Community Q&A #1: Empathy is a skill that can be learned (with Vojtech Vondra)

In the fourth episode of Season 2, we sit down with Claudiu Andrei, Site Tech Lead at Productboard’s San Francisco office, who’s in the process of building up two new teams to better serve our enterprise customers. We talk to Claudiu about what he considers when hiring staff and senior staff engineers, and what makes a candidate CV stand out. He walks us through the key steps of our interview process and discusses how to make an early impact when joining a company as a staff engineer. 

Claudiu, whose career path included stints at Meta and DocuSign as well as founding a couple of his own companies, also offers some sound advice for engineers looking to move up the ladder. We also explore how candidates can assess whether they are more of a staff or senior staff fit, and what it means to be a product engineer these days.   

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

Our third episode of Season 2 was a special live recording from this year’s WebExpo conference in Prague, where we discussed what it takes to become a Staff+ Engineer. We sat down with a trio of experts in the field – Alice Rum, Staff Software Engineer at SentinelOne, Dmitry Belyaev, Principal Frontend Engineer at Booking.com, and Tomáš Růžička, Staff Engineer at Productboard – to get their insights and advice on how to advance in today’s fast-paced tech environment.

The talk is geared toward those looking to take a step up the career ladder or simply to better understand the day-to-day of Staff+ Engineers. The panelists explain the skills and traits needed to be successful in this role, including technical expertise, leadership, and communication skills, as well as what kinds of projects will help you land that golden promotion. In addition to sharing their own career journeys, Alice, Dmitry, and Tomáš also highlight the books, podcasts and social media they turn to for the latest tech and engineering leadership trends.

After listening to the episode, be sure to read the reading and listening recommendations from our guests:

Readings:

• Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• Boring Tech Club
• The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
• The Effective Manager

Podcasts:

• Soft skills engineering
• Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
• Software engineering daily

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In our second episode of Season 2, we chatted with Hussien Khayoon, Staff Software Developer at Shopify, about the undisputable importance and value of mentoring – regardless if you’re just starting out or already at the top of your game. 

He discusses how his mentoring roles at Bootcamp, Superpeer, and ADPList gave him a different perspective on teaching people and leading teams. His participation in these groups, Hussien explains, is his way of giving back and reminding himself that he still has much to learn. After more than a decade in tech, Hussien says he still often turns to his peers when tackling new challenges and explains how regular one-to-ones can truly help redefine your career goals.   

In addition to his mentoring commitments, Hussien shares his job advice and musings in a weekly newsletter geared toward junior developers and actively posts videos on LinkedIn. His ADPList profile can be found here.   

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In our first episode of Season 2, we chatted with Ralph McTeggart, Principal Engineer at Productboard, about his decision to become a Tech Lead after wearing a manager hat for several years.
He examines the benefits as well as the challenges he faced upon returning closer to the technical side, sharing how the skills he gained from serving in both positions are now helping him in his day-to-day at Productboard.
Ralph discusses his approach to architecture and documentation, the importance of establishing strong networks both in and outside the office, why feedback matters, the reality of imposter syndrome, and how engineers can advance their careers without crossing into the management track.

After listening to the podcast, be sure to check out Ralph’s reading recommendations:

• The Elements of Style
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Crafting Killer Sentences
• Writing Well For Work and Pleasure: The New Writer's Guide to Producing Great Content
• Speak So Your Audience Will Listen: 7 Steps to Confident and Authentic Public Speaking
• Gravitas: Communicate with Confidence, Influence and Authority
• Effective Java
• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems (Martin also has great content on
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@kleppmann)
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track (and site https://staffeng.com/) 

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In the seventh episode of our podcast series, Joshua welcomes Ramona Shaw, his BetterManager leadership coach. Ramona works with both emerging and experienced technology leaders to help them achieve their fullest leadership potential. 

In this inspiring episode, Joshua and Ramona explore the function and value of coaching, revealing actual examples of challenges they worked on together as catalysts for Joshua’s growth.

Ramona, who spent years working in a corporate setting before transitioning to full-time coaching, shares the patterns she has identified that lead to success for leaders in all fields. She highlights and explains the need to cultivate open-mindedness, to prioritize long-term growth over short-term gains, and to take regular time to self-reflect.  She further explores the most important thing for leaders: to use those methods to tune their leadership style to each new situation and challenge.

To learn more about Ramona and her work, visit www.ramonashaw.com, listen to her podcast The Manager Track, or find her on LinkedIn or Instagram.

To learn more about how BetterManager could help you become a stronger leader through an evidenced-based combination of Coaching, Group Skills Training, Actionable Assessments, and E-Learning, visit www.bettermanager.us

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In the sixth episode of our podcast series, Joshua welcomed Timmy Ho, our first engineering hire in North America. An engineering manager in our Vancouver office, Timmy reflected on bootstrapping our new Canadian development center. The discussion touched on topics including product excellence, agile development, the importance of work-life balance, and how to build strong teams and culture. It also provided an intriguing glimpse into Productboard’s growth engineering and other exciting challenges in store for Productboard Canada in the coming months.   

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

For the fifth episode in our podcast series, Joshua welcomed a former colleague and old friend, Disha Al Baqui, Principal Engineering Manager at Hulu. Joshua and Disha met in 2014 when they worked as individual contributors for the same company. Today, both are tackling entirely different challenges as engineering leaders.

Besides catching up, the two discussed their paths to leadership, the importance of diversity in engineering, and how their leadership styles were shaped by the types of manager they didn’t want to be.

Interested in joining our growing team? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

For the fourth installment in our podcast series, Joshua welcomed Raz Shuty, Director of Engineering at Delivery Hero. This was an episode of firsts: the first non-productboard guest and the first episode recorded remotely. During a lively conversation, Josh and Raz discussed the challenges of leading during a crisis, the highs and lows of people management, and why you don’t have to be a manager to lead. 

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

In the third instalment of our Engineering Leadership podcast, Joshua welcomes Daniel Hejl, our CTO and co-founder. During an interesting discussion around facilitating employee growth, Daniel highlights the importance of curiosity, clear goals, and regular, honest conversations in guiding employees towards that lighthouse in the distance.

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!

What metrics do you use to track team performance? What challenges are there when scaling teams? And how do you maintain healthy relationships at work while having the difficult conversations that help people grow? In part 2 of the conversation, our Director of Engineering, Vojtech Vondra, answers these questions and more – all posed by the Prague engineering leadership community. Plus, Joshua makes someone laugh for the first time in the podcast’s brief history.

Interested in joining our growing team at Productboard? Well, we’re hiring across the board! Check out our careers page for the latest vacancies. We’d love to hear from you!