We had a blast at ELC Annual 2024, so we wanted to bring our podcast listeners some of the best highlights from popular sessions! This episode features one of the ELC Annual sessions with Anupam Singh (VP of AI & Growth Engineering @ Roblox) & Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft), as they discuss building AI/ML models at a massive scale. Anupam shares how Roblox – an immersive 3D platform with more than 77 million daily active users – scaled from zero to nearly 200 different AI models. They discuss strategies for deciding when to use open source vs. creating proprietary models; how to operationalize your models for 24/7 use; the importance of data pipelines; current and future challenges to keep in mind when creating / scaling AI models; and answer some questions from the live Q&A.

ABOUT ANUPAM SINGH

Anupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution.

"The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'”

- Anupam Singh   

ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVA

Maria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma.

SHOW NOTES:

• How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30)
• The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34)
• Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06)
• What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12)
• Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19)
• Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06)
• How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20)
• The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18)
• Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52)
• Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21)
• Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29)
• When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36)
• Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03)
• Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03)
• How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back in late September with new guests! We have some excellent sessions at the conference - check out the agenda here: https://sfelc.com/annual2024#agenda

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In today’s episode, we’re highlighting one of our favorite past conversations, featuring Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Included Health. We cover tools for increasing your capacity to win as an eng leader, getting unstuck in your career / moving forward, and applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity principles to the career. Wade shares stories of success – and failure – as an eng manager, best practices to measure success as an eng leader, and how to increase your team’s performance & potential.

ABOUT WADE CHAMBERS

Wade Chambers (@wadechambers) is the CTO and SVP of Engineering at IncludedHealth, a company that provides technology solutions to improve the way patients get healthcare matched to their needs. He has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, Proofpoint, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth.

“The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable...’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward.”

- Wade Chambers   

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

SHOW NOTES:

• Wade’s background in building a habit of conscious growth & digging deeper (4:14)
• Overcoming early failures as a first-time manager (8:11)
• Why it’s hard to unhear the truth & how to incorporate feedback as a manager (13:08)
• How understanding neuroplasticity impacts career development (18:11)
• Moving along the spectrum of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence (19:30)
• Align your growth to impact your company AND move your career forward (24:37)
• Why eng leaders need to truly understand their org’s business needs (29:49)
• Strategies for both winning & increasing your capacity to win (35:30)
• How to increase the potential of individuals & your overall team (40:52)
• Factors that are keeping you stuck in career growth (44:39)
• Turning to books to maximize learning / growth (52:11)
• How to identify core principles & why they drive your behavior (55:37)
• Final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are & where you want to be (58:54)

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We discuss how to intentionally select & create new career opportunities, both external and internal! Our guests Ali Irturk (VP of Engineering @ CommerceHub) and Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health) share their favorite frameworks around eng leadership plus tips on prioritizing your opportunities, building great relationships, making tough decisions, and identifying your values. They also reveal recommendations on filtering / assessing decisions & their go-to leadership styles!

ABOUT ALI LITTMAN

Ali Littman is the Director of Engineering at Modern Health, where she leads product engineering teams that make it possible for people to receive online mental health services the moment they need and at no cost to the individual. Prior to her current role, she served as the Director of Engineering at Omada Health. Outside of her role, she is also a champion for diversity and inclusion, most notably leading a Women's ERG, serving on company-wide belonging councils, and providing imposter syndrome coaching.

Ali Littman is a passionate engineering leader specializing in healthcare technology both in traditional and digital healthcare settings. She currently serves as Head of Engineering at Modern Health where she gets to lead engineering teams on the exciting journey of evolving how people access and receive mental health care treatment around the world. Ali enjoys taking startups through their scale phase and has been an engineering leader on hypergrowth journeys at both Omada Health and Modern Health - leading them through organizational, market, and product expansion. Her background in business from Haas at UC Berkeley helps navigate these business challenges with the philosophy of having business strategy inform the engineering strategy.

At the end of the day, she cares most about being a great people leader who creates inclusive cultures and teaches managers how to be great managers for their teams. She also goes a step beyond her usual management duties to serve on Belonging Councils, lead ERGs, provides imposter syndrome coaching, and mentor individuals from under-represented groups in tech. Additionally, Ali's led external talks on navigating career growth, imposter syndrome, challenging leadership scenarios, and more!

"I view my relationship to people that I work with or people that I manage right now, as actually like a lifelong commitment and I think because of that, I end up with these really strong connections even beyond past opportunities."

- Ali Littman   

ABOUT ALI IRTURK

Ali's day-to-day passion is creating and being part of efficient and effective engineering organizations that are firing on all cylinders where team members can achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in a psychologically safe environment. He will continue to realize this passion by working at CommerceHub as their Vice President of Engineering.

He previously worked at rocketship start-ups funded by some of the top VCs in the world including a16z, SoftBank, Microsoft Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures to name a few. Ali was the Vice President of Engineering at WorkBoard, a strategy and results enterprise SaaS platform helping large organizations align quickly for results, leading product delivery as well as accessibility, application security, release engineering, platform, and infrastructure teams. Previously, he was the Vice President of Engineering at ALICE Technologies working on revolutionizing the construction industry with an artificial intelligence-powered enterprise SaaS product.

Ali also created and managed the advanced products group at Cognex Corporation (NASDAQ: CGNX) for 8 years while working as an adjunct professor at UC San Diego. His team worked on creating innovative industrial vision systems and software to help companies improve their product quality, eliminate production errors, and lower manufacturing costs. Examples of the products he worked on were the world's first vision system on chip and the world's fastest 3D scanning system to name a few.

Where Ali is today is quite different from where his journey began. Born and raised in Istanbul, I graduated from the Turkish Naval Academy and served as an officer in the Turkish Navy. After leaving the Navy, he earned Master's degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics at UC Santa Barbara, a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at UC San Diego, and an MBA at UC Berkeley.

"In a grander scheme, I think people should be always looking for opportunities at all times. There's a famous saying... 'The best time to eat hors d'oeuvres are... they're being passed around. The moment that if you're not ready to eat, now you're gonna miss that!’"

- Ali Irturk   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish

For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today…

Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE:jellyfish.co/emr

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarksCheck out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcTake our DevTools survey & share what dev tools you use!

As a gift, we’ll send you a copy of one our favorite books AND you’ll be entered to win a free ticket to the 2022 ELC Summit!

Fill out the DevTools survey HERE: elc.community/devtools2022SHOW NOTES:

• Frameworks for navigating new internal & external opportunities (3:36)
• Three steps for determining which opportunities you should prioritize (5:21)
• Ask this question to validate your assumptions (8:08)
• Reflecting on your personal values & how they align with opportunities (9:02)
• Why growth & interpersonal connection matter to Ali Littman (10:08)
• Ali Irturk’s recommendations for great networking (11:13)
• View your professional relationships as life-long commitments (13:09)
• Book recommendations for frameworks on the job search process (14:29)
• How the right manager can provide the best opportunities (16:47)
• Use a decision-grid to help filter & assess decisions (20:06)
• Analyzing your energy level & trusting your gut while making decisions (21:52)
• How your priorities evolve over time (23:49)
• The hedgehog & outliers concepts (25:45)
• Balancing your current strengths with opportunities you can grow from (29:29)
• Why there’s no such thing as a singular leadership style (30:47)
• Vulnerable leadership & creating a culture of trust (34:10)
• Rapid fire questions (36:42)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The 2-Hour Job Search - Steve Dalton’s instructional book on how to conduct a job search in the most efficient way possible.
• This Is Day One - Drew Dudley’s guide to cultivating the behaviors that will help you succeed and empower those around you.
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson’s book on attaining and operating in staff engineering roles.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Dr. Robert B. Cialdini’s book on the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles in everyday situations.
• A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine’s book on how the insights and wisdom of Stoic philosophy are still applicable in our modern lives.
• Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership - Dr. Alan Watkins’ book on the challenges that take a toll on a leader's effectiveness and the solutions designed to improve physiological factors that impact on core competencies.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We discuss the challenges with leading eng orgs through unpredictable global events (like the covid-19 pandemic) & pivoting product strategy with Bridget Frey (CTO @ Redfin). We also cover the challenges & successes of building out AI/ ML products in your engineering org, creating an “uncertainty” algorithm, incorporating mental health best practices in your teams, and addressing data bias & systemic racism in your product’s features! Featuring guest co-host Ali Littman (Interim Head of Eng @ Modern Health).

ABOUT BRIDGET FREY

As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget Frey (@SVBridget) leads the software engineering and analytics teams. Her mission is to build technology that makes the process of buying and selling a home less complicated and less stressful. She is a leader on issues facing traditionally underrepresented people in technology, and 36% of Redfin’s technology team are women while 10% are Black or Latinx. Prior to Redfin, Frey was the director of analytics and business applications at Lithium Technologies. In addition, she has held management positions at IntrinsiQ Research, IMlogic and Plumtree Software. Since 2019, she has served on the board of directors for Premera Blue Cross. Bridget holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She was recently recognized as a Seattle CIO of The Year award winner.

"One of the things we built was this concept of virtual touring. So you could stay on your couch, but have an agent visit a home, but we could only get a very small number of people to hit that button. Despite all of our trying, we only had 1% of our tours happening virtually and then the pandemic hit and almost overnight, it jumped to about a third of our tours being virtual."

- Bridget Frey   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish

For insights into where engineering teams are investing their time and resources, how they’re operating and performing, and the way in which leaders are managing today…

Download “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE:jellyfish.co/emr

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry and gain data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Learn More About Jellyfish Benchmarks @ jellyfish.co/benchmarksCheck out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• How Bridget lead a real estate tech org through a pandemic & tumultuous housing market (1:05)
• COVID-19’s impact on the healthcare tech space (2:02)
• How to adapt product strategy based on customer patterns (5:02)
• Leading with transparency & decisiveness in uncertain times (7:20)
• Redfin’s transition to digitizing traditionally in-person experiences (10:58)
• The pandemic’s unexpected influence on employee mental health & burnout (16:14)
• How your org can implement a company-wide “no meeting” / wellness week (19:43)
• Set your org up for faster decision making & implementation (23:52)
• Challenges & solutions when building out AI/ML home buying products (25:06)
• Incorporating human needs, desires & perspectives in automated recommendation products (27:40)
• Engineering best practices for uncovering deeper customer needs (30:06)
• The inside scoop on modeling an “uncertainty” algorithm (31:12)
• Prioritization conversations & product strategy at Redfin (34:31)
• Addressing data bias & systemic racism within product features (36:33)
• How hiring diversely leads to reduced data bias (39:06)
• A framework for reducing biased data outputs (40:20)
• What hiring practices lead to a more diverse team (43:43)
• How tech orgs can cultivate a culture of inclusivity & diversity (46:08)
• Rapid fire questions (48:51)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We cover why locked-in cloud commitments are bad for eng teams & how your org can take advantage of elastic pricing models instead! Leon Kuperman (CTO @ Cast.ai) explains the dilemma of locked-in cloud spend, cost planning strategies for SaaS orgs, how to minimize egregious cloud egress cost and drive better cloud utilization through consistent analysis & debates in your eng org. Also learn why Leon is betting on container deployment as the future of software delivery & what that means for Cast.ai!

