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/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Attracting Great Talent with Ashish Aggarwal
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
If you’re a startup or any company that doesn’t have vast name recognition, attracting top talent can be a key concern. Ashish Aggarwal cut his teeth at Microsoft, Amazon, and Postmates so when the time came to start his own company, Productiv, he knew how to get the right people for the job.
Ashish spoke candidly about his past experiences and how they have helped shape Productiv. He shared with Peter the two things that attract top talent: challenging problems to solve and the opportunity to work with other high performers. Listen for more of his insights.
- (01:12) - Growing into people management
- (03:39) - Management training at Microsoft
- (06:15) - Attracting great talent at Ebay
- (08:50) - Geo-distributed offices
- (11:53) - Amazon's customer obsession
- (18:23) - Next-level ownership at Postmates
- (24:22) - Founding Productiv
- (34:30) - Principles for start-up team building
Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to aws-cto-program@amazon.com if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.