Amanda Stapleton: Get Out of Your Comfort Zone to Innovate
By: Caleb Brown
June 17, 2025 26 min read
Aerospace and defense companies can’t afford to make mistakes. So how can their engineering teams innovate and grow while meeting strict safety standards? For Amanda Stapleton, it starts by leading with empathy, welcoming curiosity, and encouraging trial and error in non-critical settings.
At the time of this conversation, Amanda was vice president of technical services at Belcan Engineering. Today, she serves as systems engineering director of mission systems at Northrop Grumman, leading engineering initiatives that stretch across teams, disciplines, and borders. In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, she shares what it means to drive change in high-stakes environments while maintaining the trust, clarity, and rigor that complex systems demand.
Amanda reflects on how she builds buy-in across global teams, champions digital engineering practices, and creates space for experimentation in industries where the margin for error is razor thin.
Starting With a Global Perspective
Amanda’s leadership lens was shaped by a childhood decision to step outside her comfort zone.
She admired trailblazers such as Amelia Earhart, finding her own spark at a STEM camp before eighth grade. “I like tinkering with things and figuring out how things work,” Amanda said. “That’s what engineers do. They get to tinker with things and create new things and design things and help make the world a better place. When you phrase it that way … who wouldn’t want to do that, right?”
That mindset, along with a deep empathy for working across cultures, led her to intern at Rolls-Royce, work in the UK, and lead cross-border engineering programs. “If I’m comfortable, then I’m not growing,” she said.
When she moved overseas, she and her husband found community by participating in sporting events like Ultimate Frisbee. “It’s friends we have today. … It’s family we chose,” she said. That same instinct for connection shows up in her leadership style.
Leading Transformation Without Losing Trust
In aerospace and defense, innovation can’t come at the cost of safety. How do you lead change when change is inherently risky?
Amanda’s approach to digital engineering—in particular, model-based systems engineering—reflects careful, collaborative evolution. “As soon as you have one link in that chain that says, ‘No, this isn’t what we want’ … it starts to crumble,” she said. Successful transformation requires buy-in across the board. That starts by investing in education and creating trust.
Her advice? “Start small in a controlled environment, demonstrate it works, allow people to ask their questions and then build upon that.”
Amanda fosters innovation through a dedicated lab where engineers can pitch, prototype, and test ideas—physically or digitally—in a safe sandbox. Her goal is to empower her team through productive competition. “We can't have all of our engineers in the space at the same time. … but it also has that reward of, if you're able to take your prototype to a certain spot, then you can move it forward.”
Communication as an Engineering Discipline
Amanda’s leadership is driven by clarity and cadence. She holds biweekly team meetings, alternating between group syncs and one-on-ones. Once a month, she delivers a “State of the Union” update to a broader team. The goal? Inclusion, transparency, and alignment.
Her cross-cultural experience has also taught her the power of simply asking questions. “Don’t be afraid to ask,” she said. “If we walk into something and just sit in our ignorance … we’re often going to stub our toe a little bit.”
That humility shows up in how she empowers others: by recognizing the strengths of the people around her. “As a leader, your biggest asset is your team,” Amanda said. “I’m not the smartest person in the room… your job is to recognize who you can trust and go to.”
Transcript
Amanda Stapleton:
Critical thinking is what keeps us unique as humans. And if we lose that, then using that AI starts to be our downfall. So even though things can process faster—and maybe it gives a better result than the human could, can go through data significantly faster, especially when you think about cloud computing, than we could just as humans traditionally. But we have to be able to critically think and do that fact check. And maintaining that technical prowess as the engineering community, I think, that's part of our both biggest challenge and biggest opportunity.
Caleb Brown:
Hey everyone, and welcome to Keep Moving Forward, the podcast from X-Team for tech professionals who are passionate about growth, leadership, and innovation. I'm your host, Caleb Brown, and in each episode, we explore candid conversations with the tech industry's brightest minds, seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers, and visionary experts.
Today, I'm joined by Amanda Stapleton. At the time of our conversation, Amanda was VP of technical services at Belcan Engineering, and she has since moved into the new exciting role of systems engineering director of mission systems at Northrop Grumman. And her history is just as exciting. From a pivotal moment at a STEM camp before eighth grade to leading cutting-edge aerospace programs, Amanda's career has taken her across countries, industries, and evolving leadership challenges. She brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise and a people-first leadership approach.
