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Contenido proporcionado por ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC). Todo el contenido del podcast, incluidos episodios, gráficos y descripciones de podcast, lo carga y proporciona directamente ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) o su socio de plataforma de podcast. Si cree que alguien está utilizando su trabajo protegido por derechos de autor sin su permiso, puede seguir el proceso descrito aquí https://es.player.fm/legal.
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Decisions, Decisions
Join Mandii B and Weezy WTF as they navigate the evolution of their podcasting journey in this candid and hilarious episode of “Decisions, Decisions.” Reflecting on nearly a decade of bold conversations, the duo opens up about the challenges and triumphs of rebranding their iconic show, previously known as “WHOREible Decisions.” Dive into their reasoning behind the name change, their growth as individuals, and the dynamics of creating space for nontraditional relationships and personal self-love. This episode features thought-provoking discussions on societal norms, reclaiming identity, and the complexities of managing a brand that champions inclusivity while addressing the limitations of media algorithms. From celibacy and creative reinvention to navigating life changes and unconventional lifestyles, Mandy and Weezy offer raw, unfiltered takes that will keep you engaged and inspired. Follow the hosts on social media Weezy @Weezywtf & Mandii B @Fullcourtpumps and follow the Decisions Decisions pages Instagram @_decisionsdecisions Don't forget to tag #decisionsdecisions or @ us to let us know what you think of this week's episode! Want more? Bonus episodes, merch and more Whoreible Decisions!! Become a Patron at Patreon.com/whoreibledecisions See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…
The Engineering Leadership Podcast
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Contenido proporcionado por ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC). Todo el contenido del podcast, incluidos episodios, gráficos y descripciones de podcast, lo carga y proporciona directamente ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) o su socio de plataforma de podcast. Si cree que alguien está utilizando su trabajo protegido por derechos de autor sin su permiso, puede seguir el proceso descrito aquí https://es.player.fm/legal.
We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Join our community of software engineering leaders @ www.sfelc.com!
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209 episodios
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Manage series 2869838
Contenido proporcionado por ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC). Todo el contenido del podcast, incluidos episodios, gráficos y descripciones de podcast, lo carga y proporciona directamente ELC and The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) o su socio de plataforma de podcast. Si cree que alguien está utilizando su trabajo protegido por derechos de autor sin su permiso, puede seguir el proceso descrito aquí https://es.player.fm/legal.
We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Join our community of software engineering leaders @ www.sfelc.com!
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209 episodios
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Unleashing potential in your employees & strategies to grow leadership skills in your org w/ Natalie Glance #201 41:51
Natalie Glance, Chief Engineering Officer @ Duolingo joins us for a conversation on unleashing potential in your employees! We discuss practices that have helped Duolingo create a meaningful path for hiring & developing engineers through their onboarding & internship programs. We also cover topics including scaling your eng org, upskilling recent grads / new hires, balancing meaningful work with measurable impact, communicating alignment within your org, formal & informal steps for building eng leadership capabilities, and essential skills for managers of all types. ABOUT NATALIE GLANCE Natalie is a lifelong learner and seasoned leader with extensive experience at startups and established companies. She’s currently the Chief Engineering Officer at Duolingo. At Duolingo, Natalie ensures engineers can help set product direction and strategy. She’s championed a culture of extensive A/B testing, and is excited about the ways generative AI can both build new features and accelerate content creation for these features. She oversees many of the efforts dedicated to scaling Duolingo’s technology to new subjects, like Math and Music. Natalie is passionate about mentorship and education. She co-founded the Int’l AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), which offers an annual Adamic-Glance Distinguished Young Researcher Award for a promising young independent researcher in the field of computational social science in the early stage of their career. SHOW NOTES: Natalie’s eng leadership background & journey scaling Duolingo (2:41) Duolingo’s approach to eng leadership & passion for unleashing potential (5:42) Implementing a mentoring program to improve eng development / retention (6:42) How the mentoring process changes as an org scales (8:51) Duolingo’s onboarding process & tips for building an onboarding program (10:12) Ways Duolingo has crafted a successful internship program (12:43) Frameworks for intern hosts to collect meaningful projects for interns (15:38) Behind the Thrive intern program (HootCamp) for rising juniors (17:44) How Duolingo’s guiding principles drive Duolingo University (21:08) Strategies for upskilling new grads into strong technical contributors (22:13) Best practices for unlocking potential & contributing to people’s growth (25:40) Natalie’s approach to balancing meaningful work with measurable impact (26:44) Practices for creating alignment within your org (28:30) Duolingo’s thought process for role training & growing leaders (30:44) Breaking down the formal & informal steps for building leaders within the org (32:41) Essential skills for role managers to develop (34:22) Addressing challenges faced by managers of managers (36:47) Rapid fire questions (38:24) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership - Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy.” This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, we explore building an AI-first company and engineering org with Rong Yan (CTO @ HeyGen)! We dive into the potential of HeyGen’s interactive avatars, imagining how they can help engineering leaders scale their impact, foster team alignment, coach effectively, and accelerate decision-making. Rong shares insights on the structure of an AI-first company and optimizing for AI teams with engineering capabilities. Plus what it means to “lead with speed” and balance product quality and velocity in an AI-first company and key leadership principles, like why it’s crucial to invest in your top performers and how to act as a productivity multiplier. ABOUT RONG YAN Rong Yan is HeyGen’s Chief Technology Officer. He brings the company's technological mission of making visual storytelling accessible to everyone, to life. Rong has nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience from companies including IBM, Facebook, Square, Snap, and HubSpot. Most recently, Rong was the VP of Engineering at Hubspot where he led the Data Intelligence and Automation product line and spearheaded the development of an intelligent CRM platform using data and AI. He was also the Director of Engineering turned Senior Director of Engineering at Snap, where he led a product engineering team of over 250 engineers across six locations, responsible for developing, optimizing, and maintaining core Snapchat features, including Camera, Messaging, Stories, Discover, Memories, and Identity. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. SHOW NOTES: Introducing HeyGen’s interactive avatar & what this means for eng leaders (3:40) How a visual layer for AI agents could scale your leadership & build alignment in your teams and orgs (5:58) The different levels of communication flow within a company (8:17) How interactive avatars can enable interactions and coaching at scale (10:46) The possibilities of interactive avatars for personalized coaching, habit building, and behavior change (14:02) Insights on building an AI-first company (20:29) What the structure of an AI-first company looks like (22:05) How leading with speed works within an AI-first company (24:10) Navigating the balance between product velocity & quality (27:23) The impact of the “leading with speed” paradigm on hiring (30:34) The role of an engineering leaders is to be a productivity multiplier (32:40) How AI impacts productivity as an eng leader (34:43) Where to start when it comes to improving productivity (36:38) AI’s role in blurring the lines between IC & management (39:48) Spend more time on your top people (42:45) Rapid fire questions (44:21) LINKS AND RESOURCES HeyGen - With HeyGen, businesses can simply write their script and generate their video. No camera, no budget, no headaches. We've helped over 45,000 companies and millions of people create, localize, and personalize videos at scale. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Re-defining & elevating engineering’s strategic role with the business w/ Rajashree Pimpalkhare #199 41:41
In this episode, Rajashree Pimpalkhare (VP / Engineering leader for Unified Builder platform and experiences @ Twilio) reflects on her experiences re-defining engineering’s relationship with the business throughout her career. We cover how the role of engineering varies across industries, why it’s paramount for engineering leaders to find their seat at the business table & rethink how engineering can drive the org’s strategic goals. Rajashree shares insights on how to unlock the creative side of product & business leaders, lessons learned from solving various customer problems, frameworks for eng orgs to combat & overcome learned helplessness, communication practices for framing decision-making, and adjusting from a “no, but” to a “yes, and” mindset. ABOUT RAJASHREE PIMPALKHAREE Rajashree is the VP / Engineering leader for Unified Builder platform and experiences - the world's most flexible customer engagement platform, that powers customer facing sales and service teams with the context, data, and channel flexibility they need to turn ordinary conversations into opportunities to drive repeat sales. Previously, Rajashree led product development at Quizlet - the popular student application that helps over 60 million learners worldwide every month study, practice and become an expert in whatever they are learning. Prior to Quizlet, Rajashree led engineering for Intuit’s 3rd party Developer Platform and app store – enabling a thriving ecosystem of thousands of small business applications that connect to Intuit’s QuickBooks Platform. Prior to Intuit, she held several engineering leadership roles at PayPal building innovative global payment products for consumers and merchants. Rajashree started her career at Intel as a design engineer and subsequently worked on industry changing software solutions for semiconductor chip design at Synopsys. Rajashree is passionate about building purpose-driven teams that exhibit engineering excellence, customer-first thinking and an inclusive culture. She is a strong advocate for women and under-represented minorities in technology; and takes a personal interest in coaching and mentoring talent at all levels to balance the playing field and help them grow in their careers. Rajashree received a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland, Baltimore. SHOW NOTES: Why engineering’s role in the business varies across industries (2:21) Finding a seat at the business table & elevating the strategic role of engineering (5:32) How Rajashree’s experiences shape her approach as an eng leader (8:54) Strategies for unlocking product / business leaders’ creativity (11:53) Shifting from a “no, that won’t work” to “yes, and here’s how” mindset (14:13) Rajashree’s experience in her global services role (16:46) Lessons learned on solving problems for different customers (19:52) Insights on scaling & productizing (21:17) Deconstructing the concept of learned helplessness in eng orgs (23:13) Frameworks for helping overcome learned helplessness (26:29) Communication practices for eng leaders to frame their decision-making (28:53) Improve your ability to ask better questions & improve dialogue bandwidth (32:16) Rapid fire questions (35:20) LINKS AND RESOURCES Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon - Colin Bryar started at Amazon in 1998; Bill Carr joined in 1999. These two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 How engineering leaders can better drive business outcomes & increase alignment between product and engineering w/ Gokul Rajaram #198 43:36
In this episode, Gokul Rajaram illuminates how eng leaders can better impact business outcomes & become key players in business strategy! We also address strategies for better goal setting & decision making, shifting to a customer-centric structure, recommendations for building alignment between cross-functional groups, positive collaboration between product & engineering, and how to achieve greater productivity. ABOUT GOKUL RAJARAM Gokul Rajaram is an investor and company helper. He serves on the boards on Coinbase, Pinterest and The Trade Desk. Most recently, he was an executive at DoorDash, a food ordering platform. Prior to DoorDash, he worked at Block as Product Engineering Lead, where he led several product development teams and served on Block’s executive team. Prior to Block, he served as Product Director of Ads at Facebook, where he helped Facebook transition its advertising business to become mobile-first. Earlier in his career, Gokul served as a Product Management Director for Google AdSense, where he helped launch the product and grow it into a substantial portion of Google’s business. Gokul is also on the board of The Trade Desk and Coinbase. Gokul holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur where he received the President's Gold Medal for being class valedictorian. He also holds an M.B.A. from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he received the MCD University Fellowship. SHOW NOTES: Why it’s critical for eng leaders to drive business outcomes (2:04) How to shift your leadership to impact organizational changes (4:18) Facilitating conversations around setting numerical / time-driven goals (6:56) Navigating the shift to a customer-centric structure & approach (9:18) Recommendations for building around this customer-oriented model (12:04) Decision-making strategies when approaching customer outcomes (13:25) Understand the role of confidence in the decision-making process (15:40) Challenges faced by eng leaders when making this customer-centric shift (18:06) How eng leaders can introduce / reinforce accountability in eng orgs (20:11) Bridging the gap between PMs & eng leaders (23:07) Challenges / dysfunctions that prevent product & engineering alignment (25:01) Establishing trust, open dialogue, and mutual respect from the get-go (26:39) Communication frameworks that increase alignment between product & eng (32:39) How eng leaders can better approach “move fast & break things” demand (35:37) Rapid fire questions (40:19) LINKS AND RESOURCES Gokul’s website - Contains a collection of Gokul’s writing that covers a wide range of topics related to product development, hiring, strategy, leadership, and more! The Mistborn Saga - Brandon Sanderson’s high fantasy saga which chronicles the efforts of a secret group of Allomancers who attempt to overthrow a dystopian empire and establish themselves in a world covered by ash. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 From VPE to CTO - mission-aligned teams, prioritizing company over department outcomes & the power of a “not do” list w/ Ryan Fox #197 40:56
Ryan Fox, CTO @ Super.com , joins us to dissect his leadership transition from Vice President of Engineering to CTO. He shares how he created his own job description and – perhaps most importantly – identified & found buy-in around his “not do” list. We also cover Ryan’s favorite strategies for coaching department heads, why it’s important to focus on strategic thinking as an eng leader, tips for instilling accountability & autonomy, and defining different levels of situational leadership. Patrick and Ryan also dissect Super.com ’s MAT leadership approach and how it is incorporated into their engineering functions. ABOUT RYAN FOX Ryan Fox is the CTO at Super.com , an all-in-one app that has helped millions of customers save, earn and put over $150 million back in their pockets. Previously, Ryan worked as both a SWE and SRE at Google. SHOW NOTES: Ryan’s background / experience with Super.com (2:04) What sparked his transition from VP of Engineering to CTO (3:40) How Ryan tackled creating his own job description (5:50) Strategies for prioritizing responsibilities & developing a “not to do” list (8:20) Process for defining what not to do (9:32) Examples of building buy in for a “not to do” responsibility (11:45) Insights on prioritizing company wide outcomes vs. departmental outcomes (13:33) Transitioning from a department head to coaching other department leaders (15:26) Components of a successful coaching conversation about strategic thinking (18:48) Frameworks for instilling accountability & autonomy in department heads (21:25) Understanding situational leadership & S3 / S4 definitions (23:08) Incorporating mission-aligned teams into the engineering organization (25:37) Why the MAT leader focuses on business, not people aspects (27:52) Elements that contribute to the MAT model’s success (29:32) The intersection of MAT & functional leadership (32:04) Ryan’s advice to leaders new to the MAT approach (34:20) Rapid fire questions (36:29) LINKS AND RESOURCES MAT Resource Guide - A guide to understand the Mission-Aligned Team organizational structure, how Super.com rolled out MATs, and how such a structure may be able to help your organization. All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, the show features insider takes on business, technology, and society and interviews with the world's most influential thinkers. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leading change, navigating career growth & finding inspiration beyond engineering - Live from ELC Annual 2024! #196 29:16
In this episode, we’re bringing listeners into the final conversations from the pop-up podcast booth at ELC Annual 2024! Patrick sat down with a few eng leaders attending the event to discuss takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 & eng leadership insights they want to share with others in the community. He chatted with Nick Hurlburt (Executive Director of the Aselo program @ Tech Matters), Manju Abraham (Vice President of Engineering, Primary Storage @ HPE), and Bhupesh Bansal (Head of Engineering - Product Server @ Square). These leaders share some of the guiding principles of their eng leadership careers, highlights from ELC Annual 2024, advice for first timers attending these types of events, and more. ABOUT NICK HURLBURT Nick Hurlburt is the Executive Director of the Aselo program at Tech Matters, a nonprofit with a mission to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity. Aselo is an open source contact center platform used by crisis helplines in over 15 countries. After completing an MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Nick began his career developing early, large-scale AI software at Amazon. He then spent six years overseas working on conflict relief efforts in Burma and South Sudan before returning to the U.S., where he managed software teams at a San Francisco machine learning startup before building the initial version of Aselo as Tech Matters’ first engineer. He gets excited about systems thinking, understanding different cultures, and walking through forests reminiscent of his rural Wisconsin childhood. ABOUT MANJU ABRAHAM Manju Abraham was VP of Engineering for Primary Storage products at HPE. She has over 25 years of experience leading Engineering organizations to deliver enterprise products of high quality, building, scaling and leading transformation, as an effective change catalyst, across companies like HPE, Delphix, NetApp, HP etc. ABOUT BHUPESH BANSAL Entrepreneur and technical leader passionate about making a positive impact in the world. 18+ years track record of building teams, large-scale distributed systems, and consumer products scaling to 100M+ users. SHOW NOTES: Why it’s important to incorporate non-eng principles into engineering (1:52) Don't run if the people can't run (4:20) The importance of iterating & identifying patterns that work (5:57) Nick’s ELC Annual 2024 highlights (7:35) Advice for first-time attendees to get the most out of ELC Annual (8:10) Challenges around cultural transformations (9:33) How transformations incorporate structure & order (11:35) Manju’s experience at / takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 (15:14) Advice for folks on how to get the most out of an experience like this (18:19) Bhupesh’s roundtable on managing yourself & learning to let go (20:17) When Bhupesh started to embody the principle of managing yourself (21:52) Frameworks for making the shift to identifying yourself as a leader (24:17) Top ways you can invest in yourself & final takeaways (26:27) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Career growth in today’s market + effective partnerships between engineering & hiring partners - Live from ELC Annual 2024 #195 29:58
We’re back with another episode live from ELC Annual 2024’s podcast booth! Patrick discusses the practices and rituals around effective hiring & recruiting with a few speakers and roundtable hosts from ELC Annual 2024, including Lawrence Bruhmuller (SVP of Engineering @ Great Expectations), Eric Fettner (Co-Founder @ Job Sauce), and Scott Swedberg (CEO & Co-Founder @ Job Sauce). Scott shares insights & takeaways from his roundtable conversation on assessing career growth & determining next steps during this trend of eng orgs continuing to become flatter. Eric and Lawrence also stop by the booth to share about their unique partnership, hiring best practices, ensuring candidates maintain your org’s engineering culture, and more. ABOUT SCOTT SWEDBERG Scott Swedberg is CEO & Founder of The Job Sauce, a boutique recruiting firm for high-growth companies. He founded The Job Sauce as a career coaching company, and partners with ELC to support engineering leaders in their careers and talent acquisition. He and his wife, Lauryn, live in Denver with their daughter and cat. ABOUT ERIC FETTNER Eric Fettner is co-founder of The Job Sauce, a high-touch recruiting firm serving Seed through pre-IPO startups. After helping launch the most successful vertical at Eventbrite (IPO September 2018), Eric was ready to take on something new. He began by building The Job Sauce as the premier provider of career services for tech workers. This focus on candidate experience revealed the horrible experience most recruiting firms provide, leading to the birth and success of The Job Sauce Recruiting, trusted by top startups funded by top VCs. ABOUT LAWRENCE BRUHMULLER Lawrence Bruhmuller is currently the SVP of Engineering at Great Expectations, the open-source data quality solution used by thousands of data engineers in the industry. He has over 12 years of experience as an overall head of engineering, mostly focused on growth-stage startups. Previous roles include CTO roles at Pave and Optimizely, and VPE roles at WeWork, ClearSlide, and Symantec. Lawrence has been a part of small startups and also larger companies, and has developed products for individual users and also the world’s largest enterprises. In particular, he has focused on delivering cloud-first products in the B2B application and developer tooling spaces. Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership ( https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/ ), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time. Lawrence holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Amy, and their three daughters. SHOW NOTES: What brought Scott Swedberg to ELC Annual 2024 & how he supports eng leaders (3:12) Summarizing Scott’s ELC Annual roundtable discussion on career growth (5:39) Understanding how trends shift as technology evolves & investor priorities pivot (9:01) Final takeaways on exploring career growth & next steps (11:26) Eric Fettner & Lawrence Bruhmuller explain their recent partnership (14:19) Questions eng leaders should ask to aid calibration / alignment between partners (17:21) Ensuring new candidates reinforce the eng culture you’re aiming to build (18:29) Strategies for adopting / adapting cultural practices while hiring & onboarding (20:33) Effective communication between eng leaders & talent partners (22:49) Lawrence explains Great Expectations’ team structure (25:04) Recommendations for providing feedback between partners (26:37) The importance of timing when it comes to the hiring process (28:00) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Selling your ideas, leveraging curiosity in tough conversations, managing emotions & psychological safety - Live from ELC Annual 2024! #194 24:05
This episode came live from ELC Annual 2024! Local ELC chapter leaders from across the globe share some of their favorite leadership principles, covering topics like how to sell your ideas & gain buy-in from senior leaders, how to manage yourself and your regulate emotions, how to leverage curiosity in tough conversations, how to build psychological safety and more! Thank you Ali Littman (VP of Engineering @ Modern Health), Mehmet Sencer Kardayi (CTO @ Dexter Energy), Tarik Kilick (Engineering Manager @ Booking.com ), and Liz Sink (Director of Engineering @ Amount) for sharing your insights + a huge thank you to all of our local leaders for what you do to make community happen across the world! Check out all of our local chapters & get involved here: elc.community/home/clubs ABOUT ALI LITTMAN Ali Littman is the Vice President of Engineering at Modern Health, a mental health technology company with a global workforce of both full-time and contracted staff. She has 15 years of experience in health tech and a business degree from Haas at Berkeley. She specializes in scaling organizations and has a track record in taking companies through hypergrowth, navigating major strategic product development pivots, as well as running major department reorganizations to optimize for current delivery and future-state architecture needs. ABOUT TARIK KILIC Tarik is an engineering leader who loves building products and teams that love building products. Currently @Booking.com, previously at SurveyMonkey and Heineken. ABOUT MEHMET SENCER KARADAYI With 15+ years of experience in the tech industry, Mehmet has worked both as an individual contributor and a manager in big-tech(Booking, Meta) and as a software consultant in both the private and public sector. He likes to call himself a "failed serial-entrepreneur"(0 to 1) 😅 and nowadays is focusing on scaling tech startups(1 to 100). Outside of work, Mehmet has a diverse set of hobbies 🎱🏀♟️🥽🏓🛹🤹 and likes adding new ones to the set every now and then. ABOUT LIZ SINK Liz Sink is currently a Director of Engineering at Amount, a digital origination and decisioning SaaS platform for deposits and lending. Liz also spearheaded the ELC Local Chapter initiative, collaborating with ELC to establish the inaugural chapter in Chicago, where she is working to build a community and leadership culture. Drawing on her diverse background in software engineering, education, and social work, Liz focuses on building cohesive, empowered teams, developing high-quality products, and driving progress and innovation in engineering leadership. SHOW NOTES: How to sell your ideas & gain buy-in from senior eng leaders (1:37) Strategies to help someone start building this skillset (3:05) Why building ELC San Diego is meaningful to Ali (6:58) How to discover which metrics are most relevant for direct-to-consumer (8:26) Learn to manage yourself as a leader (10:21) Leveraging curiosity to make tough conversations collaborative (12:14) Tarik & Mehmet’s perspective on the Amsterdam ELC community (14:09) Creating psychological safety & trust for eng leaders (18:42) Why this topic is important for employee retention, satisfaction & innovation (19:19) An invitation to ELC Chicago (22:29) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We’re back with another session from ELC Annual 2024! This episode features an engaging session on collaboration & innovation in the time of AI with Anurag Agarwal, VPE, Google Workspace @ Google, and Lizzie Matusov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Quotient! In this conversation, they dissect how AI is transforming not only the products engineering teams are building but also how teams work together internally. They cover how Google / Google Workplace specifically use AI both internally & externally, strategies for creating & maintaining alignment across a large org, how Anurag addressed challenges during this transitional period, and more. ABOUT ANURAG AGARWAL Anurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create and build together. With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information. Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family. " One of the things we sort of tried to do from very early on is to make sure teams see their success in terms of overall workspace success, in terms of more users actually being able to accomplish their work more effectively using all of Workspace's tools, right? It's not about the individual tools, it's really about the whole together.” - Anurag Agarwal ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard. SHOW NOTES: Anurag’s career at Google & what he’s currently working on (2:38) The evolution of Google Workspace & incorporating GenAI (4:31) Diving into internal AI use within Google / across teams (6:37) Challenges faced while creating alignment (9:47) Frameworks for setting goals & aligning KPIs more effectively (11:57) How Google ensures its team feel safe to fail & allow autonomy (14:03) Strategies for maintaining alignment across a large org (16:09) How Anurag’s leadership has evolved through technology transformations (18:07) Strategies for helping teams accomplish tasks & be continuously learning (20:33) Anurag’s favorite rituals / changes from this transition (24:09) Audience Q&A: What has been your biggest challenge shipping AI? (25:26) Defining Workspace’s corpus for the individual vs. the enterprise (27:29) How do you ensure content moderation when using AI features? (28:13) Build guardrails for LLMs depending on the context (29:18) How the center of excellence team distributed its knowledge across various orgs (30:48) Strategies for drawing a line where Gemini responds & ensuring determinism in the response (32:15) Quotient’s processes for QA & automation (34:02) Understanding the ethics / responsibilities behind AI usage (35:11) The evolution of developmental practices with deterministic code vs. apps written with AI (36:43) Anurag & Lizzie’s key takeaways (38:28) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
One of the most important aspects of success is a team’s ability to collaborate – but it can also be one of the most challenging parts. In this episode, we’re highlighting a popular session ELC Annual 2024 on how to encourage collaboration, ultimately increasing productivity and creating more likely outcomes of success. This conversation features Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering @ Figma, and Arquay Harris, former VP of Engineering @ Webflow. This conversation also features a robust Q&A session from ELC Annual attendees on their most pressing collaboration questions – including diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate, how to measure the success of collaborative tools, strategies for building rituals / processes around collaboration, and much more. ABOUT MARCEL WEEKES Marcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect. "A trait of product engineers that I have found to be successful in predicting positive outcomes is they view code as a tool to get something done. Engineers on the other end of the spectrum who might be more elite code engineers or more like, ‘I got this algorithm to go like .005 percent faster,’ frankly that's not what's going to get your product to product market fit. If you're not focused on the end goal here, you're going to make suboptimal decisions the whole way.” - Marcel Weekes ABOUT ARQUAY HARRIS Arquay has held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. Following her most recent role as VP of Engineering at Webflow, Arquay is currently enjoying retirement. She fills her days with occasional mentoring and speaking engagements as well as pursuing her many hobbies. SHOW NOTES: Marcel’s definition of effective team collaboration (2:36) How Figma’s dev mode is reducing collaborative tension (5:42) Processes & rituals that increase productivity early on (7:12) Marcel & Arquay’s collaboration example: success with Slack Connect (9:44) Why collaborative teams are ultimately more productive teams (13:21) Audience Q&A: Frameworks for diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate (14:25) How to avoid over collaboration / communication (17:09) Strategies for creating collaboration standards early on in a project (19:33) Navigating the balance between collaboration & preserving autonomous teams (22:23) Encouraging engineers to care about broader outcomes & collaboration (26:54) Tips for measuring the success & productivity of collaborative tools (29:11) How to foster cross-collaborative respect between design & engineering (32:19) Building relationships across teams / functions to promote smooth operation (34:27) Recommendations to help developers & design to share more work in progress (36:52) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Scaling AI for an Immersive 3D Platform with 77 Million Daily Active Users w/ Anupam Singh & Maria Kazandjieva #191 37:49
We had a blast at ELC Annual 2024, so we wanted to bring our podcast listeners some of the best highlights from popular sessions! This episode features one of the ELC Annual sessions with Anupam Singh (VP of AI & Growth Engineering @ Roblox) & Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft), as they discuss building AI/ML models at a massive scale. Anupam shares how Roblox – an immersive 3D platform with more than 77 million daily active users – scaled from zero to nearly 200 different AI models. They discuss strategies for deciding when to use open source vs. creating proprietary models; how to operationalize your models for 24/7 use; the importance of data pipelines; current and future challenges to keep in mind when creating / scaling AI models; and answer some questions from the live Q&A. ABOUT ANUPAM SINGH Anupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution. "The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'” - Anupam Singh ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVA Maria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma. SHOW NOTES: How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30) The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34) Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06) What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12) Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19) Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06) How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20) The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18) Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52) Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21) Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29) When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36) Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03) Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03) How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back in late September with new guests! We have some excellent sessions at the conference - check out the agenda here: https://sfelc.com/annual2024#agenda Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Dave Rhodes, CEO @ Sauce Labs, joins the pod to discuss the value of great digital experiences & how/why quality issues affect companies’ bottom lines, and how to connect bugs to the business! Dave dissects strategies for addressing quality issues, examples connecting quality with the bottom line, best practices for quality testing strategies, and incorporating the philosophy of embracing the impossible within your eng teams. We also cover highlights of Dave’s recent report, “Every Experience Counts” exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. And to set the stage & magnify the stakes, the Crowdstrike & Microsoft outage coincidentally happened the day we hit record. ABOUT DAVE RHODES Dave Rhodes is CEO of Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing and software quality solutions to deliver digital confidence to enterprises. He has a proven track record as a strong operational leader with success in building and scaling growth businesses. Previously, Dave held key leadership roles at Unity, where as Chief Revenue Officer he grew the company’s revenue from $160M to $640M (4x growth) and navigated its public market debut in 2020. He then created and oversaw Unity’s AI-powered business, Digital Twins. He has also held leadership roles at Paradigm and Autodesk. Rhodes holds an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of San Diego and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of California at San Diego. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode is brought to you by Revelo! Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide: A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fit A payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and compliance A team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hires With Revelo , you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team. Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. SHOW NOTES: The Crowdstrike / Microsoft news & how bugs affect the bottom line (2:31) Understanding the stakes & complexity of the Crowdstrike issue (5:05) Dave’s perspective on & passion for digital experiences (7:50) The impact of cloud computing, high-speed connectivity, AI / ML, and COVID on software innovation (10:10) Examples of how digital experiences drive a business’s bottom line (13:45) How the quality of a product impacts developer velocity & motivation (17:31) Connecting the bottom line with product quality / bugs (20:31) Strategies for communicating the business benefits of developing for scale (24:51) Addressing quality issues that impact top OKRs, like customer churn (26:48) Highlights of the “Every Experience Counts” report (31:51) Best practices for eng leaders looking to evolve their current testing strategy (35:13) What it means to think about the impossible & reverse engineer it (38:05) Frameworks for instilling this mindset into your eng teams (41:18) Rapid fire questions (44:17) LINKS AND RESOURCES Every Experience Counts - Sauce Labs’ report exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life - The seven rules to follow to realize your true purpose in life—distilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own journey of ceaseless reinvention and extraordinary achievement, and available for absolutely anyone. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Live from Config 2024! Product-building, leadership & execution lessons behind the launch of Figma’s Dev Mode w/ Marcel Weekes #189 39:57
In our latest episode, we’re coming to you live from Config 2024, Figma’s annual design conference for people who build products! This is our first time ever doing a live interview from another conference, so we are excited to share it with you. We’re joined by Marcel Weekes, VP of Engineering @ Figma. In our conversation, we dive into topics including highlights from Config 2024 & reactions to Figma’s latest feature demos (like Dev Mode), how Figma’s eng teams are involved in product design iterations, why product support teams help preserve Figma’s community, strategies for incorporating feedback into design / product roadmaps, best practices for prioritization conversations, and more. Marcel also shares a preview of what to expect from his session on collaboration @ ELC Annual 2024! ABOUT MARCEL WEEKES Marcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode is brought to you by Revelo! Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide: A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fit A payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and compliance A team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hires With Revelo , you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team. Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. SHOW NOTES: Config 2024 as the “Coachella for designers and creatives” (3:47) Marcel’s favorite conference moments that represent the Config community (5:04) Reactions to the latest Figma feature demos (7:18) Defining Dev Mode & why it’s a highlight for Figma @ Config (13:00) Figma’s approach to building Dev Mode as an eng org (16:05) How eng teams are becoming involved in product design iterations (18:58) What eng leaders can learn from Figma’s “heavy lifting approach” (20:22) Characteristics of product support teams that impact the Figma community (24:20) Processes for closing the loop between product support & engineering (26:02) Figma’s feedback process & how it gets incorporated into releases now (28:23) Prioritization conversations & how teams operate together (31:47) Understanding the timing of feedback on the product roadmap (34:38) Previewing Marcel’s ELC Annual 2024 session on collaboration (37:08) LINKS AND RESOURCES Config 2024 in review - A recap from Dylan Field, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Figma, that highlights all of the major news and releases from Config 2024. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Farhan Thawar, VP & Head of Engineering @ Shopify, was our first-ever ELC pod guest, so it’s fitting that he’s here to join us for this culmination of our series tackling the Top 10 challenges that engineering leaders face in a rapid-fire, high-energy format! Farhan shares insights into individual challenges, including motivating others after a reorg or period of uncertainty, why always being willing to learn & help is key for managing in any direction, strategies for creating buy-in, and best practices for coaching / mentoring. We cover team challenges, such as working cross-functionally to identify a shared truth and vision, using demos to measure dev productivity, and maintaining high velocity without losing quality. Farhan also dives into org-wide challenges, like understanding team topologies & building out your org’s resources. ABOUT FARHAN THAWAR Farhan Thawar ( @fnthawar ) is VP, and Head Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. Farhan is an avid investor and advisor to startups in Toronto and San Francisco, including being a mentor at yCombinator and First Round Capital. Previously, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode is brought to you by Revelo! Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide: A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fit A payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and compliance A team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hires With Revelo , you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team. Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. SHOW NOTES: Strategies for motivating your team after reorgs, rifts, or other uncertain times (2:37) Farhan’s favorite quick wins & ways to re-engage with your team (4:48) Managing up & sideways by being transparent and always looking to help (7:31) Be dedicated to learning / bouncing ideas around with others (9:59) Frameworks for identifying the long-term, winning opportunities to pursue (12:13) How to influence & create buy-in around ideas (15:26) Navigating situations where your idea / perspective is facing resistance (18:18) Best practices for messaging a pitch when working cross-functionally (21:03) Utilizing individual frameworks when mentoring & coaching (23:10) Questions to ask when developing a personal career development framework (27:30) Approaching performance-related conversations (29:11) How to use demos to measure developer productivity (32:09) Methods for maintaining high velocity without losing quality (35:21) Insights on team topologies & identifying / building the needs of your org (37:14) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Strategic Thinking, Org Design & Aligning Engineering & Business Goals - Tackling the Top 10 Eng Leadership Challenges! #187 43:06
In Part 3 of the Top 10 Challenges series, we’re addressing the biggest org-level challenges that eng leaders face. We’ve compiled conversations from past podcasts and conference sessions that cover org-related topics, such as aligning engineering & business goals, team topologies & org resourcing, and thinking strategically. This episode features a slate of top eng leaders with valuable insight to share: Jessica McKellar @ Pilot, Andrew Lau @ Jellyfish, Samir Naik @ Plaid, Former VPE @ Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, Aaron Erickson @ NVIDIA, Mike Tria @ Gusto, Emad Elwany @ Docusign, and Scott Woody @ Metronome. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Aligning Engineering and Business Goals: Invest in tracking metrics to identify / meet long-term business-building goals w/ Jessica McKellar (00:43) How to align metrics with overall, long-term business strategy w/ Andrew Lau (4:56) Planning Team Topologies and Organizational Resources: the transition between PMF & scale-up w/ Samir Naik (12:12) Approaching org design & planning during periods of hypergrowth w/ Surabhi Gupta (18:45) How to do an effective reorg w/ Aaron Erickson and Mike Tria (24:41) Strategic Thinking: Organizing engineering by strategic themes & complete units of value w/ Emad Elwany (30:12) The transition from a large unified eng team to embedding experts and building specialized teams catered to specific customer personas w/ Scott Woody (37:26) LINKS AND RESOURCES Becoming a better strategic contributor & business leader with Jessica McKellar Navigating 2024: Engineering management principles to tackle the unknowns & challenges ahead with Andrew Lau How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth with Samir Naik Hypergrowth, Scaling & Org Design with Surabhi Gupta How to Do an Effective Reorg with Aaron Erickson and Mike Tria Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity with Emad Elwany Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models with Scott Woody This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Speed v. Quality, Measuring Productivity & Cross-Functional Relationships - Tackling the Top 10 Eng Leadership Challenges! #186 42:01
This is Part 2 of our Top 10 Challenges series! In this episode, we’re focusing on three common team challenges that eng leaders face: how to increase velocity without losing quality, measure productivity & create meaningful metrics, and work cross-functionally with other teams. We identified these challenges based on conversations with hundreds of eng leaders from podcast episodes, ELC events, and more. For this ep, we’ve pulled insights from various eng leaders, including Richard Wong @ enrich, Fatemah Alavizadeh @ Notion, Andrew Fong @ Prodvana, Randall Koutnik @ Jellyfish, Abi Noda @ DX, Barbara Nelson @ InfluxDB, Laura Fay @ L Fay Associates, and Jeremy Henrickson @ Rippling. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Increasing Velocity (Without Losing Quality): Understanding the speed vs. quality dilemma w/ Richard Wong (0:58) Defining velocity & its impact on users’ ROI w/ Fatemah Alavizadeh & Andrew Fong (6:17) Measuring Productivity and Creating Meaningful Metrics: What drives productivity & makes for meaningful metrics w/ Randall Koutnik (11:31) The DevEx framework for improving developer productivity w/ Abi Noda (21:02) Working Cross-Functionally with Other Teams: Why it’s important to have cross-functional excellence between eng & product w/ Barbara Nelson & Laura Fay (26:28) Cross-functional communication strategies for addressing misaligned priorities w/ Jeremy Henrickson (37:13) LINKS AND RESOURCES Speed vs. Quality with Richard Wong How to Create Sustainable Velocity in Your Team with Fatemeh Alavizadeh and Andrew Fong Banish Bad Management with Metrics that Don't Suck with Randall Koutnik The next evolution to measure & improve developer productivity & experience with Abi Noda Bridging the Divide: Strategies for Cross-Functional Excellence between Engineering and Product Management with Barbara Nelson and Laura Fay Align & Scale Engineering AND Product with Jeremy Henrickson This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Coaching, Influencing, Motivating & Managing Up - Tackling the Top 10 Engineering Leadership Challenges! #185 42:32
In today’s episode, we’re kicking off a four-part series on the Top 10 challenges eng leaders face based on feedback from hundreds of eng leaders. In Part 1 of this mini-series, we’re tackling the first four issues: developing & coaching team members, strategies for motivating & inspiring others, influencing / creating organizational buy-in, and managing up & sideways. This episode compiles some of the best insight we’ve gained on these issues from a collection of past ELC episodes, ELC Annual sessions, events, and more, with insight from Tara Ellis @ Netflix, Elaine Zhou @ SageCXO, Pete Peterson @ Riviera Partners, Johnny Ray Austin @ Best Egg, Jan Chong @ Tally, Matt Spitz, Laura Tacho @ DX, and Preeti Kota @ Atlassian, and Dan Kador @ Abridge. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Developing and Coaching Team Members: Best practices for building & growing your team’s skills w/ Tara Ellis (0:59) Match your high performers with the right fit for their goals w/ Elaine Zhou (8:04) Influencing and Creating Buy-in: Generating & showcasing quick wins to gain buy-in w/ Pete Peterson (12:03) Communication strategies for eng leaders to create buy-in w/ Johnny Ray Austin (17:59) Managing Up and Sideways: Three key principles for effectively managing up w/ Jan Chong (23:13) Strategies for managing sideways w/ Matt Spitz (26:57) Motivating Others: Inspiring developer productivity as an eng leader w/ Laura Tacho (30:51) How leaders @ Atlassian addressed pain points & inspired developers to address them w/ Preeti Kota & Dan Kador (34:43) LINKS AND RESOURCES A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Career Growth & Internal Mobility with Tara Ellis Building self-sufficient teams and operating in constrained funding environments with Elaine Zhou Navigating complex stakeholders, competing interests & gaining buy-in with Pete Peterson Navigating the Acquisition Journey: Insights on Transparent Communication, Team Integration, and Strategic / Operational Shifts with Johnny Ray Austin Managing Up with Jan Chong Leading beyond domain expertise & laying early-stage security program foundations with Matt Spitz Move beyond measurement & inspire developer productivity with Laura Tacho Developer Joy: Maintaining “Flow” and Sustained Productivity with Preeti Kota and Dan Kador This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
After surveying hundreds of engineering leaders, we’ve pinpointed the top 10 challenges engineering leaders face! Exciting news - next week marks the launch of our 4-part series, sharing some of the best insights from hundreds of ELC events, podcasts & conference sessions. The finale? A dynamic rapid-fire session with Shopify's VP of Engineering, Farhan Thawar, tackling each challenge head-on. Have solutions of your own? Share your strategies and help spread knowledge throughout our community. Reach out at podcast@sfelc.com or tag ELC in a post/comment on LinkedIn. Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building scalable hiring processes & systems promoting operational excellence w/ Stephen Poletto #184 48:52
Today’s conversation focuses on building scalable hiring processes as your org grows and creating systems that promote operational excellence, featuring Stephen Poletto, CTO @ Lattice. He shares examples of how they introduced & scaled their hiring processes to better articulate employee value propositions, implement experience differentiators, and created hiring rubrics & loop documentation. Stephen also reveals strategies for defining what operational excellence looks like within your org, how certain rituals impact company psychology / behavior, and steps for ending & replacing rituals that are no longer working. Additionally, we dissect frameworks for adding incentives within your eng org that improve organizational impact – and how to avoid bad incentives. ABOUT STEPHEN POLETTO Stephen Poletto is the Chief Technology Officer at Lattice, where he leads the company's product development, and where he scaled the engineering team from 20 to 150 team members. Stephen began his career at Apple before spending eight years building and growing technical teams at Dropbox. Stephen has had the opportunity to incubate new products such as Dropbox Carousel and Dropbox Paper, and also work on at-scale products such as the Dropbox mobile app and Dropbox's platform infrastructure. Stephen lives in San Francisco. In the winter, you can find him snowboarding in the mountains. "Even very simple things like a candidate's been in back to back interviews. You hop on. 'Hey, how are you? Do you need a five minute break?' We would train interviewers on some of those tactics, right? At the beginning of the call, set the agenda. ‘We're going to spend this amount of time on these topics. We're going to spend this amount of time to give you space to ask questions of me.’ Now the candidate knows what to expect. They're put at ease. It's simple stuff but it really colors the way that people feel about the interview itself. What kind of feeling do they have about the company coming out of it?” - Stephen Poletto Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Stephen’s primary goal when he first joined Lattice (3:15) Steps for building out a systematic & repeatable hiring process (5:51) Defining & articulating employee value propositions during the hiring process (8:00) Strategies for presenting company culture via hiring / onboarding (10:21) Hiring experience differentiators & how to make them the norm (13:27) Training the engineering team on how to effectively hire (16:53) Stephen’s process for creating a hiring rubric & loop documentation (20:06) How hiring systems can be tweaked / evaluating current hiring needs (22:20) Identifying what operational excellence means for your org (24:22) Rituals / dilemmas to focus on that influence psychology & behavior (26:13) Examples of ending & replacing processes / operations (29:58) Signals that a ritual is no longer serving your needs (32:12) Frameworks for applying incentives / rewards within an eng org (34:57) Navigating the balance between output vs. input (38:57) First steps toward better organizational impact & avoiding bad incentives (41:07) Rapid fire questions (43:37) LINKS AND RESOURCES Product-Led AI - Greylock partner and former product builder Seth Rosenberg talks with founders about their inspiration and process to build, test, and continually reimagine how AI and humans work together. The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation - Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes—a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up, for both employees and managers. Steve Bartel’s blog - Steve Bartel is the co-founder and CEO of Gem. Prior to founding Gem, Steve was an engineering leader at Dropbox where his experience working closely with the recruiting process allowed him to see the lack of technology in the space. This inspired him to co-found Gem, which allows recruiting teams of all sizes to source talent, engage with talent, and use data to improve recruiting processes. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Conscious Career Growth w/ Wade Chambers #183 1:01:25
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1:01:25In today’s episode, we’re highlighting one of our favorite past conversations, featuring Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Included Health. We cover tools for increasing your capacity to win as an eng leader, getting unstuck in your career / moving forward, and applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity principles to the career. Wade shares stories of success – and failure – as an eng manager, best practices to measure success as an eng leader, and how to increase your team’s performance & potential. ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS Wade Chambers ( @wadechambers ) is the CTO and SVP of Engineering at IncludedHealth, a company that provides technology solutions to improve the way patients get healthcare matched to their needs. He has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, Proofpoint, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth. “The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable...’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward.” - Wade Chambers Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Wade’s background in building a habit of conscious growth & digging deeper (4:14) Overcoming early failures as a first-time manager (8:11) Why it’s hard to unhear the truth & how to incorporate feedback as a manager (13:08) How understanding neuroplasticity impacts career development (18:11) Moving along the spectrum of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence (19:30) Align your growth to impact your company AND move your career forward (24:37) Why eng leaders need to truly understand their org’s business needs (29:49) Strategies for both winning & increasing your capacity to win (35:30) How to increase the potential of individuals & your overall team (40:52) Factors that are keeping you stuck in career growth (44:39) Turning to books to maximize learning / growth (52:11) How to identify core principles & why they drive your behavior (55:37) Final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are & where you want to be (58:54) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We revisit an episode from the podcast archives – Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ Fox) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history! We cover Melody’s most important lessons negotiating on behalf of the tech org plus how they leveraged the M&A event to accelerate innovation and productivity. Melody will be joining us as one of our featured speakers @ ELC Annual 2024 (our two-day conference on 8/27-8/28! Check out our incredible line up of speakers, other conference experiences & tickets at sfelc.com/annual2024 Use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount. ABOUT MELODY HILDEBRANDT Melody Hildebrandt ( @mhil ) is Chief Technology Officer for Fox Corporation, where sets set the comprehensive technology strategy for the Company. She previous served as the company’s Chief Information Security Officer and as the President of its research and development subsidiary, Blockchain Creative Labs. In her current role, Hildebrandt leads the development, design and implementation of emerging technologies across the FOX enterprise, spanning FOX Sports, FOX News, FOX Entertainment, FOX Television Stations, and Tubi Media Group. Her current focus is on future planning, including developments in artificial intelligence and authenticating and monetizing premium content via blockchain technology. She also continues to oversee the cyber-security posture of the business and leads technology M&A efforts, identifying areas for investment and growth. Prior to FOX, Hildebrandt held the role of Global Chief Information Security Officer at 21st Century Fox, where she was responsible for the cyber security posture of 21CF businesses, including 20th Century Fox, FOX Networks Group, National Geographic Partners, FOX News, Star India and others. Before 21CF, she was Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies, where she helped start its commercial work and led Palantir’s business in cyber security, anti-money laundering and rogue trading detection. Prior to that, she consulted US and international governments with Booz Allen Hamilton, where she designed military and strategy wargames. Hildebrandt is the Executive Sponsor of Women in Technology at FOX. "One thing that we intervened on very quickly because we were AT the table for (the conversation), "How should we structure the deal?" Was to do something that was quite counter-intuitive I think, and very controversial... Which was to say ‘Let's essentially value all of our current technology assets at near-zero... And make them part of the deal.’" - Melody Hildebrandt Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Background on the Fox Disney “mega-deal” (03:39) How to structure an M&A to accelerate your tech roadmap (06:01) Motivating engineering teams with forcing functions (10:14) What it was like representing a tech org in deal structuring (13:13) How to develop an engineering org’s merger strategy (17:36) M&A negotiation tips for engineering leaders (20:07) A critical skill for eng leaders: converting tech pains into business goals (22:59) How to get executive buy-in on engineering initiatives (27:58) “Crashing” your way to a seat at the table (31:05) Melody’s process for setting the strategic direction of an engineering org (32:19) Managing engineering teams from high and low — the middle is death (34:35) Why this M&A event continues to accelerate innovation (37:37) Rapid-Fire Questions (42:26) LINKS AND RESOURCES (article) A super-powered approach to tech transformation - Melody Hildebrandt & Paul Cheesborough’s article on the untold story of the 21st Century Fox & Disney transaction (podcast) Conversations with Tyler esteemed economist Tyler Cowen engages with today’s most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (reference) The Masked Singer NFT project - www.maskverse.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss how to navigate the delicate balance between meeting current customer needs while also preparing for future tech trends & opportunities with Evan Welbourne, Head of AI and Data @ Samsara. Evan dissects the rapidly transforming pace of developing AI/ML products, sharing strategies for merging conversations around differing product-building processes, tips for moving seamlessly / gaining approval between product development stages, defining what customer success looks like, methods for working backward from problems, and best practices for avoiding friction throughout the product development process. He also shares frameworks for envisioning & working toward future tech possibilities while simultaneously developing hypotheses that inform future direction, creating diverse AI/ML team composition, and effectively communicating with stakeholders. ABOUT EVAN WELBOURNE Evan Welbourne is the Head of AI and Data and Samsara, leading the organization’s machine learning, computer vision, data science, and data analytics teams – as well as data engineering and data platform for the company. He has a long-standing career in both machine learning and IoT. Before Samsara, Evan held various roles at Amazon, including the Head of Machine Learning for Alexa Smart Home and Manager of the Computer Vision Research Group. He also led research teams at Samsung and Nokia. Evan earned his Ph.D and M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Toronto. "With AI, there's something new every week. You could stay in those stages forever. You can just keep iterating and trying new things, but at some point you have to kind of cut it off. You've got to time box it and just go with something that you know will work. You're constantly also calibrating between the quality of what you're delivering and the time it takes you to deliver it. A lot of that problem backs into this early stage of the process. We do want to do a good job of understanding opportunity but there's analysis paralysis. We don't want to just get stuck there.” - Evan Welbourne Join us at ELC Annual 2024! ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code " podcast10 " (all lowercase) for a 10% discount SHOW NOTES: Staying customer-focused while working toward the future @ Samsara (3:22) Merging forward-looking technology & customer-problem-focused product-building conversations (5:54) Defining customer success & working backwards from winning (8:38) How stage gates can confirm / assess feature accuracy & maturity (10:58) What the approval moment looks like while moving from stage to stage (15:29) Understanding what stages offer the greatest opportunity for risk / friction (17:11) Signals to watch for that allow you to move forward with confidence (19:30) Best practices for anticipating & preparing for future possibilities (21:13) Using smaller-scale projects to inform future direction of larger-scale products (23:12) Communication strategies for working with less technical stakeholders (25:22) Methods for effectively communicating complex, technical information (27:59) AI / ML team composition at Samsara (30:04) Frameworks for aligning & motivating folks to focus on customer needs (32:59) Strategies for introducing new technologies & scientific research into your teams (35:06) Introducing AI into mission-critical internal tools (36:34) Rapid fire questions (39:17) LINKS AND RESOURCES Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control - Stuart Russell lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Welcome to a special episode highlighting ELC Annual 2024, our annual conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world! Tune in to hear how we built this 2-day experience to be the ultimate accelerator of leadership and professional growth. We cover how the conference will expand your perspectives with curated peer-led roundtables and expert-led sessions with people like Thuan Pham (former CTO @ Uber & Coupang), Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ FOX), James Everingham (VPE @ Meta) Marcel Weekes (VPE @ Figma), Rajashree Pimpalkhare (VPE @ Twilio) and 40+ more speakers! We promise that you will walk away from the event with meaningful connections and actionable strategies that will empower your career and leadership growth. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey! Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024 And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Lakshmi Baskaran shares insights on impromptu communication, why it’s important, and a framework for successfully navigating these tricky situations! We also cover team topology and why it’s so important to have the right composition of product-minded vs. technical-minded engineers within any eng team. Lakshmi shares how prioritizing team topology will impact hiring, influence engineering culture, and aid in eng team reorgs / restructures. She also discusses what the future of AI looks like for executive eng leaders & what to consider when adopting AI practices / technologies. And to bring it all together, we dissect how Lakshmi’s Triple-A impromptu communication framework operates in the context of both team topology & AI adoption. ABOUT LAKSHMI BASKARAN Lakshmi Baskaran is an accomplished business leader, entrepreneur, and an angel investor with over two decades of experience in the tech industry. She has built and managed high-performing engineering teams for startups, scale-ups, and publicly listed companies across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. She is currently serving as the VP of Engineering at Metadata, a SaaS company that offers a Marketing Operating System to prominent brands and businesses worldwide. Lakshmi is passionate about coaching and mentoring business leaders and empowering women to pursue careers in technology. With the right support, she firmly believes that any woman can unleash her potential and make a significant impact on the world, rising to the heights of a great leader, entrepreneur, and a board member. Lakshmi shares her insights on leadership and technology through her writing on Medium and Thrive. “Imagine you're presenting it to your executive leadership team or to your board. As an engineering leader, you want to spice up that message with how it is interesting to your customers. The framework that I use in scenarios like this is called 'What If And So That' framework. If you're running an email platform, what if you're able to search through millions of emails in a sub millisecond so that your users can have faster search abilities compared to our competitors? Build a dream scenario and tell them how the technology can help them meet their dream scenario.” - Lakshmi Baskaran We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 – Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: Why the topic of effective impromptu communication is important (2:46) Dissecting frameworks & tools for impromptu conversations (7:16) An example of high-quality impromptu communication with a CEO (11:52) Implement the Triple-A framework (14:03) The impact of this communication method on peers (16:37) Lakshmi’s insights on team topologies & essential aspects of different eng teams (18:26) Considerations for eng team composition (20:56) How new hires play into assembling and/or reforming early-stage eng teams (23:44) Aligning with teams about what they’re looking for in terms of hiring / composition (26:12) The impact of product & tech-minded eng leaders on engineering culture (29:19) Opportunities to employ impromptu comm skills in the context of team topology (31:42) Lakshmi’s observations on AI adoption (33:47) Frameworks for effectively communicating about AI considerations (37:11) How eng leaders should apply these AI areas into their decision-making (40:40) The role of impromptu communication in AI conversations (42:33) Rapid fire questions (45:00) LINKS AND RESOURCES Lakshmi’s blog post on identifying product-minded and tech-minded engineers The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership - Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy.” This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We dissect one of the biggest challenges that eng leaders face in their day-to-day – navigating the balance between going deep in technical work & maintaining a high-level view of business strategy. Oded Kedem, Chief Technology Officer @ BigPanda, shares examples from his experience, covering strategies for prioritizing where to go deep into the technology, bringing technical expertise to the executive team, bridging the gap between marketing & technology, and aligning customer expectations with a product’s actual capabilities. Oded also shares frameworks for prioritization conversations, valuable questions to pose during executive decision-making conversations, and approaches to changing past technical decisions. ABOUT ODED KEDEM Oded Kedem, Chief Technology Officer at BigPanda, brings a wealth of experience in software from ground-up development to managing engineering teams and was also the founder of Zerto, a Cloud BC/DR company. Throughout his many years in the industry, Oded has developed a deep understanding of AIOps and the needs of customers. He recognizes that we are just scratching the surface with AI and automation. “As companies evolve, people change roles and the technology changes, the requirements change. We chose in the past, the product does it in method A. Let's ask, 'Okay, why did we choose A in the first place?' And once in a while, someone from engineering came up and said, 'Yeah, I have a great idea. Let's do B.' And I would always send them, 'Okay, go back to the documentation, because if you thought this through and you think that making these changes is worth our while and the risk and the instability it may bring, let's go, let's do it.'” - Oded Kedem We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 Attend GLOW 2024 - Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: Keeping a high-level view while diving deep into the technology (2:48) The story of how Oded first connected to this particular problem (5:03) Oded’s process for prioritizing where to go deep into the technology (7:20) Prioritization strategies & why it’s sometimes hard to say no to jumping in (9:40) How to bring technical expertise / value to the exec team (13:57) Best practices for tough conversations regarding org direction & capabilities (17:40) Types of questions to ask in executive conversations (19:58) Oded’s favorite question to pose (23:33) Bridging the gap between marketing & technology (24:26) How an eng perspective helps shape a product’s marketing outcome (27:12) Frameworks for aligning customer expectations with a product’s capabilities (29:33) Approaches to changing past technical decisions as an eng leader (31:21) Rapid fire questions (35:25) LINKS AND RESOURCES Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know - Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers -- and why they often go wrong. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Harnessing Professional Strategies & Tech Performance Tools for Personal Growth w/ Chris Cravens #177 53:49
Chris Cravens (Former VPE @ Splunk and CIO @ Uber) shares practical tips for applying professional strategies / tech performance tools into our personal lives - to increase intentionality, goal setting, and habit formation in all aspects of our lives. He shares why it’s so easy to dedicate 90% of your time & attention to work while only dedicating 10% to your personal life and reveals from his own experience how he discovered a better work-life balance by applying OKRs, goal setting, postmortems, and deep reflection. We also cover frameworks for identifying feeling-based goals, building habits & accountability within your personal life, combating negative self-talk, and rewiring your brain to focus on the present & not dwell on past failures. ABOUT CHRIS CRAVENS Chris Cravens is an industry veteran with a quarter century of successes delivering measurable value for high-growth enterprises in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. An avid change agent and catalyst for transformation, Mr. Cravens has led major global scale-up and transformation efforts for Software Engineering, Information Technology, Security, Facilities teams. As the first CIO at Zynga and Uber, he led critical functions that enabled scale from small startups to major global enterprises in record time. Mr. Cravens led digital transformation at Splunk, scaling revenue from $800M to $2.2BN in three years by reimagining and supercharging Go to Market capabilities with automation and high value software capabilities that drove greater deal size and velocity. Currently, Mr. Cravens provides expert consulting supporting Private Equity and Venture transactions and transformations and is an active Strategic Advisor, Coach, and Investor to startups delivering innovative, disruptive technologies to accelerate digital transformation. “I would just keep doing things like that because of that philosophy of in the absence of clear leadership, step in, be the one who is responsible and it goes back to that anxiety from childhood. There are people who have much healthier outlooks, and I've just never been wired that way. So I have to kind of question each decision I make as I go to do a new thing or take on more stuff. 'Is this the right thing for me to do right now, or am I making my life harder?'” - Chris Cravens We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 Attend GLOW 2024 - Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: Chris’s experience of his first week @ Uber (2:02) Borrowing professional life tools & using them in your personal life (4:53) Why it’s easy to give 90% of time to work & only 10% to your personal life (8:26) How Chris navigated his own transition (14:34) Treat a sabbatical like a job (16:15) Adding OKRs to your personal life (19:36) Strategies for assessing feeling-oriented goals (22:05) Combating negative self-talk & treating yourself like you would a good friend (24:58) How Chris’s frameworks have shifted over time when setting personal life goals (27:11) Reflection questions to help illuminate where to center your focus (29:35) Applying positive self-talk within a work context to your personal life (32:39) Incorporate blameless postmortems into a personal context (35:38) Strategies for better habit formation (37:00) How to overcome feeling a lack of motivation to start a new habit (38:08) The significance of having both clarity & accountability (40:56) Tips for rewiring the belief that you can accomplish a goal (45:27) Rapid fire questions (48:21) LINKS AND RESOURCES Chris’s Guide to Thinking Errors The Satanic Verses - novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Cold outreach & strategically expanding your business model into services w/ Jon Perl & Scott Wilson @ QA Wolf #176 53:38
