The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Group coaching, team accountability & ‘next-level’ goals with Joy Dixon #78 Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

Joy Dixon (Sr Manager, Engineering @ Salesforce) walks us through a unique goal-setting framework: Next Level Goals - to help you harness group accountability & accelerate their growth. Joy breaks down the process of getting buy-in from skeptical engineers, the power of peer accountability stand-ups, and why embodying your goals can be more effective than moving towards them.

ABOUT JOY DIXON

Joy Dixon (@JoyD1x0n) is a people-first, innovative, daring, JEDI Leader with strong technical prowess and deep business acumen. Joy has worked in the tech industry for 20+ years as a people leader, software engineer, technical trainer, and network administrator. Joy holds a Bachelor’s degree in African-American Studies, a Master’s degree in Software Engineering, and several professional certifications in software development and Agile methodologies.

In the course of a diverse career, Joy has… Led and grown development teams to deliver engineering excellence in code, collaboration, and commitment all while modeling collective genius and having fun. Designed and developed applications using several programming languages and in various environments. In addition, she has configured and administered networks for global companies. Designed and delivered online and in-person, web, animation, and game development courses. Started a software development training company, Mosaic Presence to expand opportunities, cultivate community, and promote the Mosaic.

As a self-described sunflower in a bed of roses, Joy conceives and constructs new paths that inspire innovation and transform cultures. She gives 100%+ to herself, team, and work modeling care, creativity, and excellence. Joy is a courageous communicator whose authenticity and integrity are valued and admired. Along with the above, Joy connects people and ideas in a heartfelt effort to support the success of everyone.

Additionally, Joy loves music, animation, women's basketball, the Golden State Warriors, and motorcycles. Joy lives by the following quote from the world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon, Wilma Rudolph: "'I can't' are two words that have never been in my vocabulary. I believe in me more than anything in this world."

"Don't tell people 'I like to run.' Tell them 'I'm a runner!'

It makes a world of difference! So you are embodying that person or those attributes that you want to have. And then from there, you move forward.

Because if you say 'I'm moving towards my goal.' Then you're also saying 'I'm not there yet.' But if you embody the end, ‘I'm already there!’ Right?

We know you're not holy already there, but you embody the end and then, act as if! And it makes a world of difference. You make so much more progress.

- Joy Dixon

Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.

Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

SHOW NOTES:

Team building happens in the in-between moments (2:07)
Get the right things done with smaller goals (5:52)
Help eng team members make realistic business impacts (8:59)
How to implement the Next Level framework with your eng teams (12:07)
The magic wand: monthly accountability check-ins (16:42)
Leverage peers for accountability, not just managers (18:52)
The network effects of group accountability (19:47)
Embodying your goals vs. moving towards them (25:01)
Getting buy-in from skeptical engineers (29:03)
How to measure and track abstract goals (31:46)
Apply BRAVING to engineering leadership (34:34)
Rapid Fire Questions (37:40)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

(book) Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins - book Joy referenced talking about “constant and never-ending improvement
(book) The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker - book referenced by Patrick discussing facilitation principles
(book) Dare to Lead by Brene Brown - book referenced by Joy discussing BRAVING framework applied within her engineering team meetings
(book) Linchpin by Seth Godin - what Joy is reading now

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How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth w/ Samir Naik #77 Mar 22, 2022

Show notes

How eng orgs (and careers) evolve through hyper-growth w/ Samir Naik #77

Samir Naik (Head of Engineering, Core Products @ Plaid) shares how Plaid’s engineering org has evolved over the last 10 years & the many unexpected ways his own career has transformed alongside Plaid. Samir deconstructs 3 different growth phases at Plaid, the indicators that your company is ready for the next growth stage, and how to choose an emerging tech city to expand to! Plus critical questions that helped guide Samir’s career within Plaid.

ABOUT SAMIR NAIK

Samir Naik (@samirnaik) is Head of Engineering for Plaid’s Core Products, overseeing a cross-functional team of product managers, engineers, designers, marketers building and scaling our core APIs. Having worn many hats throughout his years at Plaid, he’s managed teams large and small and as the first external engineering manager hire, he’s been instrumental in building Plaid’s engineering function from the ground up. Previously, Samir led teams at Dropbox, Zynga, and Disney.

