Leaders Unscripted

Conversations with leaders about the challenges they’ve faced and what they’ve learned.

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23: Google’s Madleina Scheidegger on Leading a Team of Internal & Open Source Software Engineers

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There are few challenges like leading a varied range of software engineers, and few places more prestigious than Google at which to do so.

18 years strong into her tenure at Google, Madleina Scheidegger is a Software Engineering Manager whose lessons on leading software teams is absolutely golden.

From staying flexible and balancing internal vs external stakeholders, to building partnerships and setting your North Star, this episode of Leaders Unscripted is a masterclass in leadership longevity.

This Episode Covers:

  • Madleina’s freedom to move around within Google
  • The importance of building partnerships with your team, rather than giving orders
  • Using a North Star to inform smaller decisions
  • Management vs leadership
  • The invaluable ability to be flexible

Episode Highlights:

“If I give folks the skills to do something, I have much more long term success than if it just happens - like ‘Yeah, you wrote the paper I wanted you to do, but did you believe what you wrote?’” - 9:40 - Madleina Scheidegger
“At the end of the day, developers are developers. A lot of times the challenges that you have are the same no matter what you're surrounded with.” - 16:20 - Madleina Scheidegger
“North Star vision is a really useful concept in setting our main priorities and what we do, in order to inform what we do. Then it comes together in some ways.” - 21:45 - Madleina Scheidegger
“We confuse management vs leadership. Management is about getting the work done, but leadership is about, especially when you're talking about up and across, how am I working inside the organizational structure? How do I know what I can do best? How can I bring other people to do what they do best uniquely?” - 26:00 - Suzan Bond
“I'll give credit to my team for doing most of this work, in the sense that they’d just been doing it for a while and continued to do it for a while. So it's been more keeping them on the rails. I would say the number one thing is you need to have accountability and responsibility.” - 28:45 - Madleina Scheidegger
“I think one of the biggest keys is being flexible. There is no one answer for any one situation and the most important thing is to be able to not be preset with the path before you know whether or not it's the right path.” - 36:10 - Madleina Scheidegger

Links & References:

Constellary: https://www.constellaryhq.com/

Suzan Bond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanbond/

Madleina Scheidegger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madleina-s/

Google: https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/

Google careers: https://careers.google.com/