CTO Connection

Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed.

In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience - on top of their day job - and substantial value is left on the table.Allison - (currently an engineering leadership consultant - previously VPE at QuotaPath and Head of Engineering at Forem) has been planning offsites for 25 years and in this thoughtful interview she shares advice on setting meaningful goals for offsites, how to think about size, location and frequency and some best practices for making them more targeted and engaging to maximize their value.If you'd like to learn more about Allison, check out her website - https://daydreamsinruby.com/

Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture.This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days to better align his team.

Hiring junior developers is always a concern. They're easier to find and cost less than experienced engineers, but in addition to being less productive, they can easily become a drag on the performance of the senior devs you depend upon to ship mission critical features. Drawing on his experience in the Israeli Military (think the Israeli NSA), Aviv shares concrete advice that can allow you to accelerate the growth of your junior engineers so that they can become productive, mid-level developers in just 6-12 months, allowing for a more cost-effective blended team rate, more satisfaction and growth for the engineers, and the ability to invest effectively in growing the next generation of software engineering talent.

As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we're leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value. In this wide-ranging discussion Rukmini Reddit, SVP of Engineering, Platform at Slack shares five questions she asks throughout her org to support herself and her team when dealing with change and how she leverages models like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous change model to better understand and support her organization through difficult transitions.

Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit's progression from junior IC to senior engineering leadership and reflect on some of the lessons learned.

Naturally, as CTOs, we often think about our job as to work with developers to ship software. But what does that mean in a world of frameworks, low code, no code, and even GenAI solutions? In this fascinating interview, I got to chat with Jeremiah Stone, CTO of SnapLogic about heuristics for finding the right level of abstraction for delivering business value, how to engage with and support citizen development, and how to deal with shadow IT in a world where even the new marketing intern is writing code.

Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (healthcare). None of these were deep tech companies, but in each case, he found a core of engineering excellence and used that to entice and retain top talent to join his team - despite not being able to match big tech salaries. In this interview, Josh takes us through his process for selecting the right CTO opportunities to accept, then building a compelling engineering brand, and using it first to retain and then attract top talent.

In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for both incumbents and AI native startups, and the broader impact on the workforce and society as we deeply adopt Generative AI over the next 5-10 years. According to Albert, right now we're both in the middle of an unprecedented hype cycle for LLMs and starting to witness a transformation as profound as that from an agrarian to an industrial society

Raji Subramanian brings a wide range of experience to the role of CTO at Opendoor (Nasdaq OPEN). She honed her technical chops culminating in a Principal Engineer role at Amazon and then ran engineering orgs at Yahoo and Amazon and cofounded Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor.In this wide ranging interview, we discuss everything from the trend towards single threaded leadership within technical orgs, sustaining innovation in larger technical orgs, the importance of respecting failure, and the three stages of value creation.

This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It's a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a product thoughtfully, but quickly. Spinach is a smaller startup, but the lessons are applicable to companies of all sizes, and previously, Yoav was Head of Product for Asurion Health, Head of Global Business Process at Uber, and a manager for Walmart eCommerce.

Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLMs as a non-expert.In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his thoughts on how CTOs should think strategically about engaging with Generative AI - both for improving the process of writing software and more broadly to rethink their product offerings and even their internal business processes.

Especially when building platform or infrastructure, sometimes it can be difficult for non-technical stakeholders to truly appreciate the value of the work being done.In this interview, Gayatri Iyengar shares her experiences building platform solutions at both Uber and Doordash and how she used storytelling to connect business stakeholders with the real value that her org was delivering.

In this wide ranging discussion, I speak with James Turnbull, SVP Engineering at Sotheby's about his approach to managing his costs during a downturn. From cloud spend and SaaS costs to prioritizing fewer projects and hiring globally, it's a great insight into how a traditional enterprise is engaging with a tighter financial environment.

While there has been a major push to return to the office (by many managers and a good number of ICs), when remote is done right, it can reduce costs, provide access to a much wider talent pool, make teams more productive and scale more effectively (beyond a certain team size, every company is distributed). In this interview I chat with Mona Soni about her experiences running a distributed team at a larger company before, during and after the pandemic and some of the lessons she learned to get the maximum value out of a distributed engineering org. 

Do you still have doubts about the wisdom of leveraging LLMs in software development? Maybe you're not sure how much they can help or how best to get started with them. Or maybe you're well into the process of experimenting with LLMs for speeding up software development and you'd just like to compare notes?!In this fascinating interview I got to chat with Matt Welsh - Chief Architect and Co-founder of Fixie.ai about his practical experiences in leveraging Generative AI for software development, clearing up some common misconceptions along the way

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Josh Nesbit (Founding Member, Widespread Care) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Jim O'Leary (VP of Engineering, Signal) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Sam Quigley (CEO, Kicho Inc) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collective) talks with Max Roser (Researcher at University of Oxford / Founder & Director of Our World In Data) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

