The Tech Trek

The Tech Trek

By ElevanoTechnology
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The Tech Trek episodes

  • Alonzo Benavides - Growing an engineering team at a (crypto-focused) information services company

    Highlights of my conversation with Alonzo:

    • Drivers for leaving a large public company for a startup
    • Moving into the blockchain information space
    • Trying to maximize time zone overlap in a remote-first strategy
    • Avoiding information lag for remote employees
    • Innovating the hiring process to fit your needs
    • Throwing out the 2-week sprint and redesigning the process
    • Building autonomous teams and trust

      • Meet: Alonzo is SVP of Engineering at The Block and is focused on leading the Product Development department through the Growth stage. He is responsible for building software and data products that enhance users' experience while supporting the business as it grows and scales. Before joining The Block, Alonzo was Vice President of Software Engineering at Mastercard Data & Services. He is passionate about technology, innovation, people leadership, investing, and entrepreneurship. Alonzo earned dual degrees in Computer Science and Physics from Carnegie Mellon University and is committed to working in the Blockchain & Digital Assets space at this stage in his career.

      If you have any questions for Alonzo, please feel free to reach out via:

      LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alonzobenavides/

      Twitter: https://twitter.com/zobenavides

      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.

      45 min
    • Jeff Gabriel - Balancing research and coding in the research (machine learning) space

      Highlights of my conversation with Jeff:

      • An idea can come from a one-off problem or a long-term strategic issue to tackle
      • Relationship between research and product management
      • Impact on roadmaps
      • Investment grows as you prove the value
      • Moving from research to POC
      • When a hypothesis doesn’t work out (building corporate memory)
      • Finding the balance in an engineer between implementing and researching
      • Nurturing the kernel of an idea

        • Meet: Jeff Gabriel has been delivering software one way or another for the last couple of decades and is now primarily focused on helping our teams to deliver high-value products for customers of DataRobot's machine learning platform. When not at work, Jeff likes to spend time with his wife and their three grown children whenever they can get hold of them.

        If you have any questions for Jeff, please feel free to reach out via:

        LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-gabriel-88395b/

        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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

        25 min
      • Fabian Frank - Planning for and hiring the right mix of technical talent

        Highlights of my conversation with Fabian:

        • Hiring the best talent vs a specific seniority level
        • Hiring “scrappy” technologists
        • Allowing your senior engineers to grow
        • Calibrate team mix based on organizational goals
        • Find a balance as you need to shift your hiring needs (avoid whiplash)
        • A roadmap update shouldn’t require a complete alteration of the hiring plan
        • Revisiting interview questions quarterly as you grow your team

          • Meet: Fabian Frank is the VP of Engineering at Airkit, a customer experience automation platform. Before Airkit, Fabian worked at Salesforce and Yahoo.

          If you have any questions for Fabian, please feel free to reach out via:

          https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabianfrank87

          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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

          31 min
        • Dehron Hite-Benson - Spirit vs letter of the law in Agile

          Highlights of my conversation with Dehron:

          • Be an advocate for your engineers
          • Typing methodology changes to values
          • People want scrum to drive autonomy and accountability
          • Let people make mistakes to drive better project management skills
          • Culture is an “output” (ask the why)
          • Use bottom-up feedback
          • Giving away control leads to a better scrum team
          • Pilot ideas (tweaks vs grenades)

            • Meet: Dehron Hite-Benson is an engineering leader with driving engineering teams. He is focused on the future of our software technologies and resource needs, as well as the governance model that drives everything. At the time of this recording, Dehron was working at DroneUp

            If you have any questions for Dehron, please feel free to reach out via:

            https://www.linkedin.com/in/dehron

            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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests or know someone that might want to be on the show.

            31 min
          • Jose Asuncion - Growing your team from startup stage to publicly-traded company

            Highlights of my conversation with Jose:

            • Being promoted into a role too quickly
            • Continuing education to grow and enhance leadership skills
            • It's important to have strong routines within a team
            • Identifying patterns and focusing on the optimal ones
            • Consistent processes help establish team expectations
            • Identify your hiring gap and find the strongest person to cover that
            • Searching for your next hire might not always offer the team the best value
            • Adding to your organization's core competencies by being able to identify future superstars

              • Meet: For the past three years, Jose Asuncion has been honing the art and science of building software engineering teams that look corporate but carry a killer instinct. He was an early employee at two Silicon Valley startups that had successful exits of more than $100M. He still works at one of these companies and is enjoying the challenge of blazing new trails in engineering management.

              If you have any questions for Jose, please feel free to reach out via:

              https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeunito

              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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

              25 min
            • Amin Lakhani - Should you elevate your best engineer to be a manager?

              Highlights of my conversation with Amin:

              • Attributes of a strong engineer
              • Technical excellence doesn’t always mean being the best coder
              • Impacting the overall organization is a key attribute of a manager
              • Empathy is a key attribute of technical leadership
              • Look for opportunities to affect the larger organization
              • Enabling collaboration between managers and principal engineers
              • Having “operational rigor”

                • Meet: Amin Lakhani is the Director of Software Engineering at ServiceLink after spending the previous three years at Microsoft. He has an undergraduate degree from DePaul University in Math and Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Illinois.

