Creating stability in startups, avoiding hesitation, mindful leadership | Emese Pogácsás, Consultant, Coach, VP of Engineering

Emese Pogácsás is a seasoned technology executive, coach, and leadership consultant with over 20 years of experience guiding teams and delivering enterprise-grade products in corporate and startup environments.

Throughout her career, including her recent decade as VP of Engineering at Secret Sauce Partners , Emese has developed a robust approach to technical leadership, balancing engineering excellence with strong project execution and people management.

Beyond her technical career, Emese’s journey with yoga has been a key influence in her approach to leadership, using its principles for cultivating self-awareness and continuous improvement as an engineering leader.

Highlights

• Why hiring engineers is like dating
• Bringing stability to fast-paced environments
• Adapting leadership from corporate to startup
• Implementing change through small, gradual improvements
• Applying yoga wisdom to tech leadership challenges

Yassine: What are the non-negotiable qualities you look for when hiring engineers?

Emese: I group my non-negotiable qualities into two categories. Some are basic human traits that I’m looking for in every human being I’m in contact with, such as honesty and self-consciousness. The other category includes traits essential for professional success, such as an ownership mindset and communication skills.

Both as a candidate and a hiring manager, I appreciate hiring processes with multiple stages. Hiring is like dating. When dating, we meet a couple of times, preferably in different setups, and decide if we want to get into a relationship based on what we see. Hiring is the same; it’s an opportunity for the hiring company and the candidates to get to know each other before jumping into a working relationship. So we, the hiring party, try to meet the candidates multiple times and get to know them from various angles. Finally, if we like what we see, they get an offer from us.

Y: What signals help you spot these qualities?

Emese: I try to build an interview process where I can get signals about these non-negotiables through questions about the candidate’s past experiences, the way the candidate approaches a complex technical problem, how they handle time or information sparsity, or how they react to my puns. Furthermore, I involve multiple people in the interview process on our end. Because of my own cognitive or emotional biases, I might miss some crucial signs – my colleagues are there to complement my view and add their unique perspectives. If I’m alone, I’m just a frog in a well, as the Chinese proverb says.

Y: With the current AI boom creating intense competition for ML and data science talent, which is essential to your team at Secret Sauce Partners, has this affected your ability to attract and retain engineers in these roles?

Emese: I believe we’re in a great position with a lot of exciting and challenging projects going on. We are a small company, so literally every line of code you write matters. If you’re eager, you can come up with some new stuff, implement it, test it, and push it into production within weeks. And impact 100 million users and some of the most well-known retailers worldwide.

For the type of talent we want to have on board, and the ones who we’d like to attract, this is usually like a drug. Personally, for me, the moment I got hooked on this feeling of having a “visible impact”, I knew this was my thing and my primary motivation. No bureaucracy and politics, please! So for this kind of people, who want to own things and make an impact, I truly believe we’re an ideal place. Our strategy is to have a hiring process highlighting this aspect of life at Secret Sauce Partners.

From this aspect, my responsibility for the folks in my team is two-fold.

• Create and maintain an environment and processes so that they can work relatively uninterruptedly and with stability. We’re a startup, and their code is in production, so this can be a challenge sometimes. But keeping your eyes on the target is much easier if you don’t have to constantly deal with inquiries like “it would be fairly important to”, “we might want to look into this”, “why haven’t we done this yet”, and “this might be a great addition to our model”.
• I have to ensure that we’re spending our time correctly - the data that’s needed is available, the criteria for shipping a feature are clear, the software developers support the software engineering and architecture aspect, and so on - this requires me seeing both the big picture and the details at the same time to see where we should improve the way we work.

Y: You’ve led teams in both large corporations like GE医疗 and smaller companies. What leadership principles have you found to be universal, and which ones needed the most adaptation based on company size and culture?

Emese: I think that all leadership principles are universal!

No matter what company you work for, you must be honest, transparent, consistent, resilient, and empowering – and I could go on and on.

