Tech Lead Journal

“It’s not about the tools or processes. Most important is you understand the target outcomes for your customers and establish the right level of shared situational awareness across the teams."

Robert Benefield is the author of “Lean DevOps: A Practical Guide to On Demand Service Delivery”. In this episode, Robert shared insights on how we can apply the Lean DevOps mindset for building successful IT delivery organizations. Robert started by sharing what initiated him writing the book and how it differs from the other available DevOps books. Robert described the concept of on-demand service delivery and important concepts, such as knowing the target outcomes, building situational awareness, and making effective and timely decisions based on the OODA loop. Robert also shared a few practices and techniques he outlined in the book, such as mission command, workflow board, queue master, service engineering lead, value stream mapping, and Einheit.
 

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Robert Benefield’s Bio
Robert Benefield is an experienced technical leader who has decades of experience delivering robust on-demand services to solve hard problems in demanding ecosystems including banking and securities trading, medical and pharmaceutical, energy, telecom, government, and Internet services. His continual eagerness to learn and work with others to make a difference has taken him from building computers and writing code in the early days of the Internet at Silicon Valley startups to the executive suite in large multinational companies. He shares his unique experience in the hopes that others can continue to build on it without having to collect quite as many scars along the way.

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“Privacy is about handling data in a way that builds for both compliance and trust, maturity and transparency."

Nishant Bhajaria is cybersecurity and data privacy executive and the author of “Data Privacy: A Runbook for Engineers”. In this episode, we discussed the importance of data privacy and privacy engineering. Nishant described his definition of data privacy and why it is becoming a key concern for users, companies, and regulators. He explained why doing data privacy is hard and how companies can build a privacy-first culture. Nishant also covered other data privacy topics, including data classification, data sharing, data consent, and data privacy applied to machine learning.  

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Nishant Bhajaria’s Bio
Nishant Bhajaria is an executive in the cybersecurity and data privacy industry. Having started out as an engineer with a second act as a product manager, he pivoted to data protection before it became a high-visibility topic. Besides building and leading teams at Nike, Netflix, Google and Uber, Nishant has also authored the recently released Data Privacy: A Runbook for Engineers - a deep dive into strategies on effectively identifying, communicating and addressing privacy risks using technical strategies. He also teaches courses on LinkedIn Learning on cybersecurity, career development and building inclusive teams.

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“Spend some time looking at the system in which you work. Understand how the work is working. Understand how flow is for your organization. And then you can work to optimize that."

James Lewis is a Director at ThoughtWorks and a pioneer of microservice architecture. In this episode, we went back memory lane to the time when James first coined and popularized the microservice architecture. James described his definition of a microservice and its important characteristics. He also shared the recent microservice evolution, including the swing between microservice and monolith. In the second half, James shared his insights from complexity science related to different scaling patterns. Particularly, he explained how different hierarchy types can affect an organization’s growth rate. Towards the end, James gave some tips on how organization can detect signs of suboptimal growth and what we can do to maintain organizational agility.  

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James Lewis’s Bio
James is a Software Architect and Director at Thoughtworks based in the UK. He’s proud to have been a part of Thoughtworks’ journey for fourteen years and it’s ongoing mission of delivering technical excellence for its clients and in amplifying positive social change for an equitable future. As a member of the Thoughtworks Technical Advisory Board, the group that creates the Technology Radar, he contributes to industry adoption of open source and other tools, techniques, platforms and languages.

He is an internationally recognised expert on software architecture and design and on its intersection with organisational design and lean product development. After defining what was the newly emerging Microservices architectural style back in 2014, James’ primary consulting focus these days is helping organisations with technology strategy, distributed systems design and adoption of SOA.

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“The three core dimensions of developer experience are feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state."

Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey and Abi Noda are the coauthors of the recently published ACM paper “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity”. In this episode, we discussed how we can better measure and improve developer productivity using a developer-centric approach. Peggy and Abi first began by explaining the importance of socio-technical factors in software development. They also shared their view on the well-known SPACE and DORA metrics, and pointed out the danger of misusing and abusing the DORA metrics. Peggy and Abi then explained the three core dimensions of developer experience from their latest paper, which are feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state. Towards the end, Peggy and Abi shared tips on how we can start measuring developer experience, including how to conduct developer surveys properly.  