In this episode, Amanda shares her insights on leading global engineering teams, navigating the cultural shifts that come with a digital transformation, and fostering innovation in a field where safety standards leave no room for error. We also talk about her leadership evolution, the importance of mentorship, and her perspective on the future of engineering in a world shaped by AI and digital engineering. If you're curious about how to lead through complexity, build trust across borders, and help the next generation thrive in engineering, this conversation is full of wisdom and inspiration. Let's get into it.
Amanda, super happy to be able to chat with you. Was lucky enough to go through your whole background as far as I could research, and really cool, interesting stuff there. Great background. I'm excited to really jump into it. But what I wanted to do, just to kick things off here, I believe it was on our prep call, you had mentioned attending GEMS Camp, that's Girls in Engineering, Math, and Science, before the eighth grade, and that totally changed your career trajectory. And I just want to see if you could tell us a little bit about that pivotal moment and what sparked that passion for engineering back then.
Amanda Stapleton:
Sure, yeah. For me, that was that decision point. Previously, I thought I was going to be an architect, and that was the route I was going. But I'd always been passionate about aerospace. Amelia Earhart actually was someone that I saw as a bit of an idol, the trail that she blazed within aviation for women. And so when I attended that camp and got exposed to the various different types of engineering and avenues that, not just a female engineer, but engineers in general, could take and go after, I thought, right, OK, I'm hooked. This is what I want to do. I like tinkering with things and figuring out how things work and it was that exposure within that camp that allowed me to recognize, oh, that's what engineers do. They get to tinker with things and create new things and design things and help make the world a better place. And when you phrase it that way, when you see that perspective, who wouldn't want to do that, right?
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. Yeah. And like I said, looking back on your career in general, it looks like you started, early experience at Rolls-Royce. And I'm really excited to hear how that shaped your approach to engineering and leadership early on. And also, it truly might be a good time, actually, to just hear a little bit about your full career trajectory, your path, how you got to where you are, and then start with that experience at Rolls-Royce, and we'll go from there.
Amanda Stapleton:
Sure. Yeah. So I'll start it where, from an engineering perspective, it all started, I'll say formally, from a career perspective. I went to Rose-Hulman, so it's an engineering school in Terre Haute, Indiana. So actually, this year, we turned 150 years old, the university did, and having females in that organization was still fairly new. I was actually on campus when we celebrated 10 years of females being on campus. So when you think about a university that's now 150 years old, it's still in its infancy from having a co-ed campus. And so that, to me, really prepared me for an engineering career because, as most of the folks probably recognize, females in engineering are a minority. We're not as evenly represented in that particular career field.
And so I started into Rolls-Royce and was really even more so going into a domain that, especially at the time, was not as female-focused. And so that opportunity not only honed in on my systems engineering thought process and how I approach problems and think about things, but started to really focus my trajectory on customer-facing and how do you communicate, how do you lead individuals if you don't have that direct ownership, if you will, of their career? And so it's a lot of continuous learning and exposure.
And then came back from that opportunity and transitioned to what, at the time, was still Rockwell Collins, now they're Collins Aerospace. And with that role, it was similar, leveraging my technical engineering background, but in a leading capacity. So helped us to certify a FADEC, so one of those edge control units, and get that team transitioned to engineering production and then eventually full-rate production. So when you think about designing these boxes, but you can't just design it, you have to be able to build it and manufacture it so that it can be used by the end user.
And so I actually helped transition all of those products from where we were, in northern Virginia, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where, at the time, Rockwell Collins was headquartered. And so again, everything is about communication, and how do you work well with others and lead and recognize you're always learning from everyone. Everyone has something that we can learn from them. So continued my career at Collins for a little while longer, and then got the opportunity with my current employer, which is Belcan Engineering. And with that, again, it's the same concept. It's working with people that I'd worked with early in my career, such as Rolls-Royce, and understanding their needs and how can we support them. And so going through that cycle, if you will, it's how can we operate more efficiently as humans first and then work through the business details, which is more or less where I'm at today.
