We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry.
Join our community of software engineering leaders @ www.sfelc.com!
Asif Makhani, CTO @ Handshake shares about making non-incremental career transitions, unique opportunities at startups, and exercising influence at mid-stage companies. Plus Asif shares questions to help you gain clarity before your next transitions AND how to attract & retain senior engineers at smaller companies. "When you have the ability to take a step back, you begin to think a little bit more philosophically about your journey. And it's not just incremental thinking. When it's incremental ...
We cover practical tools to eliminate workplace injustice and help your team “get sh*t done fast and fair” with Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor & Just Work + Trier Bryant, CEO @ Just Work! We discuss the root causes of injustice and introduce several strategies to help you interrupt bias, address prejudice & confront bullying in your organization. "You can't possibly do your best work if you are being harmed by the way you're being treated by your colleagues..." - Kim Scott "Whatever problem...
Jan Chong, VP of Engineering @ Tally shares strategies to manage and navigate relationships with your leadership team, direct reports and peers. We cover the fundamentals of managing up, why you need to align with your peers first when you join a new team, plus ways to communicate your ideas and the priorities of engineering more effectively with your non-technical colleagues. "Organizations are made up of humans that are making decisions based on the data they have. If you don't think about how...
Nick Rockwell, SVP of Engineering & Infrastructure @ Fastly shares his recent reflections on incidents, resiliency, blamelessness, and accountability. You’ll hear why the heroic model of incident response is unsustainable, how to improve reliability by closing the long-feedback loop, plus opportunities to maximize post-mortems for process improvement AND emotional processing. " We started doing a biweekly meeting. We talk about resilience. We revisit everything that has not been closed, whether ...
We have a conversation with Christina Wick, CTO @ Flowcode, on the current state of the gender gap in tech and what we can do as engineering leaders to actively bridge that gap. We cover stories of the historical impact of women in tech as well as what you can do to remove bias in interviews, performance reviews and feedback. Plus what you can do to intervene when you observe bias happening. "The first time I heard someone talking about how "women should seek executive sponsorship" I got really ...
Allan Leinwand, SVP of Engineering @ Slack shares his core philosophy & approach to creating developer productivity AND happiness! You’ll learn how Allan combines what developers want most + metrics, & analysis of the dev pipeline to optimize productivity. Allan covers how to translate those principles to remote/hybrid work and how to tell (and what to do...) if your dev teams are unhappy. "I generally say developers want to do three things... They want to solve hard problems at scale. They want...
Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst shares how to get your career unstuck at different scales & stages! You’ll learn different frameworks you can use to benchmark your growth and identify where you might be stuck. Plus different approaches you can take to get your company and the people you lead, unstuck at scale! "The specifics of the framework are not as important as having one at all. Create some ruler... Like if you're a snail and you're trying to inch your way towards the he...
Jeremy Henrickson VP Engineering & Product @ Rippling shares how to align, lead and scale a combined engineering and product organization! You’ll learn about the common tension points while scaling, different ways to structure your org, when to combine your orgs vs. split, and how to realign your teams when expectations get out of sync. Plus how to build credibility with new teams and acquire product skills as an engineering leader! “When I have like a number of teams and each of them has like a...
John Kim has had an unconventional career, pivoting from professional gamer to software developer, to serial entrepreneur. We discuss how to assess your career, make pivots, and balance your growth long term. John shares principles from complexity science to help you navigate unknowns, risks, & opportunities in your career. Plus other powerful frameworks to make better career decisions. " So if you're working at a bigger company, what you're really trying to optimize for is how quickly can you m...
Tia Caldwell shares frameworks to motivate teams, unlock individual superpowers, and shift team mindsets to confront adversity by identifying strengths using a superpower framework, understanding roles within the Drama Triangle, and creating psychological safety through open communication and personal operating manuals.
We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership, and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making. In part 2, Tom & Viraj share why they decided to start a company together, how they assess start-up opportunities, early company building & values-defining conversations, and other strong opinions on how they’re creating the engineering culture and execution at Common Room. VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox,...
We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making! Tom & Viraj share formative startup experiences that shaped their careers as a Principal Engineer & Eng Leader. Plus insights shaping their new company on assessing risk, dealing with open-ended problems, being decisive, & removing non-coding time for engineers VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both ...
Harpaul Sambhi, Founder & CEO @ Magical reveals the tools he uses to accelerate his personal and professional growth. You’ll learn how to engineer successful outcomes with your goals through accountability mechanisms, how to build a personal board of directors or leverage friendly competitions like the “master of the universe award” to learn, pivot, & grow faster. "When we do our goal setting, especially if you're trying to compete with someone... is to do the personal side just as much as the p...
Alexis Rask, Executive Coach & Partner @ Sweat Equity Ventures shares how to ask powerful questions. You’ll hear simple tactical ways to increase the power of your questions, what the most powerful question is, common failure modes of open-ended questions, how to get over your fear of silence, plus stories of the most powerful questions we’ve ever been asked. "When I say a powerful question, I'm saying 'What's the really right question, for this right moment, that is going to TRULY unlock someon...
Wendy Shepperd , GVP Engineering @ New Relic covers how she leads massive-scale strategic programs with precision execution. You’ll hear how to lead great project kickoffs, successfully execute across multi-year time horizons, navigate complex dependencies, launch, & of course celebrate success with your team. "One of the things I tell my teams all the time, especially when things get hard... is I say " Hey, y'all we are making memories! One day we're going to look back on this time and talk abo...
