CTO Connection Podcast: Recent Episodes
Peter Bell
If you run an engineering organization, connect with and learn from your peers at CTO Connection - the premier community for senior software engineering leaders. Learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers! Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and associated experts. And join our summit series (online or in-person) to share problems and get answers.Learn more about CTO Connection and their virtual summits at https://www.ctoconnection.com/
Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.
In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience - on top of their day job - and substantial value is left on the table.
Allison - (currently an engineering leadership consultant - previously VPE at QuotaPath and Head of Engineering at Forem) has been planning offsites for 25 years and in this thoughtful interview she shares advice on setting meaningful goals for offsites, how to think about size, location and frequency and some best practices for making them more targeted and engaging to maximize their value.
If you’d like to learn more about Allison, check out her website - https://daydreamsinruby.com/
Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture.
This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days to better align his team.
Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features.
Drawing on his experience in the Israeli Military (think the Israeli NSA), Aviv shares concrete advice that can allow you to accelerate the growth of your junior engineers so that they can become productive, mid-level developers in just 6-12 months, allowing for a more cost-effective blended team rate, more satisfaction and growth for the engineers, and the ability to invest effectively in growing the next generation of software engineering talent.
As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value.
In this wide-ranging discussion Rukmini Reddit, SVP of Engineering, Platform at Slack shares five questions she asks throughout her org to support herself and her team when dealing with change and how she leverages models like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous change model to better understand and support her organization through difficult transitions.
Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit’s progression from junior IC to senior engineering leadership and reflect on some of the lessons learned.
Naturally, as CTOs, we often think about our job as to work with developers to ship software. But what does that mean in a world of frameworks, low code, no code, and even GenAI solutions? In this fascinating interview, I got to chat with Jeremiah Stone, CTO of SnapLogic about heuristics for finding the right level of abstraction for delivering business value, how to engage with and support citizen development, and how to deal with shadow IT in a world where even the new marketing intern is writing code.
Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (healthcare). None of these were deep tech companies, but in each case, he found a core of engineering excellence and used that to entice and retain top talent to join his team - despite not being able to match big tech salaries.
In this interview, Josh takes us through his process for selecting the right CTO opportunities to accept, then building a compelling engineering brand, and using it first to retain and then attract top talent.
In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for both incumbents and AI native startups, and the broader impact on the workforce and society as we deeply adopt Generative AI over the next 5-10 years.
According to Albert, right now we’re both in the middle of an unprecedented hype cycle for LLMs and starting to witness a transformation as profound as that from an agrarian to an industrial society
Raji Subramanian brings a wide range of experience to the role of CTO at Opendoor (Nasdaq OPEN). She honed her technical chops culminating in a Principal Engineer role at Amazon and then ran engineering orgs at Yahoo and Amazon and cofounded Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor.
In this wide ranging interview, we discuss everything from the trend towards single threaded leadership within technical orgs, sustaining innovation in larger technical orgs, the importance of respecting failure, and the three stages of value creation.
This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It’s a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a product thoughtfully, but quickly.
Spinach is a smaller startup, but the lessons are applicable to companies of all sizes, and previously, Yoav was Head of Product for Asurion Health, Head of Global Business Process at Uber, and a manager for Walmart eCommerce.
Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLMs as a non-expert.
In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his thoughts on how CTOs should think strategically about engaging with Generative AI - both for improving the process of writing software and more broadly to rethink their product offerings and even their internal business processes.
Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the work being done.
In this interview, Gayatri Iyengar shares her experiences building platform solutions at both Uber and Doordash and how she used storytelling to connect business stakeholders with the real value that her org was delivering.
In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby’s about his approach to managing his costs during a downturn. From cloud spend and SaaS costs to prioritizing fewer projects and hiring globally, it’s a great insight into how a traditional enterprise is engaging with a tighter financial environment.
While there has been a major push to return to the office (by many managers and a good number of ICs), when remote is done right, it can reduce costs, provide access to a much wider talent pool, make teams more productive and scale more effectively (beyond a certain team size, every company is distributed). In this interview I chat with Mona Soni about her experiences running a distributed team at a larger company before, during and after the pandemic and some of the lessons she learned to get the maximum value out of a distributed engineering org.
Do you still have doubts about the wisdom of leveraging LLMs in software development? Maybe you’re not sure how much they can help or how best to get started with them. Or maybe you’re well into the process of experimenting with LLMs for speeding up software development and you’d just like to compare notes?!In this fascinating interview I got to chat with Matt Welsh - Chief Architect and Co-founder of Fixie.ai about his practical experiences in leveraging Generative AI for software development, clearing up some common misconceptions along the way
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Jim O’Leary (VP of Engineering, Signal) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
We’re going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcast”. We’ve really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we’ve seen over time that the challenges of running (say) a 5-20 person engineering team are very different from those involved when running a 200+ person org. And as many of our original startup CTOs have scaled their orgs to 200 people and beyond, we’ve decided to follow them.
Because of that, we’re going to refocus the podcast, the content, the summits, and the community on “geeks who lead at scale” - senior engineering leaders in larger companies with 200+ full-time employees in product/engineering. In that way, we’ll be able to provide information that is more consistently tuned to one of the most challenging tasks out there - leading engineering orgs at scale.
At the same time as we make the community more exclusive, we’re also going to make it more inclusive. Whether you’re running data, security, IT, or software development, there are many similarities when you’re working within a company of around 500 - 10,000 employees. I’ve been involved with a number of “CTO” clubs across the US and in each case, I’ve seen the benefits of having a range of roles (from CIO and CISO to CDO and CTO - as well as directors and VPs of Software, Platform, Data/Analytics, and Security), as many of the challenges are the same, and it means the community has deeper expertise in a number of key topics if a CDO wants to learn more about engineering best practices for their data team or a CTO needs a hot take on an AppSec challenge they’re facing.
I am disappointed that - given our limited resources - we won’t be able to continue the focus on content specifically tailored to startup CTOs, but I look forward to refining our focus so we can scale our ability to share experiences and insights from and between geeks who lead at scale.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Laura Edelson (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU, and Co-Founder of Cyber Security for Democracy Project) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
In part two of my interview with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat, we dig deeper into the process of creating predictive, fair, and efficient interview loops. In this episode we start with culture - how do you identify the cultural attributes important to help someone thrive in your environment and how do you interview for culture fit/culture add. We then discuss approaches to blending cultural and functional tests into an interview loop. We then take a little time to discuss how and when to provide hints for candidates during an interview and the surprising value of allowing candidates a redo.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Fred Diego (Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
Especially in the early days, too many companies still have ad-hoc interview processes or over index on things like resumes which aren’t super predictive of likely performance and tend to exclude many great candidates. In this episode, I get to chat with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat about their experiences in structured interviewing for engineering roles. We talk about ways to do an inexpensive but predictive initial technical screen, avoiding “pedigree bias”, structuring tests for functional competence and how best to build a lightweight, quick but predictive loop with independent assessments and clear rubrics for everyone involved.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.
I was lucky enough to attend a dinner during which Hilary Mason dropped more wisdom about hiring in one course than many people do in a 90-minute talk. In this week's episode, I get to chat with Hilary, learning how she thinks about screening for judgment, identifying the requirements for a role, the value of creating a humane, fun, structured interviewing process, and the importance of valuing a mix of talents and perspectives on the team (hackers and scalable systems builders, optimists and pragmatists, etc).
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out. After taking time to get back in balance, he returned to continue running the org. In this interview, we discuss the journey and the lessons learned.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.
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 trying to change the way the world communicated with each other back in 2009 at Twitter, or helping to solve the self driving problem to reduce the impact of automobile ownership, or more obviously in the political and then social good realms at the DNC and Emerson Collective respectively.
In the episode, Raffi shares what it’s like to move from tech centric companies to an organization that was not at all tech focused, talks about what “mission driven” means to him, and then shares some heuristics for identifying missions that might matter to you and finding ways to apply your engineering leadership skills towards those missions.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 various types and levels of management - from managing individual contributors through managing managers, functional areas, and eventually an entire function like engineering. He also shares some thoughts on how the things that can make you successful at one level can stop you from succeeding at the next.
It’s a great model for decomposing the various kinds of management skills required by a CTO and much of it comes from the book “The Leadership Pipeline” which was designed as a book to help companies to grow their leaders but which also provides a very coherent framework for thinking about the various levels of management required as an organization scales.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 explain their program and the quality of work and loyalty that their companies are getting by investing in relationships with top talent earlier.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 manager.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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, why you need a “zipper” connecting product and engineering all the way up and down the org and how to know when you’re halfway done with a change initiative.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 remove vs. distributed teams, his thoughts on timezones, the benefits of global Professional Employer Organizations, and long-term trends in global comp for engineering talent.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 effectively.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 startup) to Microsoft and then working within the largest software development company in the world.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 it may help you to understand what the domain experts are talking about!
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 dimensions of distance, time(zones), and culture.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
Show notes: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toyotas-secret-the-a3-report/
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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. 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 reliability and flexibility by moving multi-region or multi-cloud. A little geekier than many of our other discussions, but if you are involved with the architecture of your application and cloud native infrastructure it should be a great overview of some of the topics you need to consider.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 engineers that your outreach attracts.
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 starting point for engineering teams looking to improve their efficiency. But no metrics are perfect. In our chat, Michael shares how (and why) he defines DevOps for different audiences, how he thinks about each of the metrics, things to bear in mind when thinking about the survey responses, and the variability in developer experience even between companies that perform well on all four metrics. And he raises the question, “once you’re performing well on the DORA Metrics, what do you prioritize improving next?”
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 product feedback cycle, and getting product feedback directly from customers.
Resources
- The Startup Founder Sales Series - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/the-startup-founder-sales-series-an-introduction/
- Daniel Pink, To sell is human https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087GJ8KM/
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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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. 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 least within the US.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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.
PARTNERThanks 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 management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.
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 University and has since helped companies like Salesforce, Shopify, Airbnb, and LinkedIn to work on the challenge of “tech enablement” at scale. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss everything from how to encourage the sharing of such tacit knowledge to how to keep it up to date - even in a fast-growth engineering org.
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, process and people, and how he helps his team to determine whether the managers path is right for them.
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 get the most out of your engineering organization.
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 that’s a good fit for the problem that you’re trying to solve.
Get in touch with David via email, dsubar@interna.com or via the contact form at www.interna.com. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsubar or twitter https://twitter.com/dsubar.
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.
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.
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 learning where the team tagging your data can also introduce bias into models.
We then discuss the benefits of increasing the diversity and inclusiveness of both your tagging and modeling teams and questions you can ask as an engineering leader to make sure your data science team is being thoughtful about the potential impact of the models they're building.
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 the best candidates. Listen as I chat with Charlie Reverte, SVP Technology at MessageBird (previously CTO at SparkPost) about how you can ready your organization for increasing competition for top engineering talent.
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 leadership for the future.
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.
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.
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 core dev team while still getting their departmental needs met.
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 for processes and technologies
- The unexpected benefits of publishing a machine readable service directory for the org
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 build vs buy decisions.
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.
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 CTO who's focused on their org versus being an active member of the leadership team, how to balance your responsibilities to both the engineering team and leadership team, and why it's important to focus on outcomes - not egos.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with Bugsnag, who invites you to join the Apps + Coffee Connection! The Apps + Coffee Connection is a new mobile and web app community for engineering and product leaders to converse about industry topics. Every third Friday of the month we meet to discuss topics such as process efficiencies, tools, team management and future thinking. You can join the community by adding this recurring event to your calendar.
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, hear Tim talk about his remote first but office-centered approach to remote work, and the three driving principles that make sure employees are happy, productive, and enjoy similar experiences, whether they're in the office or across the country or world.
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 the organization while still providing guard rails to ensure the quality and reliability of the solutions.
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 interviews, create a good impression with the candidates and can improve the inclusivity of your process and the diversity of your team.
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 org.
Thank you to our friends at Carbon Five for sponsoring today’s episode. For over 20 years, Carbon Five has helped businesses build, launch and scale digital products and teams. They’ve helped brands like Signal, Masterclass, Stitch Fix, Chime, and more, design and develop some of the most successful apps and platforms on the market today. So whether you’re looking to build your first app, fix a broken development process, or to scale your successful engineering team — the folks at Carbon Five are ready to help. Visit carbonfive.com/ctoconnection for special access to free product development guides and technical team resources.”
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partners:
CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.
LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/
CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup
Whether you’re thinking of founding, joining or investing in an early stage tech company, Lee Edwards has some advice! From effective due diligence on an early stage company to some interesting focus areas for deep tech startups. Lee is a partner at Root Ventures - a hard tech seed VC, and was previously CTO/VPE at Teespring and an Engineering Manager at Groupon.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partners:
CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.
LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/
CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin - Measuring outcomes vs. inputs
How can you best measure the effectiveness of your engineering team? Lines of Code written? Number of PR’s? There are absolutely some input metrics that can have some value, but we don’t hire engineers to write code, we hire them to solve business problems. In this discussion Johnny Ray Austin, CTO at Till shares his experiences of managing his org by focusing on the outcomes produced rather than the inputs delivered.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partners:
CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.
LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/
CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Building vs buying software
Building vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time to market, but then you have the potential of vendor lock in and being constrained by the limitations of the tool that you chose. And in the engineering world, it’s even harder. While Not Invented Here syndrome is becoming less prevalent, you still need to pick between a ground up implementation or leveraging open source, professional open source and commercial offerings. And then to think about how to incorporate low code APIs and no code solutions into your tech mix in a way that reduces build and maintenance costs without limiting the quality of your final solution. Join us to hear how James thinks about this balance - both as a CEO of a company that buys other peoples software and as the founder of a company that sells its own SaaS solution.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partners:
CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.
LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/
CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the
Building a startup within a startup
There are a unique set of constraints when you’re running an engineering team at a “startup within a startup” - from managing the planning cycle before you’ve hit product market fit, to customizing elements of your product and infrastructure designed for a very different audience. Join us to hear how Heidi Williams, Director of Engineering at Grammarly is working on these challenges by building out an enterprise offering for a traditionally consumer focused business.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partners:
CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.
LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/
CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
JP learned engineering management the hard way - and he’s passionate about helping new engineering leaders to have a better pathway to building their skills. In this Short Byte we look at the differences between being an engineering leader at a startup vs a larger company, how JP learned to become a manager, resources that are now available for engineering leaders and some hints and tips on managing your boss and hiring effectively at a startup.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partner - CodeClimate! Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate by the end of the year and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Culture work is part of a developers job
At Flatiron Health, the team thinks that getting IC’s to invest in the team culture is so important that they’ve built it into their career ladder. So I’ll be asking Cat why “culture work” (from onboarding and mentoring to planning hackathons and running socials) is everyone’s job and how it has helped her to build a cohesive and inclusive culture despite explosive growth of her engineering org.
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
And thanks to our sustaining partner - CodeClimate! Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate by the end of the year and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
According to Christian Beedgen CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic, there is no magic bullet when it comes to innovation. His brain child, Sumo Logic, was founded to empower digital business through real-time analytics delivered as a service.
On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, Christian and Peter chat about the future of log files and where machine learning fits in. Christian also discusses his long road toward becoming a founder and CTO. Take a listen to the episode.
- (01:11) - Falling forward
- (06:58) - Technical management & leadership
- (08:31) - Leading through influence
- (16:02) - Getting insights from logs
- (24:00) - ML/AI analysis
- (32:34) - Magic bullets
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Companies have largely figured out software. Data science, however, seems to be the new frontier. Many data scientists are coming from largely academic backgrounds and maybe don’t understand how to function at jobs in the private sector. Today’s guest is Ian Wong, co-founder and CTO of Opendoor. He chatted with Peter about the questions data scientists can ask themselves to better align their work with tangible business outcomes.
Ian also discussed how the pandemic has led his team to talk about making remote-first work as a permanent practice. Tune in for his insights.
- (01:10) - Studying at Stanford
- (03:40) - Square and Prismatic
- (04:48) - Clojure and Lisp-based languages
- (08:41) - Co-founding Opendoor
- (14;26) - Recruiting winners
- (20:01) - Remote-first reality
- (28:36) - The strategy of data science
- (35:20) - Hiring data science practitioners
- (39:27) - Managing stakeholder expectations
- (41:41) - Questions to elicit competence
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Content should be both structure driven, and easily integrate with software. But most Content Management Systems are legacy systems that are not intuitive and clunky. Paolo Negri, co-founder and CTO of Contentful, was an early adopter of GraphQL.
This week on CTO Connection, Paolo talked to Peter about why GraphQL works so well for content and why organizations should strive to be API-driven. Tune in for his thoughts on management.
- (01:12) - Paolo's journey to building an org
- (04:42) - Life with 20 direct reports
- (07:49) - Attracting talent
- (11:13) - High Output Management
- (11:27) - Managing Humans
- (11:59) - The Manager's Path
- (12:11) - Team Topologies
- (12:34) - Building an API-driven company
- (18:16) - Looking into GraphQL
- (21:38) - Bridging the gap
- (26:22) - Query language
- (32:44) - Tooling maturity
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Thanks to the pandemic, many people are getting their first taste of working remotely. But for Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical, having a globally distributed team is just a way of life. On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, he discusses the pros, cons, and considerations for companies considering globally distributed teams.
Further, Gustavo talks to Peter about managing teams looking to solve big, open-ended problems, why finding motivated employees is key, and why he is a proponent of globally distributed teams. Take a listen for more.
- (01:12) - Discovering a passion
- (05:07) - Team leadership at Conectiva
- (06:18) - Doorway to Canonical
- (09:16) - Bootstrapping large projects
- (17:16) - Managing expectations
- (22:03) - Self-motivation
- (25:20) - Communication overlap
- (30:40) - International compensation
- (35:15) - Remote interviews
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Sites like Squarespace and Shopify have simplified the design and engineering process for people who either don’t have the technical skills or the resources to hire a team of engineers. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for the tools a business will need. Julien Lemoine is the co-founder and CTO of Algolia, a hosted search platform. He joined Peter for a discussion on API and customization.
Listen as Julien discusses why things are trending toward customization and greater flexibility. He also shares why getting the architecture right is one of the most important aspects for anyone managing a team of engineers.
- (01:11) - How Julien got interested in technology
- (03:15) - Small team management
- (05:53) - Becoming CTO at MASA Group
- (07:10) - Simplifying search at Algolia
- (10:26) - Build and buy
- (25:37) - Evolution of the problem
- (33:40) - Choosing the right API
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When Justin Dean was placed as a network engineer in the Marine Corps, he had no idea that this would lead to a career helping legacy and emerging businesses shape what is possible in network engineering. Justin is currently the CTO and CIO of Weedmaps, a website that helps customers find local weed dispensaries and helps dispensaries stay in compliance with state regulations.
Today, Justin takes us through his jobs at Shopzilla and Ticketmaster before arriving at the industry changing Weedmaps. Listen in as he talks to Peter about both the evolution and future of network engineering.
- (01:10) - The road to Weedmaps
- (08:37) - The secret sauce at Shopzilla
- (15:10) - Transforming Ticketmaster
- (25:49) - The World Wide Web of Weed
- (34:30) - Product prioritization
- (36:10) - Business unit organization
- (46:52) - Attracting and hiring staff
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Rob De Feo has spoken to more than 500 startups over the last few years in his role as a startup advocate. These experiences have given him insider knowledge on the patterns leaders in startups face as well as best practices that have helped businesses reach scale.
This week on CTO Connection, Rob takes Peter behind the curtain of life as a startup advocate. They also discuss their biggest career advice: searching for roles based on tasks rather than titles. Tune in for Rob’s insights.
- (01:10) - How Rob got into the tech world
- (01:55) - Joining Expedia
- (05:37) - Becoming a co-founder and CTO
- (07:20) - Moving to Amazon Web Services
- (09:54) - Speaking to start-ups
- (10:45) - Building for now
- (20:17) - Lead geek personalities
- (22:37) - Patterns for early-stage teams
- (29:57) - Getting good advice
- (32:50) - Balance in mentorship
- (35:18) - Becoming a start-up CTO
- (36:51) - Training, coaching, and mentoring
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
If you’re a startup or any company that doesn’t have vast name recognition, attracting top talent can be a key concern. Ashish Aggarwal cut his teeth at Microsoft, Amazon, and Postmates so when the time came to start his own company, Productiv, he knew how to get the right people for the job.
Ashish spoke candidly about his past experiences and how they have helped shape Productiv. He shared with Peter the two things that attract top talent: challenging problems to solve and the opportunity to work with other high performers. Listen for more of his insights.
- (01:12) - Growing into people management
- (03:39) - Management training at Microsoft
- (06:15) - Attracting great talent at Ebay
- (08:50) - Geo-distributed offices
- (11:53) - Amazon's customer obsession
- (18:23) - Next-level ownership at Postmates
- (24:22) - Founding Productiv
- (34:30) - Principles for start-up team building
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
According to Raj Sethuraman, good technology cannot be a successful technology unless it solves customer problems and drives great business outcomes. Raj is currently CTO at Wolters Kluwer and got his start at Intuit. The common thread throughout his career has been establishing customer-centricity to better inform technical decisions.
He is our guest this week on CTO Connection and talked to Peter about a program he likes called “Follow Me Home” in which he and other team members sit down with customers to find out how they use products and what could make them work better. Listen for his insights.
- (01:21) - Transitioning to leadership
- (03:48) - Customer centricity
- (05:16) - Follow me home
- (12:26) - Co-creating value
- (16:57) - Badass: Making Users Awesome
- (18:24) - Achieving quick wins faster
- (22:01) - Appetite for change
- (24:51) - Managing pushback
- (28:01) - Hiring for culture fit
- (30:30) - Engineer rotation
- (32:29) - Innovation priorities
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Greg Thomas is the author of the book, Code Your Way Up. Over the course of his 20 years in software development, he found that there was a void when it comes to developing individuals on a team into leadership and management roles.
Greg joined Peter to talk about some of the most important principles discussed in his book. He discusses why feedback isn’t always a pat on the back and shares three questions you should be asking when you join or build a new team. Listen for his advice.
- (01:32) - Code Your Way Up
- (03:10) - How to grow individuals
- (06:24) - Identifying the right track
- (09:51) - Selecting feedback
- (14:18) - Continuing to code
- (16:25) - Candidates for career change
- (22:29) - Training to become a competent manager
- (25:20) - The Making of a Manager
- (25:33) - Seth Godin's "altMBA" workshop
- (26:37) - Succession planning
- (28:50) - Touchpoints for reflection
- (31:43) - Helping teams help themselves
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
In any industry, communication is a key factor in a team’s success. For CTOs navigating complex problems, effective communication between all stakeholders is paramount. David Subar is both a Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Interna Consulting. He joined Peter to discuss common patterns that result in communication breakdowns.
David shares some of the clashes that can happen when a CEO’s vision is not in alignment with the metrics or working style of the team. He also discusses why having a hybrid position for a CTO and Product Officer eases workflow. Listen for his advice on diffusing these communication issues.
- (01:25) - David's first jobs out of college
- (03:27) - Transitioning to management
- (07:14) - Interna Consulting
- (09:43) - Common CEO failure patterns
- (12:13) - Relative strengths of C-level executives
- (16:26) - Building credibility and communication paths
- (18:41) - Helping the CEO focus on what matters
- (25:53) - Patterns in failing CTOs
- (28:35) - First time at bat
- (31:45) - Off-handed comments
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Fleming Shi has been with Barracuda Networks for more than 15 years. In that time, there has been a profound shift and evolution in the tools and security systems that power his engineering team. He joined Peter for this week’s edition of CTO Connection to discuss his journey to CTO as well as the many changes he’s witnessed over the years.
Listen for Fleming’s thoughts on keeping up with trends as well as the character traits of 10xer engineers.
- (01:27) - Fleming's career journey
- (04:17) - Moving to Barracuda
- (08:07) - Sustainability after launch
- (14:18) - Motivation for the long-term
- (19:39) - Sustaining a culture of innovation
- (24:25) - Advanced technology group
- (29:46) - What makes a 10Xer
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Data science has increasingly become an integral part of the technical makeup of organizations. However, most CTOs don’t have experience building a data science component from scratch. Jon Morra got his start in data science at eHarmony when most technical teams did not have any researchers. He joins Peter today on CTO Connection to offer advice on how to build a research team from the ground up.
Jon discusses why you want to bring on researchers who are generalists and why it is imperative that you have a clear problem you want to solve before assembling a team. He also explains why you should look at problems as oracles and offers guidance on the hiring process for data scientists. Listen to get ideas on starting a research team for your organization.
