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Velocity's Edge Podcast

Velocity's Edge Podcast

著者： EPSD Inc.
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 On the Velocity’s Edge podcast, we discuss how engineering organizations can move faster and not break things, while controlling their risks2025 EPSD, Inc マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 経済学
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  • S1E9 - Nick Selby on Factionalism

    S1E9 - Nick Selby on Factionalism
    2025/10/08
    When leadership is struggling with organizational dysfunction that stems from resource constraints, they tend to see teams in conflict: product versus engineering, sales versus operations, etc. They might assume the solution involves coaching, restructuring reporting lines, adjusting compensation models, or hiring more diplomacy-minded managers. But as EPSD’s Nicko Goncharoff and Nick Selby have learned through years of organizational interventions, the biggest threat to mid-stage technology companies isn’t functional disagreement. It’s the personal resentment that calcifies when strategic pivots in the business force zero-sum resource allocation.

    The difference between companies that navigate growth challenges successfully and those that fracture into warring factions isn’t primarily about having better processes or more mature leadership. It’s about recognizing when strategic disagreements have crossed into interpersonal territory—and having the courage to address the human conflict directly rather than pretending it’s purely about roadmap priorities or budget distribution. Because when resources become scarce, it’s political skill, not engineering merit, that determines how they are allocated.

    “The people who are the best at what they do are not necessarily the same people who are good at politicking to get the resources that they need,” Nick says. This creates resentment and discord between leaders, and while their teams might not know the details, they’re keenly aware of the power dynamics. They take sides. Pretty soon, you have factions and internecine warfare.

    Factionalism doesn’t announce itself through org chart battles. It emerges quietly, through maneuvering, betrayal, pocket vetoes, and uncommitted commitments; it is cemented by managers who say “yes” in meetings then don’t follow through. By the time leaders recognize the pattern, teams have stopped collaborating entirely—and the interpersonal damage compounds the business consequences.

    In the season one finale of the Velocity’s Edge podcast, Nick and Nicko explore how mid-life technology companies can slide into factionalism and, more important, how to pull them back from the brink. They tackle essential questions: How do you distinguish between healthy functional tension and destructive personal conflict? What are the ground rules that enable successful mediation when key leaders have stopped working together? How do you translate personal grievances into organizational imperatives that both parties can commit to solving?

    The conversation reveals a fundamental truth: the companies that survive growth challenges aren’t those with conflict-free cultures. They’re the ones willing to confront interpersonal breakdowns directly, establish clear rules and objective metrics for collaboration, and recognize that the most passionate disagreements often signal the deepest commitment to the mission.

    Nick Selby is the founder and Managing Partner of EPSD, with a career spanning cybersecurity, law enforcement, and technology leadership. He has held key executive roles at tech companies, and created the information security practice at 451 Research (now S&P Global Intelligence). He served as Director of Cyber Intelligence and Investigations at the NYPD, and as both a paid and reserve Texas police detective specializing in investigations of child sexual abuse material and online investigations. He serves on the board of directors of the National Child Protection Task Force, and the advisory board of Sightline Security.

    As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.
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    32 分
  • S1E8 - Dr. Pablo Breuer on CISO Leadership

    S1E8 - Dr. Pablo Breuer on CISO Leadership
    2025/10/01
    Many organizations hire CISOs expecting them to be security experts who can implement controls and prevent breaches. But as Dr. Pablo Breuer learned through 22 years in Navy cyber operations and leadership roles spanning NSA red teams to Fortune 50 financial firms, the fundamental challenge isn't technical — it's that most companies don't understand what they actually need from a CISO in the first place.

    "The difference between a manager and a leader is, a manager comes in every day, and they look at the to-do list," Pablo explains. "The leader is able to look out a little bit further, and really anticipate what the challenges are going to be, and communicate those not as technical challenges, but as business challenges."

    The most effective CISOs don't function as organizational brakes — they operate as racing brakes, enabling companies to go as fast as safely possible. But this requires more than security expertise. It demands translating engineering requirements into business language, converting CEO vision into actionable technical architecture, and understanding that the first letter in CISO is "C" — meaning chief executive, with all the strategic leadership responsibilities that entails.

    In this episode of Velocity's Edge, Pablo and host Nicko Goncharoff explore what separates security management from security leadership. They tackle essential questions: How do you build a security-minded organizational culture when the solutions are fundamentally cultural, not technical? What questions should CEOs ask when hiring their first CISO? Why do the best CISOs spend their first 90 days listening rather than implementing changes? How do you maintain political capital and avoid the common pitfalls that lead to rapid CISO turnover?

    The conversation reveals why successful security programs aren't built by the most technically sophisticated leaders — they're built by those who understand that their primary client is the business itself, and their job is enabling growth while reducing risk.

    Dr. Pablo Breuer is an expert in cybersecurity and information warfare, with leadership experience spanning the military, government, and private sector. He has held top roles at U.S. Special Operations Command (he served as the United States’ first Chief Information Security Officer for coalition forces in Afghanistan), the National Security Agency, and at U.S. Cyber Command. He co-founded the Cognitive Security Collaborative and co-authored the DISARM framework, used internationally to combat disinformation. Pablo is also a sought-after speaker and educator in cybersecurity strategy.

    As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.
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    18 分
  • S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records

    S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records
    2025/09/23
    When Peat Bakke sits down for breakfast with engineering leaders, the conversation inevitably turns to the same frustrating pattern: talented people leave, and with them goes critical context about why systems work the way they do. Not just the technical details—those live in the code—but the reasoning behind architectural choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives that were deliberately rejected.

    This isn't a staffing problem masquerading as a documentation problem. It's an organizational memory problem that compounds as companies grow. As Peat explains from 25 years of helping organizations through transitions and hypergrowth, "What you didn't decide to do—that's the organizational lore that gets lost when people move around."

    The solution isn't just writing more things down. Decision records only create value when they're accessible, digestible, and tied directly to the tools teams use every day. The most effective organizations treat decision context as infrastructure, not paperwork. They understand that the goal isn't comprehensive documentation—it's ensuring that when someone inevitably gets "called in when a company is going through hypergrowth" or when they need to "reduce expenditures in painful ways," the reasoning behind past choices is available to inform new ones.

    In this episode of Velocity's Edge, Peat and host Nick Selby explore how to build decision records that actually help teams move faster rather than creating bureaucratic overhead. They tackle essential questions: How do you determine when a decision is significant enough to document? What's the "after-the-fact test" that reveals whether your documentation is genuinely useful? How can AI help make years of accumulated decision records searchable and actionable without introducing hallucinations into critical business decisions?

    The conversation reveals a fundamental truth: the companies that scale successfully aren't those that document everything—they're the ones that capture decision context so future teams can make informed choices about what to change and what to preserve.

    Peat Bakke is a seasoned engineering leader with over 25 years of experience helping companies navigate significant transitions including reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, hypergrowth, and cloud migrations. He has held senior engineering roles at eBay, Kickstarter, and Peek, where he led a team of 70 engineers through a Series C funding round. Peat is the founder of Refactor Management, specializing in helping engineering leaders build high-performance teams through systems thinking and psychological safety.

    As in all our episodes, we speak in plain, executive-summary business terms, framing complex business and technology strategic challenges in context, using language that makes them more accessible and actionable.
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    16 分
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