We're going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcast”. We've really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we've seen over time that the challenges of running (say) a 5-20 person engineering team are very different from those involved when running a 200+ person org. And as many of our original startup CTOs have scaled their orgs to 200 people and beyond, we've decided to follow them.Because of that, we're going to refocus the podcast, the content, the summits, and the community on “geeks who lead at scale” - senior engineering leaders in larger companies with 200+ full-time employees in product/engineering. In that way, we'll be able to provide information that is more consistently tuned to one of the most challenging tasks out there - leading engineering orgs at scale.At the same time as we make the community more exclusive, we're also going to make it more inclusive. Whether you're running data, security, IT, or software development, there are many similarities when you're working within a company of around 500 - 10,000 employees. I've been involved with a number of “CTO” clubs across the US and in each case, I've seen the benefits of having a range of roles (from CIO and CISO to CDO and CTO - as well as directors and VPs of Software, Platform, Data/Analytics, and Security), as many of the challenges are the same, and it means the community has deeper expertise in a number of key topics if a CDO wants to learn more about engineering best practices for their data team or a CTO needs a hot take on an AppSec challenge they're facing.I am disappointed that - given our limited resources - we won't be able to continue the focus on content specifically tailored to startup CTOs, but I look forward to refining our focus so we can scale our ability to share experiences and insights from and between geeks who lead at scale.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Laura Edelson (Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU, and Co-Founder of Cyber Security for Democracy Project) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.

In part two of my interview with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat, we dig deeper into the process of creating predictive, fair, and efficient interview loops. In this episode we start with culture - how do you identify the cultural attributes important to help someone thrive in your environment and how do you interview for culture fit/culture add. We then discuss approaches to blending cultural and functional tests into an interview loop. We then take a little time to discuss how and when to provide hints for candidates during an interview and the surprising value of allowing candidates a redo. PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Fred Diego (Co-Founder & CTO, Streetwide) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

Especially in the early days, too many companies still have ad-hoc interview processes or over index on things like resumes which aren't super predictive of likely performance and tend to exclude many great candidates. In this episode, I get to chat with Jason Wodicka, Staff Software Engineer at Karat about their experiences in structured interviewing for engineering roles. We talk about ways to do an inexpensive but predictive initial technical screen, avoiding “pedigree bias”, structuring tests for functional competence and how best to build a lightweight, quick but predictive loop with independent assessments and clear rubrics for everyone involved.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Adam Kircher (Co-Founder, Sirum) about what it looks like to be mission driven in his work.

I was lucky enough to attend a dinner during which Hilary Mason dropped more wisdom about hiring in one course than many people do in a 90-minute talk. In this week's episode, I get to chat with Hilary, learning how she thinks about screening for judgment, identifying the requirements for a role, the value of creating a humane, fun, structured interviewing process, and the importance of valuing a mix of talents and perspectives on the team (hackers and scalable systems builders, optimists and pragmatists, etc).PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Ariel Ekblaw (CEO, Aurelia) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work. 

Jesse White grew with the company over at OpenNMS, from developer through to hands on CTO. He started with a team of just five, but as the company and the team grew, he founds himself working longer and longer hours until he finally burned out. After taking time to get back in balance, he returned to continue running the org. In this interview, we discuss the journey and the lessons learned.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Emerson Collection) talks with Nellwyn Thomas (CTO, Democratic National Committee) about what it looks like to be mission driven in her work.

In this very special episode, I get to introduce and interview Raffi Krikorian about his new podcast series - mission driven - that we'll be hosting and distributing on a regular basis.  From VP Engineering at Twitter and leading the self driving group at Uber to being the CTO of the Democratic National Committee and now the CTO at Emerson Collective, Raffi has had an impactful and varied career in tech. The one common thread in his career has been a passion for mission driven work - whether trying to change the way the world communicated with each other back in 2009 at Twitter, or helping to solve the self driving problem to reduce the impact of automobile ownership, or more obviously in the political and then social good realms at the DNC and Emerson Collective respectively. In the episode, Raffi shares what it's like to move from tech centric companies to an organization that was not at all tech focused, talks about what “mission driven” means to him, and then shares some heuristics for identifying missions that might matter to you and finding ways to apply your engineering leadership skills towards those missions.

These days it's quite possible to be hacking on an idea in a dorm room one week, and just a few weeks later to be the CTO of a venture backed startup. Unfortunately, jumping straight from college to the C suite can be problematic as the organization scales and the CTO needs to bring to bear various types of management that they may not have experienced or practiced before.This week, our guest - Ron Lichty shares his experiences of working with engineering leaders to help them to think about the various types and levels of management - from managing individual contributors through managing managers, functional areas, and eventually an entire function like engineering. He also shares some thoughts on how the things that can make you successful at one level can stop you from succeeding at the next. It's a great model for decomposing the various kinds of management skills required by a CTO and much of it comes from the book “The Leadership Pipeline” which was designed as a book to help companies to grow their leaders but which also provides a very coherent framework for thinking about the various levels of management required as an organization scales.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

