MEL #061 | From Pianist to Automotive Business Leader through Following Curiosity and Listening Between the Lines with Yasmine King

KING (00:00)

There’s a difference between hearing and then being able to translate that into action and knowing which parts of the signal you’re going to dampen and which parts of the signal are you going to amplify.

ADAMS (00:37)

In this episode, I speak with Yasmine King, corporate vice president and head of the automotive business unit at Analog Devices, Inc. Yasmine started as a classically trained pianist who became curious about how to capture live sound. That curiosity led her to electrical engineering and eventually into audio focused software roles. Over time, she transitioned from engineering into customer facing roles, then sales, and ultimately into business leadership. In our leadership segment,

Yasmine talks about how she led a major strategic shift by moving a long-standing proprietary technology to an open standard. This decision came from deeply listening to customer frustrations and recognizing broader industry needs. Despite uncertainty and risk, she used data, scenario modeling, and partnerships to guide the organization through the transition.

Yasmine’s advice for aspiring engineering leaders emphasizes building confidence by stepping into uncomfortable situations and learning incrementally over time. She encourages engineers to develop leadership skills outside of work using hobbies and challenges as training grounds. Her core message is simple, say yes, figure it out and use every experience to grow.

Explore the full episode summary, including guest bio, key takeaways, transcript, and recommended resources in the show notes at drangeliqueadams.com slash podcast. Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Yasminen King.

ADAMS (01:55)

Hi, Yasmine, Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

KING (01:58)

Thank you Angelique, I’m really excited to be here.

ADAMS (02:00)

I am so excited to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

KING (02:05)

I can, it’s a little different. So I may have to go back a little bit for when I first even knew what engineering was. So I started out as a classically trained pianist growing up and loved music, loved being able to perform, loved listening to live music and thought that I would spend my career in music. I even at one point in later in my life worked at Sony Music Studios in New York City. So just loved that whole environment.

When I was in a performance in high school, there was a time when my dad couldn’t come to the show. And so it left me thinking, how do I capture what like to be in a live music performance and share that with someone else afterwards? So that’s what got my mind moving in the direction of recording and sound and how do you capture this experience?

And through that exploration, I stumbled upon the idea of something called audio engineering. And at the time there weren’t very many undergraduate degrees that had audio engineering. And so what I learned is that there is another degree called electrical engineering, which was a really good transition into then sound recording and getting into that type of of career. So I thought, this is it. This is perfect. I’m going to go after it. I always loved math and science. So I felt like it could be a good fit.

So when I went to college, I actually started as a dual degree. I was a double major in piano pedagogy and I was a double major in intellectual engineering and thought that I would find a way to blend the two together. And it went really well for a couple of years and then I felt like my brain was getting pulled in two totally separate directions. And I wanted to keep music as a love and not necessarily something that I had to do. So I switched to being a studio artist

and stayed with my teacher, but I focused on electrical engineering. And that’s how I ended up stumbling into this career of electrical engineering. It was never something I sought out, but more of a love of music, love of the end application and curiosity on how to find a way to make that work as a long-term career that led me into engineering.

ADAMS (04:10)

Wow, and that is a really interesting starting point.

When you started in engineering, were you encouraged to have this dual degree to pursue both early on or were you discouraged from doing that?

KING (04:24)

It’s a very good question. I had a mix. So I was the only female in my family to not become a doctor or show any interest in becoming a medical doctor. And that was that was one thing that I put on myself. My parents never put that on me. But it was something I put on myself of am I choosing the right path? Am I going in a completely different direction? Where I was actually getting encouragement to go was business.

The whole idea of staying with music and then going into something very science and tech based was not part of the encouragement growing at that stage. But what I found is that because I loved it so much, there ended up being encouragement. So it was more of a, I knew I loved it and therefore it was yes, go pursue it. I was very fortunate when I got to school, there was an excellent women in engineering program.

they captured me freshman year, first semester. And it just so happened there was a professor there who was focusing on music and engineering. And so when I saw that, I felt like it was fate saying, this is where you’re supposed to be. And I went and talked to the professor. I ended up working for that professor for four years. wow. He stayed in his lab for four years and did a lot of work. So I was fortunate to find people who

were encouraging, maybe not day one, but very quickly turned to encouragement.

