For Susan Markel, good leadership starts with listening. As Vice President of Engineering at Koalafi, Markel draws on two decades of experience leading engineering teams to build trust, navigate conflict, and help her teammates grow. Her approach is collaborative and human centered, with an emphasis on giving people the context, flexibility, and support they need to succeed.
She learned the value of thoughtful communication early in her career after giving a colleague overly blunt feedback that landed poorly. That turning point taught her to embrace discomfort, helping her evolve into a leader who knows when to prioritize, navigate conflict, and, above all, listen. Today, she views these lessons as essential to her ongoing growth.
Here, she tells us more about her leadership role, her management strategies, and her best advice for women following in her footsteps.
How would you describe your leadership style in a few words?
I aim for a collaborative, pragmatic, and human-centric leadership style. Decisions stick better when team members feel heard, so I strive to create environments where people feel genuinely supported. For me, leadership means clearing the path ahead of us, setting expectations, and helping folks grow their careers.
What’s one management strategy that’s actually worked for your team?
Simply listening to your team and actively seeking out their perspectives works wonders. This approach lets you meet people where they stand, understand their actual concerns and blockers, and step in to clear those hurdles.
Beyond solving problems, active listening helps your team understand the 'why' behind business requests. This context, and the trust built through open communication, allows us to resolve conflict and head off issues early.
How do you approach navigating conflict or tough conversations with your team?
I lean into conflict, viewing challenging moments as opportunities to learn and grow. I also prefer addressing issues early when they remain small, which keeps tough conversations from becoming harder than they need to be.
In one situation prior to my time here at Koalafi, my team and a partner technical team ran into regular conflict. After the friction came to a head in a meeting, I pulled folks aside from that partner team and listened at length while they shared their concerns, complaints, and suggestions. It was difficult to hear how my team failed them, but that effort built trust. Listening gave us the insights we needed to adjust our interactions and processes and improve the overall situation.
How do you ensure your team feels supported, both in and out of the office?
I offer as much flexibility as possible. Life happens to everyone, and I make accommodating those personal moments a priority. In the office, I meet with my team members regularly, do everything I can to give them whatever context they need to succeed, and look for opportunities to challenge them so they can keep growing.
What’s the biggest impact you hope to have on your direct reports?
Ideally, I help my direct reports grow in the exact direction they want to take their careers. I take the responsibility of supporting individual development very seriously.
What’s the most important thing a manager should do when onboarding a new hire? And how did a past manager support you during this process?
A manager must set new hires up for success, whatever that looks like for their specific role. That means introducing them to key partners, getting the team excited for their arrival, and setting clear expectations early on. I prefer to connect people directly rather than making them go through me, so the onboarding guides I write always include a list of key colleagues to reach out to right away to start building those essential relationships.
One manager supported me by giving me space to get to know the team before moving my direct reports to officially report to me. Because he cared deeply about placing the right leaders in the right roles, his approach gave me a great opportunity to build early relationships and understand the lay of the land. Since I accepted that position right after having a child, having that flexibility really helped me on both the home and work sides to ease into the new role.
What is the most surprising lesson you’ve learned about building teams?
Teams can fall apart just as fast or faster than you build them if you get values alignment wrong on a critical role. I’ve seen this pattern time and time again. It’s most obvious to an organization when that role sits in a higher layer, but it can happen at any layer, even with engineers. Technical skills in engineering obviously matter, but you have to look at the entire picture of what a person will (or won’t) bring to the team. Every new hire changes the dynamic, and you want to make sure those changes bring a team together.
What’s been your most valuable career mistake?
Early course corrections heavily influence a career's trajectory. I learned the hard way about the importance of building relationships and being both clear and kind. Early in my career as an engineer, I gave a teammate blunt feedback on code, completely unaware that they had written it themselves. That interaction hurt their feelings and damaged trust across the team.
I had to own my mistake. I apologized for how I handled the situation and resolved to share feedback much more thoughtfully moving forward. That experience taught me to protect team relationships, take accountability, and communicate with empathy. Our failures shape us, and reflecting on that misstep helps keep me honest about the kind of leader and person I aim to be.
How do you tackle your to-do list each day?
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize! Not everything on my daily list gets done, and I’ve learned to accept that reality completely. I constantly ask myself if a task still matters, because business needs shift fast. What felt urgent yesterday might not even matter today, and I apply that same filter to how I spend my time.
What’s your number one piece of advice for women stepping into leadership roles?
When I joined a Series A startup as a leader, which was a new experience for me, the CTO offered a fresh perspective: 'You know that feeling when everything goes wrong and you don’t know what you’re doing? That's what learning feels like.' Embracing that discomfort is the only way to evolve.
