Leman Tech Leadership Podcast

#197 | How to Speed Up Without Your Team Falling ApartIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska starts from a sentence a founder said to her recently: "I know we need to move faster, but I’m scared that if I push even more, the whole thing falls apart." Alex pushes back on the idea that this fear is a personal weakness, and on the false choice hiding underneath it, that the only options are slow and safe or fast and fragile.She uses the Wheel of Conflict to show why accelerating teams start fighting: what looks like a relationship problem is almost always an unclear structure {who decides, what "done" means, how long to wait before shipping} finally under pressure. From there, she brings in Contracting to explain the actual fix, picking a small number of non-negotiables that stay fixed on purpose while everything else is allowed to flex.If you’re trying to accelerate right now and feel the ground getting shaky under your team, this episode gives you a concrete, three-step way to speed up without losing the trust that makes speed survivable in the first place.Mentioned in the episode:"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms TechnicalExperts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsStartup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #196 | You Are Your Own Worst Enemy: Self-Worth, Boundaries, and the Real State of Women in Tech (Part 2) w/ Aleksandra ŁośIn this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex sits back down with Aleksandra for part two of their conversation. If you haven't listened to part one yet (episode #188, where Ola shares her story as a serial entrepreneur now building her fourth startup), pause here and start there, then come back. This episode picks up exactly where that one left off.This time the conversation goes deeper into the state of women in tech and STEM, then and now. Ola traces her own transition from spending fifteen years trying to compete with men on their terms (efficient, unemotional, always proving she belonged) to realizing that treating her differences as a superpower, not a liability, changed everything. She and Alex unpack imposter syndrome, the exhausting habit of chasing external validation, and why so many women (and plenty of men) are, in Ola's words, "their own worst enemy."The conversation turns practical fast: how to stop being cruel to yourself in your own head, why energy (not time) is the real currency of a leader's day, and how learning to say no is what separates a good entrepreneur from a great one.And as a bridge to close things out, Alex and Ola talk about the STEMinist Summit, a two-day virtual event for women in STEM that Alex is co-hosting with AJ this October. Ola will be joining as a speaker, sharing more of exactly what you'll hear in this episode. If this conversation moved something in you, this is where you'll find your people.Mentioned in the episode:Episode #188, Part One of this conversation: "Przejścia. Którędy do miłości?" by Natalia de BarbaroSTEMinist Summit (October 15 to 16, virtual): https://steministsummit.com/ ✉︎ FOLLOW ALEKSANDRA ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandra-los-1423615bWebsite: https://www.relayn.sh/ ✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsGet the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/ Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

#195 | Your Team Just Got a Digital Twin of You. So What Are You Actually For Now?In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemańska tackles a conversation that’s been sitting with her since a recent talk with a founder she mentors in Poland, someone building AI-native tools that let a leader’s "digital twin" answer questions for their team around the clock. Her first reaction was relief on behalf of every exhausted leader she knows. Her second reaction is the one this episode is built on: if a twin of you can answer the question, what exactly is your job now?Alex is clear this isn’t a hypothetical. Whether it’s a literal digital twin or just a much smarter set of internal tools, more of what used to require pulling a leader personally into a conversation no longer does, and for a lot of leaders that’s quietly triggering an identity crisis they haven’t said out loud, because on paper it looks like nothing but good news.If you’re feeling the ground shift under what makes you valuable to your team right now, this episode gives you a concrete way to do the inventory, have the conversation, and decide, on purpose, what you’re actually for.✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsStartup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #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 MercatoIn 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 largest VC round in Poland at the time, and built Callstack, the well-known React Native contributor, which also ended in an exit. They are also business angels with over 40 portfolio companies, including ElevenLabs.The conversation opens on one of the questions founders ask most often and answer least honestly: can you really do business with family? Piotr's answer is grounded in 26 years of data. The single most important factor was not love or loyalty but culture: specifically, the decision to always treat the company as a product separate from themselves.Piotr and Aleksandra then dig into delegation, control, and the specific fear that drives most early-stage founders to micromanage: not personality, but margin. When you have no financial runway, and every client matters completely, over-controlling is not a character flaw; it is a survival response.The episode also covers the question of whether tech leaders should stay in the code, and Piotr is unambiguous: yes, and anyone who told him otherwise gave him some of the worst advice he ever received. For Piotr, staying technical is not a comfort blanket; it is the thing that keeps your judgment honest.Whether you are a tech founder, a leader trying to delegate without losing your mind, or someone figuring out how to keep both the tech and the human dimensions of leadership alive as your company grows, this conversation offers hard-won perspective from someone who has lived every stage of it.Mentioned in the episode:"Radical Candor" by Kim Scott""Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall Rosenberg"Open Mercato: https://www.openmercato.comAI Tech Leaders training {aihtechleaders.pl}: https://aitechleaders.pl✉︎ FOLLOW PIOTR ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @piotrkarwatkaX: @piotrkarwatkaWebsite: openmercato.com✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsGet the Book! https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/ Startup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/

▶︎ #193 | You Put Psychological Safety in a Slide Deck. Your Team Still Doesn’t Feel It.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.Alex is direct about why this keeps happening even with leaders who genuinely mean it: psychological safety doesn’t get built by the statement; it gets built by what happens the first time someone actually tests it, and most leaders never run that test on themselves first.If you’ve ever declared an open door and privately wondered why nobody’s walking through it, this episode gives you the specific, sixty-second-level tools to actually build the trust instead of just announcing it.Mentioned in the episode:"From Code to People: The CQ Leadership Method That Transforms Technical Experts into Leaders Teams Actually Want to Work For":https://fromcodetopeople.lemanskills.com/ ✉︎ FOLLOW ME ON: ⤵︎LinkedIn: @aleksandralemanskaTikTok: @aleksandra_lemanskaX: @lemanskillsStartup Community Poznan: @startup-community-poznan-scpwww.lemanskills.comJoin Leadership Pulse! https://lemanskills.com/pulse/