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
Continuous Learning in Engineering with Kwame Thomison
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Learning doesn’t end once you’ve earned your degree. Developers and engineers must stay up to date with their skills and emerging technologies. But most of the time, employees are expected to take on this additional learning on their own.
Our guest this week on CTO Connection is Kwame Thomison, a consultant and leadership coach formerly of Meebo, Facebook, and Asana. Kwame discusses different learning models that can be integrated into workplaces to create a strong culture of learning and collaboration. He talks to Peter about the difference between high learners and light learners, and a framework for value creation.
- [01:27] - Becoming a force multiplier
- [05:11] - Differences in culture & experience
- [08:13] - Facebook in the early days
- [10:00] - Finding balance at Asana
- [11:54] - The rewarding demands of consulting
- [13:40] - Heavy vs. light learners
- [15:01] - Communities of practice
- [22:04] - Learning guilds
- [25:40] - Project guilds
- [28:18] - Tips for growing a learning culture
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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