced-based combination of Coaching, Group Skills Training, Actionable Assessments, and E-Learning, visit www.bettermanager.us

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In this episode, Robin interviews Žilvinas Girėnas, a Senior Engineering Manager at Productboard.
They dive into Žilvinas’ experience leading a machine learning team focused on building Productboard AI. The discussion covers the team’s unique approach to working with AI, the challenges and strategies in hiring ML engineers, and their transition to building an internal AI platform.
Žilvinas also shares insights on shaping the team’s delivery process with the Shape Up methodology, how ML engineers need both technical and product knowledge, and the importance of balancing leadership and engineering skills in their roles.

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

For the fifth episode in our podcast series, Joshua welcomed a former colleague and old friend, Disha Al Baqui, Principal Engineering Manager at Hulu. Joshua and Disha met in 2014 when they worked as individual contributors for the same company. Today, both are tackling entirely different challenges as engineering leaders.

Besides catching up, the two discussed their paths to leadership, the importance of diversity in engineering, and how their leadership styles were shaped by the types of manager they didn’t want to be.
Interested in joining our growing team? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

Kicking off the podcast series, host Joshua Samberg is joined by our very own Director of Engineering, Vojtech Vondra. During a wide-ranging conversation, they discuss productboard’s efforts to expand the conversation around engineering leadership, Vojtech’s path to becoming an engineering leader, and the experiences that inspired their leadership philosophies.

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In our first episode of Season 2, we chatted with Ralph McTeggart, Principal Engineer at Productboard, about his decision to become a Tech Lead after wearing a manager hat for several years.
He examines the benefits as well as the challenges he faced upon returning closer to the technical side, sharing how the skills he gained from serving in both positions are now helping him in his day-to-day at Productboard.
Ralph discusses his approach to architecture and documentation, the importance of establishing strong networks both in and outside the office, why feedback matters, the reality of imposter syndrome, and how engineers can advance their careers without crossing into the management track.

After listening to the podcast, be sure to check out Ralph’s reading recommendations:

• The Elements of Style
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences
• Writing Well For Work and Pleasure: The New Writer's Guide to Producing Great Content
• Speak So Your Audience Will Listen: 7 Steps to Confident and Authentic Public Speaking
• Gravitas: Communicate with Confidence, Influence and Authority
• Effective Java
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems (Martin also has great content on
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@kleppmann)
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track (and site https://staffeng.com/)

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!