Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Performance Management at Indeed Oct 27, 2023

Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.

Allison McMillan - Making offsites meaningful Oct 20, 2023

In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience - on top of their day job - and substantial value is left on the table.
Allison - (currently an engineering leadership consultant - previously VPE at QuotaPath and Head of Engineering at Forem) has been planning offsites for 25 years and in this thoughtful interview she shares advice on setting meaningful goals for offsites, how to think about size, location and frequency and some best practices for making them more targeted and engaging to maximize their value.
If you’d like to learn more about Allison, check out her website - https://daydreamsinruby.com/

Paul Zhang - Town halls - influence at scale Oct 13, 2023

Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture.
This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days to better align his team.

Aviv Ben-Yosef - Accelerating Developer Growth Oct 06, 2023

Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They’re easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features.
Drawing on his experience in the Israeli Military (think the Israeli NSA), Aviv shares concrete advice that can allow you to accelerate the growth of your junior engineers so that they can become productive, mid-level developers in just 6-12 months, allowing for a more cost-effective blended team rate, more satisfaction and growth for the engineers, and the ability to invest effectively in growing the next generation of software engineering talent.

Rukmini Reddy - Leading with Empathy During Change Sep 29, 2023

As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value.
In this wide-ranging discussion Rukmini Reddit, SVP of Engineering, Platform at Slack shares five questions she asks throughout her org to support herself and her team when dealing with change and how she leverages models like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous change model to better understand and support her organization through difficult transitions.

Kit Colbert - From intern to CTO - lessons learned Sep 23, 2023

Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit’s progression from junior IC to senior engineering leadership and reflect on some of the lessons learned.

Jeremiah Stone - Choosing the right level of abstraction Sep 15, 2023

Naturally, as CTOs, we often think about our job as to work with developers to ship software. But what does that mean in a world of frameworks, low code, no code, and even GenAI solutions? In this fascinating interview, I got to chat with Jeremiah Stone, CTO of SnapLogic about heuristics for finding the right level of abstraction for delivering business value, how to engage with and support citizen development, and how to deal with shadow IT in a world where even the new marketing intern is writing code.

Josh Builder - Creating a compelling engineering brand Sep 08, 2023

Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (healthcare). None of these were deep tech companies, but in each case, he found a core of engineering excellence and used that to entice and retain top talent to join his team - despite not being able to match big tech salaries.
In this interview, Josh takes us through his process for selecting the right CTO opportunities to accept, then building a compelling engineering brand, and using it first to retain and then attract top talent.

Albert Wenger - Preparing for LLMs Sep 01, 2023

In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for both incumbents and AI native startups, and the broader impact on the workforce and society as we deeply adopt Generative AI over the next 5-10 years.
According to Albert, right now we’re both in the middle of an unprecedented hype cycle for LLMs and starting to witness a transformation as profound as that from an agrarian to an industrial society

Raji Subramanian - The three stages of value creation Aug 25, 2023

Raji Subramanian brings a wide range of experience to the role of CTO at Opendoor (Nasdaq OPEN). She honed her technical chops culminating in a Principal Engineer role at Amazon and then ran engineering orgs at Yahoo and Amazon and cofounded Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor.
In this wide ranging interview, we discuss everything from the trend towards single threaded leadership within technical orgs, sustaining innovation in larger technical orgs, the importance of respecting failure, and the three stages of value creation.

Yoav Grossman - Adding LLMs to your product - a case study Aug 18, 2023

This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It’s a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a product thoughtfully, but quickly.
Spinach is a smaller startup, but the lessons are applicable to companies of all sizes, and previously, Yoav was Head of Product for Asurion Health, Head of Global Business Process at Uber, and a manager for Walmart eCommerce.

Mike Boufford - Creating an AI Strategy Aug 11, 2023

Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLMs as a non-expert.

In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his thoughts on how CTOs should think strategically about engaging with Generative AI - both for improving the process of writing software and more broadly to rethink their product offerings and even their internal business processes.

Gayatri Iyengar - The Art of Storytelling for Managing Stakeholder Relationships Aug 03, 2023

Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the work being done.
In this interview, Gayatri Iyengar shares her experiences building platform solutions at both Uber and Doordash and how she used storytelling to connect business stakeholders with the real value that her org was delivering.

James Turnbull - Trimming your operating costs Jul 28, 2023

In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby’s about his approach to managing his costs during a downturn. From cloud spend and SaaS costs to prioritizing fewer projects and hiring globally, it’s a great insight into how a traditional enterprise is engaging with a tighter financial environment.

Mona Soni - Why the grand hybrid experiment is going to fail! Jul 21, 2023

While there has been a major push to return to the office (by many managers and a good number of ICs), when remote is done right, it can reduce costs, provide access to a much wider talent pool, make teams more productive and scale more effectively (beyond a certain team size, every company is distributed). In this interview I chat with Mona Soni about her experiences running a distributed team at a larger company before, during and after the pandemic and some of the lessons she learned to get the maximum value out of a distributed engineering org.

