The Tech Trek

Highlights of my conversation with Laku: Aligning work to the broader company goals Engineers like to work on things that actually get used CTO should focus on customer success channels Focusing on what impact we can bring to the customer Translating that to daily motivation Distilling the message into the simplest form Not using release dates as motivation Explaining technical debt to the broader...

Highlights of my conversation with Cindy: Starting as the only female engineering hire in a startup Bring up diversity hiring plans before you are hired Transparency is at the center of inclusivity Putting women on interview panels is important, but making sure it’s not just a check box Be careful not to reward the wrong traits Advice for female engineers looking to move into management Ask for th...

Highlights of my conversation with Alonzo: Drivers for leaving a large public company for a startup Moving into the blockchain information space Trying to maximize time zone overlap in a remote-first strategy Avoiding information lag for remote employees Innovating the hiring process to fit your needs Throwing out the 2-week sprint and redesigning the process Building autonomous teams and trust Me...

Highlights of my conversation with Jeff: An idea can come from a one-off problem or a long-term strategic issue to tackle Relationship between research and product management Impact on roadmaps Investment grows as you prove the value Moving from research to POC When a hypothesis doesn’t work out (building corporate memory) Finding the balance in an engineer between implementing and researching Nur...

Highlights of my conversation with Fabian: Hiring the best talent vs a specific seniority level Hiring “scrappy” technologists Allowing your senior engineers to grow Calibrate team mix based on organizational goals Find a balance as you need to shift your hiring needs (avoid whiplash) A roadmap update shouldn’t require a complete alteration of the hiring plan Revisiting interview questions quarter...

Highlights of my conversation with Dehron: Be an advocate for your engineers Typing methodology changes to values People want scrum to drive autonomy and accountability Let people make mistakes to drive better project management skills Culture is an “output” (ask the why) Use bottom-up feedback Giving away control leads to a better scrum team Pilot ideas (tweaks vs grenades) Meet: Dehron Hite-Bens...

Highlights of my conversation with Jose: Being promoted into a role too quickly Continuing education to grow and enhance leadership skills It's important to have strong routines within a team Identifying patterns and focusing on the optimal ones Consistent processes help establish team expectations Identify your hiring gap and find the strongest person to cover that Searching for your next hire mi...

Highlights of my conversation with Amin: Attributes of a strong engineer Technical excellence doesn’t always mean being the best coder Impacting the overall organization is a key attribute of a manager Empathy is a key attribute of technical leadership Look for opportunities to affect the larger organization Enabling collaboration between managers and principal engineers Having “operational rigor”...

Highlights of my conversation with Leon: Is moving into management the right next step for an employee Create opportunities for an employee to gain some exposure to management Helping employees navigate different career tracks Finding the best fit for people you manage The (possibly false) allure of moving into management Keep evolving and growing your own managerial skills Easier to take an oppor...

Highlights of my conversation with Neil: Stakeholder’s level of technical sophistication impacts the level of planning Importance of the relationship with the product team Envisioning the team's growth past the current state Incubating a team until they are able to stand on their own Avoiding being too tactical Finding opportunities to piggyback new features into the existing work Helping new team...

Topics we covered: Retaining Top Talent Understanding your employees before it's too late Safe Spaces Are more Engineering Managers better? Hypergrowth Hiring Diversity Hiring Time spent on Talent Acquisition? Offers strategy Meet the guests: Kirby Frugia - https://www.mural.co/blog/meet-kirby-frugia Kirby Frugia is MURAL’s SVP of Engineering and is responsible for Product Engineering, DevOps, and...

Highlights of my conversation with Felix: Technical debt is a warning sign Liability in the code is not the same as technical debt Dealing with “code smell” Trying to quantify technical debt You need cause to dive into technical debt Very important to set your standards Define when things are “done” Why are you digging into the code? What things are and what they should be Meet: Felix Sargent is a...

