Navigating Engineering Leadership and Strategic Decision-Making

Emily Nakashima, VPE at Honeycomb, shares her experience about the hard choices an engineering leader has to make about how to structure — and sometimes restructure — their engineering org.

Emily and Rebecca talk cross-team collaboration, emphasizing eng as an equal partner to other functions, and mistakes that seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/emily-nakashima-honeycomb/

Timestamps (0:00) Introductions (0:49) Emily’s journey to Honeycomb (4:45) Observability vs. Monitoring (7:55) About being VPE at Honeycomb (10:13) What makes Honeycomb unique (15:50) About Honeycomb’s structuring strategy (19:20) Cross-team collaboration (23:57) Examples of cross-team collaboration (26:20) About ownership challenges (29:01) Setting goals (33:41) Hiring software engineers (38:26) Pros and cons of ‘culture fit’ (42:35) Emily’s hot take on tech

Follow Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eanakashima/

Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/

Links and mentions • Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/