Main Stage

Business Acumen for Stronger Leadership

To excel as an engineering leader, developing strong business acumen is crucial.

This panel, featuring Kathleen, Abby and Jodi, will explore how leaders have cultivated their “business quotient” to enhance their effectiveness and decision making capabilities. Panelists will share their real world experiences and strategies for integrating business insights with technical leadership.

Through their insights, you’ll learn how to apply business principles to leadership challenges and make informed decisions that align with organizational goals. This session is designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to bridge the gap between engineering and business, ultimately strengthening your leadership impact.

SPEAKER
SPEAKER

Kathleen Vignos

VP ENGINEERING CAPITAL ONE

Kathleen Vignos has spent 25+ years working at tech companies and startups in Silicon Valley. She currently serves as VPE in the Card Tech organization at Capital One, leading large-scale transformation projects across web, mobile, and ML decisioning over two different business domains responsible for more than $1B in revenue.

Previously in her 6 years at Twitter, Kathleen led teams working on promoted tweet ML review, tweet translation, abuse tooling, and infrastructure automation across on-prem, Google Cloud, and AWS environments. She also personally trained 150+ Twitter engineering managers in hiring and leadership programs. Prior to Twitter, Kathleen led the engineering department at WIRED through complete site and infrastructure redesign and was tech lead for projects like Apple News.

SPEAKER
SPEAKER

Abby Kearns

CHIEF OF STAFF ALEMBIC

Kearns is an accomplished technology executive, board director, and angel investor with a proven track record of driving growth and innovation across both Fortune 500 companies and startups, including Puppet, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Pivotal Software, Verizon, and Totality. In addition to her executive roles, Kearns is a dedicated board director, currently serving on the boards of Lightbend, StackPath, and Invoke.

SPEAKER
SPEAKER

Jodi Alperstein

EXECUTIVE PRODUCT LEADER

Jodi Alperstein is an executive product leader, GM, and advisor who has been leading Product teams at both private and public companies for over 20 years. Her experience includes being in the top product leadership role at Twilio Segment, Digital Ocean, Credit Karma, Moody’s Analytics, Roofstock, Hired, and E*TRADE Corporate Services. In addition to product management, her direct leadership responsibilities have included product & infrastructure engineering, product marketing, strategy, product design, user research, product analytics, product operations, technical program management, documentation and data operations. Her superpowers are developing empowered high performance teams that deliver incredible impact and helping them to achieve their career goals.