- (01:26) - Jon's path to becoming Chief Data Scientist at ZEFR
- (02:40) - Balancing competing priorities at eHarmony
- (04:30) - Where to start building up a data science team
- (08:16) - Approaches for making the first hire
- (11:14) - Beyond full stack
- (13:07) - Filling the gaps
- (16:18) - Thirsty to learn
- (17:56) - Promoting to manager
- (19:41) - Minimizing business risk
- (22:16) - Defining success
- (24:11) - Where should the team live within an org?
- (27:42) - Initial goals and expectations
- (29:32) - What is senior?
- (32:16) - Managing senior data scientists
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
VP of Engineering is an expansive position. But what is it really like on the granular level? Alexandra Paredes is the VP of Engineering at Code Climate and joined Peter to discuss how she approaches the hiring process, keeps her team on track, and navigates metrics such as cycle time and code review involvement.
Tune in to hear Alexandra’s thoughts on communication and transparency as well as mentoring new engineers to ensure they ask the right questions from the start.
- [01:28] - Alexandra's rise to VP of Engineering at Code Climate
- [07:21] - Internal metrics
- [12:02] - Milestones without estimates
- [18:40] - Cycle time
- [20:29] - Reliability requirements
- [21:59] - Code review involvement
- [23:29] - Incremental pull requests
- [26:34] - Tracking key abilities
- [29:58] - Communicating metrics to non-technical management
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Working nonstop without delegating is not a sustainable way to live or work. Such habits often lead to burnout. CTOs in particular struggle with this problem. Many are young, inexperienced, or desirous of being part of a shippable product to relinquish control. Andy Skipper was once such a CTO himself. Now he coaches and mentors other CTOs with his company, CTO Craft.
Andy joined Peter for this week’s episode of CTO Connection to discuss what burnout is, how to identify it, and what tools you can use to turn things around. Listen to this important conversation for tips and advice on beating burnout.
- [01:26] - The early days of Andy's career
- [06:19] - The vision behind founding CTO Craft
- [07:56] - Patterns of burnout
- [11:29] - Heuristics for prevention
- [15:46] - Walking away from the golden handcuffs
- [19:36] - Mismatched expectations & resources
- [20:08] - Communication, helping others, and polyphasic sleeping
- [25:55] - Couples therapy for founders and lead technologists
- [28:50] - Cutting losses
- [30:42] - Finding a sustainable pace
- [33:54] - Step out of the situation
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
According to James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag, caring about customer experience is what makes for a better software developer. This is especially important when managing technical debt. Today on CTO Connection, James shares his experience and discusses his approach toward technical debt from both the developer and client perspectives.
James shares why he believes overcommunication is key and how carving out time can help your team achieve a manageable sprint cadence. Listen for more.
- [01:26] - Becoming CTO in hard mode
- [05:43] - Learning to let go
- [10:17] - Hiring management
- [13:11] - Process maturation
- [15:34] - Overcommunication
- [19:12] - Managing technical debt
- [26:08] - Carving out time
- [31:23] - Bug triage
- [37:23] - Delivering a good experience
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Let’s say you join a new organization. How would you spend your first hundred days if you were to figure out how to enact change and implement your own priorities? Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Andrew Fawcett, CTO of Avantica. Andrew has worked with companies of all sizes and has seen some truly amazing changes made, but also has run into those that lacked vision.
Andrew sat down with Peter to discuss some of the reasons why companies have such a hard time with change as well as best practices for setting up a culture that embraces change. He explains why he is a big believer in winning over the hearts and minds of employees. Check out the episode for more.
- [01:28] - Managing change in an organization
- [06:08] - Influencing cultural change
- [07:47] - Dealing with multiple platforms
- [13:02] - Three factors that inform how we view change
- [18:07] - Identifying a unifying vision
- [22:09] - Rolling out a large cultural change
- [25:17] - Running technology at a new organization
- [28:15] - Broadening the power base
- [30:21] - The other side of change
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
We all want our companies to succeed so it’s easy to get fixated on numbers that we believe will help us judge our efforts. However, according to Dalia Havens of Netlify, metrics need to be optimized to give you a full picture of company or project health.
Today, Dalia talks to Peter about using metrics in a healthy way that can empower and help solve problems. She also discusses why a consistent delivery pattern will give you the most insight into your operation. Listen to her thoughts.
- [01:26] - How Dalia ended up at IBM
- [04:03] - Engineering management at SailPoint Technologies
- [06:39] - Moving into the director role
- [07:54] - Engineering metrics
- [12:46] - Looking for a more consistent delivery pattern
- [14:50] - Understanding cycle time
- [18:37] - Defining the smallest unit of work
- [20:41] - Incentivizing teams
- [23:20] - Gauging quality
- [24:53] - Layering categorization on top of throughput
- [27:18] - Breaking down pull requests
- [28:40] - Educating business stakeholders
- [30:36] - Having foundational metrics in place
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When we think of startups we think of charismatic entrepreneurs plugging away on their passions. But what does it really take to form a startup? Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Bob Friday, CTO of Mist, a Juniper Company.
Bob is a veteran who has been through the startup process many times. He talked to Peter about the thought processes that go into crafting both teams and entire organizations. Bob also talks about the formula behind the process new ventures will go through and which positions are the most important to fill. Listen in for his strategy tips.
- [01:28] - The beginnings of Bob's technology career
- [04:16] - The ultimate team sport
- [05:30] - The blank sheet of paper
- [07:52] - CEO checkbox
- [09:00] - Market timing
- [10:20] - Bob's first big company adventure
- [16:05] - Mist Systems
- [20:10] - Returning to the startup world
- [21:43] - Taking on the incumbents
- [26:13] - Jumping off the cliff
- [28:40] - Getting the team together
- [30:47] - Going all-in on an enterprise AI play
- [33:57] - Creating an environment where data scientists enjoy being
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When companies transition from private to IPO, there are bound to be challenges and learning curves. Rachana Kumar has worked in five countries, two of her positions were in the non-profit sector. These experiences helped her roll with the punches as her current employer, Etsy, has undergone a massive change over the last few years.
Rachana is preparing for a talk on helping leaders navigate large organizational changes. In this week’s episode, she explains to Peter the three foundational tools that can help any leader work through changes and challenges.
- [01:34] - Rachana's transition to management
- [03:47] - Co-founding Shaadi Karma
- [06:37] - Changes at Etsy
- [11:57] - Leading through rapid change and transformation in tech
- [13:09] - Compliance in a public company
- [22:27] - Feature flagging
- [24:38] - Three tools to lead teams through external changes
- [25:38] - Focus & resiliency
- [30:43] - Communication & transparency
- [35:09] - Managing up & down
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Learning doesn’t end once you’ve earned your degree. Developers and engineers must stay up to date with their skills and emerging technologies. But most of the time, employees are expected to take on this additional learning on their own.
Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Kwame Thomison, a consultant and leadership coach formerly of Meebo, Facebook, and Asana. Kwame discusses different learning models that can be integrated into workplaces to create a strong culture of learning and collaboration. He talks to Peter about the difference between high learners and light learners, and a framework for value creation.
- [01:27] - Becoming a force multiplier
- [05:11] - Differences in culture & experience
- [08:13] - Facebook in the early days
- [10:00] - Finding balance at Asana
- [11:54] - The rewarding demands of consulting
- [13:40] - Heavy vs. light learners
- [15:01] - Communities of practice
- [22:04] - Learning guilds
- [25:40] - Project guilds
- [28:18] - Tips for growing a learning culture
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When COVID-19 hit, UserTesting was already at a unique advantage: the team was already mostly working remotely. However, as the stay at home orders have increased, UserTesting’s CTO Kaj van de Loo has seen some unforeseen issues pop up.
This week on CTO Connection, we’re discussing how the pandemic has not only changed the structure of work, but also the expectations people have of working in an office. Kaj discusses why everything (no matter how small) must be documented, why managers need to proactively talk to employees to see if there are any mental health issues coming up with the changed working environments, and the considerations that will need to be made to safely reopen.
- [01:26] - Kaj's management journey
- [03:23] - Increased specialization
- [04:56] - Programming in a pandemic
- [08:18] - Dealing with different time zones
- [12:35] - Introvert empowerment
- [15:59] - Flexibility for individuals
- [21:30] - Managing remote and distributed teams
- [25:34] - Improved metrics
- [28:39] - Online social activities
- [32:17] - Back into the office
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Kunal Anand has an interesting background for a CTO. Despite majoring in business, Kunal got his start at JPL (an offshoot of NASA). From there he worked at Myspace and the BBC. His experiences at each of these companies taught him invaluable lessons that led to him founding his own company which was acquired by Imperva where he currently serves as CTO.
Peter talked to Kunal about his diverse resume and then pivoted to an insightful conversation on the future of work. Kunal offers invaluable tips on how he is currently setting the tone for his employees by scheduling in mental health breaks and prioritizing flexibility. Check out the episode to get a clearer picture on what work will look like in the next ten years.
- [01:30] - Kunal's journey to NASA
- [05:21] - Unique workloads at MySpace
- [11:29] - The front row experience at Gravity
- [12:55] - Building microservices at BBC Worldwide
- [20:10] - ColdFusion
- [26:25] - Founding Prevoty
- [30:13] - The future of work
- [42:38] - "The Friendship That Made Google Huge"
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Hypergrowth is what every startup dreams of, but actually filling the seemingly unlimited positions available is incredibly taxing on employees. Cat Miller is the Vice President at Flatiron Health. At one point, she took on the enormous burden of interviewing at least four people a week. Recognizing the strain on resources, she and her team set out to streamline their hiring process.
Today, Cat is sharing what she’s learned from her year of panic in which she hired 100 engineers, as well as how Flatiron is structuring their current hiring process. She also discusses the training each interviewer must undergo before their first interview. Listen in for her hiring insights.
- [01:25] - Cat's early career
- [05:11] - Managing humans at Flatiron Health
- [08:25] - Product and platform team alignment
- [13:57] - Scaling hiring during hypergrowth
- [22:29] - The one-fourth rule
- [23:39] - Helping engineers become good interviewers
- [24:46] - Question maestros
- [26:27] - Hiring to match values and culture
- [28:41] - Rubric for humility
- [29:51] - Compensation strategy
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Now that everyone is working remotely, people are starting to realize how much they took meetings for granted. Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Douglas Ferguson, President of Voltage Control. Voltage Control’s mission is to rid the world of horrible meetings. So how do you transform ineffectual meetings to something of greater value?
Douglas talked to Peter about his 10 mantras for meetings that work. Some include ideas like ‘no purpose, no meeting’ and ‘embrace the child’s mind’. Tune in to learn how to make meetings work for your team.
- [01:34] - Ridding the world of horrible meetings
- [04:29] - Durable decisions
- [08:59] - The 10 meeting mantras
- [09:09] - No purpose, no meeting
- [10:18] - Disagree and commit
- [17:58] - Bring your best self
- [23:08] - Do the work in the meeting
- [26:59] - Foster emotional safety
- [28:09] - Capture room intelligence
- [30:32] - Embrace the child's mind
- [35:45] - Respect everyone's time
- [36:46] - Decide what not to do
- [38:08] - Debrief for durability
- [39:42] - Meeting about meetings
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating, or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Tolga Tarhan got his start single-handedly running all the technology in his high school. Fast forward to today in which his experience during the dot com bust and incremental steps at various development firms have led him to the belief that the cloud is the ultimate goal of any organization.
On today’s episode of CTO Connection, Tolga shares wisdom and advice on how to find the right mechanisms for your business so you can gradually shift to a cloud native architecture. For Tolga, the key is not “lift and shift,” but making a gradual shift that will enable your company to innovate quickly.
- [01:26] - How Tolga became a technologist and engineering leader
- [04:01] - Specializing in AWS at Rackspace
- [05:55] - Getting started adopting the cloud
- [09:39] - Dealing with problems of scale
- [11:11] - Bringing professional software development to the serverless world
- [13:28] - Experimenting with Serverless Framework
- [20:45] - What are microservices?
- [22:41] - When to consider more than one service
- [26:58] - Talking to clients about resilience
- [28:34] - Observability requirements
- [29:40] - Becoming cloud native
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
There are few jobs where you’re encouraged to break things, but Kolton Andrus has made a career out of “failure as a service.” Kolton is the CEO and Co-founder of Gremlin, a platform that seeks to help companies avoid outages and build more resilient systems.
On today’s episode of CTO Connection, Kolton explains the concept of chaos engineering and why it’s so important, particularly to large scale operations. Take a listen and get ideas on how you can prevent outages.
