Fanatics’ Justin Kerestes on Remote Leadership, Scaling Fast, and Operational Excellence

Strong engineering leadership isn’t a single grand gesture. Instead, it’s the sum of everyday choices.

For Justin Kerestes, senior vice president of engineering at Fanatics Betting & Gaming, trust is built in small moments, culture shapes how you lead, and operational excellence turns speed into durable progress. From moving his family to Scotland mid-pandemic to running ~35 one-on-ones a week, Justin has learned how to scale organizations rapidly while keeping people connected and standards high.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Justin shares how to flex leadership across cultures, balance “ship fast” with “build to last,” and use operational excellence to make change safer at scale. If you’re growing a team and want clarity without losing momentum, this one’s for you.

  • 35 min

Fanatics’ Justin Kerestes on Remote Leadership, Scaling Fast, and Operational Excellence

Keep Moving Forward

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Trust Is About the Everyday

For Justin, leadership isn’t about one defining act of authenticity — it’s about the small, repeated interactions that build credibility over time. He believes trust grows through consistency, humility, and showing up as a real person rather than a polished persona. “Trust isn’t just built in a moment,” he explains. “You can be authentic for one big moment and inauthentic for 50 small ones, and you’re not going to be a trusted leader.”

He rejects the notion that leadership requires perfection. For him, authenticity lives in the day-to-day details: admitting when you’re wrong, acknowledging uncertainty, and connecting with your team as people first. Those everyday behaviors, repeated over time, are what earn confidence and loyalty — not grand gestures or big speeches.

Justin’s approach to leadership reflects a belief that credibility compounds. In remote environments, especially where informal signals are easy to miss, small moments of honesty have an outsized impact. When leaders show that they’re human and transparent, they create the psychological safety that allows teams to bring their best work forward.

He also sees this principle as foundational to scaling trust. The higher up you go, the less direct visibility you have — but every interaction still matters. “There’s no big bang of authenticity,” he says. “It’s built in the little moments.”

Leading Across Cultures

When Justin and his family moved from the U.S. to Scotland in the middle of the pandemic, he quickly discovered that effective leadership doesn’t look the same everywhere. What worked in one cultural context didn’t always translate to another. The experience, he says, reshaped how he thinks about influence and alignment.

Early on, he approached a major change initiative — introducing an on-call system for the engineering team — with the direct, efficiency-focused style he was used to. It didn’t land well. “I went at it full American style,” he recalls. “I was ambitious and wanted to prove myself. But the team felt like I was being overbearing and didn’t feel bought in.” The rollout had to be paused. Months later, he returned to the same problem alongside a local leader and saw how a more patient, consensus-driven approach achieved better results.

That experience reinforced a key lesson: leadership must flex with context. Cultural differences, organizational histories, and even small variations in team norms all influence how change is received. “Your leadership style needs to flex for the culture of the group you’re working with,” Justin says. “Even small shifts in approach can ripple across a 300-person org.”

Today, he brings that cultural adaptability to every new integration or acquisition at Fanatics. By listening first and co-creating change with teams, he’s learned to move faster by slowing down — aligning people before pushing forward.

Operational Excellence as a Product

Justin’s passion for operational excellence (OE) comes from viewing it not as a checklist but as a product — something engineering owns, evolves, and continuously improves. In his words, it’s “the ultimate expression of customer obsession” inside an engineering organization.

When Fanatics Betting & Gaming went from zero to one, speed mattered most. Shipping fast and learning quickly required tradeoffs. But as the organization matured, reliability became non-negotiable. Shifting that mindset, Justin explains, demanded persistence and clear communication. “Technology and mechanisms are hard,” he says, “but the hardest thing to do, once you’ve set behaviors, is change them.”

To build lasting stability, he designed OE as an evolving system. It begins with incidents — measuring, learning, and responding quickly. Then it matures into a culture of written reflection through correction-of-error documents, where teams analyze what went wrong and how to prevent it. From there, the focus shifts to proactive telemetry: tuning systems until engineers can “hear the creaks” before failure. The final stage is refining CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment frequency while lowering change failure rates, making small, safe changes routine.

For Justin, operational excellence is both technical and cultural. It’s about instilling pride in how the organization builds, learns, and responds — and ensuring that as Fanatics grows, its systems and people can scale together. “It’s not about delivering,” he says. “It’s about building an organization that delivers.”

