Hacking the Org

Charles Humble talks to Jennifer Mace, aka as Macey. She gives us her definitions of "site reliability engineer" and “toil”, discusses how google recruits SREs, explores how to manage risk and speed, and the pros and cons of having a centralised SRE function and why that model, vs. the “You build it, you run it” model preferred by Netflix, works well at Google. She also offers advice for junior SREs and tells us what it is like when the pager goes off.

Charles Humble talks to Paula Kennedy about the rise of platforms.  They discuss platform definitions; common anti-patterns and how to guard against them at both a team and organisational level; proving the value of a platform team to the business; setting up a platform team; lessons learned from Pivotal; and the Syntasso product.

Charles Humble talks to Adrian Cockcroft, ex of AWS, Battery Ventures and Netflix. They discuss: memes in computing, serverless first, chaos and ideas around continuous resilience, strategy and Wardley Mapping, using large hardware such as AWS ultra clusters, and sustainable software.

Charles Humble talks to Apostolis Apostolidis (aka Toli) and Andy Norton from Cinch, arguably one of the UKs most successful start-ups.  They discuss: how the company got started, how Team Topologies, the Spotify Model, and the Theory of Constraints influenced how the organisation was designed; building a learning organisation; migrating from Kubernetes to Serverless; and observability and SRE practices at the firm.

In this episode Charles Humble talks to Silicon Valley Product Group partner Christian Idiodi about how he got started in product management, the Certified Scrum Product Owner and MBA pathologies,  how product management is badly taught, the skills you need, and how to improve.

Charles Humble and Matt LeMay explore what the job of product manager entails, common A/B testing pitfalls, conducting user research, dealing with senior stakeholders, and managing prioritisation.

Charles Humble talks to Liz Saling, Director of Engineering at GitHub. They discuss the role of developer experience at GitHub, why the firm paused feature development for an entire quarter to focus on making developer experience improvements, service ownership, and handling feedback.

Charles Humble talks to Sarah Wells,  Former Tech Director for Engineering Enablement at the  Financial Times.  They discuss the role of the tech director, explore what Developer Enablement (AKSA as Developer experience/DevEX and Developer Productivity) is, examples of DevEx tooling, running an internal tech conference, her upcoming book and reading recommendations.

Charles Humble talks to Zulily CTO and SVP of Technology Courtney Kissler about experience in driving technological transformations at Nike, Nordstrom, Starbucks and Zulily.  They discuss Courtney's journey within DevOps and how her experience leading transformations at large enterprises including Nordstrom, Starbucks and Nike led her to Zulily.  Topics include the importance of fixed capacity; creating a generative culture where team members feel they can be honest and supported; the 90 day framework; Value stream mapping and how this can help teams  increase the flow of value to customers; technical debt and more.

Charles Humble talks to Team Topologies co-author Manuel Pais. They discuss how the rapid adoption of Team Topologies may be being driven by companies seeking a new competitive advantage as DevOps and Cloud become ubiquitous; applying software engineering thinking to organisational design; the challenges of cross-team collaboration in a remote context; and using Team Topologies patterns for remote working.

Charles Humble talks to Susanne Kaiser, an independent tech consultant from Hamburg, Germany, supporting organisations with building socio-technical systems. They explore her thinking on combining Wardley Mapping with Domain Driven Design and perspectives from Team Topologies, and how this thoughts into broader ideas around socio-technical systems and optimising for fast flow. Transcript and show notes

In our first "Hacking the Org" podcast, Charles Humble talks to Randy Shoup, VP Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay. They discuss how eBay's architecture has evolved, discovering problems in engineering using value stream mapping, measuring engineering team velocity, and making cultural change. Transcriot and show notes.