Matt Welsh - LLMs for engineering teams - a practical guide Jul 14, 2023

Do you still have doubts about the wisdom of leveraging LLMs in software development? Maybe you’re not sure how much they can help or how best to get started with them. Or maybe you’re well into the process of experimenting with LLMs for speeding up software development and you’d just like to compare notes?!In this fascinating interview I got to chat with Matt Welsh - Chief Architect and Co-founder of Fixie.ai about his practical experiences in leveraging Generative AI for software development, clearing up some common misconceptions along the way

Mission Driven - Josh Nesbit: Founding Member, Widespread Care Mar 28, 2023

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Mission Driven - Jim O’Leary: VP of Engineering, Signal Feb 28, 2023

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Jim O’Leary (VP of Engineering, Signal) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Mission Driven - Sam Quigley: CEO, Kicho Inc Feb 14, 2023

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Mission Driven - Max Roser: Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data Jan 31, 2023

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Peter Bell - Refocusing the business and the podcast Jan 19, 2023

We’re going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcast”. We’ve really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we’ve seen over time that the challenges of running (say) a 5-20 person engineering team are very different from those involved when running a 200+ person org. And as many of our original startup CTOs have scaled their orgs to 200 people and beyond, we’ve decided to follow them.
Because of that, we’re going to refocus the podcast, the content, the summits, and the community on “geeks who lead at scale” - senior engineering leaders in larger companies with 200+ full-time employees in product/engineering. In that way, we’ll be able to provide information that is more consistently tuned to one of the most challenging tasks out there - leading engineering orgs at scale.
At the same time as we make the community more exclusive, we’re also going to make it more inclusive. Whether you’re running data, security, IT, or software development, there are many similarities when you’re working within a company of around 500 - 10,000 employees. I’ve been involved with a number of “CTO” clubs across the US and in each case, I’ve seen the benefits of having a range of roles (from CIO and CISO to CDO and CTO - as well as directors and VPs of Software, Platform, Data/Analytics, and Security), as many of the challenges are the same, and it means the community has deeper expertise in a number of key topics if a CDO wants to learn more about engineering best practices for their data team or a CTO needs a hot take on an AppSec challenge they’re facing.
I am disappointed that - given our limited resources - we won’t be able to continue the focus on content specifically tailored to startup CTOs, but I look forward to refining our focus so we can scale our ability to share experiences and insights from and between geeks who lead at scale.

Mission Driven - Laura Edelson: Postdoctoral Researcher / Co-Founder, NYU / Cyber Security for Democracy Project Jan 10, 2023

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Laura Edelson (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU, and Co-Founder of Cyber Security for Democracy Project) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.

Jason Wodicka - Interviewing for culture Dec 29, 2022

In part two of my interview with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat, we dig deeper into the process of creating predictive, fair, and efficient interview loops. In this episode we start with culture - how do you identify the cultural attributes important to help someone thrive in your environment and how do you interview for culture fit/culture add. We then discuss approaches to blending cultural and functional tests into an interview loop. We then take a little time to discuss how and when to provide hints for candidates during an interview and the surprising value of allowing candidates a redo.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Mission Driven - Fred Diego: Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide Dec 20, 2022

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Fred Diego (Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Jason Wodicka - Building a structured interview process Dec 15, 2022

Especially in the early days, too many companies still have ad-hoc interview processes or over index on things like resumes which aren’t super predictive of likely performance and tend to exclude many great candidates. In this episode, I get to chat with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat about their experiences in structured interviewing for engineering roles. We talk about ways to do an inexpensive but predictive initial technical screen, avoiding “pedigree bias”, structuring tests for functional competence and how best to build a lightweight, quick but predictive loop with independent assessments and clear rubrics for everyone involved.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Mission Driven - Adam Kircher: Co-Founder, Sirum Dec 06, 2022

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Hilary Mason - Can they do the work? Dec 01, 2022

I was lucky enough to attend a dinner during which Hilary Mason dropped more wisdom about hiring in one course than many people do in a 90-minute talk. In this week's episode, I get to chat with Hilary, learning how she thinks about screening for judgment, identifying the requirements for a role, the value of creating a humane, fun, structured interviewing process, and the importance of valuing a mix of talents and perspectives on the team (hackers and scalable systems builders, optimists and pragmatists, etc).
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Mission Driven - Ariel Ekblaw: CEO, Aurelia Nov 22, 2022

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.

Jesse White - Lessons learned from burnout Nov 17, 2022

Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out. After taking time to get back in balance, he returned to continue running the org. In this interview, we discuss the journey and the lessons learned.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Mission Driven - Nellwyn Thomas: CTO, Democratic National Committee Nov 08, 2022

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.

Raffi Krikorian - Introducing Mission Driven Nov 03, 2022

In this very special episode, I get to introduce and interview Raffi Krikorian about his new podcast series - mission driven - that we’ll be hosting and distributing on a regular basis.
From VP Engineering at Twitter and leading the self driving group at Uber to being the CTO of the Democratic National Committee and now the CTO at Emerson Collective, Raffi has had an impactful and varied career in tech.
The one common thread in his career has been a passion for mission driven work - whether trying to change the way the world communicated with each other back in 2009 at Twitter, or helping to solve the self driving problem to reduce the impact of automobile ownership, or more obviously in the political and then social good realms at the DNC and Emerson Collective respectively.
In the episode, Raffi shares what it’s like to move from tech centric companies to an organization that was not at all tech focused, talks about what “mission driven” means to him, and then shares some heuristics for identifying missions that might matter to you and finding ways to apply your engineering leadership skills towards those missions.

