Podcast appearances and mentions of katrina clokie

CTO Series: Mastering the CTPO Role, Katrina Clokie's Guide to Tech and Product Leadership   In this BONUS episode, we sit down with Katrina Clokie, a seasoned leader in strategy, change management, and building inclusive teams. Katrina shares pivotal moments in her career, offers practical leadership insights, and discusses her role as Chief Technology and Product Officer (CTPO), where she's balancing innovation with business objectives. Whether you're an aspiring tech leader or looking to sharpen your leadership toolkit, Katrina's wisdom will inspire you to embrace growth, resilience, and collaboration. Defining Moments in Leadership “Look for roles you can't fully do yet—it's the best way to grow.”   Katrina reflects on a transformative moment early in her career when a mentor from the shipping industry encouraged her to seek out challenging roles that would push her growth. This advice set her on the path to engineering management and C-level leadership. She shares how fostering curiosity and pursuing conversations about topics she didn't yet fully understand has kept her continually learning.   “Ask yourself: where do I feel stretched? That's often where the best growth opportunities lie.” The Role of CTPO: Combining Technology and Product Strategy “We needed both a unified vision and an efficient structure to remain competitive.”   Katrina discusses why her company created the CTPO role and how it reflects the size and growth stage of the organization. With no prior head of product, Katrina leaned into her experience while recognizing the importance of partnering with skilled product managers. She emphasizes the importance of having clear accountabilities and embracing growth within the role.   “The key is knowing when to lead and when to lean on your team's expertise.” Aligning Tech Strategy with Business Objectives “Trade-offs are inevitable—make them strategically, not reactively.”   At Fergus, Katrina implemented clear guardrails, such as avoiding a complete rewrite of their decade-old monolith, focusing instead on retiring components that hindered stability and developer experience. She shares how they allocate 60% of engineering capacity to strategic initiatives and 40% to ongoing business needs, ensuring tech and business priorities stay aligned.   “Guardrails help teams make decisions that align with the big picture without constant oversight.” Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration “Healthy conflict is necessary—escalation usually signals a breakdown in structure.”   Katrina describes how she structured cross-functional teams with clear goals and metrics to foster collaboration and ensure diverse perspectives are represented. She highlights the importance of empathy and role-modeling constructive conflict resolution at senior levels.   “A well-designed structure turns potential conflict into productive problem-solving.” Roadmapping with Flexibility and Focus “Roadmaps should guide—not handcuff—teams to long-term commitments.”   Katrina's approach to roadmapping balances transparency and adaptability. By reserving only 60% of capacity for roadmap initiatives and keeping annual plans intentionally light, her teams can pivot when necessary without overcommitting. Frequent, smaller releases (up to 160 changes per month) help deliver value continuously.   “Leave room in your roadmap to handle surprises without derailing progress.” Scaling Teams During Rapid Growth “Avoid constant recruiting—it can burn out your leaders and upset team dynamics.”   Drawing from her experience at Xero, Katrina advises against an “always-on” recruitment strategy, which can overwhelm hiring managers and disrupt team cohesion. Instead, she recommends batch hiring and partnering with finance and talent teams to manage hiring budgets in stages.   “Hiring in waves allows teams to stabilize and thrive, rather than constantly adjusting.” Overcoming the Challenges of Growth and Constraints “Shifting from hyper-growth to steady growth meant saying ‘no' more often and being precise.”   Katrina shares how transitioning from an environment of rapid scaling to a more constrained SaaS company required a shift in her approach to decision-making. She focused on making the business context clear to her team, fostering trust and transparency in her decision-making process.   “When people understand the ‘why' behind constraints, they're more likely to trust the process.” Recommended Reads for Tech Leaders Katrina shares the books that have shaped her leadership journey: Resilient Management by Lara Hogan The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier The Engineering Executive's Primer by Will Larson   “Great leadership isn't innate—it's learned through mentorship, reflection, and resources.” Scaling Your Influence as a Leader From her experience at global companies to her current role, Katrina's insights on transparency, collaboration, and strategic trade-offs provide a blueprint for navigating the complexities of tech leadership.   “Leadership isn't about having all the answers—it's about empowering your team and staying open to learning.”   About Katrina Clokie   Katrina Clokie is a respected leader in strategy, change management, and building inclusive teams. A keynote speaker at international conferences, she is passionate about leadership and communication. Her book, A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, has reached over 7,000 readers. In 2018, she was a finalist for New Zealand's Inspiring Individual of the Year Award.   You can link with Katrina Clokie on LinkedIn.