This is a special episode from our show “Engineering Founders” - Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive in to the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company. Check out Engineering Founders - https://hubs.la/Q02tq5ym0 ABOUT JON PERL Jon Perl is the co-founder and CEO of QA Wolf, a startup building the QA solution every engineering leader wishes for. Prior to QA Wolf, Perl led engineering teams in the healthcare and home services space, where he learned firsthand how difficult automated regression testing can be — and how critical it is for teams to have. His interest in software engineering comes from an overarching desire to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks and give people their time back. He has a dog named Finn and enjoys hiking. "Your goal is simply to book a meeting. You're not trying to close a deal through one email. It's like, 'How can I just get on the phone with somebody?' That's the goal.” - Jon Perl ABOUT SCOTT WILSON As co-founder and head of growth at QA Wolf, Scott Wilson is trying to upend 20+ years of stagnation in the QA industry. Before this he launched the marketing efforts at Wyze and helped acquire 6 million paying customers. If he’s not working, you might find him backpacking with Frank the dog, or learning a new illusion. "It's not referencing the weather in Seattle or that you got promoted. Personalization is being contextually relevant to the person. This is how your mind should be thinking. It's like, 'I saw you're a hundred person company with nine engineers on your team and no QA engineers. You're probably going through this and here's a solution for it.'” - Scott Wilson We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 Attend GLOW 2024 - Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: The origin story of QA Wolf & the desire to build an automated QA system (2:08) What got Scott excited about joining the QA Wolf founding team (7:14) Scott’s experience as the non-technical cofounder on the team (9:13) Learn enough to be dangerous & be willing to persist as a founder (10:38) The approach of paying people you can learn from & its impact on QA Wolf (14:11) Lessons learned about cold emailing & effective strategies to implement (17:12) Cold emailing strategies that don’t work (21:00) How to add value to email communication & incorporate experimentation (22:24) Why they shifted the focus from coding to sales / outreach / identifying solutions (26:23) Make accountability mechanisms a key component of early-stage teams (29:09) The false signal of free users & expanding product into services (30:45) Identifying a gap in the business & being open-minded to new ideas (33:20) What the initial testing for QA Wolf’s services approach looked like (35:22) Jon & Scott’s perspective on dealing w/ investors in the automated services space (38:31) Rapid fire questions (44:01) LINKS AND RESOURCES $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No How to Hire a Product-Led Sales Leader – at Every Stage This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Mike Hanley, Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering @ GitHub, joins us to discuss how GitHub has successfully combined its engineering & security orgs and shares recommendations for how other orgs can pivot to this model. We cover why it’s so important for eng orgs to collaborate with security early on in the product development cycle and tips for educating your engineers on security best practices. We also discuss how the rise of AI tools / usage is changing how companies need to think about & practice security, why AI is providing opportunities for increased safety & security within product development, and strategies for encouraging your org to adopt AI tooling within engineering, security, and beyond. ABOUT MIKE HANLEY Mike Hanley is the Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, Mike was the Vice President of Security at Duo Security, where he built and led the security research, development, and operations functions. After Duo’s acquisition by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018, Mike led the transformation of Cisco’s cloud security framework and later served as CISO for the company. Mike also spent several years at CERT/CC as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff and security researcher focused on applied R&D programs for the US Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. When he’s not talking about security at GitHub, Mike can be found enjoying Ann Arbor, MI with his wife and eight kids. "The idea that the security team is walled off or separate or not really connected, not just to engineering but the entirety of the business, you really can't have that. If you think about the pace of modern development, things are moving so quickly. It's so driven by software. The idea that you're like, ‘Hey, I got to walk down the hall and check in with somebody from security who has no idea what's going on in my roadmap, who has no idea what my day to day experience is living in engineering...’ That just doesn't work!” - Mike Hanley We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 Attend GLOW 2024 - Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: GitHub’s convergence of the eng & security orgs (2:33) Benefits of combining engineering & security org mandates (4:46) How the security team is involved with the internal product dev lifecycle (8:05) The downsides of engaging your security team as an afterthought (10:46) What an early-stage yes/and product conversation looks like (12:48) Examples of educating your eng team on security best practices (17:17) Expanding two-factor authentication externally (19:29) Stewarding security as a responsibility & value (21:59) Security & safety implications for orgs using / building AI tools (23:44) Why the rise of AI is a great time for eng / security collaboration (27:09) How to leverage security best practices using AI tools (29:53) Mike’s view that AI will create more opportunities & improve structural tech (32:14) Frameworks for getting to “yes” when it comes to adopting AI tooling (35:15) AI-powered tools GitHub is using to change workflows outside of eng & security (39:06) Considerations pivoting toward combining eng & security functions (40:35) Rapid fire questions (42:25) LINKS AND RESOURCES Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt - Alma Whitten And J. D. Tygar’s argument that effective security requires a different usability standard that is not achievable through the user interface techniques commonly found in consumer software. The Space Trilogy - C.S. Lewis believed that popular science was the new mythology of his age, and in The Space Trilogy he ransacks the uncharted territory of space and makes that mythology the medium of his spiritual imagination. The Works of Peter Drucker This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Adaptability in engineering orgs: how management systems, executive priorities & career transitions evolve w/ Cosmin Nicolaescu #174 41:30
In this episode, we are talking about adaptability in engineering orgs, building out impactful management systems, and navigating complex transitions as eng leaders with Cosmin Nicolaescu, CTO @ Brex. He shares how his experience moving from Romania to the United States taught him vital lessons in adaptability that he has applied throughout his eng leadership career. We also discuss how to define what success as a manager looks like, Cosmin’s approach to putting out fires (and deciding which ones to prioritize), why you should restructure your meetings to focus on output vs. review, and how to implement a succession plan. ABOUT COSMIN NICOLAESCU Cosmin ( @getCos ) leads engineering at Brex, building financial technology to accelerate entrepreneurs. Prior to Brex, he was at Stripe, leading financial infrastructure teams, building Stripe Terminal, and establishing engineering teams globally. His career started at Microsoft, launching Azure and Office365. "How are you actually changing the trajectory of something. If the person wasn't there, would things have come out differently? If the person jumped in on something, did that meaningfully change the trajectory of that particular project? The answer should be yes and I think that is a good proxy for, as a manager, are you actually leading teams, people, projects, initiatives, and moving the company forward or are you just operating the machinery?” - Cosmin Nicolaescu We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 Attend GLOW 2024 - Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store: An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow ! SHOW NOTES: How Cosmin's transition to the U.S. set the foundation for his approach to adaptability (2:40) Learn to accept what you can & cannot control as an eng leader (5:00) Frameworks for identifying / understanding what execs spend their time on (7:13) Navigating the transition from Microsoft to Stripe (9:12) Building out a successful & impactful management organization (12:08) In-demand qualities of managers during the shift to flatters orgs (15:00) Prioritizing which fires to focus on & willingness to delegate (16:39) Cosmin’s approach to triaging fires @ Brex (18:31) Restructure meetings for output rather than review (21:52) Approaches for adapting to the current macroeconomic environment (25:36) Roles that contributed to successful distributed hiring (29:09) Necessary elements that need to exist for an unconventional transition (31:28) Recommendations for developing & executing a succession plan (34:44) Rapid fire questions (37:30) LINKS AND RESOURCES Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity - Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets. The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone - As told by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh is the story of corporate change and reinvention as well as the story of Nadella’s personal journey, one that is taking place today inside a storied technology company, and one that is coming in all of our lives as intelligent machines become more ambient and more ubiquitous. Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future - Professor of psychology Jean Twenge does a deep dive into a treasure trove of long-running, government-funded surveys and databases to answer these questions. Are we truly defined by major historical events, such as the Great Depression for the Silents and September 11 for Millennials? Or, as Twenge argues, is it the rapid evolution of technology that differentiates the generations? This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Have you ever wondered what to do in the “third act” of your career & beyond when it comes to opportunities outside traditional eng leadership / operational roles? In this episode, Nidhi Gupta, CEO & Co-Founder @ SheTO, joins us to share her perspectives on identifying new pathways, taking time for self-discovery, and deciding which career opportunity you’re most passionate about. She defines what the “third act” of your career is & explains roles, such as fractional roles, coaching, serving on boards, advising, etc. Plus Nidhi explains how her passion for supporting women in CTO roles led her to found SheTO, how to give yourself permission to explore new paths, and validate your next steps. ABOUT NIDHI GUPTA Nidhi ( @NidhiGuptaSF ) is the CEO and Co-Founder of SheTO, a private community for women and non-binary engineers and engineering leaders. Less than 9% of engineering executive roles are held by women. SheTO is working on changing that. Prior to founding SheTO, Nidhi was an accomplished engineering and product executive who has built, scaled, and transformed companies. She has extensive expertise in strategy, R&D, business development, and operations. She has led various Marketplaces and SaaS businesses. As an Engineering and Product leader, she is passionate about building and growing thriving operational organizations that deliver world-class products at scale. Prior to founding SheTO, Nidhi was the Chief Technology & Product Officer at Hired, Upwork and Ning. "If you had all the free time on the planet and didn't have to worry about anything, what do you think you would do? Every single night I would go to bed and the next morning I woke up more excited solving for this 9% number than I was about my job and that told me that that's really something that I'm more passionate about so literally after I came back from vacation, I went and talked to my CEO and I quit my job.” - Nidhi Gupta We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world! Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job. New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now! We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community! SHOW NOTES: Defining “the third act” & exploring career paths beyond operational roles (3:24) What it was like for Nidhi to open herself up to new opportunities (6:09) How Nidhi’s passions influenced her to start SheTO (8:01) Additional consideration for & recommendations to inspire self-discovery (11:21) Why it’s important to take a break & pursue additional interests (13:06) Things that kept Nidhi honest with herself through the discovery process (14:51) Potential pathways to nontraditional eng leader roles (19:04) Ruling out particular pathways after the discovery phase (20:47) How Nidhi identified her happiness & transitioned into her role with SheTO (23:10) Strategies validating your assumptions & the journey of SheTO (25:43) SheTO’s pivot during COVID (28:39) What it looks like to give yourself permission to explore (31:05) Set goalposts & measurements for yourself (34:43) Rapid fire questions (35:16) LINKS AND RESOURCES Third Act with Liz Tinkham - Your first act is school, your second act is work, but have you thought about what you’re going to do in your third act? Join host Liz Tinkham, a former Accenture Senior Managing Director, as she talks to guests who are happily “pretired” – using their time, treasure, and talent to pursue their purpose and passion in the third act of their life. The Alex Cross series - A crime, mystery, and thriller novel series written by James Patterson. The protagonist of the series is Alex Cross, an African-American Metropolitan Police Department detective and father who counters threats to his family and the city of Washington, D.C. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Healthy Tension: GTM & Product/Eng Collaboration at Hundreds of Millions ARR Scale w/ Tido Carriero & Joe Morrissey #172 42:45
We’re featuring another popular session from ELC Annual 2023 – welcome to “Healthy Tension: GTM & Product/Eng Collaboration at Hundreds of Millions ARR Scale” with Tido Carriero, (Co-Founder @ Koala and Former VPE @ Segment) and Joe Morrissey (General Partner @ a16z & Former CRO @ Segment)! Tido & Joe share stories from the beginning of their partnership at Segment, including their first cross-functional annual planning meeting. They highlight lessons learned from those early days and how others can implement annual planning session frameworks to develop value drivers for their org in order to better serve customers & create products with value. Joe & Tido also cover how to build a healthy, trusting relationship between product & eng when it comes to building / executing a successful GTM strategy. ABOUT TIDO CARREIRO Tido is the Co-Founder & CEO of Koala. Prior to Koala, he led the Product & Engineering team at Segment from less than $5M in ARR to their $3.2B acquisition by Twilio. “I had been at Segment for four years. The big unlock for me and I think what I needed to lean into more in retrospect from a trust perspective was that Joe was really going to be a different kind of go to market partner. We had zoomed way out. We had looked at a multi-year strategy, not just a list of 25 features and ordering them quarter by quarter by quarter.” - Tido Carriero ABOUT JOE MORRISSEY Joe Morrissey is a general partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on enterprise technology companies. Prior to joining a16z, Joe was chief revenue officer at Segment, where he scaled revenues to upwards of $200M ARR in advance of the company’s $3.2B acquisition by Twilio. Before Segment, he was was the EMEA vice president and general manager for three open source software companies: Hortonworks, which combined with Cloudera in a $5.2B merger in 2019; MongoDB, which went public in 2017; and MySQL, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1B in 2008. Joe holds a bachelor’s degree in business studies from the University of Limerick, Ireland. He currently serves on the boards of Neon Inc., and Hopsworks AB and lives in Menlo Park with his wife and two kids. "You've got to go through this tension and I think one of the things that can happen is you avoid the tension, you avoid the conflict, you say yes to things that maybe you're not comfortable with both on the product and on the go to market side then the plan goes wrong, right? So I really think like the tension is the critical thing and that the struggle is the critical thing and that's where the learning is.” - Joe Morrissey We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world! Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job. New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now! We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community! SHOW NOTES: Joe’s first impressions of Tido & the beginning of their relationship (2:28) The story of their low point & working together on annual planning (5:32) What was agreed on in the annual planning session (7:44) Focusing on value drivers & building a trusting GTM partnership (10:55) Why it’s necessary to embrace tension in order to drive growth (15:01) Tido’s lessons learned leading eng product & sales @ Koala (16:05) Audience Q&A: Frameworks for narrowing down value drivers (19:00) The importance of cross-functional participation in planning sessions (22:21) An inside look at the exercise of identifying value drivers (24:02) How deep should salespeople go on the product? (26:27) How does annual planning change day-to-day operations for the year? (27:56) Describing the Lighthouse program (30:10) Reorganizing the org to meet the three identified value drivers (32:32) Engineering leadership’s involvement during the annual plan (35:24) Strategy behind building a platform (38:38) LINKS AND RESOURCES Video version of this episode More sessions from ELC Annual This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Driving innovation at large-scale orgs, translating leadership skills to successfully scale early-stage startups w/ Jeremy Burton #171 48:47
We dissect leadership lessons from across vastly different scales of eng orgs – ranging from 13,000-people companies to 10-person start-ups – with Jeremy Burton, CEO @ Observe. He shares how he effectively translated leadership skills from working at large-scale orgs to small, early-stage start-ups & addresses challenges faced when scaling at any point. Jeremy covers start-up strategies for bringing your eng teams closer to your customers & driving innovation at large-scale orgs; characteristics of eng leaders that promote successful scaling; gaining & communicating conviction; driving community engagement & building trust within developer communities; and more. ABOUT JEREMY BURTON Jeremy Burton is the chief executive officer of Observe, Inc. Prior to Observe, Jeremy was Executive Vice President, Marketing & Corporate Development of Dell Technologies, and served in various leadership roles at EMC prior to Dell. A 20-year veteran of the IT industry, Jeremy joined EMC from Serena Software, where he was President and CEO. Previous to Serena, he led Symantec’s $2 billion Enterprise Security product line as Group President of Security and Data Management. Jeremy also served as Veritas’ Executive Vice President of Data Management Group and Chief Marketing Officer. Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade at Oracle as Senior Vice President of Product and Services Marketing. Jeremy is currently a member of the board of directors at Snowflake, a seat he's held since 2015, and maintains a part-time role on the advisory board at McLaren Group. "I hear so many times both in startups and bigger companies, 'Oh, we have a sales execution issue.' If your early sales team is not successful, it's never the sales team. It's always the product. Where bigger companies have built new products, they've probably taken it to market too soon and the salespeople will take it to a mature account. It won't be as mature as the other products. The customer will complain and the salespeople will hate it. It'll get a bad name and then it'll get killed. That's the typical mode of operation that I've seen in a large company, which is why you got to keep it a secret until you've got the MVP, then work with a small set of customers and set the right expectation. When you get it right, you've immediately got a distribution channel that you can scale. If you get it wrong, you'll never scale it and you'll just create a whole bunch of problems in your customer base.” - Jeremy Burton We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world! Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job. New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now! We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community! SHOW NOTES: Operating at a scale of 13,000 people vs. early stage with 10 (3:13) How Jeremy adapted to operating at vastly different scales (6:30) Transitioning from a back seat role to the front seat (8:32) Approaches to helping folks better operate in ambiguity & face the unknown (11:20) Cycles that gave Jeremy more confidence to operate in instability (14:26) The romanticization of start-ups & challenges with scaling (18:22) Why eng teams should work directly with customers at start-ups (21:14) Leveraging leadership at large orgs to bring eng teams closer to customers (24:36) Strategies for innovation at large-scale orgs (27:38) Dynamics at big companies that incentivize killing new projects (30:38) Characters of eng leaders that lead to successful scaling / innovation (32:56) Recommendations for gaining conviction & communicating that effectively (34:33) Conversation frameworks for creating alignment (37:43) How to create influence & community engagement for developers (38:55) Gaining trust within your community & exuding authenticity (42:10) Rapid fire questions (44:42) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We’re sharing a session from ELC Annual 2023 – Thuan Pham (Board Director, Advisor, former CTO of Uber & Coupang) shares pivotal moments from his life, leadership journey & career with Li Fan (CTO @ Circle). Thuan shares his best leadership lessons & strategies for scaling during hypergrowth from his time at Uber and how those skills impacted him in roles since then. He shares stories about working at Uber – including both the highs & lows – and reflects on what could have been done differently or better. Thuan also shares advice on how to keep your eng org motivated during crisis; advice he would give his younger self; and skills that make a great eng leader today vs. 20 years ago. Thuan also shares stories from his upbringing and how his experience as a refugee & immigrant impacted him as an eng leader today. ABOUT THUAN PHAM Thuan Pham served as Chief Technology Officer of Coupang from September 2020 until September 2022, and of Uber Technologies, Inc. from April 2013 to May 2020. From December 2004 to January 2013, Mr. Pham served in various Vice President roles at VMWare, Inc., a software and technology company, including as Vice President of R&D – Cloud Management Platform from June 2012 to January 2013. As an engineering leader, he is passionate about building talented, healthy, and motivated engineering organization and leading it to accomplish extraordinary things. He cares deeply about organizational health and principled leadership and believes these are the greatest drivers for any team to harness its maximum potential. Mr. Pham holds both B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thuan's work and career contributions as an American immigrant were recognized by the Carnegie Foundation among its list of "2016 Great Immigrants: The Pride of America" honorees. ABOUT LI FAN Li Fan is CTO at Circle, a global fin-tech firm enabling business to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains (Circle is the principle operator of USD Coin). Prior to Circle, Li was CTO at Lime, an innovative technology company that connects and empowers urban living through mobility. Before Lime, Li was SVP of engineering at Pinterest leading all 600+ engineers to execute technology strategy and deliver company priorities. Li was a Senior Director of Engineering in Google, accountable for Google’s popular image search and was Vice President of Engineering at Baidu. We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world! Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job. New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now! We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community! SHOW NOTES: Thuan’s immigrant / refugee background & its impact on him (2:19) The experience of resetting & starting from nothing as an eng leader (4:23) Pivotal moments during Thuan’s seven years @ Uber (6:59) How Thuan provided hands-on mentorship & teaching leading the eng org (8:21) Challenges faced & lessons learned through hypergrowth at scale (11:29) Scaling infrastructure / processes while scaling talent (13:44) What caused Thuan to stay with Uber & eventually lead him to leave (17:14) Ways in which Uber could have done better (19:48) Thuan’s reflections on what he could have done to change the situation (23:14) How & why Thuan transitioned from Uber to Coupang (26:01) Reflections on what makes a great eng leader 20 years ago & today (29:49) Audience Q&A: What are Thuan’s current motivations & goals? (34:56) Keeping your engineers motivated during times of crisis (36:53) Advice Thuan would give his younger self (38:42) Qualities of a great VP of Engineering & exec team (41:30) LINKS AND RESOURCES All of the Sessions from ELC Annual This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: Using AI and Design to Maximize Customer Impact w/ Dheeraj Pandey #169 37:37
In today’s episode, we’re resharing Dheeraj Pandey’s popular session from ELC Annual 2023 on the disciplined pursuit of less! As the Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of DevRev.ai , he shares how AI tools can maximize customer impact & reduce information asymmetry between various teams, including eng, customer support, product, sales, etc., ultimately creating a more customer-centric mindset. He reveals how to leverage AI to tackle “verbs,” such as classifying, routing, attributing, summarizing and more, further streamlining productivity and empowering your org to focus on customer needs. ABOUT DHEERAJ PANDEY Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder & CEO of DevRev.ai , one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, with over 70 million dollars in seed funding. He previously founded Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), a global leader in enterprise cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, and currently sits on the board of Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) and is a member of their Audit Committee. Dheeraj co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led as its CEO and Chairman for 11+ years. Boasting the largest software IPO in 2016, Nutanix is now a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in over 60 countries. Pandey has been recognized with prestigious industry awards, including Dell's Founders 50 and the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley. Before founding Nutanix, Pandey was the VP of engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata). His technology and enterprise software experience include engineering and leadership roles at Oracle, Zambeel and Trilogy Software. Pandey has been recognized with several prestigious industry awards, including Dell's Founders 50 and the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley. Pandey holds a degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, he was a Graduate Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. program. "In my last company, we had brought almost 7,000 employees together. My biggest job was to really bring all the VPs together. What does it mean for them to work together, behave well together, and respect each other? And it's all because there were all these silos of departments. If you look at the power of AI, AI knows no boundaries. If anything, it needs the entire knowledge graph and the knowledge graph of customers and product and people and their work, not just people on the inside, but also users and their activities on the outside. That's a big problem that we all have to go and solve for.” - Dheeraj Pandey This episode is brought to you by testRigor ! testRigor is trusted by tens of thousands of companies across the globe, including Netflix, Splunk, BusinessWire, and more to solve three main problems with end-to-end test automation: It’s challenging, expensive, and slow to hire QA Automation Engineers Low productivity building your own QA Automation Fragile tests, that cause maintenance to consume enormous amounts of time testRigor solves all of the above by allowing our users to express test cases in plain English To learn more, check out a case study on testRigor here Sign up for a free trial today at testrigor.com SHOW NOTES: The role of essentialism in software dev & company building (1:52) Dheeraj’s experience fostering a customer-centric approach in all teams (4:22) Commonly used tools & why they fall short for full eng functions (7:20) Why it’s important to connect AI, analytics & collaboration features (10:15) How AI can help solve information asymmetry (13:12) Using AI for analytics to help make teams more customer-centric (15:14) Audience Q&As: A day in the life of a PM using LLMs in an interactive discussion (18:03) Tips for educating users to provide better prompts when using GenAI (22:50) How would a company typically use the DevRev product? (24:38) DevRev’s object model of support (27:21) Is DevRev capable of answering arbitrary questions once data is uploaded? (28:36) Methods used to measure performance w/ DevRev (30:02) Creating multiple namespaces w/in the same index to host multi-tenant data (31:10) Qualitative & quantitative benefits DevRev offers to its customer base (33:39) LINKS AND RESOURCES Video Version of Episode All of the Sessions from ELC Annual This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 AI ethics/safety, applying AI to address societal challenges & becoming a board member w/ Lake Dai #168 51:30
In this episode, we chat with Lake Dai (Founder & Managing Partner @ Sancus Ventures), who shares her career story & how to harness AI technology in a way that is both effective & compassionate. We cover the concept of “co-parenting AI”; why ethics in AI is non-negotiable; and how to create compassionate AI. Lake also reveals how she became a veteran at serving on boards & why it is something she is passionate about. We dissect ways current eng leaders who are interested in board service can gain the right experiences & demonstrate their value as a potential board member. ABOUT LAKE DAI Lake Dai is Founder and Managing Partner of Sancus Ventures, a VC firm focused on pre-seed to seed stage companies, investing in the next generation of software infrastructure for applications, such as distributed computing, AI model management, platform scalability, data privacy & safety, cybersecurity and more. Lake has been an Adjunct Professor of Applied AI at Carnegie Mellon University since 2016. She was a keynote speaker on AI ethics, data privacy, real-world applications, and AI education topics at the UN, UK Parliament, California State, and leading tech conferences such as the MIT conference and VentureBeat. "Students ask, 'Why do I have to study AI ethics? Why can't I just jump into how do I build this model?' If you imagine AI as a very powerful tool, there is no difference between teaching building AI tools from teaching people how to use a weapon. If you ever take any weapon training classes, the first thing people teach you is safety, which is really understanding how the weapon works and how much impact both on the positive and negative side to people surround you. That part is missing for a lot of AI technical training these days.” - Lake Dai This episode is brought to you by testRigor ! testRigor is trusted by tens of thousands of companies across the globe, including Netflix, Splunk, BusinessWire, and more to solve three main problems with end-to-end test automation: It’s challenging, expensive, and slow to hire QA Automation Engineers Low productivity building your own QA Automation Fragile tests, that cause maintenance to consume enormous amounts of time testRigor solves all of the above by allowing our users to express test cases in plain English To learn more, check out a case study on testRigor here Sign up for a free trial today at testrigor.com SHOW NOTES: Why VC fundraising is set to thrive in 2024 & beyond (2:14) Eng leaders should focus on AI ethics (6:09) The importance of starting with a safety check before implementing technology (8:14) Lake’s recommendations for eng leaders to guide current & future AI dev (9:46) Third-party involvement with internal building processes (12:22) Strategies for helping engineers address AI dev in a mid or late-stage roadmap (14:06) The concept of co-parenting AI & its implication for eng leaders (15:40) Benevolent AI & feeding AI compassion information / data (18:50) How to harness AI to address societal challenges & create positive outcomes (22:42) Examples of AI addressing climate change & education-related issues (24:44) Three reasons why Lake is passionate about serving on boards (28:33) The positive impact of serving as a board member (31:40) How to gain the right experience & demonstrate value to get on a board (33:21) Why it’s important to let others know you’re looking for a board role (35:17) Rapid fire questions (40:51) LINKS AND RESOURCES Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity - Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. The All-In Podcast - Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social, and poker. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, we’re resharing one of the most popular & exciting sessions from ELC Annual 2023, featuring a panel of experts discussing what software dev will look like in the decades to come! This conversation features Tara Hernandez, VP Developer Productivity @ MongoDB; Erik Meijer, Sr. Director of Engineering @ Meta; and Jocelyn Goldfein, Managing Director @ Zetta Venture Partners. They debate & dissect how AI is changing what software dev looks like, what capabilities future eng leaders will need to build upon, where AI technology will need to improve moving forward, and more. ABOUT TARA HERNANDEZ Tara Hernandez has spent nearly thirty years evolving ways for companies to develop and ship software. She helped launch Mozilla.org and has been a firm proponent of open source ever since. She also thinks smart companies understand the business value of having a diverse employee base. Tara currently works at MongoDB, is a member of the board for Women Who Code, and a member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. "What was so amazing about Da Vinci? Da Vinci was an artist, he was a painter, he was a sculptor, he was an engineer. Breadth, more than depth, is increasingly going to be critical.” - Tara Hernandez ABOUT ERIK MEIJER Erik Meijer is a Dutch Computer Scientist, entrepreneur, and AI enthusiast. In his long career, he has democratized many academic concepts such as functional programming, reactive programming, and language-integrated query by introducing these concepts into mainstream languages such as C#, Visual Basic, Dart, and Hack, as well as through his startup Apllied Duality Inc. As an educator, Erik has shared his knowledge through platforms like Channel 9, Coursera, and edX, enlightening learners worldwide with his courses on reactive and functional programming. As the founder of the Probability team at Meta in 2016, he is one of the pioneers in applying AI to programmer productivity and systems efficiency. Most recently, Erik is working on providing every knowledge worker with a personal assistant that supercharges their productivity and boosts job satisfaction. "I think the engineer of the future will be more like an English major or a music major. Somebody that can really explain their thoughts very well. If you have kids, I would not send them to do computer science. Send them to a liberal arts.” - Erik Meijer ABOUT JOCELYN GOLDFEIN Jocelyn Goldfein ( @jgoldfein ) is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she invests seed capital in AI-native startups with B2B business models. Jocelyn is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure, and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early-stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware. During her tenure at Facebook, she helped convert News Feed to Machine Learning and spearheaded the transition to a ‘mobile first' product organization. As an early engineer at VMware, she built core virtualization technology and ultimately created and led VMware’s Desktop Business Unit. Jocelyn also held engineering and leadership roles at startups Datify, MessageOne, and Trilogy/pcOrder. Jocelyn has a passion for STEM Education. She currently lectures at Stanford University where she received her BS in Computer Science. "Part of me finds it almost insane to think about what if there's never a new programming language? What if we're at the end of history for new programming languages and the next and last programming language is Hindi?” - Jocelyn Goldfein This episode is brought to you by testRigor ! testRigor is trusted by tens of thousands of companies across the globe, including Netflix, Splunk, BusinessWire, and more to solve three main problems with end-to-end test automation: It’s challenging, expensive, and slow to hire QA Automation Engineers Low productivity building your own QA Automation Fragile tests, that cause maintenance to consume enormous amounts of time testRigor solves all of the above by allowing our users to express test cases in plain English To learn more, check out a case study on testRigor here Sign up for a free trial today at testrigor.com SHOW NOTES: Introducing Jocelyn, Tara, and Erik & their interest in the future of software dev (2:31) Ensuring AI accuracy / confidence as a key inflection point (5:06) What the next generation of building software will look like (7:09) Why engineers will always be needed for understanding machine capabilities (10:51) Erik & Tara’s perspectives on the future of AI & engineer interaction in software dev (13:19) Great engineers of the future need to have well-rounded skills (16:38) Why flow will (or will not) be as necessary in the future (19:06) How AI will augment human creativity & the engineering role (21:06) Will AI replace the need for cross-collaborative teams? (23:30) Jocelyn’s theory that today’s best QA folks will be the best engineers in 2033 (26:14) Audience Q&A: What logical & cognitive skills will still be needed as AI progresses? (28:24) Challenging the current definition of software development (31:45) What is the potential for a future dialogue system? (34:17) Will the change in eng skills also impact other degrees like mathematics? (36:46) How will the industry navigate workforce loss as AI replaces certain roles? (38:01) LINKS AND RESOURCES Video Version of Episode All of the Sessions from ELC Annual This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Career visualization, creating a pre-transition thesis & expanding your leadership to lead an entire business unit w/ Prashanthi Padmanabhan #166 45:11
We discuss expanding your leadership capabilities to support total business growth & career visualization with Prashanthi Padmanabhan, Head of Engineering @ LinkedIn Premium and Global Women in Tech Lead @ LinkedIn. Prashanthi dissects her career journey & leadership growth practices like creating a half-pager to visualize your potential career path, developing value-based leadership skills, identifying the micro & macro transformation opportunities for your professional growth, and ways to employ empathy within your team & toward customers. We also cover the vital skills & capabilities you’ll need to expand your eng leadership to work in a more cross-functional role and directly impact the growth of your business. Prashanthi also dives into how she lead LinkedIn Premium as it adopts generative AI-based features. ABOUT PRASHANTHI PADMANABHAN Prashanthi is a seasoned technologist and product builder with over two decades of experience in the tech industry. Currently, she leads Engineering for LinkedIn Premium, building a world-class subscription platform, helping deliver customer value for millions of members, and growing LinkedIn’s online subscription business line. Prior to joining LinkedIn, she led engineering for large-scale consumer products at Yahoo and Verizon Media. She excels at operating at the intersection of Business, Technology, and People, and her leadership style is rooted in compassion - for her teams and her customers. Prashanthi also leads the global Women In Tech community at LinkedIn and routinely mentors emerging women leaders inside and outside LinkedIn. She writes on LinkedIn on topics spanning engineering, leadership, organizational culture, well-being, etc.. Outside work, she is passionate about maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle. "I wrote a half pager about how I'm looking at my career at LinkedIn, what am I passionate about, and these things that I'm passionate about needs to continue to be ingredients in my journey. And then I wrote like, short term micro-transformations that I want to go through. And then, like, longer term, what is the macro transformation that I want to experience? And that macro transformation was I want to lead as an engineering leader, or maybe even a product leader, a line of business.” - Prashanthi Padmanabhan This episode is brought to you by testRigor ! testRigor is trusted by tens of thousands of companies across the globe, including Netflix, Splunk, BusinessWire, and more to solve three main problems with end-to-end test automation: It’s challenging, expensive, and slow to hire QA Automation Engineers Low productivity building your own QA Automation Fragile tests, that cause maintenance to consume enormous amounts of time testRigor solves all of the above by allowing our users to express test cases in plain English To learn more, check out a case study on testRigor here Sign up for a free trial today at testrigor.com SHOW NOTES: Prashanthi’s early career days to leading LinkedIn Premium (3:12) Deeply understand who you are building a product for (5:10) The pivotal moment that drove Prashanthi’s involvement w/ LinkedIn Premium (8:23) Strategies for creating a career half-pager to think about what’s next (11:49) An example of DEI for micro & macro transformation opportunities (13:35) Steps to ensure your team embodies your values day-to-day (16:05) Creating a pre-transition thesis before stepping into a new role (19:11) Using other leaders as a sounding board for your thesis (21:48) Important skills / capabilities to learn when shifting to a new role (24:13) Employing empathy within a cross-functional leadership team (27:09) Challenges faced & lessons learned during Prashanthi’s leadership evolution (30:06) Demystifying the business (32:07) Why eng teams need to hear from customers & empathize with them (33:06) What gave Prashanthi’s team the confidence to reimagine LinkedIn Premium’s roadmap (35:49) Use cases for generative AI in the business model (37:44) Rapid fire questions (40:31) LINKS AND RESOURCES Possible - a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more. The conversation also features another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode has a companion story, generated by GPT-4, which will serve as a jumping-off point for a hopeful, speculative discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Reinforcing consensus-driven culture, deploying the “inverse Conway maneuver” & the unique principles behind Two Sigma’s engineering culture w/ Matt Greenwood #165 38:53
Matt Greenwood, Chief Innovation Officer & Head of Investment Management Engineering @ Two Sigma shares some of the most unique and valuable cultural practices behind how the engineering org operates at Two Sigma. We discuss strategies that prepare you for scaling (like intentional relationship-building with your front-line managers); examples of how Two Sigma successfully deployed the “Inverse Conway Maneuver,” how to reinforce a consensus-driven culture from early-days to 1000+, how to navigate both large & small reorgs; and why Two Sigma made the intentional decision to rebrand their R&D org as M&E (modeling & engineering)! Plus, Matt’s approach to full-bodied problem-solving. ABOUT MATT GREENWOOD Matt is Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Investment Management Engineering at Two Sigma. He joined Two Sigma in 2003 and since then has led a number of company-wide efforts in both engineering and modeling. Matt is also an Advisor at Two Sigma Ventures and works closely with the business’ portfolio companies as a board member and advisor. Matt began his career at Bell Labs and later moved to IBM Research, where he was responsible for a number of early efforts in tablet computing and distributed computing. In 2000, Matt was lead developer and manager for Entrisphere, Inc., where he helped create a product providing access equipment for broadband service providers. Matt earned a BA and MA in Math from Oxford University, and a Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He also holds a PhD in Mathematics from Columbia University, where he taught for many years. "We came to New York in 2003, nothing was happening in New York. Silicon Alley, as they called it back then was just kaput. Then one day, I was browsing Craigslist, because that's what you did in 2003, and there was a little ad, ‘Hedge fund, looking for excellent engineers.’ So I was like, 'All right, maybe.' I said to my wife, 'This is either the sketchiest thing ever or the best decision of my life. It's one of those two things.' On Craigslist, there's no other way you can be, right? And it was probably the best decision of my life.” - Matt Greenwood This episode is brought to you by incident.io incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com , Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization. Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.io Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Matt’s eng leadership journey & discovering Two Sigma on Craigslist (3:34) Key moments of Two Sigma’s evolution as an org that sparked excitement (7:26) Lessons learned on keeping your work exciting by focusing on “human problems” (10:25) Create a culture of investing in people’s growth across longer timelines (12:22) How Sigma Two intentionally structures its R&D org (15:18) An unexpected way to prepare for scaling your org - intentional relationship-building strategies for your first-line managers (18:10) Frameworks for deploying the inverse Conway maneuver (20:56) The right people / conversations for small & large reorgs (23:30) Consensus-driven culture at 1000+, approaches to create buy-in & ownership with organizational change (26:02) Two Sigma’s approach to full-bodied problem solving (30:26) Rapid fire questions (34:06) LINKS AND RESOURCES Whalefall - A scientifically accurate thriller from Daniel Kraus about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Unlocking Empowered, Self-Sufficient Teams: A Deep Dive into 'First Team' Strategies w/ Monica Bajaj #164 36:34
In this episode, we are deconstructing the “first team approach” with Monica Bajaj, VPE @ Okta. We cover how to apply “first team" across your org, within different team functions (including architecture, quality, security, etc.) and across all levels. She also shares real-life examples from her experience with “first teams” in scenarios like onboarding new teams after M&As, developing new products, and more. Monica provides tactical steps for implementing the first team concept within your org & why it encourages bottoms-up initiatives / self sufficient teams. ABOUT MONICA BAJAJ Monica is currently VP of Engineering at Okta where she leads the Developer Experience portfolio for Customer Identity Cloud (CIAM). She is responsible for building a frictionless developer experience for Consumer and SaaS Apps thus securing billions of logins every month. Her expertise spans technology, operations, global expansion, and product launch in areas such as Consumer/Enterprise, Infrastructure, Business Intelligence, DevOps, and Security. She has taken products into the global market by launching localization and globalization programs delivering multi-million dollar growth. Previously she has held senior engineering leadership positions at Workday, Perforce, Network Appliance, and UKG. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Mumbai. Monica is an active supporter of diversity in STEM, has launched several Women in Technology initiatives, and is now an exec sponsor for Women at Okta. When not obsessing over technology, she can be found spending time with Boy Scouts, enjoying hiking, and supporting the cause of mentorship and uplifting women and young girls. "The first team concept was launched at my level and then I went through this journey and I realized like, 'Oh, this is very powerful.' First, it was confusing that I need to put my team aside and take my peers as my first priority, but then I became more curious and then I was intrigued by the results and I'm like, 'Oh, this is so powerful. I need to put this in my own organization.' So I started with my directs like, 'Hey, we have studied about this. We did a whole session and walk them through some real examples. That's where it was like, 'Oh, we need to implement this and see it.'” - Monica Bajaj This episode is brought to you by incident.io incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com , Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization. Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.io Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Defining the “first team” concept & three characteristics that lead to success (3:22) How applying a first team approach impacts relationships (6:05) Why adopting these principles improved the quality, trust & maturity of eng teams (8:30) What conditions were met to set up the relationship between teams (12:09) Nuances of incorporating a first team approach at different levels of your org (13:48) How the first team facilitates faster pivoting as new priorities arise (16:31) First team frameworks for successfully & quickly onboarding new teams (19:08) An example of this concept applied to an architecture context (20:20) Why “first teams” support / encourage bottoms-up initiatives (23:47) Strategies for leadership to implement first teams @ different levels of their org (27:38) Recommendations for regaining cohesiveness as a first team (29:17) Rapid fire questions (31:28) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Habit of Winning: Stories to Inspire, Motivate and Unleash the Winner within This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building a culture of experimentation & innovation at massive scale w/ Kristian Lindwall, Pooja Dave & Mark Grey @ Spotify #163 1:03:03
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1:03:03In one of our most anticipated conversations of the year, we got the chance to sit down with three of Spotify’s eng leaders: Krisitan Lindwall, Director of Engineering, Data, Insights, Experimentation, & ML Infrastructure; Mark Grey, Senior Staff Engineer; and Pooja Dave, Director of Engineering, Music Promotion. They share insights from their experience building a culture of experimentation & innovation at a massive scale and what elements are necessary for experimentation at scale. They share the origin story of Spotify’s experimentation platform, how to develop eng leaders to think strategically & execute effectively, mistakes to avoid while scaling your experimentation capabilities, and navigating the balance between structured processes vs. unstructured time to ideate. ABOUT KRISTIAN LINDWALL Kristian ( @klindwall ) is an engineering leader at Spotify. He has over 10 years of experience managing and coaching a broad variety of engineering and product teams. He is currently based in New York where he manages the engineering teams working on the company’s data, insights, and machine learning platforms. Prior to that, he led parts of the agile coach practice at Spotify for a few years and has been very active in supporting the growth of a strong agile and lean approach in the company. Before Spotify, Kristian spent 8 years in fintech in Stockholm where he built and grew the engineering team at the largest online broker company in Sweden. "How we behave in the organization is really what reinforces and drives the culture and I think there's a few things driving that culture of innovation. Connecting hands to heads, meaning give people an opportunity to engage in ideation and make sure people are involved in strategy work and in the full process of figuring out where we're heading.” - Kristian Lindwall ABOUT POOJA DAVE With over a decade of experience building and leading several R&D organizations in ad tech, marketing tech, and platforms servicing those, Pooja currently runs the organization at Spotify that helps artists engage and grow their fanbase. Prior to Spotify, she worked at Microsoft on several products including Devices, Browser Rendering Engine, and Advertising/MarTech SDKs. This diversity in experiences has given her a well-rounded exposure to engineer solutions and lead teams with strong backend architecture, client, machine learning, and data practices. “For Spotify, failure is the paradox to success.” - Pooja Dave ABOUT MARK GREY Mark is a Senior Staff Engineer at Spotify, where for a decade he has worked on a broad range of distributed systems related to experimentation, data processing, and analytics. Having operated and scaled solutions at all stages of growth, his primary focus is on technical strategy and platformization. Prior to Spotify, Mark worked at the New York Times on personalization infrastructure such as near-realtime article recommendations. "We want to ideally maximize the throughput on those things that we see pan out or don't pan out. So kind of a fail faster, double down model and there's all kinds of practices and tools that we put in place that Confidence is just one among many that allow us to increase that throughput. So try and derive insights from a small experiment, validate your hypothesis quickly, and then proceed and scale up from there.” - Mark Grey This episode is brought to you by incident.io incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com , Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization. Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.io Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: About Spotify’s experimentation platform, Confidence (3:46) Why Spotify decided to offer Confidence externally (5:43) What experimentation without a platform looked like in the early days @ Spotify (6:24) Understanding the scale of the Confidence platform (8:58) Challenges eng leaders face when scaling testing / experimentation processes (10:51) Strategies for determining which experiments & features are most impactful (13:23) How to build a stronger culture of innovation / experimentation at scale (15:47) Frameworks to help develop eng leaders to be both thinkers & doers (19:11) Facilitating conversations around data ideation (23:13) An example of how Spotify ideates around data (26:10) Mistakes to avoid when scaling up & defining the experiment (28:36) How to prioritize experiments when there are conflicts (32:22) Recommendations for capturing ideas & turning them into features (35:32) Create breathing space within eng teams to help bolster innovation (40:10) Why it’s also key to implement structured processes for experimentation (42:57) What good coaching looks like when orgs are scaling their experiments (45:24) Knowing when you need to platformize something (48:55) How generalizing platform capabilities can enable greater speed (51:27) Learn to think outside the box & don’t get in the way of experimentation (55:11) Rapid fire questions (57:10) LINKS AND RESOURCES Becoming - In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. Unsolicited Feedback - A new podcast by Reforge that invites you into closed-door conversations between growth and product leaders. Brian Balfour (Reforge, HubSpot), Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack), and friends give targeted feedback around recent features and releases across the product and growth multiverse. Lenny’s Podcast - Lenny Rachitsky (author of #1 business newsletter on Substack with 500k+ subscribers) interviews world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Laura Tacho, CTO @ DX, joins us to discuss why changing what you measure doesn’t necessarily lead to improved productivity (and what to do about it)! How to define and measure productivity in your eng org is one of the hottest topics for eng leaders… We cover best practices for identifying what productivity looks like in your org, what motivates your team to reach those goals, how to harness behavioral psychology, and antipatterns to avoid when you focus on productivity. Plus Laura shares some of her favorite practices to identify your skill gaps, and how define what success looks like for yourself and your teams on your productivity journey. ABOUT LAURA TACHO Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She previously led teams at companies like CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit. She’s an expert in building world-class engineering organizations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance. "That is just a ripe environment for the rapid degradation of trust within an organization and has immeasurable consequences when it comes to degrading the culture of a team. I think the temptation is there, understandably, and I think from good intentions of, ‘I want to try to measure unobtrusively. I want to get this data about my team without them knowing about it or minimally knowing about it so that I'm not bothering them.’ That is a trap because we don't need to treat people the same way we treat distributed systems with dashboards and dashboards of telemetry data. People can talk. Just ask them.” - Laura Tacho This episode is brought to you by incident.io incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com , Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization. Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.io Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Why people care so much about measuring productivity in engineering (3:25) Antipatterns to avoid when tightening focus on productivity (5:08) The role of behavioral psychology with engineering productivity (7:04) What the ideal consulting relationship looks like structurally (8:58) Ensure you’re incentivizing the behavior you want to achieve (12:20) How to cultivate the skill of influencing without feeling too “salesy” (13:59) Understanding the different facets / types of motivation (17:08) Strategies for developing resiliency in “do more with less” environments (19:14) Behaviors that prevent eng orgs & leaders from achieving their goals (23:55) How to identify areas of personal development & closing the skill gap (27:00) Areas that are the most ripe for setting the right expectations / outcomes (29:40) Best practices for eng leaders to gain clarity & define what success looks like (32:01) Rapid fire questions (35:52) LINKS AND RESOURCES Remarkably Bright Creatures -Shelby Van Pelt’s exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. This Podcast Will Kill You - Grad students studying disease ecology, Erin and Erin found themselves disenchanted with the insular world of academia. They wanted a way to share their love of epidemics and weird medical mysteries with the world, not just colleagues. lauratacho.com - Laura’s website where you can find more information about her courses, coaching, and management program. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Navigating 2024: Engineering management principles to tackle the unknowns & challenges ahead w/ Andrew Lau #161 36:27
Andrew Lau, CEO & Co-founder @ Jellyfish, shares the engineering management principles that eng leaders will most want to develop and invest in as we transition from 2023 into 2024. We cover year-end reflection techniques, how eng leaders can become more resilient / adaptable, why honing financial acumen is key, and how eng leaders can better plan ahead to face upcoming technology & industry challenges. We also preview Andrew’s new podcast called 5 to 9, aimed to identify meaningful ways eng leaders spend their time outside of the office. Check out Andrew’s new podcast 5 to 9 here: https://jellyfish.co/5-to-9-podcast ABOUT ANDREW LAU Andrew Lau is a Co-Founder and CEO of Jellyfish, where he helps leaders use data to align their engineering teams with business strategy. He was trained as an engineer and grew to VP of Engineering at Oracle acquired company, Endeca. He is also a multi-time entrepreneur and co-founder. At every company, Andrew saw the challenges of leading engineering teams at scale. He co-founded Jellyfish to give engineering executives the tools they need to be great leaders. Andrew holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Originally from Oakland, CA, he's a devoted fan of the Oakland A's, despite residing in Red Sox territory for more than two decades. Andrew currently calls Cambridge, MA his home, where he lives with his wife Elsie and their two adorable young children, Callie and Mira. “As a leader, your job is to know the context and translate the context. You have the benefit of seeing more things, but less deeply and your job is to kind of gather these informations and help other people understand it. People forget, you think you're an engineering leader. You think it's actually about making things. It is, but it's also about translating, especially at scale. You're not making anything anymore. You're enabling other people to make, and in order to do that, you've actually got to be translating and providing context.” - Andrew Lau This episode is brought to you by incident.io incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com , Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization. Learn more about how you can better identify, learn from, and respond to incidents at incident.io Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Andrew’s observations on how the tech industry is evolving from 2023 to 2024 (3:40) Questions to help you reflect at year-end about family, team & business (5:03) How eng leaders can build adaptability & resiliency (7:16) Skills / focus areas eng leaders should hone heading into 2024 (10:51) Developing better financial acumen (13:15) Bridging the gap between engineering strategy & business alignment (16:40) Why it’s important for businesses to build a plan for a year or two out (19:50) How this relates back to eng leadership development & financial acumen (23:00) Tips for identifying skill gaps in financial expertise (24:07) Knowing what metrics to measure your company against (26:07) About Andrew’s new podcast, 5 to 9 (28:42) How eng leaders make it work in business & outside of work (31:35) Where to follow & listen to 5 to 9 (34:40) LINKS AND RESOURCES 5 to 9 Podcast - By day, engineering leaders craft innovative solutions with elegant strings of code. But when the work day ends, who do these keyboard warriors and people managers become? Tune in to 5 to 9 to explore this question and others with Jellyfish CEO, Andrew Lau. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building data engineering teams from scratch & transitioning to a full-scale data function w/ Colleen Tartow #160 42:37
As the Field CTO & Head of Strategy @ VAST Data, Colleen Tartow, Ph.D., has a vast resume of building data engineering teams from scratch and beyond. Colleen discusses the necessary components for developing new or reorienting existing data programs, strategies for effective communication & collaboration between data & eng functions, the implications of AI technology on data engineering, and integrating cross-functional partners into the data eng planning process & road map. Plus Colleen shares about building the hiring process for data eng functions, when the “data engineering” term or role didn’t exist yet, and how you can apply that to other emerging or undefined functions! ABOUT COLLEEN TARTOW Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. is Field CTO and Head of Strategy at VAST Data and has 20+ years of experience in data, analytics, engineering, and consulting. Adept at assisting organizations in deriving value from a data-driven culture, she has successfully led diverse data, engineering, and analytics teams through the development of complex global data management solutions and architecting enterprise data systems. Her demonstrated excellence in data, engineering, analytics, and diversity leadership makes her a trusted senior advisor among executives. An experienced speaker, author, valued mentor and startup advisor, Colleen holds degrees in astrophysics and lives in Massachusetts. "Everyone wants to be data driven, right? Like no one's going to say, 'No, we don't want data. We just want to function with opinions.' Like nobody's actually going to say that. But that said, getting started on that can be really challenging... With anything, you have to go back to what does the business really need. Going back to the revenue drivers and the business pain points that you're going to help solve, whether it's monetizing your data directly or using data as an enablement function to actually help in other areas and so I think getting the organization to understand that data is a product of the business and then sort of working back from there into what does that specifically mean.” - Colleen Tartow Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Colleen’s experience building a data program from scratch (2:25) What it used to be like building a data engineering team (4:43) Narrowing to first principles when hiring for / building a data eng team (6:44) Frameworks to advocate for more resources to build your org’s data function (7:53) Knowing when you need to transition your data side project to a full data program (10:11) Building data teams from a zero to one perspective (13:05) What “onboarding as discovery” conversations look like (14:38) Joining an existing team to implement a defined data-focused function (16:14) How to have effective conversations & collaborate with other eng functions (19:19) Prioritization strategies when refocusing / creating the data eng org roadmap (21:20) How to integrate cross-functional partners into the data eng planning process (22:51) The implication of AI on data teams & its intersection with eng teams (24:09) Colleen’s decision-making framework (27:54) Recommendations for tackling complex data pipelines in different ways (29:27) Navigating the paradigm of AI & data eng’s impact on other eng orgs (31:31) What the ideal collaboration between data & eng looks like (34:01) Recommendations for dealing with points of friction (35:21) Steps for aligning data & eng under the same goals (37:16) Rapid fire questions (39:04) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Lioness of Boston - Emily Franklin’s deeply evocative novel of the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston itself. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159 44:43
In this episode, Emad Elwany, CTO & Co-founder @ Lexion, joins us to discuss navigating the messy “in-between” phase startups face as they scale up! We talk about the dilemma between optimizing for vertical or horizontal teams. And we cover his approach for aligning teams based on strategic themes / “complete units of value” on the company’s product roadmap and navigating trade-offs when choosing your approach to scaling. Emad also shares strategies for successful interpersonal facilitation and how to build consensus effectively as an approach to sustain your org’s internal velocity. ABOUT EMAD ELWANY Emad Elwany is the CTO and co-founder of Lexion. Lexion is a powerfully simple operations workflow and contracting platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion streamlines and centralizes the end-to-end contract lifecycle with intuitive email-driven intake and workflows, simple no-code automation, best-in-class AI, and more. Lexion was one of the first AI companies to leverage LLMs in building production-quality applications. The company was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is backed by an iconic Silicon Valley law firm, and recently raised a $20M Series B with support from top-tier VC firms. Prior to co-founding Lexion, Emad held principal engineering roles at Microsoft Research, working on Microsoft's core AI products, specifically as founding and lead engineer on their core conversational AI and NLP platform as well as their AI scheduling assistant. Emad holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Alexandria University and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. He’s an active member of special interest groups in machine learning and artificial intelligence and has published research papers in major computer science conferences like CHI, NeurIPS, and KDD. "We said, 'We're not going to do the vertical. We're not going to do horizontal. Instead, let's be roadmap driven.' If you review our roadmap document, there's a section on key learnings from the past, and then there's a section on the three or four strategic areas we're investing in in the next quarter. So we thought, 'Okay, these strategic themes are very coherent. A lot of the projects on them are kind of homogenous but they span the full stack. They also span different functional areas. Why don't we try that? Why don't we have teams aligned to themes?'” - Emad Elwany Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Emad’s observations around scaling up @ Lexion (2:50) Strategies for dividing teams / products horizontally or vertically (5:17) Navigating trade-offs when deciding the right approach for scaling up (7:39) How to decide what areas to optimize vs. sacrifice (10:47) Using your product roadmap to drive decision making / optimization (12:59) Emad’s process for forming new teams, identifying strategies & executing vision (15:48) Fitting the trade-off discussion into this organization model (18:51) Determining your org’s specific “budget of problems” (22:21) Balancing the timing of problems vs. the quantity of problems (24:01) Recommendations for interpersonal facilitation & building consensus (27:01) How these actions can help improve & sustain your org’s internal velocity (31:16) Why velocity – or lack of it – impacts speedy, efficient decision-making (33:51) Emad’s favorite examples of his team finding consensus (35:37) Rapid fire questions (38:17) LINKS AND RESOURCES Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building -Claire Hughes Johnson’s practical and empathetic guide to being an effective leader and manager in a high-growth environment. The tactical information it puts forward—including guidance on crafting foundational documents, strategic and financial planning, hiring and team development, and feedback and performance mechanisms—can be applied to companies of any size, in any industry. Scaling People includes dozens of pages of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example documents to help founders, leaders, and company builders create scalable operating systems and lightweight processes that really work. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models w/ Scott Woody #158 47:53
Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate the tension between infrastructure & product eng teams, creating a healthy relationship between finance & eng orgs, and recommendations for strategically considering pivoting business models. ABOUT SCOTT WOODY Scott ( @l3amm ) is currently co-founder and CTO of Metronome, the usage-based billing platform built to help software companies accelerate their revenue. Prior to Metronome, Scott was a Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he led the growth and monetization team. He previously co-founded Foundry Hiring, an ATS system, that was later acquired by Dropbox. "When we were smaller, we had one giant engineering team. What we realized about nine months ago, especially as we started working with these more public companies, was that the needs of the specific personas were so specific that this concept of engineers being able to fit the entire product and need space in their head was impossible. We had to create those experts and decided to have PMs specialize and embed with these teams to become experts on the workflows.” - Scott Woody SHOW NOTES: The origin story of Metronome & Scott’s transition from Dropbox (3:14) How Metronome gained & maintained its first customers (5:36) Metronome’s two products / distinct user personas (7:58) Challenges from multiple complex stakeholders and users (10:17) The difficulty in solving & prioritizing user problems (12:23) Navigating the tension between product eng & infrastructure sides (15:41) How Metronome created experts in house & built a retainer of consultants (19:29) Roadmap for going from early-stage engineering to specialized teams (21:10) Processes for standardizing the knowledge base & communicating the info (23:16) Using brown bag talks to onboard new hires (26:16) Implications of a usage-based business model for eng leaders (28:26) Lessons learned when changing your business model (30:22) Making the shift to a consumption-based model (32:45) Strategies for rationalizing which pricing model to follow & knowing when to pivot (36:23) Developing & testing a value hypothesis (38:19) Lead with customer value in mind & communicate that value factor (40:59) Rapid fire questions (42:21) LINKS AND RESOURCES Elon Musk - From Walter Isaacson, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. Foundation - The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Becoming a great coach: Practices & principles to help you make a bigger impact on your teams w/ Jill Wetzler #157 48:10
In this episode, Jill Wetzler shares practices and principles to help you become a great coach! As an Executive Coach & former VP of Engineering, Jill shares how attending her first coaching workshop impacted her career trajectory and the frameworks she uses to help create a mindset of possibility, foster positive relationships, cultivate trust, navigate threats, and help people think about the future. She shares her own experiences working through these frameworks & how it helped guide her career decisions. Plus we discuss tools for implementing a peer coaching structure into your org & how to make the most of peer group discussions! ABOUT JILL WETZLER Jill Wetzler is a leadership coach, consultant, and former VP of Engineering with more than 15 years of experience leading engineering teams at some of Silicon Valley's fastest-growing companies. She works with organizations who want to strengthen and uplevel their management teams, and she coaches leaders at all levels to help them advance their skills and find fulfillment at work and in life. Jill has built and scaled engineering orgs at companies like Salesforce, Twitter, Lyft, and Pilot through periods of high growth. Find out more at www.jillwetzler.com "Imagine yourself five years from now. You're completely happy, you're completely fulfilled in your job. What are you spending your day doing? So not what is your job? What's your job title? But literally, what is the day to day activity? You get up at nine o'clock, you walk into a meeting, what are you doing in that meeting? Once I had all of that in sort of like a three paragraph form, I actually started to write my ideal job description.” - Jill Wetzler SHOW NOTES: The story of Jill’s first coaching workshop & its impact on her as an eng leader (3:29) Questions & topics to focus on to be a better coach (6:27) Asking questions related to vision that inspire a possibility mindset (8:49) Frameworks for helping people shift into a creative brain space (10:26) How to navigate the topic of fairness & what elements threaten it (14:33) Identifying what you want your day-to-day to look like in the future (17:25) Jill’s decision to create her own role @ Lyft working w/ L&D (20:42) Her biggest takeaways & recommendations for managers (26:05) Tips for breaking out of your pre-established identity (30:10) Implementing a “team roadshow” practice in your org (32:06) Jill’s approach for introducing a peer coaching structure into their team (34:30) Talk from your own experience & avoid simply giving advice (36:39) Rapid fire questions (40:45) LINKS AND RESOURCES Finding Me - Viola Davis’ story, in her own words, that spans her incredible, inspiring life, from her coming-of-age in Rhode Island to her present day. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Closing Executive Leadership Skill Gaps: A Portfolio Approach to Career Growth w/ Kathleen Vignos #156 50:47
