manager.flow: Recent Episodes
Emily Tsitrian
Are you a new people manager looking for advice on where to start? An experienced leader wanting to learn from your peers? Or maybe - you're considering a career in management but not sure if it's right for you? You've come to the right place! Listen and learn from a diverse and experienced team of people managers, reflecting on their journey and sharing intimate details of their highs and lows along their career path. You might pick up a thing or two, or maybe just get the courage and "know how" to raise your hand to step into a leadership role yourself. Learn more at www.emilytsitrian.com
Vaz is an engineering manager for the Pages product at LinkedIn, where he helps organizations establish their presence and connect with professionals at a global scale. In this episode, we discuss Vaz's journey as a software engineer into leadership positions, and I get a great new perspective on performance management of individuals.
Vaz has over 15 years of experience as an engineering manager in places like Stripe, Google and his own company. In his ten years at Google, Vaz held many externally facing engineering roles, both as an individual contributor and manager for different teams across the Americas region both in their Ads business and at Google Cloud.
Prior to Google he was the co-founder and CTO of a company that develops software and provides infrastructure for financial institutions and security agencies.
Since 2013 he has been based out of the San Francisco Bay area after relocating from Mexico where he is originally from. Outside of work he enjoys playing with his 4yr old son, biking, watching movies with his wife and consuming any post-apocalyptic media that is produced.
He holds a Computer Science degree from U.N.A.M. where he also helped others get theirs working there as a Professor and Developer.
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Another episode where I speak with a fellow author! Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You - a practical guide for navigating one's career that is packed with real-life skills they don't teach in college.
Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s “Career Success Accelerator”, where he’s taught for twenty years. Mark also serves on the boards of non-profits Techie Youth and Plant a Million Corals.
Mark and I have a great conversation about what inspired him to write this book and some of the career development advice he has for aspiring and new managers - and some lessons he learned the hard way so you don't have to!
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As the Vice President of Data Management at Castlight Health, Lauren Bui leads a diverse and dynamic team that delivers insights and modernization to 20+ million patient datasets through Castlight's suite of applications. That in and of itself is impressive feat, and in this episode of manager.flow, Lauren discusses her journey and growth into the highest levels of technical leadership over a several-decade period.
Notably, in 2018 she was presented the Dallas Business Journal - Women in Technology Leadership award, served as the 2019 keynote speaker at the Health Innovations Summit and has served on the MIT CISR committee. Lauren is also published in Health Tech and Digital Health and also the HCI Digital Health magazines.
Lauren and I also discuss some shared experiences in being children of immigrants as her family escaped from Vietnam during the conflicts in the 20th century, and how these identities interplay and affect leadership styles. She's got a fascinating story and an important perspective on people-management and identity.
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Does your daily work involve a lot of time on Slack? If you're anything like me, it can sometimes feel like we live and die by Slack messages - and especially in the modern, remote-first workplace, it's become a critical part of how we communicate and collaborate at work.
This week, I have a conversation with one of the former sales leaders at Slack who grew the mid-market team for a portion of the Americas, and hear about his journey to management by initiating a new division within the overall department. Prior to coming up as a leader at Slack, he was also an early member of the sales team at Dropbox, where he was the founding account executive of a global media vertical, and, before that, worked in finance at Northern Trust and at UBS.
Today, Ryan leads portion of the sales team at Stripe that focuses on enterprise customers. We actually work together frequently, so it was fun to have a conversation about management outside of the daily grind of our current roles. Ryan tells me a great story about his first "really bad day" as a people-leader and what he learned from it. There's a great lesson in there for all of us, so please tune in and enjoy!
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In this week's episode, I chat with a sales leader at BetterUp, a platform for coaching teams and people - very needed in today's uncertain world. A few weeks ago, one of Matt's posts on LinkedIn went viral and caught my eye - it was a raw, candid reflection of his growth as a leader and as a human over the past decade or so, and so I asked him to share more about his journey, the highlights and the lowlights - and all the lessons he's gleaned from both.
Matt Kennedy's career spans a few years, as he's worked as a SaaS GTM leader with over a decade of experience in hyper growth SaaS startups. During this time, Matt has made all the mistakes and cherishes those as his biggest areas for growth and reflection. He has found a lot of passion with improving the human condition in the workplace, and has developed a belief that the best way to run businesses is to take care of your people. Matt believes the future of successful business lies in knowing how to help your people thrive, and has made it his mission to bring this concept to the masses.
