In this very special episode, I get to introduce and interview Raffi Krikorian about his new podcast series - mission driven - that we’ll be hosting and distributing on a regular basis. From VP Engineering at Twitter and leading the self driving group at Uber to being the CTO of the Democratic National Committee and now the CTO at Emerson Collective, Raffi has had an impactful and varied career in tech. The one common thread in his career has been a passion for mission driven work - whether tryi...
Nov 03, 2022•27 min
These days it’s quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as the organization scales and the CTO needs to bring to bear various types of management that they may not have experienced or practiced before. This week, our guest - Ron Lichty shares his experiences of working with engineering leaders to help them to think about the...
Oct 27, 2022•31 min
There is always a tension in a mature business between the need for certainty when engaging with the rest of the company and the need for flexibility and agility when dealing with the complexities of software development. In this episode, Matt Powell, CTO at FTD shares the details of exactly how he manages planning - from annual and quarterly planning down to the sprint. A great case study in aligning and prioritizing for a decent sized (250+) tech team in a mature org. PARTNER Thanks to our par...
Oct 20, 2022•33 min
It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestones. But if you don’t start to invest in a talent pipeline you’re going to be scrambling every quarter to meet your numbers. At Code2College, Matt Stephenson and his team help engineering leaders at startups and enterprises to diversify and improve their talent pipeline by investing in high school internships. In this week's episode, hear Matt explai...
Oct 13, 2022•24 min
In this week's interview, I get to chat with Maher Saba, VP of Remote Presence (and Head of Engineering) at Meta. Before Meta, Maher was a senior developer at IBM and a Dir Eng & Distinguished engineer at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discussed why he made the move to Meta, how he thinks about managing remote teams, and how his team at Meta is working on remote presence - for work and for play. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and...
Oct 06, 2022•37 min
Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online marketplaces. Before that, he founded Zapped (payment tech) and ran local engineering at Groupon. In this week's episode, we discuss what he looks for in hiring well rounded engineers for non-trivial domains, his approach to mentorship, and the value of provocations when interviewing engineers. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost I...
Sep 29, 2022•33 min
From Amazon to Lockheed Martin, Steven Gaffney has helped a wide range of companies to improve the effectiveness of their teams. In this week's episode, we discuss the elements of a high achieving team - from having a clear north star purpose, goal, and strategy to promoting honest communications through emotional safety and improving cognitive empathy within the team. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZ...
Sep 22, 2022•32 min
Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' and they don't know what to do. It's a totally different job." Vidal Graupera has spent years gathering insights into and working through the challenges of being an engineering manager. Join us as we discuss lessons learned on transitioning into the role, methods to lessen the learning curve, and how he overcame some of his hardest challenges as an engineering ma...
Sep 15, 2022•32 min
Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that make software development and engineering leadership a unique career, the importance of setting limits, and the value of therapy as an engineering leader. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive be...
Sep 08, 2022•32 min
In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1000 people over the last two years. In this wide-ranging episode we discuss everything from MongoDB’s “Future of Work” initiative for letting their teams decide how and where to work, the importance of providing air cover for Non-Functional Requirements, w...
Sep 01, 2022•31 min
Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool 😊. After co-founding 2U, in 2014 he co-founded Andela to help companies to more easily take advantage of top engineering talent - in Africa and beyond. In this week's episode, listen to Jeremy as he shares his thoughts on hiring global talent, the benefits of remote vs. distributed teams, his thoughts on timezones, the benefits of global Professional Employer Organizations, and long-term trends in global comp f...
Aug 25, 2022•39 min
In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to chat about a range of the trends he’s been seeing in the data persistence space. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost man...
Aug 18, 2022•30 min
In this week's episode, I got to talk with Mindaugas Mozūras, who runs an engineering org of over 400 people for Vinted out of Lithuania. We talked about the importance of mental health, the benefits of therapy, and what getting coaching and mental health support taught Mindaugas about managing his team. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visib...
Aug 11, 2022•28 min
If you’re at Coinbase, JP Morgan, a power company, or the NSA, you can skip this episode. If you’re not expecting attacks from nation states, might you be able to simplify your security operations by focusing on the highest likelihood threat vectors? This week I chatted with Ismael Peinado, CTO of TopTal and a former hacker who is passionate about simplifying SecOps. From 2FA to eliminating email, he has a number of practical suggestions for reducing your security risk profile quickly and cost e...
Aug 04, 2022•35 min
Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benefits of spending longer as an IC before moving to the management track. We also chat about what quality is in architecture, operations, and teams. It’s a great, wide ranging discussion with some fun takeaways for any engineering leader. PARTNER Thanks to ou...