Kathleen Vignos, VP of Software Engineering @ Capital One, shares how to overcome executive leadership gaps that prevent eng leaders from advancing to the next level in their career. She covers how she applies a portfolio approach to career growth, how that helped her build exec skills in a way, and tips for people who are reorienting their approach to career growth. We also cover how to bridge essential executive skill gaps like facilitation, negotiation, and influencing! Plus strategies for exceptional facilitation, balancing option limiting & option exploration, dealing with conflict / reframing, and negotiation strategies to aid in decision making. ABOUT KATHLEEN VIGNOS Kathleen Vignos is a VP of software engineering at Capital One. Her organization, Customer Resiliency, builds web, mobile, and backend applications to meet customer needs in times of financial hardship so they can resolve their debt and get back on track. These applications run on a modern stack with ML decisioning and serverless components hosted on AWS. Previously in her 6 years at Twitter, Kathleen worked on promoted tweet review, tweet translation, abuse tooling, and infrastructure automation across on-prem, Google Cloud, and AWS environments. She also ran Twitter’s development programs for engineering managers, personally training 300+ managers across the topics of people management, hiring, technical skills development, and project execution/delivery. Outside of strategic technology work, Kathleen is a distance runner and loves travel. She lives with her husband in San Francisco. They have 2 adult children and are working on plans to visit their sixth continent. "I was hearing this message, 'You need to be more strategic.' I realized my definition of strategy in my head was not actually strategy and I needed to reframe strategy as being willing to completely blow everything up because there's a bigger, better thing you need to do and I think that if you are very organized and very goal oriented, you don't want to blow up your plan. You want to execute your plan. You're a great executor and that will get you to a certain level. So I think that's inflection point number one, at least it was for me and I think that's true for a lot of people. I see it over and over again.” - Kathleen Vignos SHOW NOTES: How the career portfolio concept strategically drives career growth (2:33) Surprising discoveries in Kathleen’s transition to tech (5:07) Parallels between Kathleen’s early work & current eng leadership (7:12) The impact of a career portfolio on acquiring skills in a nonlinear way (10:47) Kathleen’s tips for someone reorienting their approach to career growth (15:18) Common gaps / blocks people encounter on their career growth journey (17:08) Understanding your audience & the reach of your influence (20:13) Navigating the shift between being a great executor to a great strategist (22:23) Key principles of influencing & facilitation (24:49) Strategies for option limiting as a facilitator (27:01) How to facilitate to achieve time efficiency & positive option exploration (30:01) Applying facilitation strategies during the candidate hiring process (32:39) Examples of “polite interruption” phrases to use (35:31) Approaches for dealing with conflict & reframing (36:49) Recommendations for negotiating & decision making (39:47) Rapid fire questions (44:13) LINKS AND RESOURCES Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World - Based on Professor Stuart Diamond’s award-winning course at the Wharton Business School, Getting More concludes that finding and valuing the other party’s emotions and perceptions creates far more value than the conventional wisdom of power and logic. It is intended to provide better agreements for everyone no matter what they negotiate – from jobs to kids to billion-dollar deals to shopping. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works - A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success— where to play and how to win. The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music - Dave Grohl’s memoir chronicling his early days growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, to hitting the road at the age of 18, and all the music that followed. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
James Everingham, co-founder and VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method, principle-based decision-making, and creating narratives as a product / eng org goal-setting tool, plus how he’s employed those tools effectively throughout his career. We also address navigating the balance between process & anti-process, approaches to product planning & finding PMF, and adapting your communication style to work within a smaller vs. large org. ABOUT JAMES EVERINGHAM James Everingham ( @jevering ) is co-founder and VP of Engineering at Lightspark. Lightspark is building core infrastructure on the Lightning Network. Most recently he was Vice President of Engineering for Novi (Meta) and co-creator of Diem. Previously, James was the Head of Engineering at Instagram. James has led many world-class engineering teams throughout his 35-year career as a manager, entrepreneur, and technology developer. At Yahoo, he was Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo media properties after acquiring Luminate, an interactive image technology company he founded. Other previous roles include CTO and founding team member of LiveOps, Senior Director of Engineering at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft), and Senior Director of Engineering at Netscape Communications, where he was responsible for the flagship Netscape browser. Before joining Netscape, James held engineering and management positions at Oracle and Borland International. "We had a great story in our head of like if we can simply make money flow or value flow fast and free frictionlessly around the world like a lot of good is going to happen but then that's the ending. That's the happy ending. Like, what are the chapters that we're going to write in between to get there? The first one was, 'Well, we're going to build this new infrastructure. Let's start getting it out there and getting it quickened in an area where it's already accepted.' And that's what we did. You know, that was the first one and we worked backwards from that. They're trying to make the story happen. They're not trying to make a list of tasks happen. And I think that's a really important distinction.” - James Everingham SHOW NOTES: James’ latest experience scaling down in his career (2:44) Increasing your risk tolerance as an eng leader (5:15) Surprising ways eng leaders operate in a smaller org vs. a larger org (7:16) Optimizing communicating patterns when scaling down as a leader (10:23) Strategies for creating high-impact conversations within teams at a small org (12:12) How to use the Socratic method effectively as an eng leader (14:04) James’ framework for anchoring decision-making principles (17:05) Why focusing on customer problems before business problems is a key principle (19:30) Layering the Socratic method approach & principle-based decision making (21:43) Tips for implementing these approaches early on & scaling them up (24:31) The trap of “process” & knowing when / where to introduce processes (25:41) Navigating the balance between complete process & anti-process (27:59) Deconstructing James’ approach to product planning & goal setting (29:51) How James introduced the product planning narrative @ Lightspark (34:15) Advice for newcomers looking to identify & share a product narrative (36:38) Rapid fire questions (38:31) LINKS AND RESOURCES How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader - An article outlining the narrative goal setting framework that James discusses in the episode. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - Adam Grant’s book about the benefit of doubt and how we can get better at embracing the unknown and the joy of being wrong. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Pete Peterson, CTO @ Riviera Partners, joins our podcast to discuss strategies for gaining stakeholder buy-in in complex stakeholder environments. He shares his experience working as the CIO for the City of Oakland & how he navigated implementing change across 30+ departments & stakeholders. We cover how to find collaborators who share your vision, why quick wins are important for gaining stakeholder buy-in, balancing competing interests from stakeholders, introducing change to your tech team when there’s resistance, and more. Pete also shares his favorite leadership practices & tips for eng leaders who are presenting to stakeholders. ABOUT PETE PETERSON Andrew (Pete) Peterson is the Chief Technology Officer of Riviera Partners, a leading executive search firm for engineering, product, and design leadership roles. With over 30 years of experience in cloud/SaaS platform and solution development, Peterson oversees Riviera's technology vision, direction, and development by leading the engineering, product, and data science teams. Prior to Riviera Partners, Pete served as the Chief Information Technology Officer for the City of Oakland and held various leadership roles in technology and operations at Up Communications, Xtiva Financial Systems, and CallidusCloud Software. Pete holds an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco and a B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University. "You have 30, 40 different fiefdoms. Everyone's doing whatever they want to do to a degree. How do you convince these 30 different directors or whatever that we do have common objectives? We do have some things in common. There are places where we can collaborate. There are places where we can have sort of economies of scale if we pool all of our resources together and we can all benefit from these things.” - Pete Peterson We’re hosting the first ELC Annual Watch Party on 11/8! We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city. Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation! We have different events for Europe, East Coast & West Coast! To RSVP, find your location HERE: Europe West Coast & MidWest East Coast SHOW NOTES: Pete’s experience as CIO for the City of Oakland (3:19) Lessons learned in this CIO role & how it differed from traditional tech roles (7:08) Navigating a complex stakeholder environment from a technology perspective (9:15) Finding collaborators with a shared sense of vision (10:54) Why a quick win & great results can make later conversations easier (13:10) How past work w/ stakeholders impacted Pete’s current initiatives @ Riviera (15:13) Tips for balancing different / competing interests from stakeholders (21:27) Tapping into stakeholders’ motivations to create a unified front (25:17) How to bring your team along when there’s resistance to change (29:09) Breaking down Pete’s two main leadership practices (34:49) Pete’s favorite tips for eng leaders presenting to various stakeholders (38:13) Rapid fire questions (40:50) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Wisdom Of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return -Mihir Desai’s lucid exploration of the ideas of finance as seen through the unusual prism of the humanities. Through this novel, creative approach, Desai shows that outsiders can access the underlying ideas easily and insiders can reacquaint themselves with the core humanity of their profession. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Data leader and author of Self Advocacy: Your Guide to Getting What You Deserve at Work , Shailvi Wakhlu, joins us to discuss practical strategies for becoming a better self-advocate & skills to help you improve negative self-talk and prioritize your happiness. Shailvi also reveals the different types of self-advocacy and how eng leaders can empower/coach their teams to become better self-advocates, plus recommendations for incorporating self-advocacy into key workplace scenarios, including job promotions, negotiating a job offer, and more. ABOUT SHAILVI WAKHLU Shailvi Wakhlu is a data leader, International Keynote Speaker, and author of Self Advocacy: Your Guide to Getting What You Deserve at Work . She is the former Head of Data & Analytics at Strava and Komodo Health. Her sixteen-year data and engineering career has included companies such as Salesforce, Fitbit, and a software startup she co-founded. Shailvi’s self-advocacy expertise comes from being a practitioner at tech startups and large companies across three continents. Annually, Wakhlu speaks at twenty-five or more global conferences and corporate events hosted by Fortune 500 companies on Self-Advocacy and Data. She also teaches online courses on these subjects to a global audience. Wakhlu offers individual and group coaching. She has helped hundreds of people grow their self-advocacy skills and reach important career milestones faster. She is also an investor and advisor to several high-growth startups. Wakhlu grew up in India and studied Computer Engineering at Illinois Tech in Chicago. She loves to travel and has visited thirty-two countries. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Govind, and their sixty plants. "I believe that advocating for yourself is also advocating for the needs of the people that you care about. So if you consider yourself as part of a team, part of a community, part of a group, and if you know their happiness matters to you, if their comfort matters to you, advocating for them is advocating for yourself because if they're happier, you're happier. So I feel that for leaders who want their teams to be successful, this is something you do for yourself too because you want them to be successful. - Shailvi Wakhlu We’re hosting the first ELC Annual Watch Party on 11/8! We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city. Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation! We have different events for Europe, East Coast & West Coast! To RSVP, find your location HERE: Europe West Coast & MidWest East Coast SHOW NOTES: How Shailvi became passionate about self-advocacy as a data leader (2:21) The inspiration that ignited Shailvi’s need for a self-advocacy talk (4:36) Advice for reflecting on experiences & sharing your story in a meaningful way (7:25) Defining self-advocacy in an eng leadership context (9:12) Examples of proactive & reactive self-advocacy in the workplace (11:15) Why self-advocacy can be so hard for people (13:52) Strategies for identifying opportunities for self-advocacy (15:42) Frameworks for changing your self-talk / perception of self (18:13) How to encourage eng leaders to proactively share their stories / experiences (21:26) Practices to help embrace opportunities for self-advocacy (23:11) Why eng leaders need to help their teams cultivate self-advocacy skills (27:00) The benefit of recognizing & embracing what you’re most proud of (30:34) What successful self-advocacy within the job promotion conversation (32:37) Self-advocating while negotiating a job offer (36:57) The importance of prioritizing happiness along with self-advocacy (39:35) Rapid fire questions (43:49) LINKS AND RESOURCES Self-Advocacy - Shailvi’s book that presents a practical guide that anyone can use to master self-advocacy and equips leaders with tools to train others effectively. More from Shailvi on self-advocacy! The Speaker Author: Sell More Books and Book More Speeches - Lois Creamer and Cathy Fyock have teamed to help you become a Speaker Author and ramp up your impact to build your business. Whether you are a coach, consultant, or other expert who benefits by positioning your intellectual property, you will benefit from this idea-packed book. TickTick - a to-do list app for freelancers or small businesses that want to stay on top of tasks. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Using GenAI to address cross-functional collaboration challenges & enhance engineering leadership w/ Clemens Mewald #152 45:32
Clemens Mewald, Head of Product @ Instabase, joins our podcast to share his insights on how to embrace generative AI tools to enhance engineering leadership, productivity, and problem-solving. We also chat about creative ways to implement GenAI beyond simply chatbots, questions to ask when deciding how to leverage GenAI capabilities, rethinking the productivity aspect of generative AI, and how to use it to address cross-functional collaboration challenges within your org. Additionally, Clemens reveals how he translates his deep technical / research knowledge on generative AI into meaningful business & product outcomes. ABOUT CLEMENS MEWALD Clemens Mewald is the Head of Product at Instabase. With over 15 years of experience in the industry, Clemens Mewald has built a successful track record as a product and technology leader in the AI and machine learning space. Previously Clemens held leadership positions at Databricks, where he spent more than three years leading the product team for Machine Learning and Data Science. Before Databricks, Clemens served on the Google Brain Team building AI infrastructure for Alphabet, where his product portfolio included TensorFlow and TensorFlow Extended (TFX). Clemens holds an MSc in computer science from UAS Wiener Neustadt, Austria, and an MBA from MIT Sloan. "Whenever a new technique or like innovation comes out. It's not the product, right? So like AI is not the product. LLMs are not the product. A lot of people get caught up in the innovation, like the technology if you will, but people don't buy AI. People don't buy LLMs. They buy tools and products that like solve their own problems in the world. So really what you gained is like a new tool in your tool belt to solve your customer's problems, not a new thing that you can sell.” - Clemens Mewald We’re hosting the first ELC Annual Watch Party on 11/8! We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city. Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation! We have different events for Europe, East Coast & West Coast! To RSVP, find your location HERE: Europe West Coast & MidWest East Coast SHOW NOTES: Why Clemens got involved with Instabase & the GenAI space (2:08) Clemens’ observations on how eng leaders are applying GenAI tools (4:56) Where GenAI tools can fit the needs of an executive leader (7:00) The impact of generative AI on product building (9:04) Creative ways to apply GenAI beyond a chatbot (12:41) Strategies for better framing questions to leverage different GenAI capabilities (17:37) Understanding the unreliable aspects of generative AI tools (20:52) Leveraging these tools to tackle eng leadership-specific challenges (24:25) Rethink the productivity aspect of GenAI tools (25:59) Using GenAI tools to address cross-functional collaboration challenges (28:32) How to align / educate different stakeholders around new generative AI capabilities (32:24) Translating technical research on GenAI into business outcomes or products (35:22) The “identify, verify, amplify” framework (36:46) Clemens’ favorite methods for verifying in a lightweight way (39:35) Rapid fire questions (40:46) LINKS AND RESOURCES AI Will Save The World with Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado - In this timely one-on-one conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado, Marc discusses how this technology will maximize human potential, why the future of AI should be decided by the free market, and most importantly, why AI won’t destroy the world. In fact, it may save it. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Navigating catastrophes is never easy for eng leaders, but it’s an essential leadership skill in the startup world. Ken Pickering, SVP of Engineering @ Starburst Data, discusses navigating catastrophe, and uncertainty and building a culture of resiliency within startups & eng teams. We cover how to embrace challenges / failure, and cultivate centralized beliefs within your org. Plus the challenges behind finding PMF for a second product, and how to leverage first-principles to avoid a failed second product. ABOUT KEN PICKERING Ken Pickering is the SVP of Engineering at Starburst Data, where he is privileged to work alongside some of the best product and engineering humans in the world. Prior to his role here, he held leadership roles at large-scale consumer SaaS and enterprise security companies. "Communication and context are some of the things that are most successful in feeding an engineering organization because engineers are generalized problem solvers. We all want to be engaged with the problem and then apply a methodology to that problem. Even in high stakes situations, articulate the problem clearly, give people the timeline, give people the constraints, and let them rip. The people that can do that and perform in different kinds of environments and be flexible and adaptable are really key to driving that kind of culture.” - Ken Pickering We’re hosting the first ELC Annual Watch Party on 11/8! We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city. Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation! We have different events for Europe, East Coast & West Coast! To RSVP, find your location HERE: Europe West Coast & MidWest East Coast SHOW NOTES: Why the right team / culture can successfully navigate catastrophes (2:30) Ken’s leadership approach to tackling challenges & embracing risk (3:52) How Ken navigated an unexpected catastrophe @ Rue La La (5:58) Practices that can prepare a team for handling obstacles well (8:12) The “Travel Deal Tuesday” story @ Hopper (10:24) Hiring leaders & creating teams built to endure challenges (12:58) How a startup’s centralized beliefs impact leadership styles / decision-making (15:09) Ken’s perspective on cultivating shared beliefs within eng teams (17:01) Tips for preparing people to better endure catastrophe during downtime (19:10) Key takeaways / follow-ups from practice disaster drills (21:14) Strategies for coaching people through their first failure (22:38) Sharing examples of resilient eng leadership (24:44) Balancing the reality of an unknown future vs. the demand to execute now (27:05) Why communication & context are key for navigating uncertainty (30:11) Challenges that come with finding PMF for a second product (33:34) Ken’s examples of enduring through repeated failures / iterations (35:46) Facilitating conversation on first principles while working on a second product (38:09) Rapid fire questions (39:53) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Destroyer of Worlds: A Return to Lovecraft Country - In this thrilling adventure, a blend of enthralling historical fiction and fantastical horror, Matt Ruff returns to the world of Lovecraft Country and explores the meaning of death, the hold of the past on the present, and the power of hope in the face of uncertainty. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Strategies for creating efficient orgs & getting the most out of your eng team w/ Jamie Tischart #150 51:18
Jamie Tischart, CTO @ Bettercloud, discusses how to identify inefficiencies within your eng org & strategies for creating more efficient teams! He shares his experience at Bettercloud as one of several concurrent senior hires & why he discovered that coordination is key when hiring multiple new senior hires at once. We also chat about strategies for identifying / removing barriers that are getting in the way of your eng team’s success, making / communicating meaningful decisions, identifying inefficiencies that come up within cross-functional relationships, and frameworks for turning communication from your org’s greatest area of inefficiency to an asset. ABOUT JAMIE TISCHART Jamie Tischart serves as the Chief Technology Officer, where he is responsible for the broader technology strategy of the business as well as the day-to-day leadership of development, quality and architecture teams for the BetterCloud product suite. Jamie brings nearly three decades of experience leading technology and product teams through periods of rapid growth and product transformation. Most recently, he served as GM and VP, Software Engineering of the Marketing & Growth BU at Twilio where he was responsible for defining the product and technical strategy while focusing on the customer experience and driving highly reliable solutions for Twilio’s customers. Previously, Tischart was VP, Technical Operations at SendGrid where he led the company’s Global Data Center and DevOps strategies across the business. Prior to that, he served as CTO of the Security-as-a-Service business at McAfee where he led the creation of Intel Security's future generation Cloud solutions. He has also held leadership roles at a number of other prominent technology companies including Intel. Jamie holds an MBA from Aspen University and B.A from St. Lawrence College. "The biggest value for us is to move purposely and slowly and hear what is going on before we make decisions. The second was, what is the biggest problem that we are coming in to solve? Like why were each of us hired? It came down to, and this was difficult for a couple of the department heads was, 'Look, the biggest problem isn't in your area. I'm sorry. Yes. Let's put together a plan of how do we improve and what do we focus on in your group? But quite frankly, the focus is going to be in this area.' That was difficult for people to accept.” - Jamie Tischart Check out Jellyfish's Scenario Planner to help you accelerate your development! With Jellyfish’s Scenario Planner , you can analyze tradeoffs, and optimize resources - to ensure your highest priority initiatives meet your delivery goals and deadlines! To learn more about how Scenario Planner can help you better accelerate, predict & plan your software delivery 👉 head to jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Strategies for creating efficient orgs & getting the most out of your eng team (3:00) How the “refine, remove, reduce” framework plays out in Bettercloud (5:41) Balancing involving the right people & achieving an efficient outcome (8:06) Most beneficial structures for enabling your eng team to be high impact (10:04) Jamie’s framework for self-assessing inefficiencies (12:26) Inviting new hires to share their perspectives right away (15:42) Neuro-leadership principles to help remove barriers for eng teams (18:16) Practices for better assessing what’s getting in the way of eng teams (22:20) Identifying inefficiencies that come up between cross-functional relationships (25:37) Why coordination is key when bringing on new senior eng leaders (27:45) Jamie’s approach to making & communicating meaningful decisions (30:08) Navigating the balance between onboarding & executing defined priorities (33:28) Define your team’s core principles early on together (36:13) Strategy for mapping out your org’s changes (38:08) Practices that changed Jamie as a leader & he still leverages today (40:50) Why communication can be an eng org’s greatest area of inefficiency (43:42) Rapid fire questions (45:57) LINKS AND RESOURCES Grit - Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed—be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.” The Speed Of Trust - Collaboration is the foundation of the standard of living we enjoy today. Trust is the glue. This is the first book that teaches the ‘whats’ and the ‘hows’ of trust. Gwendy's Button Box - Stephen King teams up with long-time friend and award-winning author Richard Chizmar for the first time in this original, chilling novella that revisits the mysterious town of Castle Rock. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Reduce friction & create better alignment between product & engineering w/ Hubert Palan #149 45:00
Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ Product Board, discusses how to achieve successful collaboration between product and eng teams! He addresses the elements that make up healthy collaboration, common areas of tension between product & eng, and steps for aligning the teams on product vision, tooling, and processes. We also cover strategies for engineering leaders who want to contribute more to their business’s product vision, facilitation frameworks to improve communication between product management & eng teams, and how to best advocate for engineering’s most important considerations. ABOUT HUBERT PALAN Hubert Palan is Founder and CEO of Productboard. Driven by a passion for building truly excellent products, he started the company when he saw a hole in the market for a dedicated product management platform. Before Productboard, Hubert was VP of Product Management at GoodData and a management consultant at Accenture. Hubert mentors and advises startups and judges teams at entrepreneurship competitions and frequently speaks at his two alma maters – UC Berkeley, where he got his MBA, and the Czech Technical University, where he received an MSc. in Computer Science. "When the engineering partner would come to the conversation talking about how other products that are successful have approached that and what choices they made, as opposed to just talking about the technology in the abstract, the business aspect of it, how it helped drive business results for other companies that are in similar markets or adjacent spaces, t hat's something that's super valuable because it shows that you are thinking about the technology, just not for the love of technology, but in the business context and in the appreciation of how the technology decisions drive the business outcomes.” - Hubert Palan Check out Jellyfish's Scenario Planner to help you accelerate your development! With Jellyfish’s Scenario Planner , you can analyze tradeoffs, and optimize resources - to ensure your highest priority initiatives meet your delivery goals and deadlines! To learn more about how Scenario Planner can help you better accelerate, predict & plan your software delivery 👉 head to jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Elements that contribute to successful collaboration between product & eng (2:34) Tools for understanding customer demographics & behavior (4:50) Greatest areas of friction between engineering and product (8:11) How to determine who is driving what initiative (11:03) Tactics for splitting responsibilities between EMs, PMs, tech leads, etc. (13:03) Hubert’s favorite tooling techniques (15:39) Strategies for aligning eng & product management processes (17:51) Frameworks for developing product vision & breaking it down into steps (19:27) Solving friction points between existing & new customers (23:16) How eng leaders can get involved with the product vision side of the business (24:28) Handling conflicting priorities & misalignment between teams (27:42) Tips for successful communication between product & eng (29:16) Advocate for engineering’s most important considerations (31:32) Specific conversations for facilitating communication between eng & PM teams (34:32) Steps to ensure engineers are involved in defining product vision / strategy (37:27) Rapid fire questions (40:55) LINKS AND RESOURCES Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity - In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Operating in a high-stakes, high-scale environment & implementing “secure by design” w/ Bhawna Singh #148 41:42
In this episode, Bhawna Singh, CTO @ Okta, deconstructs lessons learned from her experience operating in a high-stakes, high-scale environment. She shares strategies for re-architecting your product roadmap, collaborating with customers, first setting up guardrails while scaling, and communicating throughout the prioritization conversation process. We also cover the important principle of “secure by design” & how that process is implemented successfully at Okta. We cover challenges faced & lessons learned from the secure by design application & high-stakes scaling process. ABOUT BHAWNA SINGH Bhawna Singh is a senior technology executive with 20+ years of experience in successfully transforming products and scaling technology for a global user base. In her career as an executive leader, advisory board member, and investor, Bhawna has worked across multiple high-growth companies to grow & scale platforms from 0 to 100+ million monthly users, led global expansion of products, steered multiple acquisitions and spearheaded innovation to drive user growth and engagement, delivering multi-million dollar revenue growth. As CTO at Okta, Bhawna leads tech strategy and vision for its Customer Identity product. Bhawna frequently connects with senior executives of Okta’s global customer base, to build deep trust by delivering highly scalable, stable, and secure products serving billions of logins per month. Bhawna sits on the Advisory board of early-stage startups and VC groups. Bhawna’s deep expertise in the area of high-growth, enterprise SaaS, and cybersecurity is frequently published in the press and podcasts. Okta's annual in-person and online gathering Oktane kicks off on 10/3! Oktane discusses the latest innovations in authentication and authorization and reveals new products. Online tickets are FREE - check it out here https://www.okta.com/oktane/ "Plan for 10x and build for 3x, which is, ‘Think big, but build for what is needed.’ As you know, many of the AI companies saw a big, big growth in their space and the space we operate in, we are offering them the logging capability. So we sit at the front door of their business, you can say, which means we have to scale faster than them so that we are never a blocker and this time it wasn't plan for 10x and build for 3x. It was build for 10x right away and with absolute urgency.” - Bhawna Singh Check out Jellyfish's Scenario Planner to help you accelerate your development! With Jellyfish’s Scenario Planner , you can analyze tradeoffs, and optimize resources - to ensure your highest priority initiatives meet your delivery goals and deadlines! To learn more about how Scenario Planner can help you better accelerate, predict & plan your software delivery 👉 head to jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Bhawna’s experience shifting to a high-scale focus @ Okta (2:01) What it was like adjusting priorities & rearchitecting (6:08) Strategies for collaborating with customers in shaping a product roadmap (9:30) Challenges faced when making the shift for scale (11:54) Factors that contribute to building trust & respect with peers (13:47) Bhawna’s approach to prioritization conversations with stakeholders (16:06) Ensuring the right guardrails are in place while scaling (20:29) How Okta’s balanced portfolio & engineering radar guardrails works (22:15) Frameworks for first setting up / building a guardrail within an org (24:48) Defining the “secure by design” principle & how it’s applied @ Okta (27:15) Challenges of implementing a secure by design process (30:28) How to gain buy-in / universal adoption of a new process (31:44) The role of security leaders working directly w/ customers (35:18) Rapid fire questions (37:56) LINKS AND RESOURCES The 6 Types of Working Genius - New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni unveils a truly groundbreaking new model that will change the way we think about work and teams forever. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, Ritu Bhargava, Chief Product Officer, CX/CRM @ SAP, joins us to discuss collaboration, relationship building, and navigating conflicts in large-scale organizations with competing priorities. We cover Ritu’s philosophy regarding building bridges between people, how to gain buy-in toward your priorities, unlocking support from fellow exec leaders, and how to address conflicts & competing interests across a massive org. Ritu also shares her strategies for minimizing ego & generating curiosity as an eng leader, her most valuable prioritization tool & how it works for SAP, and identifying / managing conflicts before they become an issue. ABOUT RITU BHARGAVA Ritu Bhargava ( @ritubhargava ) is the Chief Product Officer of SAP Customer Experience (CX). In her role, she heads product, engineering, user experience, strategy, and operations for the entire CX portfolio and recently has been appointed to the Qualtrics Board of Directors. Before joining SAP at the end of 2021, Ritu held various technology leadership positions and most recently came from Salesforce as the Senior Vice President of Engineering for Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s flagship product suite. Having started her career as an SAP developer, Ritu went on to work at Oracle for ten years and was responsible for financial applications in various roles. With extensive experience in enterprise applications and the CX space, Ritu brings a strong market focus, both from a business and engineering perspective. Ritu holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, and an M.B.A. in Finance and IT from the University of Lincolnshire, U.K. She recently joined the Qualtrics Board of Directors and co-chairs the West Coast Advisory Board for Asian University for Women. AUW is a Bangladesh-based nonprofit dedicated to women’s education and leadership development. She also enjoys supporting cricketing initiatives in America, having played on the U.S.A. Women’s Cricket team. "If we were to rely purely on just having to re-org for every business requirement that we need to deliver to or a customer need that we need to execute to, we would endlessly be re-orging and it's just not possible, which means that we have to and we must operate in matrix words, which also then further means that we have to be okay with working with each other in a way that is not just, 'Hey, if I don't report to you or you're not on my team is only when I will make you successful.' - Ritu Bhargava Check out Jellyfish's Scenario Planner to help you accelerate your development! With Jellyfish’s Scenario Planner , you can analyze tradeoffs, and optimize resources - to ensure your highest priority initiatives meet your delivery goals and deadlines! To learn more about how Scenario Planner can help you better accelerate, predict & plan your software delivery 👉 head to jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: How to maximize time & attention of senior leaders at massive scale (2:13) Tactics for building bridges across a large-scale organization (4:52) Gaining buy-in toward prioritizing dependencies over feature work (7:23) How to unlock greater support / influence from another exec leader (9:01) Frameworks for better communicating intentions & removing misconceptions (12:05) Strategies for approaching progress updates in a massive scope (14:14) Cultivate positive relationships with peers by navigating conflicts (17:08) Acting with compromise & humility while working toward a shared goal (18:55) Questions to ask to minimize ego & generate curiosity around learning (20:46) Examples of navigating conflicting priorities within a large-scale org (21:55) Ritu’s prioritization tool: vision, values, themes, and KPIs (23:41) How to address conflicts between cross-functional partners (26:06) Tips for managing conflicts before they happen (28:38) Why you should identify how much time to invest in a decision (31:35) Rapid fire questions (34:04) LINKS AND RESOURCES Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. The Light We Carry - There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with readers, considering the questions many of us wrestle with. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This episode features all things security with our guest, Laura Bell Main, CEO & Founder @ SafeStack. She shares valuable strategies for building your security team & tool stack. We cover why security is a human problem based on human motivations, prioritization conversations for assessing risks, considerations for early-stage security teams, how behavior change & decision making impact security, and considerations for companies in the “messy middle” phase. Laura also addresses communicating about security in terms of tech debt, recommendations for incorporating security monitoring tools, how to measure those tools’ ROI, and more. ABOUT LAURA BELL MAIN With over twenty years of experience in software development and information security, Laura Bell Main ( @lady_nerd ) specialises in bringing security into organisations of every shape and size. She is the co-founder and CEO of SafeStack, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused secure development training for fast-moving companies, with a focus on building security skills, practices, and culture across the entire engineering team. Laura is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone. "The most important thing that we forget to tell folks when they're starting out in security is most of our tooling is about being more effective and efficient. It's not about doing something you can't do yourself. Security isn't about a magic box. I wish it was, it would be a lot easier if we could just buy a magic box. Done! Off we go to the beach, but what we have is a really human problem.” - Laura Bell Main Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical proven strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: What to do about security if you don’t already have a security team (2:28) Security as a “human problem” in the scope of eng orgs (4:58) Why you need to understand human motivations (7:21) Prioritization frameworks & chaos engineering for assessing threats (9:14) Considerations for the early stages of forming a security org (11:47) Understanding security through a behavior change model (14:57) How to operationalize a security mindset within a software team (18:00) Examples of how decisions can flag security risks (20:50) Approaches for tracking & managing security as tech debt (23:20) Addressing security considerations as a “messy” middle-stage company (27:17) High friction aspects of security behavior change for eng orgs (30:51) Tips for knowing if you have the right security tool (34:41) How to evaluate the ROI of tools you’re considering (38:06) Methods for incorporating security monitoring into your current tool stack (39:32) Rapid fire questions (42:45) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Body Keeps The Score - The inspiring story of how a group of therapists and scientists— together with their courageous and memorable patients—has struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past. Open source checklist for high-growth CTOs This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, Jessica McKellar, CTO & Founder @ Pilot, shares her story as a serial founder and the lessons that can help you become a more impactful, strategic business contributor & eng leader. She reveals strategies for identifying your company’s ideal end state & the steps needed to achieve product-market fit, daily practices that help measure important metrics, business-building disciplines that need to be prioritized long term, and steps for creating positive collaboration between product, eng & design teams. For more episodes of Engineering Founders, subscribe here: https://engineering-founders.simplecast.com/ ABOUT JESSICA MCKELLAR Jessica McKellar ( @jessicamckellar ) is a repeat founder and the CTO of fintech unicorn Pilot, an accounting firm powered by software. Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for Zulip, a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle. Jessica is a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award. Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration. "You need to be able to think about the business in a way where you have ideas that inflect the business. What is a gap in the product that needs to be addressed? What's an idea for a way to achieve a step function improvement in margin? How can we save the company money that it is spending via an engineering investment? - Jessica McKellar Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Jessica’s founder story @ Pilot (3:26) How founding Pilot is different from past experiences w/ Zulip & Ksplice (4:29) The story behind Pilot’s “power team” of founders (7:06) Distinctions between Jessica’s focus as CTO / founder & eng roles (11:36) How eng functions can help the exec team hit important metrics (14:40) Daily actions that help optimize & monitor metrics like margin (16:33) Frameworks for identifying business trajectory (19:46) What parts of business-building discipline need to be prioritized long-term (21:29) Use market fit & size of market to determine your company’s goal end state (22:48) Past lessons the founding team applied while starting Pilot (24:45) Things Jessica thinks she & her co-founders do right (25:23) Recommendations for exploring potential paths & aligning on the final decision (29:20) Steps for becoming a more impactful, strategic business contributor (30:55) How eng leaders can identify ideal end state & achieve product-market fit (35:15) Create collaboration between product, eng & design teams (37:28) Rapid fire questions (37:09) LINKS AND RESOURCES Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff - This weekly podcast dives into history to drag up the wildest rebels, the most beautiful revolts, and all the people who long to be—and fight to be—free. It explores complex stories of resistance that offer lessons and inspiration for us today, focusing on the ensemble casts that make up each act of history. And Away… - Bob Mortimer’s life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away… This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Alamelu Radhakrishnan reveals her best frameworks for making great decisions quickly without fear in one of our favorite ELC Annual sessions last year. She covers her threefold approach to knowing when to make a decision, pitfalls & anti-patterns to avoid throughout the decision-making process, and strategies for delegating and avoiding decision fatigue, all while working around fear of failure & empowering other decision-makers to act with confidence. Alamelu also shares some interesting decision-making concepts including first principles, the 40% to 70% guide, and more. Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023 ABOUT ALAMELU RADHAKRISHNAN Alamelu is a technology leader, operator, and advisor with experience at scale and in high-growth environments across eCommerce, energy, and professional services. She's excited to start her next chapter with Homebase as VP, Engineering leading Product Delivery, helping small and medium businesses maximize their potential. Previously, she was Chief of Staff to the CTO at Shopify, supporting the Engineering organization, leading the teams responsible for building the systems, technology, and technical programs that power Shopify. Prior to Shopify, Alamelu has worked with some of Canada’s most innovative product and consulting agencies, leading engineering and delivery teams and helping organizations leverage technology to create maximum impact. Alamelu finds joy in solving business problems through technology, strives for organizational excellence, and is passionate about supporting and sponsoring underrepresented folks in the industry. Alamelu lives in Toronto, and loves food, travel, the outdoors, and horror movies. "Any decision you make is better than not making a decision. Most of the decisions that we make in our job are reversible decisions, but the time that we lose by not making a decision is irreversible. The opportunity cost of that time, you're never gonna get that back.” - Alamelu Radhakrishnan Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical proven strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Introducing Alamelu @ Shopify (2:54) Why we make decisions as eng leaders (4:11) Understand your top priority & its influence on decision-making (11:05) Common pitfalls & anti-patterns to avoid in the decision-making process (12:28) Tips for making a successful decision stick (16:20) Avoiding decision fatigue & learning to delegate when possible (19:51) Decision-making, autonomy, & navigating fear of failure (22:41) Audience Q&A: decision-making artifacts & organizational aspects (25:39) When your gut feeling contradicts your framework / decision (28:39) Examples of Alamelu’s first principles concept (30:15) Approach for knowing if you’re not delegating enough (31:49) Decision-making in remote environments (33:20) How to delegate without being perceived as disengaged (34:54) The “40% to 70%” guide & knowing when to make a decision (36:40) Alignment vs. consensus (37:32) Techniques for gaining team / individual buy-in (39:59) When you’re on the receiving end of an overly abstracted problem (41:30) Strategies for empowering decision-makers as an eng leader (43:31) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Community insights from our Pop-Up Podcast Booth at ELC Annual! #129 1:31:00
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1:31:00Welcome to the ELC Annual Pop-Up Podcast Booth! This episode features behind-the-scenes conversations of engineering leaders who joined us at ELC Annual last October. These community members jumped into our recording studio to share their best strategies for good communication and providing critical feedback; using OKRs to realign your org; lessons learned from early leadership days; balancing speed vs. quality within your eng team; how technology shifts / bets impact your org; challenges with rapidly changing workspaces between remote, in-person & hybrid; creating a culture of pride & celebrating wins; and combining empathy with the best engineering qualities to determine what you really want. Our featured guests include: Nate Lee, CISO @ Tradeshift Gaurav Nigam, VP of Engineering @ WorkBoard Cynthia Tham, VP of Engineering @ GMG Americas Mitchell Arnett, Engineering Manager @ Life360 Jeremy Eastwood (Head of Eng @ Drone Deploy) & Dobromir Montauk (VP of Engineering @ Doxel.AI ) Lizzie Masutov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Quotient Shweta Saraf, Director of Platform Engineering @ Netflix Wen Hsu, Founder & CEO at Wen Coaching Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco To get early access to tickets - email us at annual@sfelc.com Join Jellyfish's GLOW conference on 5/16 & 5/17 to maximize engineering impact! Learn from industry experts, connect and share challenges with peers as you learn effective strategies to expand your leadership! Register now at https://www.jellyfishglowsummit.com/ SHOW NOTES: Why Nate Lee @ Tradeshift believes good communication is critical as an eng leader (7:06) Know your audience, meet them where they’re at & learn to communicate up (8:44) Strategies for delivering critical feedback (11:00) Gaurav Nigam @ WorkBoard: how OKRs can be used to resync your org (14:35) Tips for first-timers establishing realistic OKRs (17:56) Things Cynthia Tham @ GBG Americas wishes she knew when she started her eng leadership journey (20:21) Identifying & maintaining consistent behaviors as an eng leader (22:58) Mitchell Arnett @ Life360 discusses speed vs. quality (25:19) Components that lead to a culture of success around speed & quality (29:01) Jeremy Eastwood @ Drone Deploy & Dobromir Montauk @ Doxel.AI on how tech shifts impact eng orgs (32:41) Jeremy & Dobromir’s predictions for the next technology curve (37:14) Commit to change & don’t go in half-heartedly (39:55) How to navigate hybrid & remote work challenges w/ Lizzie Matusov @ Quotient (48:11) Lizzie’s advice for returning to in-person networking (50:42) Practices for navigating shifting work environments between remote, hybrid & in-person (53:07) Lizzie’s vision for successfully integrating teams & developing a sense of belonging (56:23) Tips for starting conversations around belonging within eng teams (1:02:10) Shweta Saraf @ Netflix reveals how her org has built a culture of celebration (1:04:11) Tips for building moments of self-recognition as an eng leader (1:08:11) Strategies for establishing goals & providing clarity (1:10:59) Create a safe space for experimentation (1:16:57) Wen Hsu on the most important question you can ask yourself (1:19:26) Recommendations for taking steps toward what you really want (1:22:33) How to prioritize making time to move toward your “north star” (1:25:13) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Sandeep Chennakeshu, Chief Operating Officer @ Uhnder Inc., joins us to discuss how eng leaders can adopt a GM mindset & strategies for building a resilient business. The author of Your Company Is Your Castle, Sandeep also reveals the key structural elements of all successful businesses, methods to improve your business’s financial fitness / cash flow, how to overcome operational inefficiencies, why strong decision-making matters when it comes to saving money, and much more. ABOUT SANDEEP CHENNAKESHU Sandeep has spent thirty-four years in three industries and led teams across the globe that pioneered amazing products in wireless (2G, 3G, 4G mobile phones, Bluetooth, Mobile-Satellite technology), semiconductors for consumer, automotive, and medical electronics, and safety-critical software for cars, medical equipment, nuclear power plants, high-speed rail, and industrial robots. Along the way, he transformed companies to grow profitably in a sustained manner using the principles outlined in his book “Your Company Is Your Castle”. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a named inventor on 180 issued patents. "The single metric that I use to say, 'Am I doing well?' Because how do I know that the cash I'm generating is a good or bad? I use a very simple metric. If you take the enterprise value and you multiply it by the cost of borrowing money, your free cash flow must be higher than that product. When I'm doing better than that metric, then I know that I have a future.” - Sandeep Chennakeshu Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Sandeep’s most significant career milestones (2:23) Why there is no difference between an eng leader & GM (6:39) Sandeep’s passion for & background of transforming business (9:18) Key structural elements of successful companies (12:17) How a successful business resembles a castle (13:59) Strategies to improve financial fitness & generate cash flow (15:17) Metrics to determine how well you’re optimizing your cash flow (17:54) Examples of how strong decision-making led to cost savings (19:45) Frameworks for overcoming operational inefficiencies (22:12) Sandeep’s tips for categorizing / prioritizing where the cashflow’s impact hits (24:21) Why it’s important to stay ahead of the “gorilla in the room” (26:33) Resilient business models utilize stickiness & have high operating leverage (28:23) Questions eng leaders can ask to adopt a more effective GM mindset (33:30) Rapid fire questions (36:02) LINKS AND RESOURCES Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In : This worldwide bestseller by William Ury provides a concise, step-by-step, proven strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Navigating the Acquisition Journey: Insights on Transparent Communication, Team Integration, and Strategic / Operational Shifts w/ Johnny Ray Austin #127 47:10
Johnny Ray Austin, Head of Technology, Flexible Rent @ Best Egg, joins us to discuss Best Egg’s recent acquisition of Till and some of the strategic & operational shifts that happen post-acquisition. He shares reflections on integrating the team within the new company, communicating both within the leadership team and within the overall team, how product launch / development changes throughout the acquisition process, shifts in the org’s distribution model & its impact on eng functions, and what it’s like relearning your role in the scope of an acquisition. Additionally, Johnny reveals some of his greatest paradigm shifts throughout this period & how the acquisition is better supporting the flexible rent model. ABOUT JOHNNY RAY AUSTIN Johnny ( @recursivefunk ) is an experienced award-winning engineering executive focused on shipping world-class products while building high-performing engineering teams. He is also an international public speaker, speaking on engineering leadership, system design, and the JavaScript programming language. Johnny is the former Chief Technology Officer for Till, a company that built financial products to help renters pay, stay and thrive in their homes. After Best Egg acquired Till in late 2022, he transitioned to Best Egg's Head of Technology for Flexible Rent, where he continues to scale the flexible rent platform to service millions of units. "At the time, we were thinking about raising money and also in acquisition and we didn't really know exactly which route we were gonna go down. We shared that with the team. You know, we said, 'Hey, this is path number one. This is path two. Path three is a shutdown.' We were very open in talking about, 'This is a path. It's very unlikely, but this is a thing that could happen.' And so we chose transparency from the very beginning because one, we thought it was the right thing to do. Two, we knew the team could handle it, and three, it was really just one of those things where it was gonna make the process easier." - Johnny Ray Austin Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Johnny’s pop culture reflections & tips for protecting your energy (2:42) An inside look at Best Egg’s recent acquisition of Till (6:42) What it’s been like post-acquisition to integrate the team (10:12) How leadership communicated with their team throughout the acquisition (12:25) Lessons learned about communicating during early exploratory phase (15:54) Strategies for minimizing distractions resulting from uncertainty (18:08) Helpful conversations to host between leadership for effective coordination (19:18) Questions to help gain personal alignment (21:03) How product launch / development changed mid- and post-acquisition (23:11) Introducing a new methodology to the team (26:14) The new distribution model & its impact on eng functions (28:46) Differences between BNPL & Best Egg’s rent payment model (31:31) What it’s been like for Johnny to relearn his role as part of a broader eng org (34:56) Frameworks for navigating new dependencies (37:05) Johnny’s paradigm shift around planning for scale (39:21) Rapid fire questions (41:50) LINKS AND RESOURCES Dark Money: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right - Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump’s victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system. Snowfall - Over the course of five seasons, FX’s Snowfall has chronicled how an off-the-books CIA operation contributed to the destruction rock cocaine leveled upon the vibrant community of South Central L.A. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Eng Founder’s Takeover: Navigating the new fundraising environment, idea-mazing and overcoming pattern-matching bias w/ Lizzie Matusov #126 50:37
This is a special episode from our new show “Engineering Founders” - Lizzie Matusov, CEO & Co-Founder @ Quotient, shares her unique founder journey – from Harvard’s dual-degree grad program & Innovation Lab to founding Quotient! She also reveals strategies for fundraising, including utilizing your relationship pipeline, incorporating story arcs into your pitch, overcoming pattern-matching bias, and how fundraising today is different than it used to be. We also cover Quotient’s major pivots, tips for not becoming too attached to your first idea & making space for new ideas, defining idea-mazing & its impact on your product, and developing clarity as a founder. For more episodes of Engineering Founders, subscribe here: https://engineering-founders.simplecast.com/ ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV Lizzie Matusov ( @lizziematusov ) is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient - a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. Quotient’s mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures. Previously, Lizzie built software to improve access to medical-grade genetic testing at Invitae. She was also a software engineering consultant at Red Hat, where she built software applications for companies across various industries, including fintech and biotech. She holds a bachelor of science from UCLA, and an MBA and Masters of Engineering Sciences from Harvard. "Let's say in a four-month period, you check in with investors or founders that you're working with two or three times. Now what they have is not just one call to base their opinion on, but an entire story arc that they can use to say, 'All right, in August they were doing this and by October they already did this, and then by December they were here. I'm now seeing sort of a preview of what I'm backing.' I think that that really helps founders sort of help investors make decisions, right? You are de-risking for them, you are sharing more of the milestones as you're doing them.” - Lizzie Matusov ABOUT QUOTIENT Quotient is a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Their mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures. Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. With Quotient you can build and deliver a high-quality, research-backed onboarding experience, and get data-driven insights into how your team changes and grows together. Check out Quotient and join the waitlist HERE - https://www.getquotient.com/waitlist Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com Check Out Engineering Founders! We cover the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former engineering leaders turned founders - that helped them take the earliest steps to launch! You can find it wherever you get your podcasts - Spotify / Apple / Google / Web SHOW NOTES: The backstory behind Quotient (3:01) Why the atomic unit is the team, not the individual & how that impacts Quotient (4:03) Lizzie’s leadership journey before Quotient (5:25) Why Lizzie chose Harvard’s dual-degree grad program as part of her founder’s journey (8:43) How Harvard’s program helped Lizzie accelerate founding Quotient (12:43) The community aspect of entrepreneurship & Harvard’s Innovation Lab (15:48) Lizzie’s favorite grad school hacks (17:58) Frameworks behind Quotient’s key pivots (20:12) How Quotient pivoted to better support companies & the onboarding process (23:02) Tips for making space for new ideas (25:59) Defining idea-mazing & how it impacts your product / solution (28:13) Where Quotient is in terms of fundraising (31:02) How assumptions & expectations around fundraising have changed (32:43) Collect data points that show your ability to execute, lead, & grow (34:06) Strategies to help overcome pattern matching bias (36:09) How Lizzie utilized story arcs while fundraising for Quotient (38:32) Why clarity as a founder is vital & frameworks for developing clarity (41:05) The renaming process & unveiling the new name “Quotient” (44:52) Rapid fire questions (46:38) LINKS AND RESOURCES Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts’ novel following an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis documents the real story of the crash that began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking. The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers’ novel following a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Maximizing R&D spend, engineering efficiency & the journey from eng to operations w/ Madalina Tanasie #125 41:17
Madalina Tanasie joins us to share her unique leadership journey as she transitioned from eng to operations, then back to her current technical role as CTO @ Collibra. We also cover strategies to improve engineering efficiency within your organization, factors to consider when scaling eng teams, maximizing your ROI when it comes to R&D, dispelling concerns when implementing culture changes, frameworks for scaling up, and more. ABOUT MADALINA TANASIE Madalina Tanasie is the Chief Technology Officer and an Executive Committee member at Collibra, where she oversees and leads the Software Engineering, Architecture, Production Engineering, Test Engineering, and Security activities. Madalina has over 18 years of software engineering leadership experience and her expertise is in service-oriented architecture, cloud-native distributed systems, and product operations with a focus on engineering practices, scale, and operational excellence. Prior to joining Collibra in 2020, she was the Engineering VP for Medidata Solutions’ Unified Platform Organization, an organization she built from the ground up and led since 2010. She has been recognized as one of the Top 25 Software CTOs of 2023 by The Software Report. Additionally, she is a proud sponsor of Collibra’s Women in Technology, and an active member of CHIEF, a network focused on connecting and supporting women executive leaders. Ms. Tanasie earned her BS and Master’s in Computer Science at Polytechnics University of Bucharest. "The reality is that they need process and structure to eliminate the noise and to create a space for solving really, really deep challenging problems. They actually want the process for the part that is mundane and boring and disruptive. So as they discuss about what's making their life harder than it needs to be, we are coming back to a lack of process, a lack of uniformity, a lack of clear communication channels between themselves or between other departments.” - Madalina Tanasie Check out QA Wolf ! Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping! Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Madalina’s unexpected career journey, beginning @ Medidata (2:13) How Madalina transitioned from engineering into operations @ Collibra (4:57) Qualities that make Collibra’s culture stand out (5:46) What opportunities stood out when Madalina was evaluating the Collibra role (7:35) Four considerations to keep in mind when scaling eng teams (9:07) The Spotify model vs. Agile model & what worked for Collibra (15:19) Challenges to adopting new management models (19:18) Strategies for navigating people’s expectations (20:58) Insights gained from Madalina’s “listening tour” (23:20) Frameworks for addressing concerns around culture while scaling (25:04) Madalina’s perspectives on improving engineering efficiency (26:51) The right balance between cost of ownership and R&D (30:07) Collibra’s new product introduction process & its impact on R&D (31:28) Questions to help guide teams throughout the new framework (33:11) Rapid fire questions (34:22) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Navigating Multi-Product Expansion: Leadership & Career Insights from Figma’s CTO, Kris Rasmussen #124 43:14
We cover making intentional career shifts and leadership challenges navigating multi-product expansion with Kris Rasmussen, CTO @ Figma. He shares his experience transitioning from contractor work with Figma to a full-time role & the benefits of joining an eng org during its early stages. We also address Figma’s transition from a one-product company to a two-product company, Kris’s process for determining the eng org’s core areas of focus, challenges faced when becoming a multi-product org, frameworks for determining solutions to challenging projects, and lessons learned around releasing products with heavy collaboration. ABOUT KRIS RASMUSSEN Kris Rasmussen is the Chief Technology Officer at Figma, where he leads the engineering, security, and data science teams. Prior to joining Figma in 2017, Kris served as engineering lead and a technical advisor at Asana, where he co-authored many aspects of the framework and infrastructure that powers the company's real-time collaborative features. Before Asana, Kris co-founded RivalSoft Inc., a web-based application that gives companies an internal hub for market information and served as Chief Architect at Aptana. "One of the things that's helped me is just really kind of focusing on the outcome that I'm trying to create and trying to think about the most effective way to do that. All of us want to feel respected. We want to feel valued. We want to feel heard, but at the end of the day, we also want to create something that's greater than ourselves. We want to work on something that kind of outlives us and if you really want to do that, it doesn't really matter whose idea it was or who said what. All that really matters is that you come to the right solution as a group.” - Kris Rasmussen Check out QA Wolf ! Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping! Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Kris’s backstory with Figma & transitioning from contractor to CTO (1:02) What factors validated Kris’s decision to join Figma full-time (4:50) Leveraging the benefits of joining an eng org during its early stages (7:27) Figma’s recent milestone shifts & how Kris’s responsibilities changed in response (9:09) Transitioning from a one-product company to a two-product company (12:15) Kris’s process for identifying the most important problems (13:57) Strategies for determining core areas of focus (17:09) Knowing when to shift to become multi-product (19:12) How processes / org structure shifted in response to Figma’s second product (21:59) Defining Figma’s vertical product-related org structures (23:22) Challenges faced when getting to the multi-product moment (24:44) Frameworks for determining when an idea is validated enough to staff it (29:57) Kris’s process for determining a solution to a challenging R&D project (31:52) Lessons learned around releasing highly collaborative products (36:06) Strategies for letting go of your ego (39:46) Rapid fire questions (40:47) LINKS AND RESOURCES On Writing Well - On Writing Well , which grew out of a course that William Zinsser taught at Yale, has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity, and for the warmth of its style. It is a book for anybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Rippling's Response to the SVB Collapse: A Story of Leadership, Crisis Management, Clarity and Communication w/ Albert Strasheim #123 45:11
Albert Strasheim, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Rippling, joins us to share the riveting story of how Rippling’s leadership navigated the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. He reveals what was at stake for his company & the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for customers & their employees, how Rippling’s core values influenced their critical decision-making, tips for communicating with clarity both internally & externally, and tactics that allowed the team to respond with precision during crisis. Additionally, Albert shares the pre-crisis strategies, habits & systems he is most thankful for that helped Rippling leadership respond successfully throughout this critical period. ABOUT ALBERT STRASHEIM Albert Strasheim is Rippling's CTO and SVP, Engineering. Albert leads the global engineering team as it continues to expand the capabilities of Rippling’s products and the platform itself. Prior to Rippling, Albert served as VP of Engineering at Segment, where he spent more than five years building and leading the infrastructure and product teams responsible for creating Segment’s market-leading Customer Data Platform product. He was born and raised in South Africa and earned a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Engineering from Stellenbosch University. Albert lives in the Bay Area and is an avid skier and surfer. "I think we had about $130 million on the way to employees of our clients. This was more than 50,000 people. They are not like rich Silicon Valley tech workers. It's everyday Americans making less than $55,000 a year. Some of them are living paycheck to paycheck and so missing a paycheck can have devastating consequences. We had to move really quickly to make sure these folks got paid. Basically, no matter what happened with SVB, those were the stakes. It's like people that critically needed money just wouldn't get it otherwise.” - Albert Strasheim Check out QA Wolf ! Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping! Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: How Albert’s team @ Rippling responded to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse (2:56) Rippling’s SVB story & how payroll was impacted by its collapse (6:24) Identifying who was needed to coordinate Rippling’s response / decision making (9:49) Albert discusses the millions of dollars of payroll at stake on Thursday (11:47) How the SVB issue progressed into Thursday / Friday (13:07) Communicating with customers during crisis & how Rippling ultimately made the payments (15:47) Tactics that allow eng teams to respond with precision during crisis (19:57) How leadership determined the right step in the right order to achieve the intended outcome (21:56) Communicating context on how to think about a problem (23:21) What the weekend looked like & the half a billion dollars of payroll at stake (24:39) Internal communication systems that lead to Rippling’s success (26:34) Tips for communicating with absolute clarity (28:40) Albert’s SVB story: picking back up on Sunday going into the week (31:24) Implementing an external communication strategy (33:07) Pre-crisis habits & leadership systems that played a significant role in successfully navigating this issue (35:12) Reflecting on the impact of this effort externally & internally one week out (38:17) Rapid fire questions (40:27) LINKS AND RESOURCES Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building - Scaling People is a practical and empathetic guide to company building and scaling the most important resource a company has: its people. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience as a Google and Stripe executive, Claire Hughes Johnson offers actionable insights and tactical guidance on everything from crafting foundational documents to hiring and team development to feedback and performance mechanisms. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management - Will Larson’s explores the specific challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to developing succession planning—and provides a guide to solving complex managerial problems. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Shailesh Kumar, Sr. Vice President of Engineering @ ClickUp, joins us to share his insights on scaling eng orgs efficiently & cost-effectively. He reveals his strategies for gaining customer insights, identifying areas to invest in, navigating cloud cost efficiency, and optimizing your software & performing a software audit. Additionally, we cover approaches to balancing headcount & team efficiency, creating clarity around a problem, increasing the net output of your eng org, identifying where / when to add headcount, and making your EPD flywheel run smoothly. ABOUT SHAILESH KUMAR Shailesh Kumar is the Sr. Vice President of Engineering at ClickUp, leading the Engineering, Security, and IT operations for the company. He has more than 18 years of experience in building large-scale organizations and cloud platforms for high-growth enterprise companies, including his role as VP of Engineering at Mulesoft (and Salesforce post-acquisition) and Head of Data Platform and Server teams at Tableau. "You have to force yourself in having a discipline of asking the hard questions about all those ideas. What's the impact? What's the revenue goals? What's the target market? How much time are we talking about? The ideas are plenty. There are a lot of great ideas. You have to figure out which great idea is gonna turn into the highest revenue and that's a very hard exercise. I've seen many leaders know that they have to do that, but not do that very diligently and in a very disciplined way.” - Shailesh Kumar Check out QA Wolf ! Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping! Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Shailesh’s paradigm shift regarding scaling / eng org efficiency @ ClickUp (2:32) How Shailesh is navigating ClickUp through the current cost-sensitive market (4:46) Cost-effective areas that eng leaders should consider (6:55) Shailesh’s recent insights on how to better serve customers (8:43) Strategies for identifying areas to invest in & navigating difficult conversations with customers (10:02) Questions to assess challenging areas (16:44) Optimize your software & perform a software audit (18:49) Tips on building teams to optimize engineering efficiency (20:07) How to balance headcount and team efficiency (22:37) Shailesh’s approach to challenges around team efficiency (24:22) Frameworks for creating clarity of a problem / vision & refocusing a team (25:59) What makes an EDP flywheel run smoothly (27:39) Tactics to help increase the net output of your eng org (28:48) Strategies for hiring without losing efficiency & identifying where to add them (30:36) Frameworks Shailesh uses before adding a new function to the eng org (33:32) The story behind building out the TPM function (35:18) Rapid fire questions (38:24) LINKS AND RESOURCES Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity - Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world’s most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity , he shares his leadership approach for the first time. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Kenny Shin, CTO @ Fundrise, joins us to discuss Fundrise’s journey, specialization dilemmas as an early-stage org, why specializing eng functions can help overcome plateaus in the business, plus other insights on operating in highly regulated environments like FinTech. He also reveals another dimension of the product design process – legal / regulators – and shares how regulatory environments impact the eng team’s developmental process. Plus Kenny dishes on Fundrise’s Innovation Fund, its impact on the engineering org, and how they’re re-applying tech in new sectors. ABOUT KENNY SHIN Kenneth J. Shin ( @kennyshin7 ) is Chief Technical Officer of Fundrise, America’s largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment manager. He has served in this role since the company’s inception in March 2012. Fundrise’s mission is to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual investor, one that is simpler, lower cost, more reliable and transparent. They build software that enables the company to develop and manage investments uniquely well-positioned to grow and preserve their clients’ capital in any economic environment. Since launching America’s first online real estate investment platform in 2012, Fundrise has now become the largest direct-to-investor alternatives investment manager with more than 1.6 million active users, more than $3.3 billion worth of equity under management, and $7 billion worth of real estate transacted. From private credit to real estate private equity to growth-stage venture capital, Fundrise offers investors exposure to some of the most prized asset classes in the world. Prior to Fundrise, Kenny has consulted for Fortune 500 clients in financial services and technology, including Fannie Mae, Oracle, Lockheed Martin and Computer Science Corporation. Kenny has also consulted for government clients including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Defense and NATO. Kenny earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. "The entire industry generally has to try to abstract all of that complexity and regulation away from the end user and the companies that do that the best, that's one of their main value propositions. I think it's key to our operations because the opposite of it is you leave that complexity to a few subject matter experts in the organization and they become the bottleneck for everything.” - Kenny Shin Check out QA Wolf ! Looking for a way to increase end-to-end test coverage, speed up your release cycles and reduce bugs from shipping to production? QA Wolf will build, run and maintain your test suite - so that you don't have to. QA Wolf gets you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in 4 months - and keeps you there – So your team can stay focused on shipping! Learn more & schedule a 30 min demo at qawolf.com/elc Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Kenny’s journey co-founding Fundrise (2:37) What Kenny’s early risk assessment looked like (4:58) Advice for young eng talent considering taking a riskier role (8:12) Fundrise’s evolution & key inflection points (9:45) How Fundrise tackled uncertainty during the pandemic’s early days (11:52) Addressing specialization dilemmas as an early-stage org (14:45) Why specializing eng functions helped Fundrise overcome its plateau (16:08) Kenny’s approach to identifying new opportunities around specialization (19:53) Challenges of operating in a constrained space, like Fintech (23:38) Why constrained industries require orgs to abstract away more complexities (25:03) How regulatory environments impact the eng team’s developmental process (26:46) Incorporating legal / regulators into your product design process (29:17) The Innovation Fund & its role within Fundrise’s overall strategy (31:52) Unexpected ways the Innovation Fund is impacting the engineering function (34:04) Rapid fire questions (36:47) LINKS AND RESOURCES Crying in H Mart - In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Resource advocacy, frameworks for saying yes / no, & removing critical points of failure w/ Megan Kacholia #120 46:10
