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Darragh is currently the VP of Engineering at Intercom. (One of my favorite companies). He joined Intercom in early 2012 as a product engineer and Intercom's second outside hire. Fast forward to today, and he is Intercom's VP of Engineering where he has grown and scaled the organization into a world class Engineering team. Prior to Intercom, Darragh worked at numerous other companies including Amazon.com. Darragh is mentor on the Plato network and is passionate about the outdoors and his family.
On today’s show we discuss his path from IC to VP of engineering and tips on how to scale a fast growing engineering team.
Contact Info:
@darraghcurran
Show Notes:
Camille Fournier is the head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma, a financial company in New York City. Prior to joining Two Sigma she was the Chief Technology Officer of Rent the Runway, a transformative brand that offers unprecedented access to designer fashion, disrupting the way millions of women get dressed.
She is an open source contributor and project committee member for both Apache ZooKeeper and the Dropwizard web framework. Prior to working for Rent the Runway, Camille served as a software engineer at Microsoft, and most recently, spent several years as a technical specialist at Goldman Sachs, creating distributed systems for managing risk analysis and firm-wide infrastructure.
She has a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Camille is a well-respected voice within the tech community, speaking on a variety of topics such as engineering leadership, distributed systems, scaling teams, and technical architecture. In 2017 she released her book, “The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change.”
Contact Info:
Twitter: @skamille
Medium: https://medium.com/@skamille
Camille Talk: http://www.camilletalk.com/
Show Notes:
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
Lara Callender Hogan is an engineering leader, coach, and consultant at Wherewithall. She is also the author of Designing for Performance (O’Reilly, 2014), Building a Device Lab (Five Simple Steps, 2015), and Demystifying Public Speaking (A Book Apart, 2016).
Lara champions engineering management as a practice, having built and led engineering organizations as an Engineering Director at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter.
In her world tour to advocate performance to designers and developers alike, Lara has keynoted the Velocity Conference, presented at Google I/O, and given talks at companies like The New York Times to help shift them toward a culture of performance. While at Etsy, Lara co-created the initial physical device labs, and co-authored a tutorial and bookfor companies interested in building their own lab.
To connect her passion for performance with her activism, Lara donates all of the proceeds from Designing for Performance to charities focused on supporting underrepresented people in tech.
Lara also believes it’s important to celebrate career achievements with donuts.
On today's episode we discuss proper expectation setting, mindful communication, Lara's new company and a surprise management challenge! Listen on to find out what it is!
Contact Info:
Title: Co-Founder
Company: Wherewithall
Twitter: @lara_hogan
Site: http://larahogan.me/
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/lara
Show Notes:
Mihai Fonoage is the Vice President of Engineering for Modernizing Medicine. In this role he leads a Team of Engineers that are working on building high-quality software for medical practices to increase efficiency and improve patient care. With over 13 years of experience in the technology world, his technical prowess has strongly contributed to Modernizing Medicine’s success. Mihai has a PhD in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University and was Modernizing Medicine’s first employee. He is a recipient of the Sun Sentinel's 2015 Top Workplace Professionals and the South Florida Business Journal’s 2014 40 Under 40 award.
On today's episode we discuss Mihai's path from being an intern to becoming the VP of Engineering and his guidance for engineering managers on how to best prepare to scale to prepare for the role.
Contact Info:
Show Notes:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The Lead Developer London: "The Hardest Scaling Challenge of All: Yourself"
Jen Dary is the founder of Plucky, an organization that works with companies and individuals to create healthy dynamics at work. She is a leadership coach and speaker; she travels across the US teaching workshops, including her popular course, So Now You’re a Manager, which trains new managers across the country for the complex work of herding humans. Jen lives in Berkeley, CA with her husband and two young sons.
On today's episode we discuss one of the tricky challenges of being a first time manager - managing your former peers and friends. We also discuss Plucky Cards? What are those? Stay tuned to find out!
Contact Links:
Leonard is the founder and CEO of Hello Chava, a company reimagining productivity tools for the solo professional. Over the past 25 years, Leonard has recognized emerging markets and launched multiple successful products with a particular focus in SaaS, Cloud Computing, and Collaboration through first gen products such as Hello Chava, Syncplicity, Windows PowerShell, and SETI@home.