Transcript

Justin Kerestes:

Trust isn't just built in a moment, it's built in this series of small interactions that ultimately add up to trust. You can be authentic for one big moment and inauthentic for 50 small ones, and you're not going to be a trusted leader. For me, it's not like this big bang of authenticity. It's like in the little moments...

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 dive into candid conversations with the tech industry's brightest minds, seasoned leaders, forward-thinking engineers, and visionary experts.

Today, I'm joined by Justin Kerestes, senior vice president of engineering at Fanatics Betting & Gaming. Justin's career journey took him from economics into tech with stops at household names, like Amazon, before leading engineering teams through the high stakes world of sports betting and gaming. Along the way, he's learned how to scale organizations rapidly without losing sight of culture. He's also sharpened his approach to keeping people connected in remote-first environments and learned why authenticity and leadership matters more than polish.

In this conversation, Justin shares insights on building resilient engineering organizations leading through cultural differences and balancing relentless execution with long-term excellence. If you're thinking about how to grow your team while staying grounded in the why beyond the work, this episode has plenty of lessons worth taking with you. Let's get started.

Thank you so much for joining today. I had the pleasure of chatting with you on a previous call to do a little prep for this, and you have such an interesting journey and have worked in really diverse, different industries, and I'm really excited to learn more and to really dive into it. So yeah, thank you so much for joining me today.

Justin Kerestes:

Thanks for having me here.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. On that prep call that I mentioned, you described yourself as a failed economist who found his way into tech, again, I believe your words, not mine. Maybe you could walk us through that journey from economics to leading a, I believe, 250-plus person engineering organization, so pretty large and a pretty different world from where you began.

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah, I'm happy to. My undergraduate degree was in economics and, honestly, I was always kind of a mediocre economist. I got through my classes, I went through the motions, I did fine in school, but it was never really an area of intense passion for me. It was just kind of the thing that I went in and I chose to do. Before I finally chose it, I'd gone through so many different options for my degrees. I had been in international relations, I had been in politics, I had been in CompSci for a little bit that ultimately added to and sparked my interest in the engineering industry. So I'd gone around a lot before I'd finally settled and just said, "All right. Economics is good enough." And it's funny because I think a lot of my personality is baked in that desire to experiment and try new things and change. That was kind of an interesting reflection for me as I continue to grow in my careers, very, very, very prone to trying new things.

But not only was I kind of a mediocre economist, I also graduated at the height of the financial crisis, and so it was this moment in time where there was just this incredibly intense competition in the industry, banks were failing, jobs were scarce. Honestly, I was going through the motions of interviewing and I just wasn't a compelling candidate. I'd gone through a few of these interviews. I was starting to get nervous because I was approaching the time when I would graduate, and so I was starting to ask myself like, "What the hell am I going to do here?" You hear this a lot from folks who end up being in engineering, but, a lot of them, they just grew up as tinkers and they built computers or they took their toys apart to watch how the insides of their constructions work. That was me.

I always have been into computers. I'd always been adjacent to computers and technology. One of the ways that I had paid my way through my undergraduate was I had three different jobs in IT. I actually worked close to 60 hours a week in those three different jobs in all of my spare times, probably the reason I was such a mediocre economist for what it's worth. Again, as I was approaching my graduation, I started to reconsider what I would do and my passion and my experience and I decided I was going to look for jobs in IT, specifically that I was going to look for jobs in IT that were attached to universities with really good master's programs because I didn't really have that classical education in computer science. I'd take some courses, but I didn't have the degree and I knew that, if I wanted to progress my career, that was the direction I would want to go.

I ended up finding my first job in IT support at UPenn. I was building computer systems, I was installing them in offices, I was doing help desk support. It was just kind of this very introductory level job. I moved up very quickly during that time period. I moved up to systems administration pretty quickly. Then, I ended up shifting into leading projects and systems development for some of the university's executive team. Specifically, I worked with the president's and provost's office. While I was doing that, I applied to the master's program. I got accepted.

It was just this crazy time in my life because not only was I working full-time and I was growing, I was getting all these challenges and those challenges manifest in additional effort needed to be put into job, but I was also going through this master's in computer science program without that classical background. I was like YouTube-ing and trying to read up and catch up with the program and, in addition, during that time period, I had my first two children and my third by the time I graduated. So it was this really crazy period of my life of growing my family, growing my career aspirations, and also going through this master's program at the same time. That really was my shift from economics into computer science.

Caleb Brown:

You moved your entire family to Scotland for this role at FanDuel. What was that experience like, in general? And then I'm also curious how that might've shaped your perspective on leadership.

