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/
Episodes
204 episodes
Short Byte: Joris Dries - Growing vs hiring leaders: a case study
When Joris Dries, CTO of Resonate Solutions in Sydney lost his team lead in the middle of a growth spurt, he had to figure out how he could keep on scaling the team while also filling the leadership gap. He started the process of looking for a ...
Short Byte: James Kenigsberg - Run, grow, transform
This week I got to chat with James Kenigsberg - perhaps best known as the founding CTO at 2U. James shares his thoughts on making transformations tractable, helping your team to win even if their projects don’t, and the “run, grow, transform” f...
Short Byte: Dave Mangot - Architecture matters, technology doesn’t
Dave Mangot is the principal at Mangoteque, and has successfully led DevOps transformations and operational maturity achievement at companies like Salesforce, Cable & Wireless, and SolarWinds. He's also the author of
Short Byte: Jon Williams - Planning for failure
In addition to being the founder of the New York CTO Club, Jon Williams is also a fractional CTO. In this episode, in addition to briefly discussing how and why the New York club got founded, we also dug into one of Jon’s favorite patterns for ...
Short Byte: Doron Grinstein - Moving towards a Netflix grade cloud maturity
Before founding Control Plane Corporation, Doron was the Chief Software Architect for the cloud services platform at VMWare, a principal architect at Concur and a Chief Software Architect at Dell, so he has some experience architecting systems ...
Short Byte: Gary Davis - Improving your interview process
Given the demand for engineering talent, it’s important not to exclude great candidates just because they didn’t go to the right school or don’t feel like a culture fit (vs. being a culture add). In this episode, I talk with Gary Davis, Diversi...
Short Byte: Joe Lynch - How to grow the leaders within your org
Bringing new leadership into an engineering org is slow, expensive, and can be risky. It makes much more sense to focus most of the time on how you can grow your team. This week I chatted with Joe Lynch, Former Engineering Leader at Google Clou...
Short Byte: Michael Stahnke - A deep dive into the “four core metrics”. And “what’s next”?!
In this episode, I talk with Michael Stahnke, VP Platform at CircleCI about the “four core metrics”, and what’s next. Michael was Director of Engineering at Puppet back when Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim created the State of Dev...
Short Byte: Mark Birch - Selling as a CTO
While we often think of ourselves as technologists, CTOs and engineering leaders are also in the business of sales. Whether it’s internal stakeholder alignment or selling a startup vision to a technical buyer, the ability to relate to and conne...
Short Byte: Colleen Tartow - Building and managing a Hybrid team at Starburst Data
In the less than two years since Colleen Tartow, Ph.D. joined Starburst Data as Director of Engineering, the company has scaled from ~80 to ~350 staff and engineering is now at 85 people spread from California to India with offices in San...
Short Byte: Aaron Erickson & Brian Guthrie - Good and bad reasons to reorg
As VPE at Meetup.com during the fallout from the WeWork implosion, Brian saw first hand some of the challenges in organizing and reorganizing an engineering team. Aaron also engaged in his share of ...
Short Byte: Frederic Rivain - Building products with privacy and security in mind
As the CTO at a password management company, Frederic has to be passionate about security and privacy, but in this episode, he breaks down the importance of thinking about application security, company security and user privacy from day one. He...
Short Byte: Kimberly Wiefling - Overcoming the pandemic of disengaged employees and dysfunctional organizations
In this wide ranging interview, Kimberly Wiefling, Cofounder of Silicon Valley Alliances shares a range of perspectives on how and why so many people are disengaged from their work and how we can do a better job of connecting our teams to their...
Short Byte: Mike Boufford - Making “distributed” work at Greenhouse
Like many other companies, when covid hit, Greenhouse had to up its remote/distributed engineering game. From normalizing on a “one person, one screen” strategy for hybrid meetings to experimenting with a range of social opportunities for staff...
Short Byte: Jonathan Moore - Culture and the mental health of your team
From covid lockdowns to Black Lives Matter to January 6th, it’s been a couple of years. Teams expect more out of the companies they work for and also need the relational support of their managers to stay engaged and productive. In this episode,...
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Short Byte: Christine Spang - Multivariate optimization while scaling - beyond just gender balance
Back in 2019, Christine gave an awesome talk at our in-person San Francisco summit about how she had built an engineering org of ~30 with a 50:50 gender balance (Male : not male). In this episode, Christine shares what has changed as the organi...
Short Byte: Erik Peterson - Managing cloud costs
As cloud costs continue to become a bigger business expense, it’s increasingly important to have a proactive strategy for managing and understanding cloud costs rather than waiting for a call from the CFO! In this episode, Erik shares his...
Short Byte: Dan Langevin - Building an engineering culture of accountability and curiosity
As companies scale, it’s always a challenge to ensure that the dev team is as committed and passionate about the product as the founders. In this episode, I chat with Dan Langevin, Cofounder and CTO at Vericred about how they are intentional ab...
Short Byte: Mark Van de Wiel - Managing an engineering team through an acquisition
What with covid and the great resignation, it’s hard enough to keep an engineering organization intact, aligned and motivated. Imagine doing the same while negotiating a transaction that could impact everything from your feature roadmap to your...
Short Byte: Marko Gargenta - Tech enablement - the hard part of developer education
The hard part of developer education isn’t teaching your team a new language or framework. It’s teaching your team how you use the language or framework. Smart devs can always find a video course online to learn the basics of ES6 or Scala, but ...
Short Byte: Ramana Satyavarapu - Engineering management vs leadership
Ramana Satyavarapu is the CTO at Finix - a payments solution for SaaS companies. Previously he was Head of Data Engineering Platform and Product at Two Sigma, Head of Engineering, Software Network Infrastructure for Uber and a Head of Engineeri...
Short Byte: Ron Lichty - Starting a new engineering leadership role
For most of us, jumping into engineering leadership at a new company is only something we do every 3-5 years. Today's guest, Ron Lichty, Consulting VPE, often jumps into three or more new companies every year! In this episode, we’ll discuss how...
Short Byte: David Subar - How to choose a CTO coach
No matter how experienced you are, there are times where it can make sense to get a second pair of eyes on a problem. For small questions you can always tap your network, but as the amount of context required and input needed grows, it can make...
Short Byte: Joe Bradley - Leveraging conversational AI
Conversational AI has come a long way from simple rules based chatbots, but it's still a complex and quickly evolving space. Join me as I chat with Joe Bradley, Chief Scientist at LivePerson, about the use cases, tooling, team structures and go...
Short Byte: Claudius Mbemba - Sustaining culture within a remote-first team
We're all dealing with remote-first teams now whether we like to or not. But the more I investigate hybrid working options, the more likely it seems that we're going to have to come up with remote friendly approaches to building and sustaining ...