There is always a tension in a mature business between the need for certainty when engaging with the rest of the company and the need for flexibility and agility when dealing with the complexities of software development. In this episode, Matt Powell, CTO at FTD shares the details of exactly how he manages planning - from annual and quarterly planning down to the sprint. A great case study in aligning and prioritizing for a decent sized (250+) tech team in a mature org.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else. Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

It can be hard to think about your long term engineering talent pipeline when you need to hit your quarterly recruiting and product delivery milestones. But if you don't start to invest in a talent pipeline you're going to be scrambling every quarter to meet your numbers. At Code2College, Matt Stephenson and his team help engineering leaders at startups and enterprises to diversify and improve their talent pipeline by investing in high school internships. In this week's episode, hear Matt explain their program and the quality of work and loyalty that their companies are getting by investing in relationships with top talent earlier. PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this week's interview, I get to chat with Maher Saba, VP of Remote Presence (and Head of Engineering) at Meta. Before Meta, Maher was a senior developer at IBM and a Dir Eng & Distinguished engineer at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discussed why he made the move to Meta, how he thinks about managing remote teams, and how his team at Meta is working on remote presence - for work and for play.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Francisco Larrain is the CTO and co-founder at Topsort - a company that provides auction-based ad infrastructure for multi-brand retailers and online marketplaces. Before that, he founded Zapped (payment tech) and ran local engineering at Groupon.In this week's episode, we discuss what he looks for in hiring well rounded engineers for non-trivial domains, his approach to mentorship, and the value of provocations when interviewing engineers.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

From Amazon to Lockheed Martin, Steven Gaffney has helped a wide range of companies to improve the effectiveness of their teams. In this week's episode, we discuss the elements of a high achieving team - from having a clear north star purpose, goal, and strategy to promoting honest communications through emotional safety and improving cognitive empathy within the team.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Often, developers are just thrown into engineering management with little to no training. 'Congratulations, today you're the manager,' and they don't know what to do. It's a totally different job." Vidal Graupera has spent years gathering insights into and working through the challenges of being an engineering manager. Join us as we discuss lessons learned on transitioning into the role, methods to lessen the learning curve, and how he overcame some of his hardest challenges as an engineering manager.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he's been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that make software development and engineering leadership a unique career, the importance of setting limits, and the value of therapy as an engineering leader.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1000 people over the last two years. In this wide-ranging episode we discuss everything from MongoDB's “Future of Work” initiative for letting their teams decide how and where to work, the importance of providing air cover for Non-Functional Requirements, why you need a “zipper” connecting product and engineering all the way up and down the org and how to know when you're halfway done with a change initiative.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool

In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to chat about a range of the trends he's been seeing in the data persistence space.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this week's episode, I got to talk with Mindaugas Mozūras, who runs an engineering org of over 400 people for Vinted out of Lithuania. We talked about the importance of mental health, the benefits of therapy, and what getting coaching and mental health support taught Mindaugas about managing his team.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

If you're at Coinbase, JP Morgan, a power company, or the NSA, you can skip this episode. If you're not expecting attacks from nation states, might you be able to simplify your security operations by focusing on the highest likelihood threat vectors? This week I chatted with Ismael Peinado, CTO of TopTal and a former hacker who is passionate about simplifying SecOps. From 2FA to eliminating email, he has a number of practical suggestions for reducing your security risk profile quickly and cost effectively.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benefits of spending longer as an IC before moving to the management track. We also chat about what quality is in architecture, operations, and teams. It's a great, wide ranging discussion with some fun takeaways for any engineering leader.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the scalable startup”. With an unabashed commitment to hiring unicorns, managing lightly, and keeping any given engineering org within the Dunbar number, Ami shares a lot of fascinating wisdom from his experiences of founding and selling Adallon (his previous startup) to Microsoft and then working within the largest software development company in the world.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide for automated incident resolution and/or forecasting of potential issues as anomalies start to arise in the production data.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

If you're a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at Coalesce.io  gets me up to speed with the current landscape. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of data warehouses, lakes, and meshes and best practices for persisting and querying against data at scale. It's not enough to turn you into an expert in data analytics, but at least it may help you to understand what the domain experts are talking about!PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work https://www.holloway.com/g/remote-work/about (along with the also awesome Katie Wilde - VPE at Ambassador Labs and previously VPE at Buffer). In this week's episode, Juan Pablo discusses his experience in building out international remote teams and managing across the three dimensions of distance, time(zones), and culture.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degree in computer engineering to learning how to be a productive member of an engineering team and his thoughts on the skills required to help junior engineers become effective and productive.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

When Joris Dries, CTO of Resonate Solutions in Sydney lost his team lead in the middle of a growth spurt, he had to figure out how he could keep on scaling the team while also filling the leadership gap. He started the process of looking for a new team lead, but after three months realized that he needed a "plan B" to ensure he could keep the team growing and productive. In this episode we look at his approach, experiences and lessons learned.PARTNERThanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.