Short Byte: Ron Lichty - The multiple levels of engineering management Oct 27, 2022

These days it’s quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as the organization scales and the CTO needs to bring to bear various types of management that they may not have experienced or practiced before.
This week, our guest - Ron Lichty shares his experiences of working with engineering leaders to help them to think about the various types and levels of management - from managing individual contributors through managing managers, functional areas, and eventually an entire function like engineering. He also shares some thoughts on how the things that can make you successful at one level can stop you from succeeding at the next.
It’s a great model for decomposing the various kinds of management skills required by a CTO and much of it comes from the book “The Leadership Pipeline” which was designed as a book to help companies to grow their leaders but which also provides a very coherent framework for thinking about the various levels of management required as an organization scales.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Matt Powell - Aligning annual planning with agile teams Oct 20, 2022

There is always a tension in a mature business between the need for certainty when engaging with the rest of the company and the need for flexibility and agility when dealing with the complexities of software development. In this episode, Matt Powell, CTO at FTD shares the details of exactly how he manages planning - from annual and quarterly planning down to the sprint. A great case study in aligning and prioritizing for a decent sized (250+) tech team in a mature org.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Matt Stephenson - Diversifying your engineering pipeline through internships Oct 13, 2022

It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestones. But if you don’t start to invest in a talent pipeline you’re going to be scrambling every quarter to meet your numbers. At Code2College, Matt Stephenson and his team help engineering leaders at startups and enterprises to diversify and improve their talent pipeline by investing in high school internships. In this week's episode, hear Matt explain their program and the quality of work and loyalty that their companies are getting by investing in relationships with top talent earlier.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Maher Saba - Remote Presence at Meta Oct 06, 2022

In this week's interview, I get to chat with Maher Saba, VP of Remote Presence (and Head of Engineering) at Meta. Before Meta, Maher was a senior developer at IBM and a Dir Eng & Distinguished engineer at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discussed why he made the move to Meta, how he thinks about managing remote teams, and how his team at Meta is working on remote presence - for work and for play.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Francisco Larrain - Hiring multifaceted engineers Sep 29, 2022

Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online marketplaces. Before that, he founded Zapped (payment tech) and ran local engineering at Groupon.
In this week's episode, we discuss what he looks for in hiring well rounded engineers for non-trivial domains, his approach to mentorship, and the value of provocations when interviewing engineers.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Steven Gaffney - Essential elements of a consistently high achieving team Sep 22, 2022

From Amazon to Lockheed Martin, Steven Gaffney has helped a wide range of companies to improve the effectiveness of their teams. In this week's episode, we discuss the elements of a high achieving team - from having a clear north star purpose, goal, and strategy to promoting honest communications through emotional safety and improving cognitive empathy within the team.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Vidal Graupera - Challenges of being an engineering manager Sep 15, 2022

Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' and they don't know what to do. It's a totally different job." Vidal Graupera has spent years gathering insights into and working through the challenges of being an engineering manager. Join us as we discuss lessons learned on transitioning into the role, methods to lessen the learning curve, and how he overcame some of his hardest challenges as an engineering manager.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Griffin Caprio - Career progression as an engineering leader Sep 08, 2022

Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that make software development and engineering leadership a unique career, the importance of setting limits, and the value of therapy as an engineering leader.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Mark Porter - Exercising Judgement Sep 01, 2022

In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1000 people over the last two years. In this wide-ranging episode we discuss everything from MongoDB’s “Future of Work” initiative for letting their teams decide how and where to work, the importance of providing air cover for Non-Functional Requirements, why you need a “zipper” connecting product and engineering all the way up and down the org and how to know when you’re halfway done with a change initiative.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Jeremy Johnson - Building a truly global, distributed engineering team Aug 25, 2022

Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool 😊. After co-founding 2U, in 2014 he co-founded Andela to help companies to more easily take advantage of top engineering talent - in Africa and beyond.
In this week's episode, listen to Jeremy as he shares his thoughts on hiring global talent, the benefits of remote vs. distributed teams, his thoughts on timezones, the benefits of global Professional Employer Organizations, and long-term trends in global comp for engineering talent.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Ravi Mayuram - Modernizing your data infrastructure Aug 18, 2022

In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to chat about a range of the trends he’s been seeing in the data persistence space.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Mindaugas Mozūras - Mental health for engineering leaders Aug 11, 2022

In this week's episode, I got to talk with Mindaugas Mozūras, who runs an engineering org of over 400 people for Vinted out of Lithuania. We talked about the importance of mental health, the benefits of therapy, and what getting coaching and mental health support taught Mindaugas about managing his team.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Ismael Peinado - Simplifying Security Aug 04, 2022