Caleb Brown:
That absolutely makes sense. And yeah, like I said, I was really excited to have this conversation just because the industry, the domain is so fascinating, but also, like I said, you have such an interesting career and background in it. You had mentioned briefly in that about being in, I believe you said Europe, and I wanted to focus a little bit on, your career has taken you across multiple countries, I believe. And so I'm interested to know what motivated those international moves, but then furthermore, what were the impacts that experience had and how that changed your leadership style?
Amanda Stapleton:
Yeah, no, I love that question. And those that are around me a lot know I love to talk about that opportunity, because it's something I encourage everyone to go for because, exactly as you've said, it does change you as a person. It gives you more awareness. And for me in particular, I actually was an intern with Rolls-Royce, so I had already decided in my mind that, because Rolls-Royce is headquartered out of England, that I wanted to work out of England. I was going to start with Rolls-Royce after school. I wanted to be there so much so that my roommates and I, after college, we went on a trip before we started our big girl jobs, and we went over to the UK. And I told them, I said, "We need to stop at the train station in Derby," because we were just passing through, because Derby is where Rolls-Royce is located out of. And I said, "We need to stop because I'm going to be here. I'm going to work here one day." And they both thought I was a little crazy. And so we did, and we sat and we had lunch in a pub right there by the train station. And three, four years later, I'm there in Derby.
So for me, it was something that I knew I wanted that exposure and opportunity to have my eyes opened. And that's why I think it's important, in some capacity, to get outside of your comfort zone because, and I'm going to butcher the quote, but there's a quote that references staying in your comfort zone isn't where growth happens. Growth happens once you go past your comfort zone. So for me, that's a little bit of a life mantra, if you will, is that if I'm comfortable, then I'm not growing.
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. Yeah, and so at X-Team, where I work, we're a remote-first company and have engineers and employees all over the globe. And so there is some traveling involved, but also it's just nice to have coworkers that have these different experiences and you get to learn that. You become close with them, work with them often. And so yeah, I definitely knew that you had some positive thoughts about that and wanted to bring that up. I was also wondering if you could share perhaps a challenging moment in your career transition from individual contributor to leader and how you navigate that. And I'm asked that question because I know there's a lot of folks at home, even if they're a software engineer or something like that, are in that position, they're an individual contributor looking for those next steps. So yeah, I wonder if you could share a little bit of your experience there, and like I said, perhaps even a challenging moment of going from one to the other.
Amanda Stapleton:
Sure. Yeah, so actually when I joined my current company, I came in as a people manager, so call it hire/fire responsibility and that was the first time I'd ever had that. So all of my other leadership roles were just that, I was leading and I was influencing. And so I was very focused on building relationships, some even towards friendships and how do we work together as a unit. And I was very unsure of myself on, how's this going to work? Now I'm the boss. If there's a disciplinary problem, I'm the one that needs to address it, as opposed to, previously, I could just highlight there's an opportunity for improvement and take it to the person's manager. Now that's me. And it took a lot of focus and actually some training to understand that relationship with the employee does need to be a little bit different. It's not just a friendship. In order to truly do that individual to the best of their career, you need to be willing and able to give them that constructive feedback.
Caleb Brown:
And wanted to switch a little bit to digital engineering leadership, if you will. And I'm interested in how you're approaching implementing these digital engineering practices in what I imagine is a traditional aerospace environment.
Amanda Stapleton:
So within digital engineering, especially within aerospace, and even more so on the defense side of aerospace, it's an evolving domain. Especially if you think about model-based systems engineering, that's a newer practice. Using those models, specifically with the DOD, they have rolled down mandates that we're supposed to use Cameo. So there's these specifics that organizations are now having to be compliant with. And it's a new style of working. It's a new way to think about documenting your system and how do you move forward and now how do you truly get the value of that digital space and have the connectivity between your systems engineer writing those requirements and disseminating them into your designers, who then are disseminating them into the manufacturing domain and having to work through the build processes. And then you're now fielded, and you're getting information back from the field. And how is that truly connected?
And to do that effectively, it takes a team. That isn't a singular person saying, "We're going to go forward with digital engineering." It has to be an organization that is bought into it, because as soon as you have one link in that chain that says, "No, this isn't what we want," or, "This isn't the best fit," either through lack of knowledge about what the value is for them or it's just not something that organization is ready for, it starts to crumble. And so it's got to be thought of as a team initiative, and a team initiative where you're bringing people in to understand how this works and listen to the experts. The people that have done it "the old way," they are going to have lessons learned and value to provide as you look at implementing a new process for how to engineer the next generation of fighter jets, for example.