"I made the comment... I was like, 'I don't think a lot of this is really engineering focused, right? It doesn't seem super relevant to the engineering team..."

And he kind of just paused and looked at me and was like, 'That is your job! Doesn't matter if it's engineering or not, you need to fix these problems.'

And I think it was a mindset shift for me, and it was really helpful feedback. But I think it kind of framed that there's a bunch of seams in an organization. Doesn't matter whether they're engineering or not, but I really need to look for those seams and those opportunities and make sure they're addressed, whether that's in my job description or not.

- Samir Naik

Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.

Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support. Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth.

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

What was Plaid like in 2017? (2:56)
Approaching Eng Mgmt as a business within a business (6:47)
The three growth phases of Plaid (7:55)
Deciding the sequence of scaling for an engineering organization (13:10)
Relying on Eng Managers for project management (14:56)
How to attract Sr Engineers during hyper-growth (16:55)
Maturing from a single product to multiple business units (18:35)
Org maturity as a lagging indicator of success (20:08)
Indicators that your company is ready for growth stage 2 (21:10)
How scaling turned Samir’s role into a more business-focused function (24:04)
How to choose an emerging tech city to expand to (27:32)
The need for “2nd communities” in remote organizations (31:58)
Indicators that your company is ready for growth stage 3 (34:48)
How long should you delay growth stage 3? (38:29)
Evolving company culture as the organization scales (40:10)
Handing off easy tasks that can be growth opportunities for others (43:40)
Rapid Fire Questions (46:23)
Takeaways (50:00)

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Hypergrowth, Scaling & Org Design w/ Surabhi Gupta #76 Mar 15, 2022

Show notes

Hypergrowth, Scaling & Org Design w/ Surabhi Gupta #76

Discerning what to prioritize is key to success for any organization, and even more critical during hypergrowth. Surabhi Gupta (Head of Engineering @ Robinhood) shares how she identified current and future priorities as their eng org scaled from 300 to 1,000+ engineers. Plus her approach to org design, how to set up new hires for success during hypergrowth, and a framework for predicting future personnel requirements.

ABOUT SURABHI GUPTA

Surabhi Gupta is the VP of Product Engineering at Robinhood, where she oversees the company's growing engineering organization. Prior to Robinhood, Surabhi spent seven years at Airbnb where she was Head of Engineering for Airbnb's Homes business. During her tenure at Airbnb, she led a variety of teams such as Search, Growth, Guest and Host. Before Airbnb, she was a Software Engineer at Google, where she worked on web search ranking, and the Google Now team on predictive search. Surabhi holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford.

"These are not insurmountable problems. So when you make that case to other leaders, especially outside of engineering, I think it's important that...
‘Hey, we're not going for this ideal world of no technical debt. It's just that here's the impact of not focusing on it. The impact of not focusing on this technical debt is that we are going to see outages and there will be this false sense of progress because every time the engineers try to focus on some product work, they're going to have to go on this outage and solve that.’
I think the best way to put it really is you are treading water at that point.”
- Surabhi Gupta

Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.

Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

Joining Robinhood in the pandemic (2:23)
How new leaders can eliminate bottlenecks (6:59)
How to amend decisions previously made by Executive Team Members (8:58)
Robinhood’s growth from 300 engineers to 1,000 (11:49)
The 3 aspects of scaling (12:46)
Why process makes people happy (14:45)
The effects of scaling on team structure (17:33)
How to approach org design (19:23)
Why flatter org structures are better for hypergrowth (21:36)
How to perform org alignment check-ups (24:37)
Forming the executive engineering team (25:55)
A framework for predicting future personnel requirements (29:26)
How to set up new hires for success during hypergrowth (32:42)
Successfully onboarding senior leaders during hypergrowth (34:25)
Cultivating a sense of belonging in the present “future of work” (36:03)
Finding the right engineering teams for new hires (39:18)
Rapid Fire Questions (41:07)
Takeaways (45:47)

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A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Career Growth & Internal Mobility w/ Tara Ellis #75 Mar 09, 2022

Show notes

In today’s hiring environment, it’s unreasonable to expect someone to stay on your team forever. So how do you prioritize both the success of your team/company AND support the career growth of folks on your team? Tara Ellis (Engineering Leader, Animation Content Engineering @ Netflix) shares her approach to career growth & why she encourages her team to outgrow their roles! Plus, how to help someone understand if management is the right next step and how other leaders can begin facilitating a growth mentality in their organizations.

