Tech Leaders Hub by STX Next

“Engineers don’t get burned out from shipping too much. Slowness and context switching burns them out.” – Charity Majors, CTO at honeycomb.io

As humans, when we feel insecure, we freeze. We slow down to reassess.

But in software, speed is safety. It’s only when information is fresh in your mind that you can easily squash bugs and fix issues that may be frustrating your users.

To enable your developers to act quickly, you need observability. And to learn about observability, you can hardly do better than listening to Charity Majors, our Tech Leaders Hub guest!

We covered:

– What observability is, how it fits into DevOps, and how to get it right

– The importance of on-call developers and short delivery times

– Why throwing more people on a problem is one of the worst things you can do

– Why you should reward managers who say “no”

– Why interviewing engineers is broken—and it’s all Google’s fault

– What happens when you add high-performing people to low-performing teams

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“Quality is a team-based thing. ‘My QA is my quality gatekeeper’ is a ‘90s mindset.” – Leigh Rathbone, Head of Quality Engineering at Gear4Music Ltd.

After having worked at companies like Sony (working on the Playstation), Sony Ericsson, and The Very Group, Leigh Rathbone decided to get involved with an industry he’s extremely passionate about: music.

Now, as the Head of Quality Engineering at Gear4Music, Leigh is responsible for improving quality within the 12 development squads working on their music gear web store.

But what does quality really mean, and how does the definition change for companies of various sizes?

And how can you structure your teams and workflows to bake quality into everything you do so you can delight your users?

Topics we covered:

– Why you shouldn’t follow the big players when it comes to quality

– Why the QA tester shouldn’t own the quality of the product

– What a Head of Quality Engineering does and the goals of the role

– Why Leigh introduced a new name for his QAs’ role

– How to build quality into everything you do

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“There’s a strong focus on “ticking boxes” when hiring staff currently. LinkedIn encourages that style of recruitment. And you might be missing talent because of it.” – Chris Hares, CTO at Yoello

It’s the beginning of a new year and if you’re anything like us, hiring and growing your capacity are probably top of mind right now.

If you want to find great talent before the competition grabs it from the market, we’ve got a Tech Leaders Hub session that will help you succeed.

Our guest is Chris Hares, CTO of Yoello, a UK fintech company that is disrupting the payments market through leading mobile ordering and open banking technology. Following a successful 2021 which included 10 award wins for the company, and international growth that saw the platform land in 7 countries, Yoello are continuing their mission to support the hospitality space with cheaper, faster transactions whilst improving the ordering experience for customers.

In a way, they’re also putting the “let me grab another round” concept to rest.

We covered:

– How keyword-based hiring is limiting your talent pool

– The specific challenges of being a fintech CTO, and how to overcome them

– The three areas you need to be good at as a CTO

– Why companies should be more agile about being agile

– How Chris uses data for better hiring and greater team velocity

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“Few people realize the pace at which cyber fraud and hacking are becoming industries.”

That’s just one thing we learned from Joshua Bower-Saul, CEO of Cybertonica, who is the guest of our latest Tech Leaders Hub session.

If cyber fraud is becoming an industry, companies like Cybertonica are doing their best to make that industry disappear.

In fact, Joshua and his team are helping bring along a new era of fintech and payments security through the power of data.

Topics we covered:

– Why identity, payment details and authentication will converge and become a key piece of the cybersecurity puzzle

– Why CTOs put too much stock in in-house cybersecurity solutions

– How tech leaders can avoid problems with multiple security vendors

– Joshua’s best advice for other leaders in the fintech space

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“Just because everyone wants you in a meeting doesn’t mean you have to be there.”

Our next Tech Leaders Hub guest brings an enormous wealth of fintech software engineering experience… and a very clear stance against stuffing developers’ calendars with meetings.

Scott Priddy has a track record few others in fintech can boast of.

He’s worked at both Visa (as a Senior Enterprise Architect) and Mastercard (as a VP of Software Engineering).

Oh, and he just happens to be one of the four people who started the PayPal office in Austin, Texas. No big deal!

Now, he’s the CTO at U-Pledge, a startup gearing up to unlock billions of dollars of additional liquidity for nonprofits around the US.

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Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

That’s the approach that Junior Godoi’s team at Scurri has chosen, and it’s leading them to create unique processes to prepare for any possible outages of their software.

In Junior’s own words:

“99.99% of uptime with a system designed with failover in mind should not make you think that outages will not happen—they will. It’s how quickly you’ll recover when outages happen that will set you apart from the competition.”

Junior Godoi, Software Engineering Manager at Scurri, will be joining Tech Leaders Hub as our latest guest to discuss this and much more, sharing his tech leadership experience.

We covered:

– How to train your team for quick recovery

– The automations Junior’s team introduced to help developers take back their time

– How DevOps as a culture is helping Junior’s team succeed

– How to manage people when you’re “not one of them”

– How Parkinson’s law applies to team structure, and what that means for teams of teams

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Open Banking is taking the fintech world by storm, but how can you make sure that your product will be good enough for consumers to share their financial data with you?

And when regulations prompt you to ask for their permission to keep using their data every 90 days, what steps can you take to make staying with you an obvious choice for your users?

We’re happy to report that we found the perfect person to talk with about this challenge—and we interviewed them on Tech Leaders Hub!

Andrew Beacock is the Head of Engineering at Canopy, a UK fintech company looking to make the renting experience a breeze for renters, agents, and landlords alike.

We covered:

– What “Open Banking + X” is, and how it can create a dilemma for your fintech

– The areas to focus on to create a product users will be happy to feed their financial data into

– Tactics for managing multiple outsourced teams alongside an internal team

– What to do after the “iterate and learn and pivot” phase of growth as an engineering manager

– How to measure and optimize development and deployment processes using DORA metrics

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Software engineering teams that are unproductive and don’t work well together are a leader's worst nightmare. 

When the team is missing deadlines and you become a single point of failure in the team. 

Wouldn’t it be good if your team could work without needing your constant input?

What can you do to get there? You can start by listening to what Adam Craven had to say on our Tech Leaders Hub session about improving teams using software engineering principles.

Adam has spent the last 15 years helping companies like Nokia, McKinsey, and HSBC as a web developer and consultant—but the most exciting chapter of his career is just beginning.

As the creator of principles.dev, he’s on a mission to improve how engineering teams worldwide get work done. To make it a joyful experience.

Watch our conversation to learn all about it.

We covered:

– How habitual behavior and lack of principles can lead to total communication breakdown

– How principles can help you make better hiring decisions

– Examples of principles to consider for your team(s)

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The path of a tech leader is riddled with tough decisions. How to structure your teams? What goals to set, and how to communicate them? What style of management will help your teams do their best work? 

Our next guest on Tech Leaders Hub Fintech brings a wealth of experience to help you answer such questions—and become a leader who gets extraordinary results. 

Hazel Olivier is a tech leader with over 30 years of experience in the field, 10 of which she spent as CTO at companies big and small. 

She’s currently the CTO of Nimbla, a UK insurtech changing the face of invoice insurance. 

We covered:

– Why the common logic leaders apply to promoting people is wrong

– The importance of performance reviews

– How to set goals that will get your teams fired up

– What tech leaders can do to better support each other

– The particular perks and challenges of being a tech leader at a UK insurtech company

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When you have many direct reports and your company is growing fast, how can you lead your team to success? 

That’s what we tackled in the newest episode of Tech Leaders Hub.

All topics we have covered:

Our guest was Evgeny Sharypin, Software Development Manager at Sendcloud, Europe’s #1 e-commerce shipping platform.

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