The CTO Podcast

Brant Cooper is an author, disruptor, and lean innovation expert. He is CEO and founder of Moves the Needle and Market By Numbers. Brant joins Etienne de Bruin this week to explore how to improve the horizon model with visibility planning. 
Here are some ideas you’ll hear them explore:
The Horizon model originally suggested that companies plan their growth initiatives over three different time horizons, but somewhere along the line, people started equating the horizons to innovation, which was not ever part of the core concept.
The innovation mindset can be thinking of ways to tweak your existing business model rather than inventing a new one. “How do I take my existing technology and leverage it in different ways?”
Mature companies must first understand what their core objectives are over time when using the visibility model.
The decision to determine how resources are used should be based on the evidence for the impact those different projects are going to have.
“Horizon planning is arbitrarily assigning time to planning.”
What stops agile within a company is that agile doesn’t reach beyond the technical.
“You don’t have to abandon your existing horizon - you’re just using the visibility to actually populate your horizons as opposed to the other way around.”
“We have to understand that the world we live in can change so quickly that today’s v1 is tomorrow’s v2.
Resources
Brant Cooper on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter
Email him at [email protected]

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Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley are back for the final installment of this two-part episode of the 7CTO Studio Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuiti. This week, they continue their conversation about degeneracy and its relationship to redundancy.
Here are some ideas you’ll hear them explore:
It usually takes a lot of waste to get to the optimal setup.
The smaller the piece of the system, the more precise you need to be. As you zoom out, you can be more tolerant of inefficiency.
Dial in the parts of the system that are stable; focus your adaptability on the areas that are subject to change.
How is the energy in your team best applied? “The thing I've learned the most in managing teams the last couple of years, is to leave lots of slack… leave room for having the energy to think about and try different things.”
Darwin originally theorized evolution as descent with modification and differential survival. They discuss what is similar in software development, and what might be missing. 
How Deming’s generative organizational principles apply to building software development teams: “In a good generative culture the complexity will naturally evolve.”
Is it wrong to piggyback off other systems to solve degeneracy?
“Human engineers make progress all the time by looking at the solutions that evolution has come up with.” But is that an effective model to follow? They discuss the possibilities and implications. 
“Unless we allow for those emergent phenomena we're never going to get true complexity.”
Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless
Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting 
Judah McAuley | LinkedIn 
Tinuiti 
Gang of Four Design Patterns

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Etienne De Bruin welcomes Aaron Longwell, Scott Graves and Judah McAuley to this episode of the CTO Podcast. Aaron is the Software Development Manager at Serverless, Scott is the CTO at Reps and Co, as well as a Founding Partner at Scale Tech Consulting, and Judah is the Associate Director at Tinuit. In the first installment of this two-part episode, they’re exploring what engineers can learn from evolutionary biology when it comes to the software development process. 
You'll hear Etienne, Aaron, Scott and Judah talk about:
How software development follows patterns of biology and ecology, as well as dynamic systems theory.
The importance of The Adjacent Possible. This is where modification occurs in a network that makes something possible that wasn't possible before the modification. 
The way lay people think about code is much simpler than what coding actually is. "People who are not in software I always tell them, every piece of software you admire, …if you could peel the curtain back on that, you'll be shocked at how hard to understand and complicated and garbage the code looks," Aaron says. Software, especially coding, is much more complicated than it looks and there are so many algorithms that need to be followed. You can only change bits of code at a time or else the systems get out of balance. 
What matters most is how well the system around the code works. The thing that makes the code most adaptable is you. 
Why you should allow some randomness and some mess into your problem solving so that you can explore other avenues to resolve issues. 
Resources
Aaron Longwell | LinkedIn | Twitter
Serverless
Scott Graves | LinkedIn
Scale Tech Consulting 
Judah McAuley | LinkedIn 
Tinuiti

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Brittany Cotton and Etienne de Bruin talk to Kevin Goldsmith and Claudius Mbemba about the importance of building your reputation as CTO/VPE or technical executive.Check out 7ctos.com/podcast

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Check out 7ctos.com

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Duncan and I talk about what the role is of a Technical Advisor to the CEO. We also get into the hiring challenge, how to stay collaborative at such a large scale and we also touch on the immigrant story.Check out https://7ctos.com

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As we add layers of management, we as leaders should try keep our fingers on the pulse of how people down in the organization are feeling. We make extra effort to learn about their relationship with leadership change.
A “skip level” meeting is an essential tool for the technology executive to learn more about how people are doing one level below your direct reports.Check out 7CTOs.com

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Joan Pepin is the co-founder and CEO of ZeroWall. She shared her story of coming out as transgender while also being at the forefront of information security and engineering.Check out https://www.zerowall.ai/Check out https://7ctos.com/podcast

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Erik Enge is the Head of Engineering at Postmark, recently acquired by ActiveCampaign and Dave Mangot is the Founder and Principal at Mangoteque. We discussed our favorite book Accelerate and how to apply it to our organizations.Check out https://www.mangoteque.com/Check out https://postmarkapp.com/Check out https://7ctos.com/

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You should be as uncomfortable with a fractional CTO running your tech as you would be with a fractional CEO running your business.Etienne talks about how to be a great Fractional CTO.https://7ctos.com/podcast

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ctopod.com