alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Melissa Perri, author of 'Escaping the Build Trap' and 'Product Operations', discusses the importance of balancing qualitative and quantitative data in product management. They explore the consequences of overhiring and overscaling in companies, and the need for a solid product strategy. They also introduce the concept of ProductOps and highlight the significance of data and insights in shaping product strategy. Listen to this episode to gain valuable insights into crafting an ideal product strategy.

Time Management + Continuous Learning Tips for CTO Stay on top of your professional development with these learning and productivity tips from Luca Rossi, whose refactoring.club newsletter 🌀 is read by 50k subscribers every week. After scaling Wanderio to 25M users 🚀 as founding CTO, Luca sat down to distill his experiences and in the process created the tech leadership content 📰 he so badly needed. With diagrams. 🖼️ In this alphalist CTO podcast, Luca shares what he has learned about leadership - including the self-leadership needed to structure one's time and effectively harvest the plethora of ideas published online into action. Listen to find out: What is the flaw in the 'State of Flow"?🌊 Why CTOs should write more ✍️ How he structures his day 🌞 Should CTOs be generalists?🤔 How he organises his tech leadership 'news clippings' 🗂️ Tobi getting real 🫣 about recurring 1:1s BROUGHT TO YOU BY: codecentric, instaffo and WorkGenius Timestamps (approx..) (00:00:00) What is the alphalist CTO podcasts? (00:02:23) Who is Luca? (00:03:40) - (00:06:23) Luca's Journey to Full-Time Writing (00:06:24) The Growth of the Refactoring Newsletter (00:07:05) Staying in-the-know when no longer an active CTO (00:09:27) How Luca got into Computing (00:11:11) Wanderio as a Italian Startup (hyperlocal) (00:13:39) New CTO Job? Don't refactor everything (00:18:09) The Rise of the Generalist CTO (00:21:09) How Luca Stays Up to Date on Tech Trends (00:22:19) Why Luca Prefers Newsletters (00:23:26) How to organise ideas from content (00:24:50) Structuring His Day (00:26:41) Finding Your Unique Angle and Voice (00:29:01) Productivity Techniques for Solo Work (00:31:21) Overriding Time Boxes (00:31:41) Flaw in the 'State of Flow' (00:30:27) Time Management Tools (00:31:48) Can CTOs Timebox? (00:33:42) Recurring Meetings (00:35:27) Too Many 1-on-1s? (00:36:39) Curriculum of a CTO School (00:39:57) 3 Tips for CTOs (00:40:44) Which Engineering Metrics (00:45:31) A CTO is a Maker (00:46:35) Share your Thoughts Online (00:47:56) Advice To Younger Self About our sponsors codecentric The codecentric Culture and Career Podcast is unique for a company podcast. It is just employees talking freely about their daily life - from IT consulting projects they are working to imposter syndrome. We support this because we think it's pretty cool that codecentric simply lets the colleagues talk about everything, no matter what it's about - project business, Imposter sydrome, further education or parental leave in the consulting business. For us it is definitely worth a recommendation. Listen in - the codecentric Culture and Career Podcast. Note - its in German. Just go to: www.link.alphalist.com/cc instaffo Instaffo is a recruiting platform that allows you to hire tech talent in less than 25 days. It is loved by over 600 companies - including HelloFresh, Amazon, and MyPoster. By leveraging sophisticated matchmaking and allowing you to chat directly with pre-qualified tech talent right on the platform they’ve made the hiring process 3X more effective. From ‘Matched’ to ‘Chat’ in one go. While classic job portals, in-house active sourcing and headhunters give you the headache of paying upfront, having high setup efforts and dealing with 30% hiring fees, with Instaffo this now history for you. As an alphalist listener, you get to enjoy the Instaffo recruiting platform absolutely free until you find that perfect hire. Already over 2.000 tech talents and companies are connected weekly on instaffo, so what are you waiting for? Go to https://instaffo.com/cto to get started. WorkGenius Tired of sifting through countless resumes and struggling to find the right tech talent? Look no further! WorkGenius has just acquired Expertlead, known for its innovation in matching tech freelancers with top-tier companies and offering peer-to-peer live coding assessments. Now, they bring even more efficiency to your hiring process. Whether you're a startup or an established enterprise, WorkGenius is now here to turbocharge your hiring process. Say goodbye to the guesswork and endless interviews. WorkGenius matches your candidates experienced senior developers and puts them through tailored, enjoyable, and fair technical interviews. Your company will get the cream of the crop - the most sought-after talents in the industry- while saving your hardworking Tech and HR teams valuable time. Start your journey with WorkGenius - head over to https://link.alphalist.com/work connect with an expert, and find the perfect match for your engineering needs.

