As VPE at Meetup.com during the fallout from the WeWork implosion, Brian saw first hand some of the challenges in organizing and reorganizing an engineering team. Aaron also engaged in his share of reorg’s as VP Engineering at New Relic and a Senior Director over at Salesforce. In this episode, hear why Aaron and Brian decided to focus on building software designed to manage the human side of the engineering org. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Contro...
Apr 07, 2022•35 min
As the CTO at a password management company, Frederic has to be passionate about security and privacy, but in this episode, he breaks down the importance of thinking about application security, company security and user privacy from day one. He also provides advice and information for starting to build out a culture that cares about the security and privacy of your software and your operations. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive be...
Mar 31, 2022•32 min
In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people are disengaged from their work and how we can do a better job of connecting our teams to their missions. Some of the resources shared by Kimberly: Project Score Card Example PDF Performance Management Evaluations Reviews PDF Complete Detailed Quarterly Dialogue Forms & Instructions PDF PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intell...
Mar 24, 2022•27 min
Like many other companies, when covid hit, Greenhouse had to up its remote/distributed engineering game. From normalizing on a “one person, one screen” strategy for hybrid meetings to experimenting with a range of social opportunities for staff to connect while minimizing zoom fatigue. Hear Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse share his thoughts on the future of distributed work, the importance of onboarding, and the beginning of the end of geography based pay scales for top engineering talent - at ...
Mar 17, 2022•36 min
From covid lockdowns to Black Lives Matter to January 6th, it’s been a couple of years. Teams expect more out of the companies they work for and also need the relational support of their managers to stay engaged and productive. In this episode, I talk with Jonathan Moore, Founder & CTO at RowdyOrbit about admitting that it’s OK not to be OK and how to help your team to bring their whole selves to work. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost ...
Mar 10, 2022•32 min
Back in 2019, Christine gave an awesome talk at our in-person San Francisco summit about how she had built an engineering org of ~30 with a 50:50 gender balance (Male : not male). In this episode, Christine shares what has changed as the organization has scaled to ~300 and her experiences as a first-time ScaleUp founder navigating hypergrowth. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligenc...
Feb 24, 2022•34 min
As cloud costs continue to become a bigger business expense, it’s increasingly important to have a proactive strategy for managing and understanding cloud costs rather than waiting for a call from the CFO! In this episode, Erik shares his experiences with tracking and managing cloud costs at Veracode before founding CloudZero and his experiences in shifting awareness of cloud costs left. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better de...
Feb 10, 2022•30 min
As companies scale, it’s always a challenge to ensure that the dev team is as committed and passionate about the product as the founders. In this episode, I chat with Dan Langevin, Cofounder and CTO at Vericred about how they are intentional about scaling and support curiosity and customer empathy in their engineering org, and the planning process they run to ensure predictability and accountability for their key customer deliverables. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelli...
Jan 27, 2022•29 min
What with covid and the great resignation, it’s hard enough to keep an engineering organization intact, aligned and motivated. Imagine doing the same while negotiating a transaction that could impact everything from your feature roadmap to your long-term tech stack. In this episode, I chat with Mark Van de Wiel, VP Technology at Fivetran who recently navigated an acquisition of his company, HVR into Fivetran. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control co...
Jan 13, 2022•30 min
The hard part of developer education isn’t teaching your team a new language or framework. It’s teaching your team how you use the language or framework. Smart devs can always find a video course online to learn the basics of ES6 or Scala, but teaching them the patterns used within your company, where the microservices live, and how to configure your CI pipeline can be challenging as the information is often not documented - or the docs are often out of date. Marko Gargenta helped create Twitter...
Dec 30, 2021•30 min
Ramana Satyavarapu is the CTO at Finix - a payments solution for SaaS companies. Previously he was Head of Data Engineering Platform and Product at Two Sigma, Head of Engineering, Software Network Infrastructure for Uber and a Head of Engineering at Google running the Google Play search team. In this episode we discuss the distinction between management and leadership, dig into how he worked on developing the leadership principles at his current company, how he thinks about balancing product, pr...
Dec 23, 2021•30 min
For most of us, jumping into engineering leadership at a new company is only something we do every 3-5 years. Today's guest, Ron Lichty, Consulting VPE, often jumps into three or more new companies every year! In this episode, we’ll discuss how he investigates the technologies, tools, teams and processes to add value quickly to an org. Whether you’re looking forward to starting your next gig or just want to freshen up your impact at your current org, it’ll be a great chance to think about how to...
Dec 16, 2021•30 min
No matter how experienced you are, there are times where it can make sense to get a second pair of eyes on a problem. For small questions you can always tap your network, but as the amount of context required and input needed grows, it can make sense to bring in a consultant in so they can think deeply and engage thoughtfully with the problem. In this week's episode, I talk with David Subar, a fractional CTO, about his experiences of how and when to engage with a CTO coach and how to find one th...
Dec 09, 2021•29 min
Conversational AI has come a long way from simple rules based chatbots, but it's still a complex and quickly evolving space. Join me as I chat with Joe Bradley, Chief Scientist at LivePerson, about the use cases, tooling, team structures and gotchas if you're considering implementing a conversational AI system for your company.
Dec 02, 2021•29 min
We're all dealing with remote-first teams now whether we like to or not. But the more I investigate hybrid working options, the more likely it seems that we're going to have to come up with remote friendly approaches to building and sustaining the culture of our engineering orgs long term. Hear how Claudius Mbemba, CTO of Neu, has built and sustained an effective remote first culture for four years at his startup.