For Christmas week 2020, we have a special treat for you. Yves Hanoulle and I interview great Agilists and Scrum Masters that you will probably not hear from in your local Agile conference.  These are people that are really pushing the state of the practice, and we want to bring their forward-looking, and hopeful ideas to you in our Christmas Special Week for 2020.    Katrina is the author of A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, a book that offers direction and advice relevant to anyone involved in testing in a DevOps environment.   She started her Agile transition after a long stint within a waterfall organization, and she shares some of the most contrasting changes she experienced when moving to an Agile organization. Ultimately, she reminds us, the Agile approach is much closer to the final purpose: solving a problem for a customer out there. And she reminds us that we should try to keep that purpose front and center at all times.  Learning to be persuasive: a key lesson for Scrum Masters and all agile practitioners When we dive into Katrina’s most important lesson learned in her Agile journey, we discuss the need to bring our best persuasive game with us. We discuss some of the reasons why the ability to persuade others is so important, for example testers will often be outnumbered in an Agile team, and their ideas are less likely to be followed if they can’t “bring others along”. In this segment, we refer to a key book for all wanting to learn more about influencing colleagues and building collaborative relationships: How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Books for Agilists and Agile leaders The books that Katrina chose to recommend remind us that often we need to express our leadership abilities, and we can do that only if we cultivate those through reading and practice. We talk about Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management, The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier, and Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren et al.    About Katrina Clokie Katrina is an accomplished and experienced IT leader. She is a regular keynote at international conferences where the main themes include leadership, knowledge sharing, and communicating change. In 2017 Katrina published her first book, A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps. Katrina was a finalist for the Inspiring Individual of the Year Award at the 2018 New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards. You can link with Katrina Clokie on LinkedIn and connect with Katrina Clokie on Twitter.

