The Engineering Leadership Podcast

The quest to “find flow” as an eng leader can be elusive! Rob Zuber (CTO @ CircleCI) shares about his personal quest to find flow, refining/refocusing responsibilities as CTO, and why he brought on an SVPE to support. Plus some of the personal discovery frameworks & executive-level delegation practices that may aid your own quest to find flow as an engineering leader.ABOUT ROB ZUBERRob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.Before CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, Continuous Integration and Deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers acquired by Appconomy in 2011.Rob holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two children."When you start a company or you end up leading a very small company, the decision about how many people you end up managing is external forces on the company. The company just grows and your team grows to support it. And no one is saying, ‘Hey, it looks like you're ready for this...’And so I think so often what you see is early leaders end up exiting because that transition happens faster than they were prepared for. To me, that's a really fascinating dynamic because a lot of people coming into organizations are both opting in and getting selected in for the stage of the organization that you have...”- Rob Zuber   SHOW NOTESRob’s reflections on recapturing the “first-time coding” experience (3:08)On finding flow as an engineering leader (6:48)How Rob thinks about his role as CTO & why he brought on an SVPE to support (10:48)The “One Thing” moment & finding flow leading engineering teams (15:21)How do you intentionally protect maker-time (20:14)Balancing challenge & support to create flow (24:21)Frameworks for personal discovery or delegating executive responsibilities (29:35)On introducing resets & retro-ing your org (34:41)Rapid-Fire Questions (38:37)Takeaways (43:28)LINKS AND RESOURCES“The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller (book)First Team concept (definition)How CircleCI modeled it’s security training after DEF CON’s capture the flag (article) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!ABOUT ANNA PATTERSONAnna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund’s global activities.Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google’s Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc.Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results.Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift.Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis.Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband."When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline.What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan.I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..."- Anna Patterson   Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcAre you an eng leader interested in taking the leap to start your own company? Check out our brand new podcast series, Engineering Founders - Where we explore the transition from eng leader to founder!Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform HERE!SHOW NOTES:Anna’s background scaling complex systems (4:00)Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19)The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03)The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14)What’s after deep learning? (18:14)Machine learning and source code (20:06)What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04)How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43)Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16)How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30)Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20)How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49)Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38)LINKS AND RESOURCESGradient Ventures (Website)Streamlit.io (Website) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platformBuilding Your AI A-Team (Link) - Anna and Adrien Treuille’s talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What lessons can you learn from the strange and unfamiliar world of the sales team? Maulie Dass (Global Lead @ Cisco Innovation Labs) has experienced both worlds and joins to share what she’s learned! We cover questions to help you get to the root issues of your customer, design thinking strategies to generate customer empathy in your teams, how to balance product vision vs. feature requests from sales & more!ABOUT MAULIE DASSMaulie Dass (@mauliedass) is the Global Lead for Cisco's Innovation Labs, which works closely with local industries to create new technology solutions that solve common pain points and positively impact business, society, and the planet. She has been in the industry for over 20 years in a variety of tech, strategic, and customer-facing leadership roles. Maulie is passionate about her customers, innovation, technology, inclusivity, and cheese pizza."Even if a customer is very clear on a solution that they want... "I need an AI ML solution that does X, Y, Z." The question that I use often is "Tell me more about that? Like, what is instigating this need?" Think of the next question that'll kind of get you closer and closer to the source, or the root of the issue."