Merge to main
Merge to main
Podcast Description
Merge to Main is a podcast where we talk with people who've been in the trenches of tech leadership. No fancy buzzwords or corporate speak - just honest conversations about what it's actually like to build and lead engineering teams. Each week, we explore the real challenges of engineering leadership - from hiring and team culture to shipping quality products. Practical, no-nonsense conversations that help you become a better leader today.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast emphasizes engineering leadership themes such as hiring practices, team culture, quality assurance, and the adaptation to new technologies like AI. For instance, episodes might delve into hiring strategies that prioritize soft skills alongside technical abilities, examine cultural shifts within teams, and analyze the balance between quality and development speed.
Merge to Main is a podcast where we talk with people who’ve been in the trenches of tech leadership. No fancy buzzwords or corporate speak – just honest conversations about what it’s actually like to build and lead engineering teams. Each week, we explore the real challenges of engineering leadership – from hiring and team culture to shipping quality products. Practical, no-nonsense conversations that help you become a better leader today.
What happens when you throw out traditional team structures and rebuild them around missions instead of functions? Jan Hegewald, VP of Engineering at Taxdoo and former engineering leader at Zalando and SumUp, shares how he dissolved static component teams in favor of flexible, outcome-focused ”mission teams” that reformed every quarter around specific goals. The experiment worked brilliantly until it didn't.
Jan brings nearly two decades of experience building high-volume systems across e-commerce, FinTech, and point-of-sale infrastructure. At Zalando, his teams processed hundreds of thousands of product offers during Black Friday. At SumUp, he built the point-of-sale system now visible in stores across Europe, Australia, and Brazil. His career offers a rare perspective on what actually transfers between startup culture and enterprise scale.
In this episode, we explore:
How mission-based teams increase ownership but create tricky problems around code quality, knowledge retention, and maintenance work, plus the practical solutions that worked (and the seniority level required to pull it off)
Why treating QA as an enabling function rather than a gatekeeper changes the game for release velocity, even in heavily regulated FinTech environments
The hidden operational costs of AI that teams overlook: model drift, retraining cycles, and why ”garbage in, garbage out” still determines success more than any algorithm
What engineering leaders should actually hire for now, why the ”I only do backend” engineer is becoming obsolete and what holistic skill set replaces narrow specialization
Jan also pushes back on AI hype with examples from failed experiments (merchant price recommendations that solved nothing) versus measurable wins (size recommendations that cut returns). His advice for teams pressured to ”do AI”: treat it like normal product development, iterate fast using modern tools, and stop experiments that don't deliver customer value. Plus: why the old career advice to ”stay at one company forever” is now the riskiest move you can make.
Connect with Jan:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-hegewald/Link to the tshirt: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0FBKJJX7S
Connect with me:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianbarra/
Check out our awesome sponsor, dearmachines.com, QA AI Agents for Continuous Testing: https://www.dearmachines.com
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