Nov 25, 2021•23 min
Most companies are increasingly trying to leverage data science to achieve their business goals, but it's easy to create biased models that disadvantage underrepresented groups. In this episode I get to chat with Labhesh Patel, CTO and Chief Scientist at Jumio. We start by looking at common types of data bias around representation and features that may be highly correlated with protected features (zip codes that are highly correlated with race, for example) and the challenges of supervised learn...
Nov 18, 2021•31 min
The great resignation is both a threat and an opportunity for engineering leaders. To avoid regrettable attrition, you need to make sure you are tracking your comp to industry standards, creating the psychological safety to allow your team to be honest about their career aspirations and ensuring that you have consistent, high quality management across the org. At the same time, you need to be super clear about your value prop as an employer, active in recruiting, and timely in making offers to t...
Nov 11, 2021•29 min
To create a truly diverse and inclusive team where everyone can thrive and share their views, engineering leaders need to abide by the following three pillars: 1) effective and fair management principles, 2) comprehensive DEI practices, and 3) an inclusive culture. Empathy is the framework leaders can use to ensure they are incorporating all three pillars in their daily work. Jossie will share more details on the three pillars and how to leverage empathy as the foundation for inclusive leadershi...
Nov 04, 2021•29 min
In this wide ranging talk, I chat with Dr. Ben John about his experiences in scaling and managing the team at AppNexus (and post AT&T acquisition at Xandr). We talk about six week planning cycles, creating a supportive culture, building out a learnign and development team within the engineering org and Ben's advice for anyone else moving from engineering to leadership.
Oct 21, 2021•32 min
It's not easy to bring gaming technologies into the enterprise. From hardware limitations to unreasonable expectations, it's challenging to bring game like learning simulations to the corporate world. Anne Lise Waal has been doing just that at Attensi, and in this episode she shares her experiences in aligning designers, copy writers and developers, managing feature creep, prioritizing an ever changing backlog and managing technical debt.
Oct 07, 2021•29 min
They're coming. From bubble.io and webflow through UI Path and Blue Prism, the chances are that someone within your company is already building a departmental system using a "no code" tool. As with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for CIOs a decade ago, ignoring the problem isn't an option. In this episode, I chat with Colin Earl, Founder & CTO at Agiloft, about how CTOs can evaluate & leverage RPA tools to support "citizen developers" within their companies to reduce the pressure on the cor...
Sep 23, 2021•28 min
Wellington, NZ isn’t the obvious place to start a SaaS company. But Xero has built a globally distributed team of over 1800 people in product and engineering. In this episode, I chat with Mark Rees [ https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrees3/ ], their CTO about how they scaled the org. Learn more about: - How he doubled his engineering team from 150 -> 300 in a year - His approach to allocating work across a widely distributed org - Why his team actually appreciated the introduction of standards ...
Sep 09, 2021•35 min
One of the biggest risks for an engineering org is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome where the tech team wants to rethink every decision and rebuild every piece of tech from scratch. But sometimes it makes sense to take a different path if the constraints you’re optimizing for are uncommon. In this episode I chat with Adam Sypniewski, CTO at Deepgram about some of the non-obvious choices that their team has made - from programming languages and hosting to team composition and how to approach buil...
Aug 26, 2021•26 min
While running database services for AWS, Anurag Gupta, now Founder & CEO of Shoreline.io , learned the importance of going beyond monitoring and incident response to implement incident automation to automatically resolve common (and uncommon) production issues. In this episode, he talks about the importance of automating production ops, why just using cloud hosting or containers doesn’t fully solve the problem and how to think about building out an effective SRE team....
Aug 12, 2021•34 min
As a CTO, you're not just responsible for running the engineering team... Because you're also a C-level executive with the responsibility to help the executive team to leverage technology to achieve their business goals. So how can you maximize the value you're bringing to your organization? The answer is to be an "executive first". And that's what Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, talks about in this short byte. He shares what the CTO brings to the leadership team, the biggest difference between a CT...
Jul 30, 2021•39 min
Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teams We can't put the remote genie back in the bottle, but with some people desperate to get out and go back to the office, how can organizations manage the two? In today's Short Byte, I speak to Tim Olshansky , EVP of Product, Design and Engineering at Zenput, a foodtech startup focused on food safety. Tim embraced a hybrid remote model long before the pandemic and has been successfully managing hybrid remote teams for 11 years. In this chat, ...
Jun 17, 2021•32 min
Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing? The good news is that software development has moved from a peripheral activity to the heart of every business. But as technology becomes integral to all functions, how can you keep track of what embedded engineers across the org are building, balancing awareness and reliability with agility? Today we’re speaking with Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Product & Services at RackSpace about empowering technology across ...
May 20, 2021•29 min•Ep. 118
Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring process With demand for talent at an all time high, if you want to attract, identify and close the best developers for your team, you simply have to up your hiring game. Join us for this “Short Byte” as I interview Jeff Spector - a cofounder at Karat - a company dedicated to fixing the hiring process for engineers. We’ll discuss how to create a fair, predictive and enjoyable hiring process so that you get great signal from your in...
Mar 31, 2021•29 min•Ep. 117
Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering org Camille Fournier is perhaps best known for her amazing book “the managers path” - a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. But she also has a degree from Carnegie Mellon, was a VP at Goldman Sachs, and then was the CTO at Rent The Runway before eventually returning to the finance world as Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma. Today she discusses her experiences in managing a product focused engineering o...
Mar 11, 2021•29 min•Ep. 116
Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leaves Mai Irie is a director of engineering, but twice in the last two years she’s had to deal with managing the engineering org after her CTO or general equivalent left. In this interview we’ll look at some best practices for taking over an engineering org in times of transition. Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to bui...
Feb 25, 2021•26 min•Ep. 115