- Maulie Dass   SHOW NOTES:Maulie shares the “expensive lessons” she learned while designing her first microchip (2:00)How learning and curiosity guided Maulie’s career across engineering, sales, and innovation (6:19)What engineering leaders can learn from sales (11:07)“Seek to understand first” & questions Maulie uses to empathize (17:30)When should leaders stop asking questions? (21:57)How to use the design thinking tool “A Day in the Life” to cultivate customer empathy and communicate between engineering and product (23:05)How to navigate your product vision versus feature requests from sales (28:45)How to manage and sustain your personal energy long-term (32:40)The impact of changing your communication style & having cultural awareness (36:03)Rapid-Fire Questions (39:17)Takeaways (42:19)LINKS AND RESOURCESGet-Woke on Github - A tool to detect non-inclusive language in your source-codeMismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Amazon) - Maulie’s book of choice for avoiding accidental exclusion in the world around us Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcLooking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lewis Tuff (VP of Engineering @ Blockchain.com) joins us to share his experience on building a career in the cryptocurrency space! We cover his transition from traditional finance/tech to crypto, how to shift your mindset from centralized to decentralized, qualities that lead to success, tactics to help you gain exposure and experience, AND why it’s not too late to start your career in crypto! ABOUT LEWIS TUFFLewis (@tuffleuk) is the Vice President of Engineering at Blockchain.com where he is responsible for the technology underpinning Blockchain.com’s services. As the 2nd engineering hire at Revolut, he scaled the team to 50+ and spearheaded the initiative to bring cryptocurrencies to Revolut. He built the first of its kind crypto offering within a challenger bank over the course of a couple of months and was responsible for bringing $300M+ trading revenue in due course. In March 2018 Lewis joined Blockchain.com as an engineering lead to be part of one of the most important companies in crypto infrastructure, rising to the Head of Platform Engineering as the company and industry grew. That same year he was included on Business Insider’s “35 under 35” in fintech. Lewis began his career building trading and risk technology systems at Goldman Sachs and UBS. He lives in London.SHOW NOTES:Patrick’s FOMO after learning his dad owned Doge-coin… (2:03)How Lewis went from traditional finance to a career in blockchain/crypto (3:35)One question to help you gain career perspective as an engineering leader (9:36)The principles behind blockchain technology that led Lewis to “go all in” (10:34)Are blockchain engineering challenges harder to solve? (13:03)Unprecedented (but not unsolvable) problems in blockchain (14:56)Staying lean & focused while balancing team size & scope (19:47)Making the transition from "centralized" to "decentralized" thinking (24:07)How to use Github to source great engineering candidates (28:07)Do engineering leaders need to be domain experts to manage teams in blockchain/crypto? (30:15)How engineering leadership is similar in blockchain companies & crypto’s ethos of “paying it forward” (33:29)Why it’s not too late to start a career in blockchain/crypto (36:14)How blockchain leverages the power of community (38:44)The first thing you should do to explore a career in blockchain: Try out the products & technology! (45:25)Where are the hottest markets/locations for cryptocurrency right now? (46:46)Rapid-Fire Questions (47:41)Takeaways (50:20)LINKS AND RESOURCESCryptocurrency on Github - Repositories, packages, and more for the budding engineers who want to get their feet wet.Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcLooking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremy King (SVP of Engineering @ Pinterest) discusses some of the challenges, principles & frameworks behind building inclusive products. We also cover filtering decisions through your company mission, investing in rest and emerging challenges around creating serendipity with ideas, onboarding, retaining talent and the hard logistics of workplace flexibility.ABOUT JEREMY KINGJeremy King is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Pinterest, where he leads the company’s technical direction and oversees the entire Engineering team building deeply technical products, platforms and machine learning systems. Previously, he was the CTO of Walmart, where he led the digital transformation effort of the company including customer technology, merchant technology and supply chain technology that covered all Walmart U.S. stores and eCommerce. Prior to that, King was Executive Vice President of technology at LiveOps, and Vice President of engineering and software development at eBay. He holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology from San Jose State University, and is an advisory board member for the CTO Forum, an organization that brings together senior leaders across the technology industry to collaborate on key issues and accelerate innovation across organizations.SHOW NOTES:Building inclusive products starts by having diverse data setsWhy your data is probably biased alreadyWhere to start with building inclusive productsThree principles to build inclusive productsHow Pinterest disrupts entrenched patterns of thinking & balances innovation and actionHow to decide which experiments to implementWhy ROI should not be the only metric of effectivenessHow to filter decisions through your company’s missionHow AR aligns with Pinterest’s mission & allows “Pinners” to explore & experiment with different identitiesCovid’s impact on retaining talentHow “investing in rest” & cultivating work-life balance can increase productivityHow to schedule a day off for your entire engineering orgUpcoming Industry Challenges: building in serendipity, onboarding in a remote-first workplace & the logistics of workplace flexibilityRapid-Fire QuestionsTakeawaysLINKS AND RESOURCESInclusive Search and Recommendations - Nadia Fawaz’s talk on How Inclusive Search, & AI works at PinterestCheck out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcLooking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This conversation is