ABOUT LEON KUPERMAN

Formerly Vice President of Security Products OCI at Oracle, Leon’s professional experience spans across tech companies such as IBM, Truition, and HostedPCI. He founded and served as the CTO of Zenedge (acquired by Oracle). Leon has 20+ years of experience in product management, software design, and development, all the way through to production deployment. He is an authority on cloud computing, web application security, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

"So you're literally committing to a three year deal where you know, in those next three years, the probability of computing power increasing is VERY high and the probability of cost decreasing for those same computers is very high. So you're not really getting the 30, 40, 50% discount. 

So I call these reservations or these look forward commitments a necessary evil because... customers HAVE to do it in many cases. They don't have an alternative. But at the same time, it's not good for the business!”

- Leon Kuperman   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022This episode is brought to you by Jellyfish

Want to learn where engineering teams are investing their time and resources? Or how they’re operating, performing, and managing today?

Check out “The State of Engineering Management Report 2022” HERE: jellyfish.co/emr

To understand how your engineering org compares against teams from across the industry, data-driven metrics to inform your strategic decisions regarding the right tools, processes and workflows…

Check out Jellyfish Benchmarks at jellyfish.co/benchmarksThis episode is brought to you by our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Why Leon cares about cutting cloud costs (3:05)
• Economic & financial models for eng leaders (6:56)
• Cloud economics & its impact on cloud cost (8:18)
• The dilemma of locked-in cloud commitments (11:35)
• Why eng companies opt for locked-in cloud services (14:47)
• How container deployment will impact the current cloud model (16:01)
• Moving from a locked-in model to an elastic pricing model (19:39)
• What eng teams need to take advantage of an elastic cloud pricing model (22:07)
• Cost planning opportunities for SaaS companies (24:57)
• The best utilization debates for evaluating cloud spend (28:40)
• Three architectural planning principles to keep in mind (30:26)
• Drive better cloud utilization through consistent cost analysis & recurring debates (31:59)
• Defining egress & its cost for eng teams (33:05)
• Healthy methods for escaping egress costs (35:27)
• What “cloud-flation” means for eng leaders & cloud macro-economics (38:55)
• Rapid fire questions (43:06)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• (article) “Why Your Cloud Expenses Are Rising: Blame Cloud-flation” by Leon Kuperman
• (article) “Snapchat Earnings and the Case of Runaway Cloud Costs” by Leon Kuperman

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We discuss the dynamics & challenges behind building out your data engineering function with Taylor Murphy (Head of Product & Data @ Meltano). Taylor also shares his recommendations for collaborating in multi-stakeholder environments, the relationship between the data team & engineering, why you should run your data team like a product team, gaining buy-in around the ROI of data, and what it’s like being a company’s first data eng hire. Featuring guest co-host/community member John Wang (Director of Engineering @ Petal)!

ABOUT TAYLOR MURPHY

Taylor Murphy (@tayloramurphy) is the Head of Product and Data of Meltano, an open-source data platform that enables collaboration, efficiency, and visibility. Taylor has been deeply involved in leading and building data-informed teams his entire career. At Concert Genetics he scaled the Data Operations team to enable the management of hundreds of thousands of genetic tests and millions of claims records. At GitLab, he was the first data hire where he focused on building and scaling the data organization as the company headed towards its IPO. Taylor has been involved with Meltano since its inception, acting as the primary customer with whom the team engaged to understand the needs of modern data professionals.

"What next? I put this in a dashboard. What are you gonna do with this? I think a lot of people are like, ‘I wanna be more data-informed and I wanna build up a robust data organization.’ 

And that's where they stop. They think, ‘Okay, I'm gonna get the data, and then I'm gonna make a decision.’ 

And that's not good enough because there's always gonna be more work to do than you can accomplish. And every time you deliver a dashboard, they're gonna go, ‘Oh, this is great. What if we did this, this, and this?’ 

And that's fun for data people and you enjoy that, but you kind of wanna help them think through these things.”

- Taylor Murphy   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Taylor’s early days at GitLab as its first data eng hire (2:23)
• How Meltano evolved out of a GitLab business intelligence project (4:21)
• Using data eng to discover problems & iterate solutions (6:01)
• Why having data teams under finance can be detrimental to product strategy (7:22)
• The importance of data eng representation at the VP level (10:01)
• The ideal time to build your data eng team (12:57)
• Communicating the ROI of data eng functions (14:53)
• How to gain stakeholder buy-in (17:04)
• Prioritizing qualitative data in a solution’s early stages (18:54)
• Taylor’s recommendations for the early stages of building your data org (20:05)
• Roadblocks when building data teams – and solutions for success (22:42)
• The “run your data team like a product team” thesis (25:52)
• Best practices for applying product team principles to your data eng functions (27:57)
• The hand-off between data engineering & the broader engineering org (29:08)
• Navigating company politics from a data eng perspective (33:02)
• Prioritization conversations between data eng & other stakeholders (36:25)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (38:31)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• (blog) “Run Your Data Team Like Product Team” by Emilie Schario & Taylor Murphy
• (follow) @josh_wills - https://twitter.com/josh_wills

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Building growth & mobile eng teams from the ground up is never easy – but the right frameworks, guardrails, & strategic conversations will set your org up for success! We cover the intersection of growth & mobile engineering with Atish Das Sarma (Head of Growth Engineering @ Patreon ) & Shannon Ma (Director of Engineering, Mobile @ Patreon) discussing how to balance short & long-term growth demands, strategically aligning new features & growth, and what it’s like making the transition into an established company with room for impact!

ABOUT ATISH DAS SARMA

Atish (@atishdassarma) leads the Growth Engineering team at Patreon. The Growth team at Patreon is responsible for holistically improving the product surface to help creators build and grow their businesses. Specific areas of focus include working across the full funnel to drive member acquisition, member retention, and creator acquisition.

Previously, Atish led iCloud subscriptions growth initiatives which is part of the broader Services organization at Apple. In addition to accelerating revenue growth for iCloud, Atish was also responsible for various data and ML initiatives across Cloud Services. He also held roles at Twitter and Google. Atish is passionate about working in areas with a broad opportunity & scope from the early stages, defining long-lasting themes, and building the corresponding teams to execute on them. He particularly enjoys leading organizations that are directly accountable for key business outcomes.

"For growth, you need to sort of think holistically in Patreon’s world, both from creators’ and potential members’ side and truly understand what is perhaps preventing some creators from getting started. So how do you sort of think about that holistically and then start building solutions that will empower them longer term.”

- Atish Das Sarma   

ABOUT SHANNON MA

Shannon (@shannonma) is the Director of Engineering for Mobile at Patreon. Shannon and the entire team are diving in to create a world-class mobile experience built to best serve creators, so they can showcase what they do best. He previously supported consumer product teams at Instagram and Facebook for nine years. Prior to this, he got started in mobile at Apple helping build iOS.

"Our goal as a company is to be the best memberships product for creator. Our hypothesis about how we can get there is by really kind of like coupling content around community. In order for us to do this really well, the community almost has to feel like it's part of the content, like it helps kind of like elevate the content.

- Shannon Ma   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Patreon’s major strategic transformation (2:30)
• The role mobile plays in Patreon’s vision (5:27)
• Integrating a growth strategy holistically throughout your product (6:11)
• What it’s like transitioning into an already well-established company (7:48)
• Defining a framework for an early-growth organization (11:41)
• Guardrails to balance short-term and long-term growth demands (14:16)
• Habits & rituals to inspire strategy-focused conversations in your team (18:00)
• Shannon’s decision-making process – and why the focus is on mobile (19:22)
• The intersection of growth and mobile engineering (22:07)
• Why being a “ruthless” prioritizer is key (24:28)
• Prioritization conversations between mobile and engineering (27:05)
• A sneak-peek into Patreon’s next big bets (28:32)
• The implications of new features on growth engineering (32:07)
• Start with targeting your high-intent users (34:08)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (35:05)

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Greg Czajkowski (SVP of Engineering @ Snowflake) shares some of the secrets he’s learned about great teams! We discuss the power of eliminating hierarchy, “going direct,” reducing energy dissipation in your team, removing friction in your org, and creating “higher innovation per time unit.” Plus dilemmas balancing velocity & quality, what to do when team size is used as proxy for power, and how to know your eng org is operating at peak output!

ABOUT GREG CZAJKOWSKI

Grzegorz (Greg) Czajkowski, a distributed systems and organizations scaling expert, is Senior Vice President of Engineering and Support at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, Greg spent 13 years at Google, where he was VP of Engineering responsible for a broad portfolio of Google Cloud data analytics and machine learning products and for internal services addressing data analytics needs of all of Google’s businesses. Before Google, Greg spent six years at Sun Microsystems, working on Java runtime environments and operating systems. Greg has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and an undergraduate degree from AGH Krakow, Poland. He holds over 50 patents.

"What I learned at Snowflake is  really practicing "Go Direct."  If there's something you don't like, you'd like to fix, you have to go to the person who made the decision.

Usually you learn much more about the decision. There's a good conversation. Sometimes you convince the owner of the decision to do something different.

I think nothing beats going direct, because any other means of trying to change a certain decision, certain point of view indirectly, is ineffective causes, frictions, and ultimately energy gets dissipated.

- Greg Czajkowski   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus

PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity.

Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elcCheck out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Qualities and characteristics Greg's observed in great teams (2:02)
• Why Greg joined Snowflake (3:46)
• “Go direct” and other secrets to great teams (5:27)
• Balancing "go direct" and the chain of command (7:35)
• Eliminating hierarchy (9:21)
• Creating higher innovation per time unit in engineering teams (11:21)
• How do you know your eng org is operating at peak output? (13:41)
• Balancing business expectations and removing the dilemma between velocity & quality (15:36)
• Energy dissipation (18:21)
• Removing team friction at scale (21:20)
• How Snowflake’s small team units optimize for intimacy, learning & dev happiness (23:50)
• How small teams scale up & interact across the eng org (25:56)
• How to address when team size is used as proxy for power & career progression (28:35)
• Rapid Fire Questions (30:37)

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We discuss why alignment is key to delivering great digital products & team outcomes, how to recognize & navigate misalignment, and create better alignment with Jonathon Hensley (CEO @ EMERGE, Author of "Alignment"). We cover a couple of community case studies exploring dilemmas like navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict, transforming grand product visions into clear execution, AND shifting toward a customer-centric engineering culture!

ABOUT JONATHON HENSLEY

Jonathon Hensley (@jonathonhensley) is co-founder and CEO of Emerge, a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience. For more than two decades, Jonathon has helped startups, Fortune 100 brands, technology leaders, large regional health networks, non-profit organizations, and more, transform their businesses by turning strategy, user needs, and new technologies into valuable digital products and services. Jonathon writes and speaks about his experiences and insights from his career, and regularly hosts in-depth interviews with business leaders and industry insiders. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys.

