Leman Tech Leadership Podcast
Leman Tech Leadership PodcastWelcome to the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, your ultimate guide to developing exceptional tech leadership skills. Whether you're a seasoned tech leader or just stepping into a managerial role, this podcast is designed to provide you with actionable insights and best practices to create a thriving work environment that people won't want to leave. Learn how to do it with host Aleksandra Lemańska, CQ Technology Leadership Mentor & Speaker. Founder @LemanSkills, Co-Founder & Board President @Startup Community Poznan Foundation, Host @Leman Tech Leadership Podcast. She is the creator of the CQ Leadership Method: a battle-tested framework that helps te...
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#194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka
<b>▶︎ #194 | Why Co-Founding with Your Brother, Detaching from Your Product, and Staying in the Code Makes You a Better Leader w/ Piotr Karwatka @Open Mercato</b><br /><br />In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Piotr Karwatka, Co-Founder of Open Mercato, a 100% AI-engineered open-source framework for building enterprise CRM and ERP applications. Piotr has spent 26 years in technology, starting with freeware desktop software he built with his brother Tomasz as teenagers. Together they grew Divante from a two-person company to over 300 people before a successful exit, co-created Alokai (formerly Vue Storefront), which raised the larg...
#193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.
<b>▶︎ #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.<br /></b><br />In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a phrase most tech leaders have grown allergic to: psychological safety. She names the pattern first, because it’s the one that starts almost every mentoring conversation on this subject: a leader declares: "Come to me with mistakes, come to me with bad news," everyone nods, and six months later that same leader is blindsided by a problem the team saw coming for weeks and never mentioned...
#192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @Lejdi
<b>▶︎ #192 | From Corporate Beast to a Founder: On Lifelong Learning, System Thinking, and Leading with Good Intentions w/ Paulina Kotowska @LejdiSapiens / @Incepti</b><br /><br />In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra sits down with Paulina Kotowska, a transformation specialist, accredited EMCC coach and mentor, and Co-Founder of Incepti, a business agility consultancy she runs alongside her own personal brand LejdiSapiens. With nearly 30 years of professional experience spanning pharma, telecom, fintech, and tech, Paulina has led teams from operations to technology, most recently managing over 100 people, before stepping out of corporate life to work with startups and orga...
#191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving Up
<b>▶︎ #191 | Face It Till You Make It: The Real Reason You Keep Giving Up<br /></b><br />In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska opens the final quarter of the year with a subject she's lived through personally and professionally, and hears from leaders and founders on a near-daily basis: giving up.<br /><br />Alex names the pattern she keeps running into in conversation after conversation: people who feel like failures, like imposters, like they simply can't stick to a habit or deliver what they promised themselves. She's honest that she's lived both sides of it...
#190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w Ashutosh Garg
<b>▶︎ #190 | Curiosity in the Age of AI: Humility, Digital Twins, and Why the Smartest Person in the Room Stops Learning w/ Ashutosh Garg (Co-Founder & CEO, @Eightfold AI & @Viven, ex-@Google, ex-@IBM)</b><br /><br />In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Ashutosh Garg: Co-Founder and CEO of Eightfold AI and Viven, a third-time founder (after Bloomreach and Eightfold) who spent his early career as a research scientist at IBM and Google before building a career predicting where technology is headed next. Recording the conversation in the middle of 2026, Ashutosh reflects on three decades inside machine lear...
#189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path?
<b>▶︎ #189 | How to Lead Engineers Who Don't Want Your Career Path?<br /></b><br />In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska takes on a question more leaders are quietly wrestling with: how do you lead engineers who don't want your career path?<br /><br />The episode opens with a story from one of Alex's mentees, a director who built a strong promotion case for one of her best engineers, only to have him turn it down. Not for money, not for timing, but because he didn't want more people depending on him. Alex names this...
#188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś
<b>▶︎ #188 | From Renting Lambos for Crypto to Deterministic AI Agents: Self-Worth, Startups, and Finding the Right Co-Founder w/ Aleksandra Łoś (Founder @Relayn) </b><br /><br />In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits down with Aleksandra Łoś. Her path runs from management consulting in Paris and London, through a string of ventures (a sports-matching app, a startup renting luxury assets for cryptocurrency, rebuilding the original Bitcoin whitepaper for the Bitcoin Association, and TrueMe, an attempt to merge AI with personal development) to her current company, Relayn, where she and her Co-founder are building AI agents on a determin...
#187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't Practice
<b>▶︎ #187 | The Always-On Leader: You Can't Contract Boundaries You Don't Practice<br /></b><br />In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a conversation she's had for years, in corporate hallways, mentoring sessions, and now with leaders across the globe: being always on.<br /><br />The episode opens with a moment from one of Alex's own mentoring sessions: a VP of Engineering spent forty minutes describing the ground rules he'd built to protect his team's focus time, then answered a Slack message at nine at night mid-session. Alex names the gap directly: it's not what...
#186 | Imposter Syndrome, the Funding Gap, and Building the STEMinist Summit w/ AJ Lauer (Founder @Thriving Ibis Leadership Solutions)
<b>▶︎ #186 | Imposter Syndrome, the Funding Gap, and Building the STEMinist Summit w/ AJ Lauer (Founder @Thriving Ibis Leadership Solutions) {Part 2}</b><br /><br />In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex reunites with Dr. AJ Lauer, founder of Thriving Ibis Leadership Solutions and author of "My Monster Mungo: A Story About Imposter Syndrome," for part two of their conversation. Since they last spoke, AJ broke her ankle, spent two months out of commission, and used the forced pause to realign her business around the work she cares about most: coaching and imposter syndrome.<br /><br />What makes this conv...
#185 | The Loneliness of the Leader Who Do You Actually Talk To Now
<b>▶︎ #185 | The Loneliness of the Leader: Who Do You Actually Talk To Now?<br /></b><br />In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska addresses a subject she's lived through herself and hears constantly in mentoring conversations: the loneliness of the leader.<br /><br />Alex opens with a story from a mentoring session: a leader who realized she hadn't had an honest, unfiltered work conversation in months, not because of a rough patch, but because everyone below her filters what they say, and everyone at her level feels like competition. Alex names this as a struc...
