PriorityZero: A LeadDev Engineering Leadership Podcast (LeadDev)

Welcome to PriorityZero, an engineering leadership podcast from LeadDev. I'm your host, Scott Carey, the editor in chief at LeadDev. I've been covering the software business for the best part of a decade, and I love to hear how engineering leaders are solving big people and technical problems.

Subscribe to this podcast to hear how the best software engineering leaders in the business made their start in the industry, how they think about leadership, and their biggest priority right now.

In this first season you will hear from:

• Katerina Iliakopoulou, Senior ML engineer at Meta
• Nick Means, VP of Engineering at MedScout
• Dan Blundell, Engineering Director at Gymshark
• Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI
• Annie Vella, Distinguished Engineer at Westpac
• Alicia Collymore, Engineering Manager at Incident.io
• Rafe Colburn, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Depop
• Gary Stevens, Director of Engineering at Trainline
• Matt Boyle, Engineering Manager, Cloudflare

In this episode, Scott Carey sat down with Nick Means, VP of Engineering at MedScout, ahead of his ⁠talk at LeadDev London 2024 about the history of the Barbican estate⁠. We talked about the value of 1:1 meetings, storytelling as a leadership tool, spotting people's superpowers, struggling with bureaucracy, and how to build an AI team. "Software engineering is sort of like a character-building video game. You've got all of these people on your group that's traversing through this environment and everybody's got different skill alignments." 01:00 The importance of 1:1 meetings and storytelling in leadership 05:30 Building a culture of autonomy and leveraging individual superpowers 11:30 The challenges of working in a larger organization (GitHub 👀) 20:00 Building an AI team and verifying outputs

Nick's recommendation: ⁠Perplexity AI

Annie Vella, a distinguished engineer at Westpac New Zealand, joins the podcast to talk about her incredibly varied career journey, repeatedly ending up working alongside her husband, and riding the manager to individual contributor pendulum.

08:00 Working in Different Domains and Embracing Change

20:00 Transitioning into Management Roles

25:00 The Value of Embracing Change and New Opportunities

35:30 Transitioning to Engineering Manager Roles

46:00 The Impact of AI Tools on Software Engineers

Katerina Iliakopoulou, a senior machine learning engineer at Meta, joins the show to talk about leaving her dream job at the New York Times, the importance of deep domain knowledge as an engineer, and what’s around the corner in machine learning.

02:10 Why domain knowledge is vital for engineers

04:45 Leaving the New York Times for Meta

08:45 Choosing the IC track and what makes a great manager

14:44 The art of prioritization and building impactful solutions

18:00 PriorityZero: Scaling ML models for Facebook Reels

34:24 The future of recommendation systems

Katerina's recommendation: Chip War by Chris Miller