On today's episode we discuss scaling your leadership, being humble, racing cars and slowing down to go faster.
Contact Info:
website: http://www.hellochava.com/
Show Notes:
How to Talk to Kids Will Listen
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
Today's podcast is a recording of a live panel that I moderated which focused on nurturing an inclusive environment at technology companies. It was part of a larger event put on by the tech mentoring company Plato.
The fantastic guests that I had a chance to discuss this with were:
- Shivani Sharma, Senior Engineering Manager at Slack
- Nick Caldwell, VP Engineering at Reddit
- Nidhi Gupta, SVP Engineering at Hired
I have interviewed both Shivani Sharma and Nick Caldwell on previous podcast episodes and I encourage you to go to my podcast archives and listen to those episodes.
Listen on as my panelists discuss the current challenges with diversity and inclusion at tech companies and strategies for helping to foster a more inclusive environment.
A special thanks to Plato for sponsoring this great event and for allowing me to use this for my podcast.
Plato matches tech managers to highly experienced engineering leaders to help resolve their challenging management situations. If you would like to find out more information about Plato you can visit their website at PlatoHQ.com where Shivani and I are also mentors.
Show Notes:
Plato Website
Video Of the Panel Discussion
Medium Article about the event
Erica is an engineering manager for the integrations and data analytics teams at SalesLoft –
where she’s helping grow the product engineering team for the 4th fastest growing software
company in North America and #1 best place to work in Atlanta. During her 18 year career in
tech, she’s worked with large companies, including Boeing, FOX Interactive Media and Turner
Broadcasting, as well as early-stage startups--of which 2 were acquired, by MySpace and
Oracle.
Erica works passionately towards diversity and inclusion in tech, via education and exposure to
opportunities. In 2013, she started the Atlanta network of Women Who Code, where she
organizes conferences, hackathons, developer workshops, monthly tech talks and networking
events for women technologists. In addition, Erica collaborates with companies to help improve
strategies around diversity and inclusion. She also helps develop and teach youth coding
programs, speaks at tech events and mentors entrepreneurs for various incubators and
accelerators.
On today's episode we discuss improving diversity and inclusion at companies and how important it is in building high performing teams. We also discuss Women Who Code, The WeRise Conference and 100 Girls of Code.
Contact Info:
Company Website: https://salesloft.com/
Personal Website: http://www.ericastanley.io/
Conference Website: https://werise.tech/
Twitter: @ericastanley
Show Notes:
Dennis is the Head of Integration at HiredScore, a startup that helps large companies achieve their hiring and recruiting goals using deep system integrations and AI. Dennis is a former team and group leader at Sears Israel working on large scale social e-commerce platform and before that he was a team leader and a full stack developer at the Israeli Air Force. He is passionate about people growth and company culture.
On today's episode we discuss the challenges, both logistical and emotional, when a manager decides to leave their team and company. This is based on Dennis' personal experience leaving his past company and a blog post he wrote about it.
Contact Info:
https://medium.com/@
https://twitter.
Show Notes:
The hard thing about hard things: When a manager decides to quit
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership
Katie is a Director of Engineering at Buffer, a globally distributed team with no offices, and O’Reilly author. At Buffer, she leads the engineering team focusing on crafting productive, effective teams and delivering a world class software product. She previously worked as software engineer before moving into leadership. Her writing has appeared in The Next Web, Inc Magazine and Fast Company.
Contact Info:
Rachael is an engineering manager for the infrastructure and backend teams at Lever, a collaborative hiring software product helping companies recruit and grow their teams. She joined the team in 2014 as a product engineer and was one of the first employees to kickoff internal discussions around diversity and inclusion. She transitioned into a management role over a year ago and is dedicated to growing engineering teams who have a strong combination of technical and soft skills.
On today's episode we discuss best practices in hiring and diversity and inclusion in tech companies.
Contact Info:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkstedman/https://twitter.com/rkstedman
Twitter: @rkstedman
Show Notes:
Lever - The Diversity & Inclusion Handbook
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
Four Engineering Managers from Facebook, Kabam, Clever, and Medium shared their tips on becoming a great Engineering Leader during the Plato event hosted on May 15, 2017 in San Francisco.
