Where we break down the elements of humane and effective leadership.
"This is hands down one of the best podcast discussions on incident
management, coordination, and reliability I've seen in ages!
Fantastic conversation between Beth Adele Long and Jade Rubick on the
Decoding Leadership podcast. Definitely worth a listen for anyone
working in this space."
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.
31. Diana Larsen on retros, team liftoffs, agile fluency, and more
November 25, 2025
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!
30. Elaine May on making change and the dangers of SCRUM
October 29, 2025
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.
29. Charity Majors on building organizations you can believe in
September 24, 2025
Charity 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!
28. Lena Reinhard on making space for leadership that matters
August 18, 2025
Lena 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.
I 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!
Reflected 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 have 00:17 Introduction 01:26 What is reflecting power, and what does it look like? 03:14 They need to be aligned and view it as important 04:04 Can be done with peers, other leaders, and in a networked way 05:14 Don't overuse this tool 05:32 Delegating up, delegating laterally 07:24 Hierarchical thinking can limit us 08:18 Creating space for others to use your power 09:28 Conclusion
I 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 topic of cliff jumping versus ladder climbing with your career. It's a fascinating conversation full of insights for anyone interested in leadership and growth in fast-paced environments.
In 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 must-watch for anyone interested in organizational observability and leadership experiments.
23. Jim Gochee on banning "prioritization", and getting functions to work together
April 9, 2025
In 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 career progression, and the value of coaching and mentorship.
22. James Shore: what if we scaled our teams to unreasonable sizes?
March 26, 2025
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.
21. Jayanthan Bhattathiripad on introducing yourself, XP and Scrum, and waste
March 12, 2025
In 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 is harder (and better) than Scrum. * The impact of lean principles on software development and tackling waste. * The influence of cultural differences on communication and leadership.
20. Margaret Le on technical leadership and building strong engineering cultures
February 26, 2025
Join 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.
19. Jade Rubick: using task forces to solve complex leadership challenges
January 29, 2025
In 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.
18. Brent Miller on team self-selection and project Upscale
January 15, 2025
Upscale 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 of. The episode covers a lot of topics in organizational design, team autonomy, and change management.
17. Katie Wilde on the challenging step to director, and the perverse incentives of reliability
December 4, 2024
Katie 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.
We 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.
15. Ben Gahlsdorf on partnering with recruiting, advice for job seekers, and a recommendation mindset
October 9, 2024
Ben 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!
14. Alex Kroman on building strong leadership teams, product taste, and neurodivergent mode
September 25, 2024
I 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!
What 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.