Highlights of my conversation with Jeff: Wanting to join a company to impact individual lives Adjusting to a HIPAA regulated industry Understanding all aspects of data flow Evolving to the strategic impact of the CTO role and shedding some hats (the last one being VP of Engineering) Switching between the different hats (strategic vs technical) Creating an organizational plan to balance the tech st...

Highlights of my conversation with Nikhil: It takes a village (people, executives, everyone) for employee engagement to be successful Providing employees with safe spaces Leveraging trends from survey data (NPS style) Empower managers to align with individuals and their teams Allow teams to make decentralized decisions on how they implement certain processes Onboarding is a critical piece and star...

Highlights of my conversation with Ray: Historically security was done in the shadows Everyone is a partner to the security team Give people a sense of ownership and their part in the security program Drive surveys using tactical questions Do employees have confidence in the security team handling relevant issues If you have an external service, you should be thinking of security Go back and resur...

Highlights of my conversation with Dhara: Try to adopt a product mindset for shared services Measure value in a tangible way Focus on developer adoption as a metric Direct impact on development life cycle Celebrating for the team With technical customers, a technical product manager would be helpful Get client stakeholder engagement to understand and drive platform requirements Building awareness...

Highlights of my conversation with John: Establishing an analytics Center of Excellence Using a hub and spoke model as a service provider to the business Hiring analysts with a consultative mindset Consistently delivering solutions to build long term trust Juggling the delivery roadmap to meet business needs Meet: Currently Director for Analytics at Brookdale Senior Living, John is an expert in di...

Highlights of my conversation with Joshua: Educating the organization on the benefits of improved reliability and observability capabilities Setting up an SRE book club The answer isn’t always “do what Google does” Wearing your on-call “pain suit” Getting involved in business discussions earlier Sometimes it's about showing out the team’s abilities (celebrating the wins) SRE has always been a cult...

Highlights of my conversation with Sagar: Different personas have their own definition of quality Quality is baked in by shifting the process left The QA team is involved in planning and grooming Developers spend half of the sprint on QA Each pod is a self-sufficient team Meet: Sagar Anand works as a Sr Engineering Manager at Twin Health, leading the Platform team to help reverse chronic metabolic...

Highlights from my chat with Ken: Being deliberate about who and what you are Doubling a team and the change in how a team operates Incorporating different technical skill sets Bringing in external expertise and disseminating the knowledge Opening information silos and increasing transparency Meet: Ken Pickering is the VP of Engineering at Starburst Data, where he's looking to help companies make...

Highlights from my conversation with Brian: Niche industry but not niche skills Working with other teams to partner where there is a skills gap Realizing which parts of the tech stack you can “let go” to broaden the candidate pool Software engineering foundations go a long way Building an ecosystem around the Windows platform Meet: Brian Jackson ​​is a DevOps advocate currently helping create imme...

Highlights of my conversation with Kinshuk: Bell curve of seniority on the team Monitoring the manager to engineering ratio; targetting 1:5 Promoting people into management roles leads to internal credibility to lead the team Building an engineering program to give back to the organization Many times career frameworks are introduced too late in the hyper-growth phase Cedar’s Distinguished Engineer...

Some of what Arie covers: The rising importance of AB testing Measuring the impact of localization AB testing relationship with product management Archive testing recommendations as a knowledge repository Meet: Arie Polycarpou is the Manager of Digital Analytics and A/B Testing at Total Wine & More. He was raised in the Midwest and attended Indiana University Kelley School of Business with Maj...

Some of what Christian covers: Horizontal service teams enable and collaborate The balancing point between innovation and confidence in roadmaps Timeboxing approach to provide capped flexibility to explore Rotational engineering programs grow cross-functional relationships Integrating the learned knowledge from the rotational engineering program Creating a feedback loop via a service-oriented mind...

Some of what Dina talks about: Finding a way to connect with your team in a way you haven’t before Building safe spaces to allow people to be heard All slack channels are public Create a culture committee to have employees be a part of the solution Break down assumptions that have been made Time and space introduce attribution error Meet: Dina Bruzek has over 31 years of experience in technology w...