Will Larson CTO @ Calm shares with us how to focus your time on what actually matters. You’ll hear about many of the common traps engineering leaders fall into and his frameworks to help you better target your time to focus on long-term, high-impact work. "A lot of times they'll be like, 'Oh no one's working on this... I can make a huge improvement here!' But then they'll get signals from leadership that 'Actually this isn't valued...' And so I think it's really important to understand what SHOU...
Edward Kim, co-founder & CTO @ Gusto shares the different forms that “fear of failure” can take in your engineering org. Eddie shares incredible stories to help you spot the different signs of “fear of failure”. And you’ll hear different ways you can change your team culture, process and operations to reduce fear of failure. “But as you continue to scale and you grow... that thing that you optimized for starts to become a disservice to you and the company. Because what happens is this fear of fa...
Erica Lockheimer shares with us her imperfect path to engineering leadership, why the unconventional path matters, and what you can do as an individual leader & organization to empower engineering leaders with unconventional backgrounds. Plus you’ll also hear how to overcome self-doubt and launch an apprenticeship program! “Whether you're a manager or whether you're an individual contributor, you are a leader in your role. Use the voice that you've earned in the seat that you own. What can you p...
Craig Martell shares the biggest mistakes leaders of ML teams make, what to do if you have no experience leading an ML team, key skills your ML team needs, plus different models/approaches to building an ML team. You’ll hear the most expensive and time-consuming parts of ML, how to estimate timelines, unique tech debt, and how to manage expectations. “If I had to give one piece of advice about starting AI in your company, one of the first people I would hire is a really great data scientist, eve...
“Giving up control” is about empowering other people to scale yourself, and scale your effectiveness. Maria Latushkin shares with us why you need to give up control as an engineering leader and what holds people back. Plus you’ll learn tons of different ways to influence and manage your performance when it’s dependent on other people’s effectiveness. “You are responsible for the delivery of the team. At the end of the day, nobody really cares like how much YOU work. You can be working around the...
A dynamic conversation between 4 current and past VPs of Engineering who cover tons of patterns and anti-patterns about being a VPE! You'll hear how leadership is different in large vs. small companies, mental models to determine your greatest leverage, why you DON’T need to act like an owner, how to put trust into practice when you’re transitioning into a new role, and about the imperfect path to become a VPE. SPEAKERS: CATHY POLINKSY CTO @ Stitch Fix JERRY KRIKHELI VP of Engineering @ Houzz RI...
We were overwhelmed by questions from our event with Doug and Emma! This is a bonus follow up conversation that further digs into measuring productivity through “Waterlining” and Kaplan Meier estimating, hashtags in communication, remote 1:1 best practices, and Doug shows us some of the creative ways he applies Zapier integrations for his personal productivity! "What it does is it forces a debate as to A what's most important and B do we really want that thing below the line waterline? Because w...
Doug Gaff and Emma Tang discuss high-bandwidth communication, innovation accounting, preventing developer burnout, influencing teams, and communicating priorities. They’ll help you move from frustration and survival in remote work, back to optimized productivity! “Personal stuff is totally in bounds and people just listen. And they don't try to solve a problem for you. And I might be like, I'm red today. I didn't get any sleep. I'm stressed about this thing. I'm not sure I'm going to get it done...
Martin Casado and Sonal Chokshi explore what makes a great VP of Engineering at startups! You’ll hear how successful VPEs are evaluated, the ideal experience and success criteria. You’ll hear rapid-fire responses covering how to scale yourself, KPIs, the ideal VPE hiring time for startups, and what VPEs should definitely NOT do. MARTIN CASADO, GENERAL PARTNER @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ He was previously cofounder and CTOr at Nicira (acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion). At VMware, Martin was SVP & G...
Your job as an engineering leader is to win and increase your capacity to win. In Part 2, Wade Chambers discusses how to measure success for engineering leaders, what great looks like, AND how to increase your team’s performance and improve their potential! You’ll also hear how to get unstuck and move your career forward. "And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a great manager? Or what does it mean to be a great leader? Answering those questions for yourself and ac...
Wade Chambers discusses how to learn anything by applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity to your career. You’ll learn how to get unstuck, and move your career forward. Plus Wade also shares stories about his early failures as an engineering manager, and what he wished he knew when he first became a manager. "The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That w...
Andrew Fong shares how to identify, operationalize, and reinforce values in your organization as well as his strategies to scale organizations through values-based decision making and in cultivating values-based environments. You’ll also hear stories about the massive role values had in the outcomes of several large-scale infrastructure projects at Dropbox. "If we can operationalize this, the micro decision making on the ground becomes much more powerful and it doesn't force us into a command an...
Organizational change is hard. In part 2, Jean-Denis Greze explores how you can adapt and transform the strengths, capabilities or “spikes” of your organization by intentionally using the strategies of “Isolation”, “Outlets” and “Shocks.” He shares a ton of great real-world examples and case studies to help you apply these strategies in your org. "The thing that I think makes over a 10 year period, a really good engineering organization is that at any one moment in time, it has very few spikes, ...
Organizational change is hard. Jean-Denis Greze shares how he thinks about building organizations that can adapt in a way that preserves strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities or “spikes” through periodical “forced changes.” He’ll explore what those forced changes are and what they’ve looked like at Plaid and other companies. "You're asking me what makes us different. I think it's that we've been really deliberate about building what I would call a ‘spiky org’ as opposed ...
Eisar Lipkovitz shares the value of being direct as well as other insights on leadership. You’ll hear how to practice the art of direct communication, how to prepare for difficult conversations, and overcome the fear of being direct. Plus Eisar’s insights on where engineering leaders get stuck in their career and how to help them grow. "At the end of the day, the main reason I think direct is effective is you actually sort of get to the core of the issue where a lot of people dance around the de...
