---
aliases: ["Podcast recording — 2025-06-05"]
Is A: Event
Date: "2025-06-05"
Belongs to: "[[2025-06]]"
Related to: ["[[person-sarah-oconnor]]"]
Tags: ["Work", "Podcast"]
---
# Podcast recording — 2025-06-05
Recorded episode with Sarah O'Connor. Great conversation.

## Notes
- Episode theme: second session with Sarah — focused on the challenges of maintaining engineering culture during periods of significant organizational change, including layoffs, reorgs, and leadership transitions
- Sarah shared her firsthand experience navigating a major reorganization at her company where three engineering teams were merged, two managers were let go, and the surviving team had to rebuild trust and productivity from a fragile emotional state
- Her willingness to discuss the human cost of these decisions — not just the strategic rationale — made this one of our most emotionally honest episodes; she spoke about her own doubts as a leader during the process
- Powerful and necessary recording; this is the kind of content that the engineering leadership space needs more of, beyond the typical success-story podcast format
- Key quote: "You cannot optimize for resilience and pretend that the humans in your system are interchangeable. Resilience starts with acknowledging that your team is made of people who remember what happened to them"
- Audio quality was very good; Sarah recorded from a quiet conference room at her office

## Follow-up
- [ ] Send thank-you email to Sarah and confirm she is comfortable with the level of candor in the recording
- [ ] Draft show notes with sensitivity to the personal nature of the content
- [ ] Schedule editing with [[person-paco-furiani]] — discuss tone and pacing for this more serious episode
- [ ] Create social media clips carefully — select moments that are impactful without being exploitative
