Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

In this episode, Ledge sits down with Greg Starling, a full stack e-commerce and mobility expert with broad experience in the CTO seat. Ledge and Greg talk through his advice for staying on the right side of Apple’s review processes, and how to stand out in the crowd to potentially earn yourself a mobility partnership spot, based on his experience at Monscierge.

We also discuss how to manage remote team members, going so far as to setup specific video terminals where each remote team member can join conversations with an always-on camera just like they are in the office. Because one of the hardest team configurations is hybrid, the mix of tools and management techniques is challenging to make it work.

At the time of recording, Greg was the CTO of Monscierge. He recently took a new role as Labs Lead for Tailwind.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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