Originally from Silicon Valley, Jonathon got into the digital product space inspired by the incredible people developing new technologies all around him and the possibilities they unlocked. This fueled his curiosity to understand how technology transforms the ways in which people live and work.

Today that curiosity continues to drive him, as he works to help businesses harness technology. His work focuses on alignment, helping leaders define the value they want to create in a succinct and tangible way; where to focus, why, and what it will take to achieve that outcome. His favorite part is going beyond the idea but reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes so that a client can succeed.

"We hear a lot of times about the execution gap - This gap that, you know, we have this idea, or we have this outcome we want to achieve… We start building something and then it doesn't have the outcome we intended.

And that execution gap is because no bridge was ever built. You're making a leap of faith that somehow if we do this, that this will happen. And it's not grounded, most often, in its execution and process.

And so, without a clear direction how do you know what resources, or people, or process, are even needed to achieve the intended outcome that you're working towards?

- (Jonathon Hensley)   

Our in-person conference ELC Annual returns 10/27-28!

Learn from 60+ of the best engineering leaders in the industry / Critical insights on leadership, career and technology / Plus tons of experiences optimized for deep conversations & meaningful connections - all to help you build your support network!

Don't miss out on being part of the biggest celebration of engineering leadership of the year!

Grab your ticket HERE: sfelc.com/annual2022Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcThis episode is brought to you by PlusPlus

PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity.

Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Why alignment is the key to deliver great products & outcomes (2:22)
• What does alignment actually mean? (4:10)
• How do you recognize when you're misaligned? (7:51)
• How do you create alignment? (10:48)
• Navigating misaligned product vision & executive conflict (15:09)
• Transforming your grand product vision into clear actions (18:58)
• Making a shift to a more customer-centric engineering culture (23:27)
• Operationalizing customer empathy within your engineering org (28:05)
• How to gain clarity on the right intended outcomes (30:32)
• Measuring alignment (36:04)
• Rapid Fire Questions
• Takeaways

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• (Jonathon’s book) Alignment: Overcoming internal sabotage and digital product failure

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We discuss operational & organizational innovation with Zhichun Li (Director of Engineering @ Scale AI)! We explore the early days of Rapid at Scale AI, different organizational design experiments Zhi’s tested, and many of the principles behind their operational practices. You’ll hear about merging engineering & ops, designing orgs for autonomy, scaling into multiple products, and leveraging different org structures for innovation.

ABOUT ZHICHUN LI

Zhichun Li (@zhichun_li) is Director of Engineering @ Scale AI. She built the Rapid team from scratch with a focus on providing the fastest way to production-level quality labels within a day, with no data minimums. As an early employee of the company, she built up the infrastructure for Scale’s supply ops system and scaled up Scale’s 3D Sensor Fusion product.

Before Scale, Zhi worked at Lightspeed China Partners, Facebook, Microsoft and Airbnb with roles in investment and software engineering. She was a producer of VC Pulse, a podcast spotlighting venture capitalists in China. Zhichun was the youngest ever admit to the Yale MBA program, and studied computer science at CMU.

"We tried to basically brand it as like black ops, i.e. the special kind of ops where you get to do 10x work and build a lot of product out of it. And that actually, in a lot of ways attracted very entrepreneurial individuals to want to join.

So I think a lot of it is shaping the brand of the program, helping people understand how important it is and the things that I'll learn.

- Zhichun Li

This episode is brought to you by PlusPlus

PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity.

Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc

Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• The early days of scale & why engineering runs operations (1:44)
• What is ops engineering (3:48)
• Why engineering first got involved in ops (6:29)
• How to brand ops engineering to attract top engineers (8:51)
• Merging ops & engineering to eliminate silos (10:07)
• How to merge ops & engineering for the first time (11:39)
• How team composition evolved at Rapid (12:46)
• Designing your org for autonomy & customer empathy (17:07)
• Rapid’s operating principles (18:53)
• Generating Rapid’s operating principles (23:18)
• Painful short-term decisions that yielded better long-term outcomes (24:57)
• Scale AI’s evolution into multiple products (28:04)
• Behind the scenes of Scale’s multi-product moment (31:04)
• Leveraging general managers & org structures to drive product innovation (32:43)
• When to invest in, or shut down a project (36:21)
• Rapid Fire Questions (37:47)
• Takeaways (40:41)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We explore the career journey of Technologist & Technical Advisor William A. Adams. We cover how he identifies his next career challenges, the technical advisor role and how you can build your skills to grow into the role. Plus we get into the “people challenges” of the job, how the “human work” is the secret to unlocking creativity, and why building the social fabric of work matters.

ABOUT WILLIAM A. ADAMS

William A. Adams (@LeapToTech) is an award-winning D&I innovator, engineering trailblazer, and philanthropist. He was named the first Technical Advisor to Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott.

As co-founder of the LEAP apprenticeship program – Microsoft’s D&I Program of the Year in 2020 – he helped launch the training of more than 26 cohorts around the world. His most recent collaboration with the U.S. Virgin Islands aims to train technical talent and build critical technical infrastructure.

Early in his 30-year career, William was one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. He developed mission-critical custom enterprise apps for NeXT computers and pioneered an instant messaging service purchased by the CIA.

Today, in addition to his role as Technical Advisor at Microsoft, William is the philanthropic founder of The Event, a collaborative, community-based hackathon. When he’s not tinkering with code, the husband and father of three builds cabinets, knits, and rides a motorcycle.

"The predictive part of it, it's just pattern matching. You have to see it and go, 'What is that going to lead to? Let's play this out. Let's say AMD IS right. And this thing does come to pass. What will that mean?

Let's say cloud computing IS going to be the thing... What is THAT going to mean for the (micro)chips? It's gotta be optimized 'power for efficiency.'

So whoever can do that best is going to be the winner in that game.”

- William A. Adams 

Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcThis episode is brought to you by PlusPlus

PlusPlus is an all-in-one technical onboarding and internal knowledge platform that fast-tracks productivity.

Learn more & sign up at plusplus.co/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• William’s career journey from developer to Technical Advisor to the CTO @ Microsoft (1:55)
• Identifying your next career challenge & why William conducts a career assessment every 2 years (4:36)
• What is a Technical Advisor & how do you grow into the role? (9:21)
• How to gain buy-in and build influencing skills (13:02)
• Becoming a better synthesizer (15:21)
• Making long term predictions about technology (21:53)
• People challenges & solving the human equation (24:02)
• How to create shared understanding by listing assumptions (28:23)
• Why the "human work" is the secret to unlocking creativity in remote facilitation (30:42)
• Building the Microsoft LEAP Apprenticeship Program (33:01)
• Why creating the social fabric of work matters (42:16)
• Rapid Fire Questions (44:22)
• Takeaways (52:15)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Culture is the social contract you have with your team. Self-compassion is the social contract you have with yourself! We explore practices to cultivate compassion with Kevin Eyres (Executive Coach & Former MD LinkedIn Europe). We cover practices to eliminate negative self-talk, self-doubt, and increase compassion in your team. Plus bridging the gap from aspirational culture to reality, and how to identify the top 3 behaviors that help you succeed as a leader.

ABOUT KEVIN EYRES

An engineer by background, Kevin Eyres (@kevineyres) spent his early career leading engineering and product development teams for the likes of Compaq, Shopping.com and Alta Vista. Kevin has also been responsible for leading the European divisions of three Silicon Valley companies. He was the General Manager of Alta Vista International spanning 14 countries from 2001. He joined SideStep, now Kayak, as first employee and Managing Director in 2005 and in 2007 was appointed Managing Director for LinkedIn. Starting from his spare bedroom to IPO four years later Kevin lead the global movement at LinkedIn into five countries and the global Irish HQ.

Kevin ranked 22nd in Wired Magazine’s "The Wired 100" in 2010, a listing that features the most influential people shaping the UK’s digital landscape.

Today, Kevin lives in Los Altos and is now enjoying a plural career as an exec coach/board member/ investor / Hoffman Process Teacher.

"If you continue with the negative talk, it just reinforces itself. So stop. Acknowledge it, and stop. And the drop is you drop into your breath.

And the self-compassion mantra is, 'This is a moment of pain. Everybody feels pain. I'm not alone. And may I be kind and gentle to myself.’

- Kevin Eyres   

Check out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Kevin’s journey to engineering leadership (1:36)
• What prepared Kevin to become a general manager (4:45)
• Kevin’s transition to executive coaching (6:53)
• Why culture and self-compassion are important themes in Kevin’s career (9:34)
• How to eliminate negative head talk (12:52)
• “Stop, drop & roll” to overcome self-doubt (16:24)
• How to create space from automatic responses of anxiety or shame (19:14)
• Bridging the gap between aspirational company culture and reality (20:54)
• How self-compassion and culture are connected (23:25)
• Increasing self-compassion in your team (24:44)
• How peer groups increase compassion and bring relief (26:24)
• Making self-compassion a habit (29:03)
• How to cultivate the patience to be compassionate (31:02)
• Identifying the top three behaviors that help you succeed as a leader (33:01)
• Rapid Fire Questions (35:13)
• Takeaways (39:10)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We revisit an episode from the podcast archives – Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ Fox) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history! We cover Melody’s most important lessons negotiating on behalf of the tech org plus how they leveraged the M&A event to accelerate innovation and productivity.

Melody will be joining us as one of our featured speakers @ ELC Annual 2024 (our two-day conference on 8/27-8/28! Check out our incredible line up of speakers, other conference experiences & tickets at sfelc.com/annual2024 Use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount.

ABOUT MELODY HILDEBRANDT

Melody Hildebrandt (@mhil) is Chief Technology Officer for Fox Corporation, where sets set the comprehensive technology strategy for the Company. She previous served as the company’s Chief Information Security Officer and as the President of its research and development subsidiary, Blockchain Creative Labs.

In her current role, Hildebrandt leads the development, design and implementation of emerging technologies across the FOX enterprise, spanning FOX Sports, FOX News, FOX Entertainment, FOX Television Stations, and Tubi Media Group. Her current focus is on future planning, including developments in artificial intelligence and authenticating and monetizing premium content via blockchain technology. She also continues to oversee the cyber-security posture of the business and leads technology M&A efforts, identifying areas for investment and growth.

Prior to FOX, Hildebrandt held the role of 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.

Before 21CF, she was Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies, where she helped start its commercial work and led Palantir’s business in cyber security, anti-money laundering and rogue trading detection. Prior to that, she consulted US and international governments with Booz Allen Hamilton, where she designed military and strategy wargames.

Hildebrandt is the Executive Sponsor of Women in Technology at FOX.

"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   

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

SHOW NOTES:

• Background on the Fox Disney “mega-deal” (03:39)
• How to structure an M&A to accelerate your tech roadmap (06:01)
• Motivating engineering teams with forcing functions (10:14)
• What it was like representing a tech org in deal structuring (13:13)
• How to develop an engineering org’s merger strategy (17:36)
• M&A negotiation tips for engineering leaders (20:07)
• A critical skill for eng leaders: converting tech pains into business goals (22:59)
• How to get executive buy-in on engineering initiatives (27:58)
• “Crashing” your way to a seat at the table (31:05)
• Melody’s process for setting the strategic direction of an engineering org (32:19)
• Managing engineering teams from high and low — the middle is death (34:35)
• Why this M&A event continues to accelerate innovation (37:37)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (42:26)

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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If you ever find yourself staring at a screen not knowing how to even start an important presentation this episode is for you! Arquay Harris (VP Engineering @ Webflow) underscores the importance of storytelling in public speaking, and shares valuable tips on how to craft a narrative and get your point across in a way that feels natural for you.

