Shows
Decoding Leadership32. Matt Otis on training that worksMatt 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.
2026-01-1450 minDecoding Leadership31. Diana Larsen on retros, team liftoffs, agile fluency, and moreDiana 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!
2025-11-251h 04Decoding Leadership30. Elaine May on making change and the dangers of SCRUMElaine 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.
2025-10-2943 minDecoding Leadership29. Charity Majors on building organizations you can believe inCharity and I had a very personal discussion about the tremendous growth you can make personally as a leader, and the meaning you can derive from having an impact on the lives of the people around you. Full of nuance and perspective, Charity shares how her views have evolved over the years, and how her core values as a leader show up in the work she does. Such a pleasure to share this with you!
2025-09-2444 minDecoding Leadership28. Lena Reinhard on making space for leadership that mattersLena shares insights on making space for leadership work, addressing the issues leaders face, and strategies for more thoughtful and rewarding leadership. With experience as a CEO, startup founder, and former VP of engineering, Lena offers a wealth of knowledge on overcoming challenges. We discuss managing energy levels, embracing productivity, and the importance of community and self-awareness in leadership.
2025-08-1848 minDecoding Leadership27. Beth Adele Long on reliability and leadershipI sit down with Beth Long to discuss her extensive experience with reliability engineering from working at companies like New Relic, Jeli, Gruntwork, and Adaptive Capacity Labs. Beth shares her insights on the role of executives in incident management, the balance between product development and reliability, and how different organizations approach incident coordination. We also explore reliability as a product and the importance of organizational culture in effective incident response. I learned a great deal, and thought about some aspects of reliability in completely new ways. I hope you do too!
2025-07-3045 minDecoding Leadership26. Jade Rubick on reflecting powerReflected Power is a way to use power you don’t have. Join me as I introduce the concept of Reflected Power. Reflected Power is using the authority of those above you to amplify your influence and achieve your goals. We’ll cover the nuts and bolts of how to use the positional authority of the people around you to be more effective. Curious to hear your thoughts on this approach!00:00 Reflecting power: leveraging the power you don’t have00:17 Introduction01:26 What is reflecting power, and what does it look like?
2025-06-0409 minDecoding Leadership25. Molly Graham on Google to GlueI had the opportunity to interview Molly Graham, who has an impressive background working at Google, Facebook, and Quip, among other places. In 2022, she founded Glue Club, a community for startup leaders to learn from each other. Molly is best known for her concept of 'giving away your Legos,' which she developed from her experience with rapid organizational scaling. We discuss the emotional and practical aspects of change in startups. Molly also shares her (provative, deliberate, rare!) approach to organizational design, executive team dynamics, and her experience giving a TED Talk on the...
2025-05-2148 minDecoding Leadership24. Brent Miller on team health assessmentsIn today's episode, we dive into the fascinating world of team health assessments with Brent Miller. Brent, who held the title of organizational architect and worked as a principal engineer at New Relic, shares insights on conducting team health self-assessments and their impact on organizational improvements. We explore the concept of team reviews, the challenges faced during initial implementations, and how self-assessments revealed critical patterns such as stakeholder misalignment and workload issues. Brent also discusses the value of an annual organizational retrospective, the role of leadership buy-in, and the potential for smaller, more frequent check-ins. This episode is a...
2025-04-2348 minDecoding Leadership23. Jim Gochee on banning "prioritization", and getting functions to work togetherIn this episode of Decoding Leadership, host Jade interviews Jim Gochee, a seasoned expert in the software industry with a rich career spanning roles from engineer to CEO. They cover the controversial decision to ban the word 'prioritization' at Blameless, and go into some detail about how to get people to work well across departments. They discuss anti-patterns and common ruts in product and engineering interactions, the significance of clear goal-setting to unify teams, and the impact of understanding different roles within a company. Finally, Jim offers advice on leadership transitions, the role of curiosity and growth mindset in...
2025-04-0957 minDecoding Leadership22. James Shore: what if we scaled our teams to unreasonable sizes?Jim and I sit down and talk about his successful engagement at New Relic, where he brought modern autonomous team approaches the company. Jim shares how he has been doing it differently over the last few years, using an approach called Fluid Scaling Technology (FaST). We explore some parts of implementing FaST that I don’t believe are discussed anywhere else, such as how management works differently in an environment using FaST. And Jim shares how his recent engagement as a VP of Engineering has shaped his recent leadership work.
