Geeks Who Lead Podcast

 As VPE at Meetup.com during the fallout from the WeWork implosion, Brian saw first hand some of the challenges in organizing and reorganizing an engineering team. Aaron also engaged in his share of reorg’s as VP Engineering at New Relic and a Senior Director over at Salesforce. In this episode, hear why Aaron and Brian decided to focus on building software designed to manage the human side of the engineering org.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

As the CTO at a password management company, Frederic has to be passionate about security and privacy, but in this episode, he breaks down the importance of thinking about application security, company security and user privacy from day one. He also provides advice and information for starting to build out a culture that cares about the security and privacy of your software and your operations.


PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people are disengaged from their work and how we can do a better job of connecting our teams to their missions. 

Some of the resources shared by Kimberly: 

• Project Score Card Example PDF
• Performance Management Evaluations Reviews PDF
• Complete Detailed Quarterly Dialogue Forms & Instructions PDF

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Like many other companies, when covid hit, Greenhouse had to up its remote/distributed engineering game. From normalizing on a “one person, one screen” strategy for hybrid meetings to experimenting with a range of social opportunities for staff to connect while minimizing zoom fatigue. Hear Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse share his thoughts on the future of distributed work, the importance of onboarding, and the beginning of the end of geography based pay scales for top engineering talent - at least within the US.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

From covid lockdowns to Black Lives Matter to January 6th, it’s been a couple of years. Teams expect more out of the companies they work for and also need the relational support of their managers to stay engaged and productive. In this episode, I talk with Jonathan Moore, Founder & CTO at RowdyOrbit about admitting that it’s OK not to be OK and how to help your team to bring their whole selves to work.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Back in 2019, Christine gave an awesome talk at our in-person San Francisco summit about how she had built an engineering org of ~30 with a 50:50 gender balance (Male : not male). In this episode, Christine shares what has changed as the organization has scaled to ~300 and her experiences as a first-time ScaleUp founder navigating hypergrowth.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

 As cloud costs continue to become a bigger business expense, it’s increasingly important to have a proactive strategy for managing and understanding cloud costs rather than waiting for a call from the CFO! In this episode, Erik shares his experiences with tracking and managing cloud costs at Veracode before founding CloudZero and his experiences in shifting awareness of cloud costs left.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

As companies scale, it’s always a challenge to ensure that the dev team is as committed and passionate about the product as the founders. In this episode, I chat with Dan Langevin, Cofounder and CTO at Vericred about how they are intentional about scaling and support curiosity and customer empathy in their engineering org, and the planning process they run to ensure predictability and accountability for their key customer deliverables.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

What with covid and the great resignation, it’s hard enough to keep an engineering organization intact, aligned and motivated. Imagine doing the same while negotiating a transaction that could impact everything from your feature roadmap to your long-term tech stack. In this episode, I chat with Mark Van de Wiel, VP Technology at Fivetran who recently navigated an acquisition of his company, HVR into Fivetran.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spend better than anyone else. 
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

The hard part of developer education isn’t teaching your team a new language or framework. It’s teaching your team how you use the language or framework. Smart devs can always find a video course online to learn the basics of ES6 or Scala, but teaching them the patterns used within your company, where the microservices live, and how to configure your CI pipeline can be challenging as the information is often not documented - or the docs are often out of date. Marko Gargenta helped create Twitter University and has since helped companies like Salesforce, Shopify, Airbnb, and LinkedIn to work on the challenge of “tech enablement” at scale. In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss everything from how to encourage the sharing of such tacit knowledge to how to keep it up to date - even in a fast-growth engineering org.