As eng leaders, we’re often strapped for resources – so learning how to advocate for more support is vital. Megan Kacholia, VP of Engineering @ Google, reveals her best strategies when it comes to asking for more resources, removing linchpins / critical points of failure from your eng team, encouraging others to accept changes that will benefit them, knowing when to say “yes” vs. “no” to new responsibilities (and the trade-offs that come with that decision), and navigating challenging situations as a manager. ABOUT MEGAN KACHOLIA Megan Kacholia is a Vice President of Engineering within Google's Core organization. She is a leader in the Cross-Google Engineering (xGE) effort, which is responsible for company-wide technical coordination. Her passion is building effective teams and addressing barriers to help Googlers do their best work. Previously, Megan was and VP in Google’s Research organization, where her team’s work spanned machine learning in research as well as production, including products such as TensorFlow, and prior to that she had a long tenure in Google’s Ads organization, where she ran the serving system for Google’s DisplayAds business. Megan has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UIUC. "At the end of the day, we had to be able to explain it to the team. Right? And I can't go and tell the team and be like, 'Well, the opex costs are too high because you know of this reason with the headcount and this and that and I know so and so told you they love you, but really it didn't mean this thing.' In some ways, those details don't matter, right? What matters is these people are worried that their project's getting shut down. So when it came time to communicate that we actually were gonna shut it down. We have to do an official shutdown because we have to announce it externally. So that means we have to make sure people only have so many weeks to find a new project and all of these things. So the main thing I emphasize when I talked to them wasn't about like, 'Oh, I did all of this work to try and save your project, and I couldn't.' That was irrelevant. It couldn't be saved. The most important thing was about what's the impact for the people? Well, I've already lined up options and positions for every single one.” - Megan Kacholia Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Join us for one of our in-person community events! That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys. Don't see your city on the list? No problem! Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen! TO GET INVOLVED, EMAIL OUR HEAD OF COMMUNITY TIM AT TIM@SFELC.COM SHOW NOTES: How Megan advocated for more resources / support at Google (3:07) Convincing direct reports to accept changes & understand benefits (6:07) Insights on how to drive change within your eng team (10:20) Balancing accuracy & simplicity when communicating with your team (12:29) Frameworks for saying “yes” vs. “no” to new responsibilities (16:41) What to do when the decision to say “yes” or “no” isn’t clear (19:46) Having the confidence to say “no” (20:53) Find ways to give your team control within the given situation (24:38) The hardest situations to say “no” to as an eng leader (25:54) Megan’s approach to managing people with more experience than you (28:57) How to navigate managing someone you have a pre-existing peer relationship with (31:09) Knowing when to help vs. fix as a manager (35:14) Tips for removing “linchpins” / critical points of failure from your eng team (37:34) Rapid fire questions (41:12) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Emperor of All Maladies - Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Gaining cross-functional leadership at large & small scale companies & investing in org maturity w/ Bhavini Soneji #119 40:40
Bhavini Soneji, VP of Product Engineering @ Cruise, shares her leadership journey & how she gained cross-functional experience working at both large & small organizations. We cover how to gain product experience alongside engineering, deciding which elements of your org to mature/invest in, why you should examine the role of fear in your decision-making, and strategies for asking for more experience & opportunities to gain confidence. ABOUT BHAVINI SONEJI Bhavini loves using human-centered design with streamlined automation to create experiences that improve people’s lives. Previously, she has led teams through different growth stages at Microsoft, Snapchat, Headspace, and Heal. Additionally, she enjoys giving back to the community, advising C-level executives, mentoring at Techstars, First Round, and has also founded a group of Women Technology Executives in Los Angeles to support and foster this group while playing an active role in the LA CTO Forum. When she’s not working, she loves the outdoors and enjoys boogie boarding with her husband and twins. "Just knowing kind of the imposter syndrome that is holding you back. For me, it is like I'm always having a very high bar so am I hitting myself more and how do I be kind to myself? How do I support myself better? So I think that's one thing first, looking back and saying, 'No. I've done this, this, this. So my fears are not true, otherwise, I wouldn't be here.'” - Bhavini Soneji Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Join us for one of our in-person community events! That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys. Don't see your city on the list? No problem! Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen! TO GET INVOLVED EMAIL OUR HEAD OF COMMUNITY TIM AT TIM@SFELC.COM SHOW NOTES: Bhavini’s leadership journey & gaining cross-functional experience (2:47) How Bhavini tactically transitioned from each role into the next (7:24) Watch for fears & biases throughout your decision-making (11:53) Frameworks for identifying fears that are holding you back (13:41) Examples of how cross-functional leadership differs at large vs. small orgs (16:32) Conversation tips for getting stakeholders back on track (20:08) Determining which elements of an org to mature/invest in (21:32) Questions to consider when investing in technology or processes (24:03) What to invest in when an organization’s scale starts picking up (26:06) Why investing in the people element can be trickier than processes or tooling (29:26) Strategies for asking for new experiences (32:03) Bhavini’s favorite question for identifying/clarifying what you want next (34:22) Rapid fire questions (35:52) LINKS AND RESOURCES Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall - an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building platforms vs. products & leveraging OODA loops in leadership w/ Oksana Kubushyna #118 42:23
We discuss the differences between building a platform versus a product with Oksana Kubushyna, Head of Operations, Entertainment @ Riot Games! She shares about her leadership journey building the Riot Platform Group and transitioning from a technical lead to management role, tips for empowering your team, how to utilize cross-discipline thinking, the importance of internal measurement metrics, and how Oksana strategically utilizes OODA loops in her leadership style. ABOUT OKSANA KUBUSHYNA As VP of Entertainment Operations, Oksana Kubushyna oversees operations of Riot’s Entertainment division with a goal to imagine and develop bespoke IP experiences and products - animation, film, interactive narratives, music, consumer products and beyond - that deepen players’ and fans’ connections to the universe Riot has created in League of Legends. After joining Riot in 2014, she quickly rose through the ranks, holding positions including Head of Infrastructure, Development Director for League of Legends, founder and Head of Riot Platform Group, and VP of Game Studios Operations, helping build the foundation for, launch and operate Riot’s new games globally. After a few years working on establishing Riot Games' Entertainment division and releasing the award-winning Arcane animated TV series, Oksana has shifted her focus back to Riot's Game Studios where she recently took on managing Riot's Production, QA, and Creative departments. She has also been a leader of Diversity and Inclusion efforts within Riot. Her passion for the advancement of women in games and tech reaches beyond Riot, and she has been honored by groups such as Girls Inc. and Wonder Women Tech. "So for one decision of a CEO, the entire company can take months and months of work on observing, orienting, and deciding before that decision is settled throughout the organization. Now, imagine if CEO the very next day comes in and makes another decision of the same scope, and another one, because for CEO that decisions already done. He can move on or she can move on, but the team is still like wrangling. So it's very important for you as a leader to understand the speed at which your company or your team can process your decisions and act and settle in them before you make the next one. - Oksana Kubushyna Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Oksana’s experience building & leading the Riot Platform Group (2:15) Lessons learned while transitioning from product to platform (4:23) How to utilize cross-discipline thinking when building out something new (7:30) Strategies for transitioning from single- to multiple-discipline thinking (11:14) The benefits of empowering the team around you (13:37) Differences between building a product vs. building a platform (17:08) Tactics for balancing building ahead of stakeholders with maintaining vision (20:32) Internal measurement metrics that are key to Oksana’s team (23:03) How Oksana utilizes OODA loops within her leadership style (25:55) Tips for reducing the pain of the decision-making process (29:27) What drawing a picture of decisions looks like (33:25) Rapid fire questions (36:04) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Increasing capacity to win in an economic downturn, cultivating a founder’s mindset & product ownership in engineering w/ Shadi Rostami #117 50:38
Shadi Rostami, SVP of Engineering @ Amplitude, joins us to discuss key insights and strategies to increase your engineering orgs capacity to win in an economic downturn. We cover cultivating a founder’s mindset and increasing product ownership in engineering. Plus prioritization strategies, determining where to invest resources, and shifting your team’s perspective from skepticism to optimism. ABOUT SHADI ROSTAMI Shadi Rostami is SVP of engineering at Amplitude. She is a passionate, seasoned technology leader and architect experienced in building and managing highly proficient engineering teams. Prior to Amplitude, she was VP of Engineering at Palo Alto Networks. She has innovated and delivered several product lines and services specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing, big data, machine learning, and security. She has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of British Columbia and a B.Sc . from Sharif University of Technology. Shadi has published several peer-reviewed conference articles and journals as well as several patents. "Many, many years ago, I went to my VP and I asked him, ‘Rajiv, I don't know, shall I do A or B?’ And he told me, ‘if it was your own money and your own company, which decision you would've made?’ I said, ‘I'll do A,’ he says, ‘then you know the answer. You don't need to come and ask me. Right? Put your founder hat on and tell me what decision we should be making.’ Shall we do A or shall we do B? That is the ultimate sense of ownership.” - Shadi Rostami Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Join us for one of our in-person community events! That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys. Don't see your city on the list? No problem! Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen! To get involved email our Head of Community Tim at Tim@sfelc.com SHOW NOTES: Examples of how engineering increases an org’s capacity for winning (1:54) Strategies to drive product-led growth (4:58) Why product-led prioritization is key during an economic downturn (6:56) Balancing quantitative vs. qualitative data when determining where to invest resources in (9:12) Set the same goal for your eng team & the product (12:44) The importance of weekly learning users & other valuable metrics (15:58) How a founder mindset fosters a product ownership mentality in engineers (18:47) Practices to help cultivate a founder mentality (23:10) Shadi’s advice for better translation between the business & engineering (27:16) Tactics for reframing a conversation from skepticism to perpetual optimism (29:43) Owning the product experience within the restraints of an economic downturn (33:29) Signals to watch for that it’s time to pivot (36:17) How to increase opportunities for your team to find luck (41:46) Rapid fire questions (43:41) LINKS AND RESOURCES Fresh Air - Fresh Air from WHYY, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Hosted by Terry Gross, the show features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries. All Things Considered - NPR’s flagship evening newsmagazine, delivering in-depth reporting that transforms the way listeners understand current events and view the world. All-In - Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Resilience engineering, learning from incidents and unintuitive perspectives on incident analysis w/ John Allspaw #116 42:38
We cover resilience engineering & learning from incidents with John Allspaw, former CTO @ Etsy and current Founder & Principal @ Adaptive Capacity Labs! Co-hosted by Kenji Kiuchi (Head of Quality and Performance @ Postman) this episode also addresses common unintuitive perspectives within resilience engineering, strategies for effective incident response / problem solving, how to identify current sources of resilience, and practical tips for implementing these resiliency tactics in your organization today. ABOUT JOHN ALLSPAW John Allspaw ( @allspaw ) has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John’s publications include the books The Art of Capacity Planning (2009) and Web Operations (2010) as well as the forward to “The DevOps Handbook.” His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation” helped start the DevOps movement. John served as CTO at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University. "The competitive advantage is not for a leader to say, ‘Why did it take so long to restore this issue or resolve this outage?’ A competitive advantage is, ‘Oh my God, that is amazing. Tell me what made this hard and what are any of the things that made it difficult to resolve? Is there anything I can do to help get out of the way for people to do the work?’" - John Allspaw ABOUT KENJI KIUCHI Kenji Kiuchi ( @dr_kiuchi ) is Head of Quality and Performance at Postman, an API platform whose mission is to maximize everyone's creativity through the power of connected software. There he leads a global team with a focus on maximizing user delight and innovating the practice of testing. Before coming to Postman, he spent several years ‘Helping people get Jobs” at Indeed. There, he worked on scaling teams and practice to optimize engineering delivery as well as leading Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging initiatives as an Associate Site Director. Prior to Indeed, Kenji spent several years as an Engineering Manager at Twitter where he led Quality efforts across monetization, growth, infra and the delivery of live video. When Kenji isn’t driving engineering excellence, he’s driving his motorcycle, spending quality time with his 3 daughters, and mentoring leaders across the globe. Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams... Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: John’s perspective on production (4:27) What drove John toward resilience engineering (6:22) How complex systems relate to resilience engineering (9:23) Differences between robustness and resilience (13:13) The role of productive adaptation in resilience engineering (17:26) Identify sources of resilience already present in your organization (22:52) Examples of unintuitive perspectives involving incident analysis (27:15) How to make room for unintuitive perspectives (31:41) Practical tips for implementing resiliency tactics & understanding incidents (36:12) Rapid fire questions (39:51) LINKS AND RESOURCES Learning From Incidents Conference 2023 - This is a forum for sharing stories of incidents, incident handling, and the learnings from software engineers who handle large-scale distributed software systems. Hindsight and Sacrifice Decisions Blog Post on Adaptive Capacity Labs reaction to the NYSE halting trading to resolve an issue Using Language by Herbert H. Clark - Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners, writers and readers perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. In contrast to work within the cognitive sciences, which has seen language use as an individual process, and to work within the social sciences, which has seen it as a social process, the author argues strongly that language use embodies both individual and social processes. Papers We Love Talk Visual Momentum…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leading through an economic downturn & bridging the gap between engineering & business w/ Ryan Graciano #115 47:35
Ryan Graciano, Co-Founder & CTO @ Credit Karma, shares with us what it’s like to start a company during an economic downturn, how his leadership style had to evolve alongside Credit Karma’s growth, advice for running lean operations, bridging the gap between engineering & business, how to scale the business as the company matures, and identifying & correcting team/org dysfunctions. In addition, Ryan shares some of his favorite successful & failed leadership experiments that helped evolve his leadership style! ABOUT RYAN GRACIANO As a co-founder of Credit Karma and Chief Technical Officer, Ryan Graciano ( @rmgraci ) has grown the company’s engineering department from a one-man band into a team of hundreds, developing a technical framework to support the company’s rapid growth. His expertise and innovation has helped bring new levels of usability and sophistication to financial services technologies. Today, Ryan runs an ever-expanding group of engineers tasked with building out new products at pace while stressing a culture of agility and experimentation, even as Credit Karma reaches new levels of scale. As a leader, he serves as a constructive agitator, looking to break down traditional workplace hierarchies and empowering each member of his department with real influence over the future of the product. Ryan has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and spent five years at IBM before joining Credit Karma. "When I was earlier in my career, I really thought that the CTO's job was to know the most about the technology. Really, the CTO's job is to hire the people that know the most about the technology and then translate it to the business people who don't speak it at all.” - Ryan Graciano Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at sponsor@sfelc.com Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: What the early days at Credit Karma looked like (2:31) Eng leadership lessons learned from the early-stage days (4:03) Ryan’s advice on running lean & determining what matters most (5:42) The inflection point when Credit Karma’s priorities shifted (8:31) Strategies for bridging the gap between engineering & business (12:44) What was most helpful for designing a monetization engine early on (15:07) How Ryan’s leadership style evolved as Credit Karma expanded (16:37) Frameworks for identifying areas of improvement as an eng leader (18:32) Who do you hire first to scale yourself and your eng org? And other scaling principles (20:13) How to identify deficiencies in your system (22:00) An example of how detecting a dysfunction lead to systematic transformation (26:00) Tips for hosting conversations that lead to buy in / alignment (28:29) Ryan’s favorite failed leadership experiments (30:18) Why it’s important for leadership teams to measure & respond (35:50) Matching the vision for the organization to what you want to see in a product (37:04) When adjustments have to be made to the org’s vision (42:18) Rapid fire questions (43:40) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Genome Odyssey - In The Genome Odyssey , Dr. Euan Ashley, Stanford professor of medicine and genetics, brings the breakthroughs of precision medicine to vivid life through the real diagnostic journeys of his patients and the tireless efforts of his fellow doctors and scientists as they hunt to prevent, predict, and beat disease.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Making Bold Decisions and Taking Risks in Your Career w/ Annie Cheng, Claire Hough, Lisa Gelobter & Arezoo Riahi #114 44:54
Being a woman in a predominantly male industry can be challenging at times – and seeking the advice of successful women eng leaders can help inspire you to be bold! In this episode, we feature three women who shared their leadership stories & advice at ELC Annual: Annie Cheng, VP of Engineering @ Waymo; Claire Hough, CTO @ Carbon Health; and Lisa Gelobter, CEO and Founder @ tEQuitable. They discuss their career moves, along with strategies for combating disrespect in the workplace, finding work-life balance, overcoming imposter syndrome, and more. Mediated by Arezoo Riahi (Head of Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity @ Waymo), this is a high-energy episode you won’t want to miss! This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022 - check out all of the sessions here: elc.community/public/content ABOUT ANNIE CHENG Annie ( @annie_h_cheng ) is a VP of Engineering at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they are going. Prior to Waymo, Annie was a VP of Engineering at Nauto, an AI-powered automotive data platform that is improving the safety of commercial fleets today and the autonomous fleets of tomorrow. Before Nauto, Annie was VP of engineering at Yahoo responsible for the multi-billion dollar Web Search and Search Advertising business. Annie has a CS BA degree from Berkeley and MS degree from CMU. "Sometimes great opportunities are not conventional!" - Annie Cheng ABOUT CLAIRE HOUGH As CTO of Carbon Health, Claire leads engineering bringing over 25 years of experience as a technology leader. She has helped over a half dozen companies grow and scale to deliver impact-driving products and services, including Netscape, Napster, Nextag, and Udemy. Claire was named in the Forbes CIO Next List, which recognizes 50 top tech leaders who help shape the future of business and drive game-changing innovation. She is a Limited Partner at Operative Collective. "Don't let anyone take you down. Give yourself credit, have the resilience, and go after what you are looking for.” - Claire Hough ABOUT LISA GELOBTER Lisa Gelobter ( @LisaGelobter ) is the CEO and Founder of tEQuitable. Using technology to make workplaces more equitable, tEQuitable provides a confidential platform to address bias, discrimination, and harassment. Lisa has worked on products that have been used by billions of people and pioneered several Internet technologies, including Shockwave, Hulu, and the ascent of online video. Previously, at the Obama White House, Lisa was the Chief Digital Service Officer for the Department of Education, and prior to that she served as the Chief Digital Officer for BET Networks at Viacom. Lisa has been named one of Inc.'s 100 Women Building America's Most Innovative and Ambitious Businesses, Fast Company’s Most Creative People, and serves on boards for: the Obama Foundation, Times Up, and The Education Trust. Lisa is one of the first 40 Black women ever to have raised over $1mm in VC funding. She is also proud to be a Black woman with a Computer Science degree. Go STEM! "The message that I would like to convey is your otherness is what makes you unique and special. It's gonna make you a better engineer." - Lisa Gelobter ABOUT AREZOO RIAHI Arezoo Riah ( @arezooriahi ) is the first dedicated Head of Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID) at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. In her role, Arezoo is responsible for driving and executing a holistic EID strategy, helping Waymo continue recruiting, hiring and championing diversity. As a subject matter expert, Arezoo works closely with the executive team to build Waymo as a company where everyone belongs. Prior to Waymo, Arezoo led the diversity and belonging programs at Autodesk, where she evolved employee resource groups, designed inclusive hiring training, and launched global mentorship programming. She was also responsible for developing Autodesk’s diversity analytics, launching the company's diversity dashboard to understand trends and hot spots, and leading diversity communications. Prior to Autodesk, Arezoo also held roles in the nonprofit sector, notably serving as Director of TechWomen, an initiative providing professional development to women across the globe, and working with the U.S. Department of State. Arezoo holds a Masters in Public Policy from The University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from The George Washington University. Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at sponsor@sfelc.com Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Why Claire jumped into a brand new industry at Carbon Health (2:31) How Annie transitioned to the autonomous vehicles industry at Waymo (4:41) What inspired Lisa to found tEQuitable after working for the Obama White House (7:38) Annie’s big risk transitioning to search advertising & challenges faced (10:31) Why Claire decided to move from engineering to product management (14:52) Strategies for being bold & combating disrespect in the workplace (20:09) Finding the balance between personal & professional life (22:48) Advice for celebrating your wins (29:27) Audience Q&As: tips for overcoming imposter syndrome (32:40) Evaluate risk with a decision-making matrix (35:38) What happens when you have a bad boss (39:48) Lightning round – Claire, Annie, and Lisa’s best advice for women (42:12)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, Cal Henderson (Co-Founder & CTO @ Slack) and Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft) discuss strategies for how to be a force multiplier within your organization! They cover Cal’s leadership journey & the early days of Slack, how to identify lateral inflection points, aligning your people throughout periods of change, tips for personal retrospectives on where you invest your time, and more. Additionally, Cal & Maria share plenty of frameworks for both identifying if you are currently a force multiplier & how to identify opportunities to inspire productivity in others. This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022 - check out all of the sessions here: elc.community/public/content ABOUT CAL HENDERSON Cal Henderson ( @iamcal ) is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. He oversees Slack’s world-class engineering team and sets the technical vision for the company. In 2019, he was named a Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree and recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. Previously, Cal built and led the engineering teams at Flickr, through its acquisition by Yahoo. An experienced technology leader and a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book Building Scalable Websites. Cal was also a pioneer in the use of web APIs, and created the basis for OAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter and many others. Cal was involved in London’s early online network through his work with digital creative communities and the blogosphere. He has a BS in Computer Science and has received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University. He now resides in San Francisco. "What every leader needs to do is recognize when the things that you are spending your time on aren't aligned with what's really important or what's the most value that you can get out of your time. I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of having a very full calendar, feeling very busy, feeling like there's so many things to do and the things that you do don't move the needle in any way.” - Cal Henderson ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVA Maria ( @stranger_quark ) is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma. Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at sponsor@sfelc.com Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Cal describes the early days & founding of Slack (2:24) The many hats an eng leader wears during a company’s early stages (4:20) How Cal identified key inflection points as Slack evolved (6:31) Essential frameworks for successful reorgs (8:31) Tips for getting more comfortable with delegating (10:49) Why you should spend time & resources on developer productivity (13:31) Defining the leadership version of dev tools (16:52) Strategies for quickly aligning organizations through periods of change (20:04) How to align your calendar with what is most important as an eng leader (22:01) Cal and Maria’s tips for personal retrospectives on where you invest your time (24:54) Audience Q&As: why Cal no longer codes for Slack (25:56) Questions to help you identify opportunities to be a force multiplier (27:20) How to measure the success of developer productivity (30:58) Tips for handling force multiplier “killers” (34:33) Why the most brilliant engineers are not only individually productive but also inspire productivity in others (36:50)…
As eng leaders, there are many things outside of our control – however, Megan Kacholia (VP of Eng @ Google) believes being deliberate can help you realize the many factors you DO have control of. Megan provides real-life lessons from her own leadership journey on how to take ownership of your time/calendar, tips for saying “yes” & knowing when to say “no,” and strategies for communicating with authenticity. Megan also covers why it’s important as an eng leader to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, frameworks for having difficult conversations, communicating with empathy, and how she balances her role in a part-time capacity. This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022 - check out all of the sessions here: https://hubs.la/Q01wHBrS0 ABOUT MEGAN KACHOLIA Megan Kacholia is a Vice President of Engineering within Google's Core organization. She is a leader in the Cross-Google Engineering (xGE) effort, which is responsible for company-wide technical coordination. Her passion is building effective teams and addressing barriers to help Googlers do their best work. Previously, Megan was and VP in Google’s Research organization, where her team’s work spanned machine learning in research as well as production, including products such as TensorFlow, and prior to that she had a long tenure in Google’s Ads organization, where she ran the serving system for Google’s DisplayAds business. Megan has a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from UIUC. “They ask you, 'Okay! You know, we need to get this thing really done by Friday!' Okay, fine. So I send my manager note, 'I'm taking care of that. But however... this, and this will not get done this week. Or I'm gonna delegate them to so-and-so. This is the trade-off I've made. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Here's what I'm doing.' And we move forward. People seem very surprised by this sometimes, but this has been one of the best ways I have found in engaging with not only my managers but my peers. In terms of making very clear, what's on MY plate.” - Megan Kacholia Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at sponsor@sfelc.com Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Megan’s leadership journey with Google & how she balances her role in a part-time capacity (02:39) Questions to determine how to best spend your time (5:07) Frameworks for saying “yes” – and why that also means saying “no” (8:40) Be wary of situations where one person is the “lynchpin” (13:04) Advice on providing honest, authentic feedback (14:27) Strategies for having difficult conversations & knowing when to take a step back (16:25) Embrace different perspectives (19:45) Why it’s important as an eng leader to get used to discomfort (21:44) Final thoughts on how to make deliberate decisions (24:23) Audience Q&As: judging the quality of a decision separately from its outcome (26:07) Examples of how saying “yes” helped fuel Megan’s career growth (27:44) Techniques for communicating with empathy (30:30) How to decide between the safe vs. difficult choice (31:44) Megan’s advice on giving peer-to-peer feedback (33:10) Tips for communicating appropriately & speaking out in the moment (35:50) How Megan navigated a traditionally non-linear career move (38:33) What to do if “no” in an unacceptable answer (41:36)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Reorgs are never easy, often impacting eng teams – and that’s why they should always be a last resort. However, sometimes they are necessary for an org’s success! Mike Tria (Head of Eng @ Atlassian) joins Aaron Erickson (Co-Founder & CEO @ Orgspace) to discuss frameworks & strategies for implementing a successful reorg, why eng leaders should be involved throughout the entire reorg process, alternative solutions to reorgs, who is accountable when a reorg goes poorly, how to improve communication channels throughout a reorg, and implementing smooth transitions. This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022 - check out all of the sessions here : https://hubs.la/Q01wHBrS0 ABOUT AARON ERICKSON Aaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) is Co-Founder and CEO at Orgspace. Before Orgspace, he spent 30 years working in leadership roles, most recently as VP Engineering at New Relic. Over the course of his entire career, he has been an advocate for building better software. He spent a decade at ThoughtWorks, where he drove digital transformation via application of agile and continuous delivery. Aaron lives and works in San Francisco. "As managers when we've gone through reorgs they tend to be so painful and difficult to pull off that by the time we finish the reorg, all we wanna do is wipe our hands of it and be like, 'All right, I wanna move on to the next thing. Reorgs over!' How do you know it's successful? 'The changes are made in Workday. We sent the email. The reorg therefore is successful.' No, it is not! You have inserted an organ into the patient. You do not know if the organ will be accepted. - Mike Tria ABOUT MIKE TRIA Mike Tria is the Head of Engineering for Platform at Atlassian. Mike oversees Atlassian's global cloud infrastructure, identity & front-end platforms, enterprise offerings, and our third-party developer ecosystem. Mike has 15+ years of experience as a software engineer and leader, ranging from work at cloud-native startups to larger companies. He's built and run all facets of product development, including product management, design, engineering, QA, and SCM/release, but has mostly focused on SaaS, e-commerce, and building communities. As a former comedian, Mike also brings high energy and a sense of humor to the tough challenges he faces. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Looking for ways to support the show? Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available. To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at sponsor@sfelc.com Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Aaron & Mike’s experiences with good & bad reorgs (2:39) Types of reorgs – starting with the quota reorg (5:03) Defining the trend-chaser & its challenges (6:16) The zombie reorg & why only 20% of reorgs find success (7:20) How management by rumor reorgs can hurt your product & org (9:10) The best reorg framework: strategy, organization, then people last (10:37) Two major qualities of a successful reorg (13:58) Involve your eng leaders early in the reorg process (18:02) Traits of a reorg in wartime vs. peacetime (20:28) Defining the reverse Conway maneuver (23:24) Who should be held accountable when a reorg goes poorly? (25:04) Audience Q&As: entering a reorg with a KPI thesis (28:08) Improving the chain of communication & involvement during a reorg (30:19) Alternatives to reorgs (32:39) Strategies for setting your org up for success throughout continuous pivots (34:39) Aaron & Mike’s views on functional vs. mission team structures (37:04) How to support a reorg as an eng leader (39:35) Tips for implementing smooth transitions throughout a reorg (41:32) LINKS AND RESOURCES “ The Re-org Rag ” - video by Forrest Brazeal ( @forrestbrazeal )…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Engineering Founder’s Takeover: Top-down / Bottoms-up sales strategy, pricing, and enterprise product adoption w/ Abi Noda #110 50:44
This is a special episode from our new show “Engineering Founders” - Should you build B2C or B2B? What about implementing a top-down or a bottoms up sales strategy? How do you think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs and considerations behind building for consumer vs. B2B, pricing, early sales and product adoption strategies! For more episodes of Engineering Founders, subscribe here: https://engineering-founders.simplecast.com/ P.S. The Engineering Leadership Podcast will return after the winter holidays on January 3rd! ABOUT ABI NODA Abi Noda is the CEO and co-founder of DX, the world's first developer experience management platform. He was previously the CEO and founder of Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. At GitHub he led research collaborations with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, McKinsey, and Microsoft Research, which was the impetus for founding DX. "It's really good to try to sell starting on day one. That's probably, in my opinion, the best way to validate an idea, a B2B idea, is to try and go sell it and by sell it I mean literally go get money for like pre-committed customers. So it really de-risks a huge component of, I think, why these types of businesses fail, which is they just aren't able even identify, reach and successfully convert buyers.” - Abi Noda ABOUT DX DX is the world’s first developer experience management platform, helping organizations measure and improve top drivers of developer productivity and engagement. DX is designed by leading software engineering researchers, providing science-backed metrics, workflows, and education that empower teams to improve. Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Abi's journey founding DX and Pull Panda (3:07) Building your business as a side-project for consumers vs. enterprise software (6:07) If you just got laid off and want to start a business, you need to hear this (10:02) The best way to validate a B2B idea (12:44) Differences with how you talk about your product in a competitive vs. uncompetitive market (15:58) How to think about pricing for bottoms-up or top-down sales motion (17:17) Choosing the right persona to pursue as customers (20:58) How experience at large companies can help you understand how to approach enterprise product adoption (24:44) Investor expectations with bottoms-up/top-down sales and identifying ICPs (32:06) Incentivizing users to adopt new features (34:12) Closing deals and getting to the implementation stage (37:51) How Abi maximized advisor relationships (40:04) Rapid fire questions (45:27) LINKS AND RESOURCES Lenny Rachitsky’s Newsletter - a weekly advice column about product, growth, and your career. 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer’s comprehensive business strategy guide centered around power and the conditions that create the potential for persistent differential returns. Nail It Then Scale It - Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom’s guide to increasing success and reducing risk when launching a high-growth company.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We cover building community & digital transformation with Yvette Pasqua, CTO @ Exos! She shares her leadership journey from MeetUp to Exos and how her experiences shaped her views on the importance of community and effective networking. We also discuss principles for creating authentic meetup experiences, how Yvette navigated her Head of Eng search without a recruiter, the importance of asking others for help, and how Exos navigated the opportunities & challenges through their digital transformation. ABOUT YVETTE PASQUA Yvette ( @lolarobot ) is the CTO of Exos where she leads the product and engineering teams with a focus on continuous improvement, iteration, and using data to launch products that help our members become healthier and achieve their wellness, life, and work goals. Prior to joining Exos, Yvette led Product and Engineering at Haven, a health tech startup, and was the CTO at Meetup. Yvette’s career has included leadership roles at startups and product development firms building products like Grindr and the Olympics video player. She’s on the Board at Chloe Capital, a VC firm that invests in women-led seed-stage companies. Yvette lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, NY with her wife, daughter, and wheaten terrier. “Yeah, of course during the conversation I will bring up, ‘Hey, I'm looking for a head of engineering. do you know anything? Do you have any advice? What have you thought of are the best characteristics for someone in that role?” It's a long-term play, but I think the important thing is to be really upfront with your intention for the chat. And to deliver on that in an authentic way. And to not BS someone and say, ‘Hey, I wanna network!’ And then throw a job in their face and a job description. -Yvette Pasqua Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Building technology with community in mind at MeetUp and Exos (2:20) (0:07) How community and in-person experiences inspire Yvette’s career decisions (5:40) What Yvette learned about networking / community building from MeetUp (7:10) Principles for creating meaningful, authentic gatherings (10:54) Why setting boundaries & expectations encourages group psychological safety (12:38) How Yvette successfully navigated her Head of Eng search without a recruiter (14:32) Strategies for targeting potential hires that you haven’t met before (17:40) Ask others for advice (21:31) Tactics for reaching out to people in an authentic way (23:40) Prioritizing time for networking conversations (27:55) Behind the digital transformation at Exos from a primarily coaching model (32:37) How Exos continuously models growth mindset (37:42) When digital transformation reaches a turning point (39:44) Rapid fire questions (42:38) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz (blog/newsletter) - The #1 technology newsletter on Substack . Highly relevant for software engineers and engineering managers, useful for those working in tech. Written by engineering manager and software engineer Gergely Orosz who was previously at Uber, Skype/Microsoft, and at high-growth startups. (follow Gergely on Twitter @GergelyOrosz ) Software Lead Weekly by Oren Ellenbogen (newsletter) - A weekly email for busy people who care about people, culture and leadership. Level Up by Patrick Kua (newsletter) - Level Up delivers a curated newsletter for leaders in tech. Ideal for busy people such as Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, VPs of Engineering, CTOs and more. Lenny’s Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky - A weekly advice column about product, growth, and your career. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (book) - Priya argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive — and they don't have to be. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. (Patrick’s most gifted book)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, we discuss frameworks & strategies for building a “startup-within-a-startup” with Heidi Williams, Head of Engineering for Grammarly Business @ Grammarly! She shares stories about her leadership style while revealing the benefits of & considerations for creating a startup-within-a-startup, sourcing ideas & hosting knowledge-sharing meetings, identifying adjacencies in your user base, communicating challenges between individuals & teams, developing leading indicators, and more. ABOUT HEIDI WILLIAMS Heidi Williams ( @Heidivt73 ) is Head of Engineering for Grammarly Business, our product offering for professional teams and organizations. At Grammarly, Heidi is inspired by the potential impact the product can have as a platform, with the opportunity to help reduce conflicts and misunderstandings in communication and educate people on how to be more inclusive and equitable. Before coming to Grammarly, Heidi served as VP of Platform Engineering at Box, founded WEST Diversity and Inclusion, and was co-founder and CTO of tEQuitable, a confidential platform addressing issues of bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace. Heidi was at Adobe for 17 years and most notably was a founding engineer on Dreamweaver, which democratized web development in the late 1990s. Heidi volunteers as a technical advisor for PaymentWorks and Raise For Good. Her expertise and perspective have been featured in Built In SF and the podcasts Stayin’ alive in Technology, Dev Interrupted, and CTO Connection. As a lifelong soccer player, Heidi’s often on the pitch; she’s also an avid hiker, bicyclist, and kayaker. She once hiked with her husband across England, 192 miles coast to coast (with B&Bs and pub stops along the way). Heidi studied at Brown University, where she earned a BS in computer science. She also attended Stanford University’s Executive Institute. And so now you have this chasm where we'd have these weird conversations around what machine learning features should we build for Grammarly business? And neither side could understand what the other person's context was to come up with an idea. We struggled with that for a little bit until we really just put people in a room and, and it did exactly that. We said, "Here is the user research, five critical communication challenges within a company. You know what technology you have. You know how organizations work. Get together and just talk about, you know, your peanut butter, your chocolate. What can we make here? Let's have a Reese Peanut butter cup...!" -Heidi Williams Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: Heidi’s favorite “startup-within-a-startup” moments with Grammarly & Grammarly Business (1:56) What you can learn from the “PDF as MVP” approach (4:36) How early conversations impacted the final product & eng team functions (5:40) The benefits of building a startup-within-a-startup (9:21) Considerations when making the decision to become a multi-product company (11:19) Identifying the adjacencies within your current user base (13:24) The difference between discovering a new market & building the next feature (14:32) How to source new ideas & encourage innovation in your eng team (15:31) Frameworks for communicating challenges across different teams / individuals (21:02) Strategies for facilitating knowledge-sharing meetings (24:55) Fostering a culture of healthy, positive idea jams (26:50) Heidi’s advice on the cadence of idea jams for a startup-within-a-startup (28:15) What the execution / maturity pathway process looks like (29:49) Heidi’s hypothesis behind merging a product with the greater business (33:04) How to navigate dependencies when your product is in the incubator phase (35:51) Keys for determining the end game of a product – pathway to success or time to wind down? (40:09) Why it’s important to develop leading indicators to determine your product’s success (42:16) Rapid fire questions (43:40) LINKS AND RESOURCES 99% Invisible - 99% Invisible is a sound-rich, narrative podcast hosted by Roman Mars about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world. Code Switch - This podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. They explore how race affects every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between. Freakonomics Radio - Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner , co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything, plus the true stories of minimum wage, rent control, and the gender pay gap. Hidden Brain - This podcast explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We cover how to sustain long-term transformational projects with Paul Dix, CTO & Founder @ InfluxData! This high-energy conversation reveals the history behind InfluxDB and its multi-phase, long-term transformation over the past 10 years. Plus we discuss how to know when it’s time to take your company to the next level, identifying the right people for your eng teams, integrating multiple teams into an org re-architecture, and building open-source products/communities! ABOUT PAUL DIX Paul (@PaulDix) is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies, and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University. "What I need is a small team of focused people who are on board, who can be focused on getting this done and we'll prove it out as we go. And I think the mistake I made with the 2.0 cloud product was we got way too many of people involved way too quickly, right? I think for the initial phases of project, it's actually advantageous to have a smaller team. - Paul Dix Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group? ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers. Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups SHOW NOTES: The history behind InfluxDB & its multi-phase, long-term transformation (1:53) InfluxDB’s first transformational phase featuring time series data (5:48) Phase 2.0 & shifting to a cloud-first delivery model (7:50) Challenges & opportunities faced in the current phase of InfluxDB (9:31) How Paul decided it was time to take the company to the next level (11:38) Making a bet on Rust (14:25) Why making an early announcement helped push Phase 3.0 forward (16:02) Strategies for identifying the right people for your eng team (19:06) How to optimize community insights when tailoring your vision (21:56) Tips for resolving disagreements between eng team members (24:45) Frameworks for executing long-term vision & achieving alignment (26:21) Processes for integrating other teams into an org’s re-architecture (29:55) The impact of Conway’s Law on team structure & open-source software (32:07) Considerations for managing large, open-source projects (36:40) Rapid fire questions (37:56) LINKS AND RESOURCES “ The Happiness Hypothesis ” by Jonathan Haidt - Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world’s civilizations - to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives. “ The Fate of Rome ” by Kyle Harper - How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civilizations of the ancient world…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building self-sufficient teams and operating in constrained funding environments w/ Elaine Zhou #106 45:04
We cover how to uplevel your eng team with Elaine Zhou, CTO @ Change.org ! She shares some of her favorite frameworks and strategies for creating self-sufficient teams, amplifying high-performers, performing self-assessments, and hosting prioritization conversations. Plus Elaine shares the story behind how she got involved with Change.org , navigating different operating constraints in your business model (from non-profit to VC-funded contexts), and what it’s like investing in high-impact areas with no revenue expectation. ABOUT ELAINE ZHOU Change.org CTO Elaine Zhou joined the platform for change in 2020. Prior to Change.org , she was at Vidado as CTO, and has held leadership positions for over a decade at companies including HomeStore, PlanetOut, IAC and more. She’s been a longtime mentor at Upwardly Global. Follow her on Twitter at @softwired . "High performance need to be in that fail safe environment so they're willing to explore and to iterate. So really help them to do that, the way that I solve the problem with them is not just that, “You are good, you're good.” Just pump them up. No, it's actually, “Let's look at a problem. I actually agree with your solution and this is why I like your solution.” Help them to gain the confidence and give them that kind of hard opportunity to try that and you know they will build their confidence so much.” - Elaine Zhou SHOW NOTES: Why Elaine got involved with Change.org (2:24) The importance of understanding the business / non-profit model for eng leaders (6:29) How business, technology, & financial constraints impact business decisions (9:44) Investing in impact with no revenue expectation (14:42) Strategies for creating self-sufficiency within teams & traps eng leaders fall into when leveling up their team (18:06) Questions to ask yourself during self-assessments to determine priorities (22:05) What you should do as an eng leader after transitioning your team to be self-sufficient (28:10) Frameworks for prioritization conversations (29:14) The technical area Elaine is most focused on growing right now (32:23) Strategies for amplifying & supporting your best performers (33:58) Rapid fire questions (38:35) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses - Eric Reis’ book outlining his strategy for building a start-up that he developed during his time as a founder and start-up advisor. Measure What Matters - John Doerr’s collection of first-person accounts that demonstrates the focus, growth, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred in many great organizations.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Scaling your leadership 10x in 6 years and leading outside your technical depth w/ Claus Moberg #105 47:56
We sat down with Claus Moberg to discuss his career trajectory, from meteorology student and hardware CEO to current VP of Eng @ Roblox! We also cover how to overcome obstacles when scaling leadership, leading teams outside of your technical depth/knowledge, attracting & recruiting top talent, finding “diamonds in the rough,” and how to communicate effectively between business functions & eng teams. Claus also shares his best frameworks for navigating complex conversations and taking measured risks while scaling eng functions. ABOUT CLAUS MOBERG Claus Moberg leads engineering for the Roblox User Group. His teams are responsible for the applications and experiences through which over 58.5 million users explore and experience the Roblox Metaverse every day. Claus has worked at Roblox since the summer of 2016, leading teams across multiple engineering and product disciplines (VR, Consoles, Mobile, Social, Personalization) and geographies (San Mateo, CA and Shenzhen, CN). “The key mistake to avoid is to think that a lack of domain experience is an excuse to not engage at that level of depth, right? It's not. It's actually an obligation to engage at the maximum level of depth that's necessary to solve the problem, but it's an opportunity to engage, avoiding buzz words, and using plain English, and sort of doing it in a way that makes communication more clear as opposed to less clear throughout the organization.” - Claus Moberg SHOW NOTES: How Claus transitioned from meteorology student to VP of Eng at Roblox (2:17) Utilizing a maximization function for career strategy & decision-making (6:25) Claus’s early days at Roblox (9:03) Looking to the team & product space when facing uncertainties (12:56) Strategies for scaling leadership & building eng teams (14:52) The correlation between an amazing team & an amazing product (17:48) Techniques for building technical depth within eng leadership (19:09) Frameworks for effective communication between eng teams & business functions (21:24) Best practices for navigating complex conversations (25:37) Learn to delegate & let go of responsibilities (26:45) How Roblox recruits/attracts talent outside of typical hiring patterns (29:24) Claus’s advice on identifying competitive advantages in order to attract talent (34:46) Why you should take measured risks while building out eng teams (36:33) How to weigh trade-offs/concessions during the start-up phase (38:57) Lean into asking “stupid” questions & aim to participate in conversations at the deepest level possible (41:33) Rapid fire questions (42:44) LINKS AND RESOURCES Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed - Leo Janos and Ben R. Rich’s memoir detailing their nearly two decades of work in Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works program.…
We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back to regularly releasing episodes November 15th with a couple great guests! Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering @ Roblox joins to discuss his journey scaling his leadership impact & org size 10x in 6 years! Elaine Zhou CTO @ Change.org joins to discuss upleveling your team and helping them become more self-sufficient. Plus we’re launching new episodes of Engineering Founders! Email us at hello@sfelc.com And to stay involved, join the community at elc.community !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leading across different orders of magnitude & high-leverage communication with Kit Colbert #104 43:39
We sit down with Kit Colbert (SVP and CTO @ VMWare) and discuss his experiences, lessons, and approaches to leading across different orders of magnitude PLUS his approach to high leverage, high ROI communication at different scales. We cover his perspectives on lessening execution risk and creating stability through change, letting go of being a “technologist,” navigating the dilemma between macro and micro granularity in leadership, and building an innovation system. ABOUT KIT COLBERT Kit Colbert joined VMware in September 2003 (following an internship in 2002) and currently serves as senior vice president and chief technology officer. He is responsible for ensuring VMware’s long-term technology leadership through research and innovation programs, with the primary goal of positively impacting and shaping the future of VMware, its ecosystem, and its customers. As CTO, Colbert will shape the technical vision for the company, and the transformation to a cloud and subscription-centric R&D organization. His oversight includes advancing research and development efforts, overseeing the VMware Engineering Services team, the Design/UX team and the company’s ESG commitments. Prior to September 2021, Colbert served in multiple roles, including VMware’s Cloud CTO, General Manager of VMware’s Cloud-Native Apps business, CTO for VMware’s End-User Computing Business, and as the lead architect for the VMware vRealize Operations Suite. Colbert joined VMware as the technical lead behind the creation, development and delivery of the vMotion and Storage vMotion features in VMware vSphere. "What I try to focus on is, what's the outcome or the benefit that I'm looking for? And, you know, leaving the “how” as much as possible up to them. But I'm also open to being challenged and I find oftentimes that I don't really fully understand the space and the way that they do. And so I'm saying, ‘Here's kinda what we want and here's how I think we should do it.’ But then they'll say, ‘No, that doesn't make sense here. You know, here's how we should be really be thinking about.’ And so that back and forth actually creates a better solution in the end.” - Kit Colbert Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Kit's Leadership Leap from 150 to 2300 People (2:05) How guardrails lessen risks and create stability through change (4:24) How to prepare to increase your scope and lead larger teams (8:21) Identifying existential opportunities and getting ahead of foundational industry changes (12:38) Letting go of being a “technologist” & relying on others for technical insight (16:08) How clear communication is one of the highest leverage, highest ROI things you can do as a leader (18:27) Framework to prepare your communication plan at big team moments (21:56) Balancing the dilemma of micro and macro granularity in leadership (26:11) Strategies to guide and influence people to your desired outcomes (28:18) How to operationalize innovation and build an innovation system (33:23) Rapid fire questions (37:53) LINKS AND RESOURCES Atomic Habits - This breakthrough book from James Clear is the most comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Reinventing your role and refocusing your team in the face of the unknown w/ Maher Saba #103 49:49
We cover reinventing your role and refocusing your eng team in the face of the unknown with Maher Saba, Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta! He discusses his leadership history from IBM to Microsoft to Meta and how he took on IC roles to gain credibility as an eng leader. We also cover how to productively channel & embrace emotions to drive improvement, frameworks for motivating eng orgs, how to incorporate personal feedback into your product, how the pandemic offered opportunities to pivot into the unknown, refocusing eng teams after challenges/periods of uncertainty, and more! ABOUT MAHER SABA Maher Saba is the Head of Remote Presence and Engineering at Meta and is responsible for creating rich social, real-time video and audio experiences that connect people while they’re physically apart. Saba has held numerous Engineering leadership roles at Meta, and during his time at the company he launched Video on Newsfeed, Facebook Live, Facebook Watch, Messenger Rooms and Live Audio Rooms. Before Meta, Saba worked at IBM and Microsoft as a developer and software engineering lead, eventually becoming a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. Saba has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. “He goes, ‘Have you ever written an endpoint?’ I said, ‘I'm actually curious to know what an endpoint is.’ And he goes, ‘Have you written anything in Ruby?’ I'm like, ‘No, I've never seen the language before.’ He goes, ‘How about Go Language?’ I'm like, Rob Pike just came up with Go Language. Nobody knows it.’ And he's like, ‘So, you know nothing.’ I'm like, ‘I know nothing. I just wanna be in a place where either I sink or swim and the best way for me to know this is to jump with both feet into the deep end.’” - Maher Saba Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Maher Saba’s transition from Microsoft to Meta (01:54) Why Maher restarted as an IC to gain credibility before moving back into eng management (7:08) Embrace emotions in order to gain focus & drive improvement (12:14) How Maher refocused his work at the start of the pandemic & what it’s like jumping into the unknown (16:48) Frameworks for motivating eng teams to focus on execution (22:28) Maher’s favorite experiences from his team’s show-and-tell sessions (26:59) Incorporating feedback into your product from personal sources – like your mother! (28:29) Post-pandemic challenges & how to address them (31:27) How to refocus eng teams after periods of uncertainty (36:16) Do’s and don'ts for inspiring teams to be part of a turnaround (39:35) Why Maher is excited for the unknowns surrounding the metaverse (42:00) Rapid fire questions (43:51) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt’s book on how the discovery of an Ancient Greek poem changed the course of human thought and shaped the world as we know it today.…
We discuss product innovation with Saumya Bhatnagar (CPO & Co-Founder @ involve.ai), who shares her passion for the product trio and how it enriches problem-solving! We cover how to best optimize the product trio, implementing empathy into your communication practices, the importance of the value priority score, frameworks for healthy & energetic discourse between the product trio, and improving the experience of telling users “no” while pursuing potential “yes” opportunities. ABOUT SAUMYA BHATNAGAR Saumya Bhatnagar is the CPO and Co-founder of involve.ai, an AI-driven Early warning system that helps companies predict churn and revenue growth opportunities using customer data. Before starting involve.ai, Saumya co-founded a startup right out of high school in New Delhi which focussed on using technology to reduce gender-based abortions in India. She did her undergrad in Computer Science and went on to earn her Masters's in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a focus on Natural Language Processing. She is a Forbes 30 under 30 alum, winner of the Stevie Gold Entrepreneur of the Year award, recognized as the 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech by the National Diversity Council, and is on the list of Top 100 Women in Technology by AI Technology magazine. Saumya is a strong advocate of more representation for women in tech and is the founder of a nonprofit in India for women empowerment. When not working, Saumya enjoys binge-watching Netflix, photography, and traveling. "A good relationship is not about how well you work with each other, but how well you fight with each other and how well can you disagree with each other. That's the entire goal of a product trio. They shouldn't agree. They should look at it from different lenses, but then how do you have that argument and come to a consensus is like the hardest part of managing it." - Saumya Bhatnagar Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Why it’s valuable to always consider the context of a problem first (2:07) How Saumya became passionate about the product trio (5:47) Optimize the product trio by exercising empathy & good communication (10:39) Why designers & front-end eng should be connected from the start (14:36) The five components of the value priority score framework (16:59) Improving the experience of telling users “no” (20:16) The role of recency bias in prioritization conversations & how to get to “yes” (24:16) Determine a product’s success by measuring what will impact the outcome (26:36) How the product trio gained alignment regarding the trust score feature (30:54) Saumya’s tips for knowing when the product trio is working well (34:20) Frameworks for healthy discourse within your product trio (36:17) Incorporating a bottom-up decision-making process (39:28) Rapid fire questions (42:43) LINKS AND RESOURCES Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors - Michael E. Porter's book that has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Dopamine Nation - Dr. Anna Lembke’s book that explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Customer narratives, business fluency & investing in developer experience w/ Marco Argenti #101 43:03
Customer narratives are a transformative tool to help you build successful products! Marco Argenti (CIO @ Goldman Sachs) explains how to develop these narratives as your team’s guiding vision and help eng orgs better understand “the business” side of software. Plus we cover best practices for investing in developer experience, Goldman Sachs’ transition to prioritize external developers, and the signs, signals and trends Marco’s used to navigate his career across tons of different emerging technology fields. ABOUT MARCO ARGENTI Marco Argenti is the Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs. He is a member of the Management Committee, the Firmwide Technology Risk Committee, the Client Business Standards Committee, the Enterprise Risk Committee and the Global Inclusion and Diversity Committee. Mr. Argenti joined the firm as a Partner in 2019. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mr. Argenti served as Vice President of technology of Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2013, overseeing all aspects of the product lifecycle of Cloud Services, including strategy, business planning and developer engagement, and leading several AWS technology areas, such as mobile, serverless, Internet of Things, messaging, and augmented and virtual reality. Before that, Mr. Argenti spent several years at Nokia Corporation, where he was Senior Vice President and Global Head of Developer Experience and Marketplace from 2011 to 2013, with responsibility for Nokia’s developer ecosystem and app store across the company’s entire product portfolio. Earlier in his career, Mr. Argenti was a board member and Chief Executive Officer of internet and mobile company Dada S.p.A., as well as a board member, executive vice president of strategy development and chief technology officer of Canadian e-commerce solutions provider Microforum Inc., where he founded Internet Frontier Inc., an internet publisher and e-commerce retailer. He previously founded and sold Dreamware S.r.l., a software development firm, to Microforum Inc. Mr. Argenti serves on the Board of Directors of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, also known as PanCan. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Carnegie Hall. "Today, the world is so complex that it's almost like an asteroid field and when you navigate an asteroid field, if you don't turn often, you're gonna be having some surprises and so that's why iteration is so important. You need to release sometimes multiple times a day because the world is changing in front of you and there are opportunities and obstacles that come all the time." - Marco Argenti Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Marco’s leadership journey – as a CTO, VP of Tech, and beyond (2:39) Questioning biases & observing signals when predicting opportunities (8:41) How Marco used intuition & data when deciding to work with Goldman Sachs (10:10) Why engineers must understand business principles (13:46) Using customer narratives to create a guiding vision for eng teams (17:47) How to help eng orgs better understand the business metrics of software (22:01) Why Goldman Sachs transitioned to prioritizing its developer clients (25:39) Shifting the focus from internal developers to external developers (31:34) How the tech team navigated challenges during this transition (33:34) Rapid fire questions (36:43)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Prachi Gupta, VP of Engineering @ Discord, shares her best strategies for growing your career & leadership skills through transitions, moderated by Chris Chiu, Director of Engineering - Collaboration @ Figma. Prachi and Chris also cover what tactics work well for building community & leading in a remote / hybrid environment, frameworks for operating during wartime, recruiting with the whole person in mind, and why you need to “give away their legos” in order to grow as an eng leader. Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023 ABOUT PRACHI GUPTA Prachi Gupta heads engineering at Discord. With close to two decades of experience in consumer technology companies, she is responsible for leading the strategy and execution of a highly scalable and distributed technology stack that powers millions of conversations. Prachi enjoys building engineering teams and defining culture and processes that enable teams to grow and succeed in a repeatable and predictable manner. As an entrepreneurial engineer at heart, she enjoys prototyping ideas and conceptualizing, designing, and delivering impactful software. Prachi is an active supporter of diversity in STEM, co-founded LinkedIn's Women in Technology initiative, and is an alumnus board member of Women's Audio Mission. Prachi holds a Master's in Computer Science and has significant experience in working with startups to explore innovative solutions to real-world problems, from socially-driven consumer websites to enterprise business intelligence & analytics software. "You have to learn how to build something, get it to a point that's satisfactory enough to you and be okay handing it off to someone else so they can run with it. That's essentially been how I've operated in my career, not because I had this like grand vision in my mind of this is how I get to like the thing I want to get to, but because I was just hungry to learn. I just gained this reputation of, 'Oh, like if something's broken or something needs fixing or something needs figuring out, here's a flexible person that we can throw at it.'” - Prachi Gupta ABOUT CHRIS CHIU Chris Chiu is a Director of Engineering at Figma. Figma is a web-based design tool, and Chris’s teams work on Collaboration & Community as well as Figma’s mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms. Before Figma, Chris led product engineering and platform teams at Flexport and OpenGov. Chris was born in Brazil and has lived in the Bay Area for 14 years. He loves e-bike rides with his kids and reading fantasy & sci-fi novels. Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: What doesn’t work in a remote / hybrid work environment (2:42) Tactics Discord utilizes to enhance the remote / hybrid workspace (4:39) Strategies for building teams w/ a strong sense of community & belonging (7:13) Defining what it means to assess the whole person (10:58) How Discord applies the “whole person” assessment to recruiting (12:42) Prachi’s advice for operating / executing during wartime (14:54) Why understanding the “giving away your legos” philosophy is important (18:09) Prachi’s defining inflection points in her leadership journey (21:15) Balancing your career & parenthood (23:43) The best career advice Prachi has ever received (26:21) Audience Q&A: building trust w/ a new team that is more technically proficient than you are in their domain (28:55) Tips for empowering individuals to their full potential (31:12) How senior eng leaders can help frontline EMs handle their tasks (32:42) Strategies for being the unseen hand vs. seen hand in an org (35:50) Practices Prachi kept & discarded during her pivotal transitions (38:35) Navigating where to allocate your time w/ direct reports (41:50) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