2025-03-2646 minDecoding Leadership21. Jayanthan Bhattathiripad on introducing yourself, XP and Scrum, and wasteIn this episode, we talk with Jayanthan Bhattatharapad. Jay has a very interesting way of introducing himself to his teams and organization, and I asked him to demo it to us. In doing so, he shares not only this interesting practice, but lots of tidbits about how he sees leadership. We had a fascinating discussion, can't wait to share it with you!* Jay's career journey from consulting at ThoughtWorks to Expedia, to his recent role at Cisco.* The importance of mental health and psychological safety in teams.* Why Extreme Programming...
2025-03-1241 minDecoding Leadership20. Margaret Le on technical leadership and building strong engineering culturesJoin us as we welcome Margaret Le, VP of Engineering at Facet, to discuss her experience from software engineering leadership roles at New Relic, Heroku, Slack, and Facet. We dive deep into the engineering leader's role in technical direction, and building teams and culture. Margaret shares her insights on defining and executing technical vision. She also explains how to cultivate a thriving work environment by clearly defining core values. She talks about the value of psychological safety, transparency, and vulnerability.
2025-02-2626 minDecoding Leadership19. Jade Rubick: using task forces to solve complex leadership challengesIn this episode, we delve into the concept of task forces and their crucial role in addressing organizational challenges. Discover when and how to employ task forces effectively, and learn from real-life examples, including a case at New Relic to rapidly deliver a complex feature in six weeks, and another involving a complex merger that spanned every department. I share actionable tips on how to set up a successful task force, including the importance of a solid kickoff meeting, selecting the right team members, and how to leverage the power of other leaders.
2025-01-2912 minDecoding Leadership18. Brent Miller on team self-selection and project UpscaleUpscale was a large scale agile transformation at a 50 team software company. Brent and I were on the leadership team. The aim of Upscale was to address the gridlock problem with cross-team projects. Jade brought in James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development, and he led us through a massive amount of change. Upscale was extremely successful, but there were missteps and challenges.
We retrospect on Upscale, and talk through cross-team dependencies, and especially into the massive self-selection event, where most of the people in engineering got to choose which team they wanted to be a part...
2025-01-151h 07Decoding Leadership17. Katie Wilde on the challenging step to director, and the perverse incentives of reliabilityKatie Wilde is an accomplished leader from Snyk, Ambassador Labs, and Buffer. She shares how she learned to be an effective director (and how challenging the transition was), and shares tons of insights into why it's hard to build a culture of reliability in engineering organizations. And she shares a bunch of wonderful approaches to make reliability fun and desirable. This episode was a delight, and I learned a bunch from it.
2024-12-0439 minDecoding Leadership16. Jade Rubick on Tiny ThursdaysWe often don't prioritize the tiny things that make exceptional products. I share a practice we adopted recently that helps us ship lots of little things every Thursday.
2024-11-0612 min
I'm a software engineer - what next?S01E00: I’m a software engineer - what next? [Pilot]I'm a Software Engineer - What Next? S01E00 Pilot - James and Matt"I'm a Software Engineer - What Next?" is a podcast for software engineers at a career crossroads. It is hosted by tech recruiter James Wilson and veteran software engineer Matthew Sinclair and offers insights into navigating career transitions from individual contributor roles to management and beyond. This podcast, featuring discussions on personal growth and leadership, is a guide for engineers seeking direction and growth in their careers. Join us to explore the paths and possibilities that lie ahead in...
2024-11-0532 minDecoding Leadership15. Ben Gahlsdorf on partnering with recruiting, advice for job seekers, and a recommendation mindsetBen is an experienced talent acquisition leader. We discussed how leaders can work effectively with recruiting, how he coaches recruiters to work better with their stakeholders, how to stand out in the current job market, and what he's learned about leadership himself. He also gives the controversial advice to not jump to hiring a recruiter!
2024-10-0933 minDecoding Leadership14. Alex Kroman on building strong leadership teams, product taste, and neurodivergent modeI loved this conversation with Alex Kroman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LivePerson. We dive into the topic of how to craft great leadership teams, balancing vision with execution, overcoming the hub-and-spoke management model, leveraging diverse skill sets, and improving decision-making quality. Alex is someone I've learned a great deal from, and I invite you to do the same in this podcast!
