The Tech Trek

Key takeaways: Importance of having context around the greater pieces of what the business is doing Staying engaged in the business vision post-onboarding The 1-on-1 is the employees time Transparency helps employees stay aligned to the company vision Meet:  Jason Wilcox is head of technology for automotive services at Jerry. Jason leads teams using artificial intelligence and machine-learnin...

Key takeaways: Bringing modern tech thinking to a legacy company Moving away from a FAANG to a non-tech company Ability to move the needle Building agile pods aligned to company objectives Adjusting compensation and hiring strategies Meet:   Brian Pivar is the Senior Director of Data and Analytics at Kraft Heinz.  He has been at Kraft Heinz for over 2.5 years and is responsible for...

Top takeaways: Challenges around scaling data engineering teams Pros and cons of keeping job descriptions vague Waiting to make the “right” hire? Focusing on retention and career progression Meet: Liran Eisenberg is a forward-thinking Data Architect with 20 years of technical management experience guiding the development and design of enterprise database platforms for global organizations. Working...

What you’ll learn: What to think about when you are looking to scale your engineering team Healthy tech debt to support fast growth 3 categories of tech debt Team design and growth ladders Meet:   Anil Beniwal is the Head of Engineering at Arcadia, an organization with the goal of accelerating the world's adoption of renewable energy. He was previously VP of Engineering at Betterment, an...

What you’ll learn: 1-way vs 2-way doors Making a transition from a FAANG to a startup A good process should solve an acute problem Meet:   Anthony Girolamo leads the product and engineering organization at FLEXE. His teams are responsible for the development of the FLEXE Technology Platform and the capabilities that set FLEXE apart. Prior to joining FLEXE, Anthony spent 9 years at Amazon...

What you’ll learn: Very important to define stretch goals Leveraging eNPS - employee net promoter score Using employee net promoter score within your agile process Constantly tweaking and improving the methodology Getting to Teal! (Laloux Cultural Model) Meet:   Nate Loomis is a Director of Cloud Engineering at Ally Financial and Product Manager of the Cloud Patterns (Patterneers) squad....

Top 3 takeaways: The looming retention problem - returning to the office Balancing team distribution via fewer time zones Adjusting salary bands to account for location and experience Meet: Mike Brittain is the VP of Engineering at Transfix, where he leads technology initiatives to build a simpler, smarter, and more sustainable freight ecosystem. His career in Internet software dates back to the l...

What you’ll learn: Decisions as a bridge between ideation and execution RACI decision-making Decisions can’t be made absent of context; Provide as much context as possible Meet: Dan Simon is currently the VP of Engineering at Qventus, a health care operations company.  In his capacity there he manages all aspects of engineering execution and operations, from application development to data sc...

What you’ll learn: - Adjusting to the differences in structure between private industry and the military - Valuing the importance of resource allocation - Dealing with the difference between training and education - When taking your first post-military role try to understand the importance of geography, industry, and function - Transitioning your network from the military to the private industry -...

What you’ll learn: How to grow an agile data and analytics team Solving data discovery challenges to speed up productivity Agility vs velocity Providing data capabilities to more users Meet: Romit Jadhwani is the Head of Growth Analytics, Data Science, and Business Intelligence at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, he led the Ads Business Intelligence team at Google. Romit is passionate about helping co...

What you’ll learn: Challenges in getting deep expertise in many areas Moving from a project focus to deeper subject matter expertise Moving towards intent-based leadership To learn more about Intent-Based Leadership - https://davidmarquet.com/ Meet: Brian Berger has served in a variety of Engineering and Operations leadership positions in IaaS and SaaS companies for 20+ years.  He works with...

What you can take away from this episode: Connecting consumer experiences to the product Using alternative data-rich sources of information to increase understanding Considering indirect factors in consumer behavior Future technologies to capture additional consumer data points Meet: Chris Ieva is a retired Marine Corps Infantry Officer who now heads up Data Science for Anheuser-Busch. If you have...

What we cover: Improving asynchronous communication Understanding where decisions are being made Establishing repeatable actions and rituals Leadership is about availability Part of the job of the leader is to tell the story and celebrate the team Meet: Mitch Trale is Head of Infrastructure at HackerOne -- the world's leading crowdsourced security platform. He is responsible for HackerOne's highly...

