The Tech Trek

The Tech Trek

By ElevanoTechnology
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The Tech Trek episodes

  • Jeff Smith - Understanding how the CTO role will evolve as the team scales and grows

    Highlights of my conversation with Jeff:

    • Wanting to join a company to impact individual lives
    • Adjusting to a HIPAA regulated industry
    • Understanding all aspects of data flow
    • Evolving to the strategic impact of the CTO role and shedding some hats (the last one being VP of Engineering)
    • Switching between the different hats (strategic vs technical)
    • Creating an organizational plan to balance the tech stack and career opportunities for growth

      • Meet: Jeff has been working in the technology space for over 20 years as everything from a software engineer, chief architect, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer. As the CTO at Octave, he will be expanding and scaling our world-class team of software engineers, evolving our architecture for scale, and guiding our technology to make the lives of clinicians and clients better.

      Prior to joining Octave Jeff was in the Wellness space with TrueCoach, as well as the Enterprise SaaS space with Rally Software.

      When not working, he can be found enjoying everything Colorado has to offer, including snowboarding, hiking, and cycling.

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

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

      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.

      21 min
    • Nikhil Desai - Employee engagement in the engineering space

      Highlights of my conversation with Nikhil:

      • It takes a village (people, executives, everyone) for employee engagement to be successful
      • Providing employees with safe spaces
      • Leveraging trends from survey data (NPS style)
      • Empower managers to align with individuals and their teams
      • Allow teams to make decentralized decisions on how they implement certain processes
      • Onboarding is a critical piece and starts before the start date

        • Meet: Nikhil Desai is an experienced software engineer with 15+ years of global high tech and FinTech experience. He is passionate about creating products that provide real value to customers and significantly impact society. He has worked on product development for the LendingClub platform, Citrix GoToMeeting, and several other high-scale software products and services. Recently, leading 60+ engineers at Earnest, a FinTech company focused on solving interesting problems in the student loans space

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

        www.linkedin.com/in/nikhildesai

        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
      • Ray Espinoza - Surveying and assessing the confidence in your security team

        Highlights of my conversation with Ray:

        • Historically security was done in the shadows
        • Everyone is a partner to the security team
        • Give people a sense of ownership and their part in the security program
        • Drive surveys using tactical questions
        • Do employees have confidence in the security team handling relevant issues
        • If you have an external service, you should be thinking of security
        • Go back and resurvey after incorporating security changes
        • Share the security survey results with everyone and be transparent

          • Meet: Meet: Ray Espinoza is CISO at Inspectiv. At the time of recording, he was the VP of Cloud Security at Medallia. Before Medallia, Ray was CISO at Cobalt.io, a pentest-as-a-service company. Ray also drove third-party cloud security across Amazon's retail business. He also held VP and CISO roles with Atmosera and Proofpoint and various security leadership positions at Workday, Cisco Systems, and eBay.

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

          https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-espinoza-b399821/

          https://twitter.com/rayespinozasec

          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.

          27 min
        • Dhara Patel - Visibility and ROI of internal platforms/shared services

          Highlights of my conversation with Dhara:

          • Try to adopt a product mindset for shared services
          • Measure value in a tangible way
          • Focus on developer adoption as a metric
          • Direct impact on development life cycle
          • Celebrating for the team
          • With technical customers, a technical product manager would be helpful
          • Get client stakeholder engagement to understand and drive platform requirements
          • Building awareness around initiatives

            • Meet: Dhara Patel is SVP of Engineering, leading multiple groups building product platforms at Kinesso. She has industry experience in SaaS products and leading engineering teams in hyper-growth environments. Throughout her experience, she has led various platforms, services, data-centric products, and SaaS applications at scale. Before joining Kinesso, she led various engineering and product groups at Twilio and Citrix, building enterprise insights products, developer platforms, internal tools, and applications. She is passionate about leadership and enjoys working in areas where business meets engineering and innovation.

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

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

            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
          • John Wilson - Establishing an analytics Center of Excellence

            Highlights of my conversation with John:

            • Establishing an analytics Center of Excellence
            • Using a hub and spoke model as a service provider to the business
            • Hiring analysts with a consultative mindset
            • Consistently delivering solutions to build long term trust
            • Juggling the delivery roadmap to meet business needs

              • Meet: Currently Director for Analytics at Brookdale Senior Living, John is an expert in digital transformation and data strategy. He leads organizations through growth and development of business analytics practices, primarily in service-oriented industries such as healthcare. As a result, John's work has delivered ROI and winning strategies for companies in the business of people. John holds a BA from Occidental College and MBA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he lives with his family.