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Emily Sander has an impressive rap sheet. Among her achievements: being on the testing team for the first Kindle device, working on a 6-person startup team, building a global client management team from scratch, serving as a Chief of Staff for a CEO, and most notably (in my book - no pun intended!), an author.
In our conversation today - she shares her own career story and what she learned the hard way as she was suddenly thrust into a management position with zero training, and had to get scrappy, adjust her perfectionist tendencies, and figure out a way to uplevel, fast.
Emily now has a leadership coaching practice and serves clients around the world and at various stages of their growth: from seasoned executives to first-time managers, and motivated individual contributors who are ready to level up.
Emily's book is called Hacking Executive Leadership and helps new leaders execute from a place of confidence and humility. You can pick up your copy on Amazon or wherever books are sold.
Learn more about Emily's coaching practice at https://www.nextlevel.coach/
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As a new people-manager, one of the most critical peer relationships to establish and nurture from day one is that with your recruiting team. Together, your recruiting partner and you will collaborate to create a hiring strategy, execute the process to build a hiring pipeline, and in the final moments of a hiring process - sweat through the candidate closing process with every finger crossed.
In this episode, I speak with a people-leader in the recruiting function at Stripe. Casey is a recruiting manager supporting the Go To Market function, and has spent years growing his craft and building recruiting teams. In this role, he marries his deep passion and love of technology with guiding people to their dream careers.
A South Carolina native, Casey received his bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University prior to moving to the Bay Area where he resides with his wife and two sons. When he is not engaging in the broader technology community you can find him working on his golf swing at many of the Bay Area's beautiful courses, or watching Golden State Warriors basketball games with friends and family.
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In this episode, I have an insightful conversation with Alex Black. Alex is a Leadership and Team Development Coach for new managers and founders, and is a firm believer in providing coaching for first-time managers and founders to help them and their teams succeed and avoid the many trap doors that exist in the first few months in these roles.
Alex (and I) believe strongly that executive level coaching shouldn’t be exclusively for C-Suites, and that everybody deserves to have a terrific manager, which can be life-changing. Alex believes that investing in personalized development for new managers is key to the health and success of an organization.
Alex has a Bachelors in Communication from Boston University and a Masters in Nonprofit Management from NYU. She is a certified MBTI practitioner.
When she isn’t working with new managers, you can find Alex teaching dance cardio classes, officiating weddings or hanging out with her daughter and husband in South Orange, New Jersey.
Work with Alex: https://themanagercoach.co/work-with-me/
Free Meeting Planning Guide: https://themanagercoach.co/a-guide-to-leading-meetings-that-matter/
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Naz Irani is a PreSales leader who has spent the past decade building Enterprise PreSales teams at companies including Akamai and Stripe. Her true passion lies in building high performing user-focused teams in high growth environments, and more importantly, playing a role in helping people build successful careers. As president of the PreSales Leadership Collective (PSLC) council, she has made significant contributions to the PreSales function and she is currently focused on building a team to enable and innovate with Stripe’s Enterprise users.
Naz and I have conversations about how she discovered her "North Star" in her career many years ago, and that led her to realizing she wanted to be a team manager and focus her career on growing and developing teams and individuals into their own successes.
Naz has had a long journey and is committed to empowering those like herself, with DEI being a key focus as she builds for the future with her team. Her family of 4, including 2 kids (1 and 4 year old), inspire her and she believes spending time with them is what helps her get better everyday.
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Emily VerMeulen is a customer service professional, a rescue dog enthusiast, an introvert, and a Gemini. She is currently working at Vineti, a cell and gene therapy logistics start-up, doing one of her favorite things- building a support department from, more or less, the ground up. But - she didn't start her career in tech...it was a chance encounter with a YC founder she met while waiting tables that got her wheels turning in the tech world.
This episode covers her early learnings from managing a fast-paced team at a startup and learning the ropes while navigating a tricky management situation of her own, and her unique way of coping with imposter syndrome.
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Robert Kipp is a construction legend - and happens to be a thoughtful people leader with a unique perspective of having served in the armed forces as a Captain in the United States Army. His two tours of duty in Iraq taught him quite a few lessons about leadership and life - and in this week's special Veterans Day episode, we talk about his journey over the years.