Caleb Brown:
100%. That's really interesting of learning from the old ways, but still being able to innovate and move forward and learning from that, is very fascinating. What are some of the biggest challenges in reducing development cycles while also maintaining those safety standards that we touched on?
Amanda Stapleton:
So with aerospace, as I think people would hope, it's slow to change. Once we have something that is established and we're confident and safe, it's been proven, we shy away from change because change is uncertainty, and uncertainty normally leads to risk. And so with those, it's understanding what do those certification cycles look like, what do the tool certifications look like, so that we can shorten those design cycle times without reducing any level of safety or any level of confidence in the product that's being put out the door.
And that's mostly the space that the industry is sitting in, is understanding the tools, understanding how could we shorten test cycle times, leveraging the models, or in often instances, it's that digital twin. How can we use the data we have in front of us, recognizing that's based on the metal that's been cut and what the actual product will be, so that we can create a more efficient, faster delivery of the product while maintaining at or above safety requirements. And that's where the industry is trying to figure out what's the best practice, how does this look, how do we do this efficiently? And there's a lot of, as you can imagine, a lot of conversation. No one's really gone the whole way through the cycle and done it yet, so I think that's where everyone is sitting, waiting for that first adopter so everybody else can see, OK, what's the lessons learned? What do we need to do then?
Caleb Brown:
Yeah, well, so how do you manage the cultural shift that's required when implementing those new digital engineering processes? Because as you said, it is probably good that that industry has very strong standards and doesn't move too fast, but there is innovation, there is things moving forward, and so there's a cultural shift there. Interested in how you manage that.
Amanda Stapleton:
A lot of it is based on communication. People often fear things they don't understand. So the first step is giving them access to the education, having sessions to help them understand what that really means. They can understand the word “digital,” they can understand “engineering” or “model-based,” those sorts of individual words. What does that really mean? And helping them with that knowledge base.
And then we've also found it's better to not go after everything. Don't try and boil the ocean. Identify what is a small project that we could do first, start to demonstrate, allow people to ask questions, potentially fail, but fail quickly in a small, less safety-critical environment, and then grow from there. If you just look out and you say, "Right, I want to go after my entire product line and we're going to switch everything over in the next 12 months," that's quite a large goal, and that is most likely going to have some stumbling along the way. Start small in a controlled environment, demonstrate it works, allow people to ask their questions and then build upon that.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I wanted to talk a little bit, going back, as we were talking about travel and things like that, and culture. How does leading teams across different countries, and therefore cultures, impact your communication approach overall?
Amanda Stapleton:
That's a great question, and that's actually something I'm always learning, depending on which individuals, their backgrounds, their cultures, that I'm working with. What I've found through some missteps and stumbles along the way is don't be afraid to ask. Allowing us to sit in assumption space versus directly asking the person to say, “Hey, I don't want to be rude to you. Help me better understand what is accepted for you” so that, when I hear yes, for example, and the other individual—those were the letters that were said, that was the word that was said—but they don't interpret yes the same way I interpret yes, for example, can cause a lot of friction within a project. We think we're going fine. And then the team over here says, "Well, no, actually we aren't." And it can create that conflict that if we just address what's our best style of working, how do we communicate, what do these different interactions mean? And sometimes it helps to go outside of the team and ask someone else who's perhaps interacted with that culture, that team, that environment. Say, "Hey, what did you experience? What are some lessons learned? What can I take into it?" Because if we walk into something and just sit in our ignorance versus wanting to dispel that and ask those good questions, we're often going to stub our toe a little bit.
Caleb Brown:
100%. As I said, I work with folks from all over the world, and it's been so helpful to have resources like that, bosses, colleagues that have worked in those environments and with those folks before, and just being able to tap them on the shoulder and say, "This is my approach I'm going to go into it with, what do you think, knowing your experience?” It's been incredibly helpful for me. And I want to stay on that topic, again, because I find this very fascinating. What unique challenges did you face when moving your family overseas for work? It's a big thing. I agree that people should do it, if they can. It's a big thing. How did you overcome those challenges?