Justin Kerestes:

It was just a crazy time. Not only did we, and we had five boys at the time, picked up our family, sold all of our stuff, packed 17 suitcases, and moved to Scotland, but we did it during COVID and-

Caleb Brown:

It's wild.

Justin Kerestes:

It was just wild. I was kind of skeptical about it honestly. I was talking to my wife at the time and I was like, "Hey, there's potentially this opportunity to go and to work with the Scotland engineering team, but I have to be there. What do you think about it?" My wife was very excited. I remember she said, "Let's go. Let's do it, right now." I was like, "Well, let's get ready. Let's figure things out." She was ready to go. So she was really the impetus for me taking that plunge and taking that opportunity.

We probably looked insane going through the airport because it was me and my kids. Each of them had at least two bags, I had four, we were lugging them through the airport with masks over our face. We took the plunge and we moved and we got there. It was such a period of growth for all of us personally and for me professionally.

For us, personally... Again, you think about the UK & I and you're like, "Oh, this must be very close in terms of culture and expectations to America," and it really is very different. It's very different in subtle ways. The most subtle way that I can think about is I remember we got there and one of the earliest realizations we had is there's not really fast food like there is in America. There are fast food joints, but they're not on every street corner and every block, so you don't go and you don't get that hamburger from McDonald's that's always the same and always going to be there for you. It was kind of in the little things like that were just so very different.

And then, I also think, professionally, the expectation of folks and leadership there is just very different. One of the earliest items I was tasked to lead through was... We were growing. Again, we were going from 1 and 2, and we were trying to figure out how we would structure the support for our rapidly scaling software. Our team didn't go on call, and so we needed to figure out how to transition the team to on-call. I was tapped on the shoulder to do it.

I was young and hungry and ambitious and I was like, "I'm going to prove myself," and so I went at it full American style, pulled the team together, put all my thoughts on paper, said, "Hey, here's all the options. We're going to talk about it. We'll talk about it as a group. We're going to time box it. We're going to figure out what the plan is. And then we're going to go forward." I hit this incredible resistance to change as I was trying to do that. The team felt like I was being overbearing and it felt disenfranchised. They didn't feel bought into the change. It ultimately ended up getting so emotional and contentious that I just needed to pull the cord and stop it.

I came back a few months later to the problem with another more established leader in the UK. I remember just watching the way that they led through the change and how subtly different it was. For me, professionally, it was this time of growth where I realized that your leadership style needs to flex for the culture of the group that you're working with. And again, cultural boundaries aren't just countries and states. We just went through the acquisition of a team here at Fanatics, and the team is very different. They think very differently. They work very differently. They came from very different backgrounds. So, for me, professionally, it was just this great period of growth where I really exercised my muscle in listening and understanding different cultures and how to drive change and bring people along with me.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. No, that's really interesting. Even when I was working as a software developer, I remember that was an interest. Now, I'm used to it. I remember that being interesting when I just went from my very first job ever out of college to the second and the culture change was different, which I almost wasn't expecting, and it wasn't bad or even better. It's just interesting how small teams can truly just operate so differently.

Justin Kerestes:

I think also as a leader too, the way you drive change, it reverberates. It may not feel like a swing for me, but when you're responsible for a 200, 300-person org, the smallest change you'd make can have massive sweeping impact inadvertently to your entire team. So it's something you need to be really thoughtful about.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. So speaking of your team, probably my biggest takeaway from our original call, our prep call, was you mentioned that you have about 35 one-on-ones in a single week. I was blown away by that, 35 in a single work week. I want to hear you explain your philosophy behind prioritizing these individual connections despite what I have to imagine is a significant time investment.

Justin Kerestes:

It is. I tell people that. They laugh about it. But for me, having those conversations is one of the best investments you can make, especially in a remote environment. I went through this really interesting journey at Fanatics where, when I joined, we had nothing. We had no product, we had no team, and we truly went from 0 to 1. The skills required to go from 0 to 1 are so different. It's very hands-on. You've got to be in the decision making every single day. You've got to be in all of the details and nuance and on top of it at every moment in time. That doesn't scale. I think the best mantra that's come to my mind is, for me, this year, it's not about delivering, it's about building an organization that delivers. The way that you do that is you do that through people, you do that through your team.

