The Tech Trek

By ElevanoTechnology

The Tech Trek episodes

September 06, 2022Predictability vs Forecasting Empowers Decision Making with Philip Gollucci
Today’s guest is Philip Gollucci. Philip is an Executive Engineering Leader, a servant leader focused on building high-performing teams. Listen to the full episode as we discuss Predictability vs Forecasting analytics that empowers your decision making
In this episode, you’ll discover:
Difference between Forecasting and Predictability

Metrics of Forecasting and Predictability
Metric: Calculating Demo complete rate

A clear Illustration of ROI

Understanding the value chain management

Advantage of Predictability as your development model

Having a decision framework and sharing goals is a must.

Learn how to take an action plan based on your data.

How to Manage the collision of your team development.
How do you measure sprint success?

What makes a team successful?

Strict Agile Principles

Connect with Philip Gollucci
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Thank you so much for checking out this episode of TheTech Trek and if you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute and leave a quick rating and review of the show on Apple Podcast by clicking on the link below.
Want to learn more about us?
Head over at https://www.elevano.com
Have questions or want to cover specific topics with our future guests?
Please message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand)
22 min
August 30, 2022Empowering Autonomous Teams with Cory Thomas
Today’s guest, Cory Thomas, is a VP of Engineering at Secureframe. A highly effective Leader with the ability to engage and inspire Software Development Teams to achieve the best results in the least amount of time.
In this episode, Amir & Cory talks about how to help teams become more autonomous and the key metrics and guardrails that are must-haves. Click play, take good notes, and enjoy this episode of the Tech Trek.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
How can teamwork affect decision-making?

Ways to improve your Decision‐Making skills.

The best way to set team goals for success

Effective metrics for measuring team member performance and why it's so Important.

The importance of providing the right tools for your team

DACI - driver approver contributor informed

How codifying your decision works effectively.

Managing your autonomous team when something goes wrong.

Things to consider for your workplace guardrails.
About today’s guest:
As a 3-time VP of Engineering, Cory has spent nearly 20 years building SaaS applications and engineering teams, well before “SaaS” was a well-known term. He’s worked across many verticals, including enterprise information management, custom web applications, HealthTech, EdTech, and design tools. As well as various sized organizations ranging from scrappy startups to large-scale multinationals.
Connect with Cory Thomas at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corythomas
Thanks for listening to this episode, and if you enjoyed it, please share it on social media using the social share buttons below, and don’t forget to leave a short review on iTunes.
You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Spreaker – please subscribe.
27 min
August 25, 2022Improve your engineering quality through documentation with Jordan Stone
We’re very excited to welcome our special guest for today’s episode, Jordan Stone, the VP of Engineering at Paytient, a company on a mission to make paying for and accessing health care easier for everyone. Before that, Jordan led Product and Engineering teams at Panasonic, Deloitte, and Notion (a Comcast company).
In this episode, we talk about documentation and how this can help your team effectively scale. Tune in to the full episode and enjoy.
Key Takeaways:
Why are there trade-offs associated with making decisions that tend to get lost?

How does teamwork affect decision-making?

The costs of code-switching

Confluence vs Github for documentation, which one is better?

Documentation democratizes the ability of anyone on the team to have an idea.

Great way to identify and coordinate stakeholders

Ways to improve the involvement in decision making.

The challenges facing engineering and how to overcome those.

Documentation matters and why you should include it in your code.
Connect with Jordan Stone at Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/jordanmstone
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Thanks for listening to this episode, and if you enjoyed it, please share it on social media using the social share buttons below, and don’t forget to leave a short review on iTunes.
You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Spreaker – please subscribe.
23 min
August 23, 2022Raj Madan - How to build empowered teams
Highlights of my conversation with Raj:
Allowing teams to make decisions at the lowest possible level

Empowerment is coupled with responsibility

Make sure only the necessary stakeholders are in a meeting

Always do the right thing for the customer and stakeholders

Building out a learning culture

Agile mindset shift

Failing faster requires empowerment

Focusing on measuring outcomes and not activities
Meet: Raj Madan has over 20 years of digital transformation and innovation experience and is currently the CDIO at Arcutis Biotherapeutics. Before joining Arcutis, Raj served as the Vice President of Digital, Data/Analytics, and Innovation for Consumer Healthcare Technology at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). In partnership with the Chief Digital Officer, he was responsible for driving significant elements of their Digital and Tech transformation globally. Before GSK, Raj was with Novartis. He was responsible for managing and delivering global, regional, and localized digital solutions and services across three business units and in more than 80 countries. In addition to healthcare, Raj has experience in the consumer goods sector, having spent 14 years at L’Oreal in various roles, including managing the digital tech function for L’Oreal Americas. Raj holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in business administration and information systems from New York University Stern School of Business. Raj is also an advisory board member at Onymos, an app development platform that helps developers and teams build brilliant apps faster.
If you have any questions for Raj, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajvir-raj-madan-3a74252
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
22 min
August 18, 2022Clarence Chio - Being a cofounder and an engineering leader at the same time
Highlights of my conversation with Clarence:
Moving from a lead IC role to a co-founder

Leading through influence

Giving up the building hat

Realizing that you need to let go earlier than you think

Look at processes when you see a law of diminishing returns

Trial by fire when you don’t know when to ask for help

Finding peer groups were a great resource to help deal with similar problems

When you start, take your time to find out what you want to do

The role of the founder is to find, grow and nurture experts
Meet: Clarence Chio is the co-founder and CTO at Unit21, a Google-funded startup in San Francisco building tools to fight fraud, money laundering, and online abuse. He authored the O’Reilly Book “Machine Learning & Security” and is also an adjunct lecturer at U.C. Berkeley, teaching a graduate course on the same topic.
If you have any questions for Clarence, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cchio
https://twitter.com/cchio
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
20 min
August 16, 2022Clay Alvord - Organizing and managing the work to get done
Highlights of my conversation with Clay:
What does a full stack DevOps Developer do

