
James Cowling (Convex)
From StaffEng by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles)
November 30, 2021 · 48 min
About this episode
James Cowling shares insights on the importance of people-related impacts in engineering teams.
Often the biggest impacts a Staff Engineer can make in their organization are not technical but rather people-related. When teams are value-aligned due to good leadership, they go on to make larger impacts than they would otherwise have. As Senior Principal Engineer at Dropbox for almost a decade, James Cowling learned a lot about how people think and work together, and he joins us today to share some of his insights. Joining this conversation, listeners will hear about James’ experience at t...
People in this episode
Hosts: David Noël-Romas, Alex Kessinger
Guest: James Cowling
Topics covered
- leadership
- team dynamics
- Staff Engineer
- organizational impact
- collaboration
Keywords
- Staff Engineer
- leadership
- team alignment
- Dropbox
- collaboration
- organizational impact
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Dropbox
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