ADAMS (05:44)

But I could imagine because you said you loved it so much, could imagine that even you probably converted some potential skeptics just through your enthusiasm and probably your seriousness. And it’s like this wasn’t a fleeting thing where someone just come and said, I really want to do these things. And then they get into the work of the engineering and realize how rigor it is and sort of abandon these other things early on. You were probably so serious and so enthusiastic. They’re like, OK, she’s serious. We’ve got to figure out how to help her do this.

KING (06:11)

Right. And it actually worked both ways because, you know, at the time when I wanted to drop out of being a music major, but stay in the studio, that was not something done. to have access to the professors on the music side, you needed to be a major. actually needed encouragement from both now it’s something I still love finding is how do you blend these two together and bridge those two worlds because there is so

Much magic that happens when you bridge those two worlds together.

ADAMS (06:38)

That’s amazing.

KING (06:38)

When I finished up my electrical engineering degree, I was fortunate to find this. I’ll tell you another story. This is a, my whole life has happened stances. A friend of mine was sitting on the plane coming back from an interview with Nortel. So, you know, very big telecommunications company in Dallas. He was flying back to Penn State after a job interview. And the person he was sitting next to on the plane worked for a company called Texas instruments.

KING (07:03)

And they had a program where they were looking for recruits to come in and there was a job specific for software that was focused on audio to do things like, you know, the Polycom conference systems and doing beamforming with your voice to understand what directions it’s coming from. They had a very large DSP platform and they were looking for some help in doing audio engineering for that platform. So.

I had no idea about this, because my friend happened to be sitting next to this woman on the plane and heard about it, came back and told me and said, you should apply for this job. So I graduated, I moved down to Dallas, started my career as a software engineer focused on audio applications and spent the first handful of years really focused on how do you make audio algorithms more efficient so that you can run them on more embedded systems and they don’t need large power, large size.

of solutions. In that time, I found that there was more for me to learn. So I actually ended up going back to school, but I wanted to keep working. So I did this part-time. I would go to school at night and on the weekends. And I got my master’s in applied mathematics. The reason I moved from electrical engineering to applied math was that for the work in algorithms, there was just a lot of filters and a lot of mathematical equations to figure out how to make them more efficient. So I ended up

diving really deep on that subject and got my masters from UT Dallas while working and then came back to work, applied the knowledge. And because I had become a bit of an expert in this area, I was getting pulled into customer meetings quite often. And this is where I found the first bridge between what I had learned ⁓ as a pianist growing up and engineering. And part of it was my ability to listen. So in music,

When you’re performing, ⁓ a big part of your performance is listening to how you sound, listening to the sounds that you’re creating, and then responding to that. Adjusting, maybe shifting your arms, shifting your fingers, shifting your body position so that you get a different sound out of the instrument. So you spend a lot of time listening. And when I was in these customer meetings, I realized I was a very good listener. And I think it came back to what I had been trained as a musician. So with these listening skills,

I would be able to understand and hear what they were saying in between the lines and then translate that into what we needed to do from an engineering and technology standpoint because I had the right engineering background. I found that after doing this for a period of time, there was a pattern. I would leave at the end of the day with the most amount of energy when I had had customer meetings.

So I thought there’s something here. I should probably explore this a little bit more. So I started to spend more and more time in roles that were direct customer facing. And this was a progression over the course of about a decade. And finally, at the end of this, had taken the big leap and moved over to sales. So I had gone from software, engineering,

I shifted a little bit towards the customer, did more of what they called field applications engineering, so trying to translate some of the technical to the customer perspective. And then I moved all the way over into account management and sales. At that point, I ended up leading the company. I had moved up to Boston. so transitioned into a new ⁓ organization, new company, and now was running sales as…

a regional perspective. So trying to learn how to scale what I did on my own and scale it to more of a regional perspective, larger territory, and therefore working with what were called rep firms and distribution partners to scale this. And that was my first introduction to leading teams. Even though they didn’t report to me directly, it was something that I was leading them from a strategy standpoint, and I loved it.

