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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E9 - Nick Selby on Factionalism
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.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E8 - Dr. Pablo Breuer on CISO Leadership
Many organizations hire Chief Information Security Officers (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 National Security Agency 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.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E7 - Peat Bakke on Operationalizing Decision Records
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 and technical choices, the problems those choices solved, and crucially, the alternatives that were deliberately rejected.
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Velocity's Edge Podcast S1E6 - Thomas Dullien & Chris Swan on Decision Records
Most engineering leaders think institutional knowledge loss is an inevitable cost of growth. They see departing employees take critical context with them—why certain processes exist, what problems they solve, how trade-offs were evaluated—and assume the solution involves better handoff documentation or knowledge transfer sessions. But as EPSD Advisory Board members Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan learned through building and scaling organizations, the biggest risk isn’t losing people; it’s losing the reasoning behind the decisions those people made.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E5 - Sarah Wells on Cultural Change
Most engineering leaders think velocity problems are technology problems. They see slow deployments and assume the solution involves better CI/CD pipelines, more developers, or migrating to microservices. But as Sarah Wells discovered as she experienced the digital transformation of the Financial Times, the biggest constraints aren’t in your codebase; they’re in your org chart.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E4 - Carla Geisser & Chris Swan on Crisis Engineering
As Carla Geisser puts it: “The incidents that actually matter to how people interact with technology are not security incidents … They are things like, they can’t log into their bank account, they can’t buy their Taylor Swift tickets, they can’t get on an airplane.” And when everything’s on fire, most organizations make a critical mistake: they treat the crisis as the exception rather than the expectation. The companies that survive and thrive are those that understand a fundamental truth: if your business is growing, crises aren’t anomalies—they’re predictable outcomes of scale.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E3 - Melanie Ensign on Strategic Communications
Most organizations think of security communications as ‘crisis management’: what to say when something goes wrong. But waiting until an incident occurs to build relationships, establish trust, and create communication channels severely limits your response options.
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Velocity’s Edge Podcast S1E2 - Huw Rogers on Tech Debt
If you’re leading a profitable, cash-flow-positive business, you’ve probably watched technical debt pile up: those accumulated consequences of choosing quick fixes over well-designed, long-term solutions. If you’re not carefully managing it, it can become overwhelming.
Read moreVelocity's Edge Podcast S1E1 - Sarah Wells on Strategy
What makes an effective product engineering strategy? In the debut episode of the Velocity’s Edge podcast, host Nicko Goncharoff speaks with Sarah Wells about the importance of strategy to engineering effectiveness.
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Announcing Velocity's Edge: Where Speed Meets Strategy
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Velocity’s Edge, EPSD’s new podcast premiering this Wednesday. Velocity’s Edge brings you to the pivotal point where speed meets strategy—that critical spot where the wrong decision can capsize your organization, while the right one propels you forward. Each 20-minute episode delivers insights from battle-tested experts who’ve guided C-suites and boards through moments when they’ve needed to navigate crises with speed and authority.
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