- Moderator: Christian McCarrick, CTO/VP of engineering at Telmate
- Jean Hsu, Engineering Management Consultant, former Engineering Manager at Medium
- Nikhil Pandit, Engineering Manager at Clever Inc.
- Richard Sun, Senior Director of Engineering at Kabam
- Yi Huang, Senior Engineering Manager at Facebook
This event was sponsored by Plato. Plato matches tech managers to highly experienced engineering leaders to help resolve their challenging management situations. Find out more and sign-up to me mentored at platohq.com.
Show Notes:
Jean-Denis Greze is Head of Engineering at Plaid, the technology company giving developers access to the financial system and the tools to build many of the most influential applications and services of the modern financial era. Companies such as Venmo + Paypal, Coinbase, Robinhood, Acorns, Betterment, Clarity Money and hundreds more are built on Plaid - whose investors consist of Goldman Sachs, NEA, Citi Ventures, Spark Capital, American Express, and Google Ventures.
Prior to joining Plaid, Jean-Denis was Director of Engineering at Dropbox, where he led the growth, identity, notifications, Paper and payments teams. Prior to Dropbox, Jean-Denis worked in fintech in New York and has CS degrees from Columbia as well as a JD from Harvard Law School. Outside of work, you’ll find him trail running, reading, or plotting his next vacation to Japan.
If you want to learn more about Plaid after this podcast, visit them at www.plaid.com and check out the open eng roles on their career page - where you can actually apply by API. You can also follow them on Twitter - their handle is @plaid, or give their awesome recruiting team a shout at recruiting@plaid.com.
On today's episode we discuss software engineering values and how to enable engineers to be successful at your company and beyond.
Social Media
- Plaid’s website: www.plaid.com
- Twitter: @jgreze
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeandenisgreze
In this episode we discuss having hard conversations, overcoming fear to grow as a technology leader and humanizing the interviewing process.
Emily Leathers helps leaders, teams, and communities achieve big goals that make a difference. She’s lucky enough to hold two dream jobs at the same time: as a Director of Engineering at a small startup called Brigade, where she builds web and native apps to help voters make our elected representatives actually work for us, and as an engineering leadership coach and consultant, where she helps engineering leaders at all levels develop the skills, self-awareness, and vision they need to build high-performing, thriving teams.
Contact Info:
Website / blog: >greatenough.me
Twitter: @eleather
Show Notes:
The Look and Sound of Leadership Podcast
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
Matias Woloski is the CTO and co-founder of Auth0, an identity platform that provides authentication, authorization and single-sign-on as a service. Auth0 was founded in 2013 and it has now 300 employees and it’s a fully distributed company. Since 2013, Auth0 has tripled and doubled its revenue every year, counting with more than two thousand customers and tens of millions in recurring revenue. Before Auth0, he co-founded a high-end consulting business that employed 120 consultants. Matias lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina and he’s built the company from there with co-founder and CEO Eugenio Pace, who lives in Redmond, Washington.
In this episode we discuss scaling engineering teams, hiring a VP of Engineering and.
Show Notes:
randsinrepose.com - michael lopp blog. it's almost like a reference book :)
Edmond Lau is the author of the book, The Effective Engineer — now the de facto onboarding guide for many engineering teams. He's spent the past decade building and leading engineering teams at high-growth companies across Silicon Valley — including at Quip, Quora, Ooyala, and Google.
As an engineering leadership coach, Edmond has worked directly with CTO's, directors, managers, and other emerging leaders to unlock what's possible for them and their teams. He's run workshops and seminars at places like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Quip, and Medium to raise the bar on what it means to be an effective engineering leader. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Time, Slate, Inc., Fortune, and Wired.
Edmond recently embarked on a new adventure with engineering-manager-turned-coach Jean Hsu to build the best leadership development brand out there for engineers and people in tech. They'll be taking the most valuable lessons they've learned from coaching 100+ tech leads, managers, directors, engineering VPs, and CTOs — and distilling them into simple frameworks, powerful workshops, and online experiences. Follow the journey at coleadership.com, where they'll be sharing everything they're learning.
On today's episode we discuss how to be an effective engineering leader, frameworks for improving your management skills and coaching for success.