I'm talking to my directs and my leadership team every single day. If I go more than a day without talking to someone on my leadership team, chances are they're reaching out to me to hop on the Zoom and say hi and just catch up and see what's going on. We have these very regular touch points and we make it very purpose-driven to stay connected. But I think you also get something different when you connect two or three levels down because I think, so much of the time, messages that you send and behaviors that you want to drive can get so wildly misconstrued. You can say, "Hey, I'd really like to see this thing delivered." And then turn away for a day and, all of a sudden, you come back and you find your team is going and building the thing and killing themselves to do it and doing that without you ever having expected them to do it. I think one of the biggest antidotes to that is just staying connected and having conversations.

I get so many good signals by connecting down to the team that then ultimately I bring up to my leadership team, we bring it up as topics, or I bring it up to one of my directs and they weren't aware of it. And then I think, on the inverse side, anytime folks on the ground hear some misconception about me, they hear there's this thing I want and it didn't quite make sense, they have an opportunity to ask me directly, and I think that's really powerful. I think that, in a remote environment, if you can find that network of people that's highly effective at staying connected to the rest of the organization and you can tie yourselves to them, that's a great way of making sure that your organization can hear your message.

Now, there's other great ways to do it obviously. You want to be communicative, you want to do open question time, you want to write down your thoughts, but I found that, no matter how much of that you do, you still get that disconnect and the only antidote is really to build that network.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah.

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah.

Caleb Brown:

No, that does make sense. Kind of staying on this topic a little bit, I'm interested in what are the biggest challenges you faced while rapidly scaling engineering organizations, as we talked about previously, and again particularly in a highly regulated sports betting industry. I'm just curious about that.

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah. I'll maybe talk about some of the stuff, some of the experience I've had on the Fanatics Betting & Gaming journey because I think it's so rapidly gone from 0 to 1 to 2 that there's so much baked in there. I think some of the earliest challenges we had were just how quickly we had to move and finding out the balance of our willingness to take on tech debt in order to get a product out and iterate very quickly. I remember in the early days of Fanatics Betting & Gaming, right after we launched, we would get signals back from our customers of just how wrong we were. We spent a lot of time upfront, probably three to six months before we ever built anything, talking about what we believe we wanted the product to be. When I joined Fanatics, by the way, one of the things that most excited me about coming over here is that we wanted to build something that was fundamentally better.

But even with all that thought, we got so many things wrong and, for the first one to two years of our existence, we were really just trying to figure out like, "How do we get this right? How do we get something that really resonates with customers and we listen to customers and we iterate?" 

And that meant we sacrificed a lot of technical investments in order to achieve the outcomes we wanted to. One of the hardest things to articulate to the engineering team as we scaled was to articulate that was the right decision. Because you go out and you hire all these great minds and you talk about your aspirations for great quality and stability and where you want to be in five years, and then there's this shock when they come into an organization that's at this stage of growth where like, "Listen, if you write the line of code and it's not so great, but it works good enough, and it gets us out today, we should probably do that." That was an interesting learning of how do you talk to an organization about some of those trade-offs that you're making.

What's really interesting now is we went into the middle of last year and particularly the beginning of this year wanting to really change the behaviors we had in the organization and really wanting to change the mindset about stability. The rally is like, "We have gained enough momentum and visibility and market share that an outage today is orders of magnitude more impactful and expensive than what it was just a year ago." But as we went to go in and drive that change, again, we talk about changing the culture, doing things right the first time, it's been fascinating to see just how hard it is to change those habits and, as a leader, how much you need to be persistent and consistent about the words you use and the tone you use in order to drive that change. Because once you've built those atomic habits of just like, "Deliver the thing at all costs," it's very hard to change them. Again, the Fanatics journey has taught me that technology and mechanisms and getting those things right are hard, but the hardest thing to do is, once you've set behaviors, changing them.

Caleb Brown:

Well, you mentioned the importance of being authentic as a leader, even if that means that maybe not everyone will like you. Can you share an experience where staying true to yourself was maybe particularly challenging?

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah, the first thing I'd say is trust isn't just built in a moment. It's built in this series of small interactions that ultimately add up to trust. You can be authentic for one big moment and inauthentic for 50 small ones, and you're not going to be a trusted leader. For me, it's not like this big bang of authenticity. In the little moments, it's like not being afraid to say you were wrong. It's not putting on that very clean structured slack background with the perfect bookshelf because nobody really lives that life. My house is a mess right now. I've got kids running around, dropping shirts all over the floor, and making a mess because it's a Friday and they're excited to be home from school. I don't really think it's like... There's not one big moment for me of authenticity that stands out. It's just this authenticity that happens in all of these small moments of connection, if that makes sense.