Reimagine version control systems with Scott Chacon, Co-founder of GitHub and GitButler. Is the Git Protocol still useful? Can we streamline our code and commit less? Discover Scott's journey into computing, the early days of GitHub, and his passion for teaching. Learn about enhancing the Git Protocol and improving the code review process. Explore challenges in finding tech talent and the value of GitHub as a software development tool.

Leading Through A LayOff: How to downsize nicely Is there a nice way to downsize? Mike Fisher, former CTO of Etsy, shares what he learned when the company downscaled by 27% in 2 rounds of layoffs right before he joined. Find out how you can help your team navigate this sensitive period - both pre- and post-layoff. How much time⏳ you lose in a layoff (the productivity cost of layoff) Why you can’t expect to cut costs ✂️ AND grow Why Availability 🟢 needs to be prioritised as you downsize Layoffing off Generalists vs. Specialists 🧑‍🔬 How they migrated to the cloud ☁️ Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Storyblok and WorkGenius TIMESTAMPS: (0:00:00) - Intro (0:02:43) - West Point to General Electric to Etsy (0:08:11) - Downsizing's Impact on Employee Morale (0:09:11) - Knowledge Transfer (0:10:13) - Post Layoff Attrition (0:11:40) - How Being a Monolith Helped (0:13:30) - Cloud Migration (0:15:28) - Lift and Shift vs. Kubernetes (0:18:33) - How a new project helped heal (0:19:30) - The Time Costs of LayOffs (0:22:05) - You can't expect to cut costs and grow (0:24:35) - Impact of where the team was cut (0:26:30) - Advice for CTOs about to lay off (0:27:02) - Transparency During Downsizing (0:28:00) - NB: Watch out for Availability (0:31:12) - Layoffs and Stock Prices (0:33:00) - Short Term and Long Term Planning (0:33:40) - 3X Framework and Product Lifecycle Phases (0:35:00) - Laying Off R & D: Specialists vs. Generalists (0:36:24) - The Dedicated FinOps Team (40:02:58) - Keeping up your Knowledge Network Storyblok Does your current CMS hinder agile development and deployment? Storyblok is a cloud-native API-first CMS that minimizes technical dependencies, enables your development team to create frontends with whatever technology they already know, and your business users to create content only once and publish on multiple platforms. There are numbers to back this up: Storyblok cuts down development time by 50% and provides 582%ROI over 3 years, a study by Forrester found. Go get a free demo of Storyblok and learn how it can improve your speed to market.Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/cms WorkGenius Tired of sifting through countless resumes and struggling to find the right tech talent? Look no further! WorkGenius has just acquired Expertlead, known for its innovation in matching tech freelancers with top-tier companies and offering peer-to-peer live coding assessments. Now, they bring even more efficiency to your hiring process. Whether you're a startup or an established enterprise, WorkGenius is now here to turbocharge your hiring process. Say goodbye to the guesswork and endless interviews. WorkGenius matches your candidates experienced senior developers and puts them through tailored, enjoyable, and fair technical interviews. Your company will get the cream of the crop - the most sought-after talents in the industry- while saving your hardworking Tech and HR teams valuable time. Start your journey with WorkGenius - head over to https://link.alphalist.com/work connect with an expert, and find the perfect match for your engineering needs.

