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
What Does a VP of Engineering Do With Alexandra Paredes
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
VP of Engineering is an expansive position. But what is it really like on the granular level? Alexandra Paredes is the VP of Engineering at Code Climate and joined Peter to discuss how she approaches the hiring process, keeps her team on track, and navigates metrics such as cycle time and code review involvement.
Tune in to hear Alexandra’s thoughts on communication and transparency as well as mentoring new engineers to ensure they ask the right questions from the start.
- [01:28] - Alexandra's rise to VP of Engineering at Code Climate
- [07:21] - Internal metrics
- [12:02] - Milestones without estimates
- [18:40] - Cycle time
- [20:29] - Reliability requirements
- [21:59] - Code review involvement
- [23:29] - Incremental pull requests
- [26:34] - Tracking key abilities
- [29:58] - Communicating metrics to non-technical management
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.