ABOUT TARA ELLIS

Tara Ellis (@maverick_mind) is an avid tinkerer and has been since the early days of the world wide web. As a critical and creative thinker, she is a relentless problem-solver skilled in applying analysis, technical knowledge, and strong interpersonal skills in her leadership style. Tara is a strong believer in “Peopleware” and because of that has a keen understanding of building and leading teams that deliver.

As a leader at Netflix, Tara has led diverse engineering teams including continuously improving the Payments and Non-Member Experience to bring in new Netflix members globally. Currently, she leads teams in Animation Studio and Production Engineering in building products that power the Netflix Animation Studio ecosystem. Prior to joining Netflix, she led engineering teams at Disney Parks; if you’ve been to Disneyland or Disneyworld in the last decade, you’ve interacted with some of her teams’ software. She honed her engineering skills in the fast-paced, ever-changing environment at Amazon, learning lessons she still uses today.

Outside of work, Tara loves to spend time with her family, cooking and traveling. She is a passionate collector and player of board games and a music aficionado.

“When someone joins my team, I try to spend a fair bit of time with the expectation that you are not going to be here forever. I hope you are here as long as I can keep you. As long as our journeys kind of go together.
But at some point, whether that be a year, three years, five years... you're going to outgrow this. That's just the nature of work. And so I like to be really upfront about that. And then I also like to prepare for that!”
- Tara Ellis

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

Why should you help engineers outgrow their positions? (1:46)
How to discuss career growth with your team members ( 4:15)
Be a multiplier for the people you’re leading (5:53)
A framework for managers to facilitate growth (9:02)
Supporting skills acquisition for engineering contributors (12:44)
Helping someone understand whether they should be manager (16:12)
How to help first-time managers make less mistakes (25:09)
Communicating with compassionate directness (28:52)
Netflix’s pivot to growing people internally (32:45)
How managers can begin facilitating a growth mentality for their teams (42:41)
Rapid Fire Questions (45:21)
Takeaways (51:35)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

(article) “When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron” by Lara Hogan
(video) “How I learned to stop worrying, and grow high performing teams” by Tara Ellis
(book rec) “Repairman Jack” by F. Paul Wilson, Nina Abbott

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Conflict Optimization with Jordan Adler #74 Mar 01, 2022

Show notes

Conflict is a necessary part of the job. So how can you transform conflict to be collaborative, not competitive? Jordan Adler (Head of Dev Eng @ OneSignal) previews his conflict optimization workshop taking place at our 2022 Spring Virtual Summit! Jordan shares some of the main sources of conflict in eng teams, how to uncover underlying needs, shift people from entrenched positions & other frameworks to create an optimal environment for healthy conflict.

ABOUT JORDAN ADLER

Jordan M. Adler (@jordanmadler) is the Head of Developer Engineering at OneSignal, where he drives the cutting edge of cross-platform customer engagement messaging APIs & SDKs. Previously, Jordan evolved Engineering Productivity at Cruise, led API Platform engineering at Pinterest, and was a Strategic Partner Engineer and Developer Advocate at Google, where he managed technical partnerships between major organizations and Google.

