Leman Tech Leadership Podcast

▶︎ #174 | A-Players, Task Monkeys, and the AI Reckoning w/ Francis Brero (VP AI Strategy @HG Insights)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Francis Brero: VP of AI Strategy at HG Insights and Co-Founder of MadKudu, a French-born engineer who swapped the grandes ecoles of Paris for Silicon Valley and has spent 15 years building AI-powered systems for some of the world’s leading B2B revenue organizations. Francis brings a mathematician’s rigour and a founder’s scar tissue to every conversation about teams - and this one is no exception.What...

▶︎ #173 | Tech Leadership Q&A: How Do I Get My Team to Just Do Their Job Without Checking on Them Constantly?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska continues her Q&A series with one of the most common struggles tech leaders bring to her: "How do I get this person to do their job without checking on them constantly - and how do I trust that it will be done as well as I would do it myself?"Alex traces this straight back to contracting, specifically the contr...

▶︎ #172 | What Silicon Valley Taught a Tech Analyst About Marketing, Authority, and Never Burning Bridges w/ Mark Vena, @ex-Dell Technologies,  @SmartTech ResearchIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Mark Vena, CEO and Principal Analyst at SmartTech Research, a boutique technology research firm he founded after 25 years of senior marketing and leadership roles at companies including IBM, Dell, Compaq, Alienware, and Sling Media. For 18 of those years, Mark operated at the epicenter of innovation - seven minutes from the Apple campus in Silicon Valley - where he developed a rare ability to se...

▶︎ #171 | Tech Leadership Q&A: Am I Actually Good at This… or Did I Just Get Lucky?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, host Aleksandra Lemańska kicks off a new Q&A series, where she answers the questions tech leaders keep asking her in workshops, keynotes, and one-on-one conversations - the questions that often go unspoken. Today she tackles two that show up constantly with newer leaders: "Am I actually good at this leadership thing, or did I just get lucky?" and "Why do I miss writing code so much?"On the...

▶︎ #170 | From Startup Garage to Microsoft MVP: How Continuous Learning Builds Unbreakable Tech Leaders w/ Amit Chandak, @ex-Oracle, @KinerikaIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Amit Chandak, CTO and Data & AI Lead at Kinerika, a Microsoft Fabric Featured Partner operating at the forefront of cloud data engineering. Amit's career spans three distinct environments: a 10-year co-founder journey building a BI tool from a two-person apartment startup to a 50-person product company, senior engineering leadership at Oracle, and now heading data and AI strategy at a fast-scaling services organization. In 2022, he beca...

▶︎ #169 | I Wrote a Book: "From Code to People"!In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska makes an official announcement she has been building toward for over a decade: her first book, "From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For", is done. The premiere is July 30th, 2026 - and this episode is her way of celebrating it with the people who have been part of the journey.Alex is candid about what drove her to write it. After 10-plu...

▶︎ #168 | From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management, Strategic Simplicity, and the Networking Muscle You Never Built w/ Iryna Lambrianides @ClarityPoint ConsultingIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Iryna Lambrianides: fractional strategic advisor, COO, and Chief of Staff, and Founder of ClarityPoint Consulting. Iryna's career story is one of radical reinvention: arriving in the US from Ukraine with no network, taking a $7/hour restaurant job, and systematically building expertise across project management, change management, Lean Six Sigma, and organizational strategy until she was restructuring international organizations spanning 60 countries. She's been laid off twice, narr...

▶︎ #167 | Your Best Engineer Is Your Biggest Leadership Problem - Now What?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska addresses one of the most uncomfortable dilemmas tech leaders face over and over again: what to do when your technically brilliant engineer is also destroying the team around them.The problem is painfully familiar. Their output looks great on paper. Confronting or removing them feels risky - what if they quit? And yet every other person on the team is paying a daily cost for this person's behavior. Most leaders know it's...

▶︎ #166 | Staff Engineering in the Age of AI: How Engineering Teams, Roles, and Expectations Are Being Redefined w/ Jordan Cutler @PinterestIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Jordan Cutler: Staff Engineer at Pinterest, where he leads web platform initiatives supporting over 200 engineers. Jordan's career moved from junior to senior in just two years at Gusto, then through Qualified (recently acquired by Salesforce), and into the kind of cross-functional, multi-team leadership that defines the Staff Engineer role today: a role many leaders still don't fully understand.What makes this conversation stand out...

#165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them ForIn this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska takes on a transition that happens constantly in tech - and almost always without the support it actually requires: promoting your best engineer to team lead, tech lead, or principal engineer.The pattern is familiar. Six months after the promotion, the engineer is frustrated, the team is frustrated, and the person who was your most reliable individual contributor has become your most complicated leadership problem. They're still heads-down executing, ignoring everything else the new role requires...