The AI-Driven Future of Software Development, Scaling, and the Open Source git checkout the future of software development with Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. This broad podcast discusses everything from refactoring and scaling to the CTO/CEO role, from open source to AI as a Dev Tool. Every day Thomas delves into the development of software development - so his 🧠 was a great brain to pick. Listen to find out: Why refactoring 🧩 will always be a part of growth (but AI will help) What was it like being integrated ☂️ into Microsoft post-M&A What are GitHub’s current challenges 👷 Listen here BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius and Storyblok TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro 03:18 from East Germany to Silivon Valley 04:36 Ruby 06:29 From Software Developer to Founder 07:35 What happens after Microsoft aquires a company 10:45 Microsoft’s DevTools Ecosystem 12:18 Power of the Open Source 15:36 What has changed in the last 20 years 18:09 GitHub’s vision 18:51 Refactoring Legacy Code with Generative AI 25:42 DevOps and Deploying GenAI code 29:31 The Futility of Focussing on a Scalability in Earlydays Startup 32:59 What Challenges Are Being Worked art GitHub right now? 34:2o SrategyL Ideas and challefs 34:43 The Role of GitHub CEO 38:42 The generalist role of a CTO 41:57 Being a Tech Leader of DevTool 45:26 Mentorship and Inspiration (Steve Jobs) 48:09 ChatGPT 51:51 Advice to Younger Self as German Techie OUR SPONSORS WorkGenius Tired of sifting through countless resumes and struggling to find the right tech talent? Look no further! WorkGenius has just acquired Expertlead, known for its innovation in matching tech freelancers with top-tier companies and offering peer-to-peer live coding assessments. Now, they bring even more efficiency to your hiring process. Whether you're a startup or an established enterprise, WorkGenius is now here to turbocharge your hiring process. Say goodbye to the guesswork and endless interviews. WorkGenius matches your candidates experienced senior developers and puts them through tailored, enjoyable, and fair technical interviews. Your company will get the cream of the crop - the most sought-after talents in the industry- while saving your hardworking Tech and HR teams valuable time. Start your journey with WorkGenius - head over to https://link.alphalist.com/work connect with an expert, and find the perfect match for your engineering needs. Storyblok Does your current CMS hinder agile development and deployment? Storyblok is a cloud-native API-first CMS that minimizes technical dependencies, enables your development team to create frontends with whatever technology they already know, and your business users to create content only once and publish on multiple platforms. There are numbers to back this up: Storyblok cuts down development time by 50% and provides 582%ROI over 3 years, a study by Forrester found. Go get a free demo of Storyblok and learn how it can improve your speed to market.Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/cms

DX: The Developer Metrics that Unlock Developer Productivity Find out the best way to measure Developer Experience 🧑‍💻in a way that truly enables ⚡ your developers (i.e. Developer Productivity) in this CTO podcast with Abi Noda - co-creator of the DevEx Framework and founder of Pull Panda. For years Abi has been on a quest to discover what developer metrics are the key to happier and more productive developers. He tried PR Analytics (he created Pull Panda🐼 - acquired by GitHub) and DORA, before teaming up with other Developer Productivity researchers 🧑‍🔬 to create a new framework which focuses on improving developer experience (DevEx) to improve productivity. Listen to find out: Why do companies measure Developer Productivity? 🤷(from both CTO and developer perspective) How to survey your developers? (Sampling, Frequency and Length)📝 How DORA is done wrong in most companies Why he prefers bootstrapping -🥾 but got a unique type of funding for his 4th company. Listen here TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Introduction 05:09 His Bootstrapping Inspiration 06:29 When investment is good 09:07 Why measure developer productivity? 13:28 Pull Analytics Approach 16:47 How it backfired at GitHub 17:13 Companies Misuse of Data 19:01 Why DORA didn’t work 20:40 'Shiny New Object Syndrome' 22:10 The right and wrong way to do DORA 24:39 How Developer Metrics have Evolved 33:28 Small Teams and Measuring DX 34:32 Measuring DX in larger companies 36:09 Creating a survey (frequency, length, and sampling) 41:21 Honesty in survey responses 43:48 Tips for getting started BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Storyblok and WorkGenius Storyblok Does your current CMS hinder agile development and deployment? Storyblok is a cloud-native API-first CMS that minimizes technical dependencies, enables your development team to create frontends with whatever technology they already know, and your business users to create content only once and publish on multiple platforms. There are numbers to back this up: Storyblok cuts down development time by 50% and provides 582%ROI over 3 years, a study by Forrester found. Go get a free demo of Storyblok and learn how it can improve your speed to market.Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/cms WorkGenius WorkGenius provides a unique freelance hiring and management solution that covers the entire process from start to finish. We use advanced technology to make it easier and faster for businesses to find skilled freelancers who have been thoroughly vetted. With WorkGenius, you get a comprehensive solution for managing freelancers throughout their engagement. We simplify the hiring process, project management, payroll, and reporting, allowing organizations to make the most of their freelance talent pool and effortlessly manage their existing freelancers. Start your journey with WorkGenius - head over to www.workgenius.com/alphalist connect with an expert, and find the perfect match for your engineering needs.

