Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

John Isdell is the Director of Platform Engineering at Red Ventures. You may not know of Red Ventures by name, but you’re virtually guaranteed to have been on one of their sites like BankRate.com, Reviews.com, and CreditCards.com. They’re a digital portfolio company with a huge consumer web footprint, and with that footprint comes challenges of scale, legacy code, constant iteration, and evolving staffing needs.Ledge chats with John about organizing large teams to tackle these challenges, how to hire to handle pretty much every technology, and how to prioritize your organization-wide backlog. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most of us have engaged with, and even built, products and platforms that make heavy use of messaging. But how does anyone know if those messages convert into sales or other actionable metrics? In this episode I sit down with David Galante, SVP of Marketing and Product Management at Mobivity to talk about how their vast point of sale data system does just that, specifically after having acquired and integrated customer loyalty startup, Belly. Stick around for some solid advice from the product hot seat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's a saying that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Management can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, the success or failure of companies.Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle tackles the challenges of engineering management--from sizing teams, to technical debt, all the way to succession planning. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Will Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management that leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes can apply. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.In this episode Ledge sits down with the author to discuss key lessons from the book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ubiquitous platform technologies like Wordpress open up a world of opportunities for entrepreneurs in every conceivable sector, yet even user-friendly tools usually require implementation and customization by qualified developers. In this episode with talk with Gun.io client, Arian Mirzarafie Ahi, a biologist and e-learning entrepreneur, about the difficulties of finding a great developer as a non-technical founder. Arian talks through the challenges, and the approach he took to overcome them so he could focus on growing his content business. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yoav Rubin is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI. Previous to that he was a Research Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM Research. He’s a published author and self described “software guy” with a lot of interesting perspectives on the state of the art in AI.Yoav talks with Ledge about how AI, like other technologies, is being democratized through services like Azure AI such that any developer can take advantage of them. The Azure AI environment allows devs to design experiments, develop them, and move domain of AI from specialized experts to everyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oksana Shmaliy, scientist turned technologist, currently leads IT Strategy and Architecture at Grange Insurance, where she led the DevOps transformation company-wide.In this episode, Oksana and Ledge chat systems thinking, organizational scale, and how creative, multi-dimensional employees make the difference in high performance companies.Oksana gets super-meta, showing us how fractal theory can help us understand complex human organization. Super-fun geeky stuff right here, and you do not want to miss out! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the most difficult transitions an organization can make is moving from “how much will that cost?” and “how long with that take?” to “how quickly can we deliver first value?”That’s the essence of Agile transformation, so Ledge sat down with Jeff Despain, Sr. Director Engineering at CHG Healthcare to discuss the company’s relatively rapid and intensive transformation to Agile product teams -- a full 80-person org in just over 9 months.Jeff shares lessons about change management, leadership, and customer-focused value. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Facebook and Google pioneered lookalike audience marketing for B2C. Serial entrepreneur, and engineer-turned AI marketer, Olin Hyde, started Leadcrunch to do the same for B2B marketers, a group of buyers who behave in totally different patterns than consumers.Olin and Ledge discuss how engineers can learn about product-market fit for their ideas, and how SaaS subscription billing might not be the best fit for all businesses to unlock value-based billing. He makes a really convincing argument you won’t want to miss. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David “Gonzo” Gonzalez is the CEO and Co-founder of Ziff.ai, a deep learning as a service platform. Ziff’s goal: Reduce the complexity required to profit from AI in an enterprise setting.In this episode, Gonzo and Ledge discuss how to answer the question, “How do I know as a business person if my business model can be enhanced as an AI?”It comes down to prediction, forecasting, and two areas where the profits really lie: automation, and augmentation. In other words, find opportunities to help the “humans in the loop” be faster and more accurate, and you’ll win. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you make application changes when you have 120 million active monthly users? Ledge sat down for an amazingly useful chat with James Colgan, Microsoft’s Sr. Product Manager for Outlook Mobile to literally answer that question.  For the last few years he’s been working with the largest, most complicated, and most sophisticated organizations with one goal: super-happy users at super-massive scale.You won’t want to miss how James walks Ledge through the exact process he and his team followed from zero to 120 million active users in just 4 years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.