As VP of Engineering here at Abnormal Security, I’ve had numerous conversations with our team, venture capitalists, and external engineering leaders about the challenges of building and leading engineering teams. Building applied machine learning products at scale requires solving a wide range of challenges—hiring great engineers, getting customer feedback, building and iterating on machine learning data pipelines… the list goes on and on.

I’ve had the privilege to be part of engineering leadership teams at established mature companies like Twitter, as well as startups like Abnormal Security that are rapidly evolving and adapting. Strategies and tactics that are effective at one type of company frequently don’t work or apply to others. And after mutually sharing stories and tips of what’s working for startup engineering teams, we realized that many of these conversations could be interesting to the broader community. Now we've created a podcast series to share those stories.

In Abnormal Engineering Stories, we will interview engineering leaders from a variety of companies to share our stories, perspectives, and strategies on how we operate our teams, products, and engineering systems. We’ll focus on how we’ve translated engineering principles and ideas into pragmatic solutions and processes at our companies.

We hope you’ll enjoy the series of conversations! Please do subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

To launch the series first up is a conversation with Dobromir Montauk, Head of Engineering at Doxel. As an ex-Twitter engineering leader, moving to a leadership role at an early-stage startup required an adaptation of leadership principles and strategies.

I hope you enjoy hearing Dobromir and I expand on some of our lessons joining a startup, including:

• How to focus and identify the real work to be done
• What it means to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
• How to implement a customer-driven product discovery and product development lifecycle.
• And most importantly, how to learn from your mistakes 

We'd love for you to come hear us share about some of the mistakes we’ve made along the way.