A Manager’s Word Has To Mean Something
Best Manager Ever · Annie Riley
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Show Notes
What if the secret to great leadership is actually learning to say no? Annie Riley sits down with Gautam Prabhu, VP of Engineering at Scribe AI and longtime startup operator, to unpack his lessons from 25+ years of building teams at PagerDuty, Zendesk, and Opentrons. Gautam talks through why leaders should treat every “yes” as a promise, how winning teams are built through systems (not heroics), why a bad decision is better than no decision at all, and how he builds trust through honesty and accountability.
Time Stamps:
00:00 Meet Gautam Prabhu
02:11 From engineer to accidental manager
05:04 Learning leadership the hard way
08:26 The two kinds of trust
12:03 Why intent matters first
15:42 Competence has to follow
19:18 Why great managers say no
23:57 A bad decision beats no decision
28:41 Startups can’t run on heroes forever
33:22 Building systems that scale
39:48 What great leadership really leaves behind
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