The Wix Guild model, Mentorship and Platform-as-a- Runtime Get inspired about architecture - that of computers and teams - in this CTO podcast with Aviran Mordo, VP Engineering at Wix. I really enjoyed talking with Aviran about both the technical nitty gritty of powering millions of websites as well as the Wix model which - unlike the Spotify model - is still in use at its flagship company over a decade later Listen to find out: How the Wix model works 🪗(+ hiring, personal development and communication across guilds and companies) What is Platform-as-a-Runtime 🚄 Why most microservices 🪢 are done wrong (and are costing you money) How to encourage mentorship 🫶 The infra that powers 7% of the web Listen here - Timestamps 2:10 Aviran’s Personal Journey 9:43 Wix secret sauce 12:26 Cost effective serverless environments for millions of customers. 14:58 The Wix Tech Stack 16:00 The mission to iimprove developer experience 17:00 How people do microservices wrong 21:50 Platform as a Runtime 32:00 The Wi Guild model 35:37 Aligning decisions across internal ‘companies’ 38:40 The Operational Guild Model 54:49 Improving the Guilds through Feedback + KPI of Guilds 1:00:24 Mentorship in the Org 1:06:15 Working on his networking skills BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Storyblok, Zoho and codecentric Storyblok Does your current CMS hinder agile development and deployment? Storyblok is a cloud-native API-first CMS that minimizes technical dependencies, enables your development team to create frontends with whatever technology they already know, and your business users to create content only once and publish on multiple platforms. There are numbers to back this up: Storyblok cuts down development time by 50% and provides 582%ROI over 3 years, a study by Forrester found. Go get a free demo of Storyblok and learn how it can improve your speed to market.Just go to: https://link.alphalist.com/cms Zoho You have probably heard of Zoho. They have been around for 27 years and now offer an all-in-one platform with over 50 mission-critical apps that offer everything from sales to marketing and HR to accounting. All in one platform- connecting the entire enterprise, ensuring communication between departments. But its the user privacy that Zoho offers that makes it stand out. Not only do they not make money by using your data for advertising, but they also have EU datacenters which is a huge win for GDPR compliance See for yourself. Come to their user conference, named Zoholics on 26th and 27th of September 2023 in Cologne, where you can sit down with experts and get to know the people behind the software. Plus, you get 25% off with the promo code OMR_CTO. Just go to: www.link.alphalist.com/zoho codecentric The codecentric Culture and Career Podcast is unique for a company podcast. It is just employees talking freely about their daily life - from IT consulting projects they are working to imposter syndrome. We support this because we think it's pretty cool that codecentric simply lets the colleagues talk about everything, no matter what it's about - project business, Imposter sydrome, further education or parental leave in the consulting business. For us it is definitely worth a recommendation. Listen in - the codecentric Culture and Career Podcast. Note - its in German. Just go to: www.link.alphalist.com/cc