2024-09-2544 minDecoding Leadership13. Jade Rubick on learning from founder modeWhat can we learn from Paul Graham's "founder mode"? Mostly that it describes a poor way of thinking about delegation. It's not just for founders, and it can be dangerous for founders. But it's a useful tool to have in every leader's toolkit.
2024-09-1112 minDecoding Leadership12. Patrick Lightbody and Henry Shapiro on how they built ReclaimI interviewed the founders of Reclaim.ai, a successful startup that was recently acquired by Dropbox. Learn the unusual approaches they took to build a radically customer focused company. We cover how they gave up planning, selected leaders with unusual backgrounds, and kept their technology simple. And they share some of the decisions they made that helped them iterate on their approach and build a product I use every day.
2024-08-3044 min
Product TalkEP 445 - New Relic Fmr VP of Engineering on Effective Remote Communication StrategiesWhat are effective remote communication strategies for product teams? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Workleap Director of Product Barbara Bermes, New Relic Fmr VP of Engineering Jade Rubick speaks on effective strategies for managing communication in remote and asynchronous work environments. He covers the challenges of async communication, such as over-specification vs. under-specification, and strategies to address them. Jade also shares best practices for using tools like Slack to enhance productivity and collaboration, including using threaded replies, managing notifications, and replying with documentation. Tune in for insights on fostering a healthy remote communication culture.
2024-08-2343 minDecoding Leadership11. Jade Rubick on pilesWe delve into the concept of "piles", and why it can be a useful tool for seeing how to optimize flow.
2024-08-1406 minDecoding Leadership10. Jade Rubick on preventing incidentsWe cover a simple process change that is the most impactful way I've seen to prioritize reliability work. It's a rule called the "Don't Repeat Incidents" rule. In this short episode, we cover how we developed this rule, and why it made such a difference.
2024-07-3108 minDecoding Leadership9. Jade Rubick on removing yourself as a bottleneckWe discuss the inevitable challenge of being the bottleneck and how to get yourself out of this situation, mostly by growing and training your team. Learn approaches such as
Setting up indicators to preserve focus,
Using the concept of a leadership ladder to uplevel and evaluate your team, and
Using completed staff work to provide a standard for management work.
I also share
Practical advice for delegation,
How to use tenants to shape your organizations thinking, and
How to use the "gospel of I intend to" to improve coordination and allow your team to own more.
2024-07-1721 minDecoding Leadership8. Jade Rubick on organizational workOne of the most important concepts in developing a strong organization is "organizational work". I describe the concept, how you can use it to drive lasting improvements in your organization, and how you can use it to build strong, collaborative leadership teams.
2024-07-0315 minDecoding Leadership7. Jade Rubick on macho and bro leadershipLet's talk about macho and bro-ish leadership culture! Macho cultures often exhibit aggressive and sometimes sexist behavior. While risk-taking and aggressive behavior isn't uniformly bad, macho culture can result in groupthink and result in poor decision-making. And it can drive away talent. We explore why these cultures emerge, often due to stereotyped views of leadership, and share techniques for navigating them.
2024-06-2011 minDecoding Leadership7. Jade Rubick on macho and bro leadershipLet's talk about macho and bro-ish leadership culture! Macho cultures often exhibit aggressive and sometimes sexist behavior. While risk-taking and aggressive behavior isn't uniformly bad, macho culture can result in groupthink and result in poor decision-making. And it can drive away talent. We explore why these cultures emerge, often due to stereotyped views of leadership, and share techniques for navigating them.
2024-06-1918 minDecoding Leadership6. Jade Rubick on the dangers of fan out work, and managing a bottleneck teamWe discuss two related topics: fan out work and managing bottleneck teams. We first delve into fan out work, its causes, examples, and some of the problems it causes. We discuss a couple of approaches to reduce the impact of fan out work, such as having teams complete their own fan out work, and setting limits on such projects.
We then discuss bottleneck teams. Every organization has teams that suffer as they support the most critical aspects of the business. We discuss common issues like stakeholder bullying. And we offer some solutions such as a...
