The Tech Trek

Highlights of my conversation with Amin: Attributes of a strong engineer Technical excellence doesn’t always mean being the best coder Impacting the overall organization is a key attribute of a manager Empathy is a key attribute of technical leadership Look for opportunities to affect the larger organization Enabling collaboration between managers and principal engineers Having “operational rigor” Meet: Amin Lakhani is the Director of Software Engineering at ServiceLink after spending the previous three years at Microsoft. He has an undergraduate degree from DePaul University in Math and Computer Science and an MBA from the University of Illinois. If you have any questions for Amin, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amin-lakhani/ I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Leon: Is moving into management the right next step for an employee Create opportunities for an employee to gain some exposure to management Helping employees navigate different career tracks Finding the best fit for people you manage The (possibly false) allure of moving into management Keep evolving and growing your own managerial skills Easier to take an opportunity to lead than wait for it to be given Meet: Leon Fayer is a Vice President of Engineering at Teaching Strategies, a leader in early childhood education. He is a veteran technologist with over two decades of expertise focused on developing, architecting, and operating complex systems in support of organizational growth. Over his professional career, Leon worked with some of the most world-renowned organizations and agencies such as National Geographic, MTV, Wikipedia, Vodafone, White House, Toyota, and Soul Cycle.  Leon is also a published author and an industry-renowned public speaker, writing and presenting on topics of industry trends and best practices, sharing his experience related to designing and operating technology-first organizations at scale. If you have any questions for Leon, please feel free to reach out via: https://twitter.com/papa_fire https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonfayer I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Neil: Stakeholder’s level of technical sophistication impacts the level of planning Importance of the relationship with the product team Envisioning the team's growth past the current state Incubating a team until they are able to stand on their own Avoiding being too tactical Finding opportunities to piggyback new features into the existing work Helping new team members buy into the vision by providing the history behind the team/company Documentation will help the onboarding process Avoiding the walled garden when implementing a squad structure Combining project management and release management Every squad has 3 owners to drive quality (product, engineering, release) Meet: Neil Bhay is the CTO of TuneCore, a global platform for independent musicians.  He joined TuneCore in 2018 with the mission to scale and introduce enterprise-level best practices to TuneCore’s organizational structure & technology stack. He evolved an original team of 6 & established agile processes to oversee remote/local teams of 65+ in IT, QA, Release Mgmt, DevOps & Engineering in operations of office, cloud infrastructure & web/native app development. Neil comes from a history of managing enterprise technology teams at Viacom and HBO and, before that applying those same skills in start-up environments which contributed to his expertise in growing and organizing teams towards product delivery. If you have any questions for Neil, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbhay/ I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Topics we covered: Retaining Top Talent Understanding your employees before it's too late Safe Spaces Are more Engineering Managers better? Hypergrowth Hiring Diversity Hiring Time spent on Talent Acquisition? Offers strategy Meet the guests: Kirby Frugia - https://www.mural.co/blog/meet-kirby-frugia Kirby Frugia is MURAL’s SVP of Engineering and is responsible for Product Engineering, DevOps, and Data Engineering. He joined the company in October 2020, and since then, he has grown his team from 48 MURAListas to over 200. Kirby first got into software engineering because he loves problem-solving and making things easier for people — whether that’s a process, a tool, or an experience. He’s always looking for ways to unlock someone’s creativity or ability to do more with what’s in front of them. Ken Pickering - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenpickering/ Ken Pickering is the SVP of Engineering at Starburst Data, where he's looking to help companies make better, faster decisions on more complete data. Before that, he was the CTO of Hopper and made travel easy and affordable. David Ting - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dting David Ting joined Nylas from Flexport, where he led platform Engineering. David brings nearly 30 years of experience leading high-performance engineering teams for companies as diverse as Yahoo!, IBM, and Activision | Blizzard. I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Felix: Technical debt is a warning sign Liability in the code is not the same as technical debt Dealing with “code smell” Trying to quantify technical debt You need cause to dive into technical debt Very important to set your standards Define when things are “done” Why are you digging into the code? What things are and what they should be Meet: Felix Sargent is a Sr Software Engineering Manager at Truework. He has years of experience working on high-throughput platforms at scale. He’s been part of the larger tech community since 2008, and has driven industry-wide conversations around flexible product management, API design, managing technical debt, and building engineering teams. He believes teams work best when they feel safe, and are well equipped for their challenging work. His specialties are backend product and engineering management, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, containers, and deployment