Amanda Stapleton:
I think that, so my family and I, we've had the opportunity to move quite a few times over the years, and I've told this especially to individuals that are just coming out of college and are entertaining, potentially, going for an overseas role, is find something where you can connect with people. So for my family, in particular, it's Ultimate Frisbee. So my husband and I both used to play. So wherever we're moving, we look for where's the local club? Where do they play pickup on a Sunday afternoon? Where's this club play? Where can we go to a tournament and watch other folks and find our tribe, find people that we can instantly connect with? No matter what their other background is, we know Ultimate Frisbee, that's our group.
So the first time we moved over to the UK, that's exactly what we did. We ended up actually living in Nottingham, even though I was working in Derby, because Nottingham had, well, two reasons. One, they had the most curry houses per square mile. And two, they had a strong Ultimate Frisbee scene. And so we ended up playing for the team there. We do pickup, that sort of thing. And through those friendships, through that common bond, that linkage, we were able to expand our network and get information about schools and get information about where we should go on holiday and what sorts of airlines to use and which ones maybe to avoid when looking at low cost. So all of those things that you don't necessarily glean from just reading a book or looking a place up online. Relationships, to me, were the key to us being successful. And through identifying individuals through that common bond, I mean, it's friends we have today. Actually two of the friends, this is now years ago, but for my husband's 30th birthday, I flew them in as a surprise. It's effectively family. It's family we chose. So for us, that was how we always were able to go through those changes in environment.
Caleb Brown:
Yeah, I love that. Finding something familiar from home in somewhere new is always a comforting feeling, and that makes a ton of sense and it helps. Something like Ultimate Frisbee is a really good example of that. It's active, there's a community. That makes a lot of sense. And my apologies, because this relates probably more to two questions ago, but I do want to ask you, I do want to drill in a little bit more. Interested in how you maintain consistency in engineering practices across multiple teams that are international teams, and still respecting local work cultures and things like that. I know we touched on that, but I did want to drill in a little bit more.
Amanda Stapleton:
So for a lot of our teams that cross multiple cultures or countries, for those to be effective, at least in my experience, you need to have a local technical lead and then an overall technical lead. Because your local technical lead is going to not only have the face-to-face interactions—we'll table remote work for a moment—but to have those face-to-face interactions with the other team members, they know them a little bit better, and they obviously are also aware of the culture for that particular area. But then when you have that overall technical focal, that's where you start to get that consistency. So even though there's nuances to each individual location or setting, it does allow for consistency on the total deliverable, the work product that goes out the door. And those need to be, at least in my experience, those need to be kept as a cadence. So those team members need to be meeting, if not daily, at least weekly, so that they are reviewing those things, the ability to ask questions, and understand this is a gold standard output. What does it look like coming out of this domain, for example?
Caleb Brown:
Interested in how you ensure remote team members feel as included and as valued as in-office staff. And obviously, that's something that was pre-pandemic, with having an HQ and then distributed teams. But I'm interested, it's a little bit of a spin on what we were talking about with just purely remote. I'm just interested in how you bring in those folks in a more work-focused way. Obviously, doing those things outside the office, very helpful, but curious your approach there.
Amanda Stapleton:
So that's actually something that I started to hone through the pandemic situation because it was a little bit forced upon us. But I've come across a cadence that seems to work not only for myself but for my team members and, more broadly, the team is that every other week, I'll have a team meeting. And so that team is my direct reports. And so for folks that don't have direct reports, we might have to modify that model, but every other week is everyone in the team. And then on the off week is when I hold one-on-ones with everyone. And so that way, not only do you get time with the team, understand and know what they're working on, but you get your dedicated personal time.
And then once a month, I do, short of a better phrase, a State of the Union. So it's a more broad team, not just my direct reports, but all of those that have an interest, in my instance, I run system software. So I have all of the leaders for system software attend, and I give them updates on how we're doing from a business perspective, how we're doing from a new-customer perspective, and allow them an opportunity to ask questions, and then a little bit of a look ahead. These are some of the cool projects that are coming, or this is something that, as a team, we're going to work on next year. It's going to be in our 2025 strategy, for example, and allow that so that they feel that they are part of the team, even if they're not across the hall from me every day.