In this week’s episode, we’re featuring another of our most popular, inspiring sessions from ELC Annual 2022. Oksana Kubushyna, former VP of Entertainment Operations @ Riot Games, shares her best strategies for turning your career into a rocket, along with plenty of inspiring stories from her eight years and multiple promotions within Riot Games. She reveals why your mindset is the most important driver of career success, the importance of prioritizing your team, customers, & company over yourself when it comes to getting ahead, and tips for getting feedback, asking for help, prioritizing relationships, showing initiative, and much more. This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022. Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023 ABOUT OSKANA KUBUSHYNA As VP of Entertainment Operations, Oksana Kubushyna ( @GLHF2U ) oversees operations of Riot’s Entertainment division with a goal to imagine and develop bespoke IP experiences and products - animation, film, interactive narratives, music, consumer products and beyond - that deepen players’ and fans’ connections to the universe Riot has created in League of Legends. After joining Riot in 2014, she quickly rose through the ranks, holding positions including Head of Infrastructure, Development Director for League of Legends, founder and Head of Riot Platform Group, and VP of Game Studios Operations, helping build the foundation for, launch and operate Riot’s new games globally. She has also been a leader of Diversity and Inclusion efforts within Riot. Her passion for the advancement of women in games and tech reaches beyond Riot, and she has been honored by groups such as Girls Inc. and Wonder Women Tech. "If you're asking, 'How can I get ahead?', I'm here to tell you also that you gotta flip that. That's exactly the wrong question to ask because the more you ask questions like this, the more people will perceive you as self-serving. There is no quicker way to lose somebody's trust than for them to believe you are acting in your best interests and not in theirs, not in your company's, not in your customer's. Focusing on your customer, focusing on your manager's needs, on your company's needs, on your team needs is a much more effective way to move forward.” - Oksana Kubushyna Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Introducing Oksana & her roles within Riot Games over the past eight years (2:37) Secondary drivers impacting career success (5:53) Why your mindset is the primary driver of success (7:52) Always prioritize the company & customers over your own self-interests (9:57) Strategies for becoming non-reactive & showing initiative (12:53) The importance of prioritizing relationships (15:12) How to incorporate feedback to improve your leadership skills (16:38) Be in the right place so you’re not a $10 watch (19:09) Audience Q&A: tips for going about getting feedback & asking for help (20:48) How to tell stories & adapting the skill for a remote environment (22:52) Tips for recognizing your value & overcoming imposter syndrome (25:10) Knowing you’re not the right “watch” in your company / team (27:37) Defining anti-fragility & its impact on career success (29:14) Serve your team by managing up (30:32) Making the best use of your time in a one-on-one w/ high-level leadership (31:58) Why you should create time to think strategically (33:15) Frameworks for driving change within a larger organization (34:48) Oksana’s advice for moving forward instead of retreating into your comfort zone (36:10) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
What's helped you succeed in the larger company you are at (or left), seldom translates in the new smaller company you find yourself in. This conversation covers strategies for finding the next opportunity, tips for making your transition smooth, frameworks for being a successful leader at a smaller org, what skills / attributes you’ll need to succeed, and how to integrate teams that consist of original startup members & hires from larger companies Featuring Vinod Marur, SVP of Engineering @ Databricks & moderated by Ali Irturk, Vice President of Engineering @ CommerceHub. This is a featured session from ELC Annual 2022. Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023 ABOUT VINOD MARUR Vinod Marur is the SVP of Engineering at Databricks. He was previously at Rubrik where he served as SVP Engineering and established a mature engineering organization geared for rapid product development and innovation with a deep focus on product quality and organizational development. Prior to that, Vinod spent nearly 15 years in leadership roles across some of Google’s most critical business units, including Search, Ads, and Payments as well as tapping into his passion for developer platforms to create and lead the Actions on Google platform, used by third parties to develop for Google Assistant and other Google products. "You've got to want to build houses, not paint walls. Painting walls is fine and it's totally good, but if you do not like to build houses, actually don't make that transition because you're literally gonna go like, 'Oh my God, there is no wall here.' And you're gonna have to build it from scratch. Everything you need to be able to do yourself.” - Vinod Marur ABOUT ALI IRTURK Ali's day-to-day passion is creating and being part of efficient and effective engineering organizations that are firing on all cylinders where team members can achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in a psychologically safe environment. Ali is currently realizing this passion by working at CommerceHub as their Vice President of Engineering. He previously worked at rocketship start-ups funded by some of the top VCs in the world including a16z, SoftBank, Microsoft Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures to name a few. He was the Vice President of Engineering at WorkBoard, a strategy and results enterprise SaaS platform helping large organizations align quickly for results, leading product delivery as well as accessibility, application security, release engineering, platform, and infrastructure teams. Previously, Ali was the Vice President of Engineering at ALICE Technologies working on revolutionizing the construction industry with an artificial intelligence-powered enterprise SaaS product. Ali also created and managed the advanced products group at Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) for 8 years while working as an adjunct professor at UC San Diego. His team worked on creating innovative industrial vision systems and software to help companies improve their product quality, eliminate production errors, and lower manufacturing costs. Examples of the products I worked on were the world's first vision system on chip and the world's fastest 3D scanning system to name a few. Where he is today is quite different from where his journey began. Born and raised in Istanbul, Ali graduated from the Turkish Naval Academy and served as an officer in the Turkish Navy. After leaving the Navy, he earned Master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics at UC Santa Barbara, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and an MBA at UC Berkeley. Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Introducing Vinod & Ali (3:17) Vinod’s experience @ Google & the motivation to move to smaller startups (3:23) Strategies for searching for the next opportunity (7:07) Taking action vs. stagnation mode (9:31) Know your role within a smaller organization (10:27) Recommendations to make transitioning to a small org smoother (13:11) How long the transition period typically lasts (17:35) Frameworks for being an effective leader at a smaller org (18:42) Eng leadership skills & attributes that matter the most (23:25) Use coaches / mentors to help support your transition (25:55) Things Vinod says he would do differently in his earlier transitions (28:13) Audience Q&A: how leading at a small vs. large company is like working out (30:55) Switching your mindset from top-down to bottom-up (32:37) Navigating the balance between celebrating new features & operational wins at startups (34:44) Tips for integrating your startup between original team & newer hires from large orgs (39:19) Coaching individuals & organizations to accept change on both sides (42:35) Know what problems to focus on & calibrate w/ the right folks (45:12) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 How Businesses, Creators, and Researchers are Building the “Generative Generation" w/ Mira Murati, Naveen Gavini & Vijay Karunamurthy #140 49:16
This episode features one of our most fascinating sessions from ELC Annual 2022 – we explore how businesses, creators, and researchers are building the “generative generation” & harnessing generative AI’s potential – featuring Mira Murati, CTO @ OpenAI, Naveen Gavini, SVP, Products @ Pinterest & moderated by Vijay Karunamurthy Head of Engineering @ Scale AI. This session covers the current state & future of generative AI, its potential impacts, what is being done to mitigate potential risks, how smaller companies can take advantage of open-source generative AI technology, and the factors impacting future generative AI innovation. Interested in topics like this, and beyond? #ELCAnnual2023 is happening 8/30 & 8/31! You can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all our speakers + explore additional topics at sfelc.com/annual2023 ABOUT MIRA MURATI Mira Murati ( @miramurati ) is the CTO of OpenAI. Mira and her teams are pushing the frontiers of what neural networks can do, seeking to better understand the behavior of powerful AI systems and make them safer, and align them with human intentions and human values. Prior to joining OpenAI, she led the product and engineering teams at Leap Motion (VR/AR startup), and led the design, development, and launch of vehicle products at Tesla, including Model X. "We've always wanted human helpers. We've always tried to build tools like since the beginning of life we've created tools. They're just such a natural thing and now this is different because it extends the range of our mental capabilities, of our creativity and intuition and imagination. So we are sort of exploring this new era where tools are helping us extend the range of our minds.” - Mira Murati ABOUT NAVEEN GAVINI Naveen Gavini ( @ngavini ) is the SVP of Products at Pinterest, where he oversees all design and product efforts for both consumer and advertiser products. He is incredibly passionate about building great user experiences and creating environments that stimulate creativity and innovative thinking. Prior to this role Naveen led both the design and engineering functions and was one of Pinterest's earliest engineers, joining in 2012. Since then, he played a critical role in scaling the engineering team, and was involved in almost every major new product initiative the company has developed for users. ABOUT VIJAY KARUNAMURTHY Vijay Karunamurthy ( @vjkaruna ) is Scale’s Head of Engineering. He was the Director of Engineering at Apple for 5 years. He was the Co-Founder and CEO of Nom Labs, a community for food lovers to create, share and watch their favorite stories in real-time, and Co-Founder of AVOS Systems. Additionally, he was an Engineering Manager at Google and Youtube. Vijay is an expert in data-centric AI and building Machine Learning teams. He believes that the next decade of AI achievement is going to be built by teams that take on outsized ambitions, and understand that it is not always a straight line to get there. Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Introducing Mira, Naveen & Vijay (3:33) Mira discusses the current state & future of generative AI (3:51) Naveen’s perspective on how these changes impact curation (7:12) How engineering teams can bring generative AI into their own practice (10:27) Strategies for smaller companies to incorporate this technology into their work (12:54) Marketing & creative industries’ views on generative AI & its potential impact (14:32) Naveen shares his experience with guided search @ Pinterest & generative AI’s role w/ the act of discovery (17:05) The intersection of art & generative AI (19:57) Mira & Naveen’s opinions on if generative AI will replace or enhance current jobs (21:47) How generative AI is being used in highly skilled industries (25:55) Risks of generative AI, such as perceived generation of misinformation (28:13) Mira explains how OpenAI mitigates risks & spread of misinformation (31:14) Three pillars of future innovation for generative AI (33:39) Naveen answers what he sees “next week” in generative AI development (35:04) What’s in store for OpenAI (37:32) What’s next for Pinterest & ML (39:25) Audience Q&A: how to democratize AI & make it beneficial for humanity (40:11) Quantum computing / other computing considerations @ OpenAI (42:31) Weighing the pros & cons of generative AI adoption (43:49) The future of ML & mathematical / scientific discovery (46:42)4 This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, we cover compassionate accountability & facing difficulties head-on with Marc Lesser, author of Finding Clarity . He shares what it was like living in a Zen monastery for 10 years and the leadership lessons he learned while working in their kitchen. We also address strategies for conversations around high standards, accountability, agreements, and alignment; models for correcting negative self-talk; closing the gap between seemingly combative standards, such as speed vs. quality; and how to transition from avoiding conflicts to accepting them. Lastly, we close with a three-minute meditation that can help bring much-needed well-being into your workspace. ABOUT MARC LESSER Marc Lesser ( @marclesser ) is a CEO, executive coach, and Zen teacher. He founded and was CEO of 3 companies, and helped develop a mindfulness program inside of Google's headquarters. Marc was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for 10 years, and director of Tassajara, Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the western world. He is the author of Finding Clarity . "So to me it's really maybe about high standards and aligning around those standards. Avoiding those conversations is the problem and this is where I think the whole realm of emotions and emotional intelligence and self-awareness comes into play. Five emotionally intelligent engineers working together will produce much, much greater outcomes than people who are not really aligned, not really having those real conversations.” - Marc Lesser Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Marc’s experience working / living in a zen monastery for 10 years (3:30) Leadership lessons learned from the monastery’s kitchen (6:09) Exploring accountability & confronting conflict (8:37) Frameworks for conversations around high standards / accountability (10:26) How to incorporate compassionate accountability (13:53) Practices that help teams develop greater alignment (17:04) When leaders practice accountability w/ kindness (19:53) Model for correcting negative self-talk & how it impacts team alignment (21:23) Closing the gap between speed vs. quality, or other combative standards (24:22) Curiosity & flexibility as core values (26:49) Best practices for forming agreements (27:50) How to move from avoiding difficulties / conflicts to accepting them (29:57) Rapid fire questions (32:28) Marc’s three-minute closing meditation (35:27) LINKS AND RESOURCES Finding Clarity - Marc Lesser’s book that shows how, together, compassion and accountability play an absolutely critical role in transforming how we communicate in our work and family relationships. Think Again - Adam Grant, the bestselling author of Give and Take and Originals examines the critical art of rethinking: learning to question your opinions and open other people’s minds, which can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life. Peace Is Every Step - In this book Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations in our daily life that usually pressure and antagonise us. The most profound satisfactions, the deepest feelings of joy and completeness lie as close at hand as our next conscious breath and the smile we can form right now. These Truths: A History of the United States - Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leveraging your values as first-principles to shape strategy & decision making in your eng org w/ Ludo Antonov #138 37:08
Ludo Antonov, VP of Engineering @ WhatNot, shares how eng leaders can better operate from their organization’s first principles. He defines the concept & what that looks like for WhatNot through their values of listening to customers, moving uncomfortably fast, and more – plus what happens when optimizing for one principle conflicts with another! We also cover Ludo’s leadership journey, how he navigated the transition from a business model focused on discovery & matching to two-sided marketplaces, and challenges / lessons learned from working within the social, community, & marketplace space. ABOUT LUDO ANTONOV Ludo ( @ludo_antonov ) is the Vice President of Engineering at Whatnot. He has an extensive background in building engineering teams at fast-growing startups including Hulu, Pinterest, and Lyft. He led the Pinterest Growth team as the company was going through hyper-growth up to IPO. Prior to joining Whatnot, he served as an engineering executive at Lyft, overseeing the company’s core rideshare products including the rider, driver, marketplace, and growth organizations. "That's one of the important parts is it allows for common language to fall back to whenever these problems actually happen because they tend to be more and more complex and take more and more nuance in order to get right and sometimes, especially like it's very powerful to take it back to first principles and say, 'How would we do this if we have to be ruthlessly prioritizing? Are we moving comfortably fast in thinking of our approach?' And then everyone understands because it's part of our vocabulary and it takes repetition to build that.” - Ludo Antonov Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Ludo provides a status update on recent milestones @ WhatNot (2:40) What operating from first principles looks like within an eng org (4:08) Strategies for going back to your founding leadership principles (6:35) Overcoming product challenges by leading through listening to your customers (8:34) How the eng team pivoted their approach based on that first principle (9:40) Deconstructing “moving uncomfortably fast” & its impact on operating systems (12:13) Incorporating first principles with WhatNot’s international strategy (13:35) When optimizing for one value is in conflict with another (15:32) Frameworks that aid in ruthless prioritization (16:41) Assess impact, likelihood of success & effort during prioritization conversations (19:05) Lessons learned from building Pinterest that Ludo applied to WhatNot (19:57) Ludo’s transition from discovery / matching to a two-sided marketplace (23:40) How Ludo applied two-sided marketplace elements to WhatNot (24:53) Working business model aspects into an engineering context (26:23) Ludo’s favorite seller experiences (28:30) Engineering approaches to & impact on two-sided marketplaces (30:18) Recommendations for eng leaders operating in a new business model (31:57) Rapid fire questions (33:39) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Upside of Stress - Drawing from groundbreaking research, psychologist and award-winning teacher Kelly McGonigal, PhD, offers a surprising new view of stress—one that reveals the upside of stress, and shows us exactly how to capitalize on its benefits. Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore’s bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Sarah Milstein, VPE @ Daily , joins us to discuss the most surprising aspect of remote teams – the opportunity for higher trust teams. She covers counterintuitive perspectives & non-obvious practices that can benefit distributed orgs, including why hard conversations can be easier when done remotely and how remote teams are less political & more productive than co-located teams. Sarah also dives into Daily’s unique salary & promotion process and how eng leaders could implement this method into their teams. Lastly, we cover “swift trust” and Sarah’s recommendations for creating the optimal conditions for it to thrive. ABOUT SARAH MILSTEIN Sarah ( @SarahM ) joined Daily as VP of Engineering, bringing 25 years of deep experience developing products, setting strategy, and leading teams at startups. Most recently, Sarah was VP of Engineering at ConvertKit. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Engineering at Mailchimp. Sarah has extensive experience in media as a producer and author, having programmed, co-hosted, and managed conferences and trade shows, including the Web 2.0 Expo. Sarah holds an M.B.A. from University of California, Berkeley. "Swift Trust is an idea from workplace psychology about teams that come together quickly counterintuitively often build higher levels of trust and do it with very little structure, and it turns out that actually the coming together quickly and the less structure are themselves some of the conditions that can help. It turns out that those are the kind of conditions that are often true in software development. Those conditions of it's clear what you're working on, everyone has a role, there's time involved, like some sense of timing. A lot of times those conditions are available to you but maybe not being used.” - Sarah Milstein Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: The most surprising aspect of working remotely: higher trust (3:24) Sarah’s Slack experiment & how it revealed team dynamics (6:15) Additional benefits & accommodations provided by remote work (8:26) Non-obvious communication practices that benefit remote orgs (11:18) Strategies for having hard conversations one-on-one in a remote setting (13:52) Recommendations for facilitating big group conversations remotely (16:34) Why distributed teams are less political & more productive than co-located teams (18:58) Internal practices to reduce politics (21:48) How Daily’s salary & promotion process works (23:40) Frameworks for aligning projects toward peoples’ strengths within a remote team (27:04) Process for implementing a new salary & promotion model (30:28) Defining “swift trust” & creating conditions for it to be present (34:20) Benefits of creating agreements on how you’re going to work as a team (37:04) Rapid fire questions (40:28) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Staff Engineer's Path - For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well--or the engineer. Tanya O’Reilly’s staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level as role models, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills. Rethinking levels, promotions and salaries - Sarah’s blog post on Daily’s restructuring of levels, promotions, salaries, and how Daily approaches career compensation. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
We’re taking this week off for a short summer holiday. Until then, here are a few episodes from the backlog we highly recommend, for a little fun summer listening... Leveraging OODA Loops in Leadership with Oksana Kubushyna #118 - https://elc.community/home/podcasts/building-platforms-vs-products-and-leveraging-ooda-loops-in-leadership-oksana-kubushnya-riotgames Navigating Multiproduct Expansion + other eadership & career insights from Kris Rasmussen #124 - https://elc.community/home/podcasts/navigating-multi-product-expansion-leadership-and-career-insights-kris-rasmussen-figma Alignment is the key to delivering great product & team outcomes w/ Jonathon Hensley #90 - https://elc.community/home/podcasts/alignment-is-the-key-to-delivering-great-products-and-outcomes And a deep cut from the archives… Conscious Career Growth parts 1 & 2 with Wade Chambers!! #20 & #21- https://elc.community/home/podcasts/conscious-career-growth-wade-chambers-part-1 Want to get involved with ELC? Visit elc.community sign up with your email for membership (it’s free) and we’ll include you on the events & programs we have coming up! Join us at our flagship conference for eng leaders, ELC Annual on 8/30-31! sfelc.com/elcannual2023 Thanks for listening to the engineering leadership podcast. We’ll see you next week!…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Barbara Nelson, VP of Engineering @ InfluxData, joins us to share her eng leadership philosophies on career adaptation and helping teams adapt to meet both business needs & individual interests / strengths. We cover how her leadership journey has shaped her perspective on adapting to new career opportunities, implementing boundaries within eng teams to foster creativity, approaching problem sets with eng teams, and building a healthy relationship between product & eng orgs. Additionally, Barbara shares strategies for adapting a team based on personality dynamics, meeting developers where they are, and why she’s built her career on building products with purpose. ABOUT BARBARA NELSON Barbara leads the engineering team at InfluxData. She has extensive experience leading globally distributed teams in designing, developing, deploying, and supporting products and services that are delivered on a cloud-based service platform and on a range of client platforms. Prior to InfluxData, Barbara had a variety of engineering and technical leadership roles, including VP of Engineering at iPass, CTO at Cirrent, and Principal Architect at eBay. Barbara has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University College Dublin, Ireland. "There was an assumption that we had more shared context than we really had. So the engineers kind of thought, 'Well, it'll be obvious to the operations folks that this thing is deployed correctly or incorrectly.' There was no reason for it to be obvious to the operation folks. What would've made it obvious to the operations folks?” - Barbara Nelson Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Barbara’s favorite leadership dilemma – job efficiency vs. enjoyment (1:57) How Barbara has adapted to various roles throughout her leadership journey (3:42) Lessons learned from diving into the role of Interim VP of Operations (6:19) Formal & informal frameworks for making / communicating adjustments (9:03) Barbara’s perspective on pursuing new opportunities & the “career ladder” (11:33) Advice for those who feel stuck on that ladder (13:25) How Barbara’s experience at General Magic impacted her leadership philosophy (15:07) Why boundaries help foster creativity (17:30) Barbara’s approach to introducing problem sets to eng teams (19:14) Strategies for aligning eng teams to reach an intended output (21:55) Driving a healthy relationship between product & eng teams (23:58) Recommendations for bridging the gap between product & engineering (26:02) Adapt a team based on personality dynamics & what gets them excited (28:49) The power of building a product with purpose (36:31) How AI trends will impact eng team adaptation & alignment (38:12) Rapid fire questions (39:45) LINKS AND RESOURCES Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making - Written for anyone who wants to grow at work—from young grads navigating their first jobs to CEOs deciding whether to sell their company—Tony Fadell’s Build is full of personal stories, practical advice, and fascinating insights into some of the most impactful products and people of the 20th century. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss rapid prototyping & how eng leaders can develop better product instincts with David Crawshaw, CTO & Co-Founder @ Tailscale! He shares his leadership journey from Google to Tailscale and how the early product development days at his startup lead to incorporating rapid prototyping principles within their eng org. We also cover strategies and recommendations for those who are new to rapid prototyping, how to work with design & product teams while quickly iterating, navigating the tension between speed & quality, and how to avoid common pitfalls while implementing the process. ABOUT DAVID CRAWSHAW David Crawshaw ( @davidcrawshaw ) is co-founder and CTO of Tailscale. Previously he was a staff engineer at Google, where he specialized in petabyte-scale logs processing. He implemented TCP/IP networking for Fuchsia, as well as ported the Go language platform to iOS and Android. "If you're a pre-seed startup in the Bay Area and you are trying to ship something to your first few customers and you ship with 40-something languages, then you've made a mistake, but it's not necessarily true that a large company has made that mistake. For larger companies with more total requirements, I think the big question is can you construct environments where you can experiment without all of these requirements?” - David Crawshaw Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: David’s background at Google & the transition to founding Tailscale (1:51) Early-day challenges at Tailscale w/ prototyping (4:03) How Tailscale discovered & employed rapid prototyping during its early days (6:41) Paradigm shifts around the product-building process & feedback loop (8:37) Recommendations for those new to rapid prototyping (11:20) Shifting your org’s culture toward accelerated iteration cycles w/ arbitrary limits (13:36) Frameworks for getting to a faster prototype (16:52) How to work w/ design & product throughout rapid prototyping process (19:26) Navigating the tension between doing things quickly vs. working well (21:51) Where large companies try to rapid prototype & things go wrong (26:29) Trains vs. EVs in the Bay area – a metaphor for rapid iteration (28:46) Bringing that metaphor to software development (31:37) David’s perspective on widespread adoption of OpenAI (34:31) Rapid fire questions (39:19) LINKS AND RESOURCES Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - In this exhilarating novel from Gabrielle Zevin, two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leading beyond domain expertise & laying early-stage security program foundations w/ Matt Spitz #134 39:44
Matt Spitz joins our latest podcast to discuss leading beyond domain expertise! As Head of Engineering @ Vanta, Matt shares his experience managing & developing a security program in the early days of Vanta before hiring for a specialized skillset. We also cover strategies on maximizing security at your organization as it grows, developing a company culture that invests in security, identifying when your org is ready to hire a domain expert, and how to effectively communicate with & lead domain experts within your org. In addition, Matt reveals what qualities he believes a security culture expert should possess & how eng leaders (who aren’t domain experts in security) can help set the org’s right technical direction. ABOUT MATT SPITZ Matt Spitz is the Head of Engineering at Trust Management Platform provider, Vanta, where he helps companies practice better security. Previously, he co-founded and led Dropbox's NYC office, started a company, and has built and scaled diverse engineering teams solving complex product and infrastructure challenges. He lives in San Francisco and rides his bike to work. "The value that I can provide to all these departments is visibility and context. The perfect strategy for support or something like security doesn't exist. It's contextual, right? And the things that we are trying to do as a business, the things that are happening outside of those departments that maybe I have visibility into, that is value that I can provide to those people in shifting their strategy and setting the right strategy that's contextually appropriate.” - Matt Spitz Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Matt’s observations around leading beyond your expertise (2:45) Leadership tactics to employ when transitioning to a role outside your expertise (5:02) Matt's transition from Dropbox to Vanta (7:31) Paradigm shifts when transitioning between large & small orgs (9:01) How to improve in leading teams beyond your skill set (11:01) Recommendations for probing / gathering information from experts (13:19) Matt’s experience leading a successful security program before hiring an expert (15:27) Strategies to maximize the area of security as an individual (18:27) How to lay the foundational elements of an early-stage security program (22:14) Knowing when your org is ready for a domain-specific expert (24:05) Indicators to identify when seeking an expert (25:12) Frameworks for hiring / managing an expert beyond your domain (27:03) Evaluating culture fit in hiring security experts (28:54) Effective communication strategies when working with various domain experts (31:44) Setting the right technical direction when you’re not the expert (34:40) Rapid fire questions (36:22) LINKS AND RESOURCES Lost Dogs - Matt’s Pearl Jam cover band This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Becoming a more strategic contributor, becoming resilient against AI, & enduring economic downturns w/ Han Yuan #133 37:06
Han Yuan, Founder of Post-PC Labs, joins us to discuss some of the biggest converging trends hitting our industry – the rise of AI along with the tech bubble that’s poised to burst at any time. We cover not only these trends’ impact on eng leaders, but we also cover how technology trends can drive opportunities for eng leaders to become key strategic partners toward their orgs’ business strategy. Han shares advice for how to evaluate business needs, align your attitude / work toward those goals, earn a seat at the leadership table, build credibility, and use that credibility to implement strategic changes. ABOUT HAN YUAN Han Yuan is the founder of Post-PC Labs, LLC. Post-PC Labs is wholly-owned and funded by Han, powered by a global team of freelancers. The group's focus is building cash-flow breakeven projects with product-market fit. Early investment themes include wellness and corporate productivity. Before Post-PC Labs, Han was SVP of Engineering at Upwork, where he led one of the world's most distributed engineering teams: 350+ engineers in 40 countries around the world. In this role, Han was responsible for any function that had anything to do with a computer, including Information Security, IT, QA, Application Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Data Science, Infrastructure Engineering, and Program Management. During his tenure at Upwork, Upwork's revenue doubled, and the company went public in 2018. In a previous life, Han was an influential mobile engineering leader, having incubated world-class teams for eBay and Netflix. Han's early work in mobile proved that it was possible to sell billions of dollars of goods and entertain hundreds of millions of people globally using just a mobile phone. Together with his teams, Han helped launch and scale the eBay and Netflix programs from small incubation teams. At eBay, he was the first engineer on his team. When Apple announced its one billionth download in the app store and celebrated the top 25 apps in the store of all time, eBay and Netflix were both on the list. Han started his career in enterprise software specializing in the finance and human resources domains and was a co-founder of Buddystumbler.com . Han has a B.S and M.S in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from U.C. Berkeley with a minor degree in Computer Science and a Management of Technology Certificate from the Haas School of Business. "That's the language that you need to communicate with your colleagues, your peers. That's what everybody else understands. They're not going to understand, 'Oh, we need to migrate the data center to the cloud.' They're not going to understand that, 'Hey, these are all the technical reasons why a forklift could be very complicated.' You have to put it in terms that the business is going to understand. That is going to be the art, and along the way, I think if you use that framework, it helps your own teams understand why their work is relevant to the business.” - Han Yuan Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Converging industry trends that eng leaders should be aware of (2:45) The impact of these trends on tech leaders (6:54) “Opaque” technology & how it can drive innovation in eng leaders (9:48) Emerging opportunities that may intimidate, such as LLMs (11:34) Han’s litmus test to determine your risk of irrelevance as an eng leader (12:55) Framework for eng leaders to increase their value-add to business / product strategy (15:31) Evaluating the business’s needs & aligning your values toward those goals (18:02) How eng leaders can make strategic impact on the business (19:37) Key questions to help eng leaders identify strategic solutions (22:30) Tips for establishing (or reestablishing) your role as a strategic partner (24:00) How Han built credibility during his time @ Upwork (27:40) Using newfound credibility to implement strategic changes (29:54) Rapid fire questions (32:28) LINKS AND RESOURCES Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind - Sapiens, the book, takes us on a breath-taking ride through our entire human history, from its evolutionary roots to the age of capitalism and genetic engineering, to uncover why we are the way we are. Sapiens focuses on key processes that shaped humankind and the world around it, such as the advent of agriculture, the creation of money, the spread of religion and the rise of the nation-state. Unlike other books of its kind, Sapiens takes a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges the gaps between history, biology, philosophy and economics in a way never done before. Furthermore, taking both the macro and the micro view, Sapiens conveys not only what happened and why, but also how it felt for individuals. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 The next evolution to measure & improve developer productivity & experience w/ Abi Noda #132 48:28
Abi Noda, Co-founder & CEO @ DX returns to the show to discuss his latest research on measuring & improving developer productivity, and provides a practical, developer-focused framework to give you clear, actionable insights into what to measure and where to focus in order to improve developer productivity. Abi reveals the inspiration behind his whitepaper / research, elements of their new DevEx framework, and how eng leaders can implement it into their org’s practice in order to increase developer productivity. We also cover the evolution of measuring developer experience (including output metrics, DORA & SPACE frameworks) and the benefits / shortcomings of each approach. In addition, learn not only the importance of having a dedicated DevEx team, but also how to implement these insights if your org isn’t ready to have a dedicated team yet. ABOUT ABI NODA Abi ( @abinoda ) is the CEO and co-founder of DX, the world's first developer experience management platform. He was previously the CEO and founder of Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. At GitHub he led research collaborations with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, McKinsey, and Microsoft Research, which was the impetus for founding DX. "Oftentimes, organizations that are larger that get started with these types of measurements in their framework, they're really surprised. They realize that, 'Oh man, there's all these opportunities we didn't even realize and developers are telling us these are the most important things. These aren't the things we're working on and we need to shift our focus.' So, I think there's a huge opportunity to refocus by getting a holistic picture of the developer experience.” - Abi Noda Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: The background behind Abi’s developer productivity research & why it matters (2:50) The evolution of measuring developer productivity (5:50) Moving beyond output metrics to DORA (and how that fell short of solving engineering measurement problems) (7:43) Challenges, drawbacks, and limitations to current measurement approaches (like DORA & SPACE) (11:51) What is the SPACE framework & how it manifests in eng orgs (15:14) Distinction between measuring the notion of productivity vs. focusing on measurements that improve productivity (17:07) Overview of Abi’s new DevEx framework & examples of it in use (19:52) Recommendations for frontline managers, ICs, engineers, etc. to apply the DevEx framework (22:26) How DevEx uncovers blind spots (like requirements quality) (24:21) When engineering orgs should consider separating out productivity (27:44) Strategies for broad-scope leaders to apply the DevEx framework (29:21) Using local teams to address specific DevEx issues (31:30) Why the VP of Eng / org leadership’s values drive developer experience (33:00) Tips for implementing the DevEx framework as a startup vs. mature company (35:06) How Abi is incorporating DevEx strategies into his own company @ DX (37:47) What positive developer experience looks like within an eng team (39:35) The most important step a team w/o a DevEx team can take (41:29) Rapid fire questions (43:17) LINKS AND RESOURCES Abi’s new DevEx whitepaper - “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity” by Abi Noda, DX, Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria, Nicole Forsgren, Microsoft Research, Michaela Greiler, DX Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It - Obviously Awesome goes beyond teaching you what positioning is and why you should care. It gives you a step-by-step process that any startup can follow to position their product, service or company. This book will teach you how to find your product’s “secret sauce” and then sell that sauce to those who crave it. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a "position" in a prospective customer's mind-one that reflects a company's own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Redefining success and incorporating relational healing practices into eng leadership & product development w/ Tammarrian Rogers #131 45:52
In this episode, we redefine what successful, productive engineering looks like with Tammarrian Rogers. As the former Inclusive Engineering Director @ Snap, Tammarrian shares her perspective on global relational healing and what pulled her away from her traditional eng leadership role to explore this topic further. We cover the importance of incorporating relational healing practices into eng leadership & product development, the importance of the “healing profit,” how technology can help manifest healing opportunities for users, and how to align eng teams on embracing relational healing as a practice. We also cover how individual eng leaders can build awareness around internal self-talk – critical & positive – and explore self-love / reflection practices daily. ABOUT TAMMARRIAN ROGERS Tammarrian ( @tammarrian ) has enjoyed acquiring over 30 years of engineering leadership experience in both hardware and software at General Motors, Apple, Microsoft and Snap. She has had the opportunity to lead cross-functional teams with a focus on inclusive product engineering, quality assurance, release management and product localization and globalization. She has also served on community non-profit and for-profit organizations including Ada Developers Academy, NordVPN, Northwest Tech Equity Initiative (NWTEI) and OPTYVA, a social purpose organization with a business sustainability focus. In November 2021, Tammarrian left her position as Snap’s first Inclusive Engineering Director to redirect her energy to developing methodologies that promote and facilitate global relational healing; healing that will lead to a sustainable, healthy planet and future for us humans. Ultimately, her goal is to systematically embed these successful methodologies into emerging and evolving technologies. As a solo nomad today, Tammarrian is enjoying meeting and connecting with people and land around our world. You’ll likely find her on an urban or nature hike, in some body of water or giving much love to a stranger’s dog. "We really have to be aware of what is the impact of the product that we're building on our communities beyond the typical metrics that we use to say that we're being successful. So for example, we talk a lot about success being financial, right? It's a profit. How are we profiting? And that also hinges upon everything from our engagement metrics, the visits, the retention, the click-through rate. Whatever your product is, what is it that you're measuring to say that you're building and retaining a community of people and you're growing your business? We're all familiar with that, and I think what I'm inviting us to do as engineering leaders across our industry is to shift the currency of success and to bring in an entirely different currency.” - Tammarrian Rogers Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023 SHOW NOTES: Tammarrian’s transition from eng leadership @ Snap (2:45) Redefining what a productive day means & focusing on global relational healing (5:09) How Tammarrian felt pulled to move away from traditional eng leadership (6:31) Exploring what global relationship healing means (10:03) Strategies for building awareness around critical internal talk (12:16) Frameworks for practicing self-love (13:47) Tammarrian’s strategies for diverting outward distractions & focusing inward (15:32) Using your physical space to impact your perspective & vice versa (18:15) Encouraging eng leaders to consider the “healing profit” (20:19) Technology / products that manifest healing opportunities (23:12) An example of how Snap’s technology helped users feel seen (25:19) Make sure your team is aligned on if healing is a value (28:06) Tammarrian’s approach to dissonance between perceived & actual lived-out values (31:25) Active ways someone can transition from surviving mode to thriving mode (35:32) The No. 1 practice to embody the thriving mindset (38:20) Rapid fire questions (39:49) LINKS AND RESOURCES Profit Without Oppression - Profit Without Oppression unapologetically identifies the systems, institutions, and policies that privilege the few while excluding and harming the many. This book charts an inclusionary strategic path forward that seeks to develop an economic ethos and series of business models that are supremacy, coercion, discrimination, and exploitation free. The Silent Patient - A shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive. Humankind: A Hopeful History - International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We tackle the trend toward engineering efficiency with Alamelu Radhakrishnan, Head of Engineering Operations @ Shopify. She reveals strategies to move your eng org toward greater efficiency while maintaining high levels of impact & creativity. We also share how eng leaders can identify opportunities for efficiency, giving engineering a seat at the leadership table during efficiency-focused conversations, frameworks for removing toil within your eng team, how to avoid burnout while optimizing for efficiency, and the role of decision-making in maximizing efficient eng orgs. ABOUT ALAMELU RADHAKRISHNAN Alamelu leads Engineering Operations at Shopify, leading the teams responsible for building the systems and technical programs that power Shopify RnD. Her mandate is to maximize the impact of engineers on Shopify’s Missions, and her role spans across team health, engineering craft excellence, strategic planning and prioritization, and successful business operations within RnD. Prior to Shopify, Alamelu has worked with some of Canada’s most innovative product and consulting agencies, leading software delivery teams and helping organizations leverage technology across a variety of industries. Alamelu finds joy in solving business problems through technology, strives for organizational excellence, and is passionate about supporting and sponsoring underrepresented folks in the industry. Alamelu lives in Toronto, and loves food, travel, the outdoors, and horror movies. "The thing that I've been telling my team is that this is not a time to get through. This is a time to lean in. Let's not treat it as, 'Oh my God, you focus on efficiency. Let's just do it, and then it'll be done. It'll be back to the fun times.' These are the fun times. They're just fun in a different way, but these constraints are making us even more creative, and these challenges are going to lead to us doing some of the best work of our lives. That's the exciting thing, and so I think the way through the fear is actually into excitement." - Alamelu Radhakrishnan Join us at ELC Annual 2023! ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies. Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco To get early access to tickets - email us at annual@sfelc.com Join Jellyfish's GLOW conference on 5/16 & 5/17 to maximize engineering impact! Learn from industry experts, connect and share challenges with peers as you learn effective strategies to expand your leadership! Register now at https://www.jellyfishglowsummit.com/ SHOW NOTES: How Alamelu’s role @ Shopify is like an extension of eng leadership (2:52) Working yourself out of a job & identifying blind spots in the eng org (5:23) Alamelu’s approach to building a new system from scratch (7:00) Prioritization strategies when developing new systems (10:34) Inside the industry trend toward optimizing for efficiency vs. experimentation (11:45) Recommendations for how managers can find opportunities / make adjustments (14:10) Frameworks for helping your eng team overcome fear & embrace creativity (16:50) How to communicate the impact of engineering on the business (19:44) Ensure engineering has a seat at the table during efficiency conversations (21:37) The value of ad hoc vs. planned meetings (24:08) Alamelu’s perspective on helping eng teams find time for flow (26:19) Why leadership should encourage eng teams to “remove the toil” (27:44) Areas of toil that Alamelu has identified & how to address them (29:51) How to alleviate burnout while shifting toward efficiency (33:04) Decision-making as an opportunity for greater efficiency (36:24) Rapid fire questions (39:06) LINKS AND RESOURCES Land of the Giants - Big tech is transforming every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In Land of the Giants: Dating Games, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Cloud Cuckoo Land - Five protagonists dwell in the heart of Cloud Cuckoo Land: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for an exoplanet, decades from now. Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril. A book written in ancient Greek—the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky—provides solace and mystery to these unforgettable characters. This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Celebrating 100 episodes - our favorite moments from the Engineering Leadership Podcast so far 1:30:20
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1:30:20Today’s episode marks a special occasion – 100 episodes of The Engineering Leadership Podcast! To celebrate, we’ve compiled some of our favorite moments from the past hundred episodes, featuring a wide range of high-energy guests and compelling topics. We cover tension points while scaling eng & product orgs, why you should seek existential issues, how to get unstuck in your career, helping engineers outgrow their positions, hyper-growing your eng org/career, identifying burnout, understanding workplace injustice, confronting your fear of failure, and much more! Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: How to focus on what really matters... seek the "existential issues" & find where there's "Room AND Attention" - Will Larson (3:23) The Portfolio of Time Management - Jean-Denis Greze (8:50) How to get unstuck in your career - Wade Chambers (13:04) “Crashing” your way to a seat at the table - Melody Hildebrandt (15:51) The fundamentals of managing up - Jan Chong (17:12) Common tension points while scaling engineering and product organizations - Jeremy Henrickson (19:31) The story of Amazon Apollo, solving the right problem & pitching the right stakeholders - Melissa Binde (24:43) "Hero Developers don't scale" - Andrew Lau & Eli Daniel (30:09) How to increase your pool of potential candidates - Farhan Thawar (34:48) Why you should help engineers outgrow their positions & how to discuss career growth with your team members - Tara Ellis (39:45) How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth - Samir Naik (43:32) Move as fast as long as - Richard Wong (47:41) Lessons from leading large-scale, complex, strategic projects - Wendy Sheppard (49:38) How to operationalize your approach to leadership - Sri Viswanath (52:55) How to detect & identify the early signs of burnout in your engineering team - Erica Lockheimer, Sabry Tozin & Lori Allen (55:50) The root causes of workplace injustice & the roles we can play to prevent it - Kim Scott & Trier Bryan (59:29) Conflict optimizations vs. conflict resolution & why eng leaders need to embrace conflict - Jordan Adler (1:04:14) How to get over the fear of silence - Alexis Rask (1:07:22) Leading through uncertainty - David Silverman (1:13:50) "Rage-fixing" & Eddie's breakthrough moment confronting fear of failure at Gusto - Eddie Kim (1:20:05) LINKS AND RESOURCES Episode 30 - Spend Time On What Matter w/ Will Larson Episode 18 - Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 2) w/ Jean-Denis Greze Episode 21 - Conscious Career Growth (part 2) w/ Wade Chambers Episode 72 - Why Engineering Needs a Seat at the Negotiating Table w/ Melody Hildebrandt Episode 43 - Managing Up w/ Jan Chong Episode 38 - Align & Scale Engineering AND Product w/ Jeremy Henrickson Episode 47 - Building Technology That Endures w/ Melissa Binde Episode 79 - Translating engineering to the CEO w/ Andrew Lau and Eli Daniel Episode 10 - Speed & Creativity in Recruiting w/ Farhan Thawar Episode 75 - A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Career Growth & Internal Mobility w/ Tara Ellis Episode 77 - How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth w/ Samir Naik Episode 63 - Speed vs. Quality w/ Richard Wong Episode 31 - How to Lead Large Scale Projects w/ Wendy Shepperd Episode 65 - Building Autonomous Teams & Engineering Career Ladders w/ Sri Viswanath Episode 66 - Addressing Burnout in Your Engineering Org w/ Erica Lockheimer, Sabry Tozin & Lori Allen Episode 44 - “Just Work” w/ Kim Scott & Trier Bryant Episode 74 - Conflict Optimization w/ Jordan Adler Episode 32 - Ask Powerful Questions w/ Alexis Rask Episode 12 - Leading Through Uncertainty w/ David Silverman Episode 29 - Remove Fear of Failure From Your Org w/ Edward Kim SPECIAL THANK YOU TO OUR PRODUCTION TEAM Noah Olberding, Producer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding-49138a19b/ Have strong movie opinions? Send Noah a message with your hot cinema takes! Dan Overheim, Audio Engineer IG: @doverheim Are you also an avid 3D printer? Check out Dan’s 3D printing work here: bnd3d.com Ellie Coggins Angus, Copywriter LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliecoggins/ Love books? Check out Ellie’s bookstagram : @ellieturnsthepage…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Scaling your leadership to 3x exec roles and transforming your values, systems & habits w/ Vinay Hiremath CTO @ Loom 52:47
We speak with Vinay Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Loom, about his experience balancing three high-level exec roles and living out his personal values at work while prioritizing his mental & physical health! Scaling up is never easy, but Vinay shares tips and systems that have worked for him, including utilizing timetables, building good habits despite emotions, and triply verifying decisions. We also cover the stigma surrounding paternity / parental leave in the tech industry, how knowing your values inspires better health, and journaling frameworks for identifying values & goals. ABOUT VINAY HIREMATH Vinay Hiremath ( @vhmth ) is Co-Founder & CTO at Loom - Check out Vinay’s video bio on Loom here "I'd lost a sense of direction because I just took on so much work. Direction became something that was a luxury for me to think about which is an incredibly dangerous place to be as an executive and it's really easy to fall into it especially when there's a fire hose of work that's coming at you all the time. And then I had morphed my life around work versus around my health and I realized the thing that had led me to have so much mental clarity before was my health. And so I started taking health incredibly seriously again.” - Vinay Hiremath Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Vinay’s experience taking on three exec roles at Loom (3:51) Why creating a daily timetable is crucial for busy eng leaders (6:02) The intersection between mental health & living by your values (9:14) What Vinay’s personal values are & ways he identified them (10:35) Incorporating the value of freedom within your eng org (11:35) How your goals & competencies act as gatekeepers to your values (16:25) Tips for building out your schedule to expand your working capacity (19:02) The importance of understanding your systems (20:11) As you scale your eng functions, set up delegation systems (21:49) Why eng teams should utilize budgets & triple verification (25:48) How triple verification works in people systems (27:07) What the CEO role taught Vinay about leading engineering (31:40) How Loom tackles the stigma surrounding parental leave (33:40) Prioritize mental & physical health to live out your values (35:48) Journaling frameworks to contemplate values (40:28) Vinay’s process for building – and keeping – new habits (43:03) Recognize your emotions & act despite them (47:07) Rapid fire questions (48:28)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We cover how psychology, neuroscience & mindfulness tools can help eng leaders overcome challenges, communicate successfully, and foster a culture of empathy! Our guest is Luther Kitahata, an Innovative Executive Leadership Coach & Interim CTO/VP of Eng – he’s also described by Chip Conley as the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of Silicon Valley.” We also chat about identifying personality types, uncovering unconscious traits/patterns, shifting from the comfort zone to the growth zone, and how to be a transformative leader! ABOUT LUTHER KITAHATA Luther Kitahata is an Executive Leadership Coach known for his expertise in innovation, C-Suite roles leading global organizations, and as an entrepreneur building companies from the ground up. Luther draws on his deep understanding of the patterns that drive human behavior as well as his own corporate leadership experience to provide individuals and organizations with a transformative and pragmatic approach to their most complex challenges. He is described as a "Silicon Valley Obi-Wan Kenobi" in Chip Conley's bestselling book Wisdom at Work . Luther works with high-growth companies led by senior executives who are committed to their own growth and transformation. Having been a C-level executive himself, he knows their challenges from the inside out. His methodology is designed to uncover hidden strengths and blind spots. He encourages leaders to experiment with new behaviors and actions. This results in transformations at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Luther draws on his 20+ years as a C-level operating executive, as well as entrepreneurial expertise starting 8 companies, enabling him to bring practical and actionable guidance to his clients. He has grown new teams from 0 to 100+, taken over large existing teams, and successfully handled turnaround situations. Luther also serves as a Fractional CTO or VP of Engineering to fill a recruiting gap; mentor founders growing into their leadership roles; or upgrade product development methodologies to drive agility, maturity, and scalability. “We make these patterns for ourselves all the time and particularly early in life, we learn patterns of how to navigate the world. The problem is that the modern-day world has a lot of stimulus and input that can throw us into that survival state, that fight flight freeze state very easily. So if you understand that that's what's happening, that we have all these patterns and they're mostly unconscious or barely conscious, then you start to think, ‘Well, okay… What are the patterns that are serving me and what are the patterns that aren't?'" - Luther Kitahata Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 SHOW NOTES: Luther’s journey from eng leader to executive coach (02:33) The relationship dynamics between executive coach & fractional CTO (4:58) Using Enneagram results to assess eng leader’s response to challenges (6:16) Why you should be self-aware of your personality type (8:54) How to coach eng leaders to talk in ways that others will listen (10:58) Mindfulness techniques to foster a state of empathy & curiosity (12:32) What unconscious traits & patterns hold eng leaders back at work (15:42) How to recognize & address unconscious patterns (20:03) Tools to help you uncover areas where you experience resistance (21:43) Overcoming unconscious patterns by identifying your tendencies (22:49) Shift from the comfort zone to the growth zone (25:28) How to transition away from the high-stress zone (27:38) Transformative leadership starts with self-awareness & a growth mindset (30:10) Rapid fire questions (33:56) Luther’s method for tackling to-do lists with tools like Trello (35:51) Rapid fire questions continued (38:38)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
If you’ve ever wrestled with technology choices & navigated the consequences of the wrong path… this conversation is for you! Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas) defines the dilemma of the “aspirational mismatch” & shares real-life examples of how it affects a tech org’s processes, architecture, and metrics. She dives into the frameworks & tools that have helped her work through mismatches, her golden rule regarding “innovation tokens,” choosing the right sized technology for your company, and why tech companies are prone to aspirational mismatch in the first place. ABOUT LISA DUSSEAULT Lisa Dusseault is the Chief Technology Officer at Compaas. She has built her career solving complex technology problems. After Microsoft, she led internet standards groups at the IETF, and engineering teams at Linden Lab and Stubhub. She founded tech startups Cathy Labs, Klutch, and ShareTheVisit. Lisa holds a B.S. in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo. "The conversation should have been about when and why this company needed a particular technology choice, not whether a technology choice was good in and of itself." - Lisa Dusseault Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today… Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE: jellyfish.co/emr To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows… Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarks SHOW NOTES: Defining aspirational mismatch & its detrimental impact on eng orgs (02:10) What “cargo culting” is & why it’s a decision-making flaw (4:18) How aspirational mismatch manifests in eng orgs (5:48) The importance of tech companies asking the questions “when” & “why” (7:39) Examples of how eng orgs experience aspirational mismatch in their tech choices (9:08) Framework for tying your metrics to your org’s business objectives (12:33) How metrics can inform frontline decisions (14:15) Choose a technology that’s the correct size for your org (16:19) The cost of merging & compounding mismatches (19:28) Lisa’s golden rule regarding “innovation tokens” for tech start-ups (21:07) Why eng orgs need a unified vision to avoid aspirational mismatch in processes (23:52) Using epics to communicate company vision (26:37) Where aspirational mismatches come from & why eng teams experience them (29:10) Recommendations for withstanding aspirational technology pressure (32:11) Additional frameworks for working through mismatches (34:33) How to host conversations around realistically planning for future aspirations (37:02) Rapid fire questions (39:55)…
We’re taking a few weeks off to celebrate Patrick’s wedding! We’re going to be mostly unplugged in the mountains… but when we return, we have some fantastic conversations planned with folks like… Lisa Dusseault (CTO @ Compaas), Luther Kitahata (Founder, Executive Leadership Coach & Fractional CTO/VPE @ Integral Response), Vinay HIremath (CTO @ Loom), Maher Saba (Head of Remote Presence and Engineering @ Meta) & more! Email us if you have ideas for episode 100 at hello@sfelc.com Looking for ways to get involved? Join the conversation in our virtual home at elc.community !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They also reveal recommendations on filtering / assessing decisions & their go-to leadership styles! ABOUT ALI LITTMAN Ali Littman is the Director of Engineering at Modern Health, where she leads product engineering teams that make it possible for people to receive online mental health services the moment they need and at no cost to the individual. Prior to her current role, she served as the Director of Engineering at Omada Health. Outside of her role, she is also a champion for diversity and inclusion, most notably leading a Women's ERG, serving on company-wide belonging councils, and providing imposter syndrome coaching. Ali Littman is a passionate engineering leader specializing in healthcare technology both in traditional and digital healthcare settings. She currently serves as Head of Engineering at Modern Health where she gets to lead engineering teams on the exciting journey of evolving how people access and receive mental health care treatment around the world. Ali enjoys taking startups through their scale phase and has been an engineering leader on hypergrowth journeys at both Omada Health and Modern Health - leading them through organizational, market, and product expansion. Her background in business from Haas at UC Berkeley helps navigate these business challenges with the philosophy of having business strategy inform the engineering strategy. At the end of the day, she cares most about being a great people leader who creates inclusive cultures and teaches managers how to be great managers for their teams. She also goes a step beyond her usual management duties to serve on Belonging Councils, lead ERGs, provides imposter syndrome coaching, and mentor individuals from under-represented groups in tech. Additionally, Ali's led external talks on navigating career growth, imposter syndrome, challenging leadership scenarios, and more! "I view my relationship to people that I work with or people that I manage right now, as actually like a lifelong commitment and I think because of that, I end up with these really strong connections even beyond past opportunities." - Ali Littman ABOUT ALI IRTURK Ali's day-to-day passion is creating and being part of efficient and effective engineering organizations that are firing on all cylinders where team members can achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in a psychologically safe environment. He will continue to realize this passion by working at CommerceHub as their Vice President of Engineering. He previously worked at rocketship start-ups funded by some of the top VCs in the world including a16z, SoftBank, Microsoft Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures to name a few. Ali was the Vice President of Engineering at WorkBoard, a strategy and results enterprise SaaS platform helping large organizations align quickly for results, leading product delivery as well as accessibility, application security, release engineering, platform, and infrastructure teams. Previously, he was the Vice President of Engineering at ALICE Technologies working on revolutionizing the construction industry with an artificial intelligence-powered enterprise SaaS product. Ali also created and managed the advanced products group at Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) for 8 years while working as an adjunct professor at UC San Diego. His team worked on creating innovative industrial vision systems and software to help companies improve their product quality, eliminate production errors, and lower manufacturing costs. Examples of the products he worked on were the world's first vision system on chip and the world's fastest 3D scanning system to name a few. Where Ali is today is quite different from where his journey began. Born and raised in Istanbul, I graduated from the Turkish Naval Academy and served as an officer in the Turkish Navy. After leaving the Navy, he earned Master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics at UC Santa Barbara, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and an MBA at UC Berkeley. "In a grander scheme, I think people should be always looking for opportunities at all times. There's a famous saying... 'The best time to eat hors d'oeuvres are... they're being passed around. The moment that if you're not ready to eat, now you're gonna miss that!’" - Ali Irturk Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today… Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE: jellyfish.co/emr To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows… Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarks Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc Take our DevTools survey & share what dev tools you use! As a gift, we’ll send you a copy of one our favorite books AND you’ll be entered to win a free ticket to the 2022 ELC Summit! Fill out the DevTools survey HERE: elc.community/devtools2022 SHOW NOTES: Frameworks for navigating new internal & external opportunities (3:36) Three steps for determining which opportunities you should prioritize (5:21) Ask this question to validate your assumptions (8:08) Reflecting on your personal values & how they align with opportunities (9:02) Why growth & interpersonal connection matter to Ali Littman (10:08) Ali Irturk’s recommendations for great networking (11:13) View your professional relationships as life-long commitments (13:09) Book recommendations for frameworks on the job search process (14:29) How the right manager can provide the best opportunities (16:47) Use a decision-grid to help filter & assess decisions (20:06) Analyzing your energy level & trusting your gut while making decisions (21:52) How your priorities evolve over time (23:49) The hedgehog & outliers concepts (25:45) Balancing your current strengths with opportunities you can grow from (29:29) Why there’s no such thing as a singular leadership style (30:47) Vulnerable leadership & creating a culture of trust (34:10) Rapid fire questions (36:42) LINKS AND RESOURCES The 2-Hour Job Search - Steve Dalton’s instructional book on how to conduct a job search in the most efficient way possible. This Is Day One - Drew Dudley’s guide to cultivating the behaviors that will help you succeed and empower those around you. Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson’s book on attaining and operating in staff engineering roles. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Dr. Robert B. Cialdini’s book on the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles in everyday situations. A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine’s book on how the insights and wisdom of Stoic philosophy are still applicable in our modern lives. Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership - Dr. Alan Watkins’ book on the challenges that take a toll on a leader's effectiveness and the solutions designed to improve physiological factors that impact on core competencies.…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss the challenges with leading eng orgs through unpredictable global events (like the covid-19 pandemic) & pivoting product strategy with Bridget Frey (CTO @ Redfin). We also cover the challenges & successes of building out AI/ ML products in your engineering org, creating an “uncertainty” algorithm, incorporating mental health best practices in your teams, and addressing data bias & systemic racism in your product’s features! Featuring guest co-host Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health). ABOUT BRIDGET FREY As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget Frey ( @SVBridget ) leads the software engineering and analytics teams. Her mission is to build technology that makes the process of buying and selling a home less complicated and less stressful. She is a leader on issues facing traditionally underrepresented people in technology, and 36% of Redfin’s technology team are women while 10% are Black or Latinx. Prior to Redfin, Frey was the director of analytics and business applications at Lithium Technologies. In addition, she has held management positions at IntrinsiQ Research, IMlogic and Plumtree Software. Since 2019, she has served on the board of directors for Premera Blue Cross. Bridget holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She was recently recognized as a Seattle CIO of The Year award winner. "One of the things we built was this concept of virtual touring. So you could stay on your couch, but have an agent visit a home, but we could only get a very small number of people to hit that button. Despite all of our trying, we only had 1% of our tours happening virtually and then the pandemic hit and almost overnight, it jumped to about a third of our tours being virtual." - Bridget Frey Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today… Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE: jellyfish.co/emr To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows… Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarks Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: How Bridget lead a real estate tech org through a pandemic & tumultuous housing market (1:05) COVID-19’s impact on the healthcare tech space (2:02) How to adapt product strategy based on customer patterns (5:02) Leading with transparency & decisiveness in uncertain times (7:20) Redfin’s transition to digitizing traditionally in-person experiences (10:58) The pandemic’s unexpected influence on employee mental health & burnout (16:14) How your org can implement a company-wide “no meeting” / wellness week (19:43) Set your org up for faster decision making & implementation (23:52) Challenges & solutions when building out AI/ML home buying products (25:06) Incorporating human needs, desires & perspectives in automated recommendation products (27:40) Engineering best practices for uncovering deeper customer needs (30:06) The inside scoop on modeling an “uncertainty” algorithm (31:12) Prioritization conversations & product strategy at Redfin (34:31) Addressing data bias & systemic racism within product features (36:33) How hiring diversely leads to reduced data bias (39:06) A framework for reducing biased data outputs (40:20) What hiring practices lead to a more diverse team (43:43) How tech orgs can cultivate a culture of inclusivity & diversity (46:08) Rapid fire questions (48:51)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We cover why locked-in cloud commitments are bad for eng teams & how your org can take advantage of elastic pricing models instead! Leon Kuperman (CTO @ Cast.ai) explains the dilemma of locked-in cloud spend, cost planning strategies for SaaS orgs, how to minimize egregious cloud egress cost and drive better cloud utilization through consistent analysis & debates in your eng org. Also learn why Leon is betting on container deployment as the future of software delivery & what that means for Cast.ai! ABOUT LEON KUPERMAN Formerly Vice President of Security Products OCI at Oracle, Leon’s professional experience spans across tech companies such as IBM, Truition, and HostedPCI. He founded and served as the CTO of Zenedge (acquired by Oracle). Leon has 20+ years of experience in product management, software design, and development, all the way through to production deployment. He is an authority on cloud computing, web application security, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). "So you're literally committing to a three year deal where you know, in those next three years, the probability of computing power increasing is VERY high and the probability of cost decreasing for those same computers is very high. So you're not really getting the 30, 40, 50% discount. So I call these reservations or these look forward commitments a necessary evil because... customers HAVE to do it in many cases. They don't have an alternative. But at the same time, it's not good for the business!” - Leon Kuperman Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish Want to learn where engineering teams are investing their time and resources? Or how they’re operating, performing, and managing today? Check out “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE: jellyfish.co/emr To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry, data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows… Check out Jellyfish Benchmarks at jellyfish.co/benchmarks This episode is brought to you by our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Why Leon cares about cutting cloud costs (3:05) Economic & financial models for eng leaders (6:56) Cloud economics & its impact on cloud cost (8:18) The dilemma of locked-in cloud commitments (11:35) Why eng companies opt for locked-in cloud services (14:47) How container deployment will impact the current cloud model (16:01) Moving from a locked-in model to an elastic pricing model (19:39) What eng teams need to take advantage of an elastic cloud pricing model (22:07) Cost planning opportunities for SaaS companies (24:57) The best utilization debates for evaluating cloud spend (28:40) Three architectural planning principles to keep in mind (30:26) Drive better cloud utilization through consistent cost analysis & recurring debates (31:59) Defining egress & its cost for eng teams (33:05) Healthy methods for escaping egress costs (35:27) What “cloud-flation” means for eng leaders & cloud macro-economics (38:55) Rapid fire questions (43:06) LINKS AND RESOURCES (article) “ Why Your Cloud Expenses Are Rising: Blame Cloud-flation ” by Leon Kuperman (article) “ Snapchat Earnings and the Case of Runaway Cloud Costs ” by Leon Kuperman…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss the dynamics & challenges behind building out your data engineering function with Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data @ Meltano). Taylor also shares his recommendations for collaborating in multi-stakeholder environments, the relationship between the data team & engineering, why you should run your data team like a product team, gaining buy-in around the ROI of data, and what it’s like being a company’s first data eng hire. Featuring guest co-host/community member John Wang (Director of Engineering @ Petal)! ABOUT TAYLOR MURPHY Taylor Murphy ( @tayloramurphy ) is the Head of Product and Data of Meltano, an open-source data platform that enables collaboration, efficiency, and visibility. Taylor has been deeply involved in leading and building data-informed teams his entire career. At Concert Genetics he scaled the Data Operations team to enable the management of hundreds of thousands of genetic tests and millions of claims records. At GitLab, he was the first data hire where he focused on building and scaling the data organization as the company headed towards its IPO. Taylor has been involved with Meltano since its inception, acting as the primary customer with whom the team engaged to understand the needs of modern data professionals. "What next? I put this in a dashboard. What are you gonna do with this? I think a lot of people are like, ‘I wanna be more data-informed and I wanna build up a robust data organization.’ And that's where they stop. They think, ‘Okay, I'm gonna get the data, and then I'm gonna make a decision.’ And that's not good enough because there's always gonna be more work to do than you can accomplish. And every time you deliver a dashboard, they're gonna go, ‘Oh, this is great. What if we did this, this, and this?’ And that's fun for data people and you enjoy that, but you kind of wanna help them think through these things.” - Taylor Murphy Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Taylor’s early days at GitLab as its first data eng hire (2:23) How Meltano evolved out of a GitLab business intelligence project (4:21) Using data eng to discover problems & iterate solutions (6:01) Why having data teams under finance can be detrimental to product strategy (7:22) The importance of data eng representation at the VP level (10:01) The ideal time to build your data eng team (12:57) Communicating the ROI of data eng functions (14:53) How to gain stakeholder buy-in (17:04) Prioritizing qualitative data in a solution’s early stages (18:54) Taylor’s recommendations for the early stages of building your data org (20:05) Roadblocks when building data teams – and solutions for success (22:42) The “run your data team like a product team” thesis (25:52) Best practices for applying product team principles to your data eng functions (27:57) The hand-off between data engineering & the broader engineering org (29:08) Navigating company politics from a data eng perspective (33:02) Prioritization conversations between data eng & other stakeholders (36:25) Rapid-Fire Questions (38:31) LINKS AND RESOURCES (blog) “ Run Your Data Team Like Product Team ” by Emilie Schario & Taylor Murphy (follow) @josh_wills - https://twitter.com/josh_wills…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Growth & mobile engineering post-strategic transformation w/ Atish Das Sarma & Shannon Ma @ Patreon #92 40:26