For me, the biggest challenge was switching from a super-regulated corporate environment to a messy startup. At that point, I thought I knew a lot about leadership and management, but every day, I had to realize that this was a completely different environment than the one I was used to. I so often felt that I was just an imposter, nothing I knew was working!

I'm not trying to dodge the bullet like Neo. Let me give you two concrete examples of what was the hardest for me when transitioning from a corporate to a startup.

• Resilience to change: In GE Healthcare, we always felt that something was changing: reorgs, new rules, new requirements, and new high-priority bugs arrived. But man, this was a very stable environment compared to a startup! Here, you have to brace yourself for anything and everything. It’s as if you’d compare a giant cruise ship to a tiny sailboat. And the weather conditions simply impact you more.
• Ownership mindset and fluid responsibilities: No question, I am the type of person who always works as if it were my own company. However, this is on a whole different level in a startup and smaller companies in general. I often found and still am bending down to pick up the ball and get it rolling, even for mundane, less “leader-like” tasks. And it’s ok. Here, you don’t have rigid roles, and if you want to be successful in such an environment, you have to roll up your sleeves and get things done. But look at the bright side of this: you can learn a ton of new things you wouldn’t normally tap into.

Y: Your motto is "Don't hesitate too long. Go, try, and learn." How do you balance this experimental mindset with the need for reliability and security, especially when building enterprise-grade products?

Emese: Time is your most valuable asset. Especially when we’re working on an enterprise-grade product, you simply cannot afford to hesitate long. Your job is to find the right balance between being careful and fast. You have to make sure you’re ready to make decisions on whatever data points you have readily. Make the best choice at the given moment. Then don’t stop, lean back and enjoy the view, but monitor, continue gathering extra data points, and adjust the course accordingly. This way, we might take slight turns here and there, but eventually, we’ll reach our goals.

In general, I don’t believe in drastic changes. Who knows what stays standing after an earthquake? In my view, minor, subtle changes can be easier to implement, to get used to, and build a new habit. I 100% believe in the 1% better principle. This also supports an approach of making multiple, subtle adjustments while keeping the whole system monitored - this gives way more stability and security when you have to constantly and consistently deliver.

Finally, choose the right moment and the proper context for your changes. There is a reason retrospectives are a thing. When you’re done with something (let it be a partial delivery), you take a look and see what could be improved so that you can start your next cycle with those changes. If I can afford it, I like to explore the slightly more significant adjustments in a sandbox project rather than on the real thing. If I have a less critical (maybe an internal) side project, I like experimenting with it to see how new approaches could work in our environment.

Y: What specific practices or principles have you found surprisingly effective in addressing common tech leadership challenges?

Emese: I love how yoga teaches you to be in the present moment, be aware of your surroundings, adapt your practice to the current conditions, and finally, concentrate on being a better version of yourself day by day. Obviously, I could create a much longer list, since there are endless parallels, but here are my favorite principles.

• Be present. Be mindful. Be in the moment. There is nothing worse when a person in the meeting is only there in their body. Your folks will highly appreciate it if they feel you are there for them; you respect and care for them.
• Listen. According to the Dalai Lama: “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.”
• Communicate. You simply cannot overcommunicate. Even though I’m pretty good with yoga after a decade of practice, I’m 100% sure you can still help me with your instructions to improve my practice. Or give me helpful feedback on my posture. Or give me a drop of wisdom that will open new doors.
• Practice. Every day. Always retrospect on your actions and reactions and see how you can do better next time. Hone your skills, day by day, week by week, month by month. Rinse and repeat. Yoga taught me that repetitions are good. It's not dull, but on the contrary, repetitions give you an excellent opportunity to see if and how you’ve changed.
• Have fun. My favorite yoga instructor always says that if you fall out of a difficult position, do it with a smile on your face. (Thank you, Travis!) Don’t take yourself too seriously. Life is too short for that!

Thank you Emese for your time and insights!

This interview is part of the “Exec Engineering Dialog” series where I interview seasoned tech leaders on the topics of talent, product, management and culture.

If you liked the insights shared in this interview, consider giving feedback and/or sharing it with your network, it’s the best way to help this segment improve and grow.

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Yassine.