Caleb Brown:

Mm-hmm, absolutely, it does. In part of this podcast we do, in terms of listeners, there's certainly folks that are already in engineering management type roles, but also engineers that are looking to enter that world or are on the fence of if that's what they want or not. I'm curious, playing off my last question, I'm interested in what advice you'd give new leaders who might struggle with that pressure to be liked by everyone. Just talking to you right now, you feel very confident in your role, so I wanted to ask you that question. Like I said, I have spoken to folks that are very early in that leadership journey, and I thought I'd ask you that question.

Justin Kerestes:

I think the trick is just be really good at faking your confidence. That's what I always go for. No, look, I think that, first of all, leadership is in the title. It's a role you play. I think that every engineer has an opportunity to practice their leadership skills. It's practice in code review. Code review to me is the smallest atomic habit of leadership because... What is it? It's that engineering mechanism and expression of feedback on the craft that we put in every day. So I think everyone has the opportunity to practice leadership. For me, the best advice I can give for folks at the earliest stages of their career is take pride in what you do. Take pride in the small things that you do. Don't just give a thumbs up to a code review. Take the time to actually understand it and give feedback and do mentorship and take a pause to reflect on how you can use that as an opportunity to grow yourself.

On the authenticity side, I think a lot of people who find themselves on the path to leadership, they'll go through this curve and the curve is they look at other leaders who they respect and they try to emulate their skills. They try to emulate what they do and how they act and their superpowers. It's a very natural thing to do. I would encourage folks to do that. I would encourage folks to find leaders who they respect, that they can look at and spend time with them, listen to them, absorb the things they do and the way they act, and maybe try to emulate some of those. I think that a lot of folks who are going through leadership, they never figure out that, out of the 10 things that you look at that you respect from a leader, only 5 of those might work for you.

I'll give you an example. One of the leaders that I really admire is the CTO at Fanatics Betting & Gaming. He's got a huge personality, huge personality. He's wearing Hawaiian T-shirts, he's wearing colorful flamingos. He is out there and he is bubbly. He can just captivate the room with that feeling. Early on, I would try to take that same approach and it just didn't work for me. It didn't feel natural because the way that I engage in it and captivate the room is very different. I like to dive deep on problems. I like to be very intellectual. I like to ask a lot of questions and build trust by showing that I care. So my style of leadership is very different than that person who I respect a great deal, but I think that a lot of leaders get stuck in that phase between the emulation, the practice of the behaviors that they expect, and figuring out what works for them.

And I think for me, too, I still look at leaders across this organization and I have mentors outside that I have immense respect for and, occasionally, I'll see them do something and I'll stumble on it. I'm like, "That was super interesting, the way that they approach that problem." Sometimes, I try it and it works and it's this great new tool set in my arsenal, and sometimes I do it and it doesn't work and I throw it away. It's just not for me.

Caleb Brown:

Absolutely. The important thing is trying it out, right? Taking it for a spin, seeing if that feels right. Yeah, no, very well said. I wanted to know if you could walk us through how you've implemented operational excellence programs at Fanatics and what metrics that you're focused on most for that.

Justin Kerestes:

One of my areas of greatest passion is operational excellence. For me, I talked to my team about it a lot and it really is... It's a product. It's a product that the engineering organization can own and no one else can really claim ownership for it. In engineering organizations that partner with product and business and so much of what we do is ideated upon by others and then we go and build it, this is the one thing that we can really ideate on and own and build in our own circle. So it's this really cool and very special thing for engineering, for mates. It is our ultimate expression of customer obsession.

I usually look at operational excellence programs through a few lenses. Early on in the stage of operational excellence, I tend to just focus on incidents because those are the most basic and they're the most obvious and they're most measurable. The first thing you do is you just start to measure incidents and some of the metrics around them. What are the trends? How quickly are you responding to them? How many of those are identified by you versus others? I think a natural progression of a healthy and maturing OE program is then taking those incidents and creating this virtuous feedback loop. We do that through a process called correction of errors. For some of our most impactful incidents, once we've mitigated, we'll go and we'll write a document that articulates what happened, why did it happen, what are we doing about it, what did we learn.

Just like any other artifact in engineering, unlike a retro, it's a written artifact and we will take the time to peer review and pressure cast that artifact. And the intent of that artifact is to go deep enough on the problem that you will ensure that it never happens again. Because if you can create that feedback loop and you can ensure that you always prioritize the fixes for that feedback loop, then, in theory, you should avoid all known incidents from recurring, not new ones, but known ones.

