Wasabi Technologies Leadership & Management

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced weekly? 

The team I lead operates around Wasabi’s H.O.T. values: humility, ownership and togetherness. The hallmark I look for most is ownership. More specifically, people who succeed on my team and at Wasabi are those who fully own their outcomes and build influence beyond their immediate team.

We reinforce our values through consistent one-on-ones and clear communication rhythms. Each of my direct reports has dedicated time with me on a fixed cadence focused on alignment, growth and removing blockers. We talk about where they want to grow, what opportunities map to that growth, and how their work connects to the broader organization. Operational status lives elsewhere so our conversations stay focused on people, priorities and progress.

Which forum or artifact keeps priorities obvious?

My team’s single source of truth is an AI-generated weekly planning note. It captures the previous week’s accomplishments, themes for the current week, carried-forward follow-ups, and priorities. If something is important, it’s on that page.

The note is built from the flow of the week itself. Monday starts with an operational review of how our software is performing. My one-on-ones with my vice president help me understand where leadership is focused and where priorities may need to shift. Friday’s release sync shows us where every initiative stands against that direction. By the end of the week, those conversations have generated enough information to shape what next week’s note should say.

Rather than being decided in isolation, priorities emerge from the work, the operational signals and the conversations happening across the organization. From there, my one-on-ones help carry those priorities forward. The note creates clarity while our ongoing conversations create alignment.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

We’ve been moving the engineering organization toward an AI-assisted software development lifecycle and agentic development; not engineers using AI as a tool, but an SDLC where the workflow from requirements to production monitoring is designed for humans and agents to collaborate.

What excites people is that they can build things now that they couldn’t before. The old constraints on what’s worth attempting start to go away, and engineers see they can do some of the most interesting work of their careers right now, and they’re showing up for it. We went from a handful of pilot users to over a hundred active users of AI coding tools in the last quarter, with parallel adoption of automated code review and agent-based workflows.

One metric I watch most closely within my team is adoption depth, not according to how many licenses we’ve handed out, but what percentage of our engineering work actually flows through a sensible AI-assisted lifecycle: agent rules, skills files, structured code review and automated test scaffolding. When that number moves, it means our engineers have stopped building within the old constraints and started building like the constraints aren’t there.