So I stayed at that company for about four five years. And then through one of my customers, found out that there was an organization, Analog Devices, my current company that I work for, based in Boston. They were looking for a person in sales. And because of my engagement with this customer, they thought I’d be a great fit for the culture at ADI. So I came to my current company based off of the recommendation of a customer. So again, another happenstance experience. And at ADI, I’ve had a variety of roles.

came in through sales, ran our broad market team for Eastern US and all of Canada. I had experience running global accounts, so got to travel internationally, set strategy for accounts internationally. And then I made a leap and came actually back into the product line, into the business unit side. And I started out as making that shift in aerospace and defense. So I was running the RF team for aerospace and defense at ADI and then

through that experience just got more exposure to things like how do you run a P &L? How do you run teams of people that you’ve never been that job before? Because in sales, I had been living that job. so leading the team felt very natural, but moving over into the business unit, there were roles in my organization that I had never lived on a day-to-day basis. But I loved it and I was able to scale what I had learned from leading smaller teams into larger organizations.

And then the last shift that I made is my move into my most recent role where I’m running the automotive business unit. And that’s been a really fun transition. Just, it feels like coming full circle because a lot of automotive is audio. How do you have a good in cabin experience and have great sound inside the vehicle? So that to me has felt a little bit like coming full circle back to where I started.

ADAMS (12:25)

That’s amazing. Well, just the last thing you said in particular about calling out audio being such a big part of automotive and having this cabin experience. And I’m thinking that I don’t know.

very many other engineers in automotive who would even mention the cabin audio experience, let alone talk about the importance of it. So I just am seeing how your background is really informing your lens and how you’re seeing things.

Can you maybe talk just about your approach to jumping into new roles and even as you mentioned, leading people who have expertise and skills that maybe is not part of your lived experience? How do you approach getting up to a learning curve where you feel like you can really contribute?

KING (13:14)

There’s two parts of this. One aspect is self-confidence and knowing that if I’m thrown into a situation that I have the desire, capability, intelligence to figure it out. And that’s something that comes over time. I don’t think that if I were to look back at where I was when I first graduated college to where I am now, I’ve definitely developed a different level of confidence in my capabilities.

Part of that comes from intentionally putting yourself in situations where you might not succeed. And that doesn’t have to be your job, right? You can find other ways, whether it’s saying yes to a presentation that scares you and you don’t want to do, but it’s going to put you in a situation that you’re forced to figure it out. I found that those small little experiences over time compound into a broad set of capabilities.

and self-confidence that now I am much more willing to raise my hand for things that I may or may not know how to do on day one, but I know I’ll be able to figure it out. And I’ve had some good encouragement throughout the way and good mentors who have guided me on this, where I now feel like I can say default to yes. When I get thrown something, I default to yes, and then I figure out how to get it done because that context switch

You can never know a hundred percent before jumping in. There’s too much unknown and frankly, you’re not going to learn it until you live it. So know that there are, there are some capabilities and skills you need to have. You can’t just jump right into leading a large scale organization if you’ve never led any team at all. So there’s, there are some growing steps. I find that taking an intentional one step in a direction is helpful. Meaning what do mean by that? If I could map out.

what I’m doing today and the skills and capabilities I need to run a large scale organization today. I could break that down into call it five or six skill sets that are needed. I don’t need to learn all of them at the same time. I could take a role that teaches me one of those skill sets and then a different role. Even if it’s a lateral move, you moved laterally to a different role to learn a different skill set. And then over time you build this foundation of capabilities that can then allow you to accelerate into leadership positions.

And I did find that with all of my background being technical from a school standpoint, all of my degrees were technical. I did end up going back when I started to move more into the business leadership role, I did go back to school again and I ended up getting my MBA. So I found that having some capabilities and skillsets and then filling my toolbox with the right.

patterns and right skills and tools was a good combination for me to then make the leap into this business leadership role.

