I spent 17 years at Google leading engineering teams, 220+ engineers across Ads, Maps, and AI. I loved the work. Building at scale and watching people grow into leaders themselves.

What I'm Building: 

I'm writing Activate: Go Deep. Move Fast. A Leadership System for Builders. 

A book about how leaders build teams that execute quickly and adapt through uncertainty. It's the system I wish I'd had earlier in my career drawn from 17 years of building at Google and interviews with leaders across Netflix, Meta, Datadog, and more.

Alongside the book, I work directly with a small number of leaders navigating rapid growth or transformation, usually through focused sessions or short-term advisory. 

My work focuses on:

- Structural Clarity: Moving past generic alignment to engineering-minded systems that scale.

- Decision Velocity: Helping leaders navigate organizational complexity and AI transformation without stalling.

- Execution Diagnosis: Discover the friction points in your execution model and implementing the "Activate" framework to enable your teams. 

How to Work With Me

- The Newsletter: Join 40,000+ leaders who follow my work, a weekly 3-minute briefing on leadership systems. www.melodyolson.com/newsletter

- Velocity Solution Sessions: A 75-minute diagnostic to unblock your team’s speed and scale your leadership: www.melodyolson.com/advising

- Strategic Advisory: Limited capacity for longer-term partnerships with leaders navigating rapid growth or transformation.

- Speaking: Available for keynotes and workshops on high-velocity leadership and AI transformation.

Over 17 years at Google, I saw the same pattern again and again: talented people doing strong work, wondering why it wasn't landing. Often, the work wasn't the problem. The visibility was.

A mistake I made early on: assuming good work was enough.

Making your work visible isn’t bragging. People can’t advocate for you in rooms you’re not in if they don’t understand your impact. And people understanding your work is good for you and good for your team. 

A few things to do this better:

1. Communicate simply
→ Share progress in simple, repeatable ways. Send a short weekly update to your manager: what is done, what’s blocked, what’s next.

2. Make your impact clear
→ Don’t just report activity. Frame updates as problem → solution → result. 
Tailor to what each audience cares about.

3. Create touchpoints
→ Introduce yourself early in projects. Create periodic touchpoints with stakeholders. Don't wait until the end.

4. Write it down
→ Share your ideas in writing. Document tradeoffs and outcomes.  

Your work matters.

Make sure the right people can see it.

🔗 I write weekly about engineering leadership and growth. Link in bio: Melody Olson.

Melody Olson

Leadership for Product & Engineering | Ex-Google Senior Engineering Director | Activate: Go Deep. Move Fast.

Your small wins aren't small.

They're how big things actually get built.

The most ambitious projects I've been part of didn't succeed because of one bold move. They succeeded because someone broke the impossible into the possible, and then stacked wins until momentum took over.

One prototype. One conversation. One decision that unblocked ten others.

It sounds obvious. It's not easy.

When you know where you're going, small steps feel like progress. When you don't, they feel like treading water.

The teams that build ambitious things aren't waiting for perfect. They're stacking imperfect steps toward something that matters.

If your goal for the new year feels too big, good. That's the point.
Find the smallest step. Start there.

The wins will stack.

Leadership for Product & Engineering | Ex-Google Senior Engineering Director | Activate: Go Deep. Move Fast. | Weekly insights ↓

Most teams don't fail from bad ideas.


They fail from chasing too many.

I've seen it over and over, teams full of capable people and good ideas, but no momentum toward what matters most 

Here's what I learned the hard way:

The problem is rarely the ideas. It's the conditions.
→ Too many priorities = no priorities 
→ Ownership without clarity = motion without impact. 

The teams that succeed do less, but they do it with conviction.

1. They kill good ideas to protect great ones
2. They do small tests before they invest
3. They go deep on why this matters before going wide on how to build it
4. They make the hard calls early, not after months of discussion.

The best teams don't just chase ideas.
They build the conditions where the right ideas land.

➕ Follow me, Melody Olson, for what high-velocity teams do differently.

The best leaders I've worked with asked more questions than they gave answers. But that didn't mean they lacked expertise. 

They had plenty. 

Early in my career, I worked with a VP who I found intimidating. He dove deep. Asked hard questions. Pushed my thinking in ways I didn't expect.

