alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Platform Teams and DevOps Optimization: Insights from Camille Fournier on platform engineering, career growth, and CTO strategies for success. How do you create an effective platform team and optimize DevOps? Tobi interviews Camille Fournier about her career, technical insights, and best practices in platform engineering. Camille shares her journey from building her own computers and installing Linux in high school to becoming Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and authoring influential books for engineers 📚. 👩‍💻 Camille's early fascination with computers and engineering, including building her own systems and installing Linux 📚 Authoring 'The Manager's Path' and 'Platform Engineering' 🌐 Understanding platform engineering and its evolution from DevOps 🚀 Challenges and strategies in platform engineering for larger companies 💡 Key advice for CTOs on starting and managing successful platform teams Listen here 00:00 Welcome to the Alphalist Podcast 01:09 Introducing Camille Fournier 02:04 Camille's Journey into Engineering 04:37 The Fascination with Platform Engineering 07:43 The Evolution of DevOps and Platform Teams 14:48 Defining Platform Engineering 18:54 Building Effective Platforms in Diverse Organizations 30:35 The Importance of Trust in Platform Teams 33:33 The Role of Product Managers in Platform Products 34:12 Customer Focused Mindset in Platform Engineering 35:02 Measuring Success and Metrics in Platform Teams 35:53 Communicating Platform Success to Leadership 40:22 The Importance of Recognizing Engineering Work 44:31 Avoiding Overengineering in Platform Teams 48:19 Leadership Challenges in Platform Engineering 55:22 Advice for Aspiring Platform Engineers 59:42 Final Thoughts and Reflections

Dennis Winter, CTO of Börse Stuttgart, shares insights from his extensive fintech experience, previously serving as CTO of SolarisBank. He discusses scaling tech in regulated industries, emphasizing security, compliance, and culture. Dennis highlights the importance of building resilient infrastructure early, managing technical debt, and fostering team ownership. He explores the evolution of team structures as companies grow, the challenges of implementing BYOD policies in banking, and navigating compliance complexities with a focus on collaboration and automation.

Dr. Daniel Hauschildt, Co-founder and CPTO of IMG.LY, shares his expertise in building photo and video editing SDKs. He delves into the essentials of developer-friendly documentation, emphasizing its role in marketing. Daniel discusses the challenges of cross-platform compatibility, advocating for the beauty of well-designed APIs. He also highlights their focus on algorithm optimization over raw computational power. With insights on modular design, he paints a vivid picture of navigating the technical hurdles in the SDK landscape.

Planning AND Practice: The Secret to Incident Response Plan and PRACTICE for better incident response with insights from Tim Armandpour, CTO of PagerDuty. Learn the secrets to resilience from the team that mitigated the impact of a major outage—handling a 250% traffic surge while delivering on their SLA. Listen to find out: 🛠️ Why planning AND practice are both critical for incident response. 🚧 How to practice for incident response (e.g Failure Fridays with Chaos Engineering) 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Ownership: Why tech AND business teams must join post-mortems. ☁️ How to mitigate the impact of your cloud provider’s lower SLA. ⚓ Which architectural patterns are more resilient? ⚖️ WARNING: “bend” the CAP theorem at your own risk Listen here TimeStamps: (00:00:00) Introduction to Alphalist Podcast (00:01:00) Meet Tim Armanpour (00:01:56) Tim's Early Career (00:06:22) Handling Major Incidents at PagerDuty (00:09:21) The Importance of Preparedness (00:13:54) Practicing Failure Scenarios (00:18:16) Resilient Infrastructure and Architectural Patterns (00:22:44) Standardization and Data Management (00:25:48) Exploring Infrastructure Resilience (00:26:20) Achieving High Availability with Lower SLA Cloud Platforms (00:29:38) Defining Meaningful SLIs (00:32:15) Assessing Incident Readiness (00:35:15) The Importance of Ownership (00:41:30) Continuous Improvement (00:43:53) Lessons from a Yogurt Business (00:48:18) Final Thoughts and Takeaways

In this engaging discussion, Daniel Bartholomae, CTO at Optilyz, shares insights from his journey in tech and leadership. He reveals how cross-functional team dynamics can enhance efficiency without traditional roles, replacing product managers to accelerate sprints. Daniel discusses the effectiveness of tools like Miro and Asana over Jira and emphasizes the importance of hiring team members with diverse skills. He also introduces Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) as a key method for documenting technical choices, promoting clear communication and collaboration.