"Kipp" - as he is known amongst friends - is currently the Senior General Superintendent responsible for all aspects of on-site coordination, quality control, labor relations, and safe work practices for all phases of construction work, and is an industry leader in technology integration and implementation.
He holds a Masters Degree in Construction Administration from Columbia University, a BA from Norwich University, and is an Eagle Scout.
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In this episode (recorded about a year ago) I speak with Lorrin Blair - a former Woman in Construction turned Woman in Tech. A Civil Engineer by training, she spent the first part of her career supporting construction jobsites all over North America. It was on construction sites where Lorrin first developed her leadership skills and styles - uncovering inefficiencies, leaning in on hard work, and finding ways to improve the worklives of people around her.
Lorrin pivoted into a career in technology more recently to take those lessons learned and improve the industry through construction and design technology, first at PlanGrid and now at AutoDesk where she now leads a team of Technical Solutions Consultants.
Lorrin and I chat about her journey into people-management and some of her early lessons learned - and specifically where to focus energy, relationship-wise, to best get set up for personal and team success in the long run.
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In today's episode, I converse with William A. Adam - an award-winning D&I innovator, engineering trailblazer, and global philanthropist. We cover many topics, but with a focus on how people managers can gain confidence and become influencers at their companies for diversity and inclusion topics.
William and I also chat about his earlier professional experiences. Over the course of his 30-year career in software engineering, he was one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and was recently profiled by the Computer History Museum. Through his company, Adamation, William developed mission-critical custom enterprise apps for Steve Jobs' NeXT computers and pioneered a network instant messaging service purchased by the CIA. He's even been awarded two patents.
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On this episode, I discuss the unique journey of Mitzi Yue, a finance and culture leader in the healthcare technology sector. Mitzi's early experiences as an Asian-American female in the workplace were formative and shaped her leadership perspective today, and her discussion about the journey to unpack identity is fascinating and important.
Today, Mitzi currently serves as the Vice President of Financial Planning for Genome Medical. While her professional training is squarely in finance, Mitzi has had a unique perspective as a leader of both finance and culture, as well as a champion of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
These days, she splits her time between her role as a new mom, finance leader, startup advisor, and two-time nonprofit founder. Her latest nonprofit, Antiracism Books for Children, is charged with the mission of supplying positive diverse representation children's books to budget-constrained classrooms.
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Amy Buechler has worked with thousands of the world’s best startup founders as Y Combinator’s first Batch Director and only embedded Founder Coach. Founders are often in an awkward position to not only build their companies but quickly transition to people-leaders as they start to hire and grow their teams.
In this episode, we discuss some of the common challenges her clients face and muse about why millennials have a unique opportunity as we begin to step up as leaders in the workplace.
Before joining YC, she became a licensed psychotherapist and saw clients in private practice in San Francisco (CA LMFT #125743). Since leaving YC in Jan 2019, Amy has worked with over 600 venture-backed, rapidly-scaling founding teams.
You can learn more at Amy's website: thefoundercoach.com
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If you're a people-manager and you think of "marketing" -- do you just think "advertising?"
If so - you'd be wrong. Marketing has become a huge strategic growth lever in tech, and leaders of all types would be well served to understand some of the fundamentals.
In this episode, we chat with Dorian Stewart, a marketing leader, about this topic as well as his experience in people-management in marketing organizations, as well as some discussions on how people-managers can help support people of color thrive in marketing organizations and on teams.
Today, Dorian is the Head of Global Demand Generation at SmartRecruiters, whose mission is to connect people to jobs at scale. Prior to SmartRecruiters, Dorian worked at Terminal, where he played a major role in building out the demand and expansion strategy, helping build remote engineering teams for hypergrowth businesses.
He holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from UCLA and a Masters' Degree in Communications Management & Technology from NYU.
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How could an experience at a teenager's after-school-retail job shape the future leadership style of an Engineering Director at a unicorn in Silicon Valley? And what really is the career path of a young software engineer at a startup? Buckle up, listeners - Elizabeth Leddy doesn't hold back in answering these and many other inquiries.
Elizabeth has over 15 years of experience in the software industry working in a variety of domains including healthcare, athlete management, government contracting and construction. Her last role was as a director of engineering working with infrastructure, test automation, and security.