I would hesitate and often defer back to him. Then one day in a 1:1, he said to me: "I'm expecting you to be the expert. You're the one spending time on this problem. You own it. I will ask hard questions, but I want you to have an opinion."

That changed how I showed up. As a leader, I've learned: the questions aren't separate from growing your team. They're how you do it.

Image credit: Janis Ozolins 

📌  Go deep. Move fast. I write for engineers and leaders. Link in bio: Melody Olson.

Technical talent matters.
But after working with hundreds of engineers, I've learned something else matters more:

How you show up for your team.

The engineer who gets a lot done but leaves wreckage behind, doesn't help the team move faster.

The one who asks clarifying questions, disagrees respectfully, and makes others better is essential.

But being a great teammate doesn’t mean being agreeable.

Here's what separated the ones who kept advancing from the ones who didn’t:

→ Follow-through. Do what you say you'll do. It is less common than you think.
→ Calm under pressure. Show up well even when there is a fire
→ Ask the question no one's asking. Especially the question others avoid. That person becomes irreplaceable.
→ Disagree without making it personal. Challenge the idea, not the human. This is rare and valuable.
→ Take feedback as data. The teammates who grew fastest treated feedback like data, useful information, not an attack.

Technical skill gets you hired.

How you show up determines how far you go.

🔗 Join my weekly newsletter to learn where to go deep so your teams move faster as things change. https://lnkd.in/gVhWe85t.

I’ve seen this pattern many times. 

The most dangerous leaders don’t even know they’re wrong.

Your team knows things you don't. The question is whether they'll tell you. 

Reed Hastings calls it "farming for dissent.. Because it's not normal to disagree with your boss".  

What I've learned:
→ Ask directly: "Are there things I could be doing better or differently?" Then wait through the silence.
→ Thank people publicly when they push back. Make disagreement visible and safe.
→ Treat pushback as a signal of trust, not criticism. They're telling you what you can't see.

When your team pushes back, that's a good sign. It means they care.

📍 I write a weekly newsletter for leaders navigating complexity, speed, and constant change. Link in comments.

Image inspired by Janis Ozolins

The hardest shift in my career wasn't technical.

It was realizing that empowerment requires more work, not less.

I thought I was doing it right. I trusted my team. Gave them autonomy. Dove deep in building systems and stayed out of their way so they could build too.

But I hadn't done the harder work first.

I hadn't built shared clarity on who we were serving. Hadn't defined what success actually looked like. Hadn't set up signals to know if we were off course. The team was working hard on things that didn't matter enough.

So when a senior leader said we were moving slowly, I was stunned. We were shipping constantly.

But he wasn't measuring effort. He was measuring impact.

And by that measure, we were standing still.

Here's what I missed:

Getting out of the way isn't the job.

Clearing the way is.

That means building the shared meaning and context your team needs to move with conviction. The guardrails to know you're on track. Before you step back.

Empowerment without that isn't leadership. It's abandonment with good intentions.

It's the lesson I hear most from leaders I interview. We think we're going deep. We're just deep in the wrong place.

📩 More like this in Activate, my weekly newsletter — link in comments.

The relationships that stall your team…

Are the ones you’re not looking at.

Most leaders invest time with people they like or people who already support them. That's comfortable. Those relationships matter. 

But the risk isn’t in the relationships you have. It’s in the ones you haven't built. These are the people who can make or break your project. 

They are often the ones who aren’t bought in yet. 

I map relationships on two axes:
→ Do we depend on them?
→ Are they invested in helping us?

That gives me four quadrants: 

1. BUILD (High Dependency, Low Support)
 → Your blocking problem
 → Start before it’s urgent
 → Meet them where they are

2.  INVEST (High Dependency, High Support)
 → Don’t take for granted
 → Bring them in as thought partners

3. NURTURE (Low Dependency, High Support)
 → Keep warm, don’t neglect
 → Show appreciation

4. INFORM (Low Dependency, Low Support)
 → Basic updates only
 → Don’t over-invest

You're not building relationships for visibility.
You're building them so your team can move. 

 🔗 Get the 2-page worksheet (framework + mapping questions) when you subscribe. Link in comments.

Overthinking feels safe. 

