The CTO Podcast

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Change is Evolutionary with Dave Mangot Oct 05, 2022

Show notes

Is iterative growth more substantial than revolutionary growth? In this week’s show, Dave Mangot, Principal and founder of Mangoteque, explores this idea in depth. He joins Etienne de Bruin to talk about how companies find benchmarks to compare themselves to, and how his organization is holding up a mirror in this process.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
The culture you cultivate at your company will endure for the company’s lifetime.
When you’re looking for tools for your company's DevOps, pick the one that fits your company's culture the best. A tool that does most of what you want, and that fits in with your company culture, will have the highest rate of adoption.
To have continuous improvement in your company, you need to plan as well as study. Development teams need to have a calendar, they need to study the projects that they are undertaking and decide whether or not they are feasible.
As a leader, give yourself and your team permission to fail.
Be open to suggestions from your team members, and don't be quick to dismiss them. "That was a thinking, creative human being who spent time coming up with that. To dismiss it out of hand is probably not appropriate and certainly not great for team performance or team cohesion," Dave tells Etienne.
Hiring more people when work isn't getting done is not going to fix anything. Throwing more people into a broken system isn't going to fix the broken system. Instead, look at the work that needs to be done.
Resources
Dave Mangot LinkedIn | Twitter
Mangoteque
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

Getting Involved with Open Source Communities with Jesse White Sep 28, 2022

Show notes

“Large open source projects with many developers can sometimes feel like chaotic construction zones.” This week’s show is all about open-source communities. Jesse White, CTO and President of R&D at OpenNMS, joins Etienne de Bruin to define and describe open source communities, what they do, and how they work.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
OpenNMS is an open-source network monitoring program intended to monitor large enterprises at scale.
How do you nurture a community that has strong feelings about where the product needs to go?
“I see my role as being as transparent as possible in painting a picture of where we're going as an organization and what impacts that has on the open source project that we have,” Jesse shares.
Sometimes when things go wrong inside an open source community, developers fork projects in different directions or start another community outright.
If you’re thinking about contributing to an open-source community, you should start by asking around. You should also advocate for your own work - don’t seclude yourself in a silo and only come out when it’s ready. Let people know what you’re working on, and keep them posted. Even if there’s no response, people will see it and be aware.
The key to open source is the openness of code, disposition, and how you approach it.
Resources
Jesse White on the Web | LinkedIn
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

Feature Flags with Split.io CTO Patricio Echague Sep 21, 2022

Show notes

Do you dream of more harmony between product and engineering teams when releasing features? This week’s show dives deep into the world of features. Patricio Echague, CTO and co-founder of Split.io, shares how to avoid causing trauma to your engineering teams with pushes to production. He joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss the fundamentals of updating code in a way that empowers teams across your company.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
As a CTO, whether you're at a highly scaled organization or just starting, the value you create is through the code you've written. In updating that code, trunk-based development is the way to go.
Though you can use other branching techniques to use feature flags, they are more powerful when they are developed with a trunk-based methodology.
When using feature flags, you should start by placing them as high in the stack as possible and then moving them down as needed. If a feature flag has at least two conditions, two possible states, it gets exponential. This will create difficulty if you have to change many feature flags.
You can try to mitigate the animosity between product and engineering by giving them independence.
Any mature feature flag will help you identify when flags are no longer being engaged and used.
If you have a monolith code base, you can move towards trunk based by peeling off areas of the monolith that haven't changed often and have a unit of domain, and then putting that into microservice and giving some teams autonomy to iterate on that service alone.
Resources
Patricio Echague on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

The CTO & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion with Kathy Keating, Aaron Pina and Erik Enge Sep 14, 2022