“Looking at the conflict in particular, how do we switch from 'positions' to 'interests?'
Right. So how do we take away from... ‘Hey, this is what I want, this is what you want.’
To... ‘This is the reason that I have a particular want. And this is the reason that you have a particular want. And if we have clarity together, collectively on what those interests are, then we can collaboratively work towards a solution.’"
- Jordan Adler

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

Conflict optimization vs. conflict resolution (2:33)
Engineering leaders need to embrace conflict (4:34)
Conflict is necessary for collaboration (5:52)
What creates conflict in engineering teams? (8:32)
A real example of conflict optimization (10:31)
How conflict optimization leads to better decisions (13:21)
Using conflict as constraints to produce better solutions (15:24)
How to optimize a conflict (17:38)
Switching from "positions" to "interests" (20:26)
Uncovering the underlying emotional needs in a conflict (23:24)
How to use words that convey curiosity and not emotional violence (25:58)
Why video calls are key to conflict resolution in remote work (28:55)
How to practice conflict optimization - a preview of Jordan’s workshop during ELC’s Spring Summit 2022 (35:27)
Ways to avoid conflict in the first place (37:15)
Rapid Fire Questions (38:49)
Takeaways (42:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Jordan’s website: https://jmadler.dev/
(book) Conscious Business by Fred Kofman - Jerry’s favorite book
(link) David Anderson Hooker - conflict transformation source Jordan referenced
(link) Diana Francis - conflict transformation source Jordan referenced
(link) Non-violent communication & Dr. Marshall Roseberg

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Belonging, Retention, & Human-Centered Leadership with Lucius DiPhillips #73 Feb 22, 2022

Show notes

Belonging and business results are not opposing priorities! Lucius DiPhillips (CIO @ AirBnB) shares how every team member's sense of belonging is the first principle that paves the way for all other business goals. You’ll hear how Airbnb designed programs & policies to enhance belonging, support critical employee challenges, and create industry-leading retention during the height of the covid-19 pandemic & ‘great resignation’

ABOUT LUCIUS DIPHILLIPS

Lucius DiPhillips is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Airbnb, where he shares the company mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. He has over 20 years of experience that spans Product Development, Information Technology, Customer Service, Financial Services, Payments, eCommerce, and Trust & Safety.

Prior to joining Airbnb, Lucius held multiple Technology & Operations leadership roles at eBay, PayPal, Bank of America, and General Electric. He is originally from upstate New York where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and serves as the executive sponsor for several diversity and belonging groups and initiatives across the company. Through his sponsorship, Lucius has been instrumental in helping to improve the ways in which Airbnb attracts and retains diverse technical talent.

Lucius has 2 children, a lovely wife, and a new puppy in the family! He is based in Silicon Valley, but also enjoys spending as much time as he can in the Tahoe area.

"And that's what the survey told us... People are missing that sense of community, people are missing flexibility, people are missing warmth and acknowledgment... That was really it!
Ask people, 'what do they need?' And then deliver what they need.
And it's really about being in tune and listening and learning and then delivering on what those things are gonna look like for the people."
- Lucius DiPhillips

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

Why engineering leaders need to create a sense of belonging (2:34)
How (and why) Airbnb measures belonging (4:16)
Re-inventing the coffee-chat, coordinated no-meeting-days, and other wellness practices that work (7:31)
Creating a culture of idea sharing and support for employee-led initiatives (11:17)
The impact of implementing the Native Genius framework for all 500 of Airbnb’s team members (12:43)
Using a framework for career conversations as a belonging and engagement strategy (15:45)
Lucius’ template for career conversations (17:29)
Achieving some of the lowest turnover rates, in a company with some of the lowest turnover rates in the industry… during the great resignation! (25:04)
Lucius’ mentoring story on the impact of career conversations on burnout & retention (25:45)
You CAN balance career development conversations with business goals (28:54)
How to be a “multiplier” and facilitate the best work from your team members (33:09)
Effective retention strategies during the “Great Resignation”(37:21)
How leaders can use an Airbnb “host” mindset to tune into their people's needs (44:50)
Investing in the tools for the future of work (48:51)
Rapid-fire questions (56:44)
Takeaways (1:03:08)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

(tool) Topia.io - AR/VR virtual meetup & community tool Lucius experimented with his team
(book) “Multipliers” by Liz Wiseman
(coaching/workshop) "Native Genius" - workshop & consulting to activate innate intelligence with Kristen Wheeler
(resource) Native Genius - workbook from Liz Wiseman to understand your team’s Native Genius

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Why Engineering Needs a Seat at the Negotiating Table with Melody Hildebrandt #72 Feb 15, 2022

Show notes

M&As can be a major disruption for engineering orgs… so how can eng leaders strategically approach deal structuring in a way that benefits instead of distracts? Melody Hildebrandt (EVP Eng / CISO @ Fox Corporation & COO @ Blockchain Creative Labs) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history, what she learned negotiating on behalf of the tech org, and how they were able to use the event to accelerate innovation and productivity.

