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, ...
Jul 26, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Jul 16, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jul 09, 2020•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Vidhya Srinivasan shares her framework for how she’s navigated her career and operated under high pressure. You’ll learn the practices she uses to deal with and diffuse pressure plus how to coach and create opportunities for engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk. "one question that I often ask myself is... 'Given how I feel right now if I, were to fast forward five years and I look back, would I feel the same level of pressure or anxiety about the situation?' And I've ...
Jul 02, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "when someone comes to you from a management standpoint says, 'is this okay? Can I do this?'They're implicitly remo...
Jun 25, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "You should be a coach, not a referee. And the coach is the person who is there to help you improve. The referee is...
Jun 18, 2020•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Silverman ( @dksilverman ) shares how to prioritize effectively, regain productivity, compartmentalize pain, and accelerate your rate of learning to succeed through a crisis. You’ll also hear how to apply his lessons to real case studies shared by engineering leaders from our community. “When you're dealing with uncertainty, the main thing you're trying to drive and change as the leader, is you're trying to increase the rate of learning.” ABOUT DAVID SILVERMAN Leadership expert and best-se...
May 22, 2020•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you have an effective performance conversation during a pandemic? Jonathan Raymond (@jonathanrefound) will introduce us to a super-easy to use and effective framework to provide critical feedback. You’ll learn how to apply the framework using real community challenges and tease out the actual language you can directly use to initiate those conversations. “That's what feedback is about. It's not to correct the mistake, it's to start a conversation.” JONATHAN RAYMOND - Author of “Good Autho...
May 14, 2020•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Farhan Thawar ( @fnthawar ) , VP of Engineering @ Shopify shares the hiring framework he’s built where 15-minute interviews result in both faster placements AND better fits. You’ll hear how to find talent in non-traditional ways, what happens when you leverage creativity, and how speed in hiring is a massive competitive advantage. “The problem with interviews in general are they're very biased to either things you've done before or they're biased to some other signal...like school you went to co...
May 08, 2020•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Levchin shares lessons and stories that have been critical to his development as an engineering leader. He shares stories from the early PayPal days and foundational insights for leading Affirm as a mission-driven, values-based company. He also shares essential principles for building and hiring, and how the hardest problems are almost never about code. “I should just solve the thing that matters. I don't need to worry about the hard stuff, it will show up on its own. And there's plenty of h...
Apr 28, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast What should be the role of engineering leaders in recruiting? What levers do they have at their disposal? In this fireside chat, you'll hear the perspectives of two recruiting heavy-hitters, Aditya Agarwal & Dan Portillo, on how engineering leaders can optimize for successful hiring outcomes. ADITYA AGARWAL - Former CTO Dropbox; Partner-in-Residence @ South Park Commons ( @adityaag ) Aditya Agarwal is a Partner-in-Residence at South Park Commons - a collective of technologists, tinkerers, and en...
Apr 28, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Alyssa and Chanda share stories and mental frameworks about how to strategically think about and accelerate your career journey. You’ll hear examples of how to navigate between large and small companies, how to level the playing field by strategically leveraging emerging tech fields, intentionally harnessing skip-level managers, and establishing a growth mindset. Alyssa Henry - Head of Seller & Developer Business Units & Infrastructure Engineering @ Square Alyssa Henry is the Seller Lead at Squa...
Apr 28, 2020•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast While you don't jump out of bed excited about it, you know how powerful it is for morale when you make the choice to tackle technical debt. Learn a framework for how to do the same thing with organizational debt, and unlock untapped energy, creativity and connection on your team in the process. “As organizational leaders, when it comes to organizational debt, we know that we take shortcuts. We make easy decisions. We do things that are expedient in the moment. But it has a cost. But we have to d...
Apr 28, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jason Warner (@jasoncwarner), CTO @ Github shares management principles fundamental to how he leads remote engineering teams. He shares how to scale leadership by applying the right tools and frameworks for effective communication. Jason also tells us the structures and strategies he applies to build & maintain trust throughout an organization. “Every leader in an organization should make THE SET of decisions that ONLY they can make. And then delegate all the other ones. And the only way that yo...
Apr 19, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast The hardest business problem has a soft solution. Scientists and engineers display a (well-deserved) skepticism toward touchy-feely ideas such as leadership. Fred shows there's a very technical way to understand why most organizations, from couples to multinational corporations, die a premature death... and what can be done to extend their lifespan. FRED KOFMAN - Advisor, VP of Leadership Development @ Google ( @fredkofman ) “No gun in the world can get your best. No incentive can get your best....
Mar 06, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast In an interview between Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo, they discuss “Blitzscaling” and how companies achieve massive scale at incredible speed. Reid shares insights and lessons on how to prioritize speed and efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, the benefits of intense collaboration found in Silicon Valley, and non-obvious rules needed to succeed. REID HOFFMAN - Co-Founder of LinkedIn, Partner @ Greylock Partners ( @reidhoffman ) “Part of the secret and the thing that’s great about Silicon V...
Mar 06, 2020•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Facebook’s James Everingham shares about his early leadership and management experiences and the secrets he learned from quantum mechanics to manage creative teams. You’ll hear insights about how to unleash creativity by focusing on outcomes and environments instead of process and key differences between optimizing for efficiency and invention. James Everingham - Head of Engineering, Calibra @ Facebook ( @jevering ) “His approach was just to start collecting, recruiting, the smartest scientists ...
Mar 06, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Difficult conversations for engineering leaders range from telling someone they have lettuce in their teeth to delivering life-changing bad news. Learn to level-up your ability to handle difficult conversations with a few techniques, practice and hopefully a little humor from Sarah Clatterbuck's personal experiences. SARAH CLATTERBUCK - Director of Engineering, YouTube @ Google ( @girodchatterbox ) "Your discomfort is less important than your colleague's embarrassment" - Sarah Clatterbuck Sarah ...
Mar 05, 2020•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
