Geeks Who Lead Podcast

They're coming. From bubble.io and webflow through UI Path and Blue Prism, the chances are that someone within your company is already building a departmental system using a "no code" tool. As with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for CIOs a decade ago, ignoring the problem isn't an option. In this episode, I chat with Colin Earl, Founder & CTO at Agiloft, about how CTOs can evaluate & leverage RPA tools to support "citizen developers" within their companies to reduce the pressure on the core dev team while still getting their departmental needs met.

Wellington, NZ isn’t the obvious place to start a SaaS company. But Xero has built a globally distributed team of over 1800 people in product and engineering. In this episode, I chat with Mark Rees [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrees3/], their CTO about how they scaled the org. Learn more about: - How he doubled his engineering team from 150 -> 300 in a year - His approach to allocating work across a widely distributed org - Why his team actually appreciated the introduction of standards for processes and technologies - The unexpected benefits of publishing a machine readable service directory for the org

One of the biggest risks for an engineering org is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome where the tech team wants to rethink every decision and rebuild every piece of tech from scratch. But sometimes it makes sense to take a different path if the constraints you’re optimizing for are uncommon.In this episode I chat with Adam Sypniewski, CTO at Deepgram about some of the non-obvious choices that their team has made - from programming languages and hosting to team composition and how to approach build vs buy decisions.

While running database services for AWS, Anurag Gupta, now Founder & CEO of Shoreline.io, learned the importance of going beyond monitoring and incident response to implement incident automation to automatically resolve common (and uncommon) production issues. In this episode, he talks about the importance of automating production ops, why just using cloud hosting or containers doesn’t fully solve the problem and how to think about building out an effective SRE team. 

As a CTO, you're not just responsible for running the engineering team...Because you're also a C-level executive with the responsibility to help the executive team to leverage technology to achieve their business goals.So how can you maximize the value you're bringing to your organization? The answer is to be an "executive first".And that's what Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI, talks about in this short byte. He shares what the CTO brings to the leadership team, the biggest difference between a CTO who's focused on their org versus being an active member of the leadership team, how to balance your responsibilities to both the engineering team and leadership team, and why it's important to focus on outcomes - not egos.This episode is brought to you in partnership with Bugsnag, who invites you to join the Apps + Coffee Connection! The Apps + Coffee Connection is a new mobile and web app community for engineering and product leaders to converse about industry topics. Every third Friday of the month we meet to discuss topics such as process efficiencies, tools, team management and future thinking. You can join the community by adding this recurring event to your calendar. 

Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teamsWe can't put the remote genie back in the bottle, but with some people desperate to get out and go back to the office, how can organizations manage the two?In today's Short Byte, I speak to Tim Olshansky, EVP of Product, Design and Engineering at Zenput, a foodtech startup focused on food safety. Tim embraced a hybrid remote model long before the pandemic and has been successfully managing hybrid remote teams for 11 years.In this chat, hear Tim talk about his remote first but office-centered approach to remote work, and the three driving principles that make sure employees are happy, productive, and enjoy similar experiences, whether they're in the office or across the country or world.

Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?The good news is that software development has moved from a peripheral activity to the heart of every business. But as technology becomes integral to all functions, how can you keep track of what embedded engineers across the org are building, balancing awareness and reliability with agility? Today we’re speaking with Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Product & Services at RackSpace about empowering technology across the organization while still providing guard rails to ensure the quality and reliability of the solutions.

Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring processWith demand for talent at an all time high, if you want to attract, identify and close the best developers for your team, you simply have to up your hiring game. Join us for this “Short Byte” as I interview Jeff Spector - a cofounder at Karat - a company dedicated to fixing the hiring process for engineers. We’ll discuss how to create a fair, predictive and enjoyable hiring process so that you get great signal from your interviews, create a good impression with the candidates and can improve the inclusivity of your process and the diversity of your team. 

Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering orgCamille Fournier is perhaps best known for her amazing book “the managers path” - a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. But she also has a degree from Carnegie Mellon, was a VP at Goldman Sachs, and then was the CTO at Rent The Runway before eventually returning to the finance world as Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma.  Today she discusses her experiences in managing a product focused engineering org.Thank you to our friends at Carbon Five for sponsoring today’s episode. For over 20 years, Carbon Five has helped businesses build, launch and scale digital products and teams. They’ve helped brands like Signal, Masterclass, Stitch Fix, Chime, and more, design and develop some of the most successful apps and platforms on the market today. So whether you’re looking to build your first app, fix a broken development process, or to scale your successful engineering team — the folks at Carbon Five are ready to help. Visit carbonfive.com/ctoconnection for special access to free product development guides and technical team resources.”

Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leavesMai Irie is a director of engineering, but twice in the last two years she’s had to deal with managing the engineering org after her CTO or general equivalent left. In this interview we’ll look at some best practices for taking over an engineering org in times of transition.Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.And thanks to our sustaining partners:CodeClimate - Engineering leaders who are motivated to exceed 2021 goals know that gut-feel isn't enough to make performance-improving decisions. CTOs, VPEs and Directors at organizations like Slack, Gusto, Pizza Hut trust objective data from Code Climate Velocity to measure and improve productivity, efficiency and performance. Reach out to Code Climate and get a month free when you mention CTO Connection.Karat - Karat helps companies hire software engineers by designing and conducting technical interview programs that improve hiring signal, mitigate bias, and reduce the interviewing time burden on engineering teams. Check out this short video or visit Karat.com to learn how we can help you grow your team.LaunchDarkly - the Feature Management Platform Powering the Best Software ProductsOur vision is to eliminate risk for developers and operations teams from the software development cycle. As companies transition to a world built on software, there is an increasing requirement to move quickly—but that often comes with the desire to maintain control. LaunchDarkly is the feature management platform that enables dev and ops teams to control the whole feature lifecycle, from concept to launch to value. Learn more at https://launchdarkly.com/CTO Connection is  a community where senior engineering leaders can connect with and learn from their peers!If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.