Rand McNally’s Chief Technology Officer, Steve Caudill joins Pat and Shelli this week to talk about building and maintaining the culture of a startup inside a well-established brand with a 165-year history. They cover a range of topics including recruiting talent in a highly competitive market, creating tight feedback loops between customers and engineers, and structuring product development for the shortest path to revenue.

(01:13) - Technical product development
(03:17) - Recruiting product makers
(05:46) - Seek out diverse perspectives
(08:35) - Pair programming during interviews
(10:19) - Addressing salary expectations
(12:38) - Making products that have impact
(17:18) - Challenging remote work trends
(19:15) - Taking ownership of what you make
(22:03) - Buy-in from the business side
(28:16) - Find the shortest path to money
(30:16) - Leveraging brand trust
(32:57) - Benefits of mentorship

Trucks, tractors, maps, connected devices, oil and gas, potato chips, silicon chips, educational devices and more have been part of a nearly 40-year career for Steve Caudill, the Chief Technology Officer at Rand McNally. Before joining Rand McNally, Steve was a director at CNH industrial, where he was responsible for delivering the farm operations and fleet management components of CNH Industrial’s connected offerings.

Steve is the author of A Hero Behind Every Tree: The Non-Technical Reasons Your IT Investments Fail. He received a BA in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and an MBA from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at University of Texas Dallas.

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