After that role lead to a successful acquisition, she is tackling a new role as the Sr. VP of Snack Wrangling and Nap Management and works from home.
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Formally transitioning genders in the workplace can be a tricky process to navigate, and a supportive manager and team can make all the difference in the world. But what happens when you ARE the manager and are ready to come out as trans? This is one of some great topics we discuss with seasoned and sassy QA manager Tayler Knight.
Tayler is a multifaceted creator, speaker, learner and internet troll. After a decade-long career in tech growing small startups into successful giants, she is now pursuing a career in psychology.
Most of her days are spent walking her dogs, Tofu and Buddha, listening to podcasts, and planning trips with her soon-to-be wife.
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In this special Labor Day episode, we chat with a corporate-manager-turned-blue-collar-people-manager Leslie Caccamese about her pivot from a 15 year stint in corporate America to her role today in farming, and why tech workers should to remember why labor day matters in today's hyper-connected modern age.
Leslie is a registered Farm Labor Contractor responsible for managing labor safety and compliance for Oak Noll Farming Corp, a Napa Valley vineyard management company.
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Jo Halstead believes that people managers can make or break a company - and that new managers rarely get any real training on how to take care of their team, themselves, and the company. Let's change that!
Jo currently manages a team of client success individuals for a large digital health company, but over her life her work has been varied - spanning 40+ years in hospitality, nonprofits, and wellness/digital health. Across all of those fields, she's managed teams of people with the goal of helping them grow and flourish. Along the way, she's earned a pair of Masters degrees, a PMP certification, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt credentials - wow!
Jo and I have a great discussion about a later-in-life career renaissance and the value of non-traditional work history, and how we can better support our LGBTQ+ people managers in tech.
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This is a historic moment in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic as the FDA just fully approved the Pfizer vaccine for individuals 16 and over. In this episode, I am thrilled to speak with Miya Gray, who leads the Customer Experience and Engagement department at Pfizer, about her experience and journey into leadership.
Miya's role today is fascinating and especially relevant in the pandemic where leadership in healthcare has never been so important. We discuss her approach to leading her team as well as her evolution as a thought leader, as she brings many years' of experience in senior and executive leadership positions at healthcare companies.
We also discuss some of the unique challenges and opportunities of being a Black woman in a technical field and how companies can encourage more POC to raise their hands for leadership roles, and support them once they're there.
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Drew Register is the Director of Epic Support and Staffing at Tegria, a healthcare services group focused on enterprise support and operational transformation. In this role, he manages 65 remote consultants and provides strategic direction to the team to keep them successful in the volatile healthcare IT consultant market.
Drew and I discuss his journey into management via a number of hybrid "player-coach" roles and the unique challenges of coming out in the workplace over and over as minority LGBTQ+ in leadership.
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David Salinger is the co-founder and CEO at EyeLevel.io, the private social network for managers and their teams to build productive and engaging team culture. Prior to starting EyeLevel, his career has focused on building sales organizations from the ground-up at companies like Tableau and Parallels.
David's core belief is that people-managers are the heart and soul of any organization, and helping them reach their potential as leaders and advocates is his mission!
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Nicole Patterson is a seasoned leader of customer support operations at a Castlight Health - a health tech navigation company. Two years ago, her entire support center uprooted from Charlotte, NC to Salt Lake City, UT and Nicole was tasked with maintaining business continuity while establishing the new campus. Just as the dust had settled, COVID hit, and her new Utah-based team had to not only ramp up but pivot quickly into responding to the COVID crisis and economic uncertainty of the pandemic.
Nicole and I spend some time discussing this herculean effort as well as her journey into leadership and management more broadly and how she brings her authentic self to the workplace, encouraging others to do the same. It's not easy to be a gay, Black female people-leader in the tech industry, and Nicole shares some of her insights with us as well as advice to new people-managers.
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Pat Copeland has been building software for over 25 years and has worked at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He is currently a Vice President in Amazon Advertising, responsible for the products, science, and engineering of Brand Advertising and Shopping Experiences programs. When you shop on Amazon, you will see and use the experiences his team creates. More: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcopeland/
Pat and I have a great conversation about his career over the years and his reflections on team building, the vulnerability of leadership, and mull over how the working world is changing.
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