- [01:26] - Kolton's backstory
- [03:21] - Managing a team at Amazon
- [05:10] - Moving to a technical role at Netflix
- [07:51] - Founding Gremlin
- [10:36] - Formative experiences with chaos engineering
- [15:39] - Graceful degradation
- [19:33] - Next-level testing
- [22:26] - Challenges with microservices
- [26:05] - Efficiency & resilience
- [31:18] - Preventing outages
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 build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Over the last few weeks, many companies have switched to remote work. But for companies that are hiring and candidates that are looking for new opportunities, what are the best practices for remote interviews? Joining Peter today on CTO Connection is Shannon Hogue, Global Head of Solutions Engineering at Karat.
Karat has perfected the art of Interview Engineering and Shannon has some helpful advice on the three aspects that comprise a successful remote interview: defined competencies, reviews of interviewers, and consistently measuring performance. Whether you’re a hiring company or a candidate, this episode will get you prepped for your next remote interview.
- [01:27] - How to interview effectively without the office
- [03:03] - Defining competencies
- [06:55] - Measuring performance consistently
- [08:53] - Coding challenges
- [10:43] - Unbalanced questions
- [12:25] - Reviewing and training interviewers
- [16:30] - Consistently measuring performance
- [18:15] - Replacing the whiteboard
- [19:08] - Video conferencing
- [20:47] - Systems for cheating detection
- [22:18] - Traits of good interview engineers
- [24:05] - Testing for interpersonal skills
- [25:02] - Best practices for remote job candidates
If you’re looking for more remote interviewing resources, be sure to check out this guide from Karat -- Going virtual: How to interview and hire in a remote world or visit their website www.karat.com.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Before Covid-19, many companies had work from home policies in place, but the vast majority still expected employees to mostly work in an office. Now that everyone is being forced to work from home, many companies and managers are scrambling to figure out how to make it work.
David Blair, CTO of Andela, has years of experience managing distributed teams. Today he offers his best tips and advice on best practices for fully remote teams and also shares ideas to help keep boost employee morale.
- [00:20] - How David became a product guy
- [03:47] - Finding talent in new places
- [09:38] - The relationship between product and technology at Andela
- [11:49] - Building trust with non-technical stakeholders
- [16:14] - How, when, and in what form to communicate
- [22:10] - Keeping social bonds in remote-first teams
- [24:55] - Adjusting to working at home
- [26:42] - Sustaining a remote team
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When you join a team in a management role, you may find yourself grappling with bad decisions made by your predecessors. Today on CTO Connection, Denise Iglesias, Senior Director Software Engineering at Comcast, spoke to Peter about how she has dealt with poor decisions and her recommendations for transitioning records.
Denise discusses why she strives to create a one-page template that explains the history of a team’s decision making. She also shares her experience restructuring the Austin office of Comcast to fit within the larger organization in a way that made sense for her team.
- [00:22] - How Denise found her love for programming
- [02:02] - Engineering leadership at National Instruments
- [04:25] - Making an impact at Icontrol Networks
- [07:14] - Acquisition by Comcast
- [08:55] - Xfinity Home automation lift and shift
- [12:17] - Why good people make bad decisions
- [14:15] - Operating from insufficient data
- [15:18] - Platform consolidation
- [21:14] - Formally recording decisions
- [26:03] - The art of zeroing in on relevant data
- [28:45] - Be open-minded
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Incubator or labs programs tend to come with various issues. How do you navigate failure? How do you source engineers? RC Johnson has helped create an innovative incubator program at Indeed. This week on CTO Connection, RC is discussing the challenges and lessons he’s learned in creating a successful labs program.
RC talks about why he decided to model the program on the venture capital world and how a cross-functional team has fostered innovation. Listen in for RC’s tips on how to best run an incubator.
- [00:20] - Learning to program on the TRS-80
- [01:38] - Army wargames
- [02:53] - RC's entry into professional software development
- [05:53] - Transitioning to management at Bazaarvoice
- [08:51] - Starting from scratch in New York
- [10:38] - Managing managers at WP Engine and Lawnstarter
- [12:23] - Making an impact with the labs team at Indeed
- [14:20] - Measured bets in the incubator program
- [17:09] - Tackling deep tech problems
- [23:37] - Legal support at enterprise scale
- [28:22] - Testing engineers for flexibility and resilience
- [32:21] - Decoupling failure from failure
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Feedback is an integral part of work performance across all industries. Effective feedback can help an employee improve at a job or skill. But at the end of the day, feedback is universally dicey. Emotions can run high and people can take feedback too hard. Chelsea Troy, an engineering consultant at RigorWorks, has given talks on her guidelines for effective feedback. Today, she joins Peter to offer a rundown of her process.
Chelsea explains how feedback can go awry, what the best methods are for giving feedback, and offers tips on how to handle negative feedback directed at you. This episode has practical advice no matter your industry.
- [00:26] - What does Chelsea do as an engineering consultant?
- [02:30] - Foundation practices when going into a new org
- [05:07] - Facilitating getting help
- [07:01] - Where documentation should live
- [13:07] - Giving and receiving feedback
- [18:28] - Why bother with feedback?
- [19:34] - Mitigating the risk
- [23:46] - Soliciting feedback
- [32:22] - When feedback feels bad
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Many companies see the benefits of diversity and inclusion but don’t know that their own policies and culture are often the reason that women and people of color don’t come on board. James Turnbull, VP of Engineering at Glitch, is passionate about this issue and offers advice on how he advises companies to bring on more diverse talent.
James also talks to Peter about how he approaches growing individual contributors to team lead positions and why he would never stay at the same company for ten years.
- [00:20] - Moving up the hierarchy in early-stage startups
- [02:41] - Leading cross-functional teams at Puppet Labs
- [04:47] - Growing the engineering team at Kickstarter
- [11:50] - Getting people to think about their work differently
- [13:30] - Stepping out of the comfort zone
- [15:27] - Attracting the best engineers
- [18:46] - Building a pipeline of diverse talent with an inclusive culture
- [22:43] - Communicating with teams as they start to scale
- [25:17] - Developer advocacy, education, and hiring
- [29:19] - Do more listening than talking
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Joann Anderson, VP of Engineering at Scoop Technologies, had a unique childhood in that her mother was a programmer so it never seemed abnormal to Joann that she was a woman in a male-dominated industry. Because many women, particularly mothers, haven’t had that experience, Joann has made it a mission to be a model for others.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Joann spoke to Peter about her creative approach to finding the best people for her QA teams, why inclusivity is so integral to workplace culture, and her advice for finding a mentor that you click with. Check out the episode for Joann’s tips for a welcoming, collaborative work environment.
- [00:24] - Where Joann started in computer science
- [01:24] - Crossing over from QA to engineering management
- [03:11] - Optimizing hiring to identify good QA traits
- [05:39] - Transitioning to Director of Application Engineering at Slack
- [06:43] - Modernizing carpools at Scoop Technologies
- [08:26] - Tactics for ensuring inclusivity throughout an organization
- [17:23] - Mentorship fundamentals
- [26:14] - Don't be afraid to ask questions
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Randy Shoup has led engineering teams at a range of top companies including Oracle, eBay, and Google, as well as newer startups like Stitch fix and WeWork.
Randy talks to Peter about how the history of engineering – from Bletchley Park to Xerox PARC can provide lessons that are still applicable to building and managing high performance engineering teams.
If you’d like to see Randy sharing more about this topic, check out this video from the 2018 NY CTO Summit at the Nasdaq!
[00:23] - How Randy started his career
- [01:08] - Training for management at eBay
- [04:46] - Learning from the best
- [06:13] - Building and managing high-performing teams at Google
- [08:00] - Moving to VPE at Stitchfix
- [10:19] - Adding a career ladder
- [12:16] - The Bletchley Park experience
- [17:53] - Modern approaches to an organization at Lockheed Skunkworks
- [21:30] - Innovations at Xerox PARC
- [24:09] - Purpose, culture, diversity, & excellence
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
There are many routes to c-suite but Andrea Goulet has taken one of the most non-traditional paths we’ve seen on CTO Connection. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Corgibytes, Andrea leveraged her experience in content and strategic communications to help a software remodeling company scale its business.
Andrea is a big believer in the power of empathy – a word that’s not often prioritized in engineering. In this week’s edition of CTO Connection, Andrea explains how she makes empathy accessible to analytical audiences and the role empathy plays in creating a better experience and product.
- [00:24] - Andrea's path to CEO
- [03:25] - Communication debt
- [06:28] - Domain-Driven Design
- [08:06] - Keeping the knowledge close to the code
- [08:22] - Working Effectively with Legacy Code
- [11:43] - Continuous improvement
- [15:12] - Definition of done
- [18:05] - Experimentation and prototyping
- [20:53] - Slack at scale
- [24:05] - Teaching empathy
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Cai GoGwilt took a fast-tracked, non-traditional road to becoming a CTO at Ironclad. As a non-traditional CTO, Cai sees his role as helping others on the team get unblocked from any issues in their way. This approach has required a bit of humility on Cai’s part as he’s helped cultivate a culture in which engineers have felt comfortable calling him out when he was wrong.
On today’s episode of CTO Connection, Peter and Cai discuss Ironclad’s process for annual planning as well as building cross-functional teams in a rapidly scaling company.
- [00:20] - How Cai became a CTO
- [01:47] - Leveling up product engineering at Ironclad
- [06:03] - Core elements of the CTO role
- [08:54] - Jack of all trades, master of none
- [12:20] - Creating and sustaining culture
- [14:12] - Annual planning cycle
- [18:17] - Hiring a team that cares about the end-user
- [21:27] - Bringing technology to the law
- [22:58] - Cross-functional empathy
- [30:31] - Selecting engineers to thrive in an empathetic culture
- [34:31] - Finding the right applicants in the Bay area
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Dhruba Borthakur is the Co-founder and CTO at Rockset but still manages to write code, on a good week, 50% of the time. In today's interview, Dhruba explained his ethos, namely that he likes to code to add value to other developers’ lives, and discussed how it is essential to create a culture where every person on the team feels empowered to make decisions that bring the organization to the next level.
As one of the founding architects of Hadoop software, Dhruba also shares his insights on how and why Hadoop was created as well as the difference between putting together teams for shipping software externally versus SaaS (software as a service) products. Tune in!
- [00:25] - How Dhruba became a CTO
- [02:06] - Transitioning to team management
- [04:59] - Building a supportive culture
- [07:50] - Solving tomorrow's problems
- [10:34] - Creation of the Hadoop file system
- [16:21] - Recruiting for an open-source project
- [19:34] - Finding rock star engineers at Rockset
- [27:36] - Team geography
- [30:15] - Fail fast and learn quickly
- [32:12] - Pulling the plug
- [36:17] - Fast-moving teams
- [41:25] - Finding time to write code
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
According to Raghavendra Prabhu, CTO of Thumbtack, making the transition from programmer to manager isn’t too much of a stretch since you already understand the issues and stakes of your project. When you take it a step further and begin managing other managers, you’re getting further from the work and making a more indirect impact.
On today’s episode of CTO Connection, Raghavendra discusses what it’s like making the transition to higher levels of leadership and how to balance his desire for control with the need for delegation. Tune in for insights on how to successfully climb the leadership ladder.
- [00:20] - How Raghavendra started his career at Microsoft
- [02:09] - Why search is compelling
- [03:23] - The culture shift moving to Google
- [05:29] - Moving from Google to Twitter
- [08:40] - Scaling teams at Pinterest
- [13:22] - Hiring managers as engineers
- [16:56] - Transitioning from manager to director
- [20:52] - Implementing the mentorship program
- [23:28] - Anticipating and planning
- [26:17] - Fixing the hiring process
- [29:06] - What kind of CTO is Raghavendra?
Raghavendra Prabhu (RVP) is the CTO of Thumbtack and was previously the head of infrastructure at Pinterest and a senior software engineer at Twitter, Google, and Microsoft. Thumbtack is an online services marketplace enabling hundreds of thousands of local professionals from plumbers to DJs to build sustainable businesses by connecting them to millions of customers nationwide.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Ryan Graciano got his start working for a small company that was acquired by IBM. Having been on the employee side of a large merger, Ryan has been able to take what he learned to his role as CTO at Credit Karma. On today’s episode of CTO Connection, Ryan talks to Peter about his distaste for terms like microservices and technical debt as well as how to craft an environment that values both craft and customer.