about BURNOUT! You’ll hear holistic perspectives to help you identify the causes, conditions, & early indicators of burnout. Plus organizational & individual practices to address & become resilient to burnout with Sabry Tozin (VPE @ LinkedIn), Lori Allen (VP HR @ LinkedIn), & Erica Lockheimer (VPE, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Learning & Glint @ LinkedIn).About Erica LockheimerErica Lockheimer is VP of Engineering, Talent Solutions, Learning, and Glint @ LinkedIn. During her more than 10 years at the company, she built the Growth Engineering team into a high-performing 120-person team, focused on increasing membership, and deepening member engagement. In January 2018, she was promoted to Head of Engineering for the LinkedIn Learning team, formerly known as Lynda.com. She is also responsible for LinkedIn’s Women In Tech (WIT) initiative, which is focused on empowering women in technical roles at the company. Prior to LinkedIn, she worked at Good Technology as Director of Server Engineering to securely manage and synchronize e-mail and calendar data between Exchange and mobile devices. Erica loves the challenge of starting with something nascent and carving out the right strategy, hiring the best people, and plotting a course to drive results. In 2014 and 2015, Erica was recognized as one of the top 22 women engineers in the world by Business Insider.About Sabry TozinSabry Tozin is the Vice President of Enterprise Productivity Engineering at LinkedIn. In this capacity, Sabry leads the organization that powers the productivity of LinkedIn employees through innovative, scalable, and secure information technology solutions. Before joining LinkedIn, Sabry held engineering leadership roles at Netflix and IGN Entertainment. He’s a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley.About Lori AllenLori is a Speaker and Coach and serves as VP of Human Resources, Engineering for LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Mission is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce which aligns to Lori’s personal goal of helping others reach their full potential.   She has spent the last 20+ years as an HR Leader responsible for designing talent strategies and partnering with Executives to drive business results. Lori is passionate about Diversity Inclusion and belonging and was named in the 2018 list of women worth watching in the Profiles in Diversity Journal.Originally from Wichita, Kansas, she graduated from the University of Kansas with a BA and later received a master’s degree from Webster University.   Lori has resided in the Bay area for the past 20+ years and has had the privilege of workingShownotesBurnout in Q1-2021 & what caused LinkedIn to take a company-wide week off (3:31)Are patterns of burnout repeating with the new covid variant? (7:59)What are the causes, conditions, & indicators of burnout in engineering orgs? (12:19)How to detect & identify the early signs of burnout in your engineering team (19:14)Favorite non-invasive "how are you doing" questions to get better signal from your engineering team (23:47)How to build resilience against burnout by leveraging Lencioni’s “First Team Concept” (31:01)Conversation framework for internal mobility (36:44)Erica, Lori & Sabry’s personal practices to prevent burnout (40:29)What do you admire most about working with each other? (42:31)Takeaways (44:59)Check out our friends and sponsor, Jellyfish. Jellyfish helps you align engineering work with business priorities and enables you to make better strategic decisions.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcLooking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at www.sfelc.com! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our 2022 season starts next week on Tues 1/4! Check out this trailer for a preview of our first few guests covering topics like burnout, building inclusive products, and making the career transition into crypto! Looking for other ways to get involved with ELC? Check out all of our upcoming events, peer groups, and other programs at https://sfelc.com/ ! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sri Viswanath (CTO @ Atlassian) shares Atlassian’s approach to building autonomous teams, the story behind Project Pascal & how Atlassian built their engineering career ladder! You’ll learn Sri’s 3 key areas to creating autonomy (principles, priorities & process), creating transparency at scale, and common & counter-intuitive process changes. Plus the key elements to build/launch a successful engineering career growth plan! ABOUT SRI VISWANATHSri is the chief technology officer (CTO) at Atlassian. Sri joined the company in January 2016 and is at the helm of Atlassian's cloud-native journey – assuming responsibility over the building and scaling Atlassian's cloud platform. Before joining Atlassian, Sri served as CTO and senior vice president of engineering at Groupon, the vice president of R&D for mobile computing at VMware, and the senior vice president of engineering at Ning – where he was instrumental in the company's acquisition by Glam. He also led the development of a number of very successful open-source and B-to-B products at Sun Microsystems, served on the Board of Directors for SendGrid, and has a number of patents. Sri currently serves on the Board of Directors for Splunk and holds a M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a M.S. in Computer Science from Clemson University. LINKS & RESOURCESAtlassian's Engineering Handbook: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/handbookAtlassian's Project Pascal: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/career-framework SHOW NOTESSri’s people-first approach to leadership (1:50)Why “putting people first” is key to building autonomous teams (3:17)How Sri operationalizes