Unleashing potential in your employees & strategies to grow leadership skills in your org w/ Natalie Glance #201

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Natalie Glance, Chief Engineering Officer @ Duolingo joins us for a conversation on unleashing potential in your employees! We discuss practices that have helped Duolingo create a meaningful path for hiring & developing engineers through their onboarding & internship programs. We also cover topics including scaling your eng org, upskilling recent grads / new hires, balancing meaningful work with measurable impact, communicating alignment within your org, formal & informal steps for building eng leadership capabilities, and essential skills for managers of all types.

ABOUT NATALIE GLANCE

Natalie is a lifelong learner and seasoned leader with extensive experience at startups and established companies. She’s currently the Chief Engineering Officer at Duolingo.

At Duolingo, Natalie ensures engineers can help set product direction and strategy. She’s championed a culture of extensive A/B testing, and is excited about the ways generative AI can both build new features and accelerate content creation for these features. She oversees many of the efforts dedicated to scaling Duolingo’s technology to new subjects, like Math and Music.

Natalie is passionate about mentorship and education. She co-founded the Int’l AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), which offers an annual Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award for a promising young independent researcher in the field of computational social science in the early stage of their career.

SHOW NOTES:

• Natalie’s eng leadership background & journey scaling Duolingo (2:41)
• Duolingo’s approach to eng leadership & passion for unleashing potential (5:42)
• Implementing a mentoring program to improve eng development / retention (6:42)
• How the mentoring process changes as an org scales (8:51)
• Duolingo’s onboarding process & tips for building an onboarding program (10:12)
• Ways Duolingo has crafted a successful internship program (12:43)
• Frameworks for intern hosts to collect meaningful projects for interns (15:38)
• Behind the Thrive intern program (HootCamp) for rising juniors (17:44)
• How Duolingo’s guiding principles drive Duolingo University (21:08)
• Strategies for upskilling new grads into strong technical contributors (22:13)
• Best practices for unlocking potential & contributing to people’s growth (25:40)
• Natalie’s approach to balancing meaningful work with measurable impact (26:44)
• Practices for creating alignment within your org (28:30)
• Duolingo’s thought process for role training & growing leaders (30:44)
• Breaking down the formal & informal steps for building leaders within the org (32:41)
• Essential skills for role managers to develop (34:22)
• Addressing challenges faced by managers of managers (36:47)
• Rapid fire questions (38:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership - Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy.”

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/