Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Peter Bell
Geeks Who Lead Podcast

Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010! This podcast is designed for  engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams. Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/

  1. Performance Management at Indeed

    10/27/2023

    Performance Management at Indeed

    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.

    35 min
  2. Allison McMillan - Making offsites meaningful

    10/20/2023

    Allison McMillan - Making offsites meaningful

    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 bee...

    42 min
  3. Paul Zhang - Town halls - influence at scale

    10/13/2023

    Paul Zhang - Town halls - influence at scale

    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.

    41 min
  4. Aviv Ben-Yosef - Accelerating Developer Growth

    10/06/2023

    Aviv Ben-Yosef - Accelerating Developer Growth

    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 de...

    39 min
  5. Rukmini Reddy - Leading with Empathy During Change

    09/29/2023

    Rukmini Reddy - Leading with Empathy During Change

    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...

    34 min
  6. Kit Colbert - From intern to CTO - lessons learned

    09/23/2023

    Kit Colbert - From intern to CTO - lessons learned

    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.

    43 min
  7. Jeremiah Stone - Choosing the right level of abstraction

    09/15/2023

    Jeremiah Stone - Choosing the right level of abstraction

    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 w...

    40 min
  8. Josh Builder - Creating a compelling engineering brand

    09/08/2023

    Josh Builder - Creating a compelling engineering brand

    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 bu...

    37 min
See All (204)

5
out of 5
27 Ratings

About

Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010! This podcast is designed for  engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams. Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/

Information

  • Creator
    Peter Bell
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2023
  • Episodes
    204
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2023 Geeks Who Lead Podcast
  • Show Website
    Geeks Who Lead Podcast

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