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
Why Customer Centricity is Key to Company Culture with Raj Sethuraman
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According to Raj Sethuraman, good technology cannot be a successful technology unless it solves customer problems and drives great business outcomes. Raj is currently CTO at Wolters Kluwer and got his start at Intuit. The common thread throughout his career has been establishing customer-centricity to better inform technical decisions.
He is our guest this week on CTO Connection and talked to Peter about a program he likes called “Follow Me Home” in which he and other team members sit down with customers to find out how they use products and what could make them work better. Listen for his insights.
- (01:21) - Transitioning to leadership
- (03:48) - Customer centricity
- (05:16) - Follow me home
- (12:26) - Co-creating value
- (16:57) - Badass: Making Users Awesome
- (18:24) - Achieving quick wins faster
- (22:01) - Appetite for change
- (24:51) - Managing pushback
- (28:01) - Hiring for culture fit
- (30:30) - Engineer rotation
- (32:29) - Innovation priorities
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!
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