Managers Club

Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers

Home Archives for Interviews

Interview with Raylene Yung, Head of Payments at Stripe

Leave a Comment

Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Head of Payments, Stripe

What’s your background and how did you get into management?

I first joined Facebook after completing my MS at Stanford in theoretical computer science and AI. I started off as an individual contributor, but transitioned into engineering management after realizing how much I enjoyed leading projects and helping other engineers develop. I got some early exposure to management even as an IC—I was a tech lead on News Feed where I worked on a rewrite of the product and internal API infrastructure,

Interview with Benjamin Encz, Director of Engineering at PlanGrid

Leave a Comment

Location: San Francisco
Current Role: Director of Engineering at PlanGrid

What’s your background and how did you get into management?

I grew up in Germany and moved to the Bay Area 4.5 years ago to join a small startup. I gathered a fair amount of technical and project leadership experience in my first two jobs, but I didn’t get into people management until I joined PlanGrid at the end of 2015.

Interview with Natasha Vinnik, Senior Engineering Manager at Google

1 Comment

Location: Mountain View, CA.
Current role: Senior Engineering Manager at Google for Places API. I am building a team that’s focusing on providing Places data to enterprises and 3rd party developers.

What is your background and how did you get into management?

I moved to America from Russia after high school in 1999. It was the middle of the tech boom and I quickly joined a startup company, Live365, that focused on allowing anyone to create music stations.

Interview with Isabel Nyo, Engineering Manager, Technologist, Writer, Speaker, Mother

Leave a Comment

Current role: Development Manager and Head of Front-end Engineering at eBay
Location: Sydney, Australia

What’s your background and how did you get into management?

I graduated with a bachelor and master of Computer Science from the University of Wollongong in Australia and worked in hands-on technical roles before becoming a manager.

My journey to management is not unusual but not one that I had anticipated or planned for.

IF I ONLY KNEW… Never lower your bar in hiring! Never do that!

Leave a Comment

At one of my previous companies, I lowered my bar and made a bad hiring.  We were looking for a new team member and spent months interviewing. After some consideration, we decided to extend an offer to a candidate who was “almost there”.  I agreed with our panel that we could coach the person in the area they were not very strong. This turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes.

My team and I then had to spend the next 6 months to help the individual but ended up letting them go as they failed the improvement plan. 

Interview with Anthony Mazzarella, Director, Core Engineering at BAMTECH Media

Leave a Comment

Location: Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Current Role: Director, Core Engineering, BAMTECH Media

What’s your background and how did you get into management?

I spent the first decade of my career chasing global scale challenges related to databases and distributed systems. In every position, my curiosity kept me deeply engaged with operations and infrastructure. Which lead me to BAMTECH Media – then MLB Advanced Media – as a software engineer helping a company achieve the ever-coveted “DevOps transformation.”

Interview with Mickey Mantle, Co-author:  Managing the Unmanageable and Founder/CEO Wanderful interactive storybooks

Leave a Comment

Where are you located?

Napa Valley, California. I recently moved to Napa after decades in Marin, just north of San Francisco.  My company has a small office in Las Vegas, but I work primarily out of my home office in Napa and travel to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, etc. as necessary for conferences, meetings, and consulting engagements.

What is your current role?

Founder and CEO of Wanderful, Inc. – we publish interactive storybook Apps for iOS and Android tablets and phones,

Interview with Dave Stachowiak, Host, Coaching for Leaders podcast

Leave a Comment

Current role: Host, Coaching for Leaders podcast
Location: Orange County, California

What is your background and how did you get into management?

I had the privilege of managing lots of part-time staff in college (poorly, I might add). I discovered early on that while I did not naturally manage well, I had a desire to get better in order to help others grow.

In my first full-time job,

Interview with Chuck Groom, Director of Engineering at VTS

Leave a Comment

Location: New York City
Current role: Director of Engineering at VTS

What’s your background and how did you get into management?

I come from a software engineering background, but I’ve always had a passion for product and business. I’m a serial entrepreneur: I co-founded BillMonk in 2005 (tracks informal debt between friends, like roommates splitting bills; company was sold to Obopay) and the I co-founded Precision Polling in 2010 (self-serve IVR phone surveys;

Connect with me