In June, we attended Plato Elevate in San Francisco, with over 1,000 engineering leaders in the audience. Maria led a keynote about engineering budgets, which she has extensive knowledge about given her background at Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and Tinder. Now, she’s the co-founder and CEO of Proactive AI Lab. We discussed her thoughts and experiences as an engineering leader, including finding success, managing tech debt, and much more.

Highlights

In your experience, what has differentiated the outstanding leaders from everyone else?

If you could attribute your success to just one trait, what would it be?

Were there any projects where you wish you had GitStart, and how would you deploy it?

“If I could go back in time… I would use GitStart probably in all of my projects” -Maria Zhang

For the entire 24 minute conversation with Maria, check out the full video on YouTube.