Decoding Leadership

Sep 02, 2026 — George Sudarkoff is an experienced engineering leader who has made a consulting business out of coaching leaders with ADHD. We had a fascinating discussion relevant for leaders of all types: those who are neurodiverse, and those who work with them. We...

Jul 29, 2026 — Damon and I worked together a few years ago, and he conducted a fascinating practice called experience mapping. He goes over the practice and why it can make such a big difference in how a company coordinates its activities to offer exceptional...

Jul 08, 2026 — Ankit Jain is CEO of Aviator, and veteran of many companies. He's active in the developer experience space and maintains several online communities. He's in the middle of the conversation about where software is heading, and building some of the...

Jun 24, 2026 — Jason is a veteran of the technical advocacy and developer advocacy space. I thought it would be useful for people to better understand these roles. He shares how advocacy roles have shifted over the years, where in the organization they belong, and...

Jun 10, 2026 — Rebecca Hinds, Ph.D. is a world expert on meetings. She's released a new book on the topic (Your Best Meeting Ever), packed with ideas for how to improve the way your organization focuses, communicates, and works together. We discussed incentives,...

Apr 15, 2026 — Todd Etchieson and I were counterparts at New Relic. Of all the people I've worked with, he is one of the best at getting people radically aligned. This is often a huge challenge for product leaders -- the CEO and product leader alignment is notorious...

Mar 04, 2026 — Seth Engelhard has worked at some of the more interesting companies in the world: GitLab, Netlify, New Relic, and now Observable. He goes into a lot of detail about what practices he learned from these companies, and what the transition to being the...

Jan 14, 2026 — 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...

Nov 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!

Oct 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...