Listen in as Ryan discusses managing large teams of engineers while stressing a culture of agility and experimentation.
- [00:21] - How Ryan started his career in software development
- [01:40] - Transitioning to Credit Karma
- [02:50] - Building an engineering team
- [05:26] - Staying connected to the code
- [06:36] - Recruiting talent
- [11:13] - Moving from IC to manager
- [15:19] - Drawing the line at microservices
- [17:32] - Technical debt
- [22:31] - Communicating with business stakeholders
- [24:19] - Company, customer, craft
- [27:18] - What to look for in a great engineer
- [29:37] - What to look for in upper management
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Tech organizations with more than 100 employees have a unique set of challenges. When you’re in the business of innovation, it can be hard to say no to exciting new opportunities. In this week’s episode of CTO Connection, David Schwartz, CTO of Ripple stopped by to discuss why companies need to stick to their core competencies.
Tune in as Peter and David talk about the challenges of blockchain, managing the expectations of so many different stakeholders, and why hiring people who are strong in areas where the company has been weak has paid off for Ripple. Listen in!
- [00:20] - How David became a CTO
- [02:14] - Changing international payments
- [02:47] - Banking integration
- [03:57] - Scaling the organization
- [05:54] - Roles and responsibilities at Ripple
- [11:46] - Integration engineering vs. product
- [17:20] - Hiring for the integration engineering world
- [18:34] - Surprises and challenges in a CTO role
- [21:02] - Balancing management
- [24:04] - Attracting and retaining talent
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Whether it’s private communications or a product that handles sensitive information, every company needs to foster a culture of security. Our guest this week, Nick Streaker, is the CTO of ID Agent, a Kaseya company, and was an intelligence officer in the military. Nick talks to Peter about how to make security a part of your company’s overall strategic plan from hiring to product launch.
Tune in to learn why it’s hard to find cybersecurity professionals, what Nick considers the bare minimum security features, and why he turns to bootcamps to find new hires.
- [00:46] - Nick's path to becoming a CTO
- [03:39] - Recruiting for cyber skills
- [08:31] - Insight from outside the models
- [10:46] - Diversity of opinion
- [11:54] - Creating an innovative culture
- [13:58] - Empowering end-users with ID Agent
- [14:38] - When to build a culture of security
- [20:14] - Baseline security requirements
- [22:25] - Two-factor authentication
- [26:03] - Cybersecurity trends
- [32:01] - Filling the security role
- [36:00] - Relating the need for security
This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse.io. Clubhouse lets you manage software projects with the perfect balance of simplicity and structure, so you and your team can be happier, less stressed, and hyper-focused on building products that customers love. It’s free for up to 10 users, plus you can get two free months on any paid plan at https://clubhouse.io/CTO.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Mike Reust never pictured himself in management. But after several years at Betterment, the opportunity presented itself. Mike joins us this week on CTO Connection to discuss what it’s like to transition from engineering to a management role.
Listen in as Mike and Peter talk about the growing pains of transitioning roles as well as advice for those thinking of going into management.
- [00:54] - Making moves at Betterment
- [02:15] - Inflection point in accountability
- [04:11] - The next dramatic change
- [06:02] - Emotional weight
- [08:26] - Boss duality
- [08:57] - Change in responsibility
- [10:11] - Betterment Everyday
- [11:35] - Taking on a dual role
- [14:14] - Pushback
- [17:16] - Opportunity for impact
- [19:16] - Surprises about management
- [22:56] - Stepping back
- [25:13] - CTO vs. General Manager
- [27:03] - A greater level of empathy
This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse.io. Clubhouse lets you manage software projects with the perfect balance of simplicity and structure, so you and your team can be happier, less stressed, and hyper-focused on building products that customers love. It’s free for up to 10 users, plus you can get two free months on any paid plan at https://clubhouse.io/CTO.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
The customer service reps at Holiday Extras spend their days talking to customers on the phone. Andy Britcliffe, CTO of Holiday Extras, had a wild thought: what if we had an engineering apprenticeship program that enabled these reps to learn the other side of the business?
On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, Andy talks to Peter about the success of the internship and apprenticeship programs at Holiday Extras. He discusses why education programs for employees lead to better retention and higher engagement. Listen in for Andy’s tips on how to start a program like this at your company.
- [00:46] - Holiday Extras
- [01:44] - Learning to be a tech leader
- [03:38] - Apprenticeship scheme
- [08:24] - Preparation and infrastructure
- [09:24] - Sandwich year
- [10:48] - Matrix management structure
- [11:57] - Dev coaches
- [15:28] - Foundations teams
- [19:53] - Team rotation
- [22:19] - Pod composition
- [23:17] - Optional participation
- [25:08] - Distributed nearshoring teams
This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse.io. Clubhouse lets you manage software projects with the perfect balance of simplicity and structure, so you and your team can be happier, less stressed, and hyper-focused on building products that customers love. It’s free for up to 10 users, plus you can get two free months on any paid plan at https://clubhouse.io/CTO.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When James Kenigsberg immigrated to America, he quickly found that technology could make learning easier and more fun. This desire to create educational tools led him to help found 2U, a company that partners with universities to deliver online learning programs that are university quality.
James sat down with Peter ahead of his talk at the New York CTO Summit to discuss the future of education technology, why he loves software that helps with focus, and explains why future maintenance needs should be on your mind when you’re working on transformative projects. Tune in!
- [01:23] - Falling in love with education technology
- [04:35] - From coding to management
- [05:44] - Promotion at The Princeton Review
- [07:53] - Start, stop, continue
- [09:54] - Founding 2U
- [18:14] - Run, grow, and transform
- [24:03] - Measuring tasks differently
- [25:40] - Managing transformative projects
James Kenigsberg is the founding chief technology officer (CTO) at 2U, Inc., a global leader in education technology that partners with great universities to build, deliver, and support world-class online graduate programs and certificates at scale. As founding CTO, Kenigsberg directs 2U’s technology functions and efforts to build an academic product that delivers positive student outcomes, an efficient client relationship management system, and a secure, resilient, and configurable architecture.
This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse.io. Clubhouse lets you manage software projects with the perfect balance of simplicity and structure, so you and your team can be happier, less stressed, and hyper-focused on building products that customers love. It’s free for up to 10 users, plus you can get two free months on any paid plan at https://clubhouse.io/CTO.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Technical due diligence is the process of studying a technology product and evaluating its value and feasibility. You’d think that such an important process would be part of the business plan from the outset, but most companies only undergo the process when they begin VC fundraising. Jason Mongue, founder of The Clover Group, is here to talk about the process and why it should start early.
- [00:11] - Velocity by Code Climate
- [01:03] - Technical due diligence
- [02:31] - Starting the process
- [05:08] - Dress rehearsal
- [09:18] - Ask questions
- [11:18] - Security awareness
- [15:02] - Disaster recovery plan
- [17:32] - How to think about scaling
- [20:31] - Health check for technology organizations
- [22:07] - Velocity by Code Climate
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
As products and companies develop more name-brand recognition, expansion is inevitable. Prashant Pandey has experience working at companies large and small and in his current role as Head of Engineering at Asana, he knows what it’s like to navigate the growing pains of managing expanded teams.
On today’s episode, Prashant talks to Peter about what to take into consideration when judging a team member’s contribution, why failure is the single best learning tool, and how to manage expanding teams across time zones. Tune in for Prashant’s thoughts.
- [00:11] - Velocity by Code Climate
- [00:49] - Internship at Loudcloud
- [03:25] - Research at IBM
- [05:11] - Managing teams at Vdopia
- [06:53] - Learning through failure
- [09:27] - Getting up to speed with Amazon's best practices
- [10:54] - Viewing metrics
- [13:47] - Measuring impact
- [16:21] - Joining Asana
- [19:51] - Bifurcation challenges
- [24:28] - Remote vs distributed teams
- [26:28] - Collaboration tools
- [28:13] - Managing a successful rewrite
- [36:32] - Velocity by Code Climate
Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. Use concrete data to help you answer questions like:
- How fast are we moving?- Did a recent change in our process have a positive or negative impact on efficiency?- Who are my top-performing teams and why?
Sign up at https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/ and mention CTO connection to get a free month of the product.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Conneciton podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
On CTO Connection, we mostly focus on the engineering side of tech, but today, we’re taking a break to look at product. Our guest Adam Nash, Vice President of Product and Growth at Dropbox, discusses the importance of defining the role of product in a tech company and why he believes delighting customers is just as crucial as making decisions based on metrics.
Tune in to learn why Adam believes so strongly in the concept of delight and how he balances metrics with listening to customer requests when crafting product strategy.
- [01:06] - Transitioning to product management
- [04:20] - Strategy, prioritization, & execution
- [06:50] - Articulating strategy
- [09:53] - Driving product teams
- [13:51] - Making prioritization easier
- [17:18] - The three bucket system
- [17:44] - Metrics movers
- [18:37] - Customer requests
- [22:25] - Delight features
- [27:37] - Making delight part of team practice
This episode of the CTO Connection Podcast was sponsored by Velocity by Code Climate. Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. In a few weeks, they're releasing Velocity 3.0 with Jira, which will combine Git and PR data with Issue data for the first time to give engineering executives a complete understanding of how their team works. You can now see the status of every initiative, without manual reporting, and know exactly which engineering projects get off track and why. You can request early access by going to https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
According to Hector Aguilar, President of Technology at Okta, if you get too far away from technology, you can’t be an effective leader of technology. But when your day-to-day job is focused more on managing individuals, it can be hard to find the time to code.
On today’s episode, Hector and Peter discuss how making coding mandatory for all managers can help instill company values and culture. Hector also shares how he prioritizes personal projects and learning to ensure he stays on top of the technology at work.
- [00:53] - Hector's origin story
- [02:42] - Stay close to the technology
- [04:02] - The challenge of keeping up
- [06:52] - Prioritizing what to learn and how
- [09:09] - The importance of credibility
- [09:49] - Interview code testing
- [16:38] - Measuring managers
- [19:23] - Clear expectations
- [21:41] - What does Okta do?
- [23:27] - Scaling an organization
- [25:52] - Keeping the quality bar high
- [27:49] - Culture of commitment
- [29:46] - Automate yourself and become a power mobile user
This episode of the CTO Connection Podcast was sponsored by Velocity by Code Climate. Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. In a few weeks, they're releasing Velocity 3.0 with Jira, which will combine Git and PR data with Issue data for the first time to give engineering executives a complete understanding of how their team works. You can now see the status of every initiative, without manual reporting, and know exactly which engineering projects get off track and why. You can request early access by going to https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
When Adam Miller joined the Roblox team as the Vice President of Engineering, he assumed everything would just get saved to the cloud. Instead, he found that the Roblox platform’s unique infrastructure needs would necessitate more in-house development and management in order to effectively scale.
In today’s episode, Peter and Adam discuss the challenges of managing hundreds of employees drawing from the same code, scaling infrastructure, and the limitations of cloud storage for the platform model.
- [00:53] - Adam Miller, Vice President of Engineering, Technology at Roblox
- [01:03] - Making an impact in engineering through leadership
- [02:31] - The path to product/market fit
- [04:45] - Enabling a new type of human co-experience with Roblox
- [06:21] - Architecture of the metaverse
- [10:13] - Building a scaling infrastructure
- [14:08] - Exposing persistent data
- [17:20] - Assumptions about the cloud
- [19:08] - Switching to microservices
- [23:46] - Flexibility with smaller teams
This episode of the CTO Connection Podcast was sponsored by Velocity by Code Climate. Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. In a few weeks, they're releasing Velocity 3.0 with Jira, which will combine Git and PR data with Issue data for the first time to give engineering executives a complete understanding of how their team works. You can now see the status of every initiative, without manual reporting, and know exactly which engineering projects get off track and why. You can request early access by going to https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Scott Parker has seen a lot over his 15 year career having transitioned from engineer to manager to executive. In this episode of the CTO Connection podcast, Peter and Scott discuss Scott’s approach to people management, differences in building teams at small companies vs. large companies as well as how to demonstrate the value of personal growth to engineers.
Note: Since the recording of this interview, Scott has moved from VP Engineering at Signal to Director of Engineering at Root Insurance.
