Leading Engineering Teams with Empathy

Update: 2025-06-23

Description

In this episode of the Laravel Podcast, Matt Stauffer sits down with André Valentin, Director of Engineering at Laravel, to explore his unique journey from customer support to engineering leadership. André opens up about the challenges he’s faced, the lessons learned along the way, and how building strong relationships within a team has shaped his leadership style.

They dive into Laravel’s balance between open source and commercial work, the importance of effective onboarding, and how team dynamics impact success. André also shares his approach to communication, project involvement, and the tools and systems that support remote, asynchronous work. With a focus on servant leadership, empathy, and hiring well, this episode is full of insights for engineering leaders and anyone navigating team growth in the world of tech.

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Comments (1)

James James

Really liked this episode. André’s path from support to engineering leadership felt super real and easy to connect with. The way he talked about building trust in a team and leading with empathy really stuck with me. Managing code is one thing, but managing people with that kind of mindset is a whole different challenge. It actually made me think of a few chats I’ve had with the team at CHILLICODE https://chillicode.dev/. They do web and mobile dev, and I’ve worked with them on a project before. What’s cool is their team culture really lines up with a lot of what André was saying, especially when it comes to async work and onboarding new folks in a smart way. Kinda feels like when a company really leans into communication and empathy, the good products just follow naturally. Gonna send this one around to a few teammates. Definitely some solid takeaways.

Jul 9th

In Channel