If you’re at Coinbase, JP Morgan, a power company, or the NSA, you can skip this episode. If you’re not expecting attacks from nation states, might you be able to simplify your security operations by focusing on the highest likelihood threat vectors?
This week I chatted with Ismael Peinado, CTO of TopTal and a former hacker who is passionate about simplifying SecOps. From 2FA to eliminating email, he has a number of practical suggestions for reducing your security risk profile quickly and cost effectively.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Randy Kern - Bringing quality to your technology and your teams Jul 28, 2022

Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benefits of spending longer as an IC before moving to the management track. We also chat about what quality is in architecture, operations, and teams. It’s a great, wide ranging discussion with some fun takeaways for any engineering leader.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Ami Luttwak - The Scalable Startup Jul 21, 2022

Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the scalable startup”. With an unabashed commitment to hiring unicorns, managing lightly, and keeping any given engineering org within the Dunbar number, Ami shares a lot of fascinating wisdom from his experiences of founding and selling Adallon (his previous startup) to Microsoft and then working within the largest software development company in the world.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Arunava Bag - Beyond DevOps - the promise of AI Ops Jul 14, 2022

Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide for automated incident resolution and/or forecasting of potential issues as anomalies start to arise in the production data.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Satish Jayanthi - The CTOs guide to trends in data analytics Jul 07, 2022

If you’re a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at Coalesce.io gets me up to speed with the current landscape. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of data warehouses, lakes, and meshes and best practices for persisting and querying against data at scale. It’s not enough to turn you into an expert in data analytics, but at least it may help you to understand what the domain experts are talking about!
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá - Building global teams Jun 30, 2022

In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work https://www.holloway.com/g/remote-work/about (along with the also awesome Katie Wilde - VPE at Ambassador Labs and previously VPE at Buffer). In this week's episode, Juan Pablo discusses his experience in building out international remote teams and managing across the three dimensions of distance, time(zones), and culture.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: On Freund - What skills do your developers really need?! Jun 23, 2022

Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degree in computer engineering to learning how to be a productive member of an engineering team and his thoughts on the skills required to help junior engineers become effective and productive.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Joris Dries - Growing vs hiring leaders: a case study Jun 16, 2022

When Joris Dries, CTO of Resonate Solutions in Sydney lost his team lead in the middle of a growth spurt, he had to figure out how he could keep on scaling the team while also filling the leadership gap. He started the process of looking for a new team lead, but after three months realized that he needed a "plan B" to ensure he could keep the team growing and productive. In this episode we look at his approach, experiences and lessons learned.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: James Kenigsberg - Run, grow, transform Jun 09, 2022

This week I got to chat with James Kenigsberg - perhaps best known as the founding CTO at 2U. James shares his thoughts on making transformations tractable, helping your team to win even if their projects don’t, and the “run, grow, transform” framework for allocating and structuring projects based on the degree of certainty and alignment.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Dave Mangot - Architecture matters, technology doesn’t Jun 02, 2022

Dave Mangot is the principal at Mangoteque, and has successfully led DevOps transformations and operational maturity achievement at companies like Salesforce, Cable & Wireless, and SolarWinds. He's also the author of Mastering DevOps. In this episode, he shares his thoughts on why "architecture matters, technology doesn't" and how to think about DevOps and technology challenges through the lens of business value.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Jon Williams - Planning for failure May 26, 2022

In addition to being the founder of the New York CTO Club, Jon Williams is also a fractional CTO. In this episode, in addition to briefly discussing how and why the New York club got founded, we also dug into one of Jon’s favorite patterns for helping engineering teams to both think through risks associated with projects and deepen their team communications and levels of trust.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Doron Grinstein - Moving towards a Netflix grade cloud maturity May 19, 2022

Before founding Control Plane Corporation, Doron was the Chief Software Architect for the cloud services platform at VMWare, a principal architect at Concur and a Chief Software Architect at Dell, so he has some experience architecting systems at scale. In this episode, he digs into the value of a microservices architecture the benefits of containerization vs. serverless, the elements of a well thought out cloud architecture and some of the additional considerations if you want to up your reliability and flexibility by moving multi-region or multi-cloud. A little geekier than many of our other discussions, but if you are involved with the architecture of your application and cloud native infrastructure it should be a great overview of some of the topics you need to consider.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Gary Davis - Improving your interview process May 12, 2022

Given the demand for engineering talent, it’s important not to exclude great candidates just because they didn’t go to the right school or don’t feel like a culture fit (vs. being a culture add). In this episode, I talk with Gary Davis, Diversity Talent Acquisition Lead at Adobe about how to think about competencies rather than credentials, how to create a structured interviewing rubric and how to start to widen your sourcing pipeline to improve both the diversity and the quality of software engineers that your outreach attracts.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Joe Lynch - How to grow the leaders within your org May 05, 2022

Bringing new leadership into an engineering org is slow, expensive, and can be risky. It makes much more sense to focus most of the time on how you can grow your team. This week I chatted with Joe Lynch, Former Engineering Leader at Google Cloud about how best to think about supporting the growth of the engineering leaders already within your org.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Michael Stahnke - A deep dive into the “four core metrics”. And “what’s next”?! Apr 28, 2022

