When you join a team in a management role, you may find yourself grappling with bad decisions made by your predecessors. Today on CTO Connection, Denise Iglesias, Senior Director Software Engineering at Comcast, spoke to Peter about how she has dealt with poor decisions and her recommendations for transitioning records.

Denise discusses why she strives to create a one-page template that explains the history of a team’s decision making. She also shares her experience restructuring the Austin office of Comcast to fit within the larger organization in a way that made sense for her team.

• [00:22] - How Denise found her love for programming
• [02:02] - Engineering leadership at National Instruments
• [04:25] - Making an impact at Icontrol Networks
• [07:14] - Acquisition by Comcast
• [08:55] - Xfinity Home automation lift and shift
• [12:17] - Why good people make bad decisions
• [14:15] - Operating from insufficient data
• [15:18] - Platform consolidation
• [21:14] - Formally recording decisions
• [26:03] - The art of zeroing in on relevant data
• [28:45] - Be open-minded

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.