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Margaret-Anne Storey’s Bio
Margaret-Anne (Peggy) Storey is a professor of computer science at the University of Victoria and holds a Canada Research Chair in human and social aspects of software engineering. Her research focuses on improving processes, tools, communication, and collaboration in software engineering. She serves as chief scientist at DX and consults with Microsoft to improve developer productivity.

Abi Noda’s Bio
Abi Noda is the founder and CEO at DX, where he leads the company’s strategic direction and R&D efforts. His work focuses on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity. Before joining DX, Noda held engineering leadership roles at various companies and founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. For more information, visit his website at abinoda.com.

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“The goal of requirements development is clear and effective communication. Thus, it has to be done in an incremental and iterative fashion."

Karl Wiegers is the coauthor of “Software Requirements Essentials” and has previously appeared in our episode #103. In this episode, we discussed 6 essential practices for software requirements out of the 20 core practices specified in his book. Karl also explained the importance of having a clear and effective communication in developing software requirements, his view on doing software requirements for Agile teams, and the importance of having good software requirements for becoming an effective software development team and for avoiding unnecessary rework.  

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Karl Wiegers’s Bio
Karl Wiegers is Principal Consultant with Process Impact. He has a PhD in organic chemistry. Karl is the author of 14 books, including Software Requirements Essentials (with Candase Hokanson), Software Requirements (with Joy Beatty), Software Development Pearls, The Thoughtless Design of Everyday Things, Successful Business Analysis Consulting, and a forensic mystery novel titled The Reconstruction. Karl has delivered more than 650 training courses, webinars, and conference presentations worldwide. You can reach him at ProcessImpact.com or KarlWiegers.com, where you can also hear more than 50 songs he has recorded just for fun, including 18 originals that he wrote.

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“Speak about topics you are passionate about, because if you are passionate about something, you can easily find the story and the motivation that will lead you to success."

Oscar Santolalla is the author of “Rock the Tech Stage” and the host of the “Time to Shine” podcast. In this episode, we discussed techniques on how to deliver a successful tech presentation and demo. Oscar broke down the elements of a successful tech presentation, in particular, explaining in-depth the three essential elements of passion, storytelling, and interaction. Oscar also shared some practical tips on how to deliver a killer product demo, some presentation slides hacks, and insights on how we can use our voice more effectively when delivering talks.  

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Oscar Santolalla’s Bio
After a decade and a half in the technology arena, Oscar embarked on a mission to help people in technology companies present better, inspire others, and sell more. He is author of “Rock the Tech Stage” (Apress, 2020) and “Create and Deliver a Killer Product Demo” (Apress, 2018). Oscar helps professionals in the technology industry rediscover the power of sharing their best ideas onstage.

Since 2014, Oscar hosts Time to Shine, the pioneer podcast show in public speaking. He works as a Senior Sales Engineer at Ubisecure, in which he hosts the podcast “Let’s Talk About Digital Identity” and leads the company’s product training program. He has also contributed as speaking coach in several TEDx events. Oscar lives in Helsinki, Finland.

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“The notion of transaction, consistency, and ACID compliance are many times tech imposed. It should be the business that makes the decision. We as technologists should not make that decision."

Pramod Sadalage is a Director at ThoughtWorks and the co-author of the Jolt Award winning “Refactoring Databases”. In this episode, we discussed data essentials in software architecture. Pramod started by explaining why dealing with data is hard in software architecture and some data related concerns we should think about when making architecture decisions. He then shared the thought process of how we can choose the right database for our purpose and shared insights on data modeling differences between SQL and NoSQL. Pramod also touched on the important considerations in managing transactions and the trade-offs between ACID and eventual consistency. Towards the end, Pramod shared practical advice on the step-by-step how we can split a monolithic database through database refactoring.  

