Cedar Leadership & Management

What does effective management look like on your team, and how does it impact your day-to-day work?
For me, effective management starts with making sure everyone understands what we’re trying to do, not just at the project level, but in the context of the business. I lead product security, and we deal with patient financial data. My own healthcare data lives in Cedar, so it’s personal. We have a moral responsibility to protect everyone’s data, and that framing creates a values alignment. 

I give people space to ask questions and challenge the vision because at Cedar, we’ve created a culture where people really do care, want to do well, and take pride in their work. Once that alignment and buy-in is there, ownership becomes the core principle. If you’re the directly responsible individual, you truly own the decision. I’ll provide context, ask questions, and push on the thinking, but I won’t dictate the outcome. That trust is important; people want to be granted the leeway to exercise their expertise. And it gives space for everyone to contribute in the way that’s best for them. Even when the result isn’t perfect, the learning builds stronger judgment. Day to day, that balance of clarity, challenge and autonomy keeps people engaged and motivated in their work.

How do leaders at your company create clarity around priorities and expectations?
At Cedar, we’re compassionate, but we’re also very data-driven. We regularly ask, “Are we doing a good job, and how do we know? Does it make Cedar a more secure place, or a better place for developers? How have we moved the needle?” That mindset shows up in how we set priorities. Each quarter, we step back in what we call a “State of the Union” session to look at the full landscape. We talk honestly about what’s working — or what isn’t — and we’ll push each other to have clear measurements to evaluate our projects and know if we’re on track. 

From there, we define a focused set of projects and, importantly, what success looks like. We break work into milestones and keep tight feedback loops so people know where they stand, and we check in regularly to see whether someone is stuck or needs help. That structure creates clarity without micromanagement. Everyone understands the goal, the metric and their role to communicate and support each other while preserving that autonomy. 

Can you share an example of when leadership followed through on a commitment or navigated a challenge successfully?
An example that comes to mind is our encryption rework. It’s a pretty massive project because encryption is at the heart of our data protections at Cedar. It touches analytics, reporting and really every system, so the margin for error is small. From the beginning, we were very intentional about scoping it appropriately, defining milestones, and asking, “How do we know we’re not going to break anything when we make this switch?”

As we moved forward week by week, we uncovered a performance concern that involved another team. The DRI on my team started going deep into optimizing that issue. During one of our check-ins, another team member stepped back and asked, “Are we sure this is required for our minimum viable product for this quarter, or are we going off into the weeds?”

We looked at it together and realized we could defer that optimization. That moment reflects leadership following through on its commitment to ownership and peer challenge. We preserved autonomy, but we also relied on the structure we’d set up to reassess priorities. It ultimately increased the likelihood of delivering meaningful impact and set the tech lead up for success.