In this episode, I talk with Michael Stahnke, VP Platform at CircleCI about the “four core metrics”, and what’s next. Michael was Director of Engineering at Puppet back when Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim created the State of DevOps report which provided a rigorous basis for focusing on four key metrics for tracking the maturity of an engineering org. When taken together, Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover, and Change Failure Rate provide a great starting point for engineering teams looking to improve their efficiency. But no metrics are perfect. In our chat, Michael shares how (and why) he defines DevOps for different audiences, how he thinks about each of the metrics, things to bear in mind when thinking about the survey responses, and the variability in developer experience even between companies that perform well on all four metrics. And he raises the question, “once you’re performing well on the DORA Metrics, what do you prioritize improving next?”
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Mark Birch - Selling as a CTO Apr 21, 2022

While we often think of ourselves as technologists, CTOs and engineering leaders are also in the business of sales. Whether it’s internal stakeholder alignment or selling a startup vision to a technical buyer, the ability to relate to and connect with customers and stakeholders can be a superpower as a CTO.
Learn how Mark first got his sales mojo as a technologist when all the sales people in his office quit, and the impact that a customer engaged engineering leader can have by shortening the product feedback cycle, and getting product feedback directly from customers.
Resources

The Startup Founder Sales Series - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/the-startup-founder-sales-series-an-introduction/
Daniel Pink, To sell is human https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087GJ8KM/

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Colleen Tartow - Building and managing a Hybrid team at Starburst Data Apr 14, 2022

In the less than two years since Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. joined Starburst Data as Director of Engineering, the company has scaled from ~80 to ~350 staff and engineering is now at 85 people spread from California to India with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London, and Warsaw. Hear how she is managing the competing demands of creating a compelling in-office experience without disadvantaging the “remote only” members of her team.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Aaron Erickson & Brian Guthrie - Good and bad reasons to reorg Apr 07, 2022

As VPE at Meetup.com during the fallout from the WeWork implosion, Brian saw first hand some of the challenges in organizing and reorganizing an engineering team. Aaron also engaged in his share of reorg’s as VP Engineering at New Relic and a Senior Director over at Salesforce. In this episode, hear why Aaron and Brian decided to focus on building software designed to manage the human side of the engineering org.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Frederic Rivain - Building products with privacy and security in mind Mar 31, 2022

As the CTO at a password management company, Frederic has to be passionate about security and privacy, but in this episode, he breaks down the importance of thinking about application security, company security and user privacy from day one. He also provides advice and information for starting to build out a culture that cares about the security and privacy of your software and your operations.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Kimberly Wiefling - Overcoming the pandemic of disengaged employees and dysfunctional organizations Mar 24, 2022

In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people are disengaged from their work and how we can do a better job of connecting our teams to their missions.
Some of the resources shared by Kimberly:

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Mike Boufford - Making “distributed” work at Greenhouse Mar 17, 2022

Like many other companies, when covid hit, Greenhouse had to up its remote/distributed engineering game. From normalizing on a “one person, one screen” strategy for hybrid meetings to experimenting with a range of social opportunities for staff to connect while minimizing zoom fatigue. Hear Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse share his thoughts on the future of distributed work, the importance of onboarding, and the beginning of the end of geography based pay scales for top engineering talent - at least within the US.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Jonathan Moore - Culture and the mental health of your team Mar 10, 2022

From covid lockdowns to Black Lives Matter to January 6th, it’s been a couple of years. Teams expect more out of the companies they work for and also need the relational support of their managers to stay engaged and productive. In this episode, I talk with Jonathan Moore, Founder & CTO at RowdyOrbit about admitting that it’s OK not to be OK and how to help your team to bring their whole selves to work.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Christine Spang - Multivariate optimization while scaling - beyond just gender balance Feb 24, 2022

Back in 2019, Christine gave an awesome talk at our in-person San Francisco summit about how she had built an engineering org of ~30 with a 50:50 gender balance (Male : not male). In this episode, Christine shares what has changed as the organization has scaled to ~300 and her experiences as a first-time ScaleUp founder navigating hypergrowth.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Erik Peterson - Managing cloud costs Feb 10, 2022

As cloud costs continue to become a bigger business expense, it’s increasingly important to have a proactive strategy for managing and understanding cloud costs rather than waiting for a call from the CFO! In this episode, Erik shares his experiences with tracking and managing cloud costs at Veracode before founding CloudZero and his experiences in shifting awareness of cloud costs left.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Dan Langevin - Building an engineering culture of accountability and curiosity Jan 27, 2022

As companies scale, it’s always a challenge to ensure that the dev team is as committed and passionate about the product as the founders. In this episode, I chat with Dan Langevin, Cofounder and CTO at Vericred about how they are intentional about scaling and support curiosity and customer empathy in their engineering org, and the planning process they run to ensure predictability and accountability for their key customer deliverables.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Mark Van de Wiel - Managing an engineering team through an acquisition Jan 13, 2022

