Live from Nexus 2025: With UPS’ Sean Jantzen

·32 min·3 clips

Sean Jantzen reveals why partnerships at UPS must avoid finger-pointing to drive real value in massive digital shifts.

The episode begins with Tammy Soares introducing the live format and guest Sean Jantzen, who has spent over 23 years at UPS and now serves as VP of software engineering. Sean shares his career journey, starting as a co-op and intern, and moving up through roles to lead digital transformation. He discusses the UPS culture of 'bleeding brown' and team-oriented values. The conversation shifts to AI, with Sean mentioning his use of co-pilot for summarizing presentations and solving Excel problems, and he reflects on fears about AI models being toxic or racist. Sean explains his coaching leadership style, emphasizing authenticity and treating vendors and UPSers as a single team to avoid sidebar conversations. He talks about driving change at UPS by advocating for small, incremental deliveries over large monoliths, citing an example where forcing two-week sprints reduced bugs and improved quality. Sean critiques the SAFE framework for enabling waterfall approaches and stresses the importance of focusing on value over deliverables. He addresses the relationship with business partners, highlighting the need for partnership to avoid finger-pointing and drive value. Sean discusses challenges like technical debt and compliance, noting that the business often doesn't prioritize these issues. He compares greenfield and legacy projects, suggesting that legacy systems can be iterated faster by building APIs alongside them. The episode concludes with Sean and Tammy reflecting on the difficulties of staying hands-on in executive roles and the pride in empowering teams.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation on partnership, software delivery and the human side of leading transformation at UPS.

Transformation at UPS comes through here as a matter of working relationships, not just systems and process. Sean Jansen, UPS's VP of software engineering, argues for partnership over finger-pointing, then ties that idea to smaller software deployments, reduced blast radius and…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a candid live conversation on leading software teams when smaller releases, tighter blast radius and real partnership matter.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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