                If you have any questions for Amin, please feel free to reach out via:

                https://www.linkedin.com/in/amin-lakhani/

                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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

                23 min
              • Leon Fayer - Navigating engineering career and leadership growth

                Highlights of my conversation with Leon:

                • Is moving into management the right next step for an employee
                • Create opportunities for an employee to gain some exposure to management
                • Helping employees navigate different career tracks
                • Finding the best fit for people you manage
                • The (possibly false) allure of moving into management
                • Keep evolving and growing your own managerial skills
                • Easier to take an opportunity to lead than wait for it to be given

                  • Meet: Leon Fayer is a Vice President of Engineering at Teaching Strategies, a leader in early childhood education. He is a veteran technologist with over two decades of expertise focused on developing, architecting, and operating complex systems in support of organizational growth. Over his professional career, Leon worked with some of the most world-renowned organizations and agencies such as National Geographic, MTV, Wikipedia, Vodafone, White House, Toyota, and Soul Cycle.  Leon is also a published author and an industry-renowned public speaker, writing and presenting on topics of industry trends and best practices, sharing his experience related to designing and operating technology-first organizations at scale.

                  If you have any questions for Leon, please feel free to reach out via:

                  https://twitter.com/papa_fire

                  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonfayer

                  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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

                  23 min
                • Neil Bhay - Evolving from smaller to larger engineering teams

                  Highlights of my conversation with Neil:

                  • Stakeholder’s level of technical sophistication impacts the level of planning
                  • Importance of the relationship with the product team
                  • Envisioning the team's growth past the current state
                  • Incubating a team until they are able to stand on their own
                  • Avoiding being too tactical
                  • Finding opportunities to piggyback new features into the existing work
                  • Helping new team members buy into the vision by providing the history behind the team/company
                  • Documentation will help the onboarding process
                  • Avoiding the walled garden when implementing a squad structure
                  • Combining project management and release management
                  • Every squad has 3 owners to drive quality (product, engineering, release)

                    • Meet: Neil Bhay is the CTO of TuneCore, a global platform for independent musicians.  He joined TuneCore in 2018 with the mission to scale and introduce enterprise-level best practices to TuneCore’s organizational structure & technology stack. He evolved an original team of 6 & established agile processes to oversee remote/local teams of 65+ in IT, QA, Release Mgmt, DevOps & Engineering in operations of office, cloud infrastructure & web/native app development.

                    Neil comes from a history of managing enterprise technology teams at Viacom and HBO and, before that applying those same skills in start-up environments which contributed to his expertise in growing and organizing teams towards product delivery.

                    If you have any questions for Neil, please feel free to reach out via:

                    https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbhay/

                    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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

                    33 min
                  • Round Table 1 - Focusing on hiring while retaining your talent

                    Topics we covered:

                    • Retaining Top Talent
                    • Understanding your employees before it's too late
                    • Safe Spaces
                    • Are more Engineering Managers better?
                    • Hypergrowth Hiring
                    • Diversity Hiring
                    • Time spent on Talent Acquisition?
                    • Offers strategy

                      • Meet the guests:

                      Kirby Frugia - https://www.mural.co/blog/meet-kirby-frugia

                      Kirby Frugia is MURAL’s SVP of Engineering and is responsible for Product Engineering, DevOps, and Data Engineering. He joined the company in October 2020, and since then, he has grown his team from 48 MURAListas to over 200. Kirby first got into software engineering because he loves problem-solving and making things easier for people — whether that’s a process, a tool, or an experience. He’s always looking for ways to unlock someone’s creativity or ability to do more with what’s in front of them.

                      Ken Pickering - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpickering/

                      Ken Pickering is the SVP of Engineering at Starburst Data, where he's looking to help companies make better, faster decisions on more complete data. Before that, he was the CTO of Hopper and made travel easy and affordable.

                      David Ting - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dting

                      David Ting joined Nylas from Flexport, where he led platform Engineering. David brings nearly 30 years of experience leading high-performance engineering teams for companies as diverse as Yahoo!, IBM, and Activision | Blizzard.

                      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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

                      43 min
                    • Felix Sargent - How to deal with “code smell” ie technical debt

                      Highlights of my conversation with Felix:

                      • Technical debt is a warning sign
                      • Liability in the code is not the same as technical debt
                      • Dealing with “code smell”
                      • Trying to quantify technical debt
                      • You need cause to dive into technical debt
                      • Very important to set your standards
                      • Define when things are “done”
                      • Why are you digging into the code?
                      • What things are and what they should be

                        • Meet: Felix Sargent is a Sr Software Engineering Manager at Truework. He has years of experience working on high-throughput platforms at scale. He’s been part of the larger tech community since 2008, and has driven industry-wide conversations around flexible product management, API design, managing technical debt, and building engineering teams. He believes teams work best when they feel safe, and are well equipped for their challenging work.

                        His specialties are backend product and engineering management, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, containers, and deployment pipelines. He’s great at taking existing platforms and scaling them up to be more reliable, secure, and performant. He loves digging into obscure business logic and simplifying workflows.

                        If you have any questions for Felix, please feel free to reach out via:

                        https://www.linkedin.com/in/felixsargent/

                        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 send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

                        22 min

                      About The Tech Trek

                      From the publisher's feed

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