What you’ll learn: Growing and building your security capabilities Prioritizing the first cybersecurity hire Security tools and automation rather than shifting left Building relationships with security startups to expand capabilities Meet: Jonathan Jaffe, Lemonade Insurance's CISO. Jonathan's been practicing security since 1997. He has designed and installed the earliest internet-centric access co...

What you’ll learn: Building resiliency into systems Failing and non-failing validations If failure happens, what’s the fallback plan? Creating SLAs with upstream teams Meet: Teresa Martyny is the Engineering Manager for the Data OS Infrastructure team at New Relic, an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. If you have any questions for Teresa, please feel free...

What you’ll learn: The extensibility of the Salesforce platform Growth and evolution of the platform Pushing Salesforce to do something that it shouldn’t Dealing with technical debt Meet: Hyung Lee started his career in finance software and really took a more focused route during his tenure at Salesforce. From there he had the fortune to work at some noteworthy technology companies. He has a passi...

What you’ll learn: Building trust and transparency in the team Adjusting the structure of the 1-1 meeting for Zooms Replicating the ideation process while remote Meet: Zak Allen is the VP of Engineering at Shogun. Shogun, backed by 8VC and Founders Fund, empowers home improvement contractors with software products to help them manage their businesses such as Financing, Payments, and other tools. Z...

What you’ll learn: The power of being underestimated Being one of few females as an IT Director in the Massachusetts technology public sector Early exposure to technology had a very positive impact From liberal arts degree to leader in Infrastructure Get ahead by finding the work that nobody wants to do. Doing it. And doing it well. Meet: Kendra Rozett McCormick is Manager of Infrastructure Engine...

What you’ll learn: The widening scope of IT Service Management Does ITSM need their own Service Management Officer? ITSM buy-in and the why behind it Meet: Carlis Ragland - Assistant VP Configuration Manager at Valley Bank - has over 25 years of IT experience, and 10 years of IT Information Library (ITIL) experience using IT Service Management (ITSM) platforms such as ServiceNow. He was formally t...

What you’ll learn: Finding the right skill set mix in growing your analytics team Interviewing tip: Trying to understand how a candidate’s problem-solving skills when there isn’t a clear cut outcome Modern analytics driving further advanced skills Meet: Krishna is a quantitative strategic leader with a focus on finding solutions to business problems through the use of big-data behavioral analytics...

What you’ll learn: Proactive vs reactive problem management Managing the multiple touchpoints involved in a service incident Balancing needs vs the squeaky wheel Meet:  Kevin Recio is an Information Technology professional with 6+ years of experience across multiple companies and industries. His IT experience includes enterprise platform implementations, management of IT service operations ro...

What you’ll learn: Work fast and iterate very quickly Try to think with a clear mind - communicate through writing over talking Shorten time to ideation Happiness of the customer as a measure of product quality Meet: David Ting, Vice President of Nylas, has over 20 years of leadership experience in mobile development, scalable architecture, cloud infrastructure, big data, and machine learning.&nbs...

What you’ll learn: Upskilling the data analyst role Medical knowledge is doubling every 73 days; pushing the technical envelope to cope with the increase Organizational maturity will drive the analytics hiring needs Meet: Nana Somuah the Director for Data Analytics at Cityblock, responsible for Data Strategy and managing a team of data analysts. My main goal within the company is to improve our me...

What you’ll learn: Deeper partnership between platform and security engineering teams Security by design Focusing on a handful of problems that really matter Meet: Aidan Anderson is a Security Engineering Manager at FloQast, where he is focused on building a best-in-class security program that delivers resilience, confidence, and trust in the solution.  Aidan has had the privilege of helping...

What you’ll learn: Delivering analytics in a hypergrowth industry Simplifying and pinpointing the direct analytic needs Meet: Martin Corso is the Director of Measurement and Analytics for Surfside, a data-driven customer acquisition platform that specializes in activating and expanding 1st party data for marketing, insights, and measurement. Martin has diverse experience utilizing digital and offl...