How to restructure a large tech and product organisation Find out how to restructure your org using a matrix structure with Gertrud Kolb, CTO of eyeo (the company behind common adblockers). You will find out how Gertrud implemented changes across an already large organisation - from the team typologies to team communications. Listen to find out: How to restructure using team topology 🧩best practices in a large organisation. How to improve requirements engineering ✅ How to gradually consolidate team communications 💬 How ad-blockers are working advertisers to enable privacy-friendly 🎯 targeting Behind-the-scenes at the world’s most popular adblocker Listen here -- BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Zoho You have probably heard of Zoho. They have been around for 27 years and now offer an all-in-one platform with over 50 mission-critical apps that offer everything from sales to marketing and HR to accounting. All in one platform- connecting the entire enterprise, ensuring communication between departments. But its the user privacy that Zoho offers that makes it stand out. Not only do they not make money by using your data for advertising, but they also have EU datacenters which is a huge win for GDPR compliance See for yourself. Come to their user conference, named Zoholics on 26th and 27th of September 2023 in Cologne, where you can sit down with experts and get to know the people behind the software. Plus, you get 25% off with the promo code OMR_CTO. Just go to: www.link.alphalist.com/zoho Timestamps (1:58) - Gertrud’s Nerd Journey (8:24) - Restructuring your org with Team Topologies (15:04) - Working in an interdisciplinary & cross team way (16:00) - Navigating interdependencies with multiple products, teams and interests (21:55) - Inside Eyeo’s Matrix Organization (24:09) - Integrating new companies into the org (28:13) - Consolidating Communication Tools (33:02) - The tech behind ad blocking (41:26) - The move to Ad Filtering

Teresa Torres, author of 'Continuous Discovery Habits,' shares insights on outcome-oriented mindset, continuous feedback loop with customers, mistakes in product discovery, and pitfalls of founder-led product. Also discusses roles in organizations, the effectiveness of OKRs, factors for business and discovery success, lessons from early career at become.com, and shifting from an IT mindset to a product mindset.

Platform Engineering 101: Why you need it and how to do it Find out how to use platform engineering to scale your DevOps 🚀with this hands-on podcast with Sarah Polan, Field CTO at HashiCorp. Sarah is passionate about 2 things: DevSecOps 🔏 and automating everything 🔁 (she even automates aspects of her childcare :)). Which is why this podcast episode is all about scalability 📈 - from attrition-proof DevOps to automated audits. This is a must-listen podcast for both CTOs who are new to Platform Engineering as well as those who are troubleshooting from the trenches. Listen to find out: Why do we need platform engineering?🤔 From financial benefits to DevEx. Is DevOps dead? Why platform teams is the only scalable way to do DevOps How to get your platform and application teams to work together 🪢? How to balance 🤹 autonomy and innovation with centralisation? How to decide what to build at a platform level? 🧩 🏗 Does it differ by industry? Listen here -- BROUGHT TO YOU BY: WorkGenius WorkGenius provides a unique freelance hiring and management solution that covers the entire process from start to finish. We use advanced technology to make it easier and faster for businesses to find skilled freelancers who have been thoroughly vetted. With WorkGenius, you get a comprehensive solution for managing freelancers throughout their engagement. We simplify the hiring process, project management, payroll, and reporting, allowing organizations to make the most of their freelance talent pool and effortlessly manage their existing freelancers. Start your journey with WorkGenius - head over to www.workgenius.com/alphalist connect with an expert, and find the perfect match for your engineering needs. Chapters: 0:00:00 - Intro 0:00:50 - From Opera Singer to Secret Management to Scaling Infrastructure 0:03:27 - Coding and Music 0:04:40 - Nerding out about Secrets Management 0:07:36 - MomHack: Automating Childcare Notifications on WhatsApp with Twillio and Terraform 0:09:24 - Why we need Platform Engineering 0:10:00 - Why we need to attrition-proof DevOps with Platform Engineering 0:12:34 - Untangling Platform from Application: Teams, Tech Stack and Strategy 0:17:11 - People and Processes before Tech 0:19:07 - Goal of Platform Engineering by Industry 0:20:37 - Is DevOps Dead? How will DevOps roles evolve? 0:23:58 - Tech Strategy X Platform +Application Teams 0:27:13 - Getting Started with Platform Engineering 0:30:21 - Scaling Audits 0:37:50 - Do we over index on tech?