Leman Tech Leadership Podcast

▶︎ #194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka @Open MercatoIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Piotr Karwatka, Co-Founder of Open Mercato, a 100% AI-engineered open-source framework for building enterprise CRM and ERP applications. Piotr has spent 26 years in technology, starting with freeware desktop software he built with his brother Tomasz as teenagers. Together they grew Divante from a two-person company to over 300 people before a successful exit, co-created Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront), which raised the larg...

▶︎ #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a phrase most tech leaders have grown allergic to: psychological safety. She names the pattern first, because it’s the one that starts almost every mentoring conversation on this subject: a leader declares: "Come to me with mistakes, come to me with bad news," everyone nods, and six months later that same leader is blindsided by a problem the team saw coming for weeks and never mentioned...

▶︎ #192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @LejdiSapiens / @InceptiIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Paulina Kotowska, a transformation specialist, accredited EMCC coach and mentor, and Co-Founder of Incepti, a business agility consultancy she runs alongside her own personal brand LejdiSapiens. With nearly 30 years of professional experience spanning pharma, telecom, fintech, and tech, Paulina has led teams from operations to technology, most recently managing over 100 people, before stepping out of corporate life to work with startups and orga...

▶︎ #191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving UpIn this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska opens the final quarter of the year with a subject she's lived through personally and professionally, and hears from leaders and founders on a near-daily basis: giving up.Alex names the pattern she keeps running into in conversation after conversation: people who feel like failures, like imposters, like they simply can't stick to a habit or deliver what they promised themselves. She's honest that she's lived both sides of it...

▶︎ #190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI: Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w/ Ashutosh Garg (Co-Founder & CEO, @Eightfold AI & @Viven, ex-@Google, ex-@IBM)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Ashutosh Garg: Co-Founder and CEO of Eightfold AI and Viven, a third-time founder (after Bloomreach and Eightfold) who spent his early career as a research scientist at IBM and Google before building a career predicting where technology is headed next. Recording the conversation in the middle of 2026, Ashutosh reflects on three decades inside machine lear...

▶︎ #189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a question more leaders are quietly wrestling with: how do you lead engineers who don't want your career path?The episode opens with a story from one of Alex's mentees, a director who built a strong promotion case for one of her best engineers, only to have him turn it down. Not for money, not for timing, but because he didn't want more people depending on him. Alex names this...

▶︎ #188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś (Founder @Relayn) In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Aleksandra Łoś. Her path runs from management consulting in Paris and London, through a string of ventures (a sports-matching app, a startup renting luxury assets for cryptocurrency, rebuilding the original Bitcoin whitepaper for the Bitcoin Association, and TrueMe, an attempt to merge AI with personal development) to her current company, Relayn, where she and her Co-founder are building AI agents on a determin...

▶︎ #187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't PracticeIn this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a conversation she's had for years, in corporate hallways, mentoring sessions, and now with leaders across the globe: being always on.The episode opens with a moment from one of Alex's own mentoring sessions: a VP of Engineering spent forty minutes describing the ground rules he'd built to protect his team's focus time, then answered a Slack message at nine at night mid-session. Alex names the gap directly: it's not what...

▶︎ #186 | Imposter Syndrome, the Funding Gap, and Building the STEMinist Summit w/ AJ Lauer (Founder @Thriving Ibis Leadership Solutions) {Part 2}In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex reunites with Dr. AJ Lauer, founder of Thriving Ibis Leadership Solutions and author of "My Monster Mungo: A Story About Imposter Syndrome," for part two of their conversation. Since they last spoke, AJ broke her ankle, spent two months out of commission, and used the forced pause to realign her business around the work she cares about most: coaching and imposter syndrome.What makes this conv...

▶︎ #185 | The Loneliness of the Leader: Who Do You Actually Talk To Now?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska addresses a subject she's lived through herself and hears constantly in mentoring conversations: the loneliness of the leader.Alex opens with a story from a mentoring session: a leader who realized she hadn't had an honest, unfiltered work conversation in months, not because of a rough patch, but because everyone below her filters what they say, and everyone at her level feels like competition. Alex names this as a struc...

▶︎ #184 | Signal vs. Noise: How to Lead with Simplicity, Vulnerability, and Radical Clarity w/ Keith Zubchevich (@ex-Cisco, @Conviva)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Keith Zubchevich, CEO of Conviva, the company that invented video quality measurement and helped launch 12 of the 15 largest streaming apps in the world. Keith brings 35 years in technology to the conversation, having started as a market analyst and built a career defined by one constant thread: joining companies that solve real problems and leaving the rest alone.The episode opens on the concept of simp...