his approach to leadership (4:35)What processes should you prioritize first, to build autonomous teams? (9:31)Common & counter-intuitive process changes for engineering leaders to assess (15:32)How Atlassian leverages pre-mortems for major projects at Atlassian (20:29)How Atlassian’s engineering culture creates transparency at scale (22:22)Where to start with building your own engineering handbook: principles, prioritization, & process (24:29)Atlassian’s approach to engineering career growth & “Project Pascal” (32:20)How Atlassian defined each role in it’s engineering career ladder (39:48)How Atlassian formed cross-functional working groups to define different roles (42:23)How different opinions were included in Project Pascal (43:38)How Atlassian incorporated feedback to improve it’s career framework (46:08)Rapid Fire Questions (48:15)Takeaways (54:15)---Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELCListen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE: https://spoti.fi/2WLX9CmReady to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE: https://bit.ly/39QpNoHSend in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Li Fan (CTO @ Circle) shares about the power of mentoring and the impact of paying it forward! We cover Li’s career journey, the mentors that have inspired and shaped her leadership, and how Li’s passed along those lessons to the people she’s mentored. Through Li’s stories, we uncover the long-term impact and ripple effect when you pay it forward.ABOUT LI FANLi Fan is CTO at Circle, a global fintech firm enabling business to harness the power of digital currencies and public blockchains (Circle is the principle operator of USD Coin). Prior to Circle, Li was CTO at Lime, an innovative technology company that connects and empowers urban living through mobility. Before Lime, Li was SVP of engineering at Pinterest leading all 600+ engineers to execute technology strategy and deliver company priorities. Li was a Senior Director of Engineering in Google, accountable for Google’s popular image search and was Vice President of Engineering at Baidu.SHOW NOTESWhy this conversation with Li Fan is so special (2:02)When has a mentor made a meaningful difference for you? (3:30)How mentors help show you what’s possible in your career and life (6:29)How mentors inspire and shape your leadership (10:00)Mental models for a successful mentor relationship (13:29)Paying it forward and becoming a mentor (15:19)How to balance your team’s retention and your mentee’s career growth (19:12)The hard-to-imagine long term impact of mentoring (25:20)Staying in touch with your mentors and the people you mentor (29:17)The long-term ripple effect when you “pay it forward” and mentor others (31:22)Finding the right mentor and creating mutually beneficial relationships (36:04)How Art influences Li’s approach to engineering leadership (39:51)Rapid Fire Questions (44:17)Takeaways (47:38)---Special thanks to our exclusive accessibility partner Mesmer! Mesmer's AI-bots automate mobile app accessibility testing to ensure your app is always accessible to everybody. To jump-start, your accessibility and inclusion initiative, visit mesmerhq.com/ELCListen to our Bonus Episode: Building Your AI Organization with Maia Brenner! Listen HERE: https://spoti.fi/2WLX9Cm Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Maia Brenner (AI Specialist & Head of Business Development @ Tryolabs) shares the fundamentals to begin your company’s AI/ML journey! We cover the most common challenges & pitfalls eng leaders face when investing in AI, how to understand feasibility/impact & ROI of different AI/ML initiatives, how to build your AI roadmap, how to break down massive AI/ML projects into small experiments, and how to accelerate different phases of your AI/ML strategy with partners like Tryolabs.ABOUT MAIA BRENNERMaia Brenner is a passionate data scientist and economist with strong programming skills, a mathematical and statistical background, and work experience in consulting and the public sector. As an AI Specialist at Tryolabs she helps clients maximize the full potential of data science and machine learning to solve their business problems.Maia's experience in the consulting industry covers several projects related to demand forecasting, price optimization, customer segmentation, and natural language processing applications, among others. As a technical consultant, she has helped design and develop AI solutions for companies from several different industries such as Retail, Finance, Pharma, Logistics, Transportation, Hospitality, Education, and more.She is also a professor in several universities and enjoys working on initiatives of AI4SocialGood. She has helped in the application of Machine Learning to improve the Public Education sector and is involved in Gender Inequality research groups.SHOW NOTESThe origin story behind Tryolabs (2:33)Common AI/ML challenges Tryolabs helps solve (5:48)Most painful problems with building AI capabilities (7:50)What are the fundamentals to build an AI organization? (10:11)How do you integrate AI/ML into your core business? (12:42)What problems can (or can’t) be solved with AI/ML? (15:18)How Tryolabs helps companies to identify specific AI/ML use cases (16:59)Common pitfalls when investing in & integrating AI/ML into your company (18:19)How to start small & experiment with AI/ML solutions (20:14)How Tryolabs scopes & iterates their AI/ML projects (24:42)Metrics, KPIs & other ways to determine feasibility, impact & ROI of your AI/ML project (26:53)How to build an AI/ML roadmap for your organization (30:34)How Tryolabs accelerates building your AI organization (34:28)---Ready to own your AI Strategy? Learn more about Tryolabs HERE: https://bit.ly/39QpNoH Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.