What with covid and the great resignation, it’s hard enough to keep an engineering organization intact, aligned and motivated. Imagine doing the same while negotiating a transaction that could impact everything from your feature roadmap to your long-term tech stack. In this episode, I chat with Mark Van de Wiel, VP Technology at Fivetran who recently navigated an acquisition of his company, HVR into Fivetran.
PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Short Byte: Marko Gargenta - Tech enablement - the hard part of developer education Dec 30, 2021

The hard part of developer education isn’t teaching your team a new language or framework. It’s teaching your team how you use the language or framework. Smart devs can always find a video course online to learn the basics of ES6 or Scala, but teaching them the patterns used within your company, where the microservices live, and how to configure your CI pipeline can be challenging as the information is often not documented - or the docs are often out of date. Marko Gargenta helped create Twitter University and has since helped companies like Salesforce, Shopify, Airbnb, and LinkedIn to work on the challenge of “tech enablement” at scale. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss everything from how to encourage the sharing of such tacit knowledge to how to keep it up to date - even in a fast-growth engineering org.

Short Byte: Ramana Satyavarapu - Engineering management vs leadership Dec 23, 2021

Ramana Satyavarapu is the CTO at Finix - a payments solution for SaaS companies. Previously he was Head of Data Engineering Platform and Product at Two Sigma, Head of Engineering, Software Network Infrastructure for Uber and a Head of Engineering at Google running the Google Play search team. In this episode we discuss the distinction between management and leadership, dig into how he worked on developing the leadership principles at his current company, how he thinks about balancing product, process and people, and how he helps his team to determine whether the managers path is right for them.

Short Byte: Ron Lichty - Starting a new engineering leadership role Dec 16, 2021

For most of us, jumping into engineering leadership at a new company is only something we do every 3-5 years. Today's guest, Ron Lichty, Consulting VPE, often jumps into three or more new companies every year! In this episode, we’ll discuss how he investigates the technologies, tools, teams and processes to add value quickly to an org. Whether you’re looking forward to starting your next gig or just want to freshen up your impact at your current org, it’ll be a great chance to think about how to get the most out of your engineering organization.

Short Byte: David Subar - How to choose a CTO coach Dec 09, 2021

No matter how experienced you are, there are times where it can make sense to get a second pair of eyes on a problem. For small questions you can always tap your network, but as the amount of context required and input needed grows, it can make sense to bring in a consultant in so they can think deeply and engage thoughtfully with the problem.
In this week's episode, I talk with David Subar, a fractional CTO, about his experiences of how and when to engage with a CTO coach and how to find one that’s a good fit for the problem that you’re trying to solve.
Get in touch with David via email, dsubar@interna.com or via the contact form at www.interna.com. You can also connect with him via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsubar or twitter https://twitter.com/dsubar.

Short Byte: Joe Bradley - Leveraging conversational AI Dec 02, 2021

Conversational AI has come a long way from simple rules based chatbots, but it's still a complex and quickly evolving space. Join me as I chat with Joe Bradley, Chief Scientist at LivePerson, about the use cases, tooling, team structures and gotchas if you're considering implementing a conversational AI system for your company.

Short Byte: Claudius Mbemba - Sustaining culture within a remote-first team Nov 25, 2021

We're all dealing with remote-first teams now whether we like to or not. But the more I investigate hybrid working options, the more likely it seems that we're going to have to come up with remote friendly approaches to building and sustaining the culture of our engineering orgs long term. Hear how Claudius Mbemba, CTO of Neu, has built and sustained an effective remote first culture for four years at his startup.

Short Byte: Labhesh Patel - Diversity, Inclusion and Bias in AI Systems Nov 18, 2021

Most companies are increasingly trying to leverage data science to achieve their business goals, but it's easy to create biased models that disadvantage underrepresented groups. In this episode I get to chat with Labhesh Patel, CTO and Chief Scientist at Jumio.
We start by looking at common types of data bias around representation and features that may be highly correlated with protected features (zip codes that are highly correlated with race, for example) and the challenges of supervised learning where the team tagging your data can also introduce bias into models.
We then discuss the benefits of increasing the diversity and inclusiveness of both your tagging and modeling teams and questions you can ask as an engineering leader to make sure your data science team is being thoughtful about the potential impact of the models they're building.

Short Byte: Charlie Reverte - Retaining your team during the 'great resignation' Nov 11, 2021

The great resignation is both a threat and an opportunity for engineering leaders. To avoid regrettable attrition, you need to make sure you are tracking your comp to industry standards, creating the psychological safety to allow your team to be honest about their career aspirations and ensuring that you have consistent, high quality management across the org. At the same time, you need to be super clear about your value prop as an employer, active in recruiting, and timely in making offers to the best candidates. Listen as I chat with Charlie Reverte, SVP Technology at MessageBird (previously CTO at SparkPost) about how you can ready your organization for increasing competition for top engineering talent.