For Arquay’s slides & original presentation from our 2022 Spring Virtual Summit - check out the full video here: https://bit.ly/3GxMjT3

ABOUT ARQUAY HARRIS

Arquay is the VP of Engineering at Webflow. Prior to Webflow, she held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google, and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. When not working she can be found cooking, stumbling over guitar and piano chords, or watching Seinfeld.

"And so if you were using this to give an actual presentation, you might say something like, ‘Imagine a world where deploys only take two seconds? Or what if tests only took 30 seconds to write?’

So you're taking this undesirable thing and you're contrasting it with this idealistic future to really bring in that emotionality to get the audience hooked.

- Arquay Harris 

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/registerCheck out our friends at Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• What Arquay starts every presentation with (2:03)
• Message, tone, and audience (3:17)
• The hero’s journey (7:17)
• The mountain story structure (8:42)
• Nested loops (9:33)
• Sparklines (11:28)
• In medias res (13:14)
• Converging ideas (14:22)
• False start (15:16)
• The petal structure (16:27)
• Focus on the purpose (21:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• (Full video from 2022 Spring Summit) Storytelling & the art of public speaking with Arquay Harris - https://elc.community/public/videos/storytelling-and-the-art-of-public-speaking

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Sri Shivananda (EVP, CTO @ Paypal) and Joel Beasley (host of Modern CTO! podcast and CTO @ Leaderbits) discuss some of the principles and frameworks that have made the greatest impacts on Sri’s career as an engineering leader. They cover Sri’s approach to organizational transformation, a framework for choosing new technologies, areas to look for when you’re building a pipeline of leadership, and recognition and disruption of patterns through self-reflection.

ABOUT SRI SHIVANANDA

Sri Shivananda (@srishivananda) serves as PayPal’s Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer. In this role, Sri oversees Technology Platforms & Experiences, leading teams responsible for the company’s secure, reliable and scalable global infrastructure and strategic core platform, the foundation that enables PayPal to deliver innovative services to global consumers and merchants.

Sri has played a critical role in helping PayPal remain at the forefront of innovation since joining the company in 2015. Prior to his appointment as EVP and CTO, Sri was Vice President of Global Platform and Infrastructure, directing his team of technologists to drive massive growth at scale across a disruptive payments platform. Sri was responsible for all core technologies covering PayPal’s data centers, internal private cloud, online and offline data infrastructure, internal developer frameworks and tools, and various platform services.

Before PayPal, Sri was with eBay for 12 years, working his way up from a software engineer to Vice President of Global Platform and Infrastructure. As VP, he was responsible for the company’s technology infrastructure that powered the eBay Inc. businesses, including eBay’s hundreds of millions of listings and PayPal’s millions of daily payments. Sri found his way to eBay via the acquisition of Deja.com.

Sri has served on the board of F5 Networks since 2020.

He received his Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from Ohio University and holds a Bachelor of Technology, Mechanical Engineering from Jawaharal Nehru Technological University.

"The most important thing here is that the human fabric in any organization, any team, any ecosystem is the most important one. When you align people to an outcome or a purpose, they'll figure out all the techniques that are necessary to do it. Sometimes they'll pull off magic when they are called the action.

- Sri Shivananda  

ABOUT JOEL BEASLEY

Joel Beasley (@moderncto_io) is the host of the #1 leadership and technology podcast in the world, Modern CTO. Modern CTO is focused on interviewing high-profile executives in the leadership and technology space with over 150k active listeners. Joel is an MIT-educated CTO of Leaderbits with clients from Startups up to Billion dollar companies. He is also the founder of The Beasley Foundation, a charity that designs STEM-related children’s books that are then donated to orphanages, homeless pregnant women, and children in need.

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/registerCheck out Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Changing mindsets, skill sets, and toolsets in times of transformation (2:16)
• Creating clarity and alignment in eng orgs (5:24)
• Getting skeptical team members to buy into mindset shifts (7:53)
• Sri's framework for choosing new technologies (10:33)
• Why engineering leaders need substance, depth, and hunger (14:40)
• How PayPal is democratizing financial services (19:43)
• The curiosity quotient (21:44)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital, Former SVP Engineering @ Google) and Melody Meckfessel (Co-Founder & CEO @ Observable) discuss ways to make your engineering org a strategic advantage to your company. They cover how to leverage feature/system “simplicity,” how to implement product instrumentation, when to bring in SREs, and how to balance tech debt and refactor work.

ABOUT BILL COUGHRAN

Bill Coughran (@BillCoughran) works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security.

"If a leader comes in and talks about, 'I did this and I did that' rather than talking about the teams that they worked with in the past... The reality is the work got done by others.

And so, I think it's critical for more senior people to recognize the importance of an overall team. And part of their job is to help mentor and develop people on the team.

- Bill Coughran  

ABOUT MELODY MECKFESSEL

Melody (@mmeckf) is the CEO / Co-founder of Observable, where she is building the future of data collaboration. She is passionate about helping humans thrive through collaboration, inclusion, and insights. Before Observable, she was a VP of Engineering at Google, leading systems with a team of 1,000+ where she created the DevOps practice for Google Cloud.

Melody was responsible for large-scale systems delivering successful outcomes for millions of users. Melody instills passion around data innovation - improving exploration and insights from data. She is an expert in tools and systems for productive teams to thrive, and that's exactly what she is bringing to the future of data collaboration on Observable.

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/registerCheck out Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• The challenge of keeping enterprise engineers close to the end user (3:26)
• Product instrumentation vs product intuition (8:22)
• Why it’s critical for eng teams to interact with customers as a company scales (11:31)
• How long should dev teams handle site reliability before bringing in dedicated SRE (12:35)
• What attributes Bill looks for in eng leaders (18:13)
• Why a tolerance for failure is key to innovation (22:01)
• Should early stage companies deal with tech debt? (24:17)
• The value of mentor-first engineering leaders (31:15)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it take to build a tech org from the ground up? Khawaja Shams (Co-Founder & CEO @ Momento) sits down with Anshu Narula (VP Digital Technology @ Rivian) to discuss how Anshu went from larger companies like PayPal and eBay to scaling Rivian’s digital tech org from scratch. They discuss critical cultural values, early guiding principles and processes for the org, Anshu’s approach to scaling the engineering teams, and a starting point if you’re building from 0.

ABOUT ANSHU NARULA

At Rivian, Anshu is responsible for the strategic development of Rivian’s digital ecosystem. She leads teams building products and architecting systems across the technology stack, which has her overseeing a wide range of initiatives from rivian.com to charging software, in order to best serve Rivian B2C and B2B customers. With more than 20 years of experience in product development, technical management and software architecture, Anshu is passionate about technology and building products that are simple, scalable and engaging.

"I started with my leadership team first. Next approach we took, was to go after hiring those engineers underneath them. Because I really needed coders to get through the aggressive growth phase. So those teams then hired all those engineers, once we had the architecture in place.

Then we started layering the managers to help. And started calling out the sub-functional areas. And that's when we started to add in the layer of senior managers...

- Anshu Narula  

ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMS

Khawaja (@ksshams) is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/registerCheck out our friends & sponsor Coderpad!

CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company.

Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster?

Learn more at coderpad.io/elcCheck out Shortcut!

Shortcut is an issue tracker that offers all the functionality, without most of the complexity making it easier for you to plan, collaborate, build, and measure success.

Right now, listeners of our show can get 2-months free on any paid plan.

Learn more & sign up at shortcut.com/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Being the first digital tech hire at Rivian (1:58)
• Shaping Rivian’s tech org from scratch (4:42)
• Anshu’s approach to establishing processes (6:00)
• Adapting the hiring strategy to the pandemic (8:15)
• Creating culture in a remote-first environment (9:41)
• How to build an organization from the ground up (11:06)
• Deciding how to structure the tech org (13:31)
• Anshu’s strategy for scaling engineering teams (15:17)
• Identifying the right candidate for something that’s never been done before (17:56)
• Prioritizing teamwork in the leadership layer of the eng org (19:36)
• How to assess teamwork as an attribute in candidates (21:01)
• Balancing pace of innovation with quality (22:33)
• Advice for any eng leader building an org from scratch (24:15)
• Ashu’s takeaways from scaling Rivian (24:57)

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To grow your engineering team from 200 to 1,200+ you can expect many phase changes in your org. How might your role change and what can you anticipate? Ryan King (CTO @ Chime) and Clarence Chio (Co-founder & CTO @ Unit21) explore how Ryan’s role has evolved across Chime’s different phases of growth over the last 10 years! You’ll hear how team topologies changed, how they hire senior leaders/VPEs for different phases of the company, how goal setting changes, and other great insights to help you scale your org to the next level!

ABOUT RYAN KING

Ryan King (@ryanking) is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Chime. Ryan was previously VP of engineering at Plaxo, an early professional social networking pioneer that was acquired by Comcast Interactive Media. Ryan also held senior engineering roles at Liberate Technologies and Microsoft. Ryan earned a BS in computer science & engineering from UCLA, and an MS in computer science from Stanford University.

"There are a few things that I have come to have strong opinions about... One is, teams should own their own domains, services and data. You got to own full-stack your domain. You want to minimize coordination between teams and dependencies on teams. And then something that gets often overlooked as you scale is... aligning the organization with the architecture. The organization's growing, the architecture is evolving, but you have to consciously align those two things if you want to maintain a highly functioning engineering team as you grow...”

- Ryan King

ABOUT CLARENCE CHIO

Clarence Chio (@cchio) is the co-founder and CTO at Unit21, a Google-funded startup in San Francisco building tools to fight fraud, money laundering, and online abuse. He authored the O’Reilly Book “Machine Learning & Security” and is also an adjunct lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, teaching a graduate course on the same topic.

This episode is brought to you by Orgspace

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. Easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

Sign up for a free trial today, at orgspace.io/registerCheck out our friends & sponsor Coderpad!

CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company!

Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster? Learn more at coderpad.io/elcSHOW NOTES:

• Ryan’s story of how Chime first started (2:00)
• How Ryan’s role as CTO changed over time (4:17)
• How Chime’s engineering org structure & team topologies evolved (6:37)
• When should you deviate from your existing team structure? (9:06)
• When do you know you need to bring in a VP of Engineering? (10:23)
• How did new VPEs build trust and credibility when first starting? (14:32)
• How does Chime set goals today? (16:14)
• How do you measure engineering team and org performance? (19:22)
• What Chime does different to hire great engineers (23:03)
• Final advice for engineering leaders running teams who have yet to find product-market fit (27:20)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is a special episode from our new series Engineering Founders - We deconstruct the recently closed pre-seed fundraising experience of our friends Brian Guthrie & Aaron Erickson (co-founders of Orgspace). Brian & Aaron share their experience finding a co-founder and making the decision to leave their engineering leadership positions at big companies. Plus they share great advice on navigating the fundraising experience and dealing with rejection! Check out Engineering Founders - https://bit.ly/3KnIfFI

Learn more about Orgspace & check out their new beta HERE: http://orgspace.io/elc

ABOUT BRIAN GUTHRIE

Brian Guthrie (@bguthrie) is Co-Founder and CTO at Orgspace. His career spansr 20 years, leading teams at everything from global enterprises to seed-stage startups. Prior to founding Orgspace, he was VPE at Meetup, where he led the organization through their transition out of WeWork. He’s worked in software domains as diverse as agile coaching, music hosting and pizza procurement and is a recognized thought leader in continuous integration and delivery. Brian lives and works in Brooklyn.

ABOUT AARON ERICKSON

Aaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) is Co-Founder and CEO at Orgspace. Before Orgspace, he spent 30 years working in leadership roles, most recently as VP of Engineering at New Relic. Over the course of his entire career, he has been an advocate for building better software. He spent a decade at ThoughtWorks, where he drove digital transformation via application of agile and continuous delivery. Aaron lives and works in San Francisco.

Aaron: “I remember one person in particular, saw our slide deck and said, 'Literally, I wouldn't even give you a reference to somebody with this slide deck.’ It was so bad...

Tough to hear! Right? You know, very, very tough to hear... But was very, very valuable! I mean, it really honed our message and it was precisely the thing we needed to hear, to actually make our pitch a lot better...”

Brian: I actually, I didn't find it that tough to hear. I always presumptively assume that whatever I'm doing is awful so to hear some of the reflected back, I'm like, 'Yes! It is terrible! Tell us more. Give us the worst.'

I really, I love that actually.”

Aaron: “Hence why I'm always the optimistic one and Brian always dragged me back to reality.”

Brian: “He was so wounded by it! I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a terrible deck!'”

ABOUT ORGSPACE

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. You can easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

If you want to learn more (or sign up for their JUST launched beta!) check them out at orgspace.io/elc

Check out our friends & sponsor Coderpad!CoderPad is a technical interview platform built for all scales of business, whether you’re a startup or large global company!

Do you want to improve your candidate experience & hire the right people faster? Learn more at coderpad.io/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Closing a Pre-Seed round of funding (3:21)
• Brian’s decision to leave Meetup (5:53)
• Aaron’s decision to leave Salesforce (10:09)
• How to choose a co-founder (13:21)
• Questions to ask potential co-founders (15:50)
• How to choose an idea (20:30)
• Navigating the fundraise (25:27)
• Filtering the feedback you get on your startup (28:16)
• How to communicate your idea to investors (32:19)
• Dealing with rejection (35:37)
• Product > pitch deck (39:31)
• How to balance building a business and fundraising (42:23)
• Rapid Fire Questions (45:19)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to our first ever LIVE recording of the show! This is a special behind-the-scenes preview of the upcoming 2022 ELC Virtual Summit (4/20-4/22)! We cover speaker sessions we’re excited about, why we’re excited for community-led round tables, how they’ll help you harness community & build your support network! Plus we showcase 4x round table discussions covering performance management, courageous leadership, hiring vs. buying, and helping women thrive not just survive in tech!

Learn more & register for the 2022 ELC Virtual Summit HERE: www.sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES

• Welcome to our first ever LIVE recording of the Engineering Leadership podcast! (1:39)
• What is the ELC Virtual Summit all about? (4:08)
• Preview of a few speaker sessions we’re excited about (5:54)
• Why we’re excited for community-led roundtables & how they’ll help you harness community & build your support network (9:02)
• What are “round-tables” & why are they valuable to engineering leaders?
• Introducing roundtable hosts Joy, Andrei, Wen & Keng (plus why they’re most excited about their discussion topic) (12:46)
• Performance management roundtable preview (18:28)
• What unexpected feedback have you received from your team during performance reviews? (22:31)
• Courageous leadership roundtable preview (27:51)
• If you saw “courageous leadership” what would you want to gain from a roundtable? (34:55)
• Hire vs. Buy roundtable preview (38:38)
• Helping women thrive, not just survive in tech - roundtable preview (47:11)
• Wrap Up! Register for the ELC Summit @ www.sfelc.com/summit2022 (56:52)

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Communication between engineering leadership and the CEO is crucial, and not without its challenges. In this special episode Andrew Lau (Co-Founder & CEO @ Jellyfish) and Eli Daniel (Head Of Engineering @ Jellyfish) give us an inside look into their own working relationship and share tips for optimal collaboration between engineering leaders, CEOs and "the business."

ABOUT ANDREW LAU

Andrew Man-Hon Lau (@amlau) is Co-Founder and CEO of Jellyfish, the leading Engineering Management Platform (EMP) that provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate.

Prior to Jellyfish, Andrew was the Chief Strategy Officer for ad-tech leader Nanigans after his social retail-tech company LoopIt was acquired. He also previously helped create companies at Redstar Ventures. Andrew was VP Engineering and founding technology team member of Endeca Technologies, an enterprise search software company that was acquired by Oracle Technologies for over $1B. He also has experience at companies such as Microsoft and IBM.

Andrew holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a certified barbecue judge for the Kansas City Barbecue Society. He hails from Oakland, CA and is still an avid fan of the Oakland Athletics despite living in Red Sox country for over 20 years. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife Elsie and two young children Callie and Mira.

"There's a game of distrust already happening here, or at least his satisfaction.

And dissatisfaction could be why is it something else coming out faster? Like I thought this has been done? Or this thing didn't come out good. Or my favorite person isn't working on this thing.

The supposition in the set person's head is that something's wrong with the work assignment, patterns slash it's the wrong matching of people to work or they're doing some stuff is wasting time.

Use the act of sharing it and their critique on the specific things to try to suss out what their discontent with...

- Andrew Lau   

ABOUT ELI DANIEL

Eli Daniel is Head of Engineering at Jellyfish, where he leads the efforts to develop our software products.  He comes to Jellyfish by way of 20+ years in the Boston tech scene, having seen both successful exits and smoldering craters, which have led to a keen interest in what makes successful product development teams go.Eli holds a BS in Computer Science from Yale.  He lives with his family and labrador retriever in Somerville, MA, and looks forward to returning to his regular bike-commute to work.

"I would try hard to head that thing off at the pass and be like, ‘Whoa! whoa! whoa! Like what... Help me understand, what are you trying to do with this information? How can I help you get what you actually want?

Because I don't think it's a list of tasks you haven't heard of that the junior person is working on over there.’”

- Eli Daniel   

Check out our friends at 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:

• Translating engineering to the CEO (2:50)
• The tension between CEO and Head of Engineering (3:54)
• 1:1’s with the CEO (7:01)
• The disconnect between CEO and engineering leaders (8:22)
• How to navigate mistrust from the CEO (12:44)
• Maintaining clarity with the CEO (17:15)
• Reporting hiring challenges for engineering (19:50)
• Hero developers don’t scale (27:02)
• What level of business insight do engineering leaders need? (36:40)
• Should engineering teams adopt trending frameworks? (39:10)
• Managing release expectations (45:11)
• How engineering leaders can stay in tune with business priorities (53:01)
• Takeaways (59:18)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

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)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We discuss how to navigate the delicate balance between meeting current customer needs while also preparing for future tech trends & opportunities with Evan Welbourne, Head of AI and Data @ Samsara. Evan dissects the rapidly transforming pace of developing AI/ML products, sharing strategies for merging conversations around differing product-building processes, tips for moving seamlessly / gaining approval between product development stages, defining what customer success looks like, methods for working backward from problems, and best practices for avoiding friction throughout the product development process. He also shares frameworks for envisioning & working toward future tech possibilities while simultaneously developing hypotheses that inform future direction, creating diverse AI/ML team composition, and effectively communicating with stakeholders.

ABOUT EVAN WELBOURNE

Evan Welbourne is the Head of AI and Data and Samsara, leading the organization’s machine learning, computer vision, data science, and data analytics teams – as well as data engineering and data platform for the company. He has a long-standing career in both machine learning and IoT. Before Samsara, Evan held various roles at Amazon, including the Head of Machine Learning for Alexa Smart Home and Manager of the Computer Vision Research Group. He also led research teams at Samsung and Nokia.

Evan earned his Ph.D and M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Toronto.

"With AI, there's something new every week. You could stay in those stages forever. You can just keep iterating and trying new things, but at some point you have to kind of cut it off. You've got to time box it and just go with something that you know will work. You're constantly also calibrating between the quality of what you're delivering and the time it takes you to deliver it. A lot of that problem backs into this early stage of the process. We do want to do a good job of understanding opportunity but there's analysis paralysis. We don't want to just get stuck there.”

- Evan Welbourne   

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

SHOW NOTES:

• Staying customer-focused while working toward the future @ Samsara (3:22)
• Merging forward-looking technology & customer-problem-focused product-building conversations (5:54)
• Defining customer success & working backwards from winning (8:38)
• How stage gates can confirm / assess feature accuracy & maturity (10:58)
• What the approval moment looks like while moving from stage to stage (15:29)
• Understanding what stages offer the greatest opportunity for risk / friction (17:11)
• Signals to watch for that allow you to move forward with confidence (19:30)
• Best practices for anticipating & preparing for future possibilities (21:13)
• Using smaller-scale projects to inform future direction of larger-scale products (23:12)
• Communication strategies for working with less technical stakeholders (25:22)
• Methods for effectively communicating complex, technical information (27:59)
• AI / ML team composition at Samsara (30:04)
• Frameworks for aligning & motivating folks to focus on customer needs (32:59)
• Strategies for introducing new technologies & scientific research into your teams (35:06)
• Introducing AI into mission-critical internal tools (36:34)
• Rapid fire questions (39:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control - Stuart Russell lays out a new approach to AI that will enable us to coexist successfully with increasingly intelligent machines.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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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!

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:

• 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)

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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!

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:

• 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 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!

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:

• 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 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!

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:

• 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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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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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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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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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

 

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

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com!

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Lewis Tuff (VP of Engineering @ Blockchain.com) joins us to share his experience on building a career in the cryptocurrency space! We cover his transition from traditional finance/tech to crypto, how to shift your mindset from centralized to decentralized, qualities that lead to success, tactics to help you gain exposure and experience, AND why it’s not too late to start your career in crypto! 

ABOUT LEWIS TUFF

Lewis (@tuffleuk) is the Vice President of Engineering at Blockchain.com where he is responsible for the technology underpinning Blockchain.com’s services. As the 2nd engineering hire at Revolut, he scaled the team to 50+ and spearheaded the initiative to bring cryptocurrencies to Revolut. He built the first of its kind crypto offering within a challenger bank over the course of a couple of months and was responsible for bringing $300M+ trading revenue in due course. 

