A weekly 5-minute show for SE leaders
The Solution Engineering Leadership Show
Two voices. Two perspectives. One goal: making you a better PreSales leader. A weekly five-minute conversation for solution engineering leaders.
A seasoned enterprise pragmatist and a modern scale-up builder — who rarely agree, and both turn out to be right.
One topic, one honest conversation, one practical move you can use the same week. No fluff, no 90-minute monologues.
1:1 coaching, discovery, demo strategy, pipeline, hiring, retention — the things that actually keep PreSales leaders up at night.
The hosts
The Seasoned Pragmatist
VP of PreSales · ~200 SEs across regional teams
Twelve years in SE leadership at enterprise SaaS. Led through reorgs and acquisitions, scaled teams from 30 to 200. Believes in what works at scale, not what's trendy — and leads through his managers, not around them.
The Modern Builder
Sr. Director of Solutions Engineering · 12 direct SEs
Built an SE function from zero to twelve through Series B, C, D, and IPO — with 95% retention. Sees every challenge as a design problem, coaches first, and challenges the old way with modern, people-first frameworks.
The voices and characters in this podcast are fictional and AI-produced. The content, frameworks, and experiences are real — informed by years of working with 350+ solution engineers trainedand the leaders who run them. We think the ideas should stand on their own merit, so we're upfront about how the show is made.
Latest episodes
An SE leader running thirty SEs split his enablement into two completely separate tracks — internal product team plus external sales partner — and refused to let one absorb the other.
ListenAn SE leader scaled from three to thirteen direct reports in eighteen months before getting team leads approved. By then he wasn't coaching anyone — he was doing triage.
ListenAn SE leader scaling from five to twenty SEs stopped hiring from the presales talent pool. His last six hires were former controllers and accountants — and they ramped faster than his traditional SE hires.
ListenWhen demos commoditize and AI-first competitors look better on paper, what wins deals? Nate makes the case that accountability is now the durable moat — and explains how SE leaders need to retrain teams to sell it.
ListenAva walks through how she now evaluates every vendor — and why the way she buys software today is exactly how her customers will buy from her tomorrow.
ListenSaaS vendors are still hiding their API behind the Enterprise tier — and your customers are about to start asking for it. Nate breaks down what API maturity now means for SE leaders, both as buyers of software and as bui
ListenNew episode every week. Subscribe and never miss a five-minute leadership move.
Produced by SE Rockstars
SE Rockstars (PreSales Unleashed GmbH) helps PreSales teams become trusted advisors. Founded by Tim Brömme & Jan-Erik Jank, we've worked with 350+ solution engineers trained across enterprise and scale-up.