▶︎ #164 | From Five Failed Products to 100-Person Company: Delegation, Detachment, and the Real Root of Burnout in Tech w/ Prashanth Tondapu  (ex-@McAfee, @Innostax Tech LLC)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Prashanth Tondapu: CEO of InnoStacks Tech LLC, a 100-person software services company with active R&D in LLM products. Prashanth's story is one many tech leaders will recognise all too painfully: a gifted developer who believed that passion for the craft was enough to build a business, went through five failed products before finding one that worked, and had to syste...

#163 | “I Know I Should Say No. So Why Can't I?”In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on one of the most persistent gaps between what tech leaders know and what they actually do: saying no.Almost every leader Alex works with already knows, intellectually, that they should say no more often. They've read about it. They've advised their own team to do it. And then a stakeholder drops something on their desk, a peer asks for support just outside their remit, or their manager adds one more...

▶︎ #162 | VP of Engineering on Leading Without Drowning: Neuroscience, Boundaries, and the Skills Tech Never Tells You to Build w/ Greg Jaworek (ex-Cisco, ex-ABB)In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Grzegorz (Greg) Jaworek - VP of Engineering with nearly 20 years of experience spanning software development, agile transformation, corporate organisations, and startups across Poland and internationally. Greg discovered early in his career that he was better at connecting people than connecting lines of code. That realisation became the foundation of an entire leadership philosophy built on self-awareness, systems thinking, and the scie...

#161 | “Nobody Prepared Me for How Lonely This Job Would Be.”In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska opens with a sentence she heard in a mentoring session: one that the person saying it had never said out loud before. "Nobody prepared me for how lonely this job would be." And she gives it the space it deserves.Leadership loneliness in tech is not social isolation in the conventional sense. It's something more specific and more corrosive: being the pressure plate between executives who want results and a team that...

▶︎ #160 | A Serial Founder’s Story: What It Really Takes to Build, Fail, and Scale in the AI Era w/ Łukasz Łażewski @LLInformaticsIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Łukasz Łażewski,  CEO of LLInformatics and one of the most experienced serial Founders in the Polish and European tech ecosystem. Łukasz's career reads like a masterclass in reinvention: from a software engineer in Dublin and Berlin, through a string of startups. A used cars marketplace, an early influencer marketing platform, and Zenloop, a customer insights SaaS that grew into a major B2B pl...

▶︎ #159 | “I Feel Like a Fraud - And I'm the One Running the Team.”In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska names something that a significant number of tech leaders carry in silence: the feeling that they're making it up as they go, that their success belongs to luck or timing, and that sooner or later, someone in the room will figure it out.That feeling is called the impostor phenomenon, and Alex is precise about what it is and what it isn't. It's not low self-esteem, and it's not a lac...

▶︎ #158 | From Teenage Entrepreneur to the CTO: Building Teams That Win in the AI Era w/ Ben Wilcox @ProArchIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Ben Wilcox: a CTO and CISO of ProArch, for a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually takes to lead technology teams in the age of AI. Ben's story is anything but conventional: he started monetising the internet as a 15-year-old, built and sold a web hosting business before most people his age had a bank account, and has spent the last 19 years growing from an individual contributor to h...

▶︎ #157 | Your Team Is Already Having the Hard Conversation. Just Without You.In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska addresses the conversation that most tech leaders know they need to have and keep finding reasons not to. Maybe it's about what AI means for certain roles. Maybe it's about team dynamics that quietly fractured in Q1. Maybe it's about the ambient anxiety sitting just under the surface of every standup: unspoken, unaddressed, and growing.Alex names the three real reasons leaders avoid difficult team conversations: fear of making things worse...

▶︎ #156 | Lead by Example or Lose the Best: What A-Players Actually Need From Their Leaders w/ Svante Horn @Scandinavian Data CentersJoin your host, Aleksandra Lemańska, for a refreshingly candid episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast as she sits down with Svante Horn, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Scandinavian Data Centers — a company on a mission to become the energy node, data node, and heat node of their communities, building green, high-performance data center infrastructure across the Nordics.In this episode, Svante brings a non-linear career story — from Morgan Stanley M&A to fixed income sa...

▶︎ #155 | The Burnout Nobody Talks About: What Happens When You, the Leader, Are Running on EmptyIn this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska turns the burnout conversation inward: toward the person who is most often the last to receive support, the last to admit they're struggling, and the first to keep showing up with a plan. The leaders themselves.Alex opens by naming what leader burnout actually looks like, and how it's almost the inverse of what you'd expect. Where a burned-out engineer goes quiet and withdraws, a burned-out leade...