Scaling Your Leadership with Your Company: Case Study from Prezi

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Jose Roca, VP of Product and Engineering at Prezi. He tells his story about going from shy kid to great engineering leader, building and scaling Prezi's platform team, overcoming internal resistance on different levels, and much more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Getting into leadership at Prezi
• Scaling yourself with your company
• Finding mentors and mentoring others
• Overcoming internal resistance
• Key leadership skills
• Balancing the dual role of VP of Product and Enginering
• Scaling in and out of the office

Excerpt from the interview:

"My most controversial move was adding the first full-time product manager to an infrastructure team. The resistance mostly came from the engineers. They didn’t understand what the product manager was going to do, or they didn't think they needed that type of help.

I explained everything step by step. We went through everyone’s roles and responsibilities, but the infrastructure engineers have been working without product help for so long, I couldn’t convince them it was going to be helpful. On the other side, I worked closely with the first product manager to make sure he fit into the team, and in time, the engineers started seeing the value of his work.

Today, our platform teams always work with product managers and they like it, because they understand what tasks they take off the table, so the engineers can focus more on writing code. Some of the platform engineers enjoy doing interviews with product engineers, but most of them are relieved that the product managers take care of it."

Click here to read the full interview!