The 3 Conversations That Improve Developers' Lives w/ Reprise's Jennie MacDougall

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Conor Bronsdon, executive producer and sometimes host of Dev Interrupted. Before we start this week's episode, I want to ask for two minutes of your time that'll help us create hundreds of hours of content vital to your journey as a developer or engineering leader.
We've created a super quick survey to help us understand what you like about Dev Interrupted, what you dislike and what you want out of our podcast in general. You can find the survey linked to the show notes of the episode, so please take the time now or after the episode to help us make this a must listen for you and thousands of other developers each week. Now on to the episode.

**Jennie MacDougall** (0:31)
I ask everyone I interview, whether you are right out of school or a principal engineer, what is a project that you are most proud of? The reason I ask that is because I want to see and hear their excitement.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:46)
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**Dan Lines** (1:27)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Jennie MacDougall, Director of Engineering at Reprise.
Jennie, welcome to the show.

**Jennie MacDougall** (1:38)
Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:41)
Awesome, you know, having you on the pod here. And before we start, of course, I want to thank you for being at Interact. You were a great speaker. And for anyone in the audience who may have missed Interact, Jennie joined us for a panel discussing building successful engineering organizations. If you're interested in listening to that conversation, highly recommended.
It features speakers from Stack Overflow, Data Stacks. It was released as a pod episode. You can find that also on our YouTube channel. So totally check that out. Jennie's awesome.
And in preparing for this pod with you, Jennie, we were uncovering so much great wisdom on how to inspire, grow and empower developers. We figured the best way to get a handle on all of it was to talk about the three most important conversations that you regularly have with developers in your life. So we're gonna do a range of things from recruiting, daily productivity, being a member of a larger company.
But before we get into all of that, let's give our listeners a chance to know you a little bit better. I looked at your LinkedIn. You did not come from a formal computer science background. So how did you get into software engineering and therefore kind of touching the lives of so many developers not formally coming from that space?

**Jennie MacDougall** (3:08)
Yeah, absolutely. You are 100% correct. I actually graduated with a degree in international business and a minor in French. So director of engineering is a big change. And pretty much after graduating, I had no idea what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. I ended up joining a startup. I was maybe the 30th employee and it was in the insurance industry. I knew nothing about insurance, but figured I would just give it a shot. So I joined using the software that they were building and we were just growing like crazy. So every year we were doubling.
And so for me, I had a phenomenal manager who actually took me under her wing and every time she got promoted, I pretty much took her old job. So for a while, I thought it was totally normal to get a promotion every like six months and be leading more and more teams, which turns out non-normal. But I was so fortunate to be kind of part of that journey.
So for the first five years, I was at that company. I was leading teams on the operation side of things. I knew the product very well that we were working on, which then led me to doing app support for the same company, which then led to QA, managing QA, then more of kind of Scrum Master and more on the engineering leadership side.