GUEST BIO: My guest on today’s show is Katrina Clokie.Katrina leads a team of around 100 testers as a Test Practice Manager in Wellington, New Zealand.  Katrina is also an active contributor to the international testing community as the author of “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps”, an international keynote speaker, a co-founder of the WeTest New Zealand Testing community, the founder of Testing Trapeze magazine as well as being a frequent blogger and tweeter. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Katrina Clokie is Phil’s guest, on this week’s podcast. Like so many IT professionals, she started her career as a developer. After several years filling various roles she moved into the field of testing. Katrina is the co-founder of WeTest a New Zealand testing community. She regularly speaks at conferences and is the founder of the Testing Trapeze magazine and the author of “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps”. KEY TAKEAWAYS: ­­­ (1.01) – So, Katrina, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Katrina started her career after completing a computing and mathematical science degree. She majored in software engineering and started her full-time IT career, 10 years ago, by working in development. But, for a while she moved from sector to sector, finally, settling on testing as her field. Katrina is currently moving more into coaching and management within the testing domain. (2.04) – What made you switch from development to testing? Katrina explains that she found developing to be quite an isolated role. A way of working that she does not really enjoy. So, she switched to being a solution delivery engineer. The job gave her the chance to travel and work closely with others, something that appealed to her, at the time. She worked across Central and Latin America and Asia carrying out Telco network installs. Katrina had to test the installs as well as physically put them in place. She found the detective work involved in tracking down the root cause of any issues to be interesting, so decided that testing would be her new focus. (4.38) – Phil asks Katrina for a unique IT career tip. Katrina’s tip relates to finding new opportunities within IT. She points out that there is no need to pigeonhole yourself, something that most people tend to do. It is easier than you think to move into new disciplines within the IT industry. (6.13) – Phil agrees, but wonders if Katrina has any more tips to help people to identify where the opportunities lie. Katrina’s advice is to be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities within the organization you work for. When you see something a little different, that interests you, go and speak to some of the people who are currently filling that role or working in a similar field. If possible also talk to the person who is doing the recruiting, before, you edit your CV and apply for it. Taking this approach will give you a much deeper understanding of the types of roles that are available. If your application fails, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. This will help you to improve your approach for your next application. (7.30) – Katrina is asked to share her worst career moment by Phil. She explained that happened when she was working for a mobile service provider, in Uruguay. They had a big problem. People were double-dipping on their mobile top up codes. Basically, one person was buying $20 worth of credit, entering that code into their phone, and then sharing it with their friends. Their friends were then also getting $20 worth of calls, but without paying anything. Naturally, the company wanted the development team to solve the problem quickly. For Katrina, as a new team member, working under so much pressure was particularly difficult. But it was a situation that she learned a lot from. In particular, she saw how effective distributed communication could be when senior people conducted themselves in the proper way. It taught Katrina the importance of effective communication. A skill set that Katrina noted is, sadly, not taught as part of a computer science degree. (10.49) – Phil asks Katrina what her best career moment was. Katrina said that setting up and seeing WeTest succeed has been her career highlight, to date. She set this software testing community up with Aaron Hodder, in 2012. Just 6 years later they have been able to reach 500 testers and now run conferences in both Wellington and Auckland. The conferences have already attracted international speakers. WeTest has grown fast and is now influencing the conversations happening throughout the testing community in New Zealand. (11.54) – Phil asks what excites Katrina about the future of the IT industry. Katrina says the technology is exciting, as is the way the community is tooling and developing systems using it. It is clear that this new wave of technology is going to have a drastic impact on society, this is also exciting. But, Katrina is also very interested in the ethics, social science and philosophy of this exciting state of affairs. She is pleased to see the development community becoming more mindful of the impact their work is going to have on the way people earn their income and live day-to-day. (14.00) - Phil says that, in June, he had April Wensel on the podcast. She spoke about her compassionate coding philosophy and the work she was doing to spread this way of thinking and working. He went on to state that the movement is definitely gaining momentum, right now. (14.33) – What drew you to a career in IT? Katrina said that, initially, it was the money that attracted her. She saw an advert in a local newspaper for a web developer and was stunned to learn that they earned six figures. So, she cut that advert out and put it on the desk she used while studying for High School. Her aim was to land a job like that. To get there, she initially enrolled for an E-Commerce degree, but soon switched to pure computer science because she found that to be so interesting. (15.42) – What is the best career advice you were given? One of Katrina’s mentors is a CEO of a shipping company. She explained to Katrina how to present her skills in a way that management, who are usually non-technical, could understand. With her help, Katrina learned how to effectively demonstrate what she could contribute and help them to understand the true value she could bring to the company. (16.38) – If you were to start your IT career again, now, what would you do? Katrina said she would probably still end up taking the developer route into IT. She commented that is still what most students still do despite the fact they could be training for so many other IT disciplines and roles. (17.22) – Phil asks Katrina what career objectives she is currently focusing on. Katrina explained that she is planning another lateral movement to make sure that her role continues to be varied and interesting. She has just picked up a product owner role. This is allowing her to develop new skills in terms of product management thinking and tooling. She is also creating and leading a new delivery team. This is enabling her to learn more about communicating with business stakeholders from a product perspective rather than a technical one. (18.25) – What is the non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Katrina feels that developing clear and empathetic communication skills has really helped her career progression. Using this type of communication creates an environment where everyone works together in a more harmonious way. (19.05) – Phil asks Katrina to share a parting piece of career advice. Katrina says that when you get started, landing that first role can be difficult. So, you have to learn to “keep going.” Don’t be demotivated by rejection. Instead, try to seek feedback and alter your approach when applying for the next role. BEST MOMENTS:  (7.16) KATARINA  – “ I think more people should look broadly and also do a little bit of research, I guess about what those broader options are because we pigeonhole ourselves. But it's, it's largely us who do that.” (10.15) KATARINA – “Communication isn't something that's really emphasized when you do a computer science degree. Yet it's something that's so important.” (16.20) KATARINA – “She gave me some really good tips around presenting my skills in a way that management could relate to and understand.” (16.48) KATARINA – “I still think it's quite hard for students to see a route into IT, that's not through development.” CONTACT KATARINA CLOKIE: Twitter: https://twitter.com/katrina_tester LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrina-clokie/ Blog: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrina-clokie/

As organizations shift to a culture of intense collaboration and rapid delivery, the expectations for testers are changing. What does testing look like in an environment with automated build and deployment pipelines? How does appetite for risk change once a product can be tested in production? Who should testers look to connect with across the organization, and how can they work together effectively to deliver quality software? That's what we'll be test talking about in this episode with Katrina Clokie, author of the book A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps.

This week we are joined by Katrina Clokie, author of “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps” to talk about the growth of DevOps, which organizations are actually doing it (and how well/completely they are), and the strange three-way handshake that happens with Development, Operations and Testing. If you have been curious about the ins and outs of testing in DevOps, we have you covered this week. Resource by QualiTest Group

Trish and Bruce chat with Katrina Clokie about changing the testing conversation.