Geeks Who Lead Podcast

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 feat...

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 supe...

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...

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.

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...

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 e...

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...

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...

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...

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 C...

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 mode...

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 speakin...

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...

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 Engin...

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 Serv...

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 Engin...

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 mana...

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 ne...

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 worki...

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 managi...

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 e...

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 hi...

Companies have largely figured out software. Data science, however, seems to be the new frontier. Many data scientists are coming from largely academic backgrounds and maybe don’t understand how to function at jobs in the private sector. Today’s guest is Ian Wong , co-founder and CTO of Opendoor. He chatted with Peter about the questions data scientists can ask themselves to better align their wor...

Content should be both structure driven, and easily integrate with software. But most Content Management Systems are legacy systems that are not intuitive and clunky. Paolo Negri , co-founder and CTO of Contentful , was an early adopter of GraphQL. This week on CTO Connection, Paolo talked to Peter about why GraphQL works so well for content and why organizations should strive to be API-driven. Tu...

Thanks to the pandemic, many people are getting their first taste of working remotely. But for Gustavo Niemeyer of Canonical, having a globally distributed team is just a way of life. On this week’s episode of CTO Connection, he discusses the pros, cons, and considerations for companies considering globally distributed teams. Further, Gustavo talks to Peter about managing teams looking to solve bi...