Jul 28, 2022•36 min
Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the scalable startup”. With an unabashed commitment to hiring unicorns, managing lightly, and keeping any given engineering org within the Dunbar number, Ami shares a lot of fascinating wisdom from his experiences of founding and selling Adallon (his previous s...
Jul 21, 2022•33 min
Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide for automated incident resolution and/or forecasting of potential issues as anomalies start to arise in the production data. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero ...
Jul 14, 2022•28 min
If you’re a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at Coalesce.io gets me up to speed with the current landscape. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of data warehouses, lakes, and meshes and best practices for persisting and querying against data at scale. It’s not enough to turn you into an expert in data analytics, but at least i...
Jul 07, 2022•27 min
In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work https://www.holloway.com/g/remote-work/about (along with the also awesome Katie Wilde - VPE at Ambassador Labs and previously VPE at Buffer). In this week's episode, Juan Pablo discusses his experience in building out international remote teams and managing across the three dime...
Jun 30, 2022•37 min
Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degree in computer engineering to learning how to be a productive member of an engineering team and his thoughts on the skills required to help junior engineers become effective and productive. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence ...
Jun 23, 2022•26 min
When Joris Dries, CTO of Resonate Solutions in Sydney lost his team lead in the middle of a growth spurt, he had to figure out how he could keep on scaling the team while also filling the leadership gap. He started the process of looking for a new team lead, but after three months realized that he needed a "plan B" to ensure he could keep the team growing and productive. In this episode we look at his approach, experiences and lessons learned. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost...
Jun 16, 2022•28 min
This week I got to chat with James Kenigsberg - perhaps best known as the founding CTO at 2U. James shares his thoughts on making transformations tractable, helping your team to win even if their projects don’t, and the “run, grow, transform” framework for allocating and structuring projects based on the degree of certainty and alignment. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. Th...
Jun 09, 2022•30 min
Dave Mangot is the principal at Mangoteque, and has successfully led DevOps transformations and operational maturity achievement at companies like Salesforce, Cable & Wireless, and SolarWinds. He's also the author of Mastering DevOps . In this episode, he shares his thoughts on why "architecture matters, technology doesn't" and how to think about DevOps and technology challenges through the lens of business value. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . C...
Jun 02, 2022•32 min
In addition to being the founder of the New York CTO Club, Jon Williams is also a fractional CTO. In this episode, in addition to briefly discussing how and why the New York club got founded, we also dug into one of Jon’s favorite patterns for helping engineering teams to both think through risks associated with projects and deepen their team communications and levels of trust. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions wi...
May 26, 2022•33 min
Before founding Control Plane Corporation, Doron was the Chief Software Architect for the cloud services platform at VMWare, a principal architect at Concur and a Chief Software Architect at Dell, so he has some experience architecting systems at scale. In this episode, he digs into the value of a microservices architecture the benefits of containerization vs. serverless, the elements of a well thought out cloud architecture and some of the additional considerations if you want to up your reliab...
May 19, 2022•34 min
Given the demand for engineering talent, it’s important not to exclude great candidates just because they didn’t go to the right school or don’t feel like a culture fit (vs. being a culture add). In this episode, I talk with Gary Davis, Diversity Talent Acquisition Lead at Adobe about how to think about competencies rather than credentials, how to create a structured interviewing rubric and how to start to widen your sourcing pipeline to improve both the diversity and the quality of software eng...
May 12, 2022•26 min
Bringing new leadership into an engineering org is slow, expensive, and can be risky. It makes much more sense to focus most of the time on how you can grow your team. This week I chatted with Joe Lynch, Former Engineering Leader at Google Cloud about how best to think about supporting the growth of the engineering leaders already within your org. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform . Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelli...
May 05, 2022•31 min
In this episode, I talk with Michael Stahnke, VP Platform at CircleCI about the “four core metrics”, and what’s next. Michael was Director of Engineering at Puppet back when Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim created the State of DevOps report which provided a rigorous basis for focusing on four key metrics for tracking the maturity of an engineering org. When taken together, Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover, and Change Failure Rate provide a great sta...
Apr 28, 2022•34 min
While we often think of ourselves as technologists, CTOs and engineering leaders are also in the business of sales. Whether it’s internal stakeholder alignment or selling a startup vision to a technical buyer, the ability to relate to and connect with customers and stakeholders can be a superpower as a CTO. Learn how Mark first got his sales mojo as a technologist when all the sales people in his office quit, and the impact that a customer engaged engineering leader can have by shortening the pr...
Apr 21, 2022•27 min
In the less than two years since Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. joined Starburst Data as Director of Engineering, the company has scaled from ~80 to ~350 staff and engineering is now at 85 people spread from California to India with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London, and Warsaw. Hear how she is managing the competing demands of creating a compelling in-office experience without disadvantaging the “remote only” members of her team. PARTNER Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost I...
Apr 14, 2022•32 min
