Geeks Who Lead Podcast

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...

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 Intell...

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 chall...

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 o...

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 th...

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...

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 Co...

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...

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...

 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 disadv...

 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...

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. PA...

In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people are disengaged from their work and how we can do a better job of connecting our teams to their missions.  Some of the resources shared by Kimberly:  Project Score Card Example PDF Performance Management Evaluations Reviews PDF Complete Detailed Quart...

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 onb...

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...

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 I...

 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...

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 accountabili...

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 in...

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 informati...

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 de...

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...

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,...

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

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