Developing Leaders on a Team with Jill Wetzler

How do you lead the leaders on your team? Today’s guest has been developing leaders for years, and she’s sharing her insights on this episode of Scaling Software Teams. Jill Wetzler is the Head of Engineering at Pilot. Before her current role, she scaled Lyft’s Infrastructure Engineering organization from a handful of people to over 100 infra engineers. She was also Lyft’s Director of Engineering Leadership Development. In this episode, we talk about the principles and tactics she’s used to develop leaders; from skip-level one-on-ones to developer advocacy. We also dive into the management issues that can hold under-represented individual contributors back and what we can do to fix them.
Wes’ Takeaways:
Skip-level one-on-ones can be incredibly useful for finding coaching areas for managers
Hire managers who think about management the same way you do–Stay in front of management hiring.
Use a charter to align teams on tasks, priorities, and customer needs.
Developer advocacy is critical for a developing team. (What engineers wish HR would be)
If under-represented groups are stuck, it’s likely a management issue.