ADAMS (16:10)

All right, Yasmine can you tell us how you use leadership skills in your work?

KING (16:13)

Yes, I feel like there’s not a day I don’t use leadership skills in my job. But let me, let me give you one specific example. We have a business that has been very successful for many years and has, you know, large, a large presence in the industry. And it’s been a proprietary solution that we’ve developed over the course of over a decade. Now within automotive, there’s a lot of disruption that’s happening. And you may have seen this as well with there’s more autonomous driving that’s that you

Customers are trying to push the higher levels of autonomous driving. There’s more experience inside the vehicle that’s trying to get pulled in, whether it’s through audio, like I mentioned earlier, whether it’s video with people doing video calls while in the car. And it’s creating a large demand on the vehicle network that is challenging for current systems to fulfill.

And so there is a new thought process of, how do we enable vehicles to do all of this advanced capability and add all these new features in yet still develop new vehicles at a pretty fast rate because consumers are demanding a faster turn rate between when new car models are available. There, you know, we’re so used to the mobile phone, a new mobile phone coming out every year that that mindset has influenced even the automotive industry.

customers were starting to express frustration of not being able to move fast enough, but yet at the same time, also trying to add in more technology. And that to us was our first signal. And this goes back to the listening of where do you listen, who are you listening to, and how do you take that information and then translate it to your business strategy. So we took this technology that had been proprietary for many years and we realized

One of the ways that the industry can move faster is if they align on a standards-based solution as opposed to using a proprietary solution. When you have something that’s standards-based, there are more companies that invest into it so technology can move faster. And it also allows for customers to align on a platform and then they can choose solutions to plug in or out based off of that standards profile. Now it’s very uncomfortable because if you have a very large business that’s

proprietary to then open that up and make it a standards based solution feels like you’re adding risk and you are actually adding risk to your business. But by spending the time listening to customers and trying to dig into the why behind their frustration. So not just listening to the frustration, but understanding why, what could be done to help solve this problem. The decision became pretty clear to us that it was either we choose

to help the industry move into a faster cadence and open up a proprietary solution, or we’re going to risk the industry stalling and taking a longer time to develop. And that wouldn’t be positive for the business anyway. So it was a matter of utilizing the skills in that moment of discomfort. You don’t have perfect data.

you’re going to be making some assumptions, but understanding what those assumptions are, clearly identifying what would need to change in order for you to change your behavior or change your decisions, and then using your listening skills to identify patterns so that you can adapt and shift your strategy. So to me, that was how we can use adaptive leadership.

making sure that you are not getting stuck in how you’ve done something for many years because you’re willing to adapt to a new environment. It required the systems thinking from engineering. So not just my own decision for my own company and my business, but how is this affecting the broader ecosystem and the broader industry? So those two aspects for me were really critical in this particular decision and key study of how we decided in the end to open this up and create our own association that was

taking this proprietary solution to an open standards model.

ADAMS (20:01)

Yeah, that is a huge shift in both mindset and also application and how it’s an industry wide change. so I want to dig in a little bit more. so one of the things you talked about was this discomfort, that it is uncomfortable. And I’m curious, what were some of the strategies you used to try to onboard important stakeholders that would need to buy in both internally and then maybe also externally?

KING (20:29)

So internally, we’re an engineering organization. so the data always helps being able to present with data. So we mapped out possible future scenarios. And you would look at each one of these scenarios. If I simplify it down, I could say best case, assumed likely to happen, and then worst case. And in each of those scenarios, we ran models on what would the revenue projections be? Best case, worst case, assumed likely.

