How do you build an engineering organization from zero to 700 professionals? What happens when your biggest leadership lesson comes from a broken leg and a Border Collie?

In this episode of Senors @ Scale, I sit down with Lucian Popovici, a force multiplier in tech leadership with 20+ years of experience scaling engineering organizations at Ericsson, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte Digital. Lucian is the founder of Bridging Innovation, an enterprise strategy advisory and AI consultancy, and Bridging Gaps, a pro bono mentoring community of 80+ senior tech leaders that has delivered over 3,000 hours of free mentoring to 400+ professionals in Romania.

Lucian shares the raw, unfiltered story of his transition from Java developer to engineering director, including the panic attacks he didn't acknowledge, the "control freak" feedback that changed everything, and why he believes informal leadership matters more than titles. We go deep on how AI is reshaping team structures (from 10-person teams to 5), why junior developer roles are disappearing, why Romania's IT industry needs to shift from body leasing to product thinking, and his bold take that project managers should "die" as a role. Whether you're scaling your first team or building your hundredth, this conversation is packed with hard-won wisdom.

🔸 KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED

- Scaling engineering organizations from scratch at Deutsche Bank, Deloitte Digital, and beyond

- The brutal transition from developer to leader and why most people aren't prepared

- Manager vs. leader: why less ego and more empathy changes everything

- Why flat organizations beat pyramid schemes of managers

- How AI is cutting team sizes in half and eliminating junior roles

- The Romanian IT industry's transformation from outsourcing to product and consultancy

- Why 85% more time is now spent on code reviews than writing code

- Fractional CIO/CTO roles and why SMBs desperately need them

- Building a pro bono mentoring community of 80+ senior leaders

- AI readiness: why most companies fail at AI implementation before they even start

- The startup ecosystem in Romania and why this is the best time for non-technical founders

- Why project managers should disappear (but product managers never will)

- The engineering mindset vs. role segregation in modern teams

- Adaptability and curiosity as the core leadership skills for 2030

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Lucian Popovici

02:22 From Developer to Leader: The Brutal Transition

06:27 Manager vs. Leader: Ego, Empathy, and Flat Orgs

09:28 Scaling Organizations (Without a Playbook)

11:23 How AI Is Reshaping Team Structures

16:02 Is Romania's IT Industry Scaling Down?

24:40 The "Control Freak" Feedback That Changed Everything

29:37 How Bridging Gaps Started (The Border Collie Story)

36:30 From Corporate to Entrepreneur: Bridging Innovation

45:59 The Future of Engineering Roles and Leadership

🔗 FOLLOW LUCIAN

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucianpopovici/

🌐 Bridging Innovation: https://bridging-innovation.com

🤝 Bridging Gaps: https://bridging-gaps.ro/

📝 Blog: https://lucianpopovici.com

🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

🎙 Podcast URL: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/señors-scale/

📚 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- HowToWeb Conference: https://www.howtoweb.co

- Ascendis Training: https://www.ascendis.ro

#EngineeringLeadership #ScalingTeams #TechLeadership #AI #SoftwareEngineering #StartupRomania #EngineeringManagement #ProBonoMentoring #FractionalCTO #AgileLeadership #DevOps #TeamScaling #SenorsAtScale

💬 Have you made the jump from developer to leader? What was your biggest challenge? Share in the comments!

What makes a great tech lead? It's not just technical chops—it's the soft skills that scale your impact beyond your own keyboard.

In this episode, I sit down with Anemari Fiser, an engineering leader, O'Reilly author, and coach who's spent over a decade helping engineers make the leap from individual contributor to technical leader. Anemari has led teams at ThoughtWorks through massive transformations (think monolith-to-microservices, datacenter-to-AWS migrations), coached 500+ engineers, and trained 300+ tech leads worldwide.

Her new book, "Leveling Up as a Tech Lead," distills years of hands-on experience into practical frameworks for the hardest role in tech. We explore why so many senior engineers struggle with the transition, how to measure success when you're no longer shipping code, and the collaboration techniques that actually work in real-world teams.

This conversation goes deep on the unglamorous but essential work of technical leadership—from running effective 1-on-1s to delegation that empowers rather than bottlenecks, from defining what success means for you to navigating the brutal tech lead job market.