Caleb Brown:
I wanted to go a little bit more into engineering culture and innovation. How do you foster that culture of innovation? We talked about it a little bit, but while maintaining those very strict safety standards in aerospace, I'm just trying to understand how you balance making sure everything is strict and according to safety protocols, but also a true culture of innovation moving forward, thinking how we can do this differently.
Amanda Stapleton:
No, I love that question. And quite honestly, that's a question that, as an organization, and I anticipate many organizations, we've asked ourselves the past several years, is how do we, especially in a remote working world, how do we continue to promote innovation so that the next big idea is being pushed and these engineers, these individuals are thinking about those things? And so we actually have what we call an innovation lab. So it's both a physical and a digital environment that our engineers can put forward suggestions or ideas of things that they think would be a cool idea, or something that could help us be more efficient or help the customer be more efficient, or a better way of doing a particular design.
And we have, I guess you could call it, a board, people who evaluate those ideas. And then funding and time is allocated to those engineers to go into the lab, either physically or digitally. We operate within an AWS environment, so allow them to deliver a prototype, if you will, and test out their idea and bring on board how could this actually work in a sandbox environment, in a non-safety critical, non-customer environment, trial it out. So that then we can say, "Right, is this ready for prime time?" So it gives them a space. It's a little bit of competition because not everyone gets access to that. We can't have all of our engineers in the space at the same time. So there's some level of that competition, but it also has that reward of, if you're able to take your prototype to a certain spot, then you can move it forward and present it to the customer and hopefully implement it, pushing it through that formal set of wickets within the aerospace domain.
Caleb Brown:
That's so cool. For one, the innovation lab exists, I love that. But also, yeah, that makes a ton of sense, but I would be envious. It sounds like it would be very fun to work at the innovation lab. That is, like I said, why I was so excited to do this, because my background's in software development. I'm typically talking to other software developers, and I understand the space pretty well, I would say. And so this was one that was a little bit different for me, a little newer for me. So it's fun to ask these questions and understand more of how it works under the hood.
So I wanted to, and this is actually,, we're starting to wrap up. I only have four or five more, but this is my favorite part. We save for the end some future outlook stuff, and I love talking about that. So I wanted to kick it off with just asking you, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for digital engineering in the aerospace industry over the next, call it, a decade or so?
Amanda Stapleton:
Yeah, I think the largest opportunity that we have within digital engineering is reducing the amount of actual test time with the units. So if you think about, from a cost and from a timeline perspective, the more that we can test and not only test, but reliably test within that digital environment versus the actual hardware that's produced, the better the product's going to be. And as you start to refine that model, and that digital twin is truly representative of what is fielded, you're going to have safer, more efficient machines, and those are going to be able to continue to evolve at a faster rate. So to me and to a lot of my team members, that's what we're most excited about is, how do we shorten the cycle time and improve continuously, versus just when you're deploying the product? It's cycling back through and those continuous updates, improvement, and understanding the model versus the “as built,” and closing the gap between the two.
Caleb Brown:
Interesting. And how do you, this is definitely a more leadership-focused question, but interested in how you think leadership in engineering will evolve as we continue to become more and more distributed and diverse, as we've covered. Just interested, as that becomes more of the norm than the exception, just how that changes leadership in engineering.
Amanda Stapleton:
That's a great question. That's actually something, I’m roughly mid-career, that I'm thinking through, and how do I continue to improve myself? And I think a piece of it, and even within the digital engineering realm, I'm not the smartest person in the room, and recognizing that, as a leader, your biggest asset is recognizing who on your team that you can trust and go to and can help coach and lead. It is paramount.
So it's a little bit of a different model than perhaps we're used to seeing in leadership where, if you're at the top of the pyramid, what you say goes. It's recognizing you may be at the top because you have strong leadership attributes, but technically, there might be people who have five years experience that have vastly more technical knowledge in that particular domain because it's software, it's tools, it's products that we've had to learn as professionals 20 years into our career versus something that, students are coding Python now and in grade school. It's just a different environment, and being able to recognize as a leader, to swallow a little bit of that pride, and that, as a leader, your biggest attribute is your team.
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. That makes sense. Again, my favorite part of the segment and perhaps my favorite question is, as I'm excited to learn more about this, what emerging technologies are you seeing now that you're most excited about in terms of transforming aerospace development in general?
