Level Up: Recent Episodes
OpsLevel
Level Up is a podcast for technical leaders to share wins, mistakes, and words of wisdom. Each episode will feature a conversation with some of the brightest minds in engineering about building and scaling phenomenal teams, improving developer experiences, and driving best practices organization-wide. If you’re seeking the roadmap for building a world-class engineering team in a chaotic and ever-changing world, then you’ve found the right community. Welcome to Level Up!
When it comes to scaling up, time is everything, and it never feels like there’s enough. Implementing a strong culture of experimentation can help drive the balance between the speed and standardization needed to optimize growth.
Our guest today is Daniel Gebler, the Founder & CTO at Picnic. He discusses how he built a culture of experimentation that enabled him to scale Picnic from a mere idea to over 3,000 employees and how the culture continues to drive growth by optimizing the developer experience.
Join us as we discuss:
* Implementing a culture of experimentation
* Optimizing for rate of change and optionality
* Finding balance between application and business needs
* Driving continuous growth by focusing on developer experience
You can follow Daniel on Twitter: @Daniel_Gebler
By leaning into platform engineering best practices and taking time to learn about what your teams need, you can improve your developer velocity and build strong products faster at any stage of growth. Our guest today is Lawrence Jones, an Engineer at Incident.io, who talks about how he has driven engineering efforts through different stages of growth and complexity.
Join us as we discuss:
* Phases of platform engineering development
* Addressing the unique needs of teams
* How to drive alignment across teams
* Understanding more insightful incident metrics
You can read more from Lawrence at his blog
Identifying what works with your team at a small scale and how that translates as you grow can be one of the most valuable lessons you learn as a leader.
Our guest today, John Laban, Co-Founder and CEO of OpsLevel, talks about his experiences growing a team (and a business) and learning how to delegate tasks to the right people at the right time for professional growth across the organization.
Join us as we discuss:
* Scaling your company and building a successful team
* Creating clear ownership for each team
* Identifying performance bottlenecks
* Adopting microservices
Stepping into a managerial role is a major change in anyone’s career. But what happens when you decide to step away from a managerial role and back into an individual contributor role?
You should apply what you learned as a manager to your IC role!
Our guest today, Guiliano Bossi, Principal Engineer for Applications Platform at Shopify, joined to discuss his career transitions from IC to manager and then back to an individual contributor as a Principal Engineer and how he still uses what he learned as a manager of a team in an individual role to increase productivity and achieve team success
Join us as we discuss:
The aim, assemble and achieve framework
How switching from a managerial role back to an IC role can be beneficial for everyone
Getting an entire team to work towards a single goal
The elements of imposter syndrome
Hiring and managing your team is an important benchmark when growing your business. It isn’t easy to shift as the one-stop-shop from the individual contributor to recognizing when it is time to not just expand your team but also when to hand off your own responsibilities to those team members.
Our guest today, Cai GoGwilt, Co-Founder and CTO at Ironclad, joined to discuss how the growth of your team with your business can be a vital part to not just your company’s success but also allows you to focus on the larger tasks on your plate without affecting the day-to-day operations of your company.
Join us as we discuss:
- Shifting from an individual contributor to hiring a team
- Effective one on one meetings with team members
- The right time shift away from responsibilities from yourself to new team members
As your company grows, keeping teams and their development to scale can be a daunting task for some.
Thankfully, there are meaningful and productive ways to keep these growing pains at bay and keep everyone coordinated in their development.
Our guest today, Alan Boyce Senior Vice President of Engineering at Sprout Social, Inc, joined us to discuss how team building and development has helped increase product development at Sprout and how to effectively keep teams aligned in the development as a company scales in size.
Join us as we discuss:
- The traits engineering leaders have across every level of growth and scale
- Evolving the product development from a single team to multiple teams
- Strategies used to keep teams aligned
- The growing pains when becoming a public company with bigger teams