I think the next evolution of an OE program, for me, is focusing on key technical indicators for your systems. That's really the stage of fine tuning the performance of your system and really understanding how it works. I always think about... If you have a mechanic that you really love and you trust and someone that you've experienced they can just listen to the sound of a car and they can know what the problem is, that's what happens when you really tune yourself to the telemetry of your system. You start to hear the creaking and the cracking of the system before anything breaks, and then you can get in front of it. For me, that's another evolution of the OE program.

The last one for me is, as you start to get into CI/CD, you start to really focus on driving up the frequency of change while driving down the change failure rate so that the chunks of change that you put into the system are smaller and they're ultimately safer. So, for me, kind of like the last evolution of an OE program is you look at your pipelines, you look at the health of your pipelines, you ask the question of, "Where are you doing the most rollbacks, i.e., where are you introducing the most defects as part of your CI/CD process?" and you push and you push for appropriate frequency of change. And again, this is an interesting one because the business never understands that a higher frequency of change, counterintuitively, should result in less errors. That's a fun one to explain to the business as well, and the OE program is a really effective mechanism of doing that.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah.

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah.

Caleb Brown:

I'm curious what emerging technologies or trends, kind of anything that falls into that category, you're most excited about, specifically in sports betting and gaming space?

Justin Kerestes:

Yeah. I think everyone probably says this, but there's a lot of buzz and there's a lot of hype around AI and particularly generative AI. That's very exciting for me. I think it's a little bit different in the sports betting industry. I think that, without delving into too much detail, the way that you can apply AI to solving trading-specific problems is incredibly exciting because if you can offer better odds, more personalized odds, if you can have more cash out capabilities than anyone else, then our core sports bettors who use the product... There'll be a certain level of how good and reliable are the product that they care about. But above and beyond that and when you hit that mark, it's really pricing. It's really pricing and what we can offer in that dimension. A lot of that is driven by human intelligence. A lot of that is driven by humans who sit on our trading team and they make really good decisions about how to price and offer odds through the system, but that can't scale. That can only scale to a certain level.

So I think AI has these really interesting implications for that. I think that, for the engineering team, AI also has some very interesting implications in terms of how it makes us more effective. But it is absolutely a double-edged sword, the risk being, if you are a junior engineer and you're using AI before you've ever really learned to code into production system yourself, you should probably stop, put the AI down, make sure you feel competent in your core competencies first.

Caleb Brown:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's solid advice. It truly is fascinating. You're right. Obviously, AI is just popping up in every conversation ever now, but it really is very fascinating to see all of these different industries and different... implementing it and looking into how they can implement it. It really is a pretty fascinating time. I will wrap up on this one last question, which I think you'll do well at. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how engineering organizations typically operate, what would that be and why?

Justin Kerestes:

What a great question. I think that I would give all of our engineers the magical ability to always understand the why behind what they're being asked to do. Again, it's this incredible problem that affects us at scale. It's this problem that's exacerbated by being in this remote workforce. But so many times when we run into conflict or confusion or misalignment about what we need to do or where we're going, the root cause of that can be traced back to engineers who just have been moving so fast or they're disconnected just a little bit in such a way that they don't understand the why. Again, we're not a factory, right? We're not a factory that takes inputs and spits out outputs. That's a very old school way of thinking about an effective engineering organization. What makes engineering organizations effective is when they can put themselves in the lens of the customer and they can understand the why behind what they're building. So, for me, that is the magic wand I would wave.

Caleb Brown:

Excellent answer and, yeah, a good one to end on. Justin, thank you so much for joining me today. You're a pleasure to chat with. It was a great conversation. I learned a lot, and I appreciate it.

Justin Kerestes:

It was great chatting today. Thank you so much.

Caleb Brown:

What an insightful conversation with Justin about what it takes to scale engineering in such a demanding industry. His perspective on adapting leadership style across cultures and contexts was also powerful, reminding us that change only sticks when people feel included in the process. I also found his emphasis on one-on-ones compelling. At first, 35 a week sounds extreme, but Justin showed how making time to connect to every level creates alignment, prevents miscommunication, and strengthens trust in a remote-first organization. At the core of his perspective is a belief that trust and clarity go hand in hand. When engineers know not just what they're building but why it matters, they become more resilient, more creative, and more committed to the outcome. Thank you, Justin, for sharing your journey and the lessons you've carried across industries, continents, and teams. These are the kinds of stories that push us all to 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.