Links
- Website: effectiveengineer.com / coleadership.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/edmondlau
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/effectiveengineer/
Show Notes
The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
On today's episode we discuss product & engineering team alignment, deadlines and urgency and ideas for helping under representated groups becoming technology leaders.
Kimber Lockhart is Chief Technology Officer at One Medical Group – a rapidly growing model of primary care that integrates innovative design with leading technology to deliver higher quality service while lowering the total cost of care. Previously, Kimber co-founded Increo, a web-based service that allows users to share and review documents in a secure space. Increo was acquired by Box in 2009, and she hired and scaled the web application engineering team over the next four years, ultimately responsible for building most user-facing features on Box. Kimber speaks frequently on technology, heath care, and engineering careers in San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Stuart Parmenter is VP of Engineering at One Medical – a rapidly growing model of primary care that integrates innovative design with leading technology to deliver higher quality service while lowering the total cost of care. Previously, Stuart co-founded Rise, a mobile app for dieting and health, that aims to connect users with their own personalized diet plans and daily feedback from nutrition coaches for a fraction of the usual cost. Rise was acquired by One Medical in 2016. Before Rise, Stuart was running Mobile at Mozilla.
Contact Info:
LinkedIn:
Don’t create a sense of urgency, foster a sense of purpose.
Under the hood: Calibrating technical teams with a simple shift
The 12 Elements of Great Managing
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
How F*cked Up Is Your Management?: An uncomfortable conversation about modern leadership
Andrew Marsh, CTO and co-founder of Interviewing.io talks about the poor state of interviewing process in today's tech companies, how to improve them and his company, Interviewing.io
Andrew Marsh is co-founder and CTO of Interviewing.io A product designer and software engineer, he previously founded Fifth Column Games and has shipped titles with over 100 million users. Andrew ultimately left games in search of an industry where making a positive impact on the community was more aligned with success.
Contact Information:
My company website is Interviewing.io
On today's show Lawrence and I discuss why group meetings can be such time wasters, the importance of one-one-ones and lawrence's book.
Over the last 18 years, Lawrence Krubner has been the technical co-founder of 3 different startups that he has led to success. He has also seen millions of dollars wasted on poorly run projects that he have had to turn around and save. Turning around a failing project can go smoothly, so long as everyone on the team can be completely honest about why a project was failing up to that point. He is a proponent of the "train fast, fire fast, fail fast, iterate fast" philosophy -- a team should improve itself as much as possible, through training or replacement, and thereby maximize the speed with which it delivers products.
Contact Info:
Show Notes:
One-on-one meetings are underrated, whereas group meetings waste time
Why Can't They Just by Lara Hogan
how to destroy a tech startup in 3 easy steps
Juan Pablo Buritica, VP of Engineering at splice.com, talks about building and managing a distributed team and the benefits of running developer communities.
Juan Pablo Buritica is the VP of Engineering at splice.com where he leads a distributed engineering team throughout the US and Latin America that is building the creative hub for the modern musician.
Juan Pablo has built effective software engineering organizations by emphasizing Open Source software values, technical excellence, trust, and empathy. He has organized more than 10 software engineering conferences in the US & Latin-America, founded multiple JavaScript meetups, and led the growth of Colombia’s JavaScript community, the largest Spanish-speaking JS community in the world with more than 7,000 members.
Contact Information:
Twitter @buritica
Show Notes:
When your manager isn't supporting you, build a Voltron
The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Ben Jackson, formally of VICE Media and The NYT, talks about the importance of employee onboarding and his new company For the Win.
Ben Jackson has been designing and building consumer-facing products for 20 years.
Before founding For the Win, Ben worked as Director of Mobile at VICE Media and iOS Lead at The New York Times. He’s written about design, technology, and psychology for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and WIRED, among others. Ben studied Computer Science and Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
In today's episode we discuss the importance of employee onboarding, Ben's new company, "For the Win," his Slackbot and "Harold and the Purple Crayon."
Contact Links:
Show Notes:
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
Robert Slifka, VP of Engineering at Sharethrough, talks about Calibrate, the conference for software engineering managers he organizes, the importance of finding good fit for both employees and companies and having a more fulfilling work experience.
Arquay Harris, Director of Engineering at Slack, and I discuss the importance of self advocacy and taking ownership of your career path.