pipelines. He’s great at taking existing platforms and scaling them up to be more reliable, secure, and performant. He loves digging into obscure business logic and simplifying workflows. If you have any questions for Felix, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/felixsargent/ I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Jeff: Wanting to join a company to impact individual lives Adjusting to a HIPAA regulated industry Understanding all aspects of data flow Evolving to the strategic impact of the CTO role and shedding some hats (the last one being VP of Engineering) Switching between the different hats (strategic vs technical) Creating an organizational plan to balance the tech stack and career opportunities for growth Meet: Jeff has been working in the technology space for over 20 years as everything from a software engineer, chief architect, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer. As the CTO at Octave, he will be expanding and scaling our world-class team of software engineers, evolving our architecture for scale, and guiding our technology to make the lives of clinicians and clients better. Prior to joining Octave Jeff was in the Wellness space with TrueCoach, as well as the Enterprise SaaS space with Rally Software. When not working, he can be found enjoying everything Colorado has to offer, including snowboarding, hiking, and cycling. If you have any questions for Jeff, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefmsmit I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Nikhil: It takes a village (people, executives, everyone) for employee engagement to be successful Providing employees with safe spaces Leveraging trends from survey data (NPS style) Empower managers to align with individuals and their teams Allow teams to make decentralized decisions on how they implement certain processes Onboarding is a critical piece and starts before the start date Meet: Nikhil Desai is an experienced software engineer with 15+ years of global high tech and FinTech experience. He is passionate about creating products that provide real value to customers and significantly impact society. He has worked on product development for the LendingClub platform, Citrix GoToMeeting, and several other high-scale software products and services. Recently, leading 60+ engineers at Earnest, a FinTech company focused on solving interesting problems in the student loans space If you have any questions for Nikhil, please feel free to reach out via: www.linkedin.com/in/nikhildesai I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Ray: Historically security was done in the shadows Everyone is a partner to the security team Give people a sense of ownership and their part in the security program Drive surveys using tactical questions Do employees have confidence in the security team handling relevant issues If you have an external service, you should be thinking of security Go back and resurvey after incorporating security changes Share the security survey results with everyone and be transparent Meet: Meet: Ray Espinoza is CISO at Inspectiv. At the time of recording, he was the VP of Cloud Security at Medallia. Before Medallia, Ray was CISO at Cobalt.io, a pentest-as-a-service company. Ray also drove third-party cloud security across Amazon's retail business. He also held VP and CISO roles with Atmosera and Proofpoint and various security leadership positions at Workday, Cisco Systems, and eBay. If you have any questions for Ray, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-espinoza-b399821/ https://twitter.com/rayespinozasec I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with Dhara: Try to adopt a product mindset for shared services Measure value in a tangible way Focus on developer adoption as a metric Direct impact on development life cycle Celebrating for the team With technical customers, a technical product manager would be helpful Get client stakeholder engagement to understand and drive platform requirements Building awareness around initiatives Meet: Dhara Patel is SVP of Engineering, leading multiple groups building product platforms at Kinesso. She has industry experience in SaaS products and leading engineering teams in hyper-growth environments. Throughout her experience, she has led various platforms, services, data-centric products, and SaaS applications at scale. Before joining Kinesso, she led various engineering and product groups at Twilio and Citrix, building enterprise insights products, developer platforms, internal tools, and applications. She is passionate about leadership and enjoys working in areas where business meets engineering and innovation. If you have any questions for Dhara, please feel free to reach out via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharapateldesai/ I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.

Highlights of my conversation with John: Establishing an analytics Center of Excellence Using a hub and spoke model as a service provider to the business Hiring analysts with a consultative mindset Consistently delivering solutions to build long term trust Juggling the delivery roadmap to meet business needs Meet: Currently Director for Analytics at Brookdale Senior Living, John is an expert in digital transformation and data strategy. He leads organizations through growth and development of business analytics practices, primarily in service-oriented industries such as healthcare. As a result, John's work has delivered ROI and winning strategies for companies in the business of people. John holds a BA from Occidental College and MBA from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he lives with his family. If you have any questions for John, please feel free to reach out via: https://twitter.com/johnawilsontn https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnawilson/ I hope you enjoyed the episode. The best place to connect with me is on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirbormand (Amir Bormand). Please send me a message if you want me to cover specific topics with future guests.