Eric Bowman, CTO at King, brings a wealth of experience from gaming and e-commerce. He delves into the importance of balancing outputs and outcomes for impactful results. The conversation touches on organizing teams effectively to boost productivity and minimize bottlenecks. Eric also discusses the concept of adjacent possibilities in innovation, especially concerning AI. He emphasizes the need for clear problem definitions and strategic goal-setting to foster a culture of continuous improvement. Tune in for practical insights for technical leaders!

Rebecca Murphey, Field CTO at Swarmia and co-author of "Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization," shares her insights from her roles at Stripe and Indeed. She discusses aligning engineering work with business outcomes and the significance of developer experience. Topics include using queuing theory to evaluate workflows, the ethical implications of tracking developer metrics, and the balance between immediate optimization and future consequences. Rebecca emphasizes the need for effective communication and the importance of team metrics over individual ones.

Claire Fautsch, CTO at Joblift, shares her expertise in cloud cost optimization. She reveals how Joblift reduced its monthly cloud expenses from €100K to €30K without sacrificing performance. Claire discusses building effective dashboards and aligning cloud costs with business KPIs. She emphasizes the importance of involving the entire team in cost management, avoiding over-provisioning, and making impactful technical tweaks. The conversation also touches on cultivating cost sensitivity within tech teams and maintaining financial efficiency without a dedicated FinOps team.

How DevOps has Changed QA Keep an eye on the latest trends in this CTO podcast episode featuring Hannes Lenke (CEO and Co-founder of Checkly). Hannes shares insights from over a decade of shaping the testing and monitoring landscape. From AI-powered mobile testing to cloud-based browser testing to synthetic monitoring, he has seen it all. Listen to find out: 👀 What is "Monitoring as Code"? How does it differ from traditional observability? 🔄 Has DevOps changed QA forever? Is there still a place for dedicated QA teams in an automated world? 🚀 How did Checkly evolve into a PLG company with a sales team? ⚙️ How do they run customer code at scale across 21 global data centers? Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY SmartRecruiters Timestamps (00:00) – Introduction to Alphalist Podcast (02:05) – Meet Hannes Lenke (05:13) – Hiring the Right People (07:50) – Hannes’s Journey into Computing (12:30) – TestObject: AI for Mobile Testing in the Early 2010s (16:33) – Globalizing a Berlin-Based Business (21:01) – The Birth of Checkly and Monitoring as Code (23:00) – How DevOps Changed QA (30:52) – The Right Observability Stack for SaaS (37:39) – Cross-Functional Teams vs. Dedicated QA (43:10) – Challenges of Executing Customer Code at Scale (49:08) – How Teams are Arranged at Checkly (50:51) – PLG with Enterprise Sales (53:52) – Lessons Learned as a Second-Time Founder: Pace Yourself About Hannes Lenke Hannes is the co-founder of Checkly. former CEO and Founder of TestObject and General Manager EMEA Sauce Labs. Addicted to devops and passionate about all things tech. About our sponsor SmartRecruiters Want to make recruiting more efficient with AI? Smart Recruiters offers a comprehensive global recruiting solution. They cover applicant management, CRM, talent onboarding, CMS, and reporting. Fossway calls it "the leading platform for talent acquisition." Use their AI-driven solution for active sourcing and candidate selection. Smart Recruiters helps you identify top talent in internal and external databases, providing detailed applicant analysis with weighted matching and scoring. Their AI system also recommends suitable positions for new applicants and improves through user feedback. It ensures bias-free, objective analysis and compliant operations worldwide, supporting over 4,000 companies, including LinkedIn, Visa, Bosch, Axel Springer, and SIXT. Their platform is highly rated by recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates for its intuitive design and easy integration. Ready to elevate your recruiting process? Visit the Smart Recruiters website for free resources on AI and recruiting trends. Book a free consultation and mention the alphalist.CTO podcast for a 10% discount. Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/smartrecruiters QUOTE: "As a second-time founder, you always think it's so much easier to fall into a second business. I think it's not… the expectations are just larger."

Tuomas Artman, CTO of Linear, emphasizes the value of sustainable business growth over hypergrowth. He shares insights on maintaining product quality without expanding teams and the risks of feature bloat in customer-driven development. Artman discusses the advantages of prioritizing longevity over early acquisitions and reveals why Linear raised funds after initially planning to bootstrap. He also addresses why Full-Stack Engineers are preferred over QA Teams and the unique benefits of a local-first synchronization engine for a seamless user experience.