Show notes

DEI isn’t just an organizational to-do; it’s about the day-to-day behavior in a company. Inclusion and Equity are the things we put into practice in our daily lives – how are we inclusive of people, and how do we ensure there is equity across the board? Today, Etienne de Bruin is talking to three experts in their fields, and in the leadership of major organizations who are taking DE&I seriously. Erik Enge is the Head of Engineering at Postmark, Active Campaign. Kathy Keating the VP of Technology at Ad Hoc, and Aaron Pina is the founder of Anthropolicy. They discuss what DE and I really means, how to make it an integral part of your company, and why that matters.
They discuss:
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion isn’t a set of checkboxes to tick off. The number of people of color or members of the LGBTQ community in your company doesn’t mean anything if their day-to-day experience of working in the organization isn’t inclusive. “If you focus on the I, the D will come.”
Psychological safety is important, but the idea of it has de-developed equity in North America. It has kept majority culture, particularly whiteness, from fully engaging in the process and practice of inclusion. Real psychological safety is something else.
Where do you start having conversations about people’s biases and resistance? Aaron recommends looking at skepticism and resistance as a signal for a story that needs to be told.
When you’re part of majority culture, what you find normal, pleasant, easy and conducive to success, it’s hard to imagine that others don’t have the same experience. Eric talks about this realization and how he acted on it.
Trust and safety doesn’t come from doing and saying everything perfectly, it comes from creating something new. Cathy shares that she feels safety comes from “that beautiful moment when we move from your needs, my needs and where it’s about us expressing our needs.”
Aaron talks about how the whole self doesn’t always belong at work, but spaces where you can be unapologetically yourself are vital. He recommends active bystander training and looking at how it can be applied in the world.
Fear is a feeling you can move through – it doesn’t have to be avoided, and it doesn’t have to stop you from making changes and doing the work.
What happens when you bring difference into your workplace ‘tribe’? It always creates friction but how you treat and respond to that friction dictates whether you grow and evolve or stagnate and eventually decay.
Resources
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
Aaron Pina on LinkedIn Instagram
Anthropolicy Consulting
Kathy Keating on LinkedIn
Ad Hoc
Erik Enge on LinkedIn
Active Campaign
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

A Conversation With PayPal CTO, Sri Shivananda Sep 07, 2022

Show notes

“When your name is mentioned, what are the characteristics that people implicitly jump to in a millisecond?” This week’s show peels back the curtain on leadership, authenticity, and the role of a CTO. Sri Shivananda, CTO and EVP of Product and Platform Engineering at PayPal, joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss a variety of topics all centering around his experience as CTO. Sri explores building effective teams, the intricate inner workings of a company, and the impact of a brand.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
At the end of the day, leadership is really about building great teams. It’s not an act of one - it’s the act of many passionate people that come together.
Communication channels are critical in leadership.
The CTO is the pulse for the customer. Their role allows organizations to continuously evolve the experiences both consumers and merchants have.
Authenticity is foundational for creating trust in any relationship. It’s about ensuring that the way you express yourself and the way you interact with people is in harmony with your core value system.
Leadership is about serving people, but it often gets clouded by worrying about what other people think. Concerns like, “Did I sound stupid?’ are common, but they ultimately don’t improve your leadership. It’s important that you give yourself permission to not be perfect.
You become much more productive collaboratively when you learn to stop judging things and people around you on a continuous basis.
People who have a habit of reflecting during the weekend have an advantage in going into a new week with new learning.
Within a company, the primary operating system involves the reporting relationships such as manager to employee, but the real information and work actually gets done through a secondary operating system of experts connecting with each other.
Networking is very important for both personal and professional growth.
Resources
Sri Shivananda on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
PayPal
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

Extracting Value From Your Network with Erin Fusaro, Wayne Haber and Brent Thumlert Aug 31, 2022

Show notes

“If you spend a ton of time cultivating your network, how are you leveraging that work in your current role?” This week’s show explores multiple ways to reap the rewards of building a strong professional network, and how this week’s guests tap into that. Etienne de Bruin welcomes Erin Fusaro, Wayne Haber and Brent Thumlert to the CTO Studio Podcast. Erin is VP of Engineering at Chipper Cash, a fintech company. Her role involves helping the company grow and scale sustainably. Wayne is VP of Engineering at GitLab, focusing on security, growth and machine learning. Their primary objective is increasing “revenue via growth experiments and growth hacking and also apply machine learning to make teams customers more efficient.” Brent is the Managing Director of Software and Technology at Radicle. “Our purpose is to help people find the balance between people, planet and profit, specifically around inventory and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions,” he tells Etienne.
Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:
Who are you bringing to the table when you sit at the table? Having a strong network means that you bring more than just your expertise; you’re also bringing all the people you know and have influence over.
You can get objective feedback on new ideas from your network and enter new places at a high level of trust.
Maintaining a network of professionals who are as invested in personal development as you are is like “crowdsourcing mentorship”.
Relationship building is everything in networking.
“My network always wins,” Erin says. “That network is such a big part of my value as a leader … my network supersedes any job I have, because it is continuous across my career whereas I may work for a company for a period of time.”
“A healthy network creates knowns and predictability or removes uncertainty.”
One way to keep relationships strong is to watch what you say publicly.
How to measure the health of your network.
The power of community and group discussion. Using a personal Slack channel to keep in touch and simultaneously help one another expand their network.
Resources
Erin Fusaro on LinkedIn | Email
Brent Thumlert on LinkedIn | Email
Wayne Haber on LinkedIn
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