2024-06-0518 min
Level UpYour Roadmap is NOT Your StrategyIf you're an engineering leader, you've likely struggled with finding a balance between kindness and effectiveness. Author and Advisor Jade Rubick spends his days helping leaders strike that balance.Listen to the episode to learn more about:Roadmap and strategyHow to drive effectivenessHow to be kind while holding others accountable...and more!Learn more about the episode: www.opslevel.com/podcasts/can-engineering-leaders-be-both-nice-and-effectiveFollow Jade on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaderubick/
2024-05-2936 minDecoding Leadership5. John Hyland on early career engineers, decomposing monoliths, and the preventable problems paradoxJohn Hyland is an expert on making early career engineers successful. They led up the Ignite program at New Relic, which was an incredibly innovative program that was so good they expanded it to more senior levels. They go into some detail about how they set up and adapted the program. They also give lots of advice on hiring for both early career and later career engineers.
After that, we did a retrospective on deconstructing a Ruby monolith at New Relic. It was a large, complicated project, and some parts of it didn't go a...
2024-05-221h 05Decoding Leadership4. Jason Poole on product+engineering+design mind-melds, managing vs leading, and fast decision-makingIn this episode of Decoding Leadership, Jade sits down with experienced engineering leader Jason Poole to discuss the ins and outs of building strong partnerships between product, engineering, and design. Jason shares his insights on:
Establishing trust and a unified front in engineering/product relationships
Integrating design into the triad and its transformative impact
Communicating effectively within the triad through structured and ad-hoc touchpoints
Helping local teams develop their own effective triads
Lessons learned from experimenting with the single threaded owner model vs. triad approach
The distinction between management and leadership skills
A powerful framework for efficient, high-quality...
2024-05-0842 minDecoding Leadership3. Nadya Duke Boone on alignment tips, radical candor, and how to really protect your teamNadya is an accomplished product leader and chief product officer. I've always been impressed with how she has navigated getting large groups of people on the same page. And she's really good at aligning executives. She gives us some tips for getting better at that, and talks through her approach to radical candor, protecting teams, and growing the people on her team.
2024-04-2435 minDecoding Leadership2: Keizan Shaffer on mentorship, sponsorship, career advice, and reorgsKeizan Shaffer talks through how he thinks about mentorship. He talks about the importance of surfacing your thinking and sharing your mental models, how mentorship, teaching, coaching, and sponsorship are different. And he shares some career advice that his mentors have found useful. He also talks about Conway's law, and some tips for managing reorgs successfully.
2024-04-1042 minDecoding Leadership1: Alexa Stefanko on the Single Threaded Owner model, product metrics, and how training alligators is different than training peopleAlexa Stefanko led one of the most dramatic improvements in a team I've seen. We talk about a set of changes we introduced at Gremlin, including the Single Threaded Owner model, the introduction of product metrics, and setting up an "API" between local teams and senior leadership. Alexa also talks about her move to being a director, the differences between medical and tech leadership, and how animal training has influenced (and not influenced) her approach with people.
2024-03-2743 min
Reliability Enablers#23 - The Danger of Unreliable Platforms (with Jade Rubick)Jade Rubick needs no introduction in the reliability and observability space. He was VP of Engineering at New Relic from 2010 to 2019. It was my pleasure to take on his non-obvious ideas on managing expectations with teams, especially platform-based teams. We had a few spicy ideas to dive into.We also touched on topics like enhancing engineering practices, DORA metrics, and so much more. Be sure to listen all the way through to learn Jade's amazing insights. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other...
2024-01-1629 min
On The Frontier#16 - Jade Rubick (ex VPE at New Relic, Eng Advisor to Jeli, Flatfile, Mode, Maze & more) - Tactical Advice for Building Effective Eng Teams, Anti-Patterns for Eng Teams to AvoidJade Rubick is a Eng Advisor to multiple startups (23 and counting). He was previously Vice President Engineering at New Relic and has taken on interim VPE roles at multiple other startups over the years before he began solely focused on advising startups. In this episode, Jade joins us to cover common anti-patterns he sees in eng teams, how teams can better communicate, what hiring practices work well and how to think about structuring career paths for employees. Everything from hiring tips, to product & feature development, to adjusting to the current “do more with less” environment and common advice across all...
2023-08-0844 min