- [00:24] - Using the perspective of investment portfolio management as a lens to view managing people within an organization at scale
- [02:09] - Extending the analogy: managing the portfolio of people on your team
- [04:08] - Understanding what each person wants out of their career in order to create balanced teams
- [07:00] - The winding path from engineering to leadership
- [09:19] - Scott’s experience moving into managing "teams of teams"
- [11:15] - The need for an engineering-specific focus within manager training
- [13:02] - Diving deeper into the new manager onboarding structure
- [14:06] - Scott’s focus as the VP of Engineering at Signal
- [15:04] - Creating an environment where engineers are excited about personal growth opportunities
You can find Scott on Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging about culture, on-boarding and management over at his own blog.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
This week Peter invites long-time technology leader and CTO Summit speaker Stacy Gorelik to the podcast. Stacy is currently the Director of Engineering at Flatiron Health, a health-tech company committed to fighting cancer.
Peter and Stacy discuss her career from individual contributor to engineering management to director, what she looks for when hiring and her recent experiences speaking at the CTO Summit in New York.
- [00:21] - Stacy’s background
- [01:12] - Transitioning from individual contributor to management.
- [02:56] - The appeal of an engineering management role
- [04:59] - Responsibilities of an engineering manager vs. director
- [06:41] - Ideal qualities in a leader
- [09:10] - Reflections on growing a platform engineering team
- [11:26] - It always comes back to the people
- [13:03] - What Stacy looks for in an engineer
- [15:15] - Learning and developing in the engineering world
- [20:09] - What it’s like to speak at and attend a CTO summit
You can find out more about Stacey on LinkedIn, Twitter and at her blog on Medium.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Johnny Austin, Engineering Director of Navigation at Mapbox, to discuss the best and most challenging aspects of engineering leadership, practical tips for creating a solid onboarding program and ways to maintain a sense of connection within a distributed team.
[00:30] - The road to engineering leadership at Mapbox
[03:00] - It’s all about the people
[03:46] - What does great potential look like?[06:32] - The Myth of the 10x Engineer, Johnny’s May 2019 CTO Summit Talk
[07:44] - The first 90 days: communication dynamics when building a team
[11:11] - How Mapbox attracts talent
[12:29] - In the weeds of the recruiting process
[19:36] - Thinking about team member growth beyond just tech skills
[21:58] - Maintaining culture and connection with distributed teams
[24:59] - The thing that keeps Johnny up at night
[25:57] - Setting your team up for failure (it’s not what you think)
This episode was recorded prior to the Summit
Prior to running engineering for Mapbox's core navigation capabilities, Johnny Austin held engineering leadership roles at Capital One and ISL and is a strong advocate for engineering operational excellence. Johnny is also an international public speaker - speaking on topics such as engineering leadership, system design, and the JavaScript programming language.
He believes, strongly, that technical excellence, inclusion, empathy, and customer obsession are the keys to driving a successful engineering organization.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
This week, Peter Bell is joined by SVP of Engineering at Upwork, Han Yuan. Han and Peter dive into what it’s like to run an engineering team that spans countries, building a good engineering culture for a remote team and how he brings on new engineers to the team.
[00:21] - Differences in thinking about distributed teams across multiple companies[02:59] - Communication best practices across time zones & countries[05:22] - Interviewing for long term fit[08:15] - Development environment workflow with an evolving team[09:46] - Code quality & remote collaboration[11:58] - Providing new opportunities for engineers while retaining knowledge[13:42] - Autonomy, consistency and self-organization across teams and services[21:13] - Balancing support and product development teams[24:39] - Onboarding new engineers[28:24] - Building social and cultural cohesion [31:05] - Fostering a sense of connection and community within a big company with a remote team
Han Yuan is currently the Sr. VP of Engineering at Upwork. Prior to Upwork, he’s held Sr. leadership roles at eBay and Netflix. You can find more information about Han Yuan at LinkedIn.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down withRebecca Parsons, CTO ofThoughtworks, to discuss managing a large, truly global engineering team, the implications for current advancements in architecture and the importance of supporting diversity and inclusion.
- [00:28] Path to CTO
- [01:58] Leading a 1200-person engineering team
- [04:08] Deciding on team size and structure
- [05:22] Managing geographically distributed teams; hiring locally
- [07:49] Career development for individual contributors and managers
- [11:00] Keeping up with new technologies
- [12:19] ThoughtWorks University
- [15:43] Looking forward to the next 3-5 years
- [18:58] Advancements in how we think about architecture
- [25:29] What makes a great engineer
- [26:42] Attracting talent
- [29:17] Bias in AI and the science of diversity
You can hear more at The 2019 San Francisco CTO Summit, coming up May 21, 2019, where Rebecca will be presenting her talk on Bias in AI and the Science of Diversity. You can also find Rebecca on LinkedIn or Twitter and her latest book, Building Evolutionary Architectures, is out now.
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Colin Bodell, Chief Technology Officer of Groupon, to discuss how to balance being open to unexpected opportunities while still delivering on today’s commitments, encouraging idea-sharing from all levels of an engineering organization and what differentiates leaders from managers.
- [00:27] The need to stay open to unexpected discoveries
- [02:38] How to remain open to those unplanned opportunities while still delivering promised business objectives
- [05:12] The boldness required to surface the alternative solution
- [06:30] How identifying entrepreneurial flare plays into the hiring process
- [08:06] Teaching managers inclusivity tactics to ensure everyone has a voice
- [09:40] How to have a meaningful impact with a team of more than 1k engineers
- [13:52] How Colin’s career path evolved and his current role and career goals
- [16:16] What differentiates a manager from a leader and the value of both
- [16:47] What Colin is most proud of in his career
You can hear more at The 2019 Chicago CTO Summit, coming up May 1, 2019, where Colin Bodell will be presenting his talk - Scratch Your own Itch and then Scratch Theirs.
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
In this episode of CTO Connection, host Peter Bell sits down with Nick Caldwell, Chief Product Officer of Looker, to discuss the challenges of scaling leadership in a growing tech organization.
Nick shares his experience moving from a 15-year career at Microsoft into the world of Bay area startups, his approach for finding and developing tech leaders, and some of the hard lessons he learned early in his management career.
- [00:53] Fundamental challenge of scaling leadership in pace with the business
- [01:33] Nick’s career journey from Microsoft to Reddit to Looker
- [04:00] Thinking about career progression and training in a growing business
- [06:26] Balancing priorities of product delivery and people management
- [09:34] What resources to provide managers for their career development
- [11:09] The MBA experience as a ‘forcing function’ for exiting your comfort zone
- [13:06] Is this an engineering manager or is it a replicant?
- [15:13] Different traits desired from an engineering manager versus director
- [17:07] Cringeworthy lessons from early days in management
- [21:25] View of opportunities in the Bay area and tapping talent across the country
- [23:51] What Nick gets out of attending the CTO Summits
You can hear more at The 2019 Chicago CTO Summit, coming up May 1, 2019, where Nick Caldwell will be presenting his talk - Ignite the Fire: How Managers Can Spark New Leaders.
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Welcome to the CTO Connection Podcast!
StartupCTO.io was an amazing podcast, but Kevin and Miles got busy with their many other projects, so they decided to pass it along to myself.
I’m an ex-CTO, a Senior Director at WeWork/Flatiron, and the founder of CTO Connection - a series of summits, meetups and an online platform where engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers. I’m speaking with senior engineering leaders from fast-growth tech companies on a regular basis anyway for the summits and meetups, and in the last few weeks, I recorded over fifteen new interviews with engineering leaders like Nick Caldwell, CPO at Looker, Edith Harbaugh, CEO of LaunchDarkly and Rebecca Parsons, CTO at ThoughtWorks. Look out for a new episode every couple of weeks. And if there’s ever anyone you want to see on the show - email me - peter@pbell.com - and I’ll do my best to fit them in!
Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Today we are posting an interview for The Changelog that StartupCTO.io host Kevin Owocki recently did. From The Changelog:
We’re joined by Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a platform to monetize or incentivize work in open source software. We talked about how Gitcoin sits at the intersection of sustaining open source and cryptocurrencies, their history and roadmap, their decision to leverage the brand name of Git, bug bounties, funded issues, web3, MetaMask, and the future of Gitcoin and how open source benefits.
[from the archives] Our guest today is Scott Carleton.
Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at Andela, a global engineering organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of elite tech talent across Africa. Previously, Scott co-founded Artsicle as CTO, building a global community of visual artists now featuring over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, which was able to create a personalized experience for passive users, earned NYER’s “Best Use of Technology” award in 2013.
This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship.
Favorite Quotes
- You hear a lot that “it's all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins.
- I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works its way through the organization.
- In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldn't provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit.
- I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”.
- We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They really care about its usability.
- Friction rises in communication when information doesn't have a place to settle.
- Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behavior you want, but you need a cultural change or a behavior/belief change to use the tool effectively.
- Chat allows us an always-on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asynchronous tool to keep everyone in sync.
- On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels”
- The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration?
- Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important.
- When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know.
- If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper.
- When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems.
- I have a passion for developing peoples potential.
- How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills?
- The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just so hard to do remotely.
- Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direction.
- What's really incredible about software development is that the people who are building the applications have a lot more information about the problems they're solving than you do. You really want most solutions coming from the bottom up.
- I focus on how I can expose business problems to the team. I tell them what we’re solvin
Clay Collins & Nick Gauthier are founders of Nomics will be “Yahoo Finance for Crypto” and the internet’s home page for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
Nick Gauthier has been developing for the web for 10 years and loves Ruby, Go, and PostgreSQL. You can find him on Twitter at @ngauthier.
Clay Collins is currently CEO/Co-founder of Nomics and Board Chair at Drip/Leadpages. Before co-founding Nomics, Clay founded Leadpages, where he drove growth to over 48K paying customers (and 175 employees), led the company’s acquisition of Drip, and raised $38M in venture capital financing
This episode is co-hosted by Jacob Ablowitz. We are honored today to be interviewing Quin Hoxie, founder and CTO of Swiftype. This episode covers Quin’s experiences as an engineer at Scrib, and then as Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype — The leading platform delivering search solutions for businesses.
Quin’s BioQuin Hoxie is the Co-Founder and CTO of Swiftype, the leading search platform for delivering fast, relevant and customizable search results for businesses. After graduating from University of Arizona in 2008 with a B.S. in Computer Science, Quin worked on search at AboutUs before joining Scribd in 2010 to work on their search team. His experiences building the search platform at Scribd led him to start Swiftype with fellow Scribd engineer Matt Riley in 2012. Since graduating from Y Combinator in Winter 2012, Swiftype has become the easiest way to add powerful search to any website or application. With clients ranging from TechCrunch to Hubspot to Qualcomm, Swiftype powers billions of searches every month across the web.
About SwiftypeFounded in 2012, Swiftype’s industry-leading search platform delivers relevant and customizable search results for businesses. Swiftype’s suite of products, Site Search and Enterprise Search, have revolutionized the way people find information across their organization and on public-facing websites. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has raised $23 million in funding, by investors including NEA and Y Combinator. Its strong customer portfolio includes AT&T, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Dr. Pepper, publishers Engadget and TechCrunch, and brands like Qualcomm, Asana, Marketo, and Hubspot.
About Jacob AblowitzJacob Ablowitz serves as Co-Founder and CEO of dmi.io, the marketplace for business data. dmi is transforming business decision-making by democratizing access to data-driven insights through connecting sellers and buyers of data while streamlining data discovery, evaluation and contracting.
Jacob has deep experience with the data and technology systems that power the modern information economy. He began his career at Lockheed Martin, working on bleeding-edge ballistic missile defense and submarine sonar systems. At Dealertrack Technologies (now Cox Automotive), Jacob led infrastructure projects underpinning their market-leading car loan application platform. In 2012 he moved on to Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, in an analytics role, before starting dmi in 2013.Jacob holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado and a Master’s in Systems & Information Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is an active member of the Colorado startup community.
Today, we are honored to have Eric Berry, founder of CodeSponsor.io
Code Sponsor is a matchmaking platform for software developers and open source projects. Code Sponsor enables paying sponsors to get their messages across in front of developers.
In this very special combo episode,
- Learn more about the founding story of Code Sponsor and the success they’re seeing in helping Open Source projects become more sustainable.
- Learn about the founding of Gitcoin, a project that Kevin founded with a similar goal — pushing open source forward.
If you have an OSS project you’re working on, and a few bucks every day in sponsorships might help, CodeSponsor is there to help. Learn more about Codesponsor at CodeSponsor.io and Eric at @coderberry.