Short Byte: Jossie Haines - Empathy and Inclusion in Engineering Leadership Nov 04, 2021

To create a truly diverse and inclusive team where everyone can thrive and share their views, engineering leaders need to abide by the following three pillars:
1) effective and fair management principles,
2) comprehensive DEI practices, and
3) an inclusive culture.
Empathy is the framework leaders can use to ensure they are incorporating all three pillars in their daily work. Jossie will share more details on the three pillars and how to leverage empathy as the foundation for inclusive leadership for the future.

Short Byte: Ben John - Managing engineering at scale Oct 21, 2021

In this wide ranging talk, I chat with Dr. Ben John about his experiences in scaling and managing the team at AppNexus (and post AT&T acquisition at Xandr). We talk about six week planning cycles, creating a supportive culture, building out a learnign and development team within the engineering org and Ben's advice for anyone else moving from engineering to leadership.

Short Byte: Anne Lise Waal - Gaming the enterprise Oct 07, 2021

It's not easy to bring gaming technologies into the enterprise. From hardware limitations to unreasonable expectations, it's challenging to bring game like learning simulations to the corporate world.
Anne Lise Waal has been doing just that at Attensi, and in this episode she shares her experiences in aligning designers, copy writers and developers, managing feature creep, prioritizing an ever changing backlog and managing technical debt.

Short Byte: Colin Earl - How and why CTOs should engage with no-code tools Sep 23, 2021

They're coming. From bubble.io and webflow through UI Path and Blue Prism, the chances are that someone within your company is already building a departmental system using a "no code" tool.
As with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for CIOs a decade ago, ignoring the problem isn't an option. In this episode, I chat with Colin Earl, Founder & CTO at Agiloft, about how CTOs can evaluate & leverage RPA tools to support "citizen developers" within their companies to reduce the pressure on the core dev team while still getting their departmental needs met.

Short Byte: Mark Reese - Starting from somewhere else Sep 09, 2021

Wellington, NZ isn’t the obvious place to start a SaaS company. But Xero has built a globally distributed team of over 1800 people in product and engineering. In this episode, I chat with Mark Rees [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrees3/], their CTO about how they scaled the org.
Learn more about:
- How he doubled his engineering team from 150 -> 300 in a year
- His approach to allocating work across a widely distributed org
- Why his team actually appreciated the introduction of standards for processes and technologies
- The unexpected benefits of publishing a machine readable service directory for the org

Short Byte: Adam Sypniewski - Going against the flow Aug 26, 2021

One of the biggest risks for an engineering org is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome where the tech team wants to rethink every decision and rebuild every piece of tech from scratch. But sometimes it makes sense to take a different path if the constraints you’re optimizing for are uncommon.
In this episode I chat with Adam Sypniewski, CTO at Deepgram about some of the non-obvious choices that their team has made - from programming languages and hosting to team composition and how to approach build vs buy decisions.

Short Byte: Anurag Gupta - The importance of automating production ops Aug 12, 2021

While running database services for AWS, Anurag Gupta, now Founder & CEO of Shoreline.io, learned the importance of going beyond monitoring and incident response to implement incident automation to automatically resolve common (and uncommon) production issues. In this episode, he talks about the importance of automating production ops, why just using cloud hosting or containers doesn’t fully solve the problem and how to think about building out an effective SRE team.

Short Byte: Rob Zuber - Being an executive first Jul 30, 2021

As a CTO, you're not just responsible for running the engineering team...
Because you're also a C-level executive with the responsibility to help the executive team to leverage technology to achieve their business goals.
So how can you maximize the value you're bringing to your organization? The answer is to be an "executive first".
And that's what Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, talks about in this short byte. He shares what the CTO brings to the leadership team, the biggest difference between a CTO who's focused on their org versus being an active member of the leadership team, how to balance your responsibilities to both the engineering team and leadership team, and why it's important to focus on outcomes - not egos.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with Bugsnag, who invites you to join the Apps + Coffee Connection! The Apps + Coffee Connection is a new mobile and web app community for engineering and product leaders to converse about industry topics. Every third Friday of the month we meet to discuss topics such as process efficiencies, tools, team management and future thinking. You can join the community by adding this recurring event to your calendar.

Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teams Jun 17, 2021

Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teams
We can't put the remote genie back in the bottle, but with some people desperate to get out and go back to the office, how can organizations manage the two?
In today's Short Byte, I speak to Tim Olshansky, EVP of Product, Design and Engineering at Zenput, a foodtech startup focused on food safety. Tim embraced a hybrid remote model long before the pandemic and has been successfully managing hybrid remote teams for 11 years.
In this chat, hear Tim talk about his remote first but office-centered approach to remote work, and the three driving principles that make sure employees are happy, productive, and enjoy similar experiences, whether they're in the office or across the country or world.

Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing? May 20, 2021

Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?

The good news is that software development has moved from a peripheral activity to the heart of every business. But as technology becomes integral to all functions, how can you keep track of what embedded engineers across the org are building, balancing awareness and reliability with agility? Today we’re speaking with Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Product & Services at RackSpace about empowering technology across the organization while still providing guard rails to ensure the quality and reliability of the solutions.

Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring process Mar 31, 2021

Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring process

With demand for talent at an all time high, if you want to attract, identify and close the best developers for your team, you simply have to up your hiring game. Join us for this “Short Byte” as I interview Jeff Spector - a cofounder at Karat - a company dedicated to fixing the hiring process for engineers. We’ll discuss how to create a fair, predictive and enjoyable hiring process so that you get great signal from your interviews, create a good impression with the candidates and can improve the inclusivity of your process and the diversity of your team.

Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering org Mar 11, 2021

Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering org

Camille Fournier is perhaps best known for her amazing book “the managers path” - a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. But she also has a degree from Carnegie Mellon, was a VP at Goldman Sachs, and then was the CTO at Rent The Runway before eventually returning to the finance world as Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma. Today she discusses her experiences in managing a product focused engineering org.

Thank you to our friends at Carbon Five for sponsoring today’s episode. For over 20 years, Carbon Five has helped businesses build, launch and scale digital products and teams. They’ve helped brands like Signal, Masterclass, Stitch Fix, Chime, and more, design and develop some of the most successful apps and platforms on the market today. So whether you’re looking to build your first app, fix a broken development process, or to scale your successful engineering team — the folks at Carbon Five are ready to help. Visit carbonfive.com/ctoconnection for special access to free product development guides and technical team resources.”

Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leaves Feb 25, 2021

Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leaves

Mai Irie is a director of engineering, but twice in the last two years she’s had to deal with managing the engineering org after her CTO or general equivalent left. In this interview we’ll look at some best practices for taking over an engineering org in times of transition.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup Feb 19, 2021

Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup

Whether you’re thinking of founding, joining or investing in an early stage tech company, Lee Edwards has some advice! From effective due diligence on an early stage company to some interesting focus areas for deep tech startups. Lee is a partner at Root Ventures - a hard tech seed VC, and was previously CTO/VPE at Teespring and an Engineering Manager at Groupon.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin Measuring outcomes vs. inputs Feb 12, 2021

Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin - Measuring outcomes vs. inputs

How can you best measure the effectiveness of your engineering team? Lines of Code written? Number of PR’s? There are absolutely some input metrics that can have some value, but we don’t hire engineers to write code, we hire them to solve business problems. In this discussion Johnny Ray Austin, CTO at Till shares his experiences of managing his org by focusing on the outcomes produced rather than the inputs delivered.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software Feb 06, 2021

Building vs buying software
Building vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time to market, but then you have the potential of vendor lock in and being constrained by the limitations of the tool that you chose. And in the engineering world, it’s even harder. While Not Invented Here syndrome is becoming less prevalent, you still need to pick between a ground up implementation or leveraging open source, professional open source and commercial offerings. And then to think about how to incorporate low code APIs and no code solutions into your tech mix in a way that reduces build and maintenance costs without limiting the quality of your final solution. Join us to hear how James thinks about this balance - both as a CEO of a company that buys other peoples software and as the founder of a company that sells its own SaaS solution.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the

Short Byte: Heidi WIlliams - Building a startup within a startup Jan 29, 2021

Building a startup within a startup

There are a unique set of constraints when you’re running an engineering team at a “startup within a startup” - from managing the planning cycle before you’ve hit product market fit, to customizing elements of your product and infrastructure designed for a very different audience. Join us to hear how Heidi Williams, Director of Engineering at Grammarly is working on these challenges by building out an enterprise offering for a traditionally consumer focused business.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partners:

CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.

LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software Products
Our vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/

CTO Connection is a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá 12/17/2020 - learning the craft of engineering management Dec 17, 2020

JP learned engineering management the hard way - and he’s passionate about helping new engineering leaders to have a better pathway to building their skills. In this Short Byte we look at the differences between being an engineering leader at a startup vs a larger company, how JP learned to become a manager, resources that are now available for engineering leaders and some hints and tips on managing your boss and hiring effectively at a startup.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partner - CodeClimate! Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate by the end of the year and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Short Byte: Cat Miller 12/3/20 Dec 03, 2020

Culture work is part of a developers job

At Flatiron Health, the team thinks that getting IC’s to invest in the team culture is so important that they’ve built it into their career ladder. So I’ll be asking Cat why “culture work” (from onboarding and mentoring to planning hackathons and running socials) is everyone’s job and how it has helped her to build a cohesive and inclusive culture despite explosive growth of her engineering org.

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

And thanks to our sustaining partner - CodeClimate! Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate by the end of the year and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

Using ML/AI to Analyze Your Log Files with Christian Beedgen Dec 02, 2020

According to Christian Beedgen CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic, there is no magic bullet when it comes to innovation. His brain child, Sumo Logic, was founded to empower digital business through real-time analytics delivered as a service.

On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, Christian and Peter chat about the future of log files and where machine learning fits in. Christian also discusses his long road toward becoming a founder and CTO. Take a listen to the episode.

(01:11) - Falling forward
(06:58) - Technical management & leadership
(08:31) - Leading through influence
(16:02) - Getting insights from logs
(24:00) - ML/AI analysis
(32:34) - Magic bullets

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.

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