In March 2018 Lewis joined Blockchain.com as an engineering lead to be part of one of the most important companies in crypto infrastructure, rising to the Head of Platform Engineering as the company and industry grew. That same year he was included on Business Insider’s “35 under 35” in fintech. Lewis began his career building trading and risk technology systems at Goldman Sachs and UBS. He lives in London.

SHOW NOTES:

• Patrick’s FOMO after learning his dad owned Doge-coin… (2:03)
• How Lewis went from traditional finance to a career in blockchain/crypto (3:35)
• One question to help you gain career perspective as an engineering leader (9:36)
• The principles behind blockchain technology that led Lewis to “go all in” (10:34)
• Are blockchain engineering challenges harder to solve? (13:03)
• Unprecedented (but not unsolvable) problems in blockchain (14:56)
• Staying lean & focused while balancing team size & scope (19:47)
• Making the transition from "centralized" to "decentralized" thinking (24:07)
• How to use Github to source great engineering candidates (28:07)
• Do engineering leaders need to be domain experts to manage teams in blockchain/crypto? (30:15)
• How engineering leadership is similar in blockchain companies & crypto’s ethos of “paying it forward” (33:29)
• Why it’s not too late to start a career in blockchain/crypto (36:14)
• How blockchain leverages the power of community (38:44)
• The first thing you should do to explore a career in blockchain: Try out the products & technology! (45:25)
• Where are the hottest markets/locations for cryptocurrency right now? (46:46)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (47:41)
• Takeaways (50:20)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Cryptocurrency on Github - Repositories, packages, and more for the budding engineers who want to get their feet wet.

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

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com!

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Jeremy King (SVP of Engineering @ Pinterest) discusses some of the challenges, principles & frameworks behind building inclusive products. We also cover filtering decisions through your company mission, investing in rest and emerging challenges around creating serendipity with ideas, onboarding, retaining talent and the hard logistics of workplace flexibility.

ABOUT JEREMY KING

Jeremy King is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Pinterest, where he leads the company’s technical direction and oversees the entire Engineering team building deeply technical products, platforms and machine learning systems. 

Previously, he was the CTO of Walmart, where he led the digital transformation effort of the company including customer technology, merchant technology and supply chain technology that covered all Walmart U.S. stores and eCommerce. Prior to that, King was Executive Vice President of technology at LiveOps, and Vice President of engineering and software development at eBay. 

He holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology from San Jose State University, and is an advisory board member for the CTO Forum, an organization that brings together senior leaders across the technology industry to collaborate on key issues and accelerate innovation across organizations.

SHOW NOTES:

• Building inclusive products starts by having diverse data sets
• Why your data is probably biased already
• Where to start with building inclusive products
• Three principles to build inclusive products
• How Pinterest disrupts entrenched patterns of thinking & balances innovation and action
• How to decide which experiments to implement
• Why ROI should not be the only metric of effectiveness
• How to filter decisions through your company’s mission
• How AR aligns with Pinterest’s mission & allows “Pinners” to explore & experiment with different identities
• Covid’s impact on retaining talent
• How “investing in rest” & cultivating work-life balance can increase productivity
• How to schedule a day off for your entire engineering org
• Upcoming Industry Challenges: building in serendipity, onboarding in a remote-first workplace & the logistics of workplace flexibility
• Rapid-Fire Questions
• Takeaways

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Inclusive Search and Recommendations - Nadia Fawaz’s talk on How Inclusive Search, & AI works at Pinterest

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

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com!

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Welcome to a special episode highlighting ELC Annual 2024, our annual conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world! Tune in to hear how we built this 2-day experience to be the ultimate accelerator of leadership and professional growth. We cover how the conference will expand your perspectives with curated peer-led roundtables and expert-led sessions with people like Thuan Pham (former CTO @ Uber & Coupang), Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ FOX), James Everingham (VPE @ Meta) Marcel Weekes (VPE @ Figma), Rajashree Pimpalkhare (VPE @ Twilio) and 40+ more speakers! We promise that you will walk away from the event with meaningful connections and actionable strategies that will empower your career and leadership growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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This conversation is about BURNOUT! You’ll hear holistic perspectives to help you identify the causes, conditions, & early indicators of burnout. Plus organizational & individual practices to address & become resilient to burnout with Sabry Tozin (VPE @ LinkedIn), Lori Allen (VP HR @ LinkedIn), & Erica Lockheimer (VPE, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Learning & Glint @ LinkedIn).

About Erica Lockheimer

Erica Lockheimer is VP of Engineering, Talent Solutions, Learning, and Glint @ LinkedIn. During her more than 10 years at the company, she built the Growth Engineering team into a high-performing 120-person team, focused on increasing membership, and deepening member engagement. In January 2018, she was promoted to Head of Engineering for the LinkedIn Learning team, formerly known as Lynda.com.

She is also responsible for LinkedIn’s Women In Tech (WIT) initiative, which is focused on empowering women in technical roles at the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering to securely manage and synchronize e-mail and calendar data between Exchange and mobile devices. Erica loves the challenge of starting with something nascent and carving out the right strategy, hiring the best people, and plotting a course to drive results. In 2014 and 2015, Erica was recognized as one of the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

About Sabry Tozin

Sabry Tozin is the Vice President of Enterprise Productivity Engineering at LinkedIn. In this capacity, Sabry leads the organization that powers the productivity of LinkedIn employees through innovative, scalable, and secure information technology solutions. Before joining LinkedIn, Sabry held engineering leadership roles at Netflix and IGN Entertainment. He’s a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley.

About Lori Allen

Lori is a Speaker and Coach and serves as VP of Human Resources, Engineering for LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Mission is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce which aligns to Lori’s personal goal of helping others reach their full potential.   

She has spent the last 20+ years as an HR Leader responsible for designing talent strategies and partnering with Executives to drive business results. Lori is passionate about Diversity Inclusion and belonging and was named in the 2018 list of women worth watching in the Profiles in Diversity Journal.

Originally from Wichita, Kansas, she graduated from the University of Kansas with a BA and later received a master’s degree from Webster University.   Lori has resided in the Bay area for the past 20+ years and has had the privilege of working

Shownotes

• Burnout in Q1-2021 & what caused LinkedIn to take a company-wide week off (3:31)
• Are patterns of burnout repeating with the new covid variant? (7:59)
• What are the causes, conditions, & indicators of burnout in engineering orgs? (12:19)
• How to detect & identify the early signs of burnout in your engineering team (19:14)
• Favorite non-invasive "how are you doing" questions to get better signal from your engineering team (23:47)
• How to build resilience against burnout by leveraging Lencioni’s “First Team Concept” (31:01)
• Conversation framework for internal mobility (36:44)
• Erica, Lori & Sabry’s personal practices to prevent burnout (40:29)
• What do you admire most about working with each other? (42:31)
• Takeaways (44:59)

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Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elc

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Our 2022 season starts next week on Tues 1/4! Check out this trailer for a preview of our first few guests covering topics like burnout, building inclusive products, and making the career transition into crypto! Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at https://sfelc.com/ ! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sri Viswanath (CTO @ Atlassian) shares Atlassian’s approach to building autonomous teams, the story behind Project Pascal & how Atlassian built their engineering career ladder! You’ll learn Sri’s 3 key areas to creating autonomy (principles, priorities & process), creating transparency at scale, and common & counter-intuitive process changes. Plus the key elements to build/launch a successful engineering career growth plan!

 

ABOUT SRI VISWANATH

Sri is the chief technology officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Sri joined the company in January 2016 and is at the helm of Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri served as CTO and senior vice president of engineering at Groupon, the vice president of R&D for mobile computing at VMware, and the senior vice president of engineering at Ning – where he was instrumental in the company's acquisition by Glam.

 

He also led the development of a number of very successful open-source and B-to-B products at Sun Microsystems, served on the Board of Directors for SendGrid, and has a number of patents. Sri currently serves on the Board of Directors for Splunk and holds a M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University.

 

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Atlassian's Engineering Handbook: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/handbook
• Atlassian's Project Pascal: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/career-framework

 

SHOW NOTES

• Sri’s people-first approach to leadership (1:50)
• Why “putting people first” is key to building autonomous teams (3:17)
• How Sri operationalizes his approach to leadership (4:35)
• What processes should you prioritize first, to build autonomous teams? (9:31)
• Common & counter-intuitive process changes for engineering leaders to assess (15:32)
• How Atlassian leverages pre-mortems for major projects at Atlassian (20:29)
• How Atlassian’s engineering culture creates transparency at scale (22:22)
• Where to start with building your own engineering handbook: principles, prioritization, & process (24:29)
• Atlassian’s approach to engineering career growth & “Project Pascal” (32:20)
• How Atlassian defined each role in it’s engineering career ladder (39:48)
• How Atlassian formed cross-functional working groups to define different roles (42:23)
• How different opinions were included in Project Pascal (43:38)
• How Atlassian incorporated feedback to improve it’s career framework (46:08)
• Rapid Fire Questions (48:15)
• Takeaways (54:15)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Listen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE: https://spoti.fi/2WLX9Cm

Ready to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE: https://bit.ly/39QpNoH

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

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Li Fan (CTO @ Circle) shares about the power of mentoring and the impact of paying it forward! We cover Li’s career journey, the mentors that have inspired and shaped her leadership, and how Li’s passed along those lessons to the people she’s mentored. Through Li’s stories, we uncover the long-term impact and ripple effect when you pay it forward.

ABOUT LI FAN

Li Fan is CTO at Circle, a global fintech firm enabling business to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains (Circle is the principle operator of USD Coin). Prior to Circle, Li was CTO at Lime, an innovative technology company that connects and empowers urban living through mobility. Before Lime, Li was SVP of engineering at Pinterest leading all 600+ engineers to execute technology strategy and deliver company priorities. Li was a Senior Director of Engineering in Google, accountable for Google’s popular image search and was Vice President of Engineering at Baidu.

SHOW NOTES

• Why this conversation with Li Fan is so special (2:02)
• When has a mentor made a meaningful difference for you? (3:30)
• How mentors help show you what’s possible in your career and life (6:29)
• How mentors inspire and shape your leadership (10:00)
• Mental models for a successful mentor relationship (13:29)
• Paying it forward and becoming a mentor (15:19)
• How to balance your team’s retention and your mentee’s career growth (19:12)
• The hard-to-imagine long term impact of mentoring (25:20)
• Staying in touch with your mentors and the people you mentor (29:17)
• The long-term ripple effect when you “pay it forward” and mentor others (31:22)
• Finding the right mentor and creating mutually beneficial relationships (36:04)
• How Art influences Li’s approach to engineering leadership (39:51)
• Rapid Fire Questions (44:17)
• Takeaways (47:38)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Listen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE: https://spoti.fi/2WLX9Cm

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Maia Brenner (AI Specialist & Head of Business Development @ Tryolabs) shares the fundamentals to begin your company’s AI/ML journey! We cover the most common challenges & pitfalls eng leaders face when investing in AI, how to understand feasibility/impact & ROI of different AI/ML initiatives, how to build your AI roadmap, how to break down massive AI/ML projects into small experiments, and how to accelerate different phases of your AI/ML strategy with partners like Tryolabs.