We are joined this week by Matt Walters (Blockchain Engineer at Consensys, former Techstars CTO), and Rhys Lindmark (Independent Blockchain Engineer) for a very special Blockchain episode of StartupCTO.io.
Join us as we share stories about web3, a hacking story, Blockchain Engineering stories, and to learn about “the human operating system”.
Today's episode is a cross-post from Vincent Horn’s new podcast, Crypto-Mind. With permission, I’ve reposted it from Crypto-Mind podcast. This podcast is about contemplating deeply the societal, spiritual, network implications of the networked Web 3.0 world.
This episode is all about networks. Specifically,
- What’s it mean to be a part of the network?
- Why are networks important?
- How do we organize ourselves?
- How do we identify ourselves?
- What’s it mean to create value and distribute that value?
- Which network do I want to put value into?
- How much what's happening to cryptocurrency is _just what’s happening in the world_ reflected back into crypto?
- The big network is Life and all life that we know. Making connections there seems really important.
- Is it ethical to run a bitcoin node in a world where there is climate change? Is POS a moral eventuality?
- How a simple Google bus is an analogy for a new world and a lightning rod for some.
- Taking the model of the king and democratizing it some. If you are a good entrepreneur you are king. You have followers. Take that model and took it apart so everyone can be king in their own way.
- The rise of mindfulness when attention becomes a constraint.
Subscribe to the Crypto-Mind podcast here.
Raine Revere is the Lead Architect at Prism — The world’s first trustless portfolio market platform.
Join Raine and special guest co-host Kevin Seagraves as we discuss blockchain, ethereum, and the future of Web3.
Miles & Kevin announce some changes to the podcast:
- Miles will be winding down his involvement in the podcast.
- The show will be once a month (instead of once a week).
- We’ll ramp up our ‘Emerging Tech’ series, focused initially on VR, AR, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, and Cryptography.
- Interested in guest co-hosting? Recommend a speaker, and let’s chat.
[from the archives]
Our guest today is Dave Zwieback, the author of Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success and an engineering leader in various organizations in & around New York City.
Dave does workshops for organizations looking to build People First cultures. If you’re interested in hosting a highly-rated, practical, hands-on workshop based on the book at your company, please contact workshops@mindweather.com. You’ll learn the theory and, most important, get to practice conducting Learning Reviews, a critical new practice for building resilient, people-first learning organizations.
This episode is for you if you’re interested in learning about soft-skills, career, or management.
So you can build it… but, do you know what to do once it’s built? How to monetize it? How do you make enough money to live off of while your company takes off? In this episode, learn about how to go beyond your raw skills of building anything you want and learn what it takes to create a thriving business.
Speakers:
– Mike AbiEzzi
– Alison Hughes
– Dan Moore
– Brian Ponterelli
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Kathy Keating, CTO of Apostrophe on the show.
Kathy has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies, and implemented more highly complex software applications than she can count. She has a knack for building diverse technology teams, successful agile business practices, and mentoring the leaders of tomorrow.
Previously Kathy was VP of Engineering at Autopay, founded Tricalyx, and was VP of Product Strategic Systems at Monster.
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally on the show.
Ed and his co-founders at Goally are on a mission to help parents build their children’s independence and self-confidence while giving those parents a break from emotionally-draining and endless reminders. All while freeing kids from always feeling “bossed around”. They aim to meaningfully reduce anxiety and stress in millions of family homes, with an early focus on children with autism, ADHD and Down Syndrome. Prior to working at Goally, Ed was a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm where he created and led a global team working on 4G LTE.
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This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime.
Subjective measures like story points and tickets only tell part of the story of software development. GitPrime gives engineering managers the full picture with metrics in context on team productivity. So you can spot risk, identify waste, move faster, and advocate for your team with hard data instead of a narrative. Stop flying blind — and start leading engineering with concrete data.
More at gitprime.com
Our Boulder Startup Week episode streak continues. Today, we’ve got Nick Cheever, VP of Technology at 10-4 on the show.
Nick has over 15 years of experience in product development, particularly in a technical leadership role. He has been the lead for multiple SaaS-based platforms and has a proven track record of executing intuitive and technically-savvy solutions. Currently, Nick oversees the devops, product, creative, and development groups at 10-4 systems as they disrupt the transportation industry by providing big data logistical solutions.
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This week’s episode is sponsored by GitPrime.
Subjective measures like story points and tickets only tell part of the story of software development. GitPrime gives engineering managers the full picture with metrics in context on team productivity. So you can spot risk, identify waste, move faster, and advocate for your team with hard data instead of a narrative. Stop flying blind— and start leading engineering with concrete data.
More at gitprime.com
Hi and welcome to a very special Boulder Startup Week episode.
This week we’ve got some stories from a session entitled “Dev War Stories”. If you’re a longtime listener, you know that this is one of our favorite questions to ask interviewees.
There are 3 speakers giving war stories in this episode.
The first is Ed Johnson, CTO of Goally
The second is Jason Cole, CTO of a few startups around town.
The third is Greg Lems, CTO at Door to Door Organics.
One last thing. If you hear a flashlight turning on and off, it's because Miles set up the session to have the lights down low, kind of like a campfire ghost story type of atmosphere.
Enjoy yall!
This week’s guest is Andy Pai, VP Engineering at FullContact. FullContact is the most powerful, fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and enterprises who need to master their contacts and be awesome with people. As VP of Engineering, Andy is focused on growing the engineering organization, and building a secure, private and scalable data platform. Previously, Andy has helped build several data-oriented startups as CTO. He’s passionate about scaling platforms, driving organizational change, maximizing team effectiveness and helping people reach their potential.
Jeff Rose presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. Artificial intelligence is undergoing a renaissance, with the number of relevant research papers, startups, applications, and new ideas expanding rapidly. These new capabilities will enable people and result in greater aggregate productivity, analogous to the invention of the steam engine that powered the industrial revolution. At the same time, many laborers, drivers, assembly line workers, and even some more skilled roles in society will be made redundant. This shift will have both positive and negative consequences for individuals’ lives, society, and the economy, which is why it is important to start understanding the trends and preparing now.
Join Jeff Rose, CEO of Boulder AI company ThinkTopic, to discuss the technology, economic and political landscape of our automated future.
Cryptocurrencies have the potential to be TCP/IP of money. What does the future look like if they do to money, what the internet did for information? Learn about Ethereum, one of the top cryptocurrencies of 2017. Piper Merriam, Ethereum developer, presenting at Boulder Startup Week.
Video of this talk available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPoaMC1qNFY and embedded below:
EFA Colorado presenting in a very special Boulder Startup Week 2017 talk. What is Cryptography, and why does it matter? What is the history of cryptography, and where is it going in the future? Join this joint presentation of the Future of Tech + Legal tracks at Boulder Startup Week to learn more about the civil rights battles of the 21st century.
Video of this talk is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RN0F2CmXPU and embeded below:
Today's episode is from the archives. Michael Lopp (also known as @rands) is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. He works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.
Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike.Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.
Today's episode is from the archives.
We ask each of our guests what their engineering values are. What we love about this question is that the answers boil down the brass tacks of leadership into 2-3 minutes of fundamentals.
We’ve got a fun little thematic episode this week, with 5 answers to this question “What are your engineering values?” jammed packed into a 15-minute episode.
In order of appearance:
- Nader Akhnoukh– CTO of Kapost
- Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime
- Julia Austin — CTO of Digital Ocean
- Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education
- Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.
Today's episode is from the archives. Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites.
These four stories are ordered by scale. We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.
In order of appearance:
- Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
- Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime. A story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
- Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello. The story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
- Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by twitter. A story about screening your customers for success
Enjoy!
Our guests this week are Jack Dietrich and Ryan VanMiddlesworth of Fount Studio. Join the partners of Fount as they explain The Pirate Code Of Startups how Pirates were doing workplace democracy before it was cool. Awesome.
Today's episode is from the archives.
We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great chess; It’s not about having a great strategy; It’s about playing positional chess so that you have all of your pieces in place so when an opportunity presents itself you can take advantage of it.
Chris is a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software, and architecture. He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.
Today's episode is from the archives.
Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io. He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for analytics via APIs (among a million other things) at Keen — a leader in the analytics space. Join us to learn about the growth of Keen.io at 3, 10, 30, and (soon) 100 team members; and Dan & his co-founders' journey to building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliver great analytics software.
Our guest today is Scott Carleton.
Scott has a passion for building communities and empowering self-growth through education. Scott is currently the VP of Technology at Andela, a global engineering organization dedicated to fostering the next generation of elite tech talent across Africa. Previously, Scott co-founded Artsicle as CTO, building a global community of visual artists now featuring over 6000 creators in 100 countries. His work on Artsicle’s discovery engine, which was able to create a personalized experience for passive users, earned NYER’s “Best Use of Technology” award in 2013.
This episode is for you if you’re into #learning #hiring or #mentorship.
Favorite Quotes
- You hear a lot that “it's all about the people”, but you don’t really get it until it kicks you in the shins.
- I think a lot about communication through a company in the context of dynamic systems and controls. You can have an input of information where someone’s unaligned or there’s some dissonance, and you’re not going to feel the full impact of that until it works it’s way through the organization.
- In the early days, I felt like I needed the “best” engineers. That came out as needing Stanford Grads. But what I realized very quickly was that they had very different expectations and needs. I couldn't provide for them the right kinds of challenges because we were still hunting for product market fit.
- I’ve found that in hiring I should look for “potential” and not “pedigree”.
- We created a culture of really customer focused engineers. The engineers really own their parts of the product. They really care about its usability.
- Friction rises in communication when information doesn't have a place to settle.
- Chat is a tool. I’m sold on it. A tool is necessary but not sufficient. You need the tool to be able to create the behavior you want, but you need a cultural change or a behavior/belief change to use the tool effectively.
- Chat allows us an always-on meeting in its worst form. At best, it’s an asynchronous tool to keep everyone in sync.
- On chat, my top belief is “Get everything into public channels”
- The health of an engineering team is: How many issues are raised and resolved, and how fast is that iteration?
- Finding out how to have the right focus for a conversation in a chat channel is important.
- When I first started doing 1:1s, I totally didn’t want to do it. I’d make up excuses. Every 1:1, there were engineers who would complain and I just wanted to avoid that. But it turns out 1:1s are invaluable because you’ll always discover something important that you don’t know.
- If you’re having problems in your organization, a 1:1 is like taking a knife to that problem and sinking it a little deeper.
- When I first joined an organization with an existing engineering team, the first 1:1s were very much “clearing out the backlog” — Figuring out the existing problems.
- I have a passion for developing peoples potential.
- How do we measure someone’s learning velocity – how quickly they’re picking up new skills?
- The killer problem with distributed teams right now is whiteboarding. It’s just so hard to do remotely.
- Distributed teams are about trust. How do you get the information you need? How do you communicate outward & upward so that we have trust at all times? We need to know we’re all pushing in the same direction.
- What's really incredible about software development is that the people who are building the applications have a lot more information about the problems they're solving than you do. You really want most solutions coming from the bottom up.
- I focus on how I can expose business problems to the team. I tell them what we’re solving that quarter, and
Today's episode is from the archives.
We are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins, CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid. SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim is currently involved with back-end development, operations, and support, and has worn many hats as SendGrid has grown from 3 team members to over 300 over the last 8 years.
Join us to hear the founding story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the ebb & flow of a CTO’s responsibilities as a company scales massively, and learn about how SendGrid’s culture has been defined by the 4 H’s: honest, hungry, humble, and happy.
Our guest this week is Courtland Allen; MIT graduate, Y Combinator alum, full-stack web developer, and professional designer. He’s spent over 8 years building, designing, and marketing web-based products and companies, and is currently running IndieHackers.com.
This episode is for you if you’re into bootstrapped businesses, side projects, and community.
Favorite Quotes
- I’ve been doing startups ever since graduating from school.
- The idea behind Indie Hackers is that it’s completely transparent. Everyone shares their revenue. They share their strategies for growing and marketing their business. We built community through transparency.
- You can go on Techcrunch and you can hear about the Snapchats or Ubers of the world. But you can’t learn about Joe the Hacker who is running a $2k/ month business.
- The cultures could not be more different (bootstrapped vs VC backed).
- Instead of worrying about raising money from VCs and building a billion dollar company, you could instead focus on your product and solving for a need that your customers will pay money for.
- A lot of startup founders don’t achieve their goals because the bar is set so astronomically high. In a VC funded startup, sometimes if you don’t reach that goal, your expected value goes to zero.