Amanda Stapleton:
So something that, as an organization, we've been experimenting with, if you will, is AI. And how does that leverage how we develop our products, whatever that may be, whether it's an engine or an airframe or a missile or whatever it needs to be, especially within defense and aerospace domain? And as you could imagine, it's an area that, especially on the military side of things, people are a little nervous about. What does this really mean? How do we know that it's right?
And so I think that is our biggest opportunity, and simultaneously our biggest threat, is not leaning so heavily on this ever-improving tool that we lose the ability for critical thought. And that critical thinking is what keeps us unique as humans. And if we lose that, then using that AI starts to be our downfall. So even though things can process faster, and maybe it gives a better result than the human could, can go through data significantly faster—especially when you think about cloud computing—than we could just as humans traditionally. But we have to be able to critically think and do that fact check. And maintaining that technical prowess as the engineering community, I think that's part of our both biggest challenge and biggest opportunity.
Caleb Brown:
100%. And that makes sense. And being an emerging tech and being just the nature of AI. But that's good to hear, that we're exploring it, we're looking into it, but right, a little skeptical or at least a little measured in the right approach to it, I think makes a lot of sense. And I wanted to just close out, I believe my last question of this interview, going a little full circle. I just wanted to see what advice you'd have for young women out there considering a career in engineering and, specifically, engineering leadership.
Amanda Stapleton:
So I would suggest to reach out to someone, so especially with platforms we've got these days, LinkedIn and so forth, there are females in engineering around the world. Find someone that you admire, look up to, has a role, either an organization or type of field that you're interested in, and reach out. When folks reach out to me and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about maybe doing engineering," or, "I'm a freshman and interested about going this," 100%, I love to help coach and support. And quite honestly, I have yet to come across another female in engineering that has not been more than willing to bend over backwards and say, "How can I help you? What do you need to know? I'd love to sit down for a coffee or a lunch or breakfast and better understand you and what are your fears? What are you concerned about?"
I actually do a mentorship at one of the schools that I went to, as well, and being able to give back, I don't think is a unique thing to me. Women in engineering recognize that we are a minority, and the only way to bring us up and level that playing field is to get more women in engineering. And that's through information and coaching and them seeing someone that looks like them. It's a lot easier to identify with a career path or a role or a company when you look at it and say, "Oh, well, there's someone else who's gone through the challenges that I might go through. I can look up to them as a mentor, and they can help me along the way."
Caleb Brown:
Absolutely. Great advice. And obviously, I can't speak to a woman in engineering, but I can tell you one of the great lessons that unlocked for me a little later on was that cold emailing works, that so many folks out there do want to help. And you're a little hesitant, you're a little scared because they're a stranger, or you feel like you're bothering them. Dropping someone a short message or short email or something, it works more times than I would expect it to. And so, if there's someone that you want to pick their brain, you look up to them, admire them, they're in your field or a field you want to be in, it does not hurt to reach out and see what happens. But yeah, I think that is an awesome point to end on your advice there. And yeah, Amanda, thank you so much for joining. Like I said, it was an honor for me to get to learn a little bit more about an industry I don't know a ton about and dig in there. So thank you so much for joining today.
Amanda Stapleton:
No, thank you for having me. It was great.
Caleb Brown:
What an inspiring conversation with Amanda about leadership, transformation, and staying grounded in your values while working on the future of aerospace. What stood out to me most was Amanda's approach to balancing innovation with rigor. In an industry where safety is non-negotiable, she helps teams explore new technologies like AI and digital engineering while maintaining the highest standards of reliability. Her emphasis on communication, culture, and critical thinking reminds us that transformation is much about people as it is about the tools.
I also loved hearing how Amanda builds connection and trust with her teams, from leveraging consent, communication cadences, to championing inclusion across borders. Her advice for aspiring women in engineering—reach out, ask questions, find someone who's walked the path—is something we can all learn from, no matter where we are in our careers. Thank you, Amanda, for sharing your journey and your leadership philosophy. And thank you to our listeners for being part of this conversation. It's stories like these that remind us why we keep moving forward.
Join us next time for more insightful conversations with tech leaders who inspire us to grow, lead and innovate. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. And don't forget to share this episode if it resonated with you. Until next time.
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