ABOUT MAIA BRENNER

Maia Brenner is a passionate data scientist and economist with strong programming skills, a mathematical and statistical background, and work experience in consulting and the public sector. As an AI Specialist at Tryolabs she helps clients maximize the full potential of data science and machine learning to solve their business problems.

Maia's experience in the consulting industry covers several projects related to demand forecasting, price optimization, customer segmentation, and natural language processing applications, among others. As a technical consultant, she has helped design and develop AI solutions for companies from several different industries such as Retail, Finance, Pharma, Logistics, Transportation, Hospitality, Education, and more.

She is also a professor in several universities and enjoys working on initiatives of AI4SocialGood. She has helped in the application of Machine Learning to improve the Public Education sector and is involved in Gender Inequality research groups.

SHOW NOTES

• The origin story behind Tryolabs (2:33)
• Common AI/ML challenges Tryolabs helps solve (5:48)
• Most painful problems with building AI capabilities (7:50)
• What are the fundamentals to build an AI organization? (10:11)
• How do you integrate AI/ML into your core business? (12:42)
• What problems can (or can’t) be solved with AI/ML? (15:18)
• How Tryolabs helps companies to identify specific AI/ML use cases (16:59)
• Common pitfalls when investing in & integrating AI/ML into your company (18:19)
• How to start small & experiment with AI/ML solutions (20:14)
• How Tryolabs scopes & iterates their AI/ML projects (24:42)
• Metrics, KPIs & other ways to determine feasibility, impact & ROI of your AI/ML project (26:53)
• How to build an AI/ML roadmap for your organization (30:34)
• How Tryolabs accelerates building your AI organization (34:28)

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Ready to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE: https://bit.ly/39QpNoH

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Richard Wong (SVP of Engineering @ Coursera) shares how the dilemma of speed & quality evolves as a company scales. We cover how to balance building new features & fixing quality issues, internal & external signals to help you determine your priorities, & how to gain alignment. Plus how to avoid over-engineering!

ABOUT RICHARD WONG
Richard oversees Coursera's infrastructure and product development. Prior to joining Coursera, Richard held various engineering leadership roles at the early days of LinkedIn, with a key focus on scaling the Jobs marketplace and Talent Solutions to become its first billion-dollar product.

Richard also oversaw the product development for Linkedin international expansions. Prior to LinkedIn, Richard spent over a decade at Microsoft leading various product development teams including MSN Hotmail, Active Directory, Windows Server, and System Center. Richard received his Master’s degree from Stanford University.

SHOW NOTES

• The dilemma of speed v. quality (1:49)
• Richard’s personal example of speed v. quality dilemma (5:58)
• How Coursera improved product quality (7:47)
• Tactical steps to improve product quality (10:34)
• How to avoid over-engineering & leverage customer complaints to improve product quality (16:37)
• How to balance speed & quality as an engineering leader (20:06)
• How to get alignment on quality issues with executive & cross-functional teams (25:25)
• How to prevent spending too much time on quality-focused engineering work (29:46)
• What are the signals for when you need to shift between speed v. quality? (33:22)
• How the dilemma of speed v. quality change as you scale (38:52)
• How Richard allocates resources to focus on new features or quality (42:02)
• Rapid Fire Questions (48:28)
• Takeaways (54:17)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC

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Juni scaled 2x-3x week-over-week in the 1st month of Covid-19 restrictions. Vivian Shen (Co-Founder & CEO @ Juni Learning) shares why they had to massively shift priorities from growth to internal tooling/operations & how they gained buy-in from their engineering teams throughout the process. Plus you’ll hear about their pitch process to surface innovative ideas, and how the “engineering pod” team structure increases ownership, creativity & directly connects engineering to user impact!

ABOUT VIVIAN SHEN, CO-FOUNDER & CEO @ JUNI LEARNING

Vivan's experience ranges from strategy development for Fortune 500 companies to building teams from scratch at startups -- and everything in between. Prior to founding Juni in 2017 to satisfy the gap in the education system, Vivian served as the Director of Product at Operator, where she launched multiple products in the US and China. She also spent two years as a Consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office, working with high-growth tech companies. She began her career as a software engineer at Google.

Vivian has been featured on Forbes’ 30 Under 30, as well as in Fast Company, TechCrunch and Fortune. She holds a B.S in Computer Science from Stanford, with a minor in Creative Writing. Today, she is passionate about helping kids discover and cultivate new interests and skills, empowering them to learn through the power of community and connections.

 

LINKS SHARED

IDEO Design Thinking Blog with David Kelly - https://www.ideo.com/journal

 

SHOW NOTES

• Juni’s Covid pivot: Why they focused on engineering operations & internal tooling (2:19)
• Making the decision to pivot (4:59)
• Prioritizing and reallocating engineering resources (8:49)
• Refocusing the team and getting buy-in (11:01)
• Dealing with resistance/friction on the company’s direction (13:50)
• Juni’s pitch process to surface new ideas (17:06)
• How to leverage end-users to motivate your teams (21:03)
• Increase ownership and creativity with “Engineering Pods” (26:13)
• Lessons learned on communicating priorities (28:21)
• When to revisit your orgs priorities while scaling (32:09)
• Shifting focus back on growth (34:52)
• Collaborating in planning meetings with analytics / biz ops & engineering to impact end users (37:10)
• Rapid Fire Questions (40:13)
• Takeaways (46:19)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC

 

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Brad Henrickson (Leadership Coach, Former CTO @ Scoop Technologies) shares how to reclaim ownership of your time by using an energy/calendar audit! You’ll learn the mechanics of how to conduct an energy audit and how to transform energy-draining moments engineering leaders commonly encounter, into energy-giving moments. Plus how to apply this at scale to amplify energy AND increase ownership throughout your entire org!

 

ABOUT BRAD HENRICKSON, LEADERSHIP COACH, FORMER CTO @ SCOOP TECHNOLOGIES

Brad is a seasoned technology leader with a broad range of experience from founding companies, to building product, to maturing organizations to driving culture and results in highly dynamic environments.

 

Brad has an extensive range of skills including but not limited to: building recruiting and hiring pipelines, organization design and SDLC design, people management, product management, board representation, budgeting, performance management, culture advocacy and delivery of critical technical projects.

 

Outside of the technical domain you will find Brad out rock climbing, surfing and mountaineering. He grounds himself through his connection to the outdoors and through his meditation practice which he has been doing for 20 years.

 

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Conscious Leadership Group: https://conscious.is/
• Henrickson Leadership: https://henricksonleadership.com/
• Sign up for Brad's Newsletter: https://bradhenrickson.substack.com/people/38350988-brad-henrickson
• Follow Brad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lowercase24

 

SHOW NOTES

• Introducing the “energy audit” (2:31)
• “Time is an expression of your priorities and values” (4:21)
• How an “energy audit” impacts how you spend your time (5:42)
• How to address routine meetings on your calendar that drain your energy (7:25)
• How to conduct your own calendar review & energy audit (10:55)
• How to approach a calendar review when you don't have total control of your time (14:36)
• Common energy audit trends for engineering leaders (18:13)
• How to transform energy-draining meetings to make them exquisite (19:34)
• Unplanned energy giving experiences to have on the calendar (22:54)
• How to transform activities from energy draining to energy giving (25:35)
• Renters vs. Owners & how to increase ownership in your engineering team (27:37)
• How to use energy audits at different scales of your organization (32:24)
• Framework to start a conversation about energy draining activities (33:50)
• How to get people to share problems without emotion or fear of judgement (37:00)
• Other contexts to apply the energy audit beyond meetings (39:34)
• How to use the energy audit to amplify your energy (41:16)
• Rapid Fire Questions (44:11)
• Takeaways (48:01)

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Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Interested in ELC's Peer Group Program? Click here to learn more & apply: https://bit.ly/3oBwLDC

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Welcome to our community’s FIRST DEBATE! Farhan Thawar (VPE @ Shopify) & Jerry Krikheli (Sr. Director of Engineering @ Facebook) hash out which org structure should rule them all… Should you go flat? Or should you become a hierarchy? You’ll hear how each structure impacts culture, innovation, and velocity!

FARHAN THAWAR, VP OF ENGINEERING @ SHOPIFY

Farhan Thawar is currently VP, Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. He is an avid writer and speaker and was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Prior to Xtreme, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, Celestica, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo. Farhan is also an advisor at yCombinator and holds a board seat at Optiva (formerly Redknee).
 

JERRY KRIKHELI, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING @ FACEBOOK

Prior to Facebook, Jerry was VP of Engineering at Houzz where he oversaw all infrastructure, platform, and engineering across Consumer, Marketplace, and Industry Solutions initiatives. Jerry was also an engineering director at Google responsible for developing early versions of the display ad serving infrastructure and launching YouTube ads as well as video ads on mobile apps. He has a passion for building high-performing systems, products, and people.
 

SHOW NOTES

• The rules of the debate (2:45)
• Opening Statement: Why hierarchical organizations? (3:39)
• Opening Statement: Why flat organizations? (6:25)
• Culture in flat organizations (9:09)
• Culture in hierarchical organizations (10:55)
• Culture rebuttals (14:19)
• Innovation in flat organizations (19:49)
• Innovation in hierarchical organizations (22:01)
• Innovation rebuttals (24:57)
• Velocity in hierarchical organizations (26:05)
• Velocity in flat organizations (28:42)
• Closing Statements on Flat vs. Hierarchical (30:16)
   

BROUGHT TO YOU BY...

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at sfelc.com!

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You've found the mythical product-market fit & are scaling fast... now what?! Bill Coughran (Partner @ Sequoia Capital; Former SVP Engineering @ Google) & David Singleton (CTO @ Stripe) cover common mistakes scaling engineering orgs make, signals to help you identify & develop good managers internally AND find great hires externally. Plus how to balance short & long term demands while scaling & more!

 

DAVID SINGLETON, CTO @ STRIPE

David joined Stripe from Google, where he was VPE, leading the Android Wear & Google Fit teams. At Google, David led teams that built some of the company’s most ambitious products, including its first apps with voice search; publisher products for Google Adsense; Google Offers; and Google Mobile Search Apps. He was also one of the first engineers at Google London and oversaw much of the growth of the London engineering office from inception to the large scale it has today.

 

Prior to Google, David spent 3 years as a senior engineer at Symbian, the pioneering mobile phone operating system, where he developed software for Nokia & Samsung smartphones & worked on both the Bluetooth stack & PC Connect software.

 

BILL COUGHRAN, FOUNDER'S COACH & PARTNER @ SEQUOIA; FORMER SVP ENGINEERING @ GOOGLE

Bill Coughran works as a founders' coach and partner at Sequoia Capital to help build spectacular technology-centric companies. Previously, Bill was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google with oversight of Chrome, YouTube, maps, google.com, underlying infrastructure systems, and security.