How to Make the Horizon Model Better with Visibility Planning with Brant Cooper Aug 24, 2022

Show notes

Brant Cooper is an author, disruptor, and lean innovation expert. He is CEO and founder of Moves the Needle and Market By Numbers. Brant joins Etienne de Bruin this week to explore how to improve the horizon model with visibility planning.
Here are some ideas you’ll hear them explore:
The Horizon model originally suggested that companies plan their growth initiatives over three different time horizons, but somewhere along the line, people started equating the horizons to innovation, which was not ever part of the core concept.
The innovation mindset can be thinking of ways to tweak your existing business model rather than inventing a new one. “How do I take my existing technology and leverage it in different ways?”
Mature companies must first understand what their core objectives are over time when using the visibility model.
The decision to determine how resources are used should be based on the evidence for the impact those different projects are going to have.
“Horizon planning is arbitrarily assigning time to planning.”
What stops agile within a company is that agile doesn’t reach beyond the technical.
“You don’t have to abandon your existing horizon - you’re just using the visibility to actually populate your horizons as opposed to the other way around.”
“We have to understand that the world we live in can change so quickly that today’s v1 is tomorrow’s v2.
Resources
Brant Cooper on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Email him at brant@brantcooper.com
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

What Evolutionary Biology Can Tell Us About Software Development - Part 2 Aug 17, 2022

Show notes

Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley are back for the final installment of this two-part episode of the 7CTO Studio Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuiti. This week, they continue their conversation about degeneracy and its relationship to redundancy.
Here are some ideas you’ll hear them explore:
It usually takes a lot of waste to get to the optimal setup.
The smaller the piece of the system, the more precise you need to be. As you zoom out, you can be more tolerant of inefficiency.
Dial in the parts of the system that are stable; focus your adaptability on the areas that are subject to change.
How is the energy in your team best applied? “The thing I've learned the most in managing teams the last couple of years, is to leave lots of slack… leave room for having the energy to think about and try different things.”
Darwin originally theorized evolution as descent with modification and differential survival. They discuss what is similar in software development, and what might be missing.
How Deming’s generative organizational principles apply to building software development teams: “In a good generative culture the complexity will naturally evolve.”
Is it wrong to piggyback off other systems to solve degeneracy?
“Human engineers make progress all the time by looking at the solutions that evolution has come up with.” But is that an effective model to follow? They discuss the possibilities and implications.
“Unless we allow for those emergent phenomena we're never going to get true complexity.”
Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless
Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting
Judah McAuley | LinkedIn
Tinuiti
Gang of Four Design Patterns
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

What Evolutionary Biology Can Tell Us About Software Development - Part 1 Aug 10, 2022

Show notes

Etienne De Bruin welcomes Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley to this episode of the CTO Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuit. In the first installment of this two-part episode, they’re exploring what engineers can learn from evolutionary biology when it comes to the software development process.
You'll hear Etienne, Aaron, Scott and Judah talk about:
How software development follows patterns of biology and ecology, as well as dynamic systems theory.
The importance of The Adjacent Possible. This is where modification occurs in a network that makes something possible that wasn't possible before the modification.
The way lay people think about code is much simpler than what coding actually is. "People who are not in software I always tell them, every piece of software you admire, …if you could peel the curtain back on that, you'll be shocked at how hard to understand and complicated and garbage the code looks," Aaron says. Software, especially coding, is much more complicated than it looks and there are so many algorithms that need to be followed. You can only change bits of code at a time or else the systems get out of balance.
What matters most is how well the system around the code works. The thing that makes the code most adaptable is you.
Why you should allow some randomness and some mess into your problem solving so that you can explore other avenues to resolve issues.
Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless
Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting
Judah McAuley | LinkedIn
Tinuiti
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

Work on your reputation inside and outside your company! with Kevin Goldsmith and Claudius Mbemba Jul 25, 2022

Show notes

Brittany Cotton and Etienne de Bruin talk to Kevin Goldsmith and Claudius Mbemba about the importance of building your reputation as CTO/VPE or technical executive.Check out 7ctos.com/podcast
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com

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