▶︎ #183 | Return to Office Isn't a Policy Problem. It's a Values Conflict You're Being Asked to Enforce.In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska goes deep on a subject she's been asked about constantly: how to lead your team through a change, like a return-to-office mandate, especially when you're not fully on board with it yourself.The spark for the episode was a question from a manager during a change management workshop: "How do I communicate this with honesty when I don't agree with the decision?" Alex is ca...

▶︎ #182 | Clear Is Kind: Why Most Leaders Avoid the Conversations That Actually Matter w/ Peter Murphy @Pocket PrepIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Peter Murphy, CEO and Co-Founder of Pocket Prep, a company built to help people pass notoriously difficult certification exams. Peter's path started in aerospace manufacturing at Lockheed Martin, where he was handed leadership responsibility in his first week on the job with zero preparation for it. After failing a critical operations certification exam by a single point, twice, he turned that frustration into the idea for Pock...

▶︎ #181 | I Don't Have Answers (and My Team Needs Them Anyway)In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a subject listeners have been asking her about for years: what to actually say and do when your team needs answers, and you don't have them.Reorganizations, AI-driven restructuring, rolling layoffs, hiring freezes that appear and disappear without warning (change has become constant, not a rare crisis). Alex names the two instinctive but costly patterns leaders fall into under this pressure: manufactured certainty ("everything's fine"), which quietly destroys trust...

▶︎ #180 | Ditch the Shock Collar: Why Punishment-Based Leadership Fails (and What Works Instead) w/ Craig Taylor @CyberhootIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Craig Taylor, Co-Founder of Cyberhoot, a learning management platform built at the intersection of psychology, education, and cybersecurity. With a psychology degree and over 30 years in the industry, including two decades working with Fortune 500 companies, Craig made a pivotal career shift 12 years ago after being let go from a major corporate role. That turning point led him to co-found Cyberhoot, where he applies behavioral science to a prob...

▶︎ #179 | My Team Uses AI to Do the Work. How Do I Know If They're Actually Good at Their Job?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska unpacks a question that's been sitting with her since a mentoring conversation a few weeks ago: if a piece of work looks correct, clean, and well structured, how do you actually know whether the person who produced it understands it?The spark was a real story: a leader approved a pull request from one of her strongest engineers. It broke in pr...

▶︎ #178 | Female Founders, Fear of Success, and the Leadership Leap Nobody Prepares You For w/ Nita Laad (@ex-Cisco, @ex-HP, @Nexia AI)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Nita Laad: Founder and CEO of Nexia AI, a Silicon Valley startup building an AI-native platform for product management teams. Nita brings a rare arc to this conversation - eight years writing code, then a full-stack leadership career spanning engineering, product, and go-to-market at Cisco and Hewlett Packard, and finally the leap into founding. She is also a 2025 Silicon Valley Business Journal Woman of Influence - an...

▶︎ #177 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Push Back on My Manager's Unrealistic Deadline or Scope?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series with two closely linked questions: "How do I push back on my manager's unrealistic deadline or scope?" and "Did I actually agree to this, or did I just not object?"On pushing back, Alex reframes the entire conversation: it isn't conflict, it's renegotiating a contract that was never properly set in the first place. Her own approach is calm and p...

▶︎ #176 | From PhD to Director: What Academia Never Teaches You About Leading People w/ Quentin Reul (Director AI Strategy and Solutions at expert.ai)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Quentin Reul: Director AI Strategy and Solutions at expert.ai, a Belgian-born computer scientist whose one-year English adventure in the UK quietly turned into a decade - a PhD in symbolic AI, a front-row seat to the academic-to-enterprise transition, and eventually a leadership path built through teams of data scientists, software engineers, knowledge engineers, and QA specialists spread across continents.The...

▶︎ #175 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Why Does the Same Feedback Land for One Person and Wreck Another?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series by tackling two questions that go hand in hand: "Why does the same piece of feedback land fine with one person and wreck another?" and "Is it normal to dread one-on-ones with certain people?"Alex's answer centers on communication intelligence, or CQ - the core of her CQ Leadership Method, built tightly to the Process Communication Model. Feedback that doesn...