Summit Sessions with Bryan Schielke
Summit Sessions with Bryan Schielke is your go-to podcast for insights on leadership, business growth, and relationship-driven success. Hosted by Bryan Schielke, Co-Founder and COO of Summit Group Solutions, each episode explores the strategies, stories, and lessons from top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and industry experts.
Whether you’re scaling a business, building meaningful professional connections, or navigating today’s fast-changing market, Bryan brings actionable advice, real-world experiences, and candid conversations to help you elevate your potential and reach the summit of your career.
Tune in and discover how speed beats perfection, relationships drive results, and curiosity fuels growth.
Summit Sessions with Bryan Schielke
Keith Jia - Founder & CEO, Aude.ai
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In this episode of Summit Sessions with Bryan Schielke, Bryan sits down with Keith Jia, Founder & CEO of Aude.ai, to explore the challenges of engineering visibility, team trust, and performance measurement in tech organizations. From his early days at Microsoft and Amazon to founding his own company, Keith shares his personal journey and the lessons that inspired him to rethink how engineering output is measured.
Keith dives into the gaps he sees in traditional performance dashboards, the importance of balancing human factors with data-driven insights, and how leaders can coach and build teams that consistently improve while avoiding burnout. This conversation is a must-listen for tech leaders, founders, and anyone looking to optimize team performance in high-growth environments.
Bryan Schielke (00:00)
Thanks again for joining. So Keith, you've gone from leading engineering and cybersecurity teams in large enterprises to founding Aude.ai. What pushed you to tackle engineering visibility and trust as your next chapter?
Keith Jia (00:11)
An interesting story—moving to Seattle, starting at Microsoft as a young engineer, and growing personally and professionally. After stints at medium-sized companies and Amazon, I realized there’s always friction around evaluating engineers. How do you measure their impact when engineering output doesn’t directly correlate to revenue? That challenge—and the pain points I experienced—led me to start Aude.ai.
Bryan Schielke (02:00)
You built Aude.ai around the idea that traditional metrics miss what actually drives performance. What are the most common gaps you see when teams rely on dashboards?
Keith Jia (02:09)
Traditional dashboards focus on outputs like lines of code or bugs, but they miss the inputs—design, thinking, collaboration—that actually drive results. DORA and other frameworks measure outcomes without explaining how to improve them. At Aude.ai, we focus on behavior and insight-based analysis to give engineers actionable feedback.
Bryan Schielke (04:56)
You lead engineering groups at sizes ranging from 20 to 500. How do the challenges around coaching, trust, and performance shift as organizations scale?
Keith Jia (05:07)
The principles stay the same, but scale adds complexity. Building personal rapport is critical. I remember an offshore engineer whose work improved dramatically after visiting Seattle. Intentional one-on-ones focused on personal connection—not status reports—make a huge difference, whether you’re leading a small or large team.
Bryan Schielke (07:47)
That emphasizes a ground-up, engineer-first approach. How do you help leaders balance objective insights with the human factors that shape real team health?
Keith Jia (07:58)
Top-down dashboards often feel like surveillance. To be effective, tools must provide value to engineers directly. Leaders need to consult with engineers and ensure insights improve their work, not just serve management metrics. That’s how you maintain trust while driving performance.
Bryan Schielke (10:02)
Last question: Looking back across engineering, security, leadership, and now entrepreneurship, what's been the biggest lesson in building teams that consistently improve and avoid burnout?
Keith Jia (10:14)
At startups, mission and vision matter more than money or prestige—especially early on. People join for purpose, not just compensation. The lesson: focus on building a compelling mission and vision to inspire your team, while supporting their growth and avoiding burnout.
