Scaling your leadership 10x in 6 years and leading outside your technical depth w/ Claus Moberg #105

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

We sat down with Claus Moberg to discuss his career trajectory, from meteorology student and hardware CEO to current VP of Eng @ Roblox! We also cover how to overcome obstacles when scaling leadership, leading teams outside of your technical depth/knowledge, attracting & recruiting top talent, finding “diamonds in the rough,” and how to communicate effectively between business functions & eng teams. Claus also shares his best frameworks for navigating complex conversations and taking measured risks while scaling eng functions.

ABOUT CLAUS MOBERG

Claus Moberg leads engineering for the Roblox User Group. His teams are responsible for the applications and experiences through which over 58.5 million users explore and experience the Roblox Metaverse every day. Claus has worked at Roblox since the summer of 2016, leading teams across multiple engineering and product disciplines (VR, Consoles, Mobile, Social, Personalization) and geographies (San Mateo, CA and Shenzhen, CN).

“The key mistake to avoid is to think that a lack of domain experience is an excuse to not engage at that level of depth, right? It's not.

It's actually an obligation to engage at the maximum level of depth that's necessary to solve the problem, but it's an opportunity to engage, avoiding buzz words, and using plain English, and sort of doing it in a way that makes communication more clear as opposed to less clear throughout the organization.”

- Claus Moberg

SHOW NOTES:

• How Claus transitioned from meteorology student to VP of Eng at Roblox (2:17)
• Utilizing a maximization function for career strategy & decision-making (6:25)
• Claus’s early days at Roblox (9:03)
• Looking to the team & product space when facing uncertainties (12:56)
• Strategies for scaling leadership & building eng teams (14:52)
• The correlation between an amazing team & an amazing product (17:48)
• Techniques for building technical depth within eng leadership (19:09)
• Frameworks for effective communication between eng teams & business functions (21:24)
• Best practices for navigating complex conversations (25:37)
• Learn to delegate & let go of responsibilities (26:45)
• How Roblox recruits/attracts talent outside of typical hiring patterns (29:24)
• Claus’s advice on identifying competitive advantages in order to attract talent (34:46)
• Why you should take measured risks while building out eng teams (36:33)
• How to weigh trade-offs/concessions during the start-up phase (38:57)
• Lean into asking “stupid” questions & aim to participate in conversations at the deepest level possible (41:33)
• Rapid fire questions (42:44)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed - Leo Janos and Ben R. Rich’s memoir detailing their nearly two decades of work in Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works program.

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