Co-founder of Brainhub, Matt describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur”. Throughout his career, Matt has developed several startups in Germany, wearing many hats- from a marketer to an IT Engineer and customer support specialist. As a host of the Better Tech Leadership podcast, Matt talks about growing successful businesses and the challenges of being a startup founder and investor.
In this episode, Matt interviews Stefano Grossi about strategies for effective R&D investment, leadership development, and achieving business outcomes through innovation and team growth. Stefano introduces the “R&D Pyramid of Needs,” an investment allocation tool, and discusses overcoming technical debt. He also shares his distaste for rigid processes in product teams, advocating for guidelines and frameworks that encourage collaboration and experimentation.
In this episode, Matt interviews Sebastiano Armeli, an engineering leader, about his experiences at various tech companies. They explore cultural differences, management frameworks, and lessons learned at Spotify, PayPal, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Upwork. Sebastiano also shares his insights on engineering management, OKRs, team leadership, remote work, and his personal management style.
In this episode, Matt interviews Diederik van Liere, CTO at Wealthsimple, about simplifying system architecture, data modeling, and leadership. Diederik shares his experiences with microservices versus monolithic codebases, advocating for fewer, more domain-aligned services. He also discusses anti-patterns in data products, emphasizing the importance of data modeling and long-lived, vertical data science teams.
In this episode, Matt interviews Geoffrey Teale about diversity in engineering, developer experience, and leadership. Geoffrey shares his experiences and insights on building diverse teams, fostering a positive developer experience, and making contrarian decisions. He also recommends books and resources that have been helpful to him as a leader in tech!