manager.flow Emily Tsitrian

Vaz is an engineering manager for the Pages product at LinkedIn, where he helps organizations establish their presence and connect with professionals at a global scale. In this episode, we discuss Vaz's journey as a software engineer into leadership positions, and I get a great new perspective on performance management of individuals.

 Vaz has over 15 years of experience as an engineering manager in places like Stripe, Google and his own company. In his ten years at Google, Vaz held many externally facing engineering roles, both as an individual contributor and manager for different teams across the Americas region both in their Ads business and at Google Cloud.
Prior to Google he was the co-founder and CTO of a company that develops software and provides infrastructure for financial institutions and security agencies.
Since 2013 he has been based out of the San Francisco Bay area after relocating from Mexico where he is originally from. Outside of work he enjoys playing with his 4yr old son, biking,  watching movies with his wife and consuming any post-apocalyptic media that is produced. 
He holds a Computer Science degree from U.N.A.M. where he also helped others get theirs working there as a Professor and Developer. 


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Another episode where I speak with a fellow author! Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You - a practical guide for navigating one's career that is packed with real-life skills they don't teach in college. 

Educated at MIT, Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia. He’s developed new software languages, online marketplaces, new authentication systems, and tracked criminals and terrorists on the dark web. Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s “Career Success Accelerator”, where he’s taught for twenty years. Mark also serves on the boards of non-profits Techie Youth and Plant a Million Corals.

Mark and I have a great conversation about what inspired him to write this book and some of the career development advice he has for aspiring and new managers - and some lessons he learned the hard way so you don't have to!


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As the Vice President of Data Management at Castlight Health, Lauren Bui leads a diverse and dynamic team that delivers insights and modernization to 20+ million patient datasets through Castlight's suite of applications. That in and of itself is impressive feat, and in this episode of manager.flow, Lauren discusses her journey and growth into the highest levels of technical leadership over a several-decade period. 

Notably, in 2018 she was presented the Dallas Business Journal - Women in Technology Leadership award, served as the 2019 keynote speaker at the Health Innovations Summit and has served on the MIT CISR committee.  Lauren is also published in Health Tech and Digital Health and also the HCI Digital Health magazines. 

Lauren and I also discuss some shared experiences in being children of immigrants as her family escaped from Vietnam during the conflicts in the 20th century, and how these identities interplay and affect leadership styles. She's got a fascinating story and an important perspective on people-management and identity.
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Does your daily work involve a lot of time on Slack?  If you're anything like me, it can sometimes feel like we live and die by Slack messages - and especially in the modern, remote-first workplace, it's become a critical part of how we communicate and collaborate at work. 

This week, I have a conversation with one of the former sales leaders at Slack who grew the mid-market team for a portion of the Americas, and hear about his journey to management by initiating a new division within the overall department. Prior to coming up as a leader at Slack, he was also an early member of the sales team at Dropbox,  where he was the founding account executive of a global media vertical, and, before that, worked in finance at Northern Trust and at UBS. 

Today, Ryan leads portion of the sales team at Stripe that focuses on enterprise customers. We actually work together frequently, so it was fun to have a conversation about management outside of the daily grind of our current roles. Ryan tells me a great story about his first "really bad day" as a people-leader and what he learned from it. There's a great lesson in there for all of us, so please tune in and enjoy!
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In this week's episode, I chat with a sales leader at BetterUp, a platform for coaching teams and people - very needed in today's uncertain world. A few weeks ago, one of Matt's posts on LinkedIn went viral and caught my eye - it was a raw, candid reflection of his growth as a leader and as a human over the past decade or so, and so I asked him to share more about his journey, the highlights and the lowlights - and all the lessons he's gleaned from both.

Matt Kennedy's career spans a few years, as he's worked as a SaaS GTM leader with over a decade of experience in hyper growth SaaS startups. During this time, Matt has made all the mistakes and cherishes those as his biggest areas for growth and reflection. He has found a lot of passion with improving the human condition in the workplace, and has developed a belief that the best way to run businesses is to take care of your people. Matt believes the future of successful business lies in knowing how to help your people thrive, and has made it his mission to bring this concept to the masses. 
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Emily Sander has an impressive rap sheet. Among her achievements: being on the testing team for the first Kindle device, working on a 6-person startup team, building a global client management team from scratch, serving as a Chief of Staff for a CEO, and most notably (in my book - no pun intended!), an author.

In our conversation today - she shares her own career story and what she learned the hard way as she was suddenly thrust into a management position with zero training, and had to get scrappy, adjust her perfectionist tendencies, and figure out a way to uplevel, fast.
Emily now has a leadership coaching practice and serves clients around the world and at various stages of their growth: from seasoned executives to first-time managers, and motivated individual contributors who are ready to level up. 

Emily's book is called Hacking Executive Leadership and helps new leaders execute from a place of confidence and humility. You can pick up your copy on Amazon or wherever books are sold. 

Learn more about Emily's coaching practice at https://www.nextlevel.coach/
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