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

              https://twitter.com/johnawilsontn

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

              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.

              20 min
            • Joshua White - SRE: Getting involved in business discussions earlier

              Highlights of my conversation with Joshua:

              • Educating the organization on the benefits of improved reliability and observability capabilities
              • Setting up an SRE book club
              • The answer isn’t always “do what Google does”
              • Wearing your on-call “pain suit”
              • Getting involved in business discussions earlier
              • Sometimes it's about showing out the team’s abilities (celebrating the wins)
              • SRE has always been a culture shift
              • Asking for the right outcomes and letting things shift
              • SRE is a core business partner

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

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

                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.

                30 min
              • Sagar Anand - Different personas have their own definition of quality within the software development process

                Highlights of my conversation with Sagar:

                • Different personas have their own definition of quality
                • Quality is baked in by shifting the process left
                • The QA team is involved in planning and grooming
                • Developers spend half of the sprint on QA
                • Each pod is a self-sufficient team

                  • Meet: Sagar Anand works as a Sr Engineering Manager at Twin Health, leading the Platform team to help reverse chronic metabolic diseases. He takes pride in building customer-centric products while cultivating a positive culture & team spirit. Before Health Tech, he developed marketplaces & Big data platforms for different industries, including RPA and Enterprise Software.

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

                  https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanand1989/

                  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.

                  27 min
                • Ken Pickering - Preparing to scale: Being deliberate about who and what you are

                  Highlights from my chat with Ken:

                  • Being deliberate about who and what you are
                  • Doubling a team and the change in how a team operates
                  • Incorporating different technical skill sets
                  • Bringing in external expertise and disseminating the knowledge
                  • Opening information silos and increasing transparency

                    • Meet: Ken Pickering is the VP 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.

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

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

                    https://twitter.com/kpick

                    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
                  • Brian Jackson - Determining which technical skills you can be more flexible filtering on

                    Highlights from my conversation with Brian:

                    • Niche industry but not niche skills
                    • Working with other teams to partner where there is a skills gap
                    • Realizing which parts of the tech stack you can “let go” to broaden the candidate pool
                    • Software engineering foundations go a long way
                    • Building an ecosystem around the Windows platform

                      • Meet: Brian Jackson ​​is a DevOps advocate currently helping create immersive Star Wars experiences at Lucasfilm. Currently, Brian is the Manager of DevOps Engineering at Lucasfilm. Previously helped Apple Pay and ESPN.com be more productive through delivery automation.

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

                      https://twitter.com/jaxzin

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

                      https://www.instagram.com/jaxzin/

                      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 would like me to cover certain topics with future guests.

                      22 min
                    • Kinshuk Mishra - Leading engineering teams in a strategic way while your startup is on a hyper-growth trajectory

                      Highlights of my conversation with Kinshuk:

                      • Bell curve of seniority on the team
                      • Monitoring the manager to engineering ratio; targetting 1:5
                      • Promoting people into management roles leads to internal credibility to lead the team
                      • Building an engineering program to give back to the organization
                      • Many times career frameworks are introduced too late in the hyper-growth phase

                        • Cedar’s Distinguished Engineer Program (DEP): https://decode.cedar.com/our-engineering-growth-framework/

                        Meet: Kinshuk Mishra leads the product engineering and data teams at Cedar in his role as VP, Engineering. Cedar is a healthcare financial engagement platform that addresses all of the challenges consumers face when paying for care.

                        Kinshuk started his career as a backend engineer in Seattle working for Expedia and Amazon for the first few years of his career. He then joined as one of the founding engineers of Spotify’s Ads Engineering team in NYC, and witnessed the hyper-growth of Spotify’s product and the organization during his stint leading the Ads Engineering team—learning the strategies one needs to navigate a rapidly scaling company. He then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to lead engineering for a small startup in the video communication space, Houseparty. And just prior to Cedar, Kinshuk led teams at YouTube in the music streaming space.

                        Through his experience of managing teams at companies large and small, he has learned valuable management lessons through both successes and failures.

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

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

                        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 would like me to cover certain topics with future guests.

                        25 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.