Managing SW engineers as a non-SW engineer

Engaging your employees to maintain a high degree of performance and innovation

Helping people stay focused on their core competencies

Managing different types of engineers/skillsets on a team

Being transparent about your own weaknesses with the team

Making sure that everyone can see a path forward for their career

Survey your team quarterly with their technology comfort level to see gaps in your team

Planning work with the entire team and not just with the senior people

Each person driving the project will create and maintain their own wiki (Confluence) page

Driving personal ownership of the project plan will help increase the quality of the plan
Meet: Clay Alvord, a Bay Area native, got his start in IT helping his dad out at Fry's electronics doing low voltage work. From there, he got a job as a sys admin at a startup that eventually sold to Oracle. At that point, he moved into hardware and data centers like Apple and VMware. Clay eventually landed as the Senior Data Center Engineer at Box and eventually became the Global Data Center Manager, managing data centers across the planet for Box. With a passion for infrastructure and automation, Clay built a tooling team to enhance and better scale the management of Box's physical infrastructure. As a Senior Manager, Clay now runs 2 DevOps teams that build software and tools to effectively manage Box's on-prem infrastructure and its vast public cloud presence.
If you have any questions for Clay, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clayalvord/
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
28 min
August 11, 2022Ana Lebron - SRE is an engineering function with a strategic business focus
Highlights of my conversation with Ana:
The intersection of SRE/business

Complex systems always fail

Reliability is a feature of the system

SLAs are a partnership with the customer

Managing SLAs in proactive and reactive situations

Measure everything

Impact of outages and communicating to business

Collaboration with Security

Involving SRE at the beginning of the implementation is important

Planning for future tools

Celebrating team wins

Learning opportunities from outages
Meet: Ana Lebron is the leader of the Site Reliability Engineering team at Enova International. She has been in the technology industry for the last 15 years in different roles. She started her career as a system engineer in the aerospace industry, working in Germany and Spain. In 2010 Ana undertook an MBA specializing in Technology Operations, and since then, she has worked at Enova International, leading change management, problem management, and site reliability engineering teams. Ana has co-organized Chicago Women in Tech Conference (Chiwitcon) and is passionate about DevOps and Agile practices.
If you have any questions for Ana, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ana-a-lebron/
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
23 min
August 09, 2022Moitree Rahman - Building a cross-functional analytics team
Highlights of my conversation with Moitree:
Building an analytics team to support the company's digital transformation initiatives

The skill sets of an analytics team have become diverse

Investing in emerging technologies and using them

Evaluating resourcing to be able to get the most out of your investment

Business vs technical chops

Finding hybrid skills is a challenge to growing teams

Define your requirements to drive the skill set you need on your team

When do you add new capabilities vs keeping it with external partners
Meet: Moitree Rahman is a marketing analytics and data professional with 12+ years of experience making an impact in data and tech strategy roles for Fortune 500 companies that span across diverse business verticals, including CPG (Colgate-Palmolive), Telco (AT&T), Media-Entertainment (AT&T/Warner Media/ Xandr) and SaaS (LiveRamp) companies.
Currently leading the Digital Measurement transformation at Colgate-Palmoliveer efficiently and at scale.
If you have any questions for Moitree, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/moitreerahman/
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
27 min
August 04, 2022Laku Adedoyin - Communicating the “why of engineering work”
Highlights of my conversation with Laku:
Aligning work to the broader company goals

Engineers like to work on things that actually get used

CTO should focus on customer success channels

Focusing on what impact we can bring to the customer

Translating that to daily motivation

Distilling the message into the simplest form

Not using release dates as motivation

Explaining technical debt to the broader organization

Engineering bandwidth as a pie chart
Meet: As CancerIQ’s CTO, Laku Adedoyin leads a growing engineering team that is helping to end cancer as we know it by focusing on early detection and efficient screening. He has over 20 years of experience in software development, engineering, and product leadership. Before joining CancerIQ, he led engineering and product management teams that built electronic data collection and clinical trial management systems used by leading research centers, clinical research organizations, sponsors, research sites, and large health systems.
Laku is very passionate about building products that bring value to customers and building engineering and product teams to deliver efficiently and at scale. In his free time, he spends time hiking, woodworking, cooking, and with his kids.
If you have any questions for Laku, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakuad/
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
25 min
July 28, 2022Cindy Chu - Growing your engineering team with diversity in mind
Highlights of my conversation with Cindy:
Starting as the only female engineering hire in a startup

Bring up diversity hiring plans before you are hired

Transparency is at the center of inclusivity

Putting women on interview panels is important, but making sure it’s not just a check box

Be careful not to reward the wrong traits

Advice for female engineers looking to move into management

Ask for the opportunity; don’t wait for it

Educational opportunities to move into STEM
Meet: With over a decade of experience developing consumer web products, Cindy currently leads the engineering team at imgix. Previously, Cindy led the web and mobile engineering teams at Polyvore, which was acquired in 2015. She has a degree in computer science from Stanford.
If you have any questions for Cindy, please feel free to reach out via:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindywangchu/
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 message me if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.
25 min

About The Tech Trek

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The Tech Trek is a podcast about how founders, operators, and technology leaders build and scale technology companies.

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The Tech Trek

The Tech Trek episodes

About The Tech Trek