Building growth & mobile eng teams from the ground up is never easy – but the right frameworks, guardrails, & strategic conversations will set your org up for success! We cover the intersection of growth & mobile engineering with Atish Das Sarma (Head of Growth Engineering @ Patreon ) & Shannon Ma (Director of Engineering, Mobile @ Patreon) discussing how to balance short & long-term growth demands, strategically aligning new features & growth, and what it’s like making the transition into an established company with room for impact! ABOUT ATISH DAS SARMA Atish ( @atishdassarma ) leads the Growth Engineering team at Patreon. The Growth team at Patreon is responsible for holistically improving the product surface to help creators build and grow their businesses. Specific areas of focus include working across the full funnel to drive member acquisition, member retention, and creator acquisition. Previously, Atish led iCloud subscriptions growth initiatives which is part of the broader Services organization at Apple. In addition to accelerating revenue growth for iCloud, Atish was also responsible for various data and ML initiatives across Cloud Services. He also held roles at Twitter and Google. Atish is passionate about working in areas with a broad opportunity & scope from the early stages, defining long-lasting themes, and building the corresponding teams to execute on them. He particularly enjoys leading organizations that are directly accountable for key business outcomes. "For growth, you need to sort of think holistically in Patreon’s world, both from creators’ and potential members’ side and truly understand what is perhaps preventing some creators from getting started. So how do you sort of think about that holistically and then start building solutions that will empower them longer term.” - Atish Das Sarma ABOUT SHANNON MA Shannon ( @shannonma ) is the Director of Engineering for Mobile at Patreon. Shannon and the entire team are diving in to create a world-class mobile experience built to best serve creators, so they can showcase what they do best. He previously supported consumer product teams at Instagram and Facebook for nine years. Prior to this, he got started in mobile at Apple helping build iOS. "Our goal as a company is to be the best memberships product for creator. Our hypothesis about how we can get there is by really kind of like coupling content around community. In order for us to do this really well, the community almost has to feel like it's part of the content, like it helps kind of like elevate the content. - Shannon Ma Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Patreon’s major strategic transformation (2:30) The role mobile plays in Patreon’s vision (5:27) Integrating a growth strategy holistically throughout your product (6:11) What it’s like transitioning into an already well-established company (7:48) Defining a framework for an early-growth organization (11:41) Guardrails to balance short-term and long-term growth demands (14:16) Habits & rituals to inspire strategy-focused conversations in your team (18:00) Shannon’s decision-making process – and why the focus is on mobile (19:22) The intersection of growth and mobile engineering (22:07) Why being a “ruthless” prioritizer is key (24:28) Prioritization conversations between mobile and engineering (27:05) A sneak-peek into Patreon’s next big bets (28:32) The implications of new features on growth engineering (32:07) Start with targeting your high-intent users (34:08) Rapid-Fire Questions (35:05)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Greg Czajkowski (SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake) shares some of the secrets he’s learned about great teams! We discuss the power of eliminating hierarchy, “going direct,” reducing energy dissipation in your team, removing friction in your org, and creating “higher innovation per time unit.” Plus dilemmas balancing velocity & quality, what to do when team size is used as proxy for power, and how to know your eng org is operating at peak output! ABOUT GREG CZAJKOWSKI Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Greg spent 13 years at Google, where he was VP of Engineering responsible for a broad portfolio of Google Cloud data analytics and machine learning products and for internal services addressing data analytics needs of all of Google’s businesses. Before Google, Greg spent six years at Sun Microsystems, working on Java runtime environments and operating systems. Greg has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree from AGH Krakow, Poland. He holds over 50 patents. "What I learned at Snowflake is really practicing "Go Direct." If there's something you don't like, you'd like to fix, you have to go to the person who made the decision. Usually you learn much more about the decision. There's a good conversation. Sometimes you convince the owner of the decision to do something different. I think nothing beats going direct, because any other means of trying to change a certain decision, certain point of view indirectly, is ineffective causes, frictions, and ultimately energy gets dissipated. - Greg Czajkowski Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity. Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Qualities and characteristics Greg's observed in great teams (2:02) Why Greg joined Snowflake (3:46) “Go direct” and other secrets to great teams (5:27) Balancing "go direct" and the chain of command (7:35) Eliminating hierarchy (9:21) Creating higher innovation per time unit in engineering teams (11:21) How do you know your eng org is operating at peak output? (13:41) Balancing business expectations and removing the dilemma between velocity & quality (15:36) Energy dissipation (18:21) Removing team friction at scale (21:20) How Snowflake’s small team units optimize for intimacy, learning & dev happiness (23:50) How small teams scale up & interact across the eng org (25:56) How to address when team size is used as proxy for power & career progression (28:35) Rapid Fire Questions (30:37)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss why alignment is key to delivering great digital products & team outcomes, how to recognize & navigate misalignment, and create better alignment with Jonathon Hensley (CEO @ EMERGE, Author of "Alignment"). We cover a couple of community case studies exploring dilemmas like navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict, transforming grand product visions into clear execution, AND shifting toward a customer-centric engineering culture! ABOUT JONATHON HENSLEY Jonathon Hensley ( @jonathonhensley ) is co-founder and CEO of Emerge , a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience. For more than two decades, Jonathon has helped startups, Fortune 100 brands, technology leaders, large regional health networks, non-profit organizations, and more, transform their businesses by turning strategy, user needs, and new technologies into valuable digital products and services. Jonathon writes and speaks about his experiences and insights from his career, and regularly hosts in-depth interviews with business leaders and industry insiders. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys. Originally from Silicon Valley, Jonathon got into the digital product space inspired by the incredible people developing new technologies all around him and the possibilities they unlocked. This fueled his curiosity to understand how technology transforms the ways in which people live and work. Today that curiosity continues to drive him, as he works to help businesses harness technology. His work focuses on alignment, helping leaders define the value they want to create in a succinct and tangible way; where to focus, why, and what it will take to achieve that outcome. His favorite part is going beyond the idea but reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes so that a client can succeed. "We hear a lot of times about the execution gap - This gap that, you know, we have this idea, or we have this outcome we want to achieve… We start building something and then it doesn't have the outcome we intended. And that execution gap is because no bridge was ever built. You're making a leap of faith that somehow if we do this, that this will happen. And it's not grounded, most often, in its execution and process. And so, without a clear direction how do you know what resources, or people, or process, are even needed to achieve the intended outcome that you're working towards? - (Jonathon Hensley) Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28! Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network! Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year! Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022 Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity. Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Why alignment is the key to deliver great products & outcomes (2:22) What does alignment actually mean? (4:10) How do you recognize when you're misaligned? (7:51) How do you create alignment? (10:48) Navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict (15:09) Transforming your grand product vision into clear actions (18:58) Making a shift to a more customer-centric engineering culture (23:27) Operationalizing customer empathy within your engineering org (28:05) How to gain clarity on the right intended outcomes (30:32) Measuring alignment (36:04) Rapid Fire Questions Takeaways LINKS AND RESOURCES (Jonathon’s book) Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We discuss operational & organizational innovation with Zhichun Li (Director of Engineering @ Scale AI)! We explore the early days of Rapid at Scale AI, different organizational design experiments Zhi’s tested, and many of the principles behind their operational practices. You’ll hear about merging engineering & ops, designing orgs for autonomy, scaling into multiple products, and leveraging different org structures for innovation. ABOUT ZHICHUN LI Zhichun Li ( @zhichun_li ) is Director of Engineering @ Scale AI . She built the Rapid team from scratch with a focus on providing the fastest way to production-level quality labels within a day, with no data minimums. As an early employee of the company, she built up the infrastructure for Scale’s supply ops system and scaled up Scale’s 3D Sensor Fusion product. Before Scale, Zhi worked at Lightspeed China Partners, Facebook, Microsoft and Airbnb with roles in investment and software engineering. She was a producer of VC Pulse, a podcast spotlighting venture capitalists in China. Zhichun was the youngest ever admit to the Yale MBA program, and studied computer science at CMU. "We tried to basically brand it as like black ops, i.e. the special kind of ops where you get to do 10x work and build a lot of product out of it. And that actually, in a lot of ways attracted very entrepreneurial individuals to want to join. So I think a lot of it is shaping the brand of the program, helping people understand how important it is and the things that I'll learn. - Zhichun Li This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity. Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: The early days of scale & why engineering runs operations (1:44) What is ops engineering (3:48) Why engineering first got involved in ops (6:29) How to brand ops engineering to attract top engineers (8:51) Merging ops & engineering to eliminate silos (10:07) How to merge ops & engineering for the first time (11:39) How team composition evolved at Rapid (12:46) Designing your org for autonomy & customer empathy (17:07) Rapid’s operating principles (18:53) Generating Rapid’s operating principles (23:18) Painful short-term decisions that yielded better long-term outcomes (24:57) Scale AI’s evolution into multiple products (28:04) Behind the scenes of Scale’s multi-product moment (31:04) Leveraging general managers & org structures to drive product innovation (32:43) When to invest in, or shut down a project (36:21) Rapid Fire Questions (37:47) Takeaways (40:41)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
We explore the career journey of Technologist & Technical Advisor William A. Adams. We cover how he identifies his next career challenges, the technical advisor role and how you can build your skills to grow into the role. Plus we get into the “people challenges” of the job, how the “human work” is the secret to unlocking creativity, and why building the social fabric of work matters. ABOUT WILLIAM A. ADAMS William A. Adams ( @LeapToTech ) is an award-winning D&I innovator, engineering trailblazer, and philanthropist. He was named the first Technical Advisor to Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott. As co-founder of the LEAP apprenticeship program – Microsoft’s D&I Program of the Year in 2020 – he helped launch the training of more than 26 cohorts around the world. His most recent collaboration with the U.S. Virgin Islands aims to train technical talent and build critical technical infrastructure. Early in his 30-year career, William was one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He developed mission-critical custom enterprise apps for NeXT computers and pioneered an instant messaging service purchased by the CIA. Today, in addition to his role as Technical Advisor at Microsoft, William is the philanthropic founder of The Event, a collaborative, community-based hackathon. When he’s not tinkering with code, the husband and father of three builds cabinets, knits, and rides a motorcycle. "The predictive part of it, it's just pattern matching. You have to see it and go, 'What is that going to lead to? Let's play this out. Let's say AMD IS right. And this thing does come to pass. What will that mean? Let's say cloud computing IS going to be the thing... What is THAT going to mean for the (micro)chips? It's gotta be optimized 'power for efficiency.' So whoever can do that best is going to be the winner in that game.” - William A. Adams Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity. Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc SHOW NOTES: William’s career journey from developer to Technical Advisor to the CTO @ Microsoft (1:55) Identifying your next career challenge & why William conducts a career assessment every 2 years (4:36) What is a Technical Advisor & how do you grow into the role? (9:21) How to gain buy-in and build influencing skills (13:02) Becoming a better synthesizer (15:21) Making long term predictions about technology (21:53) People challenges & solving the human equation (24:02) How to create shared understanding by listing assumptions (28:23) Why the "human work" is the secret to unlocking creativity in remote facilitation (30:42) Building the Microsoft LEAP Apprenticeship Program (33:01) Why creating the social fabric of work matters (42:16) Rapid Fire Questions (44:22) Takeaways (52:15)…
Culture is the social contract you have with your team. Self-compassion is the social contract you have with yourself! We explore practices to cultivate compassion with Kevin Eyres (Executive Coach & Former MD LinkedIn Europe). We cover practices to eliminate negative self-talk, self-doubt, and increase compassion in your team. Plus bridging the gap from aspirational culture to reality, and how to identify the top 3 behaviors that help you succeed as a leader. ABOUT KEVIN EYRES An engineer by background, Kevin Eyres ( @kevineyres ) spent his early career leading engineering and product development teams for the likes of Compaq, Shopping.com and Alta Vista. Kevin has also been responsible for leading the European divisions of three Silicon Valley companies. He was the General Manager of Alta Vista International spanning 14 countries from 2001. He joined SideStep, now Kayak, as first employee and Managing Director in 2005 and in 2007 was appointed Managing Director for LinkedIn. Starting from his spare bedroom to IPO four years later Kevin lead the global movement at LinkedIn into five countries and the global Irish HQ. Kevin ranked 22nd in Wired Magazine’s "The Wired 100" in 2010, a listing that features the most influential people shaping the UK’s digital landscape. Today, Kevin lives in Los Altos and is now enjoying a plural career as an exec coach/board member/ investor / Hoffman Process Teacher. "If you continue with the negative talk, it just reinforces itself. So stop. Acknowledge it, and stop. And the drop is you drop into your breath. And the self-compassion mantra is, 'This is a moment of pain. Everybody feels pain. I'm not alone. And may I be kind and gentle to myself.’ - Kevin Eyres Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Kevin’s journey to engineering leadership (1:36) What prepared Kevin to become a general manager (4:45) Kevin’s transition to executive coaching (6:53) Why culture and self-compassion are important themes in Kevin’s career (9:34) How to eliminate negative head talk (12:52) “Stop, drop & roll” to overcome self-doubt (16:24) How to create space from automatic responses of anxiety or shame (19:14) Bridging the gap between aspirational company culture and reality (20:54) How self-compassion and culture are connected (23:25) Increasing self-compassion in your team (24:44) How peer groups increase compassion and bring relief (26:24) Making self-compassion a habit (29:03) How to cultivate the patience to be compassionate (31:02) Identifying the top three behaviors that help you succeed as a leader (33:01) Rapid Fire Questions (35:13) Takeaways (39:10)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
If you ever find yourself staring at a screen not knowing how to even start an important presentation this episode is for you! Arquay Harris (VP Engineering @ Webflow) underscores the importance of storytelling in public speaking, and shares valuable tips on how to craft a narrative and get your point across in a way that feels natural for you . For Arquay’s slides & original presentation from our 2022 Spring Virtual Summit - check out the full video here: https://bit.ly/3GxMjT3 ABOUT ARQUAY HARRIS Arquay is the VP of Engineering at Webflow . Prior to Webflow, she held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google, and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. When not working she can be found cooking, stumbling over guitar and piano chords, or watching Seinfeld. "And so if you were using this to give an actual presentation, you might say something like, ‘Imagine a world where deploys only take two seconds? Or what if tests only took 30 seconds to write?’ So you're taking this undesirable thing and you're contrasting it with this idealistic future to really bring in that emotionality to get the audience hooked. - Arquay Harris This episode is brought to you by Orgspace Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register Check out our friends at Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: What Arquay starts every presentation with (2:03) Message, tone, and audience (3:17) The hero’s journey (7:17) The mountain story structure (8:42) Nested loops (9:33) Sparklines (11:28) In medias res (13:14) Converging ideas (14:22) False start (15:16) The petal structure (16:27) Focus on the purpose (21:13) LINKS AND RESOURCES (Full video from 2022 Spring Summit) Storytelling & the art of public speaking with Arquay Harris - https://elc.community/public/videos/storytelling-and-the-art-of-public-speaking…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, Sri Shivananda (EVP, CTO @ Paypal) and Joel Beasley (host of Modern CTO! podcast and CTO @ Leaderbits) discuss some of the principles and frameworks that have made the greatest impacts on Sri’s career as an engineering leader. They cover Sri’s approach to organizational transformation, a framework for choosing new technologies, areas to look for when you’re building a pipeline of leadership, and recognition and disruption of patterns through self-reflection. ABOUT SRI SHIVANANDA Sri Shivananda (@srishivananda) serves as PayPal’s Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Sri oversees Technology Platforms & Experiences, leading teams responsible for the company’s secure, reliable and scalable global infrastructure and strategic core platform, the foundation that enables PayPal to deliver innovative services to global consumers and merchants. Sri has played a critical role in helping PayPal remain at the forefront of innovation since joining the company in 2015. Prior to his appointment as EVP and CTO, Sri was Vice President of Global Platform and Infrastructure, directing his team of technologists to drive massive growth at scale across a disruptive payments platform. Sri was responsible for all core technologies covering PayPal’s data centers, internal private cloud, online and offline data infrastructure, internal developer frameworks and tools, and various platform services. Before PayPal, Sri was with eBay for 12 years, working his way up from a software engineer to Vice President of Global Platform and Infrastructure. As VP, he was responsible for the company’s technology infrastructure that powered the eBay Inc. businesses, including eBay’s hundreds of millions of listings and PayPal’s millions of daily payments. Sri found his way to eBay via the acquisition of Deja.com . Sri has served on the board of F5 Networks since 2020. He received his Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio University and holds a Bachelor of Technology, Mechanical Engineering from Jawaharal Nehru Technological University. "The most important thing here is that the human fabric in any organization, any team, any ecosystem is the most important one. When you align people to an outcome or a purpose, they'll figure out all the techniques that are necessary to do it. Sometimes they'll pull off magic when they are called the action. - Sri Shivananda ABOUT JOEL BEASLEY Joel Beasley (@moderncto_io) is the host of the #1 leadership and technology podcast in the world, Modern CTO. Modern CTO is focused on interviewing high-profile executives in the leadership and technology space with over 150k active listeners. Joel is an MIT-educated CTO of Leaderbits with clients from Startups up to Billion dollar companies. He is also the founder of The Beasley Foundation, a charity that designs STEM-related children’s books that are then donated to orphanages, homeless pregnant women, and children in need. This episode is brought to you by Orgspace Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register Check out Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Changing mindsets, skill sets, and toolsets in times of transformation (2:16) Creating clarity and alignment in eng orgs (5:24) Getting skeptical team members to buy into mindset shifts (7:53) Sri's framework for choosing new technologies (10:33) Why engineering leaders need substance, depth, and hunger (14:40) How PayPal is democratizing financial services (19:43) The curiosity quotient (21:44)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In this episode, Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital, Former SVP Engineering @ Google) and Melody Meckfessel (Co-Founder & CEO @ Observable) discuss ways to make your engineering org a strategic advantage to your company. They cover how to leverage feature/system “simplicity,” how to implement product instrumentation, when to bring in SREs, and how to balance tech debt and refactor work. ABOUT BILL COUGHRAN Bill Coughran (@BillCoughran) works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com , underlying infrastructure systems, and security. "If a leader comes in and talks about, 'I did this and I did that' rather than talking about the teams that they worked with in the past... The reality is the work got done by others. And so, I think it's critical for more senior people to recognize the importance of an overall team. And part of their job is to help mentor and develop people on the team. - Bill Coughran ABOUT MELODY MECKFESSEL Melody (@mmeckf) is the CEO / Co-founder of Observable , where she is building the future of data collaboration. She is passionate about helping humans thrive through collaboration, inclusion, and insights. Before Observable, she was a VP of Engineering at Google, leading systems with a team of 1,000+ where she created the DevOps practice for Google Cloud. Melody was responsible for large-scale systems delivering successful outcomes for millions of users. Melody instills passion around data innovation - improving exploration and insights from data. She is an expert in tools and systems for productive teams to thrive, and that's exactly what she is bringing to the future of data collaboration on Observable. This episode is brought to you by Orgspace Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register Check out Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: The challenge of keeping enterprise engineers close to the end user (3:26) Product instrumentation vs product intuition (8:22) Why it’s critical for eng teams to interact with customers as a company scales (11:31) How long should dev teams handle site reliability before bringing in dedicated SRE (12:35) What attributes Bill looks for in eng leaders (18:13) Why a tolerance for failure is key to innovation (22:01) Should early stage companies deal with tech debt? (24:17) The value of mentor-first engineering leaders (31:15)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
What does it take to build a tech org from the ground up? Khawaja Shams (Co-Founder & CEO @ Momento) sits down with Anshu Narula (VP Digital Technology @ Rivian) to discuss how Anshu went from larger companies like PayPal and eBay to scaling Rivian’s digital tech org from scratch. They discuss critical cultural values, early guiding principles and processes for the org, Anshu’s approach to scaling the engineering teams, and a starting point if you’re building from 0. ABOUT ANSHU NARULA At Rivian, Anshu is responsible for the strategic development of Rivian’s digital ecosystem. She leads teams building products and architecting systems across the technology stack, which has her overseeing a wide range of initiatives from rivian.com to charging software, in order to best serve Rivian B2C and B2B customers. With more than 20 years of experience in product development, technical management and software architecture, Anshu is passionate about technology and building products that are simple, scalable and engaging. "I started with my leadership team first. Next approach we took, was to go after hiring those engineers underneath them. Because I really needed coders to get through the aggressive growth phase. So those teams then hired all those engineers, once we had the architecture in place. Then we started layering the managers to help. And started calling out the sub-functional areas. And that's when we started to add in the layer of senior managers... - Anshu Narula ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMS Khawaja (@ksshams) is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers. This episode is brought to you by Orgspace Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register Check out our friends & sponsor Coderpad ! CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company. Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster? Learn more at coderpad.io/elc Check out Shortcut ! Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success. Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan. Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elc SHOW NOTES: Being the first digital tech hire at Rivian (1:58) Shaping Rivian’s tech org from scratch (4:42) Anshu’s approach to establishing processes (6:00) Adapting the hiring strategy to the pandemic (8:15) Creating culture in a remote-first environment (9:41) How to build an organization from the ground up (11:06) Deciding how to structure the tech org (13:31) Anshu’s strategy for scaling engineering teams (15:17) Identifying the right candidate for something that’s never been done before (17:56) Prioritizing teamwork in the leadership layer of the eng org (19:36) How to assess teamwork as an attribute in candidates (21:01) Balancing pace of innovation with quality (22:33) Advice for any eng leader building an org from scratch (24:15) Ashu’s takeaways from scaling Rivian (24:57)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 The Evolution of a CTO: How Your Leadership Can Change through Hypergrowth w/ Ryan King & Clarence Chio #82 29:29
To grow your engineering team from 200 to 1,200+ you can expect many phase changes in your org. How might your role change and what can you anticipate? Ryan King (CTO @ Chime) and Clarence Chio (Co-founder & CTO @ Unit21) explore how Ryan’s role has evolved across Chime’s different phases of growth over the last 10 years! You’ll hear how team topologies changed, how they hire senior leaders/VPEs for different phases of the company, how goal setting changes, and other great insights to help you scale your org to the next level! ABOUT RYAN KING Ryan King (@ryanking) is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Chime. Ryan was previously VP of engineering at Plaxo, an early professional social networking pioneer that was acquired by Comcast Interactive Media. Ryan also held senior engineering roles at Liberate Technologies and Microsoft. Ryan earned a BS in computer science & engineering from UCLA, and an MS in computer science from Stanford University. "There are a few things that I have come to have strong opinions about... One is, teams should own their own domains, services and data. You got to own full-stack your domain. You want to minimize coordination between teams and dependencies on teams. And then something that gets often overlooked as you scale is... aligning the organization with the architecture. The organization's growing, the architecture is evolving, but you have to consciously align those two things if you want to maintain a highly functioning engineering team as you grow...” - Ryan King ABOUT CLARENCE CHIO Clarence Chio (@cchio) is the co-founder and CTO at Unit21, a Google-funded startup in San Francisco building tools to fight fraud, money laundering, and online abuse. He authored the O’Reilly Book “Machine Learning & Security” and is also an adjunct lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, teaching a graduate course on the same topic. This episode is brought to you by Orgspace Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/register Check out our friends & sponsor Coderpad ! CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company! Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster? Learn more at coderpad.io/elc SHOW NOTES: Ryan’s story of how Chime first started (2:00) How Ryan’s role as CTO changed over time (4:17) How Chime’s engineering org structure & team topologies evolved (6:37) When should you deviate from your existing team structure? (9:06) When do you know you need to bring in a VP of Engineering? (10:23) How did new VPEs build trust and credibility when first starting? (14:32) How does Chime set goals today? (16:14) How do you measure engineering team and org performance? (19:22) What Chime does different to hire great engineers (23:03) Final advice for engineering leaders running teams who have yet to find product-market fit (27:20)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 SPECIAL: Pre-seed fundraising, pitching investors & dealing with rejection w/ Aaron Erickson & Brian Guthrie #81 55:35
This is a special episode from our new series Engineering Founders - We deconstruct the recently closed pre-seed fundraising experience of our friends Brian Guthrie & Aaron Erickson (co-founders of Orgspace). Brian & Aaron share their experience finding a co-founder and making the decision to leave their engineering leadership positions at big companies. Plus they share great advice on navigating the fundraising experience and dealing with rejection! Check out Engineering Founders - https://bit.ly/3KnIfFI Learn more about Orgspace & check out their new beta HERE: http://orgspace.io/elc ABOUT BRIAN GUTHRIE Brian Guthrie ( @bguthrie ) is Co-Founder and CTO at Orgspace. His career spansr 20 years, leading teams at everything from global enterprises to seed-stage startups. Prior to founding Orgspace, he was VPE at Meetup, where he led the organization through their transition out of WeWork. He’s worked in software domains as diverse as agile coaching, music hosting and pizza procurement and is a recognized thought leader in continuous integration and delivery. Brian lives and works in Brooklyn. ABOUT AARON ERICKSON Aaron Erickson ( @AaronErickson ) is Co-Founder and CEO at Orgspace. Before Orgspace, he spent 30 years working in leadership roles, most recently as VP of Engineering at New Relic. Over the course of his entire career, he has been an advocate for building better software. He spent a decade at ThoughtWorks, where he drove digital transformation via application of agile and continuous delivery. Aaron lives and works in San Francisco. Aaron: “I remember one person in particular, saw our slide deck and said, 'Literally, I wouldn't even give you a reference to somebody with this slide deck.’ It was so bad... Tough to hear! Right? You know, very, very tough to hear... But was very, very valuable! I mean, it really honed our message and it was precisely the thing we needed to hear, to actually make our pitch a lot better...” Brian: I actually, I didn't find it that tough to hear. I always presumptively assume that whatever I'm doing is awful so to hear some of the reflected back, I'm like, 'Yes! It is terrible! Tell us more. Give us the worst.' I really, I love that actually.” Aaron: “Hence why I'm always the optimistic one and Brian always dragged me back to reality.” Brian: “He was so wounded by it! I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a terrible deck!'” ABOUT ORGSPACE Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. You can easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans. If you want to learn more (or sign up for their JUST launched beta!) check them out at orgspace.io/elc Check out our friends & sponsor Coderpad ! CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company! Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster? Learn more at coderpad.io/elc SHOW NOTES: Closing a Pre-Seed round of funding (3:21) Brian’s decision to leave Meetup (5:53) Aaron’s decision to leave Salesforce (10:09) How to choose a co-founder (13:21) Questions to ask potential co-founders (15:50) How to choose an idea (20:30) Navigating the fundraise (25:27) Filtering the feedback you get on your startup (28:16) How to communicate your idea to investors (32:19) Dealing with rejection (35:37) Product > pitch deck (39:31) How to balance building a business and fundraising (42:23) Rapid Fire Questions (45:19)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Welcome to our first ever LIVE recording of the show! This is a special behind-the-scenes preview of the upcoming 2022 ELC Virtual Summit (4/20-4/22)! We cover speaker sessions we’re excited about, why we’re excited for community-led round tables, how they’ll help you harness community & build your support network! Plus we showcase 4x round table discussions covering performance management, courageous leadership, hiring vs. buying, and helping women thrive not just survive in tech! Learn more & register for the 2022 ELC Virtual Summit HERE: www.sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES Welcome to our first ever LIVE recording of the Engineering Leadership podcast! (1:39) What is the ELC Virtual Summit all about? (4:08) Preview of a few speaker sessions we’re excited about (5:54) Why we’re excited for community-led roundtables & how they’ll help you harness community & build your support network (9:02) What are “round-tables” & why are they valuable to engineering leaders? Introducing roundtable hosts Joy, Andrei, Wen & Keng (plus why they’re most excited about their discussion topic) (12:46) Performance management roundtable preview (18:28) What unexpected feedback have you received from your team during performance reviews? (22:31) Courageous leadership roundtable preview (27:51) If you saw “courageous leadership” what would you want to gain from a roundtable? (34:55) Hire vs. Buy roundtable preview (38:38) Helping women thrive, not just survive in tech - roundtable preview (47:11) Wrap Up! Register for the ELC Summit @ www.sfelc.com/summit2022 (56:52)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Translating engineering to the CEO w/ Andrew Lau and Eli Daniel 1:01:54
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1:01:54Communication between engineering leadership and the CEO is crucial, and not without its challenges. In this special episode Andrew Lau (Co-Founder & CEO @ Jellyfish) and Eli Daniel (Head Of Engineering @ Jellyfish) give us an inside look into their own working relationship and share tips for optimal collaboration between engineering leaders, CEOs and "the business." ABOUT ANDREW LAU Andrew Man-Hon Lau ( @amlau ) is Co-Founder and CEO of Jellyfish , the leading Engineering Management Platform (EMP) that provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Prior to Jellyfish , Andrew was the Chief Strategy Officer for ad-tech leader Nanigans after his social retail-tech company LoopIt was acquired. He also previously helped create companies at Redstar Ventures. Andrew was VP Engineering and founding technology team member of Endeca Technologies, an enterprise search software company that was acquired by Oracle Technologies for over $1B. He also has experience at companies such as Microsoft and IBM. Andrew holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a certified barbecue judge for the Kansas City Barbecue Society. He hails from Oakland, CA and is still an avid fan of the Oakland Athletics despite living in Red Sox country for over 20 years. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Elsie and two young children Callie and Mira. "There's a game of distrust already happening here, or at least his satisfaction. And dissatisfaction could be why is it something else coming out faster? Like I thought this has been done? Or this thing didn't come out good. Or my favorite person isn't working on this thing. The supposition in the set person's head is that something's wrong with the work assignment, patterns slash it's the wrong matching of people to work or they're doing some stuff is wasting time. Use the act of sharing it and their critique on the specific things to try to suss out what their discontent with... - Andrew Lau ABOUT ELI DANIEL Eli Daniel is Head of Engineering at Jellyfish , where he leads the efforts to develop our software products. He comes to Jellyfish by way of 20+ years in the Boston tech scene, having seen both successful exits and smoldering craters, which have led to a keen interest in what makes successful product development teams go.Eli holds a BS in Computer Science from Yale. He lives with his family and labrador retriever in Somerville, MA, and looks forward to returning to his regular bike-commute to work. "I would try hard to head that thing off at the pass and be like, ‘Whoa! whoa! whoa! Like what... Help me understand, what are you trying to do with this information? How can I help you get what you actually want? Because I don't think it's a list of tasks you haven't heard of that the junior person is working on over there.’” - Eli Daniel Check out our friends at Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Translating engineering to the CEO (2:50) The tension between CEO and Head of Engineering (3:54) 1:1’s with the CEO (7:01) The disconnect between CEO and engineering leaders (8:22) How to navigate mistrust from the CEO (12:44) Maintaining clarity with the CEO (17:15) Reporting hiring challenges for engineering (19:50) Hero developers don’t scale (27:02) What level of business insight do engineering leaders need? (36:40) Should engineering teams adopt trending frameworks? (39:10) Managing release expectations (45:11) How engineering leaders can stay in tune with business priorities (53:01) Takeaways (59:18)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Joy Dixon (Sr Manager, Engineering @ Salesforce) walks us through a unique goal-setting framework: Next Level Goals - to help you harness group accountability & accelerate their growth. Joy breaks down the process of getting buy-in from skeptical engineers, the power of peer accountability stand-ups, and why embodying your goals can be more effective than moving towards them. ABOUT JOY DIXON Joy Dixon ( @JoyD1x0n ) is a people-first, innovative, daring, JEDI Leader with strong technical prowess and deep business acumen. Joy has worked in the tech industry for 20+ years as a people leader, software engineer, technical trainer, and network administrator. Joy holds a Bachelor’s degree in African-American Studies, a Master’s degree in Software Engineering, and several professional certifications in software development and Agile methodologies. In the course of a diverse career, Joy has… Led and grown development teams to deliver engineering excellence in code, collaboration, and commitment all while modeling collective genius and having fun. Designed and developed applications using several programming languages and in various environments. In addition, she has configured and administered networks for global companies. Designed and delivered online and in-person, web, animation, and game development courses. Started a software development training company, Mosaic Presence to expand opportunities, cultivate community, and promote the Mosaic. As a self-described sunflower in a bed of roses, Joy conceives and constructs new paths that inspire innovation and transform cultures. She gives 100%+ to herself, team, and work modeling care, creativity, and excellence. Joy is a courageous communicator whose authenticity and integrity are valued and admired. Along with the above, Joy connects people and ideas in a heartfelt effort to support the success of everyone. Additionally, Joy loves music, animation, women's basketball, the Golden State Warriors, and motorcycles. Joy lives by the following quote from the world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon, Wilma Rudolph: "'I can't' are two words that have never been in my vocabulary. I believe in me more than anything in this world." "Don't tell people 'I like to run.' Tell them 'I'm a runner!' It makes a world of difference! So you are embodying that person or those attributes that you want to have. And then from there, you move forward. Because if you say 'I'm moving towards my goal.' Then you're also saying 'I'm not there yet.' But if you embody the end, ‘I'm already there!’ Right? We know you're not holy already there, but you embody the end and then, act as if! And it makes a world of difference. You make so much more progress. - Joy Dixon Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc SHOW NOTES: Team building happens in the in-between moments (2:07) Get the right things done with smaller goals (5:52) Help eng team members make realistic business impacts (8:59) How to implement the Next Level framework with your eng teams (12:07) The magic wand: monthly accountability check-ins (16:42) Leverage peers for accountability, not just managers (18:52) The network effects of group accountability (19:47) Embodying your goals vs. moving towards them (25:01) Getting buy-in from skeptical engineers (29:03) How to measure and track abstract goals (31:46) Apply BRAVING to engineering leadership (34:34) Rapid Fire Questions (37:40) LINKS AND RESOURCES (book) Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins - book Joy referenced talking about “constant and never-ending improvement (book) The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker - book referenced by Patrick discussing facilitation principles (book) Dare to Lead by Brene Brown - book referenced by Joy discussing BRAVING framework applied within her engineering team meetings (book) Linchpin by Seth Godin - what Joy is reading now…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth w/ Samir Naik #77 Samir Naik (Head of Engineering, Core Products @ Plaid) shares how Plaid’s engineering org has evolved over the last 10 years & the many unexpected ways his own career has transformed alongside Plaid. Samir deconstructs 3 different growth phases at Plaid, the indicators that your company is ready for the next growth stage, and how to choose an emerging tech city to expand to! Plus critical questions that helped guide Samir’s career within Plaid. ABOUT SAMIR NAIK Samir Naik ( @samirnaik ) is Head of Engineering for Plaid’s Core Products, overseeing a cross-functional team of product managers, engineers, designers, marketers building and scaling our core APIs. Having worn many hats throughout his years at Plaid, he’s managed teams large and small and as the first external engineering manager hire, he’s been instrumental in building Plaid’s engineering function from the ground up. Previously, Samir led teams at Dropbox, Zynga, and Disney. "I made the comment... I was like, 'I don't think a lot of this is really engineering focused, right? It doesn't seem super relevant to the engineering team..." And he kind of just paused and looked at me and was like, 'That is your job! Doesn't matter if it's engineering or not, you need to fix these problems.' And I think it was a mindset shift for me, and it was really helpful feedback. But I think it kind of framed that there's a bunch of seams in an organization. Doesn't matter whether they're engineering or not, but I really need to look for those seams and those opportunities and make sure they're addressed, whether that's in my job description or not. - Samir Naik Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd! We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth. Learn more and register HERE : sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES: What was Plaid like in 2017? (2:56) Approaching Eng Mgmt as a business within a business (6:47) The three growth phases of Plaid (7:55) Deciding the sequence of scaling for an engineering organization (13:10) Relying on Eng Managers for project management (14:56) How to attract Sr Engineers during hyper-growth (16:55) Maturing from a single product to multiple business units (18:35) Org maturity as a lagging indicator of success (20:08) Indicators that your company is ready for growth stage 2 (21:10) How scaling turned Samir’s role into a more business-focused function (24:04) How to choose an emerging tech city to expand to (27:32) The need for “2nd communities” in remote organizations (31:58) Indicators that your company is ready for growth stage 3 (34:48) How long should you delay growth stage 3? (38:29) Evolving company culture as the organization scales (40:10) Handing off easy tasks that can be growth opportunities for others (43:40) Rapid Fire Questions (46:23) Takeaways (50:00)…
Hypergrowth, Scaling & Org Design w/ Surabhi Gupta #76 Discerning what to prioritize is key to success for any organization, and even more critical during hypergrowth. Surabhi Gupta (Head of Engineering @ Robinhood) shares how she identified current and future priorities as their eng org scaled from 300 to 1,000+ engineers. Plus her approach to org design, how to set up new hires for success during hypergrowth, and a framework for predicting future personnel requirements. ABOUT SURABHI GUPTA Surabhi Gupta is the VP of Product Engineering at Robinhood, where she oversees the company's growing engineering organization. Prior to Robinhood, Surabhi spent seven years at Airbnb where she was Head of Engineering for Airbnb's Homes business. During her tenure at Airbnb, she led a variety of teams such as Search, Growth, Guest and Host. Before Airbnb, she was a Software Engineer at Google, where she worked on web search ranking, and the Google Now team on predictive search. Surabhi holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford. "These are not insurmountable problems. So when you make that case to other leaders, especially outside of engineering, I think it's important that... ‘Hey, we're not going for this ideal world of no technical debt. It's just that here's the impact of not focusing on it. The impact of not focusing on this technical debt is that we are going to see outages and there will be this false sense of progress because every time the engineers try to focus on some product work, they're going to have to go on this outage and solve that.’ I think the best way to put it really is you are treading water at that point.” - Surabhi Gupta Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd! We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth. Learn more and register HERE : sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES: Joining Robinhood in the pandemic (2:23) How new leaders can eliminate bottlenecks (6:59) How to amend decisions previously made by Executive Team Members (8:58) Robinhood’s growth from 300 engineers to 1,000 (11:49) The 3 aspects of scaling (12:46) Why process makes people happy (14:45) The effects of scaling on team structure (17:33) How to approach org design (19:23) Why flatter org structures are better for hypergrowth (21:36) How to perform org alignment check-ups (24:37) Forming the executive engineering team (25:55) A framework for predicting future personnel requirements (29:26) How to set up new hires for success during hypergrowth (32:42) Successfully onboarding senior leaders during hypergrowth (34:25) Cultivating a sense of belonging in the present “future of work” (36:03) Finding the right engineering teams for new hires (39:18) Rapid Fire Questions (41:07) Takeaways (45:47)…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
In today’s hiring environment, it’s unreasonable to expect someone to stay on your team forever. So how do you prioritize both the success of your team/company AND support the career growth of folks on your team? Tara Ellis (Engineering Leader, Animation Content Engineering @ Netflix) shares her approach to career growth & why she encourages her team to outgrow their roles! Plus, how to help someone understand if management is the right next step and how other leaders can begin facilitating a growth mentality in their organizations. ABOUT TARA ELLIS Tara Ellis ( @maverick_mind ) is an avid tinkerer and has been since the early days of the world wide web. As a critical and creative thinker, she is a relentless problem-solver skilled in applying analysis, technical knowledge, and strong interpersonal skills in her leadership style. Tara is a strong believer in “Peopleware” and because of that has a keen understanding of building and leading teams that deliver. As a leader at Netflix, Tara has led diverse engineering teams including continuously improving the Payments and Non-Member Experience to bring in new Netflix members globally. Currently, she leads teams in Animation Studio and Production Engineering in building products that power the Netflix Animation Studio ecosystem. Prior to joining Netflix, she led engineering teams at Disney Parks; if you’ve been to Disneyland or Disneyworld in the last decade, you’ve interacted with some of her teams’ software. She honed her engineering skills in the fast-paced, ever-changing environment at Amazon, learning lessons she still uses today. Outside of work, Tara loves to spend time with her family, cooking and traveling. She is a passionate collector and player of board games and a music aficionado. “When someone joins my team, I try to spend a fair bit of time with the expectation that you are not going to be here forever. I hope you are here as long as I can keep you. As long as our journeys kind of go together. But at some point, whether that be a year, three years, five years... you're going to outgrow this. That's just the nature of work. And so I like to be really upfront about that. And then I also like to prepare for that!” - Tara Ellis The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd! We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth. Learn more and register HERE : sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES: Why should you help engineers outgrow their positions? (1:46) How to discuss career growth with your team members ( 4:15) Be a multiplier for the people you’re leading (5:53) A framework for managers to facilitate growth (9:02) Supporting skills acquisition for engineering contributors (12:44) Helping someone understand whether they should be manager (16:12) How to help first-time managers make less mistakes (25:09) Communicating with compassionate directness (28:52) Netflix’s pivot to growing people internally (32:45) How managers can begin facilitating a growth mentality for their teams (42:41) Rapid Fire Questions (45:21) Takeaways (51:35) LINKS AND RESOURCES (article) “ When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron ” by Lara Hogan (video) “ How I learned to stop worrying, and grow high performing teams ” by Tara Ellis (book rec) “ Repairman Jack ” by F. Paul Wilson, Nina Abbott…
Conflict is a necessary part of the job. So how can you transform conflict to be collaborative, not competitive? Jordan Adler (Head of Dev Eng @ OneSignal) previews his conflict optimization workshop taking place at our 2022 Spring Virtual Summit! Jordan shares some of the main sources of conflict in eng teams, how to uncover underlying needs, shift people from entrenched positions & other frameworks to create an optimal environment for healthy conflict. ABOUT JORDAN ADLER Jordan M. Adler ( @jordanmadler ) is the Head of Developer Engineering at OneSignal, where he drives the cutting edge of cross-platform customer engagement messaging APIs & SDKs. Previously, Jordan evolved Engineering Productivity at Cruise, led API Platform engineering at Pinterest, and was a Strategic Partner Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google, where he managed technical partnerships between major organizations and Google. “Looking at the conflict in particular, how do we switch from 'positions' to 'interests?' Right. So how do we take away from... ‘Hey, this is what I want, this is what you want.’ To... ‘This is the reason that I have a particular want. And this is the reason that you have a particular want. And if we have clarity together, collectively on what those interests are, then we can collaboratively work towards a solution.’" - Jordan Adler The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd! We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth. Learn more and register HERE : sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES: Conflict optimization vs. conflict resolution (2:33) Engineering leaders need to embrace conflict (4:34) Conflict is necessary for collaboration (5:52) What creates conflict in engineering teams? (8:32) A real example of conflict optimization (10:31) How conflict optimization leads to better decisions (13:21) Using conflict as constraints to produce better solutions (15:24) How to optimize a conflict (17:38) Switching from "positions" to "interests" (20:26) Uncovering the underlying emotional needs in a conflict (23:24) How to use words that convey curiosity and not emotional violence (25:58) Why video calls are key to conflict resolution in remote work (28:55) How to practice conflict optimization - a preview of Jordan’s workshop during ELC’s Spring Summit 2022 (35:27) Ways to avoid conflict in the first place (37:15) Rapid Fire Questions (38:49) Takeaways (42:24) LINKS AND RESOURCES Jordan’s website: https://jmadler.dev/ ( book ) Conscious Business by Fred Kofman - Jerry’s favorite book ( link ) David Anderson Hooker - conflict transformation source Jordan referenced ( link ) Diana Francis - conflict transformation source Jordan referenced ( link ) Non-violent communication & Dr. Marshall Roseberg…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Belonging, Retention, & Human-Centered Leadership with Lucius DiPhillips #73 1:06:28
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1:06:28Belonging and business results are not opposing priorities! Lucius DiPhillips (CIO @ AirBnB) shares how every team member's sense of belonging is the first principle that paves the way for all other business goals. You’ll hear how Airbnb designed programs & policies to enhance belonging, support critical employee challenges, and create industry-leading retention during the height of the covid-19 pandemic & ‘great resignation’ ABOUT LUCIUS DIPHILLIPS Lucius DiPhillips is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Airbnb, where he shares the company mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. He has over 20 years of experience that spans Product Development, Information Technology, Customer Service, Financial Services, Payments, eCommerce, and Trust & Safety. Prior to joining Airbnb, Lucius held multiple Technology & Operations leadership roles at eBay, PayPal, Bank of America, and General Electric. He is originally from upstate New York where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and serves as the executive sponsor for several diversity and belonging groups and initiatives across the company. Through his sponsorship, Lucius has been instrumental in helping to improve the ways in which Airbnb attracts and retains diverse technical talent. Lucius has 2 children, a lovely wife, and a new puppy in the family! He is based in Silicon Valley, but also enjoys spending as much time as he can in the Tahoe area. "And that's what the survey told us... People are missing that sense of community, people are missing flexibility, people are missing warmth and acknowledgment... That was really it! Ask people, 'what do they need?' And then deliver what they need. And it's really about being in tune and listening and learning and then delivering on what those things are gonna look like for the people." - Lucius DiPhillips The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd! We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth. Learn more and register HERE : sfelc.com/summit2022 SHOW NOTES: Why engineering leaders need to create a sense of belonging (2:34) How (and why) Airbnb measures belonging (4:16) Re-inventing the coffee-chat, coordinated no-meeting-days, and other wellness practices that work (7:31) Creating a culture of idea sharing and support for employee-led initiatives (11:17) The impact of implementing the Native Genius framework for all 500 of Airbnb’s team members (12:43) Using a framework for career conversations as a belonging and engagement strategy (15:45) Lucius’ template for career conversations (17:29) Achieving some of the lowest turnover rates, in a company with some of the lowest turnover rates in the industry… during the great resignation! (25:04) Lucius’ mentoring story on the impact of career conversations on burnout & retention (25:45) You CAN balance career development conversations with business goals (28:54) How to be a “multiplier” and facilitate the best work from your team members (33:09) Effective retention strategies during the “Great Resignation”(37:21) How leaders can use an Airbnb “host” mindset to tune into their people's needs (44:50) Investing in the tools for the future of work (48:51) Rapid-fire questions (56:44) Takeaways (1:03:08) LINKS AND RESOURCES (tool) Topia.io - AR/VR virtual meetup & community tool Lucius experimented with his team (book) “ Multipliers ” by Liz Wiseman (coaching/workshop) " Native Genius " - workshop & consulting to activate innate intelligence with Kristen Wheeler (resource) Native Genius - workbook from Liz Wiseman to understand your team’s Native Genius…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
M&As can be a major disruption for engineering orgs… so how can eng leaders strategically approach deal structuring in a way that benefits instead of distracts? Melody Hildebrandt (EVP Eng / CISO @ Fox Corporation & COO @ Blockchain Creative Labs) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history, what she learned negotiating on behalf of the tech org, and how they were able to use the event to accelerate innovation and productivity. ABOUT MELODY HILDEBRANDT Melody Hildebrandt ( @mhi l) is the Chief Information Security Officer at FOX and Chief Operating Officer of its subsidiary Blockchain Creative Labs (BCL). She is responsible for the cyber security posture of the entire business, spanning Fox Sports, Fox News, and Fox Entertainment. She also leads technology Merger & Acquisition efforts, identifying areas for investment of the company, leading to her current operating leadership role of FOX’s expansion into NFT and other blockchain technologies through the $100m creative fund of BCL. Previously, she ran product and engineering for all digital experiences across web, mobile, and living room applications within the FOX brands, notably leading the platform architecture to stream Super Bowl 2020, which broke all previous national video concurrency records while also setting a new quality bar with 4K/HDR. She is the Executive Sponsor of FOX Women in Technology and on the FOX Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council. She previously was the Global Chief Information Security Officer at 21st Century Fox where she was responsible for the cyber security posture of 21CF businesses including 20th Century Fox, Fox Networks Group, National Geographic Partners, Fox News, Star India and others. She moved into a larger role at FOX following the announcement of the spin-off of many assets to Disney. Before joining 21CF, she was an executive vice president of Palantir Technologies. An early employee of the company, she helped start Palantir’s Commercial work, opened its New York Office, and led Palantir’s sales, product and field execution in cyber security, anti-money laundering, and rogue trading detection. Prior to that, she consulted to US and international governments with Booz Allen Hamilton where she designed military and strategy wargames. "One thing that we intervened on very quickly because we were AT the table for (the conversation), "How should we structure the deal?" Was to do something that was quite counter-intuitive I think, and very controversial... Which was to say ‘Let's essentially value all of our current technology assets at near-zero... And make them part of the deal.’" - Melody Hildebrandt SHOW NOTES: Background on the Fox Disney “mega-deal” (3:14) How to structure an M&A to accelerate your tech roadmap (5:45) Motivating engineering teams with forcing functions (10:07) What it was like representing a tech org in deal structuring (13:22) How to develop an engineering org’s merger strategy (18:00) M&A negotiation tips for engineering leaders (20:41) A critical skill for eng leaders: converting tech pains into business goals (23:45) How to get executive buy-in on engineering initiatives (29:01) “Crashing” your way to a seat at the table (32:18) Melody’s process for setting the strategic direction of an engineering org (33:37) Managing engineering teams from high and low — the middle is death (36:02) Why this M&A event continues to accelerate innovation (39:10) Rapid-Fire Questions (44:18) Takeaways (49:10) LINKS AND RESOURCES (article) A super-powered approach to tech transformation - Melody Hildebrandt & Paul Cheesborough’s article on the untold story of the 21st Century Fox & Disney transaction (podcast) Conversations with Tyler esteemed economist Tyler Cowen engages with today’s most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (reference) The Masked Singer NFT project - www.maskverse.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
The quest to “find flow” as an eng leader can be elusive! Rob Zuber (CTO @ CircleCI) shares about his personal quest to find flow, refining/refocusing responsibilities as CTO, and why he brought on an SVPE to support. Plus some of the personal discovery frameworks & executive-level delegation practices that may aid your own quest to find flow as an engineering leader. ABOUT ROB ZUBER Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI , Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide. Before CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, Continuous Integration and Deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers acquired by Appconomy in 2011. Rob holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two children. "When you start a company or you end up leading a very small company, the decision about how many people you end up managing is external forces on the company. The company just grows and your team grows to support it. And no one is saying, ‘Hey, it looks like you're ready for this...’ And so I think so often what you see is early leaders end up exiting because that transition happens faster than they were prepared for. To me, that's a really fascinating dynamic because a lot of people coming into organizations are both opting in and getting selected in for the stage of the organization that you have...” - Rob Zuber SHOW NOTES Rob’s reflections on recapturing the “first-time coding” experience (3:08) On finding flow as an engineering leader (6:48) How Rob thinks about his role as CTO & why he brought on an SVPE to support (10:48) The “One Thing” moment & finding flow leading engineering teams (15:21) How do you intentionally protect maker-time (20:14) Balancing challenge & support to create flow (24:21) Frameworks for personal discovery or delegating executive responsibilities (29:35) On introducing resets & retro-ing your org (34:41) Rapid-Fire Questions (38:37) Takeaways (43:28) LINKS AND RESOURCES “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller ( book ) First Team concept ( definition ) How CircleCI modeled it’s security training after DEF CON’s capture the flag ( article )…
This is the first episode of our new series “ Engineering Founders ” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host! ABOUT ANNA PATTERSON Anna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund’s global activities. Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google’s Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc. Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results. Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org , the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift. Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis. Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband. "When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline. What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan. I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..." - Anna Patterson Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Are you an eng leader interested in taking the leap to start your own company? Check out our brand new podcast series, Engineering Founders - Where we explore the transition from eng leader to founder! Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform HERE ! SHOW NOTES: Anna’s background scaling complex systems (4:00) Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19) The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03) The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14) What’s after deep learning? (18:14) Machine learning and source code (20:06) What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04) How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43) Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16) How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30) Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20) How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49) Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38) LINKS AND RESOURCES Gradient Ventures ( Website ) Streamlit.io ( Website ) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platform Building Your AI A-Team ( Link ) - Anna and Adrien Treuille’s talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling…
What lessons can you learn from the strange and unfamiliar world of the sales team? Maulie Dass (Global Lead @ Cisco Innovation Labs) has experienced both worlds and joins to share what she’s learned! We cover questions to help you get to the root issues of your customer, design thinking strategies to generate customer empathy in your teams, how to balance product vision vs. feature requests from sales & more! ABOUT MAULIE DASS Maulie Dass ( @mauliedass ) is the Global Lead for Cisco's Innovation Labs, which works closely with local industries to create new technology solutions that solve common pain points and positively impact business, society, and the planet. She has been in the industry for over 20 years in a variety of tech, strategic, and customer-facing leadership roles. Maulie is passionate about her customers, innovation, technology, inclusivity, and cheese pizza. "Even if a customer is very clear on a solution that they want... "I need an AI ML solution that does X, Y, Z." The question that I use often is "Tell me more about that? Like, what is instigating this need?" Think of the next question that'll kind of get you closer and closer to the source, or the root of the issue." - Maulie Dass SHOW NOTES: Maulie shares the “expensive lessons” she learned while designing her first microchip (2:00) How learning and curiosity guided Maulie’s career across engineering, sales, and innovation (6:19) What engineering leaders can learn from sales (11:07) “Seek to understand first” & questions Maulie uses to empathize (17:30) When should leaders stop asking questions? (21:57) How to use the design thinking tool “A Day in the Life” to cultivate customer empathy and communicate between engineering and product (23:05) How to navigate your product vision versus feature requests from sales (28:45) How to manage and sustain your personal energy long-term (32:40) The impact of changing your communication style & having cultural awareness (36:03) Rapid-Fire Questions (39:17) Takeaways (42:19) LINKS AND RESOURCES Get-Woke on Github - A tool to detect non-inclusive language in your source-code Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Amazon) - Maulie’s book of choice for avoiding accidental exclusion in the world around us Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Lewis Tuff (VP of Engineering @ Blockchain.com) joins us to share his experience on building a career in the cryptocurrency space! We cover his transition from traditional finance/tech to crypto, how to shift your mindset from centralized to decentralized, qualities that lead to success, tactics to help you gain exposure and experience, AND why it’s not too late to start your career in crypto! ABOUT LEWIS TUFF Lewis ( @tuffleuk ) is the Vice President of Engineering at Blockchain.com where he is responsible for the technology underpinning Blockchain.com ’s services. As the 2nd engineering hire at Revolut, he scaled the team to 50+ and spearheaded the initiative to bring cryptocurrencies to Revolut. He built the first of its kind crypto offering within a challenger bank over the course of a couple of months and was responsible for bringing $300M+ trading revenue in due course. In March 2018 Lewis joined Blockchain.com as an engineering lead to be part of one of the most important companies in crypto infrastructure, rising to the Head of Platform Engineering as the company and industry grew. That same year he was included on Business Insider’s “35 under 35” in fintech. Lewis began his career building trading and risk technology systems at Goldman Sachs and UBS. He lives in London. SHOW NOTES: Patrick’s FOMO after learning his dad owned Doge-coin… (2:03) How Lewis went from traditional finance to a career in blockchain/crypto (3:35) One question to help you gain career perspective as an engineering leader (9:36) The principles behind blockchain technology that led Lewis to “go all in” (10:34) Are blockchain engineering challenges harder to solve? (13:03) Unprecedented (but not unsolvable) problems in blockchain (14:56) Staying lean & focused while balancing team size & scope (19:47) Making the transition from "centralized" to "decentralized" thinking (24:07) How to use Github to source great engineering candidates (28:07) Do engineering leaders need to be domain experts to manage teams in blockchain/crypto? (30:15) How engineering leadership is similar in blockchain companies & crypto’s ethos of “paying it forward” (33:29) Why it’s not too late to start a career in blockchain/crypto (36:14) How blockchain leverages the power of community (38:44) The first thing you should do to explore a career in blockchain: Try out the products & technology! (45:25) Where are the hottest markets/locations for cryptocurrency right now? (46:46) Rapid-Fire Questions (47:41) Takeaways (50:20) LINKS AND RESOURCES Cryptocurrency on Github - Repositories, packages, and more for the budding engineers who want to get their feet wet. Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
Jeremy King (SVP of Engineering @ Pinterest) discusses some of the challenges, principles & frameworks behind building inclusive products. We also cover filtering decisions through your company mission, investing in rest and emerging challenges around creating serendipity with ideas, onboarding, retaining talent and the hard logistics of workplace flexibility. ABOUT JEREMY KING Jeremy King is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Pinterest, where he leads the company’s technical direction and oversees the entire Engineering team building deeply technical products, platforms and machine learning systems. Previously, he was the CTO of Walmart, where he led the digital transformation effort of the company including customer technology, merchant technology and supply chain technology that covered all Walmart U.S. stores and eCommerce. Prior to that, King was Executive Vice President of technology at LiveOps, and Vice President of engineering and software development at eBay. He holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology from San Jose State University, and is an advisory board member for the CTO Forum, an organization that brings together senior leaders across the technology industry to collaborate on key issues and accelerate innovation across organizations. SHOW NOTES: Building inclusive products starts by having diverse data sets Why your data is probably biased already Where to start with building inclusive products Three principles to build inclusive products How Pinterest disrupts entrenched patterns of thinking & balances innovation and action How to decide which experiments to implement Why ROI should not be the only metric of effectiveness How to filter decisions through your company’s mission How AR aligns with Pinterest’s mission & allows “Pinners” to explore & experiment with different identities Covid’s impact on retaining talent How “investing in rest” & cultivating work-life balance can increase productivity How to schedule a day off for your entire engineering org Upcoming Industry Challenges: building in serendipity, onboarding in a remote-first workplace & the logistics of workplace flexibility Rapid-Fire Questions Takeaways LINKS AND RESOURCES Inclusive Search and Recommendations - Nadia Fawaz’s talk on How Inclusive Search, & AI works at Pinterest Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Addressing Burnout in Your Engineering Org with Erica Lockheimer, Sabry Tozin & Lori Allen #66 48:00
