Carol Palombini is a Leadership & Culture Consultant specializing in the human side of AI adoption. A psychologist, former Head of HR, and executive coach with extensive experience working with technology leaders, she helps organizations assess whether their leaders, people, and culture are ready for AI-driven change.

Her work brings leadership readiness, psychological safety, workforce attitudes, and burnout risk into AI adoption strategy, helping organizations create the conditions for AI to move from experimentation to sustainable adoption.

This is the Thriving in Engineering Podcast, where we talk to engineers and technical leaders about what AI is actually changing in day-to-day work, past the headlines and the hype.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why AI adoption resistance is an influence problem, not a technical one
2. The two types of leaders AI disruption is creating
3. Why a three-year AI vision is impossible for AI adoption
4. Why metacognition is becoming engineers' most valuable skill
5. Why measuring AI adoption by tokens burned backfires

Carol's details:

Website: https://www.carolpalombini.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolpalombini/
Substack: https://carolpalombini.substack.com/

Michał Poczwardowski is a Staff Engineering Manager with over a decade of combined engineering, leadership, and management experience, and the founder of Perspectiveship, a newsletter on timeless leadership and communication skills. He mentors software leaders in decision-making and problem-solving.

This is the Thriving in Engineering Podcast, where we talk to engineers and technical leaders about what AI is actually changing in day-to-day work, past the headlines and the hype.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why AI writing sounds the same, and why only your own stories make it worth reading
2. Why outsourcing every decision to AI is like a runner who stops training
3. The €1,000 fake course he built on April Fool's Day as a honeypot for AI agents
4. How he uses an Activity Watch MCP server to get a daily AI-generated focus report
5. What a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat taught him about detaching from stress

Michał's details:
Perspectiveship: https://read.perspectiveship.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poczwardowski/

Elena Calvillo is an independent product builder based in Mexico City. After more than a decade in enterprise product management, she went independent in January 2026 and now builds her own products full time, including DraftKit, an async writing workspace for Substack creators. She writes Prompt-Led Product on Substack, where she teaches product managers how to build with AI instead of just talking about it.

This is the Thriving in Engineering Podcast, where we talk to engineers and technical leaders about what AI is actually changing in day-to-day work, past the headlines and the hype.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why she stopped waiting for permission to build and went independent with no team and no engineers
2. How the AI Advent Challenge grew into a community of almost 900 people with 200 learning daily
3. Why she scrapped the calendar-first version of DraftKit after listening to what writers actually wanted
4. How she built an MCP protocol that lets paid subscribers search her entire prompt library from Claude
5. Why she treats user feedback as neutral information instead of praise or criticism

Elena's details:
Prompt-Led Product: https://promptledproduct.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elena-product-manager/
DraftKit: https://draftkit.app
AI Advent Challenge: https://aiadventchallenge.com

Alyssa Fu Ward is a data science leader and executive coach with a PhD in behavioral science from Stanford. She has worked at companies including Meta and Twitter, and now coaches professionals navigating AI-driven change in their work and identity. She writes Step Up Step Together, a newsletter on technology, work, and what she calls "how to human."

This is the Thriving in Engineering Podcast, where we talk to engineers and technical leaders about what AI is actually changing in day-to-day work, past the headlines and the hype.

In this conversation, we discuss:
1: The Human-Centered AI Capability Framework: two dimensions crossed to map where you actually are with AI against where you want to go
2: Why "build with AI" means something completely different for an engineer than for a marketer or an accountant
3: Her case for why humans won't be replaced by AI, but will hit a shared limit alongside it
4: The energy test she uses to decide what to automate and what to protect
5: Open Room, her open source project teaching non-technical people, especially women, to build together with AI

Alyssa’s details:
Step Up Step Together Newsletter: https://alyssafuward.substack.com/
The Hart Studio Newsletter: https://thehartstudio.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssafuward/
Website: https://alyssafuward.com/
Open Room: https://open-room-open-source.vercel.app/
You Are Already Technical Enough: alyssafuward.substack.com/p/you-are-already-technical-enough

Michi Goetz is the Director of Technical Program Management at Celonis, and he writes TPM Breakdowns, a Substack on the realities of program management.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1: Why status reports turn red two days before launch, and why calling it red early is a gift, not a failure
2: What his survey of 250 TPMs revealed about where AI adoption actually stands
3: Why bad underlying data breaks AI's usefulness before it even starts
4: His "TPM boardroom" method for pressure-testing decisions with AI personas before a meeting
5: The three stages he sees TPMs moving through, ending in what he calls an "AI architect"
6: His weekly voice-note practice for building a personal decision record

Michi’s details:
TPM Breakdowns Newsletter: https://michigoetz.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michi-goetz/

Amy Mitchell is a Product Manager who started her career writing code and leading an engineering team before a lateral move pushed her into product. She writes Product Management IRL, a newsletter where she shares what she's learning as AI reshapes the job, including a term she's been using lately: the "builder PM," product managers stepping back into code, sales conversations, and go-to-market decisions all at once.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1: Why moving from leading engineers to leading product managers meant trading precision for a stack of maybes
2: The "builder PM" shift, and why AI is pulling product people back toward engineering work
3: A support document that closed a deal when the spec sheet couldn't, and what it taught her about what customers actually value
4: How she uses AI to understand a customer's day to day before a single feature gets written
5: Her read on where product and engineering roles land once the current collision between them settles

Amy's details:

Product Management IRL newsletter - https://amycmitchell.substack.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amycmitchell/
Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/amycmitchell.bsky.social

Colette Molteni works in data analytics and AI governance inside a major tech company, where her job has shifted in the last six months from building dashboards and presenting to leadership to building the AI agents that do that work instead. She also writes Empathy Elevated, a newsletter on human skills for tech professionals, and has a decade of experience watching organizations bolt AI onto broken processes and wonder why it doesn't work.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why slapping an AI agent on a broken process is like hiring an intern with no onboarding — and what to fix first
2. The 80% problem: why AI gets most of a task right, but the last stretch still needs a human — true for code and dashboards alike
3. Whether empathy skills transfer to working with AI agents — and why a calm, clear communication style gets better results
4. How AI note-takers are quietly letting people zone out in meetings — and why that's a trust problem
5. Why team politics don't get smaller as teams get smaller — they just change shape
6. Her actual prediction on the AI transformation timeline — and why she doesn't buy the four-hour workday by 2027

Colette's details:
Empathy Elevated Newsletter - https://empathyelevated.substack.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/colettemolteni/

Roman Nikolaev is Head of Technology at Cambri, a Nordic research tech company whose AI-first platform helps global brands like Nestlé and Coca-Cola test product concepts before launch. He's also the author of High Impact Engineering, a Substack newsletter on practical, field-tested guidance for engineering leaders. Roman has been building and scaling software teams for over 20 years — and Cambri started working with AI and ML well before the ChatGPT moment made it mainstream.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. Why 65% AI tooling adoption only produced 10% more PR throughput — and what the GetDx data actually tells us
2. The "building on a swamp" problem: why applying AI on top of a broken development process gives you almost no upside
3. Whether the software engineering profession is going away — and the car mechanic analogy that reframes the question
4. How Cambry is running semi-automated agent workflows right now, with agents picking up tickets, asking questions, and raising PRs
5. MCP servers worth paying attention to: Figma, Chrome/Chromium, and what Roman would actually build with them
6. Why every engineer is now effectively a manager — and the two constraints that stop anyone from being a one-person company

Roman's Details:
High Impact Engineering newsletter - https://highimpactengineering.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roman-nikolaev-43465019/