What would our share of market be? What would the industry impact be? And in each one of those, we could pull through some of it, data-based and some of it, had to make assumptions where we did make assumptions. We clearly identified each one of those assumptions and we tried to pull through customer voices as well. So a large part of this was engaging directly with customers, making sure we understood the position they were in and then using their perspective.

in our analysis so that this was not just us and our own potentially biased view making the decision, but really pulling in a broader set of partners and customers to help influence each of those future scenarios that we mapped out. So that’s how we did this internally. would say externally, one of the challenges we faced is the belief that we were truly going to do it. the beginning, was a lot of doubt that we would

actually make this happen because it was such a big decision. So in this case, what we ended up doing was finding partners who were as eager and as like-minded as we were in helping the industry move fast and push this transition forward. And we brought them on board by sharing our ideas, talking through why we wanted to make this decision. When we found there was alignment, now we could use both of our voices to help.

amplify and market that message to the broader industry. And we’re still very closely aligned with many of those partners now. In fact, they’re integral into making this association successful in the market. And we’ve intentionally not tried to drive that 100 % just from ADI because it shows a broader acceptance when you have other companies who are also engaged in helping drive the message.

ADAMS (22:41)

Internally, you have the data, not just the numbers, but also the customer perspectives, and you’re also showing, and you’re also very clearly stating your assumptions, and you’re showing multiple scenarios. And certainly it helps when you’re in an engineering business, they really are expecting to see.

to see those numbers and to see those models. And I can just envision like, you your team, you and your team standing up there and having these, I can envision these long drawn out, where’d you get that number? Where’d you get that number? Where’d you get that number? Yeah, but that’s all part of it. And if you know that going in and you just know we just got to work through it and probably get some good insights and some good critiques as well. And that just makes the whole system better. And then of course, externally,

you know, getting partners who are aligned, you can do things together and demonstrate, know, it builds the network to demonstrate, you know, this is really gonna happen and we’re all aligned. The other thing I wanted to talk a little bit more about is listening. So you’ve brought this up a couple of times as really being an important part of your leadership and your ability to have an impact. And I’m curious if you find yourself

coaching others in their listening skills and if so, what are some of the things that you advise them when they’re trying to get better at listening? Not only maybe in hearing, right? And actually paying closer attention, but also in like, how do know what’s a signal that you, how do you do something with that? How do know what to do with this, with what you hear?

KING (24:10)

I’ll tackle that in two different ways. So if I if I talk about the tactics of just pure listening Depending on the team member. I’ve had to I’ve had to coach some on listening more and that might mean that they are talking less so in that case, I think of it as How many chips do you have and you can only play those chips? If you have five chips, you can only use each one and talk for each one of those chips That’s one of the techniques that I’ll use of saying

Consider how many chips you have at the beginning of the meeting. Know that you have a set number of chips and that’s how many times you can speak. And if you were to think of it that way, does that change your behavior in a meeting? So that’s sort of the tactics. When I come to, as you very rightly stated, there’s a difference between hearing and then being able to translate that into action and knowing which parts of the signal are you going to dampen and which parts of the signal are you going to amplify.

What I found helpful here is when you go into meetings, typically I’m not by myself, right? I’ll be with either one of the other team members in my organization or I’ll be with a sales team member. So there’s usually at least two people, sometimes three people in a particular meeting. And afterwards, we will each write up our own notes and takeaways from the discussion and then we debrief. Those debrief sessions are extremely critical.

It’s amazing to me how many times we have a debrief session and there are three different things heard from the same meeting. So it can over time, if you practice this, it’s something that you realize, they’re hearing it a different way. And just knowing there is a different way of hearing the same message opens your mind to considering other options. And that gives you a good sense of how, how to approach this on a broader scale.

One of the other aspects that we’ll look at, and I think is really critical is how do you take this and read what people aren’t saying? Because the listening to what a person is literally saying is also different from listening to what they’re not saying or listening to what they’re trying to imply. And that’s where I use a lot of the sales skills that I developed over time, understanding what motivates a person, how are they incentivized?

what is driving them in their career and in this decision so that that might influence what they’re stating and what they can’t state. So there’s a lot that goes into it. does take time to build up this, this expertise. I would encourage, it’s very uncomfortable, but I would encourage everyone to spend a little bit of time in sales. It’s a great learning experience. can be extremely uncomfortable at first, but what you gain from it is so invaluable leading through influence.

learning to listen, trying to drive a collaborative approach to a solution. Those are skills that you’ll need regardless of what role that you end up in and forcing yourself to learn it through an experience like sales is highly valuable.