This conversation is about BURNOUT! You’ll hear holistic perspectives to help you identify the causes, conditions, & early indicators of burnout. Plus organizational & individual practices to address & become resilient to burnout with Sabry Tozin (VPE @ LinkedIn), Lori Allen (VP HR @ LinkedIn), & Erica Lockheimer (VPE, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Learning & Glint @ LinkedIn). About Erica Lockheimer Erica Lockheimer is VP of Engineering, Talent Solutions, Learning, and Glint @ LinkedIn. During her more than 10 years at the company, she built the Growth Engineering team into a high-performing 120-person team, focused on increasing membership, and deepening member engagement. In January 2018, she was promoted to Head of Engineering for the LinkedIn Learning team, formerly known as Lynda.com. She is also responsible for LinkedIn’s Women In Tech (WIT) initiative, which is focused on empowering women in technical roles at the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering to securely manage and synchronize e-mail and calendar data between Exchange and mobile devices. Erica loves the challenge of starting with something nascent and carving out the right strategy, hiring the best people, and plotting a course to drive results. In 2014 and 2015, Erica was recognized as one of the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider. About Sabry Tozin Sabry Tozin is the Vice President of Enterprise Productivity Engineering at LinkedIn. In this capacity, Sabry leads the organization that powers the productivity of LinkedIn employees through innovative, scalable, and secure information technology solutions. Before joining LinkedIn, Sabry held engineering leadership roles at Netflix and IGN Entertainment. He’s a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley. About Lori Allen Lori is a Speaker and Coach and serves as VP of Human Resources, Engineering for LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Mission is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce which aligns to Lori’s personal goal of helping others reach their full potential. She has spent the last 20+ years as an HR Leader responsible for designing talent strategies and partnering with Executives to drive business results. Lori is passionate about Diversity Inclusion and belonging and was named in the 2018 list of women worth watching in the Profiles in Diversity Journal. Originally from Wichita, Kansas, she graduated from the University of Kansas with a BA and later received a master’s degree from Webster University. Lori has resided in the Bay area for the past 20+ years and has had the privilege of working Shownotes Burnout in Q1-2021 & what caused LinkedIn to take a company-wide week off (3:31) Are patterns of burnout repeating with the new covid variant? (7:59) What are the causes, conditions, & indicators of burnout in engineering orgs? (12:19) How to detect & identify the early signs of burnout in your engineering team (19:14) Favorite non-invasive "how are you doing" questions to get better signal from your engineering team (23:47) How to build resilience against burnout by leveraging Lencioni’s “First Team Concept” (31:01) Conversation framework for internal mobility (36:44) Erica, Lori & Sabry’s personal practices to prevent burnout (40:29) What do you admire most about working with each other? (42:31) Takeaways (44:59) Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish . Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions. Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
Our 2022 season starts next week on Tues 1/4! Check out this trailer for a preview of our first few guests covering topics like burnout, building inclusive products, and making the career transition into crypto! Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at https://sfelc.com/ !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Sri Viswanath (CTO @ Atlassian ) shares Atlassian’s approach to building autonomous teams, the story behind Project Pascal & how Atlassian built their engineering career ladder! You’ll learn Sri’s 3 key areas to creating autonomy (principles, priorities & process), creating transparency at scale, and common & counter-intuitive process changes. Plus the key elements to build/launch a successful engineering career growth plan! ABOUT SRI VISWANATH Sri is the chief technology officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Sri joined the company in January 2016 and is at the helm of Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri served as CTO and senior vice president of engineering at Groupon, the vice president of R&D for mobile computing at VMware, and the senior vice president of engineering at Ning – where he was instrumental in the company's acquisition by Glam. He also led the development of a number of very successful open-source and B-to-B products at Sun Microsystems, served on the Board of Directors for SendGrid, and has a number of patents. Sri currently serves on the Board of Directors for Splunk and holds a M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University. LINKS & RESOURCES Atlassian's Engineering Handbook: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/handbook Atlassian's Project Pascal: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/career-framework SHOW NOTES Sri’s people-first approach to leadership (1:50) Why “putting people first” is key to building autonomous teams (3:17) How Sri operationalizes his approach to leadership (4:35) What processes should you prioritize first, to build autonomous teams? (9:31) Common & counter-intuitive process changes for engineering leaders to assess (15:32) How Atlassian leverages pre-mortems for major projects at Atlassian (20:29) How Atlassian’s engineering culture creates transparency at scale (22:22) Where to start with building your own engineering handbook: principles, prioritization, & process (24:29) Atlassian’s approach to engineering career growth & “Project Pascal” (32:20) How Atlassian defined each role in it’s engineering career ladder (39:48) How Atlassian formed cross-functional working groups to define different roles (42:23) How different opinions were included in Project Pascal (43:38) How Atlassian incorporated feedback to improve it’s career framework (46:08) Rapid Fire Questions (48:15) Takeaways (54:15) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Listen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE : https://spoti.fi/2WLX9Cm Ready to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE: https://bit.ly/39QpNoH Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Li Fan (CTO @ Circle ) shares about the power of mentoring and the impact of paying it forward! We cover Li’s career journey, the mentors that have inspired and shaped her leadership, and how Li’s passed along those lessons to the people she’s mentored. Through Li’s stories, we uncover the long-term impact and ripple effect when you pay it forward. ABOUT LI FAN Li Fan is CTO at Circle, a global fintech firm enabling business to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains (Circle is the principle operator of USD Coin). Prior to Circle, Li was CTO at Lime, an innovative technology company that connects and empowers urban living through mobility. Before Lime, Li was SVP of engineering at Pinterest leading all 600+ engineers to execute technology strategy and deliver company priorities. Li was a Senior Director of Engineering in Google, accountable for Google’s popular image search and was Vice President of Engineering at Baidu. SHOW NOTES Why this conversation with Li Fan is so special (2:02) When has a mentor made a meaningful difference for you? (3:30) How mentors help show you what’s possible in your career and life (6:29) How mentors inspire and shape your leadership (10:00) Mental models for a successful mentor relationship (13:29) Paying it forward and becoming a mentor (15:19) How to balance your team’s retention and your mentee’s career growth (19:12) The hard-to-imagine long term impact of mentoring (25:20) Staying in touch with your mentors and the people you mentor (29:17) The long-term ripple effect when you “pay it forward” and mentor others (31:22) Finding the right mentor and creating mutually beneficial relationships (36:04) How Art influences Li’s approach to engineering leadership (39:51) Rapid Fire Questions (44:17) Takeaways (47:38) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Listen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE : https://spoti.fi/2WLX9Cm…
Maia Brenner (AI Specialist & Head of Business Development @ Tryolabs) shares the fundamentals to begin your company’s AI/ML journey! We cover the most common challenges & pitfalls eng leaders face when investing in AI, how to understand feasibility/impact & ROI of different AI/ML initiatives, how to build your AI roadmap, how to break down massive AI/ML projects into small experiments, and how to accelerate different phases of your AI/ML strategy with partners like Tryolabs. ABOUT MAIA BRENNER Maia Brenner is a passionate data scientist and economist with strong programming skills, a mathematical and statistical background, and work experience in consulting and the public sector. As an AI Specialist at Tryolabs she helps clients maximize the full potential of data science and machine learning to solve their business problems. Maia's experience in the consulting industry covers several projects related to demand forecasting, price optimization, customer segmentation, and natural language processing applications, among others. As a technical consultant, she has helped design and develop AI solutions for companies from several different industries such as Retail, Finance, Pharma, Logistics, Transportation, Hospitality, Education, and more. She is also a professor in several universities and enjoys working on initiatives of AI4SocialGood. She has helped in the application of Machine Learning to improve the Public Education sector and is involved in Gender Inequality research groups. SHOW NOTES The origin story behind Tryolabs (2:33) Common AI/ML challenges Tryolabs helps solve (5:48) Most painful problems with building AI capabilities (7:50) What are the fundamentals to build an AI organization? (10:11) How do you integrate AI/ML into your core business? (12:42) What problems can (or can’t) be solved with AI/ML? (15:18) How Tryolabs helps companies to identify specific AI/ML use cases (16:59) Common pitfalls when investing in & integrating AI/ML into your company (18:19) How to start small & experiment with AI/ML solutions (20:14) How Tryolabs scopes & iterates their AI/ML projects (24:42) Metrics, KPIs & other ways to determine feasibility, impact & ROI of your AI/ML project (26:53) How to build an AI/ML roadmap for your organization (30:34) How Tryolabs accelerates building your AI organization (34:28) --- Ready to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE : https://bit.ly/39QpNoH…
Richard Wong (SVP of Engineering @ Coursera) shares how the dilemma of speed & quality evolves as a company scales. We cover how to balance building new features & fixing quality issues, internal & external signals to help you determine your priorities, & how to gain alignment. Plus how to avoid over-engineering! ABOUT RICHARD WONG Richard oversees Coursera's infrastructure and product development. Prior to joining Coursera, Richard held various engineering leadership roles at the early days of LinkedIn, with a key focus on scaling the Jobs marketplace and Talent Solutions to become its first billion-dollar product. Richard also oversaw the product development for Linkedin international expansions. Prior to LinkedIn, Richard spent over a decade at Microsoft leading various product development teams including MSN Hotmail, Active Directory, Windows Server, and System Center. Richard received his Master’s degree from Stanford University. SHOW NOTES The dilemma of speed v. quality (1:49) Richard’s personal example of speed v. quality dilemma (5:58) How Coursera improved product quality (7:47) Tactical steps to improve product quality (10:34) How to avoid over-engineering & leverage customer complaints to improve product quality (16:37) How to balance speed & quality as an engineering leader (20:06) How to get alignment on quality issues with executive & cross-functional teams (25:25) How to prevent spending too much time on quality-focused engineering work (29:46) What are the signals for when you need to shift between speed v. quality? (33:22) How the dilemma of speed v. quality change as you scale (38:52) How Richard allocates resources to focus on new features or quality (42:02) Rapid Fire Questions (48:28) Takeaways (54:17) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Juni scaled 2x-3x week-over-week in the 1st month of Covid-19 restrictions. Vivian Shen (Co-Founder & CEO @ Juni Learning) shares why they had to massively shift priorities from growth to internal tooling/operations & how they gained buy-in from their engineering teams throughout the process. Plus you’ll hear about their pitch process to surface innovative ideas, and how the “engineering pod” team structure increases ownership, creativity & directly connects engineering to user impact! ABOUT VIVIAN SHEN, CO-FOUNDER & CEO @ JUNI LEARNING Vivan's experience ranges from strategy development for Fortune 500 companies to building teams from scratch at startups -- and everything in between. Prior to founding Juni in 2017 to satisfy the gap in the education system, Vivian served as the Director of Product at Operator, where she launched multiple products in the US and China. She also spent two years as a Consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office, working with high-growth tech companies. She began her career as a software engineer at Google. Vivian has been featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30, as well as in Fast Company, TechCrunch and Fortune. She holds a B.S in Computer Science from Stanford, with a minor in Creative Writing. Today, she is passionate about helping kids discover and cultivate new interests and skills, empowering them to learn through the power of community and connections. LINKS SHARED IDEO Design Thinking Blog with David Kelly - https://www.ideo.com/journal SHOW NOTES Juni’s Covid pivot: Why they focused on engineering operations & internal tooling (2:19) Making the decision to pivot (4:59) Prioritizing and reallocating engineering resources (8:49) Refocusing the team and getting buy-in (11:01) Dealing with resistance/friction on the company’s direction (13:50) Juni’s pitch process to surface new ideas (17:06) How to leverage end-users to motivate your teams (21:03) Increase ownership and creativity with “Engineering Pods” (26:13) Lessons learned on communicating priorities (28:21) When to revisit your orgs priorities while scaling (32:09) Shifting focus back on growth (34:52) Collaborating in planning meetings with analytics / biz ops & engineering to impact end users (37:10) Rapid Fire Questions (40:13) Takeaways (46:19) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Brad Henrickson (Leadership Coach, Former CTO @ Scoop Technologies) shares how to reclaim ownership of your time by using an energy/calendar audit! You’ll learn the mechanics of how to conduct an energy audit and how to transform energy-draining moments engineering leaders commonly encounter, into energy- giving moments. Plus how to apply this at scale to amplify energy AND increase ownership throughout your entire org! ABOUT BRAD HENRICKSON, LEADERSHIP COACH, FORMER CTO @ SCOOP TECHNOLOGIES Brad is a seasoned technology leader with a broad range of experience from founding companies, to building product, to maturing organizations to driving culture and results in highly dynamic environments. Brad has an extensive range of skills including but not limited to: building recruiting and hiring pipelines, organization design and SDLC design, people management, product management, board representation, budgeting, performance management, culture advocacy and delivery of critical technical projects. Outside of the technical domain you will find Brad out rock climbing, surfing and mountaineering. He grounds himself through his connection to the outdoors and through his meditation practice which he has been doing for 20 years. LINKS & RESOURCES Conscious Leadership Group: https://conscious.is/ Henrickson Leadership: https://henricksonleadership.com/ Sign up for Brad's Newsletter: https://bradhenrickson.substack.com/people/38350988-brad-henrickson Follow Brad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lowercase24 SHOW NOTES Introducing the “energy audit” (2:31) “Time is an expression of your priorities and values” (4:21) How an “energy audit” impacts how you spend your time (5:42) How to address routine meetings on your calendar that drain your energy (7:25) How to conduct your own calendar review & energy audit (10:55) How to approach a calendar review when you don't have total control of your time (14:36) Common energy audit trends for engineering leaders (18:13) How to transform energy-draining meetings to make them exquisite (19:34) Unplanned energy giving experiences to have on the calendar (22:54) How to transform activities from energy draining to energy giving (25:35) Renters vs. Owners & how to increase ownership in your engineering team ( 27:37) How to use energy audits at different scales of your organization (32:24) Framework to start a conversation about energy draining activities (33:50) How to get people to share problems without emotion or fear of judgement (37:00) Other contexts to apply the energy audit beyond meetings (39:34) How to use the energy audit to amplify your energy (41:16) Rapid Fire Questions (44:11) Takeaways (48:01) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Welcome to our community’s FIRST DEBATE! Farhan Thawar (VPE @ Shopify) & Jerry Krikheli (Sr. Director of Engineering @ Facebook) hash out which org structure should rule them all… Should you go flat? Or should you become a hierarchy? You’ll hear how each structure impacts culture, innovation, and velocity! FARHAN THAWAR, VP OF ENGINEERING @ SHOPIFY Farhan Thawar is currently VP, Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. He is an avid writer and speaker and was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Prior to Xtreme, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, Celestica, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo. Farhan is also an advisor at yCombinator and holds a board seat at Optiva (formerly Redknee). JERRY KRIKHELI, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING @ FACEBOOK Prior to Facebook, Jerry was VP of Engineering at Houzz where he oversaw all infrastructure, platform, and engineering across Consumer, Marketplace, and Industry Solutions initiatives. Jerry was also an engineering director at Google responsible for developing early versions of the display ad serving infrastructure and launching YouTube ads as well as video ads on mobile apps. He has a passion for building high-performing systems, products, and people. SHOW NOTES The rules of the debate (2:45) Opening Statement: Why hierarchical organizations? (3:39) Opening Statement: Why flat organizations? (6:25) Culture in flat organizations (9:09) Culture in hierarchical organizations (10:55) Culture rebuttals (14:19) Innovation in flat organizations (19:49) Innovation in hierarchical organizations (22:01) Innovation rebuttals (24:57) Velocity in hierarchical organizations (26:05) Velocity in flat organizations (28:42) Closing Statements on Flat vs. Hierarchical (30:16) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
You've found the mythical product-market fit & are scaling fast... now what?! Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital; Former SVP Engineering @ Google) & David Singleton (CTO @ Stripe) cover common mistakes scaling engineering orgs make, signals to help you identify & develop good managers internally AND find great hires externally. Plus how to balance short & long term demands while scaling & more! DAVID SINGLETON, CTO @ STRIPE David joined Stripe from Google, where he was VPE, leading the Android Wear & Google Fit teams. At Google, David led teams that built some of the company’s most ambitious products, including its first apps with voice search; publisher products for Google Adsense; Google Offers; and Google Mobile Search Apps. He was also one of the first engineers at Google London and oversaw much of the growth of the London engineering office from inception to the large scale it has today. Prior to Google, David spent 3 years as a senior engineer at Symbian, the pioneering mobile phone operating system, where he developed software for Nokia & Samsung smartphones & worked on both the Bluetooth stack & PC Connect software. BILL COUGHRAN, FOUNDER'S COACH & PARTNER @ SEQUOIA; FORMER SVP ENGINEERING @ GOOGLE Bill Coughran works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security. SHOW NOTES What are the most common mistakes scaling organizations make? (2:24) What's the best way to add managers to a technology organization? (4:40) Signals to identify potential engineering managers to develop from inside the organization (7:32) Finding the right external hires while in hyper-growth (signals & warning signs) (8:41) What questions do you ask for hiring references? (11:23) Navigating doing things that don’t scale in the short term (16:17) “Second system syndrome” & avoiding the urge to rewrite your system (19:12) How to retain early employees at a hyper-growth startup (21:30) What Bill’s most excited about in the tech industry right now (24:18) Tips to help turn ICs into leaders (25:20) Deciding on org structure when you’re scaling fast (27:26) Navigating speed & long-term quality building your architecture at an early-stage company (29:43) Final advice from Bill & David (31:37) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Marianna Tessel (CTO @ Intuit) & Aileen Lee (Founder/Managing Partner @ Cowboy Ventures) cover how to navigate the build vs. buy decision! They share the frameworks they use to make a “buy” decision, how they assess engineering talent during acquisitions, how they decide between vendor software vs. open-source vs. building yourself. Plus the leadership skills that help Marianna lead a 5,000+ person team! MARIANNA TESSEL, CTO @ INTUIT Marianna oversees Intuit’s technology strategy and leads all of Intuit’s product engineering, data science, information technology and information security teams worldwide. Marianna's been at the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. Marianna previously served as Executive VP of Strategic Development at Docker, held leadership roles at VMware, Ariba, and General Magic working on the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. AILEEN LEE, FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER @ COWBOY VENTURES Aileen is founding Partner at Cowboy Ventures, a team that backs seed-stage technology companies re-imagining work and life through technology, what they call “life 2.0”. Cowboy Ventures works with startups like Guild Education, Lightstep, Dollar Shave Club, and Tally. Aileen periodically writes about technology insights and is known for coining the business term “unicorn” for public and private companies valued over $1bn. She has been named to the Forbes Midas List of best investors and Forbes Most Powerful Women, as well as to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. Prior to Cowboy, Aileen was a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was founding CEO of RMG Networks, and worked at Gap Inc in operating roles. She has degrees from MIT and HBS, is mom of 3, wife to a startup founder, an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and co-founder of the non-profit All Raise - aiming to accelerate success for women in the technology ecosystem. SHOW NOTES About Marianna’s role at Intuit (2:33) How many acquisitions / build vs. buy decisions have you had to make? (4:35) Marianna’s evaluation framework for buying companies (6:26) Assessing engineering talent in acqui-hires (9:37) How do you decide to buy vendor software or build yourself? (15:41) How do you define what’s core to the business vs. context? (19:11) Where are you looking to buy instead of build right now? (21:40) Hard & soft skills that helped Marianna advance her career and run a 5000+ person team (23:48) Were you always good at the "developing talent" and "managing" part of being a CTO? (26:50) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 BONUS: Internal mobility, mission-driven decisions, & self-service infrastructure w/ Guillermo Fisher 31:17
Guillermo Fisher (Director of Engineering, Infrastructure @ Handshake) shares the impact of mission & values alignment, supporting your team’s internal mobility & professional growth, plus interesting infrastructure challenges & actualizing values on the infra team. This episode serves as a great reminder of WHY we become engineering leaders - to empower our teams to become great leaders in tech. "The engineering team pivoted! Trashed OKRs! Trashed the roadmap... and said, 'We're going to build out virtual career fairs.' And so we did the work over the course of the year. Delivered career fairs in that same year... which is amazing! And have since served thousands and thousands of career fairs." GUILLERMO FISHER, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INFRASTRUCTURE @ HANDSHAKE Guillermo Andrae Fisher has been working on the Web for almost twenty years in several capacities, many of which are detailed on LinkedIn . He is currently the Director of Infrastructure at Handshake . He is also the founder of 757ColorCoded , a nonprofit organization focused on helping people of color achieve careers in technology and an advisor at Kura Labs, a free training and job placement academy for Infrastructure Computing, DevOps, & SRE for students from under-served communities. Guillermo is a Christian, husband, father of four, continuous delivery enthusiast, writer, AWS Data Hero , and a fan of very silly comedy. SHOW NOTES Guillermo’s engineering leadership origin story (1:39) Discovering mission & values alignment at Handshake (4:29) The impact of Handshake’s COVID career fair pivot on students (6:25) How engineering enables Handshakes mission (8:03) Internal mobility, promotions & how Handshake supports professional growth within the company (10:15) How Handshake’s values are actualized on the infrastructure team (13:02) Practices to operationalize empathy on your team (14:43) What Guillermo loves most about the people and culture at Handshake (18:36) How to cultivate care & passion on your team (19:56) The infrastructure team's future focus and impact (21:45) Infrastructure challenges Guillermo's most excited about (23:42) Why Guillermo’s most excited to be at Handshake right now (25:39) Guillermo’s favorite part of being an engineering leader (27:43) Final Words: “If you want to work on something cool that matters, come here” (28:50) LINKS 757 Color Coded: https://www.757colorcoded.org/ Guillermo's Website: https://guillermoandraefisher.com/ Kura Labs: https://kuralabs.org/ WANT TO CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION? To stay up to date with key engineering initiatives at Handshake, keep an eye out in the coming weeks for the launch of the LinkedIn group, "Engineering at Handshake." And of course, if you're exploring new opportunities and motivated by Handshake's mission, check out open roles at joinhandshake.com/join-us/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This episode covers productivity practices to scale both your time & mind with Ashton Kutcher (Actor & Investor) & Ryan Petersen (CEO @ Flexport). They share their most essential productivity tools & systems, how to filter decisions & say NO to optimize your time, leverage your company’s culture to scale your time/mind. Plus energy audits, networking hacks, powerful questions, and more! ASHTON KUTCHER, ACTOR & INVESTOR Ashton’s career has spanned over many years with well-known projects on screen and film, but it's his passion in technology, entrepreneurship and investing that has brought him notable recognition. He’s been named TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” as well as being honored by Vanity Fair's New Establishment List, which identifies the top 50 of an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies and entrepreneurs. Twice, Kutcher was named one of Forbes magazine’s “World’s Most Powerful Celebrities,” and one of Fast Company magazine’s “Most Creative People.” RYAN PETERSEN, FOUNDER & CEO @ FLEXPORT Ryan Petersen is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flexport, a full-service freight forwarder and customs broker. Since founding Flexport in 2013, Ryan and his team have worked to make global trade easy for everyone. Ryan led Flexport from inception to the company it is today: supporting over 10,000 customers and suppliers across 109 countries and doubling revenue to nearly $450m last year. His areas of focus include setting company strategy, ensuring the company tracks to goals, and most importantly, building and maintaining Flexport’s unique culture. Prior to founding Flexport, Ryan helped run an e-commerce company and co-founded ImportGenius, one of the largest providers of business intelligence to the import-export industry. His experience and frustration with global logistics served as the inspiration to start Flexport. Ryan holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia University. SHOW NOTES How Ashton & Ryan first met & their early entrepreneurship hustles (2:15) Productivity tools & systems (4:06) How to say “NO” to optimize your time (7:08) Leverage culture in your organization to scale your time and mind (10:32) The power of predictability on company culture and productivity (15:26) Networking Hack: Connect through social impact (17:40) Creating a personal mission statement & the “energy audit” (19:02) How to avoid being reactive to your to-do list (21:26) Productivity as your company scales & cultivating sub-cultures within your org (23:17) What question should you be asking yourself right now? (25:01) SPONSORS Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This episode covers effective strategies to help you “close” engineering candidates with Darian Shimy (VP of Engineering, Weebly @ Square). We share how to strategically approach closing throughout the interview process, how storytelling & vulnerability help you connect with candidates, how to communicate the value of your company/compensation & strategically navigate offer negotiations! DARIAN SHIMY, VP OF ENGINEERING, WEEBLY @ SQUARE As an engineering leader who scales teams and products, Darian Shimy is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience. He is currently at Square with prior leadership positions at Weebly, Attensity, and eHarmony.com. He received an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and continues to code as a hobby. Outside the professional setting, Darian is a softball coach for various age levels from the recreation to the competitive level. SHOWNOTES How Darian approaches closing engineering candidates (2:33) Who’s involved in closing conversations (4:55) How to address candidates’ needs throughout the interview process (6:09) “Boomerang candidates” & maintaining relationships to rehire previous co-workers (11:23) How to make candidates feel they can immediately contribute and be successful (13:12) How to make remote offers an opportunity to close candidates (18:50) High leverage ways to show appreciation & gratitude for hiring candidates (20:44) Money’s role in the closing conversation (23:47) Navigating offer negotiation (25:16) How to help candidates navigate multiple offers (27:42) Is "no" the end of the closing process? (30:59) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This special feature covers strategies to lead an effective technical interview! Through live examples, we share your 3 main responsibilities, how to give clarity & guidance, set candidates at ease, create consistency & get the best from candidates in your technical interview with Lusen Mendel (Director of Developer Relations @ Karat) & Rohit Grover (Senior Interview Engineer & Mentor @ Karat). Lusen Mendel (they / them) is Director of Developer Relations at Karat, where they share interviewer best practices with interviewers around the world. Previously, Lusen helped build Karat's Interview Engineer organization. Before that, they managed engineering teams at Indiegogo and Rackspace, worked as a software engineer at a number of startups and research groups, and graduated with a couple of Computer Science degrees from MIT. Lusen is also the host of Candidate Planet - a podcast / YouTube channel empowering engineering candidates to ace interviews, negotiate offers and advocate for themselves at work. SHOWNOTES Setting the Stage - Interview Example #1 (1:41) Time management during the technical interview (5:52) Your 3 main responsibilities in the technical Interview (6:29) Setting candidates at ease when they're having difficulty during the technical interview (8:26) Interview Example #2 (8:58) How to get the best from candidates during the technical interview (11:17) Sources of noise & bad signal in the technical interview (16:48) How to give hints appropriately in the technical interview (19:15) Interview Example #3 (21:04) Creating consistency in your technical interview experience (22:12) How to handle a difficult technical interview (25:07) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This ELC Hiring Summit special feature explores tactics & strategies to help you build powerful relationships & professional network! We cover the impact of vulnerability, why you should focus on “giving” first, how to break down power dynamics, prepare for important introductions & more with Dan Portillo (Managing Partner & Founder @ Sweat Equity Ventures) & Jim Cook (CFO @ Orbital Insight). DAN PORTILLO Dan is a former Talent Partner @ Greylock. Previously, he was VP of Success & Engagement at Rypple, and VP of Organizational Development at Mozilla, creators of Firefox. Earlier in his career Dan spent a decade building out successful early-stage, venture-backed consumer and enterprise companies. Dan also served as a Council member for Code2040.org, a non-profit creating opportunities for underrepresented minorities in tech. JIM COOK, CFO @ ORBITAL INSIGHT Jim Cook is the CFO at Orbital Insight and he has scaled some of Silicon Valley's most iconic brands. Companies like Intuit, Netflix, Mozilla... He was one of the first finance hires at Intuit. He was one of the original six founding members at Netflix. He also launched the Bench Board Executive Network, which is a leadership network and knowledge-sharing network for operational executives. SHOW NOTES Early career lessons on people, relationships, & “giving” (2:24) Vulnerability & the impact of lowering your guard (8:37) Building authentic relationships & trust long-term (12:55) Breaking down power dynamics & building up “relationship credits” (14:49) Learning from mistakes, burning bridges & removing your ego (19:38) Tactics for effective relationship building & networking (24:27) How to prepare for an important introduction (28:24) How to balance your priorities & invest time to help others (29:21) RESOURCES/LINKS (book) "Give and Take" by Adam Grant - https://www.adamgrant.net/book/give-and-take/ (article) 'How to Work with Me' - Reid Hoffman - https://coda.io/@reidhoffman/meet-reid BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This ELC Hiring Summit special feature dives into compensation! We cover where you should start with your comp strategy, how to create consistency/transparency in your program, competing on comp/equity at the early stages, how to consider geography, and when you should bring in external support with Thanh Nguyen (Founder & CEO @ OpenComp) and Cyrus F. (GM/SVP @ Hatched Labs). THANH NGUYEN, FOUNDER & CEO @ OPENCOMP Thanh has spent the greater part of his decades-long career partnering with founders and investors on compensation and HR strategies. He is a leading expert in his field and has helped thousands of tech companies, including Airbnb, Figma, LiveNation, Lyft, Uber and many others. As founder and CEO of OpenComp, Thanh brings to market a solution that combines his experience with powerful data and technology to help companies get compensation right and pay employees fairly. Before joining Connery Consulting, Thanh led Rewards at Salesforce.com where he remained for 9 years, spanning domestic and international HR and Talent leadership roles. CYRUS F, GM/SVP @ HATCHED LABS Cyrus claims to have dabbled in the software development space since the first bubble. He's the GM/SVP at Hatched Labs - a globally distributed group of crafters. He recently achieved the distinction of Assistant Cofounder to the Adventure Council®. He doesn't have any venture capital, he owns no equity and he's not on social media. He looks up to his three and three-quarters-year-old daughter who's already acquired four unicorns." SHOWNOTES Where to start with your compensation strategy (1:30) Consistency in compensation (5:00) Transparency in compensation (7:13) How to think about DE&I proactively in your compensation strategy (8:57) How to compete on comp & equity in an early stage company (11:34) How to consider geography with your hiring/compensation strategy (16:53) When to bring in external support for compensation & hiring (20:13) Once you’ve established a compensation strategy, now what? (22:15) How to minimize differences in expectations on compensation for a role (24:07) How should you decide to globalize or localize compensation? (26:28) BROUGHT TO YOU BY... Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Attracting Top Talent & Engineering Branding w/ Cosmin Nicolaescu, Kris Rasmussen, Brad Henrickson & Sam Wholley #52 24:45
What IS engineering branding? What are the most effective things you can do to immediately improve your engineering brand & attract top talent? This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit covers all things engineering branding & attracting top talent with Cosmin Nicolaescu (CTO @ Brex) Kris Rasmussen (VPE @ Figma) Brad Henrickson (Leadership Coach / former CTO @ Scoop Technologies) & Sam Wholley (Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners). SHOWNOTES What are the most important things you can do to attract top talent? (1:52) How have you changed how you attract top talent post-pandemic? (4:44) Tactical tips to overcome the gap between virtual and onsite employee experiences (8:00) What IS engineering branding? (9:10) Easy, immediate actions to improve your engineering brand (15:18) How do you retain & engage engineers in the company long term? (20:09) Controversial, but effective approaches to branding & attracting talent (23:33) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This ELC Hiring Summit special feature covers building a diverse hiring pipeline! You’ll hear how to approach DE&I holistically & what success looks like beyond the metrics. Plus how to balance headcount demand with DE&I goals, hold execs/managers accountable & ideas for effective DEI programs & partnerships with Ragini Holloway (SVP People @ Affirm) and Gabe Westmaas (VPE @ Checkr). RAGINI HOLLOWAY, SVP PEOPLE @ AFFIRM Ragini is currently Senior Vice President of People at Affirm and is an advisor for PeopleTech Partners and tech startups, including Shift.org and Pinkaloo Technologies. Ragini helps high-growth startups scale recruitment and People processes, often from scratch. She took Credit Karma from 40 to just over 500, and has similar ambitious hiring goals now, already taking Affirm from 100 to nearly 1,000. Ragini advocates for collaborative hiring practices and facilitates organic and authentic work cultures where people come together and discover common goals. Ragini is heavily focused in building diverse teams and designing employee engagement programs that drive ongoing workplace satisfaction and high retention rates. GABE WESTMAAS, VPE @ CHECKR Gabe is VP of Engineering at Checkr, building a fairer future through a better understanding of the past. The team is bringing automation, consistency, and fairness to the manual processes behind background checks. Gabe has led several teams through high growth periods, most recently at Airbnb, and prior to that in the crowdfunding space at Tilt, and the Cloud Servers team at Rackspace. SHOWNOTES How to think about diversity, equity & inclusion holistically (1:37) Why authenticity matters & how it impacts your hiring process and funnel (4:48) Balancing headcount demands & hiring diverse teams (8:53) How to hold executives & hiring managers accountable for DEI goals (14:53) What a successful DE&I program looks like (beyond the metrics) (20:12) Aligning hiring managers & hiring processes with DE&I goals (22:57) Effective programs & partnerships to create hiring opportunities for URGs (25:51) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit covers optimizing and scaling your hiring process! You’ll learn signs that indicate it’s time to optimize/scale, tactics to create a consistent hiring bar, key metrics to measure efficiency, feedback loops & more with Catherine Miller (VPE @ Flatiron Health) Vinithra Varadharajan (Head of Platform Eng @ Airtable) & Keng He (Sr. Director of Eng @ LiveRamp). SHOWNOTES The current size and scale of Cat/Vinithra’s engineering teams + their current hiring process (1:55) Early signs indicating it’s time to optimize or scale your current hiring process (3:34) Tactics to ensure you have a consistent hiring bar (5:28) Why engineering rubrics are essential to your hiring process (7:48) How to encourage engineers to become interviewers (when resistant to interviewing candidates) (9:41) Interview panel structures (17:13) Key metrics to measure efficiency in your hiring process (21:24) How many recruiters, sourcers or coordinators do you need? (22:33) How has remote work changed your hiring process? (24:11) Who owns the top of the funnel in your hiring process? (25:48) What are the feedback loops you have in your hiring process? (27:17) How do you mitigate concerns candidates have about their potential managers in your hiring process? (28:30) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Sourcing Engineering Candidates in a Remote World w/ Kah Seng Tay, Shauna Geraghty & Mike Pinkowish #49 29:38
This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit covers everything sourcing engineering candidates! You’ll hear the latest sourcing trends, most effective sourcing tactics, how to get candidates attention, increase response rates to your outreach, & source senior engineers with Kah Seng Tay (GM & Eng @ Airtable) Shauna Geraghty (SVP, Head People & Ops @ Talkdesk) & Mike Pinkowsky (Head of Eng @ Gem) KAH SENG TAY - GM & Engineering @ Airtable SHAUNA GERAGHTY - SVP, Head People & Operations @ Talkdesk MIKE PINKOWISH - Head of Engineering @ Gem SHOWNOTES Sourcing Trends (2:26) Shauna, Kah Seng & Mike’s most effective sourcing tactics (5:37) How to change your outreach to get attention and increase response rates (10:11) Where are you sourcing candidates from? (17:59) Strategies to source senior engineers (22:29) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
This special feature from the ELC Hiring Summit explores the current state of hiring and how the rise of remote work will affect sourcing engineering candidates, the interview process, and compensation with Bret Reckard (Talent Partner @ Sequoia), Maia Josebachvili (former Head of People @ Stripe), and Erica Lockheimer (VPE @ LinkedIn) BRET RECKARD - Talent Partner @ Sequoia Capital MAIA JOSEBACHVILI - Head of M&A and Investing (interim), former Head of People @ Stripe ERICA LOCKHEIMER - VP of Engineering, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Learning & Glint @ LinkedIn SHOWNOTES Introduction to Maia, Bret & Erica’s & their experience with the hiring ecosystem (1:08) The current state of hiring for engineering leaders in 2021 (2:58) Sourcing Trends (8:10) How platforms like LinkedIn are evolving with sourcing trends (17:05) Interviewing tactics (21:26) How the priorities of job seekers are changing (27:42) How to uncover values & priorities during the interview process (29:57) Compensation predictions (34:30) Final Advice on hiring in 2021 (39:55) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
Melissa Binde, VP Engineering, Cloud @ Splunk, shares lessons from her time building Amazon Apollo. You’ll hear the origin story of Amazon Apollo, how to define the right problem, identify the right solution, and what makes technology endure 20+ years. Plus how to improve your engineering storytelling and pitch the right product features to the right stakeholders! "We were heavily influenced by an early project manager I worked with who called it, the 'JEDI principle' - You make just enough decisions to implement! And so anytime we hit something. We would actually stop, if we were arguing, we'd stop and go, 'Well, wait, hang on. Do we actually have to decide this now? Or can we kick this down the road?' And so that helped us avoid getting too tied up in philosophical arguments." ABOUT MELISSA BINDE Melissa Binde previously served as Splunk’s VP of Platform and Observability. Prior to joining the company, Melissa led Google’s GCP Site Reliability organization for almost five years, supporting GCP’s growth from 250M revenue in 2015 to almost 9B in 2019. Before that she led engineering teams at Nordstrom, helping them transition to online and cloud, a cloud startup providing business continuity as a service to SMBs, and several other startups. Ms. Binde began her career as one of Amazon’s first 1000 employees, spending almost ten years there developing tools and technologies that are still part of the company’s core AWS stack. Ms. Binde holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College. LINKS Check out Melissa's hand-made pens: https://motleywoods.com/ SHOWNOTES The origin story behind Amazon Apollo (2:44) Pitching the right features to the right audience (10:48) Solving the right problem vs. what you were asked & the value of owning outdated projects (12:15) Selling, pitching and building buy-in for new projects (16:21) How do you know the problem defined isn't the problem you should solve? (20:56) How to determine if you need a technical, process or organizational solution (27:35) Building enduring tools & technology (30:23) How to become a better storyteller (32:44) Other examples of determining the right type of solution (36:08) Lessons on project naming (38:44) Rapid Fire Questions (40:10) Takeaways (44:50) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Becoming a site lead, bootstrapping new teams & re-thinking vacation in a pandemic w/ Sarah Clatterbuck #46 43:40
Sarah Clatterbuck, Sr. Director of Engineering, YouTube & Google Zurich Site Lead @ Google, shares the story of her transition as a site lead during the covid-19 pandemic. We cover her past experiences that helped prepare her for the role, what it was like bootstrapping a new team during a pandemic, re-introducing teams to in-person work, AND the story behind her 18-day staycation & its impact on team burnout. "You can't worry about pleasing everyone because there are many thousands of people that I'm trying to represent. But you can try to think about what kind of decisions optimize for the most good." ABOUT SARAH CLATTERBUCK Sarah joined Google in 2018. She is leading engineering teams working on the Creator Economy at YouTube. Prior to joining Google, she was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Linkedin focused on Application Infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, she was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Linkedin focused on Application Infrastructure. She previously held roles at Yahoo! and Apple while progressing in leadership ranks. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of San Francisco and her graduate degree from San Jose State University. She is passionate about getting girls interested in technology and from 2013 until 2018, she served on the board of Girl Scouts of Northern California, leading the board STEM task group. SHOWNOTES What is a site lead and the reporting structure? (2:28) Why Sarah became a site lead for Google Zurich and what the transition was like (6:57) How is the tech industry, community & culture in Zurich different from Silicon Valley? (10:52) Sarah’s past experiences that helped prepare her to be a site lead (13:16) Possible career paths & surprise lessons after becoming a site lead (19:00) Bootstrapping a new team during the COVID-19 pandemic (22:15) Integrating remote hires to in-person office culture (25:19) How to help your team feel included (27:07) About Sarah’s YouTube Channel (29:41) Sarah's 18-day staycation & combating burnout in your team (31:34) Rapid Fire Questions (35:20) Takeaways (41:32) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
Asif Makhani, CTO @ Handshake shares about making non-incremental career transitions, unique opportunities at startups, and exercising influence at mid-stage companies. Plus Asif shares questions to help you gain clarity before your next transitions AND how to attract & retain senior engineers at smaller companies. "When you have the ability to take a step back, you begin to think a little bit more philosophically about your journey. And it's not just incremental thinking. When it's incremental thinking it's about, 'what's next in my career.' But when you are able to take a step back, it's about... 'What impact do you want to leave behind? When I look back 10 years from now, will I be happy? Will I feel a sense of fulfillment?' I think that line of questioning really gives you the courage to be able to break away from an incremental way of looking at next steps." ABOUT ASIF MAKHANI Asif has over 20 years of engineering experience with a focus on search engines and edtech. He is currently the CTO of Handshake , the largest career platform for college students and recent graduates. Most recently, Asif was the head of Google Image Search and prior to that, he was the Sr. Director of Engineering for Learning Solutions at LinkedIn, leading the Lynda.com online learning technology organization and launching LinkedIn Learning. Asif was the founding member and engineer of A9.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com ), creator and GM of Amazon CloudSearch, and the Head of Search at LinkedIn. Asif is passionate about scaling high performance organizations, developing leaders and coaching early talent SHOW NOTES What Asif learned from starting A9.com at Amazon (2:45) The unique opportunity of early stage companies & lessons from Amazon Cloud Search (6:26) How do you exercise influence at a mid-stage startup? (9:02) Successful transitions, why it’s essential to capture your early perspectives, & Asif’s favorite relationship building question (13:25) Asif’s lessons from taking time off & how that gave him clarity with his next career transition (17:56) Why Asif made the transition to Handshake (22:47) Questions you should ask to help you gain clarity before your next transition (25:39) How to attract and retain senior engineers at a smaller company (30:03) Rapid Fire Questions (39:49) Takeaways (43:29) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Edward Kim, co-founder & CTO @ Gusto shares the different forms that “fear of failure” can take in your engineering org. Eddie shares incredible stories to help you spot the different signs of “fear of failure”. And you’ll hear different ways you can change your team culture, process and operations to reduce fear of failure. “But as you continue to scale and you grow... that thing that you optimized for starts to become a disservice to you and the company. Because what happens is this fear of failure, if you take it too far, it starts to change a lot of things about the business.” ABOUT EDWARD KIM Prior to Gusto, Edward was the CEO and co-founder of Picwing, a Y Combinator startup and photo-printing platform. Before Picwing, Edward worked as a senior project engineer at Volkswagen Group of America Electronics Research Lab, where he led research and development for cloud-based navigation and speech recognition systems for Volkswagen and Audi. Edward is also the developer of several award-winning Android apps that have generated more than $1 million in revenue. Edward holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. SHOWNOTES What it means to “remove fear of failure” as you scale (2:25) Signs that indicate your company is optimized around a fear of failure (6:19) How to know when “healthy management” actually means your company has a fear of failure and is holding you back (10:54) Other forms “fear of failure” can take in your organization (14:20) MTTR over MTBF - Why you should prioritize recovering from failure over avoiding failure (17:40) “Rage-fixing” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment confronting fear of failure at Gusto (23:43) “Kicking the flipchart” & Eddie’s breakthrough moment #2 (27:52) How to maximize unplanned or unintended crucial conversations (33:54) How to decide when you need to abandon the agenda and “kick the flipchart” (37:37) How psychological safety can make your team more resilient to fear of failure (40:17) Takeaways (44:07) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Erica Lockheimer shares with us her imperfect path to engineering leadership, why the unconventional path matters, and what you can do as an individual leader & organization to empower engineering leaders with unconventional backgrounds. Plus you’ll also hear how to overcome self-doubt and launch an apprenticeship program! “Whether you're a manager or whether you're an individual contributor, you are a leader in your role. Use the voice that you've earned in the seat that you own. What can you personally do to create a different outcome. And all of us have that power in a role that we have.” - Erica Lockheimer ABOUT ERICA LOCKHEIMER Prior to LinkedIn Learning, Erica served as the VP of Engineering heading the Growth Engineering team, where her focus was on increasing growth in new members and deepening engagement with members across LinkedIn's products. She started the Growth Team from the ground up to now a high-performing 120-person team. She is also responsible for LinkedIn's Women In Tech (WIT) initiative that is focused on empowering women in technical roles within the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering, In 2014 and 2015, Erica was also voted amongst the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider. Erica is a San Francisco Bay Area native, has 2 kids, loves to run and is a graduate from San Jose State University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. RESOURCES About REACH: https://careers.linkedin.com/reach/AboutReach Shalini Agarwal, LinkedIn REACH Lead & Eng Leader https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-agarwal-5b735b2/ SHOWNOTES Erica’s first experience on a hiring committee (2:28) Erica’s imperfect path to engineering leadership (6:51) Erica’s career decision-making criteria (12:01) How to overcome self-doubt (13:32) Jerry’s personal story of the “imperfect path” (16:25) Other "unconventional paths" to engineering leadership (17:27) How Erica evaluates potential in people (25:03) What type of support to provide when you’re pushing people outside their comfort zone (27:44) How to create more opportunities for unconventional candidates in the hiring funnel through LinkedIn REACH (30:20) About apprenticeship programs (35:41) How to start launching your apprenticeship program (39:25) How diverse teams impact product and change outcomes (41:12) How to have a conversation about bias in your algorithm (43:44) Final words of wisdom for those with “unconventional” backgrounds (45:07) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Craig Martell shares the biggest mistakes leaders of ML teams make, what to do if you have no experience leading an ML team, key skills your ML team needs, plus different models/approaches to building an ML team. You’ll hear the most expensive and time-consuming parts of ML, how to estimate timelines, unique tech debt, and how to manage expectations. “If I had to give one piece of advice about starting AI in your company, one of the first people I would hire is a really great data scientist, even if they can't code. Just so they're the one who's going to start training you and helping you think about, how to gather data, how the modeling is going to work, what you're going to need, whether that feature that you want to build is even modelable in the first place..." - Craig Martell ABOUT CRAIG MARTELL Craig is Head of Lyft Machine Learning. He’s also an adjunct professor of Machine Learning for Northeastern University’s Align program. Prior to joining Lyft, he was Head of Machine Intelligence @ Dropbox, and led a number of AI teams and initiatives at LinkedIn, including the development of the LinkedIn AI Academy. Before LinkedIn, Craig was a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specializing in natural language processing (NLP). He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and is the co-author of the MIT Press book Great Principles of Computing. RESOURCES (ML training) Galvanize: https://bit.ly/3ckF6Gz (website) Andrew Ng: https://bit.ly/3cgerdU (courses) ML: https://bit.ly/3iNB9gf | AI for Everyone: https://bit.ly/2HeZKwl (course) Fast.AI: https://bit.ly/35SPwMD (book) "Hands-On ML with Scikit" : https://amzn.to/35SbGyh SHOW NOTES An overview of the machine learning lifecycle (2:49) The most expensive and time-consuming aspect of the machine learning lifecycle (6:07) The key skills of a machine learning team (7:21) How do you build an AI/ML Team and what are the different models? (8:41) What to do If you’re an engineering manager with no AI/ML skills or experience (15:19) How deep does your understanding of AI/ML have to be in order to lead effectively? (18:48) How do you estimate project timelines for AI/ML teams? (19:15) What are the biggest mistakes engineering leaders make managing AI/ML teams? (20:52) How do you manage expectations in an organization that’s in the early days of AI/ML development? (21:33) What are sources of technical debt unique to AI/ML systems? (22:13) How do machine learning teams interface with product teams? (23:55) AI/ML resources for executive engineering leaders (25:44) When’s the right time to invest in AI/ML? (26:10) Can you apply the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) to AI/ML development? (26:40) Takeaways (28:12) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
“Giving up control” is about empowering other people to scale yourself, and scale your effectiveness. Maria Latushkin shares with us why you need to give up control as an engineering leader and what holds people back. Plus you’ll learn tons of different ways to influence and manage your performance when it’s dependent on other people’s effectiveness. “You are responsible for the delivery of the team. At the end of the day, nobody really cares like how much YOU work. You can be working around the clock. And it's not how great you are or what you produce. It stops being about you and it starts being about the function that you lead.” - Maria Latushkin ABOUT MARIA LATUSHKIN Maria is responsible for leading Omada Health’s technology vision and team. Prior to joining Omada Health and moving to the healthcare space, Maria has spent over 15 years in eCommerce, retail, and enterprise SaaS companies ranging from series B startups to large companies, such as Walmart. SHOW NOTES Why you need to give up control as a senior engineering leader (2:07) What holds people back from giving up control? (9:27) The impact and trade-offs you make when you avoid or resist giving up control (15:31) How to influence and manage your performance now that it’s dependent on your team’s effectiveness (23:49) How to make sure people heard you, so that you know you’re on the same page (29:04) Does the discomfort of “giving up control” happen at every transition to a new leadership level, or is it a one-time thing? (32:44) How to regain “control” and empower your team (39:40) The Impact - how you feel when you give up control (41:25) Takeaways (43:36) --- Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Growing Into a VPE - Patterns & Anti-Patterns ft. Cathy Polinsky, Jerry Krikheli, Richard Wong, Erica Lockheimer & Claire Lew #25 47:03
A dynamic conversation between 4 current and past VPs of Engineering who cover tons of patterns and anti-patterns about being a VPE! You'll hear how leadership is different in large vs. small companies, mental models to determine your greatest leverage, why you DON’T need to act like an owner, how to put trust into practice when you’re transitioning into a new role, and about the imperfect path to become a VPE. SPEAKERS: CATHY POLINKSY CTO @ Stitch Fix JERRY KRIKHELI VP of Engineering @ Houzz RICHARD WONG SVP of Engineering @ Coursera ERICA LOCKHEIMER VP of Engineering @ Linkedin Learning And CLAIRE LEW CEO @ Know Your Team SHOWNOTES What Cathy means by “the best leaders spot patterns, understand problems, then build systems to solve them” (3:55) Jerry’s view on how the practice of leadership is different at large companies vs. small companies (7:30) Erica’s perspective on how the transition to VPE is different than other eng leadership roles and how to put trust into practice (12:27) Why Richard resonates with “act like an owner” and what it actually looks like in practice as VPE (16:40) Cathy’s top 3 priorities as VPE that determine how she spends her time and how to refocus your team (23:50) Richard's mental model to determine where he has the most leverage for impact and why being technical isn't always about writing code (26:16) Jerry's 3 key hiring traits and how to create an environment where you're the first to know when something's wrong (30:10) The imperfect path to become a VPE and Erica’s advice for engineering leaders with an “unconventional” background (34:01) The common struggle to balance being a problem solver and being the bottleneck as a VPE (39:11) How they cope with and manage stress (42:55) Takeaways (45:00) --- Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 *Bonus* Optimizing Productivity for Remote Engineering Teams with Doug Gaff, VPE @ Zapier & Emma Tang, EM @ Stripe #24 35:07
We were overwhelmed by questions from our event with Doug and Emma! This is a bonus follow up conversation that further digs into measuring productivity through “Waterlining” and Kaplan Meier estimating, hashtags in communication, remote 1:1 best practices, and Doug shows us some of the creative ways he applies Zapier integrations for his personal productivity! "What it does is it forces a debate as to A what's most important and B do we really want that thing below the line waterline? Because what happens sometimes is people are super excited about this thing. And then when you see this rank list of stuff, you're like, Oh, but wait a second. There's like running the business stuff below the water line. We actually have to get that up and staff that..." - Doug Gaff DOUG GAFF - VP of Engineering @ Zapier Doug is the VP of Engineering at Zapier, the software solution that helps your other software work together more effectively. As the leader of an organization with over 100 engineers, he has learned a lot about effective management and leadership. Doug currently resides in the Greater Boston Area. EMMA TANG - Engineering Manager @ Stripe Emma is an Engineering Manager in Data Infrastructure at Stripe based in San Francisco. Her team focuses on building distributed computation infrastructure to support Stripe's business. At Stripe, we believe in investing in our remote culture, and have built out the remote engineering hub, and tripled the number of remote engineers in the last year. SHOWNOTES How to Measure Productivity - Waterlining and Kaplan Meier (2:44) Waterlining as a tool to discuss priorities (9:10) Using hashtags to understand intent and to increase the bandwidth of communication (11:02) Best practices for remote 1:1’s when you don’t see the productivity levels you want (17:37) Tips for onboarding new grads (23:03) Doug’s remote work routine and lifestyle (24:47) Doug’s favorite Zapier integrations to increase productivity (29:21) Takeaways (33:45) --- Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Optimizing Productivity for Remote Engineering Teams with Doug Gaff, VPE @ Zapier & Emma Tang, EM @ Stripe #23 39:30
Doug Gaff and Emma Tang discuss high-bandwidth communication, innovation accounting, preventing developer burnout, influencing teams, and communicating priorities. They’ll help you move from frustration and survival in remote work, back to optimized productivity! “Personal stuff is totally in bounds and people just listen. And they don't try to solve a problem for you. And I might be like, I'm red today. I didn't get any sleep. I'm stressed about this thing. I'm not sure I'm going to get it done or this thing's happening personally. I'm worried about a friend who's not well... and it requires a certain level of vulnerability and you've got to have a trust, comfort level, but, that's another thing like as leaders, the best thing you can do is demonstrate this kind of behavior so that other people know it's okay to do it.” - Doug Gaff DOUG GAFF - VP of Engineering @ Zapier Doug is the VP of Engineering at Zapier, the software solution that helps your other software work together more effectively. As the leader of an organization with over 100 engineers, he has learned a lot about effective management and leadership. Doug currently resides in the Greater Boston Area. EMMA TANG - Engineering Manager @ Stripe Emma is an Engineering Manager in Data Infrastructure at Stripe based in San Francisco. Her team focuses on building distributed computation infrastructure to support Stripe's business. At Stripe, we believe in investing in our remote culture, and have built out the remote engineering hub, and tripled the number of remote engineers in the last year. SHOWNOTES Ideas for Remote “Offsites” (3:27) How to ensure clear, high-bandwidth communication (5:44) How to make engineers feel connected to the mission and company (9:44) Measuring productivity with “Innovation Accounting” and “Waterlining” (15:03) It's time to trust your people and fix your cultural anti-patterns (21:19) How to prevent developer burnout (25:03) How to influence leadership teams remotely (28:26) How to communicate priorities to multiple groups and teams (33:00) Health metrics to track your team - Happiness surveys, pull requests, and “innovation accounting” (35:11) Takeaways (38:34) --- Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 How to Become a Startup VPE with Martin Casado, General Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz & Sonal Chokshi, Editor in Chief @ Andreessen Horowitz #22 32:59
Martin Casado and Sonal Chokshi explore what makes a great VP of Engineering at startups! You’ll hear how successful VPEs are evaluated, the ideal experience and success criteria. You’ll hear rapid-fire responses covering how to scale yourself, KPIs, the ideal VPE hiring time for startups, and what VPEs should definitely NOT do. MARTIN CASADO, GENERAL PARTNER @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ He was previously cofounder and CTOr at Nicira (acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion). At VMware, Martin was SVP & GM of the Networking and Security Business Unit (which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate). Martin’s early career was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense, networking, and cybersecurity. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement and cofounded Illuminics Systems (acquired by Quova). He’s been awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. Martin serves on the board of: ActionIQ, Astranis, DeepMap, Imply, Kong, Pindrop Security, RapidAPI, SigOpt, and Yubico. “In my experience over a number of engineering leaders is whether or not they're a good engineer is totally orthogonal to the actual role. And in fact, someone that's deeply passionate about a particular architecture technology or approach can be very damaging because you have a power asymmetry in the team.” - Martin Casado SONAL CHOKSHI, EDITOR IN CHIEF @ ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ AKA "a16z" Sonal built and oversees all of Andreessen Horowitz’s editorial operations, including showrunning and hosting the a16z Podcast, leading production of the a16z Crypto Canon; and more. Prior to a16z Sonal was a Senior Editor at Wired. Prior to that, Sonal was responsible for content and community at Xerox PARC. Before moving back to California from NYC, Sonal was doing graduate work in developmental and cognitive psychology at Columbia University's school of education and worked as a researcher "ethnographer" on NSF grants around teacher professional development and early numeracy. She studied English and Psychology at UCLA. SHOWNOTES Hiring misconceptions & Why VPs of Engineering are so valuable (4:21) Ideal experience and success criteria for a Startup VPE (8:45) Does a VPE need to be a good engineer? (10:56) Two key areas VPEs are evaluated (13:01) How to balance product and engineering as a VPE (17:34) The hard issue of managing people (19:54) Why engineering analytics and conscious decisions are important to building great engineering orgs (22:24) Good KPIs and how to scale yourself as a VPE (24:19) When is the right time to become a VPE at a startup? (26:25) What a VPE should NOT do (27:44) What is a CTO’s role and how do you work with them as a VPE? (31:00) Takeaways (32:0) LINKS a16z Podcast…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Conscious Career Growth (part 2) with Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds #21 34:43
Your job as an engineering leader is to win and increase your capacity to win. In Part 2, Wade Chambers discusses how to measure success for engineering leaders, what great looks like, AND how to increase your team’s performance and improve their potential! You’ll also hear how to get unstuck and move your career forward. "And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a great manager? Or what does it mean to be a great leader? Answering those questions for yourself and actually getting to the point where you have confidence and are willing to stand behind it because it's well-reasoned and like it's a principled point of view... will help you improve" - Wade Chambers Wade oversees all aspects of engineering and technology innovation as the CTO & SVP of Engineering at Grand Rounds. With more than 25 years of engineering leadership experience, he has deep technical domain expertise and a successful track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth for companies of all sizes including Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, and Opsware. Before Silicon Valley, Wade served in the military and the White House Situation Room. SHOWNOTES How to measure success, “win, and increase your capacity to win” (2:32) How to increase the potential of people on your team (8:24) How to get unstuck in your career (12:31) The 3 “buckets” to help identify where your career growth is stuck (16:53) How to maximize learning and growth from the books you read (21:23) How to get to the core principles that drive your behavior (25:52) Wade’s final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be (29:38) Takeaways (31:41) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Conscious Career Growth (part 1) with Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Grand Rounds #20 44:45
Wade Chambers discusses how to learn anything by applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity to your career. You’ll learn how to get unstuck, and move your career forward. Plus Wade also shares stories about his early failures as an engineering manager, and what he wished he knew when he first became a manager. "The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward." - Wade Chambers ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS Wade oversees all aspects of engineering and technology innovation as the CTO & SVP of Engineering at Grand Rounds. With more than 25 years of engineering leadership experience, he has deep technical domain expertise and a successful track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth for companies of all sizes including Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, and Opsware. Before Silicon Valley, Wade served in the military and the White House Situation Room. SHOWNOTES How Wade formed the habit of being conscious, thoughtful and digging deeper (4:37) Wade’s early failure as a first-time manager (8:25) Neuroplasticity as the foundation for conscious growth and getting unstuck in your career (15:01) How to learn and become competent in almost anything with conscious growth (23:06) How to align your growth to both impact your company AND move your career forward (28:54) How to predict your company’s needs by applying an anthropological perspective (36:06) Takeaways (41:12) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Andrew Fong shares how to identify, operationalize, and reinforce values in your organization as well as his strategies to scale organizations through values-based decision making and in cultivating values-based environments. You’ll also hear stories about the massive role values had in the outcomes of several large-scale infrastructure projects at Dropbox. "If we can operationalize this, the micro decision making on the ground becomes much more powerful and it doesn't force us into a command and control environment." - Andrew Fong ABOUT ANDREW FONG Andrew is the Vice President of Infrastructure at Dropbox. In this role he oversees all infrastructure engineering and operations efforts which are responsible for scaling Dropbox’s infrastructure stack in order to support hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Prior to Dropbox, he was at YouTube, Google, and AOL in various infrastructure capacities SHOWNOTES What it means to “operationalize values” and why it matters (2:12) How to operationalize values in OKRs (4:45) How to identify values in your team or organization (8:01) How to reinforce values in your organization in meetings, all-hands, and personally (14:35) How to operationalize values in recruiting (18:52) How operationalized values impact projects: Dropbox’s data center migration story (20:41) Lessons learned from Dropbox’s “Magic Pocket” project (26:09) How to make values endure beyond people in projects with long time horizons: be explicit with your decision making process (29:27) How to operationalize values in small teams and start ups (34:46) How Andrew operationalizes his personal values (40:31) Takeaways (48:11) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 2), with Jean-Denis Greze, Head of Engineering @ Plaid #18 50:01
Organizational change is hard. In part 2, Jean-Denis Greze explores how you can adapt and transform the strengths, capabilities or “spikes” of your organization by intentionally using the strategies of “Isolation”, “Outlets” and “Shocks.” He shares a ton of great real-world examples and case studies to help you apply these strategies in your org. "The thing that I think makes over a 10 year period, a really good engineering organization is that at any one moment in time, it has very few spikes, but over a long period of time, it has all the spikes." - Jean-Denis Greze ABOUT JEAN-DENIS GREZE Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid. Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams. Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School. SHOWNOTES How to mitigate weaknesses in your organization using the strategies of Isolation & Outlets (2:47) How to use “Isolation” in your business units as an org building strategy: examples from Plaid and Xbox (8:44) How to use “Isolation” in recruiting & product strategy: examples of apprenticeships to hire, roles you've never hired for, and incubator programs (12:17) How to use "Outlets" to create different conversations, adopt different values, and set new priorities (16:38) The “Portfolio Theory of Time Allocation” (19:41) How to introduce "Shocks" proactively to change and adapt your organization (28:32) How to intentionally use Acquisitions to “Shock” your organization (33:35) How to intentionally use Reorgs to “Shock” your organization (36:06) The power of peer groups and re-reading (45:19) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Building a Successfully "Spiky" Org (Part 1), with Jean-Denis Greze, Head of Engineering @ Plaid #17 48:17