ABOUT MELODY HILDEBRANDT

Melody Hildebrandt (@mhil) is the Chief Information Security Officer at FOX and Chief Operating Officer of its subsidiary Blockchain Creative Labs (BCL). She is responsible for the cyber security posture of the entire business, spanning Fox Sports, Fox News, and Fox Entertainment. She also leads technology Merger & Acquisition efforts, identifying areas for investment of the company, leading to her current operating leadership role of FOX’s expansion into NFT and other blockchain technologies through the $100m creative fund of BCL.

Previously, she ran product and engineering for all digital experiences across web, mobile, and living room applications within the FOX brands, notably leading the platform architecture to stream Super Bowl 2020, which broke all previous national video concurrency records while also setting a new quality bar with 4K/HDR. She is the Executive Sponsor of FOX Women in Technology and on the FOX Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council.

She previously was the Global Chief Information Security Officer at 21st Century Fox where she was responsible for the cyber security posture of 21CF businesses including 20th Century Fox, Fox Networks Group, National Geographic Partners, Fox News, Star India and others. She moved into a larger role at FOX following the announcement of the spin-off of many assets to Disney.

Before joining 21CF, she was an executive vice president of Palantir Technologies. An early employee of the company, she helped start Palantir’s Commercial work, opened its New York Office, and led Palantir’s sales, product and field execution in cyber security, anti-money laundering, and rogue trading detection. Prior to that, she consulted to US and international governments with Booz Allen Hamilton where she designed military and strategy wargames.

"One thing that we intervened on very quickly because we were AT the table for (the conversation), "How should we structure the deal?" Was to do something that was quite counter-intuitive I think, and very controversial... Which was to say ‘Let's essentially value all of our current technology assets at near-zero... And make them part of the deal.’"

- Melody Hildebrandt

SHOW NOTES:

Background on the Fox Disney “mega-deal” (3:14)
How to structure an M&A to accelerate your tech roadmap (5:45)
Motivating engineering teams with forcing functions (10:07)
What it was like representing a tech org in deal structuring (13:22)
How to develop an engineering org’s merger strategy (18:00)
M&A negotiation tips for engineering leaders (20:41)
A critical skill for eng leaders: converting tech pains into business goals (23:45)
How to get executive buy-in on engineering initiatives (29:01)
“Crashing” your way to a seat at the table (32:18)
Melody’s process for setting the strategic direction of an engineering org (33:37)
Managing engineering teams from high and low — the middle is death (36:02)
Why this M&A event continues to accelerate innovation (39:10)
Rapid-Fire Questions (44:18)
Takeaways (49:10)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

(article) A super-powered approach to tech transformation - Melody Hildebrandt& Paul Cheesborough’s article on the untold story of the 21st Century Fox & Disney transaction
(podcast) Conversations with Tyler esteemed economist Tyler Cowen engages with today’s most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.
(book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
(reference) The Masked Singer NFT project - www.maskverse.com

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“Finding Flow” in Engineering Leadership with Rob Zuber #71 Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

The quest to “find flow” as an eng leader can be elusive! Rob Zuber (CTO @ CircleCI) shares about his personal quest to find flow, refining/refocusing responsibilities as CTO, and why he brought on an SVPE to support. Plus some of the personal discovery frameworks & executive-level delegation practices that may aid your own quest to find flow as an engineering leader.

ABOUT ROB ZUBER

Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

Before CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, Continuous Integration and Deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers acquired by Appconomy in 2011.

