June 16, 2022

Neil Bhay - Evolving from smaller to larger engineering teams

32 minutes

Highlights of my conversation with Neil:

Stakeholder’s level of technical sophistication impacts the level of planning

Importance of the relationship with the product team

Envisioning the team's growth past the current state

Incubating a team until they are able to stand on their own

Avoiding being too tactical

Finding opportunities to piggyback new features into the existing work

Helping new team members buy into the vision by providing the history behind the team/company

Documentation will help the onboarding process

Avoiding the walled garden when implementing a squad structure

Combining project management and release management

Every squad has 3 owners to drive quality (product, engineering, release)

Meet: Neil Bhay is the CTO of TuneCore, a global platform for independent musicians. He joined TuneCore in 2018 with the mission to scale and introduce enterprise-level best practices to TuneCore’s organizational structure & technology stack. He evolved an original team of 6 & established agile processes to oversee remote/local teams of 65+ in IT, QA, Release Mgmt, DevOps & Engineering in operations of office, cloud infrastructure & web/native app development.

Neil comes from a history of managing enterprise technology teams at Viacom and HBO and, before that applying those same skills in start-up environments which contributed to his expertise in growing and organizing teams towards product delivery.

If you have any questions for Neil, please feel free to reach out via:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbhay/

I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

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