 

SHOW NOTES

• What are the most common mistakes scaling organizations make? (2:24)
• What's the best way to add managers to a technology organization? (4:40)
• Signals to identify potential engineering managers to develop from inside the organization (7:32)
• Finding the right external hires while in hyper-growth (signals & warning signs) (8:41)
• What questions do you ask for hiring references? (11:23)
• Navigating doing things that don’t scale in the short term (16:17)
• “Second system syndrome” & avoiding the urge to rewrite your system (19:12)
• How to retain early employees at a hyper-growth startup (21:30)
• What Bill’s most excited about in the tech industry right now (24:18)
• Tips to help turn ICs into leaders (25:20)
• Deciding on org structure when you’re scaling fast (27:26)
• Navigating speed & long-term quality building your architecture at an early-stage company (29:43)
• Final advice from Bill & David (31:37)
   

BROUGHT TO YOU BY...

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

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Lakshmi Baskaran shares insights on impromptu communication, why it’s important, and a framework for successfully navigating these tricky situations! We also cover team topology and why it’s so important to have the right composition of product-minded vs. technical-minded engineers within any eng team. Lakshmi shares how prioritizing team topology will impact hiring, influence engineering culture, and aid in eng team reorgs / restructures. She also discusses what the future of AI looks like for executive eng leaders & what to consider when adopting AI practices / technologies. And to bring it all together, we dissect how Lakshmi’s Triple-A impromptu communication framework operates in the context of both team topology & AI adoption.

ABOUT LAKSHMI BASKARAN

Lakshmi Baskaran is an accomplished business leader, entrepreneur, and an angel investor with over two decades of experience in the tech industry. She has built and managed high-performing engineering teams for startups, scale-ups, and publicly listed companies across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

She is currently serving as the VP of Engineering at Metadata, a SaaS company that offers a Marketing Operating System to prominent brands and businesses worldwide.

Lakshmi is passionate about coaching and mentoring business leaders and empowering women to pursue careers in technology. With the right support, she firmly believes that any woman can unleash her potential and make a significant impact on the world, rising to the heights of a great leader, entrepreneur, and a board member.

Lakshmi shares her insights on leadership and technology through her writing on Medium and Thrive.

“Imagine you're presenting it to your executive leadership team or to your board. As an engineering leader, you want to spice up that message with how it is interesting to your customers. The framework that I use in scenarios like this is called 'What If And So That' framework. If you're running an email platform, what if you're able to search through millions of emails in a sub millisecond so that your users can have faster search abilities compared to our competitors? Build a dream scenario and tell them how the technology can help them meet their dream scenario.”

- Lakshmi Baskaran   

We’re less than one week away from GLOW 2024 – Jellyfish’s virtual summit for engineering, product, and finance leaders who are looking to deliver greater business impact while building great software and teams. Here’s a preview of what’s in store:

• An inspiring guest keynote by TIME Magazine’s Kid of the Year, Gitanjali Rao
• Strategies for engineering excellence from CTOs at Keller Williams, Genius Sports, and FanDuel
• Jellyfish CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Lau’s keynote on the future of software engineering
• Exciting product roadmap updates from Jellyfish

Register for this May 15 event today at jellyfish.co/glow!SHOW NOTES:

• Why the topic of effective impromptu communication is important (2:46)
• Dissecting frameworks & tools for impromptu conversations (7:16)
• An example of high-quality impromptu communication with a CEO (11:52)
• Implement the Triple-A framework (14:03)
• The impact of this communication method on peers (16:37)
• Lakshmi’s insights on team topologies & essential aspects of different eng teams (18:26)
• Considerations for eng team composition (20:56)
• How new hires play into assembling and/or reforming early-stage eng teams (23:44)
• Aligning with teams about what they’re looking for in terms of hiring / composition (26:12)
• The impact of product & tech-minded eng leaders on engineering culture (29:19)
• Opportunities to employ impromptu comm skills in the context of team topology (31:42)
• Lakshmi’s observations on AI adoption (33:47)
• Frameworks for effectively communicating about AI considerations (37:11)
• How eng leaders should apply these AI areas into their decision-making (40:40)
• The role of impromptu communication in AI conversations (42:33)
• Rapid fire questions (45:00)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Lakshmi’s blog post on identifying product-minded and tech-minded engineers
• The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical Leadership - Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy.”

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Marianna Tessel (CTO @ Intuit) & Aileen Lee (Founder/Managing Partner @ Cowboy Ventures) cover how to navigate the build vs. buy decision! They share the frameworks they use to make a “buy” decision, how they assess engineering talent during acquisitions, how they decide between vendor software vs. open-source vs. building yourself. Plus the leadership skills that help Marianna lead a 5,000+ person team!

 

MARIANNA TESSEL, CTO @ INTUIT

Marianna oversees Intuit’s technology strategy and leads all of Intuit’s product engineering, data science, information technology and information security teams worldwide. Marianna's been at the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops.

Marianna previously served as Executive VP of Strategic Development at Docker, held leadership roles at VMware, Ariba, and General Magic working on the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops. the forefront of significant tech transformations, including virtualization, cloud, and dev ops.

 

AILEEN LEE, FOUNDER & MANAGING PARTNER @ COWBOY VENTURES

Aileen is founding Partner at Cowboy Ventures, a team that backs seed-stage technology companies re-imagining work and life through technology, what they call “life 2.0”. Cowboy Ventures works with startups like Guild Education, Lightstep, Dollar Shave Club, and Tally.

Aileen periodically writes about technology insights and is known for coining the business term “unicorn” for public and private companies valued over $1bn. She has been named to the Forbes Midas List of best investors and Forbes Most Powerful Women, as well as to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Prior to Cowboy, Aileen was a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was founding CEO of RMG Networks, and worked at Gap Inc in operating roles. She has degrees from MIT and HBS, is mom of 3, wife to a startup founder, an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and co-founder of the non-profit All Raise - aiming to accelerate success for women in the technology ecosystem.

 

SHOW NOTES

• About Marianna’s role at Intuit (2:33)
• How many acquisitions / build vs. buy decisions have you had to make? (4:35)
• Marianna’s evaluation framework for buying companies (6:26)
• Assessing engineering talent in acqui-hires (9:37)
• How do you decide to buy vendor software or build yourself? (15:41)
• How do you define what’s core to the business vs. context? (19:11)
• Where are you looking to buy instead of build right now? (21:40)
• Hard & soft skills that helped Marianna advance her career and run a 5000+ person team (23:48)
• Were you always good at the "developing talent" and "managing" part of being a CTO? (26:50)

 

BROUGHT TO YOU BY...

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

 

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Guillermo Fisher (Director of Engineering, Infrastructure @ Handshake) shares the impact of mission & values alignment, supporting your team’s internal mobility & professional growth, plus interesting infrastructure challenges & actualizing values on the infra team. This episode serves as a great reminder of WHY we become engineering leaders - to empower our teams to become great leaders in tech.

"The engineering team pivoted! Trashed OKRs! Trashed the roadmap... and said, 'We're going to build out virtual career fairs.' And so we did the work over the course of the year. Delivered career fairs in that same year... which is amazing! And have since served thousands and thousands of career fairs."

 

GUILLERMO FISHER, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INFRASTRUCTURE @ HANDSHAKE

Guillermo Andrae Fisher has been working on the Web for almost twenty years in several capacities, many of which are detailed on LinkedIn. He is currently the Director of Infrastructure at Handshake. He is also the founder of 757ColorCoded, a nonprofit organization focused on helping people of color achieve careers in technology and an advisor at Kura Labs, a free training and job placement academy for Infrastructure Computing, DevOps, & SRE for students from under-served communities. Guillermo is a Christian, husband, father of four, continuous delivery enthusiast, writer, AWS Data Hero, and a fan of very silly comedy.
 

SHOW NOTES

• Guillermo’s engineering leadership origin story (1:39)
• Discovering mission & values alignment at Handshake (4:29)
• The impact of Handshake’s COVID career fair pivot on students (6:25)
• How engineering enables Handshakes mission (8:03)
• Internal mobility, promotions & how Handshake supports professional growth within the company (10:15)
• How Handshake’s values are actualized on the infrastructure team (13:02)
• Practices to operationalize empathy on your team (14:43)
• What Guillermo loves most about the people and culture at Handshake (18:36)
• How to cultivate care & passion on your team (19:56)
• The infrastructure team's future focus and impact (21:45)
• Infrastructure challenges Guillermo's most excited about (23:42)
• Why Guillermo’s most excited to be at Handshake right now (25:39)
• Guillermo’s favorite part of being an engineering leader (27:43)
• Final Words: “If you want to work on something cool that matters, come here” (28:50)
   

LINKS

• 757 Color Coded: https://www.757colorcoded.org/
• Guillermo's Website: https://guillermoandraefisher.com/
• Kura Labs: https://kuralabs.org/
   

WANT TO CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION?

To stay up to date with key engineering initiatives at Handshake, keep an eye out in the coming weeks for the launch of the LinkedIn group, "Engineering at Handshake."

And of course, if you're exploring new opportunities and motivated by Handshake's mission, check out open roles at joinhandshake.com/join-us/

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This episode covers productivity practices to scale both your time & mind with Ashton Kutcher (Actor & Investor) & Ryan Petersen (CEO @ Flexport). They share their most essential productivity tools & systems, how to filter decisions & say NO to optimize your time, leverage your company’s culture to scale your time/mind. Plus energy audits, networking hacks, powerful questions, and more!

 

ASHTON KUTCHER, ACTOR & INVESTOR

Ashton’s career has spanned over many years with well-known projects on screen and film, but it's his passion in technology, entrepreneurship and investing that has brought him notable recognition. He’s been named TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World,” as well as being honored by Vanity Fair's New Establishment List, which identifies the top 50 of an innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies and entrepreneurs. Twice, Kutcher was named one of Forbes magazine’s “World’s Most Powerful Celebrities,” and one of Fast Company magazine’s “Most Creative People.”

 

RYAN PETERSEN, FOUNDER & CEO @ FLEXPORT

Ryan Petersen is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Flexport, a full-service freight forwarder and customs broker. Since founding Flexport in 2013, Ryan and his team have worked to make global trade easy for everyone. Ryan led Flexport from inception to the company it is today: supporting over 10,000 customers and suppliers across 109 countries and doubling revenue to nearly $450m last year. His areas of focus include setting company strategy, ensuring the company tracks to goals, and most importantly, building and maintaining Flexport’s unique culture.

Prior to founding Flexport, Ryan helped run an e-commerce company and co-founded ImportGenius, one of the largest providers of business intelligence to the import-export industry. His experience and frustration with global logistics served as the inspiration to start Flexport. Ryan holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia University.
 

SHOW NOTES

• How Ashton & Ryan first met & their early entrepreneurship hustles (2:15)
• Productivity tools & systems (4:06)
• How to say “NO” to optimize your time (7:08)
• Leverage culture in your organization to scale your time and mind (10:32)
• The power of predictability on company culture and productivity (15:26)
• Networking Hack: Connect through social impact (17:40)
• Creating a personal mission statement & the “energy audit” (19:02)
• How to avoid being reactive to your to-do list (21:26)
• Productivity as your company scales & cultivating sub-cultures within your org (23:17)
• What question should you be asking yourself right now? (25:01)
   

SPONSORS

 

Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELC

 

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