🔸 KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED

- The journey from software engineer to product director—and what she learned along the way

- Why soft skills, not just technical expertise, determine your impact at scale

- The critical difference between senior engineers and tech leads

- How to transition from "doing the work" to "enabling the work"

- Why your success as a tech lead depends entirely on your team's success

- The accountability framework that drives consistent growth in others

- How to get people out of their comfort zones without breaking trust

- The power of intentional growth vs. accidental learning

- Measuring impact when you're not writing code anymore

- Why 1-on-1s are your secret weapon (and how to run them effectively)

- The delegation playbook that removes pressure while empowering your team

- Networking strategies that actually work in today's tech job market

- How to interview for tech lead roles—and spot the red flags

- The collaboration techniques that scale teams beyond individual heroics

⏱️ CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Anemari Fiser

00:58 Early Career: From University to First Tech Job

04:09 Balancing Work and University in Romania

09:00 First Job Experiences and Learning to Code

12:02 The Importance of Accountability in Leadership

16:07 Strategies for Encouraging Growth in Others

20:03 Intentional Growth and Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

20:56 Scaling Soft Skills in Tech

23:57 Senior Engineer vs. Tech Lead: What's the Difference?

26:55 Making the Transition from Senior Engineer to Tech Lead

29:40 Expanding Your Team's Impact Beyond Your Own Work

31:01 The Tech Lead Role Across Different Companies

32:32 Balancing Hands-On Technical Work with Leadership

34:29 Defining Success as a Tech Lead

38:10 Measuring Impact and Setting Personal OKRs

42:07 Guiding Junior Engineers: Teaching vs. Enabling

43:51 Job Hunting Strategies in the Current Tech Market

46:10 Why Networking is Your Best Job Search Tool

50:52 Interviewing for Tech Lead Roles: Green Flags and Red Flags

53:28 Key Takeaways from "Leveling Up as a Tech Lead"

📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED

- Anemari's Book: "Leveling Up as a Tech Lead" (O'Reilly) - https://www.amazon.com/[BOOK-LINK]

- Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson

- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

- The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier

- Continuous Deployment by Valentina Servile

- The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

🔗 FOLLOW ANEMARI

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anemari-fiser

- Website: https://anemarifiser.com

🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

🎙 Podcast URL: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/se%C3%B1ors-scale/

MicroFrontends at Scale with Florian Rappl | The Art of Modular Architecture

What if you could build web applications where teams could deploy independently without breaking each other's code? In this episode, we sit down with Florian Rappl—author of "The Art of Micro Frontends," creator of the Piral framework, and Microsoft MVP—to explore how micro frontends are transforming how we build scalable web applications.

Florian shares hard-won lessons from over a decade of building distributed systems, from smart home platforms to enterprise portals for some of Germany's largest companies. We dive deep into the philosophy behind Piral, why modular architecture isn't just about using multiple frameworks, and how micro frontends might be the key to unlocking AI-powered development workflows.

🔸 Key Topics Discussed:

- The evolution from monolithic frontends to true modular architecture

- Why loose coupling is more important than multi-framework support

- How Piral solves the orchestration problem that Module Federation doesn't

- The "inverse dependency" pattern that makes micro frontends resilient

- Building enterprise portals that scale across hundreds of teams

- Server-side rendering and SEO challenges in micro frontend architectures

- Why Cloudflare Workers and edge computing are game-changers for MFEs

- The future of AI-assisted development in modular codebases

- Lessons learned from smart home systems, customer portals, and production deployments

Whether you're an architect evaluating micro frontends for your organization or a developer curious about modular patterns that actually work in production, this conversation offers battle-tested insights you won't find in the documentation.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction & Welcome

01:31 - The Origin Story of Piral

04:30 - The Micro Frontend Landscape in 2019

08:05 - Piral vs Module Federation: Understanding the Difference

12:15 - The Inverse Dependency Pattern

18:20 - Building Enterprise Portals at Scale

25:40 - Server-Side Rendering & SEO Challenges

35:10 - Cloudflare Workers & Edge Computing for Micro Frontends

45:25 - Cross-Framework Components & the Converter API

52:30 - Discovery Services & Dynamic Module Loading

58:15 - AI-Assisted Development & Modular Architecture

1:04:01 - Book Recommendations

📚 Resources Mentioned:

- Piral Framework: https://piral.io

- The Art of Micro Frontends (2nd Edition) by Florian Rappl

- Building Micro-Frontends (2nd Edition) by Luca Mezzalira

- Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku

- Release It! by Michael T. Nygard

- Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble & David Farley

🔗 Follow Florian:

- LinkedIn: [Add Florian's LinkedIn]

- Twitter/X: [Add Florian's Twitter]

- GitHub: [Add Florian's GitHub]

🎙️ Follow & Subscribe:

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

🎙 Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/señors-scale/

#MicroFrontends #WebDevelopment #SoftwareArchitecture #Piral #ModuleFederation #ScalingSoftware #EnterpriseArchitecture #JavaScript #React #DevOps

💬 What's your experience with micro frontends? Have you tried Piral or other frameworks? Let us know in the comments!

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Señors @ Scale is a podcast exploring the technical decisions, architectural patterns, and scaling strategies that power modern software systems. Each episode features deep conversations with engineers, architects, and technical leaders building software that serves millions.