Frontier Podcast by Gun.io

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.

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“How does your software development team measure performance?” -- that’s the question Dan Lines and Ori Keren set out to answer with Linear B. Ledge sits down to talk with the duo, each veteran software engineering leaders with global teams and several high profile exits.

While planning their solution, Dan and Ori reflected on their experiences working together, specifically targeting the incredible amount of time they spent pulling data and munging reports in order to measure and demonstrate the productivity of their teams.

They built their new company to tackle that problem head on, drawing together dozens of data sources into metrics designed to track three pillars: Quality and Value; Activity and Throughput; and Social and Teamwork -- the balance of which achieves a high performance team.

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Liz Fong-Jones is a 15-year Site Reliability Engineer. She’s a former Google and current SRE and observability advocate for Honeycomb.io.

Liz evangelizes “Building Excellent Systems” that both look out for the people who use the system, and for the people who work on it.

In this fascinating episode, she talks with Ledge about wide ranging ethical issues in engineering, and about how it’s a business advantage to say you’re an ethical engineer.

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Chris Overton is the VP of Cloud Engineering at open source leader, Elastic, a globally distributed company with engineers in more than 30 countries.

Chris and Ledge discuss how supporting remote work is an unparalleled competitive advantage that allows for hiring the very best people, regardless of location. When the entire world is your candidate pool, you’re going to be hard to beat, and commercially available technology now makes that easier than ever.

After a full career of remote work, Chris is a wealth of tactical tips including how precise and deliberate communication is job one, and how being a micro-manager is a death knell for your team. Bottom line: if you don’t want to empower and trust you’re going to fail.

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Ravi Sahu is the founder and CEO of Strayos, a VC-backed computer vision and deep learning company that’s improving the mining industry by using 3D aerial intelligence to reduce costs, and to improve safety by providing highly accurate data.

In this episode Ledge and Ravi discuss the importance of creating a culture of customer empathy, and how that focus has allowed for better feedback and understanding from their clientele. Ravi also discusses how the Strayos internship program works to develop talented engineers, and shares a few specific tips on how to stay connected with your remote teams.

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“Engineers want to win.” says Steve Prosser, VP of Software Development at Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the US, responsible for more than $20B in annual loan volume.

Ever worked at a company that tries to hide engineering from executives? Not this one.

Steve and Ledge discuss how their organization has gone all-in on engineer autonomy, where each and every dev manages their own communication needs all the way to direct executive team collaboration.

You’ll also be surprised to learn about the organization’s language choices, as well as their intense investment in learning and development to support them while building a robust recruiting pipeline.

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Ever had to parse through an absolutely awful contract? How about a 60-page MSA from one of those big company procurement departments? One of the promises of AI is that the happy robots will start taking away the drudgery of tasks like parsing our 4-page IP transfer clause.

In this episode, Ledge sits down with Lars Mahler, Chief Science Officer at LegalSifter. Spoiler alert: they already have AIs to do this! As a bonus Lars lays down one of the best machine learning analogies the I've heard.

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How will Chinese companies like Huawei affect the future of cyber security? How does our relationship with China affect the open source community and the future of AI? These are big questions for big thinkers like Chris Short.

Chris runs the newsletter DevOpsish and is also a Principal Product Marketing Manager for Redhat. In this episode, Chris and Ledge discuss the fundamental differences between Chinese and US internet, the technological, legal, and contractual hoops companies jump through in order to tap into a Chinese market, and a breakdown on how Huawei could shape the tech landscape in years to come.

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How can best practices from one industry change another industry? 25-year Technology Executive, Dave Ugan joins Ledge in the episode to deep dive into a real example: how he spent 6 years bringing UX, CX, and technology from the hospitality and attractions industry to the end-of-life (yes, funerals) industry.

Dave talks about the importance of iterating, of targeting open-minded customers early so you can turn them into evangelists, and how to take the critical feedback that helps your product leap forward. He also walks us through the critical pricing determinations that helped fuel growth.

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Unplanned work blows up estimates, kills team morale, and drives down productivity, which makes it no surprise that the best agile engineering leaders target operations improvements as a core value. Today’s guest Shawn Kuenzler takes that mission even deeper.

Scaling engineering teams is what Shawn does, and he joins Ledge to discuss balancing efficiency with empathy for customers and team members, a concept and goal state he blends into what he calls "Frictionless Development.”

When we recorded this episode, Shawn was the Director of Engineering at Zen Planner. He’s since gone on to co-found Manatee, where he serves as the company’s CTO.

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