Organizational change is hard. Jean-Denis Greze shares how he thinks about building organizations that can adapt in a way that preserves strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities or “spikes” through periodical “forced changes.” He’ll explore what those forced changes are and what they’ve looked like at Plaid and other companies. "You're asking me what makes us different. I think it's that we've been really deliberate about building what I would call a ‘spiky org’ as opposed to a very balanced organization. The reality is when you're in a fast-growing company, it's much easier to do a few things well than to try to do everything.” - Jean-Denis Greze ABOUT JEAN-DENIS GREZE Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid. Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams. Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School. SHOWNOTES What you should focus on when building an organization: Be a "spiky" org (2:31) How to change and adapt your organization that preserves your strengths, mitigates weaknesses, and develops new capabilities: force yourself to adapt your “spikes” (7:01) Recruiting, Growth and Performance Management as “spike” examples in organization building (and why it's NOT useful to be good at all three of them) (8:15) The org design dilemma between "Hiring Well" vs. "Firing Fast" (12:01) The org design dilemma between business impact vs. craft and quality (18:27) How you know when you should change your strengths, values and build a new "spike" (24:48) The dilemma of building an organization with bottom-up vs. top-down decision making (27:47) How to develop new strengths, capabilities, or “spikes” in your engineering organization (32:20) Jean-Denis's process to create space for questions, creativity, and problem-solving (36:33) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Eisar Lipkovitz shares the value of being direct as well as other insights on leadership. You’ll hear how to practice the art of direct communication, how to prepare for difficult conversations, and overcome the fear of being direct. Plus Eisar’s insights on where engineering leaders get stuck in their career and how to help them grow. "At the end of the day, the main reason I think direct is effective is you actually sort of get to the core of the issue where a lot of people dance around the details and they're conflict-averse" -Eisar Lipkovitz ABOUT EISAR LIPKOVITZ Eisar is Executive Vice President of Engineering at Lyft. Prior to Lyft, Eisar spent 15 years at Google in various leadership roles, overseeing the tremendous growth of that business while streamlining operations and reducing product complexity. Since 2014, his team of several thousand engineers built Google’s Display, Video, and Apps Advertising products. Previously, Eisar worked on the infrastructure behind Google Search, driving many innovations during a tremendous increase in scale and a transition from web to structured data. Prior to that, he worked for four years at Akamai during the explosive growth of the Internet. Eisar began his career at Israeli Air Force after graduating from Tel Aviv University with B.Sc and MBA. Shownotes Why being direct is more effective and how to practice the art of direct communication (2:27) How to overcome conflict aversion and the fear of being direct (9:16) How to prepare yourself for a direct, difficult conversation (13:14) How to balance communicating vision and strategy vs. the details (16:42) How to navigate conversations when people don’t understand you (20:31) How to make your conversation more direct when someone is speaking ambiguously or in code (26:07) How to help junior engineering leaders grow (28:29) Where people typically get stuck in the engineering leadership career track (32:59) How inclusion creates environments for more direct conversations about real world challenges (36:26) What has brought you the greatest amount of joy as an engineering leader? (38:00) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Vidhya Srinivasan shares her framework for how she’s navigated her career and operated under high pressure. You’ll learn the practices she uses to deal with and diffuse pressure plus how to coach and create opportunities for engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk. "one question that I often ask myself is... 'Given how I feel right now if I, were to fast forward five years and I look back, would I feel the same level of pressure or anxiety about the situation?' And I've yet to come across a situation where it would still be that relevant five years out" -Vidhya Srinivasan ABOUT VIDHYA SRINIVASAN Vidhya is the VP/GM at Google Ads responsible for engineering and product for Measurement & Analytics @ Google Ads. Previously, she led engineering, operations & product management for Amazon Redshift and other analytics services at AWS. Before that, she was an engineering leader for 10 years at IBM. SHOWNOTES How Vidhya has approached and navigated her career (2:04) Vidhya’s framework she uses to deal with high pressure (7:20) How to diffuse pressure (12:55) How Vidhya’s dealt with and diffused pressure personally and professionally (15:44) How Vidhya learned to operate out of hunger vs. fear (19:35) How to coach engineering leaders to be more comfortable with failure and risk (28:28) How to create opportunities for your team to fail and take on more risk (33:38) When you should step in and help your team (36:23) Who is someone who’s most inspired you to be a better leader? (38:39) What’s brought you the greatest joy as an engineering leader? (40:01) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
We cover practical tools to eliminate workplace injustice and help your team “get sh*t done fast and fair” with Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor & Just Work + Trier Bryant, CEO @ Just Work! We discuss the root causes of injustice and introduce several strategies to help you interrupt bias, address prejudice & confront bullying in your organization. "You can't possibly do your best work if you are being harmed by the way you're being treated by your colleagues..." - Kim Scott "Whatever problem you're solving, whatever OKR you have... your people are the ones that get it done. So we have to optimize for that experience!" - Trier Bryant ABOUT KIM SCOTT & TRIER BRYANT KIM SCOTT is the author of Just Work: Get Sh*t Done Fast and Fair as well as Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - (one of our community’s ALL TIME favorite books!) Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. TRIER BRYANT is Co-Founder and CEO of Just Work LLC, the implementation counterpart to Just Work, the book. Trier previously held leadership roles at Astra, Twitter, & Goldman Sachs. She proudly served as a combat veteran in the United States Air Force, as a Captain leading engineering teams while spearheading diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for the Air Force Academy, Air Force, and DoD. Trier also advises leading companies like Equinox, Airbnb, SoundCloud, Alto, Rockefeller Foundation, and others on their talent and DEI strategies. RESOURCES Read Just Work (The Book): https://www.justworktogether.com/the-book Contact Just Work (The Company): https://www.justworktogether.com/our-capabilities SHOW NOTES Why Kim wrote Just Work after Radical Candor (4:58) How Trier got involved & became CEO of Just Work (7:23) The impact of workplace injustice and why it matters (10:33) The root causes of workplace injustice and the roles we play (13:51) How to interrupt and stop bias (17:01) How to use “bias interrupters” and make them a part of your culture (29:55) Why language matters & how to respond to someone concerned about the “word police” (34:22) How to address bias using “I Statements” (39:46) What to do when someone is “mansplaining” during your meeting (44:39) How to confront prejudice using “It Statements” (47:58) How to address bullying with “You Statements” (51:05) Takeaways (54:08) --- Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
Jan Chong, VP of Engineering @ Tally shares strategies to manage and navigate relationships with your leadership team, direct reports and peers. We cover the fundamentals of managing up, why you need to align with your peers first when you join a new team, plus ways to communicate your ideas and the priorities of engineering more effectively with your non-technical colleagues. "Organizations are made up of humans that are making decisions based on the data they have. If you don't think about how that data is being seen and understood, then you're going to have a really hard time getting the outcomes or driving the goals that you want to achieve..." ABOUT JAN CHONG Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tally, a financial automation company helping people navigate the complex world of consumer finance to save money, pay down their debt and reach their goals sooner. She leads and oversees the company’s client engineering, infrastructure security and technical operations teams. Before joining Tally, Jan was a long-time executive at Twitter where she played a critical role in launching and scaling its core mobile and web products, overseeing a team of more than 300 people in Twitter’s consumer engineering organization. Prior to that, Jan ran client and server development at OnLive, a cloud gaming platform. She received multiple degrees from Stanford University, including her Ph.D in management science and engineering, and M.S. and B.S in computer science. SHOW NOTES What is Managing Up (3:52) What to do when your manager has different expectations and perception of your performance (6:19) The fundamentals of managing up (8:42) Making the world of management visible (10:39) The three categories of “managing up” and why you should align with your peers first (15:07) Who you need to “mind-meld” with & how to replicate it remotely (22:29) How to align & “mind-meld” with your peer leaders (27:22) Managing up at different levels of seniority (33:28) What you need to do to “manage up” effectively (39:30) Unexpected differences of working with non-technical colleagues & Jan’s metaphors to explain engineering (43:23) Takeaways (51:05) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Nick Rockwell, SVP of Engineering & Infrastructure @ Fastly shares his recent reflections on incidents, resiliency, blamelessness, and accountability. You’ll hear why the heroic model of incident response is unsustainable, how to improve reliability by closing the long-feedback loop, plus opportunities to maximize post-mortems for process improvement AND emotional processing. " We started doing a biweekly meeting. We talk about resilience. We revisit everything that has not been closed, whether it's a year old, or it's a day old, , we're forced to keep coming back to it. So how to move away from that incident based post-mortem to something that's more like a continual revisiting of every thread or pathway that's been opened until they're not even open anymore. So that's the lines I'm thinking along." ABOUT NICK ROCKWELL Nick Rockwell is SVP of Engineering & Infrastructure @ Fastly helping build the next-generation edge infrastructure for a faster, safer, more resilient Internet. Nick was formerly Chief Technology Officer at The New York Times, overseeing product engineering, infrastructure and R&D. Previously he was Chief Technology Officer of Conde Nast, and Digital CTO at MTV Networks. Throughout his career, Nick has worked at the intersection of media and the Internet, building digital products at scale. Nick graduated from Yale in 1990 with a B.A in Literary Theory. SHOWNOTES Nick’s story of why incidents, resiliency, accountability & blamelessness are top of mind (2:20) The “heroic model” of incident mitigation and it’s emotional impact (6:41) Building a resilient system & transitioning away from heroics to a more mechanistic incident management model (12:12) “The long feedback loop” of incidents (15:57) Grappling with the risks of a more process-driven, mechanistic model of incident management (21:27) Dedicated vs. distributed incident response teams & how incident management evolves over time (24:43) Balancing individual accountability and a culture of blamelessness (28:37) Why you need to talk about incidents and process their residual emotions (33:12) On maximizing post-mortems for process improvement & emotional processing (37:01) Takeaways (40:15) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC…
We have a conversation with Christina Wick, CTO @ Flowcode, on the current state of the gender gap in tech and what we can do as engineering leaders to actively bridge that gap. We cover stories of the historical impact of women in tech as well as what you can do to remove bias in interviews, performance reviews and feedback. Plus what you can do to intervene when you observe bias happening. "The first time I heard someone talking about how "women should seek executive sponsorship" I got really annoyed... The term executive sponsor in project management usually means the C-level executive that sponsors or is responsible for the project. So like, why do women need an executive sponsor? I'm not some project! But then I thought about it... And men sponsor men all the time! We just don't label it that." ABOUT CHRISTINA WICK Christina was previously VP of Engineering at Harry’s, a successful next-generation CPG company. Before Harry’s, Christina’s roles have ranged from running Product, Design and Engineering at Venmo, to defining strategies and building services in the mobile and devices space at Amazon, to AOL where she started as a Software Engineer and rose to the level of Sr. Technical Director responsible for over 50 consumer-facing mobile apps and websites and where she received an Apple Design Award for the Best iPhone Entertainment Application, AOL Radio, in June 2008. Christina has a Bachelors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Psychology, and a Masters in Computer Science and Applications from VA Tech, with her area of concentration being Human-Computer Interaction." SHOWNOTES The historical impact of women in programming & tech (2:03) The current state of the gender gap in tech (7:04) Three things you can do to start actively bridging the gender gap in tech (12:12) Stop gender stereotypes & vague feedback (14:04) Remove bias in performance reviews and interviews (17:01) Intervene when observing bias (23:44) Executive sponsorship (29:40) Establish norms and make it okay to talk about bias (34:29) The Impact of “throwing starfish in the ocean” (37:36) Takeaways (38:39) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Allan Leinwand, SVP of Engineering @ Slack shares his core philosophy & approach to creating developer productivity AND happiness! You’ll learn how Allan combines what developers want most + metrics, & analysis of the dev pipeline to optimize productivity. Allan covers how to translate those principles to remote/hybrid work and how to tell (and what to do...) if your dev teams are unhappy. "I generally say developers want to do three things... They want to solve hard problems at scale. They want to see that hard problem when they solve it... get put to use! The third thing that I think, honestly, is they just don't want to work with jerks. I think if you master those three things then you end up with a very happy and productive development team." ALLAN LEINWAND SVP ENGINEERING @ SLACK Prior to leading engineering & operations at Slack, Allan was Chief Technology Officer at ServiceNow, where he was responsible for overseeing all technical aspects and strategy. He has co-founded and held senior leadership positions at multiple companies and was a venture capital investor for seven years. He founded Vyatta (acquired by Brocade), the open-source networking company, and co-authored “Cisco Router Configuration” and “Network Management: A Practical Perspective” and has been granted a patent in the field of data routing. Leinwand previously served as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught on the subjects of computer networks, network management, and network design. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. SHOWNOTES Your team is more than the metrics! (2:19) The cyclical pattern & lifecycle of developer productivity (4:05) Allan’s essential components to developer productivity (7:48) How to account for people behind the metrics (12:12) The goal is not the metrics! The goal is to understand developer workflow! (17:40) How to know if your dev teams are happy (26:49) What to do if developer productivity goes up, but dev happiness goes down… (30:55) Staying present & how to context switch effectively (34:32) How to identify metrics serving the wrong purpose or incentivizing the wrong behavior (38:12) How Allan’s principles on dev happiness & productivity translate to remote & hybrid work (39:29) Takeaways (42:46) Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer ! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com !…
Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst shares how to get your career unstuck at different scales & stages! You’ll learn different frameworks you can use to benchmark your growth and identify where you might be stuck. Plus different approaches you can take to get your company and the people you lead, unstuck at scale! "The specifics of the framework are not as important as having one at all. Create some ruler... Like if you're a snail and you're trying to inch your way towards the head of lettuce, and you're trying to measure whether or not you're making progress every day... It doesn't actually matter whether or not you're using an imperial tape measure with inches or the metric system and a yardstick... You can make up your own ruler! As long as that ruler is consistently being used over and over again. This is why I say it's important for people to have A framework... not necessarily any one framework. And that they come back to it.” QUENTIN CLARK, MANAGING DIRECTOR @ GENERAL CATALYST Quentin is a product and systems technical leader with broad experience in the enterprise space. Incepted, built, and delivered successful products over many years - from servers to SaaS platforms and applications. He will be joining General Catalyst in January as a managing director. Prior to embarking on a career in investing, Quentin was the CTO at Dropbox, where he led all of engineering, product, design, and growth. He worked with them through its IPO, its pivot to Dropbox Spaces, and drove the portfolio expansion starting with the acquisition of HelloSign. He was at Microsoft for 20 years, most of that time focused on innovation - creating new products and value. The last decade of his time at Microsoft, Quentin was responsible for the high-growth data platform business, including SQL Server. There he worked for Satya Nadella leading the whole data platform business into the cloud. After Microsoft, Quentin was at SAP for two years, first as CTO then as Chief Business Officer where he led strategy and product direction for the platform and ultimately for the whole company. Before joining Dropbox he spent a year angel investing and exploring the VC world. He currently serves on the boards of Coda, Highfive, and Minio, and has been investing and advising very early-stage companies. SHOWNOTES What does it mean to get “unstuck?” (2:55) How do you get unstuck? (5:32) How to divide your time between growth, grunt work, & what you’re good at (7:06) Where engineering leaders get stuck + how to benchmark your growth using the 6 areas of competency (10:42) How to get people unstuck at scale (15:55) Why it’s important to have a framework to benchmark your growth (21:22) Quentin’s story of getting unstuck in his career (25:20) “Give up” what got you stuck by changing your goals & intention (31:20) How to get your company and culture unstuck (37:15) Quentin’s podcast “Equivalent to Magic” (44:20) Takeaways (45:58) Quentin's Podcast - Equivalent to Magic : https://spoti.fi/3ulOVwc Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com ! Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Jeremy Henrickson VP Engineering & Product @ Rippling shares how to align, lead and scale a combined engineering and product organization! You’ll learn about the common tension points while scaling, different ways to structure your org, when to combine your orgs vs. split, and how to realign your teams when expectations get out of sync. Plus how to build credibility with new teams and acquire product skills as an engineering leader! “When I have like a number of teams and each of them has like a product leader AND an engineering leader... the expectation that I set with them is like, "Look, you guys are gonna have different points of view. And that's okay. But when you come to me, you either need to one, have a really clear, shared point of view on something, because you've gone into this together and have thought it out. Or a clear point of disagreement, so that you know, we can tie break on, okay, which one of these is actually more important right now?" And either one of those is totally fine. But a shared understanding of the facts, a shared understanding of the trade-offs is sort of the floor that I draw on those conversations.” JEREMY HENRICKSON, VP PRODUCT & ENGINEERING @ RIPPLING Jeremy Henrickson is responsible for scaling a world-class engineering team across two continents. Previously as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, he oversaw 5x growth of the product and engineering organization and transformed a scrappy startup into a global cryptocurrency platform with millions of users. He began his career at Apple in the 1990s and holds a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford. Jeremy enjoys playing board games and piano with his kids. SHOWNOTES Jeremy’s experience scaling engineering and product at Coinbase (3:00) How to bridge the gap between engineering and product (5:26) How to think about hiring the right people for early and growth stages of a company (7:56) Finding both true believers AND skills for scaling + navigating hiring doubt through the “crypto-winter” (9:37) Common tension points while scaling engineering and product organizations (14:27) How much technical detail and context should be shared between product and engineering? (19:00) How to build trust and credibility when you’re leading a new team (21:11) Dunbar’s number and the different phases of scaling a product and engineering organization (25:43) Different ways to structure engineering and product organizations (29:20) When You Should Combine Engineering and Product Orgs & Jeremys different approaches with Rippling, Coinbase & Guidewire (35:16) What to do if you want to pursue a career in product AND eng leadership (40:13) How to get engineering & product aligned when they have misaligned expectations (43:02) Where to begin if you’re an engineering leader who just took over product manager responsibilities (45:21) Takeaways (46:29) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com ! Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
John Kim has had an unconventional career, pivoting from professional gamer to software developer, to serial entrepreneur. We discuss how to assess your career, make pivots, and balance your growth long term. John shares principles from complexity science to help you navigate unknowns, risks, & opportunities in your career. Plus other powerful frameworks to make better career decisions. " So if you're working at a bigger company, what you're really trying to optimize for is how quickly can you move up in turn terms of 'Abstraction Layer.' It's not about titles. It's about, can you actually understand the next layer of abstraction within the business. So if you're like an IC, what is the engineering manager's priority right now for your team? What is the, let's say a director of engineering's priority right now for the team? And if you actually start caring about those things, you'll be able to make a lot more faster progress." JOHN KIM, CO-FOUNDER & CEO @ SENDBIRD John S. Kim is the Co-founder and CEO of SendBird, the world's no.1 chat API. The platform currently serves over 100M monthly chat users across the world's leading companies such as Reddit, Delivery Hero, Yahoo!, Rakuten, Paytm, Accolade, Livongo, and DHL. John is a serial entrepreneur, engineer at heart, and an expert in the API economy and communications tech space. Little known fact about John is that he was Korea's no.1 pro-gamer for Unreal Tournament. SHOWNOTES How John went from professional gamer to #1 chat API company @ Sendbird (2:47) Creating vs. consuming & why John walked away from professional gaming (6:58) John’s early career pivots: from software engineer to social gaming & Y Combinator (9:08) How to apply the complexity science principles of “Convergence” & “Divergence” to your career decisions (11:17) Navigating “Abstraction Layers” & why you need to invest time to build “social capital” in your career (15:31) The “Human Capital” Framework & balancing the skills you accumulate throughout your career (19:04) Building emotional capital, training for cognitive empathy, & the tradeoffs of agreeableness (20:41) How to manage expectations & communicate with stakeholders when you need to pivot (27:34) How John applied these principles to make career decisions and pivot his company (30:23) How to pick careers aligned with your happiness and motivation (37:10) How to pivot your career using the “2PM” framework (people, product, market, money) (39:59) Future founders: Why you’ll be happier making 10 year career decisions & quick pivots (44:04) Takeaways (46:23) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com ! Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Tia Caldwell, former Director of Engineering @ Slack, shares different frameworks she’s used to motivate teams and unlock their superpowers! We cover methods to identify, maximize, & balance strengths on your team, how to shift your team’s mindset from drama to EMPOWERED so they can better confront adversity & challenges. Plus we share the explicit conversations you should be having in your first 1:1s to create greater psychological safety! “You don't need to have this manager game face. I think there's this perception that when you're a manager, you're supposed to be the person who knows the answers to everything… And while a part of the execution piece is really necessary with being an effective manager, I think the other part is relationship building. You need to invest the time in understanding how people work. Because people will be more open and honest with you, it'll help out with retention for your team and overall happiness. But if you don't… it's not going to go well because you'll be treating people as resources and not humans.” TIA CALDWELL, FORMER DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING @ SLACK Tia led the Monetization Team at Slack, a leading global collaboration hub that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. Over the past 15 years, she has led and managed engineering teams at Netflix and Microsoft, covering a breadth of projects such as Xbox, Office 365 and Streaming Content Delivery. She serves as a facilitator in /dev/color and is the co-founder of Color Code ( https://www.colorcode.org/ ), a scholarship fund dedicated to future leaders of color in tech. Tia studied computer science at Xavier University of Louisiana and spent her undergraduate years doing research for the Missile Defense Agency. SHOWNOTES How do you motivate your team? Find their Superpower! (3:05) Tia’s Superpowers (8:02) Knowing your superpowers maximizes strengths & protects against your weaknesses (10:09) How superpower awareness & common language changes how you operate, make decisions, & structure teams (12:31) Why you should balance your team’s superpowers to increase collaboration and be more effective (17:06) “The Drama Triangle” (20:51) How to recognize what role you’re playing in “The Drama Triangle” (28:30) Shift your team’s mindset with “The Empowerment Triangle” (32:45) How to shift someone from “Victim” to “Creator” or from “Villain” to “Challenger” (34:27) Personal operating manuals & having explicit conversations to get the best from your team (39:06) “What’s your grumpiness level?” & other ways to create psychological safety in your 1:1’s (41:37) How to prompt self-reflection and identify how your team wants recognition & feedback (46:03) Why relationships & removing the “manager game face” are your most effective tool (49:20) Takeaways (50:52) Find all the links & resources shared by Tia HERE : https://sfelc.com/podcasts/superpowers-psychological-safety-and-empowering-your-team-tia-caldwell Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Parallel Engineering Paths, Culture Building & Co-Founding (part 2) with Viraj Mody & Tom Kleinpeter #35 45:05
We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership, and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making. In part 2, Tom & Viraj share why they decided to start a company together, how they assess start-up opportunities, early company building & values-defining conversations, and other strong opinions on how they’re creating the engineering culture and execution at Common Room. VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOM Tom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages. SHOWNOTES Tom’s career path - from engineering leader to principal engineer (4:07) Viraj’s career path to become an engineering leader (8:54) How to reduce mental overhead by connecting with your team and leveraging candor & authenticity (14:27) How to shape the culture and execution of an engineering org at a new company (17:46) Early company building & values-defining conversations (22:33) How they decided to start a company together & Tom’s framework to assess joining a startup (28:27) Tom & Viraj’s strong opinions on building engineering organizations and culture (34:34) What Tom & Viraj admire most about working with each other (40:33) Takeaways (43:01) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at https://sfelc.com/…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Parallel Engineering Paths, Culture Building & Co-Founding (part 1) with Viraj Mody & Tom Kleinpeter #34 39:23
We deconstruct two distinct career paths in engineering & leadership and a co-founder relationship 15 years in the making! Tom & Viraj share formative startup experiences that shaped their careers as a Principal Engineer & Eng Leader. Plus insights shaping their new company on assessing risk, dealing with open-ended problems, being decisive, & removing non-coding time for engineers VIRAJ MODY, CO-FOUNDER & CTO @ COMMON ROOM Viraj led engineering organizations at Convoy and Dropbox, helping both companies scale their teams and products. Viraj was also a founding engineer at Audiogalaxy, where he worked alongside Tom, which was acquired by Dropbox. TOM KLEINPETER, CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF ARCHITECT @ COMMON ROOM Tom was a Principal Engineer at Dropbox, and before that the CTO at Audiogalaxy and FolderShare, startups which sold to Dropbox and Microsoft, respectively. He’s also the co-host of The Downtime Project - https://downtimeproject.com/ a podcast that helps engineers learn from the Internet’s most notable outages. SHOWNOTES The Beginning - How Tom & Viraj first met over 15 years ago (3:48) The Early Days - Microsoft, Tom’s start-up jump to Audiogalaxy, and why Viraj followed (8:55) Lessons in hiring and assessing risk at an early stage startup (15:07) ”Yo, I don’t even know how to use a Mac…” + other strong opinions & mantras from their early start up experience (24:07) What happens when you remove decision-making delays & non-coding time from an engineer’s schedule (29:03) What principal IC’s & engineering leaders have in common... “Your job is to be decisive!” (34:08) Takeaways (39:17) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Harpaul Sambhi, Founder & CEO @ Magical reveals the tools he uses to accelerate his personal and professional growth. You’ll learn how to engineer successful outcomes with your goals through accountability mechanisms, how to build a personal board of directors or leverage friendly competitions like the “master of the universe award” to learn, pivot, & grow faster. "When we do our goal setting, especially if you're trying to compete with someone... is to do the personal side just as much as the professional side. And you get that layer of intimacy that is often not necessarily shown in these types of meetings. And as a result, they become an exceptionally vital part of your life.” HARPAUL SAMBHI, FOUNDER & CEO @ MAGICAL Harpaul Sambhi is a serial entrepreneur and life optimizer. His current company Magical is reinventing copy and paste, automating mundane, soul-crushing tasks.He previously sold his company, Careerify, to LinkedIn in 2015 and joined the product management team. SHOWNOTES The origin story of Harpaul’s hunger for personal growth (2:47) Introducing the “Personal Board of Directors” as a tool to accelerate your personal & professional growth (4:25) Accountability as a mechanism to achieve your goals (7:38) How a personal board of directors works and impacts your thought process (10:07) How to identify your gaps and leverage your personal board of directors (14:31) Increase the richness of your discussion and reduce “off the cuff thinking” with “prep notes (20:47) How to curate and build your personal board of directors (25:33) Where to start building your personal board of directors (33:32) How to use “friendly competitions” like the “Master of the Universe Award” to accelerate your growth (37:14) Focus on your goal’s inputs vs. outputs (43:22) How the “Master of the Universe Award” impacts your relationships (45:34 Takeaways (48:50) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Ask Powerful Questions with Alexis Rask, Executive Coach & Partner @ Sweat Equity Ventures #32 56:02
Alexis Rask, Executive Coach & Partner @ Sweat Equity Ventures shares how to ask powerful questions. You’ll hear simple tactical ways to increase the power of your questions, what the most powerful question is, common failure modes of open-ended questions, how to get over your fear of silence, plus stories of the most powerful questions we’ve ever been asked. "When I say a powerful question, I'm saying 'What's the really right question, for this right moment, that is going to TRULY unlock someone's thinking, in a way that gets at new information.'" ALEXIS RASK, EXECUTIVE COACH & PARTNER @ SWEAT EQUITY VENTURES Named 40 under 40 by Silicon Valley Business Journal, Alexis is an experienced business operator turned Executive Coach to Silicon Valley's top founders and VCs. Prior to founding her coaching firm, Future Consulting, Alexis founded the Marketing Solutions team at LinkedIn in 2006. She opened offices, hired out the sales and customer success teams, and developed the go-to-market plans. She has also served as COO/CRO at Shopkick which sold for $250million in 2014. She is also a faculty member of UC Berkeley's Executive Coaching Institute. SHOWNOTES What’s the most powerful question you’ve ever been asked? (4:40) Failure-modes of open-ended questions & how to use powerful questions to get to “the heart of the matter” (11:54) The impact of a more powerful question (18:55) Emotional intelligence & how to get the best from people (25:40) Why “WHY” is the perfect follow up question (31:24) How to use powerful questions in your 1 on 1’s (38:49) How to get over the fear of silence… (41:40) Identify opportunities to ask more powerful questions with the “mental review” (48:18) Takeaways (54:19) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Wendy Shepperd , GVP Engineering @ New Relic covers how she leads massive-scale strategic programs with precision execution. You’ll hear how to lead great project kickoffs, successfully execute across multi-year time horizons, navigate complex dependencies, launch, & of course celebrate success with your team. "One of the things I tell my teams all the time, especially when things get hard... is I say " Hey, y'all we are making memories! One day we're going to look back on this time and talk about what we learned and laugh about it and share stories about it." ABOUT WENDY SHEPPERD Wendy Shepperd, GVP Engineering, leads product development for the New Relic Telemetry Data Platform, the leading SaaS multi-tenant observability platform used by tens of thousands of engineers to build and operate more perfect software for their customers. She also oversees global infrastructure, architecture, managed services, and engineering operations for New Relic. Having worked with a variety of organizations from start-ups to billion-dollar companies, Wendy brings a unique perspective on what works well for different types of situations and at different stages of growth. She loves growing leaders and building winning teams that execute with precision. Currently leading her fourth multi-million dollar cloud migration, Wendy has developed deep expertise and a fair amount of scar tissue around the many aspects of complex platform migrations in large-scale environments. SHOWNOTES Wendy's lessons learned after leading 4 multi-million dollar cloud migrations (2:29) How to decide when to fix-forward or roll-back your complex strategic project (6:36) What great project execution looks like in a complex cloud migration (9:37) Wendy’s keys to a smooth cloud migration & the major steps of strategic planning (13:57) How to lead a successful planning phase for your project (16:28) How to resolve conflict when your teams and projects have different priorities (18:46) How to move your project forward despite unknown dependencies (22:22) How to hold a great project kickoff and what to avoid (26:59) How to sustain momentum and successfully execute large, complex projects with precision (31:33) Wendy’s team, leadership, and communication cadence during Project Cumulus (37:19) How to handle real-time coordination and execution during pre and post-project launch phases (39:27) Wendy’s favorite project milestone celebration (42:33) How Wendy’s past work as a technical writer impacts her leadership now (44:54) Wendy’s less obvious, but essential advice to lead large, complex projects (46:43) Takeaways (48:56) Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Will Larson CTO @ Calm shares with us how to focus your time on what actually matters. You’ll hear about many of the common traps engineering leaders fall into and his frameworks to help you better target your time to focus on long-term, high-impact work. "A lot of times they'll be like, 'Oh no one's working on this... I can make a huge improvement here!' But then they'll get signals from leadership that 'Actually this isn't valued...' And so I think it's really important to understand what SHOULD be valuable, and then understand what IS actually valued, and then make your own decisions based on that in terms of where you want to put your time." WILL LARSON, CTO @ CALM Will previously working at places like Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He's been writing on his blog, Irrational Exuberance , since 2007 with 600+ different posts covering tons of topics on engineering leadership, management and career. He is also the author of “ An Elegant Puzzle ” and his *NEW* book “Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” Follow Will on Twitter @Lethain Here is the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs (engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’) SHOWNOTES When Will confronted the existential question “Am I actually working on what matters?” (3:56) Where most people go wrong when evaluating how they spend their time (8:52) How to focus on long-term impact and avoid short-term “snacks” & “preening” (10:12) How to navigate a company that recognizes high visibility work over high-impact work (13:12) How to mitigate & reduce status-chasing in your teams (16:09) What high-visibility, low impact work looks like with engineering leaders (18:20) “Chasing Ghosts” and the trap of projecting familiarity onto problems (20:59) How to catch yourself “chasing ghosts” (27:31) Focus on what really matters by seeking the “existential issues” & where there’s “Room AND Attention” (32:10) How to identify and anticipate future existential issues with the “Iterative Elimination Tournament” (35:28) Creating “Room and Attention” & identifying your unique capabilities as an eng leader (38:20) Get projects unstuck and prioritized fast by “Lending Privilege” (42:11) Why Will wrote his new book - “Staff Engineering: Leadership Beyond the Management Track” (45:42) Takeaways (48:40) LINKS & RESOURCES Will's blog Irrational Exuberance: https://lethain.com/ Here’s the interview Will referenced with Aaron Suggs on engineering sponsorship & being a ‘frequent first follower’: https://staffeng.com/stories/aaron-suggs Will's book An Elegant Puzzle: https://lethain.com/elegant-puzzle/ Will's *NEW* book - "Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track": https://staffeng.com/book Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "when someone comes to you from a management standpoint says, 'is this okay? Can I do this?'They're implicitly removing the accountability and responsibility from that decision" - Darian Shimy ABOUT DARIAN SHIMY Darian Shimy is the Engineering Lead @ Square. As an engineering leader who scales teams and products, Darian Shimy is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience. He is currently at Square with prior leadership positions at Weebly, Attensity, and eHarmony.com. He received an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and continues to code as a hobby. Outside the professional setting, Darian is a softball coach for various age levels from the recreation to competitive level. SHOWNOTES How to scale leadership through effective delegation (1:40) How to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability (5:25) The power of repetition in communication and how to get feedback on your message (13:11) How trust saves you time and creates leverage to scale (15:26) Improve communication by adjusting your style and asking more engaging questions (22:15) How to reduce fear and increase team input in large meetings (27:37) How to read the room: what cues and signals you need to pay attention to (33:11) The leader who most inspired and impacted Darian (36:20) The simple power of smiling (38:31) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Darian Shimy ( @dshimy ) shares the lessons he’s learned as a longtime sports coach and engineering leader. You’ll learn coaching techniques he’s applied in his engineering teams you can leverage to increase the value and productivity of your teams. Plus how to scale your leadership through effective delegation and how to create environments of trust, ownership, and accountability. "You should be a coach, not a referee. And the coach is the person who is there to help you improve. The referee is the one who is there to point out all the problems. They're not there to make you better." - Darian Shimy Darian Shimy is the Engineering Lead @ Square. As an engineering leader who scales teams and products, Darian Shimy is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience. He is currently at Square with prior leadership positions at Weebly, Attensity, and eHarmony.com. He received an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and continues to code as a hobby. Outside the professional setting, Darian is a softball coach for various age levels from the recreation to competitive level. SHOWNOTES Darian's lessons from coaching sports applied to engineering leadership (1:29) How to communicate when someone is doing well but can still improve (9:20) How to leverage your time to create more productivity and value for your team (13:08) How to elevate and scale productivity and learning in your junior “players” (18:22) (20:47) How to handle the risk of failure when delegating (21:39) Create consistent, good management by modeling the way (25:14) The impact when you treat your team as humans (30:36) Our key takeaways from the episode (33:20) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
David Silverman ( @dksilverman ) shares how to prioritize effectively, regain productivity, compartmentalize pain, and accelerate your rate of learning to succeed through a crisis. You’ll also hear how to apply his lessons to real case studies shared by engineering leaders from our community. “When you're dealing with uncertainty, the main thing you're trying to drive and change as the leader, is you're trying to increase the rate of learning.” ABOUT DAVID SILVERMAN Leadership expert and best-selling author David Silverman has paved the way in transforming groups into high-performing, agile, and adaptive teams that drive success. David continues to bring out the best in people as CEO and Founder of CrossLead. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, David served in the US Navy as a SEAL Officer for 12 years. Building off of his collective leadership experiences, David created CrossLead as a holistic performance management solution for today’s environment. CrossLead is designed to empower leaders, teams, and organizations to scale the adaptability of elite small teams to the entire enterprise. David previously co-founded the McChrystal Group and led the company as CEO from 2011 through 2015. During his time at McChrystal Group, David laid out the framework for CrossLead as a co-author in the New York Times bestseller Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. If you want to learn more about David Silverman and CrossLead, connect with him on LinkedIn or check out CrossLead . SHOWNOTES David’s experience with uncertainty from the Navy SEAL’s (1:15) How to compartmentalize and deal with physical and mental pain (5:16) How to restore and improve your productivity (13:11) How to increase your rate of learning to succeed when things are changing fast (16:26) The difference between “wartime” and “peacetime” leaders (26:10) How to prioritize effectively in a crisis applying the framework “Ship, Shipmate, Self” (29:33) How you can build trust in a crisis (34:29) Applying Dave’s lessons in a company trying to find product-market fit (38:11) How to apply the tools to deal with uncertainty to support your family (40:55) How to deal with uncertainty when you’re not the decision-maker (45:23) How you can boost team morale in the short and long term (48:41) How to create trust and camaraderie remotely (51:56) How to deal with cross-team or cross-organization issues and negotiations (54:06) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
How do you have an effective performance conversation during a pandemic? Jonathan Raymond (@jonathanrefound) will introduce us to a super-easy to use and effective framework to provide critical feedback. You’ll learn how to apply the framework using real community challenges and tease out the actual language you can directly use to initiate those conversations. “That's what feedback is about. It's not to correct the mistake, it's to start a conversation.” JONATHAN RAYMOND - Author of “Good Authority”, Founder & CEO @ Refound Jonathan spent 20 years building careers in business development and personal growth before figuring out a way to bring them together. He advises CEOs and organizational leaders on how to create a people-first culture that drives results. Refound works with organizations going through dynamic change, from Fortune 100 companies like Panasonic and McKesson to tech startups. Jonathan loves being a dad to two girls, surfing, and yoga. He also has a surprisingly good jump shot. SHOWNOTES What to do when someone on your team is obviously less productive (1:17) Why people are afraid to give critical feedback and what makes it hard (6:01) What is “The Accountability Dial?” (9:06) How you can open a feedback conversation using “The Mention” (11:04) Understanding the reality of where people are at and how you can move forward using “The Mention” during this pandemic. (17:21) The right time to deliver critical feedback effectively. (23:06) What happens if the first feedback conversation doesn’t work? Reopen it by applying “The Invitation” (30:41) Signs you know your feedback is working. (33:04) How to have a performance conversation during the pandemic by applying “The Mention” & “The Invitation” (36:39) Introducing the other stages of “The Accountability Dial” (42:50) How to increase team morale and give positive feedback using “The Accountability Dial” (53:34) How to create an environment where feedback goes both ways between manager and employee. (55:04) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Farhan Thawar ( @fnthawar ) , VP of Engineering @ Shopify shares the hiring framework he’s built where 15-minute interviews result in both faster placements AND better fits. You’ll hear how to find talent in non-traditional ways, what happens when you leverage creativity, and how speed in hiring is a massive competitive advantage. “The problem with interviews in general are they're very biased to either things you've done before or they're biased to some other signal...like school you went to company, you worked for, GPA in some cases, right? Google used to use that... And it excludes a wide swath of people. That's my number one problem with interviews. Not that good candidates can pass an interview. It's that non-traditional candidates will likely fail your interview” ABOUT FARHAN THAWAR Farhan is currently VP, Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. He is an avid writer and speaker and was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Prior to Xtreme, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, Celestica, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo. Farhan is also an advisor at yCombinator and holds a board seat at Optiva (formerly Redknee). SHOWNOTES Farhan’s origin story being recruited to start Helpful.com by Daniel Debow. (1:28) Impact and examples of going above and beyond in recruiting using unusual ways to reach potential candidates. (8:30) Using speed as a competitive advantage, especially when you’re small. (12:44) How to prevent speed from backfiring by thinking about decisions as “one-way” or “two-way doors.” (14:36) Critical structures to best assess candidate fit. (15:17) How Farhan starts from first principles to leverage creativity in recruiting. (20:38) Farhan’s MOST IMPORTANT indicator of performance, and how to uncover it in an interview. (25:49) Results of speed in the hiring process - 15 min interview (31:36) How the 15 min interview works. (33:47) What’s different in hiring an engineering leader. (35:41) How to increase your pool of potential candidates through “backward promotions,” interim titles, and recruiting people who haven’t “done it” before. (42:41) Examples of what happens when bias is removed in the interview process and people are given a shot. (48:03) Farhan’s most terrible leadership mistake & how to turn underperformers into extremely high performers in 30 days with Performance Improvement Plans (PIP’s). (49:36) Farhan’s most impactful leadership action: the power of personalization. (53:56) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Technology, Leadership, & Opportunity with Max Levchin, former CTO @ PayPal & Ben Jun, CEO @ HVF Labs #9 31:38
Max Levchin shares lessons and stories that have been critical to his development as an engineering leader. He shares stories from the early PayPal days and foundational insights for leading Affirm as a mission-driven, values-based company. He also shares essential principles for building and hiring, and how the hardest problems are almost never about code. “I should just solve the thing that matters. I don't need to worry about the hard stuff, it will show up on its own. And there's plenty of hard problems and the more you work with people, the more you'll realize that the truly hard problems are always about humans, they're never about code.” - Max Levchin MAX LEVCHIN - Founder and CEO @ Affirm Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company, co-founder and Chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company, and co-founder and general partner at SciFi VC, a private venture capital firm. All three companies were created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation lab, HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by Ebay in 2002. In 2002, he was named to the Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year. In 2004, he founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, which he sold to Google in August 2010. Also in 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was the first investor in and Chairman of the Board from 2004 until 2015. He has served on several boards such as Yahoo!, Yelp, and Evernote. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist and active investor in more than 100 startups. BEN JUN - CEO @ HVF Labs Benjamin Jun is Chief Builder at HVF Labs (hard / valuable / fun), a fintech startup studio. The lab focuses in areas where technically differentiable solutions can unlock world-changing companies. HVF founders have spun out companies such as Affirm, Divvy Homes, and Yelp. Ben was co-founder and CTO of Cryptography Research, which provides security technologies for payment systems, mobile handsets, digital content protection, and the manufacturing supply chain. While there, he developed and architected security technologies that shipped in over 25 billion consumer devices. Cryptography Research was acquired by Rambus for $340M in 2011. SHOWNOTES Max’s unsung passion for cryptography and how it came to be. (4:53) Max’s cryptography side-hustle stories while starting PayPal. (6:01) How Ben tried to convince Max to leave Peter Thiel and PayPal. (9:58) PayPal’s early milestones, and why that’s different than what’s commonly celebrated in the press and Silicon Valley. (11:46) PayPal’s “one metric” that matters. (13:10) How Max is different as a leader now vs. during his time at PayPal. (18:00) What to think about when transitioning from a VP of Engineering to becoming CEO (20:52) How Max builds complimentary teams. (24:25) “Max’s aura test” or “the hallway avoidance test” in hiring. (26:16) How to guide your company and know you’re doing the right thing. (29:00) Join our community of engineering leaders at sfelc.com Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 The Role of Engineering Leaders in Recruiting with Aditya Agarwal former CTO @ Dropbox & Dan Portillo Talent Partner @ Greylock #8 30:48
What should be the role of engineering leaders in recruiting? What levers do they have at their disposal? In this fireside chat, you'll hear the perspectives of two recruiting heavy-hitters, Aditya Agarwal & Dan Portillo, on how engineering leaders can optimize for successful hiring outcomes. ADITYA AGARWAL - Former CTO Dropbox; Partner-in-Residence @ South Park Commons ( @adityaag ) Aditya Agarwal is a Partner-in-Residence at South Park Commons - a collective of technologists, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs who have come together to freely learn, explore new ideas, and help each other launch their next venture. Aditya was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Dropbox. He scaled the Engineering team from 25 to 1000 and was responsible for new product development, infrastructure, and technical operations. Aditya came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company that he co-founded. Prior to Cove, Aditya was one of Facebook’s first engineers. He helped build the first versions of key products like Search, NewsFeed and Messenger. He was Facebook’s first director of Product Engineering, overseeing engineering for products like NewsFeed, Profile, Groups and Events. Aditya serves as an independent director on the board of Flipkart, India’s leading e-commerce company, the advisory board of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and on the board of trustees of the Anita Borg Institute. He is also an active investor and advisor to Silicon Valley startups. DAN PORTILLO - Talent Partner @ Greylock ( @dan_portillo ) Dan is Talent Partner at Greylock. Previously, he was VP of Success & Engagement at Rypple, and VP of Organizational Development at Mozilla, creators of Firefox. Earlier in his career Dan spent a decade building out successful early-stage, venture-backed consumer and enterprise companies. Dan also served as a Council member for Code2040.org, a non-profit creating opportunities for underrepresented minorities in tech. SHOWNOTES Have you ever not promoted an engineering leader because they couldn’t recruit a good team? (3:18) What is the role of engineering leaders in the recruiting process? (5:21) Sourcing advantages from Aditya’s experiences from Dropbox and Facebook. (7:34) On taking the long view and thinking long term about recruitment. (9:42) How Aditya closes candidates creatively. (11:21) Aditya’s favorite story from Dropbox closing a talented intern. (14:23) How to leverage compensation, even if you’re a small stack at the table. (18:59) What Aditya tells engineering leaders who are building teams for the first time. (21:48) Does comp asymmetry reward good performers or good negotiators? (23:03) Using comp as a tool to value, reward, and recognize performers not on the sexiest problems. (25:32) Recruiting when you don’t have a brand. (27:58) What engineering managers need to know to effectively sell the company and recruit. (29:53) Join our community of engineering leaders at sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Zooming Out From Engineering: featuring Alyssa Henry, Head of Seller & Developer Business Units @ Square & Chanda Dharap, VP of Engineering @ NodeSource #7 22:58
Alyssa and Chanda share stories and mental frameworks about how to strategically think about and accelerate your career journey. You’ll hear examples of how to navigate between large and small companies, how to level the playing field by strategically leveraging emerging tech fields, intentionally harnessing skip-level managers, and establishing a growth mindset. Alyssa Henry - Head of Seller & Developer Business Units & Infrastructure Engineering @ Square Alyssa Henry is the Seller Lead at Square, which creates tools that help sellers start, run, and grow their businesses. She leads product management, design, and engineering for Square’s seller- and developer-facing products. Alyssa has been integral to shifting Square from a single app focused on payment processing into a broad financial services platform and commerce ecosystem that serves the complex needs of verticals from restaurants to retail. Prior to joining Square in 2014, she previously served as VP of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Services and Product Unit Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Data Access. “People want to work on something that matters, something where they’re growing and learning. Autonomy, mastery & purpose resonates with everyone.” Alyssa Henry Chanda Dharap - VP of Engineering @ NodeSource She is currently the VP Engineering at NodeSource, bringing 20+ years experience leading Engineering and Product teams with a strong focus on emerging trends and new technologies. With a solid mix of both global corporate and startup experience, Dharap has a proven track record of excellence, most recently in the the Node.js ecosystem, leading cross-functional efforts around solutions to drive the API economy. Prior to joining NodeSource, she held a product leadership role at Adobe, where she was responsible for the vision and technical direction of a next-generation search platform for Adobe’s cloud ecosystem. Dharap holds a Masters and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University, and has also earned a certificate in Strategic Decision and Risk Management from Stanford University’s Center for Professional Development. SHOWNOTES Alyssa’s work at Square supporting new entrepreneurs start and grow businesses. (5:13) The experience and challenges transitioning from a large to small company. (6:51) How you transition from running an engineering team to broad cross-functional teams. (8:49) How Alyssa grew her teams at Amazon and Square. (11:41) Early adoption of emerging technology, having a growth mindset, and the power of skip level mentoring to drive career development (15:28) Alyssa’s questions she asks to assess her next career opportunities. (18:59) When should product and engineering be in the same organization? (20:45) Lessons from growing at hyperscale. (21:13) How to retain core members of a team, especially in a high-turnover industry. (23:29) Want to get involved with our community of engineering leaders? Check us out at sfelc.com Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
While you don't jump out of bed excited about it, you know how powerful it is for morale when you make the choice to tackle technical debt. Learn a framework for how to do the same thing with organizational debt, and unlock untapped energy, creativity and connection on your team in the process. “As organizational leaders, when it comes to organizational debt, we know that we take shortcuts. We make easy decisions. We do things that are expedient in the moment. But it has a cost. But we have to deal with it as a responsible leader.” ABOUT JONATHAN RAYMOND Jonathan Raymond ( @jonathanrefound ) is the CEO at Refound and author of the award-winning book, Good Authority. In 2018, he was named one of Inc. Magazine’s top 100 leadership speakers. Refound trains leaders on how to give effective feedback and create a culture of accountability. The former CEO of EMyth, Jonathan has led business transformation projects in technology, renewable energy, and the coaching industry. He’s a half-decent barista, a bad-but-enthusiastic surfer, and will never give up on the New York Knicks. SHOWNOTES What is “organizational debt?” (3:45) Defining technical debt. (5:05) How you know when you have technical or organizational debt. (6:34) The first step to solve technical/organizational debt. (7:26) Second step, what’s next before entering “solution mode.” (10:47) Understanding the problem now that the issue is in the open. (12:03) How you sell someone on doing something new (13:05) Where we often leave the process of solving organizational debt unfinished. (15:10) The active solution after the first three steps. (17:25) What separates good engineering leaders from mediocre ones. (20:00) Become the engineering leader your team is waiting for. (21:39) Additional examples of organizational debt. (23:48) Who owns organizational debt. (24:53) Dealing with over-leveling or title inflation. (25:48) Join our community of software engineering leaders @ sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Leadership Principles for Remote Teams (and All) with Jason Warner, CTO @ Github #5 1:13:14
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1:13:14Jason Warner (@jasoncwarner), CTO @ Github shares management principles fundamental to how he leads remote engineering teams. He shares how to scale leadership by applying the right tools and frameworks for effective communication. Jason also tells us the structures and strategies he applies to build & maintain trust throughout an organization. “Every leader in an organization should make THE SET of decisions that ONLY they can make. And then delegate all the other ones. And the only way that you can do that is if everyone is empowered to make the right decisions with the right context, and you have invested ahead of time and trained the neural net of the organization to make those appropriate decisions well.” - Jason Warner ABOUT JASON WARNER Jason oversees the Office of the CTO, whose mission is to explore the unknown and non-existent aspects of technology and software in order to build a map of GitHub’s future. He oversees over 704 engineers, 85% of whom operate remotely. He was previously Senior VP of Technology at GitHub, where he played an integral role in scaling the Engineering, Product, and Security Teams, and built GitHub’s product roadmap. He’s been the leader of fully distributed companies for the last 10 years. Prior to GitHub, Jason was VP of Engineering at Heroku. He oversaw Product Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Phone at Canonical. He’s also a member of the Advisory Board of INNOVATE Ohio - reporting to the Lt. Governor advising policy decisions that impact growth in technology and aim to make Ohio the most INNOVATIVE state in the country in the next 5 years. RESOURCES The Art of Simple Sabotage SHOW NOTES Why challenges with trust, communication, and engagement are NOT unique to remote teams. (2:34) The differences between building trust in remote and co-located teams. (4:05) Why micromanaging is the easiest way to cause breakdowns, destroy productivity and negatively affect morale. (5:40) Jason’s biggest fear as a leader and the fundamentals he uses to scale leadership. (9:17) Structures for effective communication at different scales. (12:20) Early signs of mistrust and how to easily measure the health of an organization(14:39) How you can use “organizational canaries” to get unfiltered feedback (19:26) How to maintain trust & avoid destroying relationships. (24:14) Effective executive communication using the “V-shaped” pathway. (27:17) Examples of how to measure gaps in your communication feedback loops. (31:46) How to turn concepts of healthy communication into mechanisms in your team. (34:48) Signs of bad communication and you can overcome them. (37:10) How to train your organization to make better decisions when you’re not in the room (41:17) Why you should prioritize tools for asynchronous communication and institutional memory (43:45) How you can increase the fidelity of your communication. (46:56) Frameworks to think about team engagement. (51:53) Why Jason believes the role of in-person communication will diminish over time. (57:54) Two actions you can take IMMEDIATELY to improve hiring for your remote team. (1:03:05) Back pain as a metaphor for addressing the root issues in your organization. (1:07:36) Jason’s greatest joy as an engineering leader. (1:12:35) Want to get involved with our community of engineering leaders? Check us out at sfelc.com…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
The hardest business problem has a soft solution. Scientists and engineers display a (well-deserved) skepticism toward touchy-feely ideas such as leadership. Fred shows there's a very technical way to understand why most organizations, from couples to multinational corporations, die a premature death... and what can be done to extend their lifespan. FRED KOFMAN - Advisor, VP of Leadership Development @ Google ( @fredkofman ) “No gun in the world can get your best. No incentive can get your best. You can only give your best because you want to. It’s not contractible. And that’s the difference between leadership and management for me. Leadership is about eliciting internal commitment. You do it because it comes from the inside.” - Fred Kofman Fred Kofman earned his PhD. in Economics from the UC Berkeley, is Google’s Vice President and advisor of leadership, a director of the Conscious Leadership Center at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, & a founder and president of the Conscious Business Center International. Previously, he was a VP of Executive Development at LinkedIn & a co-founder of Axialent, a global consulting company that has delivered leadership programs to more than 15,000 executives around the world. Fred is the author of the trilogy Metamanagement ('01), Conscious Business ('06) and The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership ('18). Since 1990, Fred has designed and facilitated programs on leadership, personal mastery, team learning, organizational effectiveness and coaching for thousands of executives, and consultants worldwide. His book, Conscious Business, has been translated to more than ten languages, received numerous awards and was recently named by Sheryl Sandberg in her New York Times interview as "the business book every executive should read" RESOURCES Meaning Revolution Conscious Business SHOW NOTES You don’t know your job. (2:52) Why you’re wrong, how this organizational disease works and kills your organization (8:19). Looking at the whole organizational system vs. the parts. (10:24) The problem you can not avoid. (13:25) Why doing your job may be hazardous to your career. (15:38) Why we’re screwed - the two issues in economics of information. (18:28) Issues with decentralization vs centralization of the system. (27:27) So we’re screwed... but here’s the solution. (33:56) The assumptions you need to change. (36:27) What makes you give your best effort. (37:21) The two tools incentivizing people’s best. (41:33) The absolute human need. (43:36) Q & A. (48:14) Want to get involved with our community of engineering leaders? Check us out at sfelc.com . We're working on a number of interesting projects to continue to empower engineering leaders. Join us at sfelc.com to be included in updates with our content, events, and all other new opportunities we’re creating! Learned something impactful? Have an idea to improve our show? We'd love to hear your insights and feedback! ... Send us a message at hello@sfelc.com If you enjoyed this or found it impactful, share the episode with someone who might find it meaningful!…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies with Reid Hoffman Co-Founder of LinkedIn, Partner @ Greylock & Sarah Guo, General Partner @ Greylock Partners #3 44:07
In an interview between Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo, they discuss “Blitzscaling” and how companies achieve massive scale at incredible speed. Reid shares insights and lessons on how to prioritize speed and efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, the benefits of intense collaboration found in Silicon Valley, and non-obvious rules needed to succeed. REID HOFFMAN - Co-Founder of LinkedIn, Partner @ Greylock Partners ( @reidhoffman ) “Part of the secret and the thing that’s great about Silicon Valley is that, while we compete intensely, we also collaborate intensely.” - Reid Hoffman An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses including co-founding PayPal & LinkedIn. In '09 he joined Greylock Partners where he serves on the boards of Airbnb, Apollo Fusion, Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Gixo, Microsoft, Nauto, Xapo. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Endeavor, CZI Biohub, & Do Something. He is the host of the podcast Masters of Scale, co-author of two New York Times best-selling books: The Start-Up of You & The Alliance. His new book is Blitzscaling, based on his Stanford course. SARAH GUO - General Partner @ Greylock Partners ( @saranormous ) Sarah joined Greylock Partners as an investor in '13 and focused on B2B apps & infrastructure. Prior, she was at Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage tech startups like Dropbox & advised pre-IPO tech companies like Workday as well as public clients like Zynga, Netflix & Nvidia. RESOURCES Greylock Blitzscaling: The Lightning Fast Path to Creating Massively Valuable Companies Masters of Scale Podcast SHOW NOTES Discovering the “secret sauce” to Silicon Valley and discovering “Blitzscaling” (3:50) Defining the framework of “Blitzscaling.” (7:01) The OODA Loop. (7:21) Reid’s first insight to Blitzscaling at PayPal when they were compounding at 2-5% daily user growth. (8:28) Do rapidly scaling companies ever stop Blitzscaling? (11:39) The dynamics of prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty. (13:25) Why Reid chose collaboration and to publicly share the “secret sauce” to Silicon Valley. (15:45) What Reid’s learned about rapid scaling from his portfolio at Greylock. (17:45) How Blitzscaling applies to different company scales. (20:10) Where Blitzscaling goes bad. (21:48) How Blitzscaling applies to technical leaders. (23:25) Facebook’s example emphasizing speed at different scales. (26:18) How to make decisions when you don’t have full data or an opinionated team. (29:26) Reid’s three non-obvious rules of management. (32:02) How to be comfortable “embracing chaos.” (33:55) How do you think about product development when scaling fast? (37:03) How Blitzscaling accounts for the “tech-lash,” the changing cultural perception of Silicon Valley, and perceived obsession with speed over accountability. (38:42) How Blitzscaling applies to deeply technical problems with a long time-horizon. (40:45) Get involved at sfelc.com !…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Facebook’s James Everingham shares about his early leadership and management experiences and the secrets he learned from quantum mechanics to manage creative teams. You’ll hear insights about how to unleash creativity by focusing on outcomes and environments instead of process and key differences between optimizing for efficiency and invention. James Everingham - Head of Engineering, Calibra @ Facebook ( @jevering ) “His approach was just to start collecting, recruiting, the smartest scientists he could find, and tell them what the end result needed to be. He trusted them to just go figure it out.” -James Everingham James is an engineering leader at Facebook. Previously, James was the Head of Engineering at Instagram. Throughout his 35-year career as a manager, entrepreneur and technology developer, James has led many world-class engineering teams. At Yahoo he was Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo media properties after the company acquired Luminate, an interactive image technology company which he founded. Some of his other previous roles include CTO and founding team member of LiveOps, Senior Director of Engineering at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft) and Senior Director of Engineering at Netscape Communications where he was responsible for the flagship Netscape browser. Before joining Netscape, James held engineering and management positions at Oracle and Borland International. SHOW NOTES James’ early introduction to management at Penn State & Borland. (3:30) What managing creative teams and quantum mechanics have in common. (7:56) A simple explanation of Classical physics and quantum mechanics. (8:40) Henry Ford and classical management. (9:35) Robert J. Oppenheimer and “quantum management.” (10:24) The distinction between classical and quantum managers. (12:41) Other examples of quantum managers. (14:16) The observer effect. (17:00) Translating the principle of “superposition” into management. (18:16) Quantum entanglement, “spooky action at a distance”. (23:15) Creating positive “entanglements” and “spooky management at a distance” in your teams using reciprocity, empathy, and camaraderie. (23:39) How to get better results for yourself using feedback. (26:06) Want to get involved with our community of engineering leaders? Check us out at sfelc.com . We’re working on a number of interesting projects to continue to empower engineering leaders. Join us at sfelc.com to be included in updates with our content, events, and all other new opportunities we’re creating! Learned something impactful? Have an idea to improve our show? We’d love to hear your insights and feedback! … Send us a message at hello@sfelc.com! If you enjoyed this or found it impactful, share the episode with someone who might find it meaningful!…
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast
1 Mastering Difficult Conversations With Sarah Clatterbuck, Director of Engineering @ Google #1 23:22
Difficult conversations for engineering leaders range from telling someone they have lettuce in their teeth to delivering life-changing bad news. Learn to level-up your ability to handle difficult conversations with a few techniques, practice and hopefully a little humor from Sarah Clatterbuck's personal experiences. SARAH CLATTERBUCK - Director of Engineering, YouTube @ Google ( @girodchatterbox ) "Your discomfort is less important than your colleague's embarrassment" - Sarah Clatterbuck Sarah Clatterbuck joined Google in 2018. She currently leads four teams focused on Alternative Monetization for YouTube Creators. Prior to joining Google, she was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Linkedin focused on Application Infrastructure. She previously held roles at Yahoo! and Apple while progressing in leadership ranks. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of San Francisco and her graduate degree from San Jose State University. She is passionate about getting girls interested in technology and from 2013 until 2018, she served on the board of Girl Scouts of Northern California, leading the board STEM task group. SHOW NOTES Where engineering leaders are woefully ill-prepared. (2:48) Level One: Awkward conversations. (4:58) The self-talk, script & power-up tips. (6:32) Level Two: Addressing Misalignment. (7:54) Level Three: The Apology… (10:49) Next Level: Delivering Feedback - Sarah’s most effective 3-part script. (15:10) The Last Level: The Agonizing Conversation - delivering news with a significant negative impact. (18:06) Suggestions to get team members to express themselves when uncomfortable. (22:10) How to talk to someone who doesn’t admit to faults, performance problems or passes blame. (23:21) Want to get involved with our community of engineering leaders? Check us out at sfelc.com . We’re working on a number of interesting projects to continue to empower engineering leaders. Join us at sfelc.com to be included in updates with our content, events, and all other new opportunities we’re creating! Learned something impactful? Have an idea to improve our show? We’d love to hear your insights and feedback! … Send us a message at hello@sfelc.com! If you enjoyed this or found it impactful, share the episode with someone who might find it meaningful!…
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