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Pramod Sadalage’s Bio
Pramod Sadalage is Director at ThoughtWorks where he enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. In the early 00’s he developed techniques to allow relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations. He is co-author of Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: Modern Trade-Off Analyses for Distributed Architectures, co-author for Building Evolutionary Architectures - Automated Software Governance, co-author of Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design, co-author of NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence, author of Recipes for Continuous Database Integration and continues to speak and write about the insights he and his clients learn.

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“Understand the stage of your company and the kind of risks you face at that stage, make decisions that are appropriate, and remind other people about that all the time."

Sarah Milstein is the VP of Engineering at Daily and has run remote teams for 25 years. In this episode, Sarah started by sharing some remote work insights we may not have heard before, such as why remote distributed teams often have higher propensity of trust, how remote work could help make difficult conversations easier, and how leaders can establish swift trust by having more intentional communications. In the second half of our conversation, Sarah shared about her experience of leading engineers as someone from a non-tech background. She explained why a lack of technical expertise can sometimes be useful and pointed out some leadership qualities an engineering leader should have to balance out the need for technical acumen. Sarah also shared her few tips on how to upskill herself in technical stuffs and her perspective on whether a company should consider having non-tech engineering leaders.  

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Sarah Milstein’s Bio
Sarah Milstein is VP of Engineering at Daily, which lets developers add real-time video and audio to any app or website. Before Daily, Sarah held executive roles at ConvertKit, Mailchimp,18F.gov, and indie.vc. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions and co-author of The Twitter Book. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and has run remote teams for 25 years.

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“The difference of why some companies are so much more successful at producing high value, high-impact products than others comes to 4 areas of GIST (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks)."

Itamar Gilad is a coach and author with over 20 years of experience in product management, strategy, and growth, and was previously a product manager at Google and the head of Gmail’s growth team. In this episode, we discussed all things about product management and how to build high-value products. Itamar first shared his journey at Google growing Gmail to 1 billion MAUs and some of his lessons learnt on managing large-scale product changes, getting users feedback, and dogfooding. Itamar then explained in-depth his GIST framework as an alternative to the product roadmap, a collection of methods and best practices for producing high-value and impactful products. He shared some challenges working with product roadmap and how teams can create better alignment instead. He also shared how we can do product prioritization better by using the ICE technique and his Confidence Meter. Towards the end, Itamar shared the different ways of how companies can conduct product experimentation and how to use the GIST board to improve the way we execute product development.  

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Itamar Gilad’s Bio
Itamar is a coach, author and speaker specializing in product management, strategy, and growth. For over two decades, he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google, Itamar led parts of Gmail and was the head of Gmail’s growth team (resulting in 1Bn MAUs).

Itamar publishes a popular product management newsletter and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST Framework and The Confidence Meter. Itamar is based in Barcelona, Spain.

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“The core of threshold leadership is a set of four pathways of cultivating stillness, embodying intelligence, thinking independently, and maturing consciousness."

Nick Chatrath is a leadership and organizational transformation expert and the author of “The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI”. In this episode, Nick shared the concept of threshold leadership and explained its importance in the wake of recent AI advancements. Nick first shared some impact AI has made in our lives, both the good and the bad, and pointed out the importance of leaders taking accountability for those AI impact. Nick then shared in-depth the threshold leadership and its four pathways to help leaders be more responsible in the development and use of AI, which are cultivating stillness, thinking independently, embodying intelligence, and maturing consciousness. For each pathway, Nick shared a few tips on what we can do to improve ourselves, both at the personal level and the organization level. Towards the end, Nick closed our conversation by reminding us not to forget the two best human qualities we have compared to AI, which are love and wisdom.  

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Nick Chatrath’s Bio
Dr. Nick Chatrath is an expert in leadership and organizational transformation. A former McKinsey & Co. consultant, he now serves as managing director of the Oxford-based executive leadership firm Artesian Transformational Leadership. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, and a dozen training certifications from organizations like The Leadership Circle and Hogan Assessment Systems. Previously, he co-founded the tech startup Coachify and the social reform advocacy group The Shaftsbury Partnership Ltd. A bestselling author, his most recent book is The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI. He is an avid cook and triathlete.

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Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/128