ScaleUp Sound Bytes

In this episode, Sam sits down with Raj Senanayake, Technology Delivery Director, at WTW (Willis Towers Watson). Follow his journey from a kid mucking around with computers to working at one of the world’s biggest global risk advisory, insurance brokerage and consulting solutions companies as their Director.

Sam and Simran discuss the typical traits of engineering leaders. Leaders will come from 1 of 3 backgrounds (tech, people, delivery), Engineering leaders will be a blend of 1 or 2 and it's incredibly hard to be the perfect/unicorn blend of the three.

When these skill sets blend the leader adopts a particular persona that will usually guide their ability to lead, influence and delegate. If this is not done effectively by incorporating 2 skills out of the 3 and the leader only relies on their main core skillset, what results is usually pain for the team below and above.

Environment is a huge factor in determining the success of the leader, some persona's work better in different organisations than others. Personas can and often do change over time depending on the leadership role - team & technical leads may require different personas to HOE/CTO in the same organisation.

If you are looking to ScaleUp your career into leadership and into CTO level then this for you! Play along with the podcast and think what is my background and what persona will I become!

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Start you own business? What the worst that could happen? - Monica Ly Co-Founder of EdgeRed

EdgeRed stands at the forefront of empowering businesses to make informed decisions by collaborating closely to analyse and engineer their data.

This conversation not only delves into Monica's path to entrepreneurship and the creation of a distinctively successful business, it explores her family's narrative of resilience as refugees in Australia, their entrepreneurial endeavours, and family in general.

Monica's openness and vulnerability shines through in this discussion, offering a rare glimpse into how having a grateful mindset can liberate yourself to pursue your dreams fearlessly. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

To find out more on EdgeRed check out their website at: https://www.edgered.com.au/

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Sam recently had a blast chatting with Roneel Muhammad, Director of Engineering at OpenTable. Acquainted for just shy of 10 years now, he is by far one of the most inspiring technology leaders in Australia.

Roneel spills the beans on how he fine tuned OpenTable's interview process in order to scale quickly and effectively.

Picture this: a team desperately wrestling with acquiring the right technical people, facing a tidal wave of candidates dropping out mid-process. Yikes!

After a deep dive into their then-extensive hiring process, Roneel and his crew started brainstorming on how they could make it better. They embarked on a mission to streamline the maze, remove bottlenecks, and implement training for his team on improving interview processes. Throw in a sprinkle of magic on the candidate experience ensured that it was a process they won’t forget.

The result? A jaw-dropping turnaround and a hiring extravaganza that would even make Reid Hoffman do a double-take (Hellooooo Blitzscaling)! All during COVID, the notorious nightmare for hiring software engineers.

The secret sauce? Cut down on the processes, be empathetic, ditch the pointless fluffy questions, make sure you have a valid tech test, and be bold in decision-making.

If you are embarking on a hiring journey, or just want to ScaleUp your team then this is a must listen! Dive into this podcast for an inside scoop on these game-changing strategies.

Selina Small - Engineering Manager at Fresho talks about switching careers into software development and growing into a leader.

Ken Kencevski, founder and owner of Devika, shares his story of creating a successful software consulting company, innovating new products and retaining staff & clients.

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Welcome Antoine Sabourin, CTO and co-founder of Streem. Join us as we have an intimate discussion about the realistic life of what it was like to build Streem, a highly innovative tech start up that is successfully disrupting the media space.

In this episode, Sam sits down with CTO Micha Wotton, over the past decade he's worked as an Engineering Manager, Head of Engineering and CTO for multiple SME’s and Start-ups in the Australian technology scene.

Micha has the expertise of being an exceptional people leader of technical teams with a passion of identifying and fostering the growth of leadership potential within his teams.

We discuss what it takes to build a high performing technical team, how you cultivate a high performing culture, what’s needed to improve talent density within the team and the identification of leaders. Spoiler alert: it’s not always your best performers!

It’s an informational listen referencing the pros and cons of topical leadership theories in the start-up world with real life examples from Micha’s experience.

If you are embarking on the journey of scaling up your team or searching for that next leader within it, you need to need to listen to this! 

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Time Stamps

0:00 Intro

01:03 What key strategies can leaders use to scale and

14:45 Managing strong characters within the team

20:26 Do you need the expertise to be a strong leader?

23:54 How do you foster an environment to inspire leaders to

36:23 What is your favourite leadership book?

37:27 Most influential person in Micha’s career and why?

39:52 What habit do you contribute to your success as a tech

44:24 Outro

Rozario Chivers has worn many hats throughout his career, he's spent a lot of time within enterprise organisations in particular within the finance space. Roz has developed an expertise of implementing modern technology initiatives around creating visual user interfaces with JavaScript technologies.

Throughout his career Roz has navigated the political landscape of implementing digital transformative change. Throughout this podcast we discuss what challenges come up, how to overcome them and why so many digital transformations in large enterprise companies fail after kicking off.

Roz credits design thinking methodology to the success of his digital projects, something we elaborate in depth on. We also go down a few rabbit holes around navigating your way through the politics of a large organisation and discuss something we love, the dark triad.

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Time Stamps

0:00 Intro

00:41 What is transformation?

2:26 How companies do digital transformation well and where are the challenges?

5:10 Unpacking scaled agile

09:04 How does leadership play in the role of transformation success or failure?

12:25 Communication, flow and discovering transformation challenges

17:20 Importance of embracing truth and honesty

21:22 The power of energy and crowdsourcing

26:38 The foundations of creating a high performing team

27:48 How The Dark Triad and Machiavellianism identifies with people in power

38:30 What role design thinking plays in transformation?

46:18 Deep dive into someone who helped you as an influential person

50:17 Habits Roz contributes to his success

52:07 Favourite leadership book of Roz

52:48 Piece of advice you would go back and give yourself

55:49 How being a dad has impacted your ability to be an effective leader

45:45 Outro

The Russians have a saying “the first pancake is always lumpy” meaning things aren’t going to be perfect the first time so don’t expect it to be. Much can be learnt from this when trying to navigate a career transition into software development. It's something Paul is incredibly passionate about and been through it himself.

Throughout this podcast you will hear from Paul, who has created his own career path leading into a technical expert level, and his experience leading teams building some of Australia’s most used mobile applications. We also look at how he has tinkered into new fields such as AI and hybrid apps.

This talk is not only about transitioning your career into software development and rising up the ranks, but will get you to think about what excites you and what gets you up in the morning. In closing we also talk about the state of mobile development, the pro’s and con’s of native app development, hybrid application development and how AI is impacts not only mobile app development but software engineering in general.

ScaleUp are always looking to speak to people who have byte sized ideas they want to share with our community. If you want to ScaleUp your team, ScaleUp your career or be a part of a future ScaleUp Sound Bytes podcast reach out to us at [email protected].

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Time Stamps

0:00 Introduction

00:59 Paul’s background

6:19 Advice for transitioning a career into Software Development

9:10 Be okay with mistakes – thanks uncle bob!

10:57 Having the right Attitude & Curiosity

15:08 What challenges do developers face when climbing the ranks?

20:08 Moving into leadership and letting go of control

23:20 Self-doubt and imposter syndrome

28:02 Native vs. Hybrid

33:59 Pro’s for Native development

36:48 How is AI impacting software development

45:45 Outro