But it's fear in disguise.

You can't steer a parked car. But that's what I've watched so many leaders try to do, including me early on. 

Wait for more data. Wait for alignment. Wait until we're "ready."

Meanwhile, the team sits frozen. Momentum slows. The window closes.

Patrick Collison got this right:
"If you can make twice as many decisions at half the precision, that's often better."

Here's the reality:
→ Most decisions are reversible. The cost of being wrong is almost always smaller than the cost of being slow.
→ Momentum creates clarity. You learn more by doing. 
→ Certainty is a myth. Will more analysis actually change the call, or just postpone it? Often you are choosing between two good options. 
→ Waiting isn't free. Your team feels it. They lose energy. The best ones start to wonder why they're stuck.

The leaders I admired most weren't the ones who got it right every time. They decided. Learned and adjusted faster than everyone else.

Speed builds.

Hesitation doesn't.

🔗 Join my weekly newsletter to learn where to go deep so your teams move faster as things change. Link in comments.

Empowerment isn’t just stepping back.

It’s knowing when not to.

"Step back and let them run". 

A leader I interviewed learned the hard way why this advice is incomplete.

When one of his leads went on leave, he assumed he had it covered. Smart, senior engineers. Capable tech lead. Major refactoring project already kicked off.

So he didn't check in. Didn't ask why. Didn't verify scope or timelines.

Timelines kept quietly sliding and months later, he finally looked under the hood.

The team had built a "perfect" system for a problem nobody cared about anymore.

Not a disaster. But a lot of effort that didn't move the needle at all.

His reflection: "Trust is not a substitute for verification.” 

You can trust someone's judgment and still ask why. You can empower your team and still put in guardrails to know when something is off track.

I’ve been there too and this lesson has stuck with me.

Stepping back isn't a strategy. It's the last step.

Before you let go, build the floor: 
→ Dive deep — understand where things actually are 
→ Build clarity & guardrails — so the team knows what's theirs to decide and you know if things are off track
→ Then step back

The order matters.

🔗 Get the full framework—link in comments.

I'm working on a book and people asked how to follow along. 


Starting this week, I'm sharing what I'm learning as I go.

Every Tuesday: one short email. 

What I'm discovering, building, or rethinking.

Like this week: why knowing your mission isn't the same as knowing what to build.

Link is here: https://lnkd.in/gNgUb-pg

I've let things go for too long more times than I want to admit. 

Not understanding what was really happening. Then coming back and realizing that I didn't know how far off things had drifted.

By then, it's really hard to bring it back.

The hardest part? Everything looked "good enough." 

Progress was happening. People were busy. Nothing seemed that broken.

"Good enough" is the most dangerous signal. 
It tells you to step back when you should be digging in.

And while you're trusting the surface, the costs are quietly accumulating:
→ Your best people leave. Not dramatically. They just see that their work stopped mattering. And they quietly find teams where it does.
→ Trust erodes. They lose confidence that you can move at the speed you need to. 
→ The window closes. While you're figuring out something is wrong, competitors aren't waiting. By the time you see it, you're already behind.
→ People burn out. Talented people don't sit idle when things aren't working. They compensate to make up for the gaps. 

The first job of a leader is to see reality clearly.

But seeing isn't enough.

You have to be willing to act on what you find. To intervene. To rebuild what's missing. To stop asking your team to compensate for what's broken.

Your job isn't to trust what looks "good enough."

It's to cut the watermelon open and do something about what you find.

🔗 I write a weekly newsletter about engineering leadership and growth. Link in bio: Melody Olson.

Most companies are using a sledgehammer when they need a scalpel.


AT&T just showed what the alternative looks like.

They moved from massive general-purpose models to small, task-specific ones:
→ 90% cost reduction 
→ 70% faster processing 
→ Accuracy that met the need

Here's the thing: for most tasks, summarizing calls, parsing invoices, routing tickets, you don't need general intelligence. You need a specialized worker.

You also don't have to choose between big and small.
You can also use a reasoning model as the manager to route tasks to a fleet of fast, cheap specialists. 

This is the judgment call now:
- Where does broad reasoning matter? 
- Where is speed or lower resources the priority? 

The advantage in 2026 isn't the biggest model. It's the right architecture.

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