The Happy Engineer | Career Success for Engineering Leadership
Jul 14, 2026 · 59 min · 13 segments
👉 Watch the Engineering Director Promotion Plan (free): https://youtu.be/ZrRe3O8KHSQ Casey Tubman went from a $37K design engineer to VP of Engineering at Whirlpool, leading an 8–10 billion…
Casey TubmanGuestSo I, I wanna s- hover on this for a moment, because one of the things that comes up again and again and again in these conversations on the podcast is, you call it a high performing team dynamic.
But there's something about that experience when you do get s- settled into an amazing team with a great project that has a clear vision and impact that you can actually make the progress and go deliver.
Like, something about that dynamic that everybody talks about, those are the, those are the days.
I actually am curious, Casey, for your perspective, why is it, do you think, that so many people have never actually had that experience? Why is it so hard to create those kinds of, you know, dynamics in organizations? It's like everybody's striving for it, all the leaders know how important high performing teams are, and yet a lot of engineers I coach really have no experience like what you just described to lean back to.
For me, the thing that pops up in my head, and I'm seeing it right now as I, as I said, as I come back into this area, is the teams are very large now, and they're very matrixed and spread out across the world.
We were seven people that literally sat in a small corner of this tech center.
We cared about each other, even though no one may have cared about what we were doing.
And so there were other people that were getting the spotlight and the limelight and everything else.
We just wanted to get our stuff done, do it really well, and have a product that we knew the consumer was gonna love.
All of us loved it as we were designing it, and so we were like, "This is the best thing.
Consumers are gonna love it, and it's gonna be great." So we were passionate about it.
And so if you have a team of people that are tight-knit and they're focused and they're passionate, it's, it's a great experience.
But to your point, you don't get that on every project because a lot of times you have your small segment that you worked on.
So I, I wanna s- hover on this for a moment, because one of the things that comes up again and again and again in these conversations on the podcast is, you call it a high performing team dynamic.
But there's something about that experience when you do get s- settled into an amazing team with a great project that has a clear vision and impact that you can actually make the progress and go deliver.
Like, something about that dynamic that everybody talks about, those are the, those are the days.
I actually am curious, Casey, for your perspective, why is it, do you think, that so many people have never actually had that experience? Why is it so hard to create those kinds of, you know, dynamics in organizations? It's like everybody's striving for it, all the leaders know how important high performing teams are, and yet a lot of engineers I coach really have no experience like what you just described to lean back to.
For me, the thing that pops up in my head, and I'm seeing it right now as I, as I said, as I come back into this area, is the teams are very large now, and they're very matrixed and spread out across the world.
We were seven people that literally sat in a small corner of this tech center.
We cared about each other, even though no one may have cared about what we were doing.
And so there were other people that were getting the spotlight and the limelight and everything else.
We just wanted to get our stuff done, do it really well, and have a product that we knew the consumer was gonna love.
All of us loved it as we were designing it, and so we were like, "This is the best thing.
Consumers are gonna love it, and it's gonna be great." So we were passionate about it.
And so if you have a team of people that are tight-knit and they're focused and they're passionate, it's, it's a great experience.
But to your point, you don't get that on every project because a lot of times you have your small segment that you worked on.
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