ADAMS (26:59)

You know, I completely a lot of technical folks have a real misconception about what sales actually is. And so you actually get in there and learn about it. You know, there’s really just this conception that it’s just about pushing your agenda and it’s about trying to, be manipulative when in reality it’s so much about trying to really understand what the other party

needs, what will help them, both the technical solution, but all these other factors as well, and coming to a win-win solution for them is how you make the sale, And so I completely agree with you.

I also spend some time advising hard tech entrepreneurs in our local ecosystem. And I’m constantly recommending that they learn what sales really is before they try to actually sell their thing because they’re gonna be enlightened. I personally think they’re gonna actually like that part of the process a lot more when they actually understand what’s there.

KING (27:54)

Yes. And frankly, business leadership is a lot like sales, right? Especially for entrepreneurs, if they’re trying to sell, pitch their company, you go out and do a ⁓ pitch to get funding from a VC that sales. If I’m a business leader and I’m trying to convince my boss to invest more money into my business, that sales. If I’m trying to convince a partner to work with me and help me drive a new strategy forward, that sales.

All of these interactions come back to, it’s really just fundamentally, how do you work with other people? How do you find, like you said, a win-win solution that is beneficial and it’s soft skills. That’s really what it comes down to. And everyone in engineering has the technical skills. We have the systems thinking. Combining that with soft skills is an unbelievable combination that really advances business leadership.

ADAMS (28:53)

All right, Yasmine, as we wrap up, what advice do you have for engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

KING (28:59)

One thing I would consider, a lot of skills can be learned outside of our jobs. We don’t have to gain leadership skills only from the roles that we’re in. So I would encourage everyone to think of, and even if it’s a hobby, I I talked about music and that being a way that I learned listening and I’m using that in my leadership training, another hobby that I got into late in life, I’d never been athletic growing up.

Dare to even say, I’m not sure if I’m athletic now, but I do train. And so I found that for me, exercise is a way to de-stress. It’s a way to stay healthy and that lets me be a better leader. But through friends, I was convinced to sign up for a triathlon. I’d never run a mile. I knew how to swim. I wasn’t necessarily the best swimmer and I could bike, but it was always just casual biking down the road. But it forced me to go into things like, how do I train for triathlon?

What kind of plan would I have? How do I progress from where I am today and set a goal to accomplish this in the next four five months? So in that process, I actually at the end of it walked away looking back on it with a lot of skills that helped me in my leadership development. So I learned how to set a long-term goal and have discipline in the near term to achieve that long-term goal.

that I use in business as well. I know where I need to be in a business in five years. How do I make decisions today and stick to those decisions so that I can hit my five-year goal? I was in the triathlon training uncomfortable a lot. There was a lot of discomfort. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. The first time I did an open water swim, I think I got about 10 strokes in and then got right back out. It was just something completely new to me. discomfort in leadership also happens

on a daily basis. You progress feels hard and then it feels rewarding. And we find that not just in our jobs, but also in our personal lives and some of the hobbies that we may pick up. So I would look at this as what are the hobbies that I love to do? And in those hobbies, in the things that I love, if you look at it from a different lens, what are the skills that I’m gaining in that hobby that I can apply into my work? Or

What are things that I fear at work that I could learn through something fun in a hobby? Because we’re more willing to tackle our fears if it’s in a fun environment. It feels so stressful to tackle a fear in the work environment, like it’s a life or death moment. So find a fun way to tackle your fears and use your hobbies as a way to do that. You don’t have to gain everything just from your jobs or just from your roles. There’s a lot of leadership skills that can be gained outside of work as well.

ADAMS (31:32)

Yasmine, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

KING (31:35)

Thank you for having me. This was so much fun.