- Indie Hackers community has a lot of people who are making $1k or $2k/mo per side project while working a full-time job. That’s basically like giving themselves a raise.
- I wish more people knew you didn’t have to do this crazy all or nothing thing.
- The tech press is incentivized by what gets the most eyeballs, which is inevitably going to be the craziest most flashy stories with the biggest numbers possible. The unicorns are what they call them now. This venture capital narrative is fed to everybody.
- There are binary outcomes with VC funded companies. They tend to either fail spectacularly or succeed spectacularly. They give you advice and resources that push you to those binary outcomes. I wish people were aware you could build businesses in more of a traditional way, getting revenue from day 1.
- Having all of our interviews be transparent was an important value from the start. I wasn’t going to publish any interviews where the founder wasn’t going to be transparent about how they build the business. I was building Indie Hackers for myself, thinking of the time in which I was trying to build a side business myself.
- I get inspired by putting myself in the interviewees shoes and seeing the kind of decisions they made to get to where they are.
- If you want to start a company, start a company in an area you’re interested in or want to learn about. I need to read books, I need to learn about business, marketing, growth if I want to be able to curate good interviews.
- ‘I’m a developer, I’m pretty confident in my programming skills. I’m not a great writer, or marketer, or salesperson.’ But what people don’t realize is that you just need to know the basics. Learning how to code is a lot harder than learning how to do a lot of these skills at a passable level.
- One of the things I’ve learned about Marketing is the importance of targeting a niche: A specific group of people who share qualities and characteristics who ideally will use your product.
- If you target a small specific group of people that you have almost no competition. You can build features that only they care about.
- A niche isn’t a group of features your product has. You need to describe an actual existent group of people.
- Having a monopoly is important. Whatever target market you’re targeting, you want your audience to look at you as the best possible solution to their problems. Is the market I’m in super humongous? No, there’s not billions of
Our guest today is Dave Zwieback, the author of Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success and an engineering leader in various organizations in & around New York City.
Dave does workshops for organizations looking to build People First cultures. If you’re interested in hosting a highly-rated, practical, hands-on workshop based on the book at your company, please contact workshops@mindweather.com. You’ll learn the theory and, most important, get to practice conducting Learning Reviews, a critical new practice for building resilient, people-first learning organizations.
This episode is for you if you’re interested in learning about soft-skills, career, or management.
Our guest today is Zack Bomsta, CTO of Owlet, which produces the Owlet Baby Monitor. In addition to growing the team, he is involved in electronic hardware design and miniaturization, manufacturing, firmware, and embedded systems development. Join us to hear war stories from the founding story of Owlet.
Owlet is hiring engineering leaders in UT.
Our episode today is from the archives. Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams.
Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com
Michael Lopp (also known as @rands) is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, Pinterest, and Apple. While he’s not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. He works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco where he’s furiously working on helping teams reinvent work.
Michael has written two books. His first book “Managing Humans, 3rd Edition” is a popular guide to the art of engineering leadership and clearly explains that while you be rewarded for what you build, you will only be successful because of your people. His second book “Being Geek” is a career handbook for geeks and nerds alike.Michael plays hockey, mountain bikes, tinkers with drones, and drinks red wine in the redwoods of Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is more important than staying busy.
Anant Jhingran has been in the tech industry for 27 years and has a Ph.D. in Database Systems from Berkeley. He’s been at IBM, CTO of Apigee, and then after Apigee was acquired, at Google.
Apigee manages an API & data layer for various large enterprises. They look at the data exhaust of those systems and understand patterns so people can improve what they’re doing through the APIs. Apigee was recently acquired by Google, and Anant is working on integrating its technologies into Google’s infrastructure.
Our guest this week is Ian Bernstein, CTO of Sphero. Sphero is creating a new category of toys called “Connected Toys” that take the best of what kids and adults love about their smart devices and fuse it with our robots that exist in the real world.
Ian’s passion is in electronics and robotics. Ever since he was 12 years old he has been building robots. Learn about how he parlayed his love of robotics into one of the most successful robotics company in the country. Sphero is a robotic ball that can be controlled with a smartphone. The company also makes the BB-8 toy robot featured prominently in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Dan Kador is the co-founder & CTO of Keen.io. He’s responsible for building the technology and team responsible for analytics via APIs (among a million other things) at Keen — a leader in the analytics space. Join us to learn about the growth of Keen.io at 3, 10, 30, and (soon) 100 team members; and Dan & his co-founders journey to building a different type of organization — with a team that’s got the autonomy, purpose, and tools they need to deliver great analytics software.
Today we are honored to be joined by Tim Jenkins, CoFounder & CTO of SendGrid. SendGrid solves problems for companies sending transactional e-mail. Tim is currently involved with back-end development, operations, and support, and has worn many hats as SendGrid has grown from 3 team members to over 300 over the last 8 years.
Join us to hear the founding story of one of the most successful email deliverability providers on the web, take a journey through the ebb & flow of a CTO’s responsibilities as a company scales massively, and learn about how SendGrid’s culture has been defined by the 4 H’s: honest, hungry, humble, and happy.
(BONUS EPISODE FROM THE ARCHIVES)
Learn about how Patrick McKenzie combined his technical skills with marketing/sales skills to launch & grow several successful internet businesses.
Patrick is the creator of Bingo Card Creator. He learned marketing and sales to launch and grow Kalzumeus Software; He has worked with 37signals, Fog Creek Software, and is now in content & community at Stripe.
Find Patrick on Twitter at @patio11 and listen to Patrick’s podcast here.
Don’t miss out on future episodes! Subscribe quickly at StartupCTO.io/subscribe.
We’re joined this week by guest co-host Diana Pfeil to interview Kathy Keating — Kathy is a Colorado-based Startup CTO who has helped build several successful technology startups, founded her own technology consulting business, guided product strategy for companies and implemented many complex software applications.
Join us for the first episode of StartupCTO.io in 2017 to discuss Kathy’s approach to building a startup from the ground up, data & analytics, being involved in the community, mentorship, and creating great software teams.
This week’s episode is from the archives. It’s an interview with Jud Valeski. Jud was a co-founder of Gnip (acquired by Twitter), a real-time data portability software initiative. From client-side consumer-facing products to large scale back-end infrastructure projects, he has enjoyed working with technology for over twenty years. He’s been a part of engineering, product, and M&A teams at IBM, Netscape, onebox.com, and AOL. He has played a central role in the release of a wide range of products used by tens of millions of users worldwide.
Find Jud on Twitter at @jvaleski and at http://one.valeski.org/.
We ask each of our guests what their engineering values are. What we love about this question is that the answers boil down the brass tacks of leadership into 2-3 minutes of fundamentals.
We’ve got a fun little thematic episode this week, with 5 answers to this question “What are your engineering values?” jammed packed into a 15-minute episode.
In order of appearance:
- Nader Akhnoukh– CTO of Kapost
- Travis Kimmel — CEO of GitPrime
- Julia Austin — CTO of Digital Ocean
- Manuel Mattke — Chief Innovation Officer at Opportunity Education
- Maria Gutierrez & Glenn Vanderburg — Maria is VP Engineering at FreeAgent and Glen is VP Engineering at First.
We are joined this week by Chris McAvoy to talk about growing your people & their careers. Learn why advancing your career is like playing great chess; It’s not about having a great strategy; It’s about playing positional chess so that you have all of your pieces in place so when an opportunity presents itself you can take advantage of it.
Chris is a technology leader with a passion for open source communities, innovative products, software, and architecture. He is presently a mentor at Techstars and the VP Engineering at Cognizant QuickLeft.
Last week, @owocki’s startup released a new product — The battles last week during this release reminded us of some of our favorite engineering war stories. We ask every CTO on our show “What is your favorite engineering war story?”, and this episode we’re going to play 4 of our favorites.
These four stories are ordered by scale. We’ll start with “just a guy in the garage with a product” to a war story from a large venture scaled startup.
In order of appearance:
- Patrick McKenzie – independent software developer. Story misplacing your pager and being unaware of your outage
- Travis Kimmel – CEO of GitPrime. A story about after launch the dance of cleaning up your early assumptions and building new features
- Jay Zeschin, Lead Architect at ello. The story of “blowing up”, getting tens of thousands of users, and VC funding all at once.
- Jud Valeski – CTO at GNIP, acquired by Twitter. A story about screening your customers for success
Enjoy!
Gevorg was the Co-Founder/CTO of LionSharp, where he led the development of Gesture and Voice controlled systems. After he left Lionsharp, he became an Agile product/project manager. Join Gevorg as we chat about collaborative leadership, agile teams and organizations, customer engagement, and delivering business and customer value at breakneck speed.
Manuel Mattke is an innovator, entrepreneur, tech product guy (and from time to time developer), with a background in finance, technology, and innovation consulting.
This week is an extra special episode. Manuel was Kevin’s CTO mentor at the last startup he founded, and Kevin is super excited to share some of the insights that Manuel shared with him, with all of you.
When he’s not mentoring up & coming CTO’s, Manuel is building his own startups. He has founded and built several startups, including an enterprise software company, a mobile app company and an innovation consulting firm, and likes to focus on combining business strategy, innovation and design thinking, and technology products.
Manuel is currently designing and implementing relevant & engaging learning experiences for teens in the US and in the developing world. Education models around the world have seen limited innovation over the last 50+ years, and are ripe for significant new efforts. Learn about Manuel’s work as Chief Innovation Officer disrupting education at Opportunity Education in this week’s episode.
We’re taking this week off; If you’re in the US, you’re celebrating Thanksgiving. If you’re not in the US, you can still give thanks — Listen to one of our favorite episodes from the archives: Quantifying Engineering w. Travis Kimmel of Gitprime.
Travis Kimmel is the CEO of GitPrime. GitPrime analyzes a team’s codebase to quantify engineering progress. They make it easy to identify engineers who are stuck or bogged down with refactoring and quantify the amount of effort spent paying down technical debt.
Find Travis on Twitter at @traviskimmel.
Julia Austin is the CTO of DigitalOcean and a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School of Entrepreneurial Management. Hear about her experiences scaling at rocket ship speed leading DigitalOcean’s engineering and product teams.
Find Julia on Twitter at @austinfish and find DigitalOcean at DigitalOcean.com
Andrew Useckas is the CTO of Threat-X; a 10 person startup based out of Colorado that provides Web Application Firewalls as a Service. Join Andrew as we discuss the most relevant threats to software startup companies today and we learn how he and his team built a next-gen security company.
Find Andrew on Twitter at https://twitter.com/daronin and Threat-X at https://threat-x.com/
Favorite Quotes:
An engineer has to be a self starter. I look for someone who can really take initiative; someone who can take a project and make it their ownA quality I look for in hires is ability to pivot as necessary. What tool you use depends upon the task. Things always improve and you have to be flexible.
Ingrid Alongi is the co-founder of Quickleft, a software development firm in Boulder Colorado which was acquired by Cognizant in March of 2016. In this episode, Ingrid takes us through the founding story of QuickLeft, and how QuickLeft used Net Promoter Scores to drive great outcomes for end-customers.
Find Ingrid on Twitter at @electromute and check out QuickLeft at QuickLeft.com.
Favorite Quotes:
My biggest engineering value is pragmatism and collaboration. Things get done better when you work as a team. The best solution is the one that launches.Its really important to be able to communicate ideas, and to sell your ideas; even if the client is not technical. We invest in speaking at conferences and blog posts a lot.If people write software on time and clients are happy, then that’s a success. It doesn’t matter as much if the code they write is poetry.I’ve seen the ebb and flow of people wanting more structure and then less structure. Organizations today are much flatter than they used to be.
We’ve got a special bonus episode for you all this week.
Episode 0.8 of our Podcast was a Boulder Startup Week talk about ZCash by its founder; Zooko Wilcox. ZCash is a privacy-centric blockchain. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private.
A lot of people are really excited about a blockchain that enables truly anonymous transactions on the web and believes that ZCash could be a top 5 blockchain within a year. ZCash has an all-star roster of cryptographers; and they today in version 1.0.0; So I’m reposting our ZCash episode, episode 0.8.
Brandon Purcell is the CTO of SpatialKey; a leading geospatial intelligence analytics platform. SpatialKey started as a proof of concept prototype in 2007 and has grown into a full-fledged profitable business over the last seven years. Listen to this episode to hear SpatialKey’s founding journey; from finding a core customer who was willing to pay for their product, to growing into a SAAS provider serving several prominent paying customers.