Rob holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two children.

"When you start a company or you end up leading a very small company, the decision about how many people you end up managing is external forces on the company. The company just grows and your team grows to support it. And no one is saying, ‘Hey, it looks like you're ready for this...’
And so I think so often what you see is early leaders end up exiting because that transition happens faster than they were prepared for. To me, that's a really fascinating dynamic because a lot of people coming into organizations are both opting in and getting selected in for the stage of the organization that you have...”
- Rob Zuber

SHOW NOTES

Rob’s reflections on recapturing the “first-time coding” experience (3:08)
On finding flow as an engineering leader (6:48)
How Rob thinks about his role as CTO & why he brought on an SVPE to support (10:48)
The “One Thing” moment & finding flow leading engineering teams (15:21)
How do you intentionally protect maker-time (20:14)
Balancing challenge & support to create flow (24:21)
Frameworks for personal discovery or delegating executive responsibilities (29:35)
On introducing resets & retro-ing your org (34:41)
Rapid-Fire Questions (38:37)
Takeaways (43:28)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

“The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller (book)
First Team concept (definition)
How CircleCI modeled it’s security training after DEF CON’s capture the flag (article)

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AI/ML Start-up Trends with Anna Patterson #70 Feb 01, 2022

Show notes

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!

ABOUT ANNA PATTERSON

Anna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund’s global activities.

Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google’s Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc.

Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results.

Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift.

Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis.

Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband.

"When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline.
What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan.
I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..."

- Anna Patterson

Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.

Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

Are you an eng leader interested in taking the leap to start your own company? Check out our brand new podcast series, Engineering Founders - Where we explore the transition from eng leader to founder!

Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform HERE!

SHOW NOTES:

Anna’s background scaling complex systems (4:00)
Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19)
The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03)
The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14)
What’s after deep learning? (18:14)
Machine learning and source code (20:06)
What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04)
How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43)
Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16)
How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30)
Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20)
How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49)
Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Gradient Ventures (Website)
Streamlit.io (Website) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platform
Building Your AI A-Team (Link) - Anna and Adrien Treuille’s talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling

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Surprising Lessons from Sales with Maulie Dass #69 Jan 25, 2022

Show notes

What lessons can you learn from the strange and unfamiliar world of the sales team? Maulie Dass (Global Lead @ Cisco Innovation Labs) has experienced both worlds and joins to share what she’s learned! We cover questions to help you get to the root issues of your customer, design thinking strategies to generate customer empathy in your teams, how to balance product vision vs. feature requests from sales & more!

ABOUT MAULIE DASS

Maulie Dass (@mauliedass) is the Global Lead for Cisco's Innovation Labs, which works closely with local industries to create new technology solutions that solve common pain points and positively impact business, society, and the planet. She has been in the industry for over 20 years in a variety of tech, strategic, and customer-facing leadership roles. Maulie is passionate about her customers, innovation, technology, inclusivity, and cheese pizza.

"Even if a customer is very clear on a solution that they want... "I need an AI ML solution that does X, Y, Z." The question that I use often is "Tell me more about that? Like, what is instigating this need?" Think of the next question that'll kind of get you closer and closer to the source, or the root of the issue."

- Maulie Dass

SHOW NOTES:

Maulie shares the “expensive lessons” she learned while designing her first microchip (2:00)
How learning and curiosity guided Maulie’s career across engineering, sales, and innovation (6:19)
What engineering leaders can learn from sales (11:07)
“Seek to understand first” & questions Maulie uses to empathize (17:30)
When should leaders stop asking questions? (21:57)
How to use the design thinking tool “A Day in the Life” to cultivate customer empathy and communicate between engineering and product (23:05)
How to navigate your product vision versus feature requests from sales (28:45)
How to manage and sustain your personal energy long-term (32:40)
The impact of changing your communication style & having cultural awareness (36:03)
Rapid-Fire Questions (39:17)
Takeaways (42:19)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

Get-Woke on Github - A tool to detect non-inclusive language in your source-code
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Amazon) - Maulie’s book of choice for avoiding accidental exclusion in the world around us

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