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: Labhesh Patel - Diversity, Inclusion and Bias in AI Systems
Most companies are increasingly trying to leverage data science to achieve their business goals, but it's easy to create biased models that disadvantage underrepresented groups. In this episode I get to chat with Labhesh Patel, CTO and Chief Sc...
Short Byte: Charlie Reverte - Retaining your team during the 'great resignation'
The great resignation is both a threat and an opportunity for engineering leaders. To avoid regrettable attrition, you need to make sure you are tracking your comp to industry standards, creating the psychological safety to allow your team to b...
Short Byte: Jossie Haines - Empathy and Inclusion in Engineering Leadership
To create a truly diverse and inclusive team where everyone can thrive and share their views, engineering leaders need to abide by the following three pillars: 1) effective and fair management principles, 2) comprehensive DEI ...
Short Byte: Ben John - Managing engineering at scale
In this wide ranging talk, I chat with Dr. Ben John about his experiences in scaling and managing the team at AppNexus (and post AT&T acquisition at Xandr). We talk about six week planning cycles, creating a supportive culture, building out...
Short Byte: Anne Lise Waal - Gaming the enterprise
It's not easy to bring gaming technologies into the enterprise. From hardware limitations to unreasonable expectations, it's challenging to bring game like learning simulations to the corporate world. Anne Lise Waal has been doing ...
Short Byte: Colin Earl - How and why CTOs should engage with no-code tools
They're coming. From bubble.io and webflow through UI Path and Blue Prism, the chances are that someone within your company is already building a departmental system using a "no code" tool. As with B...
Short Byte: Mark Reese - Starting from somewhere else
Wellington, NZ isn’t the obvious place to start a SaaS company. But Xero has built a globally distributed team of over 1800 people in product and engineering. In this episode, I chat with Mark Rees [
Short Byte: Adam Sypniewski - Going against the flow
One of the biggest risks for an engineering org is the “Not Invented Here” syndrome where the tech team wants to rethink every decision and rebuild every piece of tech from scratch. But sometimes it makes sense to take a different path if the c...
Short Byte: Anurag Gupta - The importance of automating production ops
While running database services for AWS, Anurag Gupta, now Founder & CEO of Shoreline.io, learned the importance of going beyond monitoring and incident response to implement incident automation to automati...
Short Byte: Rob Zuber - Being an executive first
As a CTO, you're not just responsible for running the engineering team...Because you're also a C-level executive with the responsibility to help the executive team to leverage technology to achieve their business goals.So how ca...
Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teams
Short Byte: Tim Olshansky - Managing hybrid remote teamsWe can't put the remote genie back in the bottle, but with some people desperate to get out and go back to the office, how can organizations manage the two?
Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?
Short Byte: Jeff DeVerter - Do you even know what software your company is developing?The good news is that software development has moved from a peripheral activity to the heart of every business. But as technology beco...
Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring process
Short Byte: Jeffrey Spector - Why you have to improve your hiring processWith demand for talent at an all time high, if you want to attract, identify and close the best developers for your team, you simply have to up you...
Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering org
Short Byte: Camille Fournier - Managing a product focused engineering orgCamille Fournier is perhaps best known for her amazing book “the managers path” - a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. But she al...
Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leaves
Short Byte: Mai Irie - What to do when your engineering leader leavesMai Irie is a director of engineering, but twice in the last two years she’s had to deal with managing the engineering org after her CTO or general equ...
Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startup
Short Byte: Lee Edwards - How to pick the right tech startupWhether you’re thinking of founding, joining or investing in an early stage tech company, Lee Edwards has some advice! From effective due diligence on an early ...
Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin Measuring outcomes vs. inputs
Short Byte: Johnny Ray Austin - Measuring outcomes vs. inputsHow can you best measure the effectiveness of your engineering team? Lines of Code written? Number of PR’s? There are absolutely some input metrics that can ha...
Short Byte: James Smith - Building vs buying software
Building vs buying softwareBuilding vs buying is always a fraught decision. Nominally buying a solution provides more capability and a quicker time to market, but then you have the potential of vendor lock in and being co...
Short Byte: Heidi WIlliams - Building a startup within a startup
Building a startup within a startupThere are a unique set of constraints when you’re running an engineering team at a “startup within a startup” - from managing the planning cycle before you’ve hit product market fit, to...
Short Byte: Juan Pablo Buriticá 12/17/2020 - learning the craft of engineering management
JP learned engineering management the hard way - and he’s passionate about helping new engineering leaders to have a better pathway to building their skills. In this Short Byte we look at the differences between being an engineering leader at a...
Short Byte: Cat Miller 12/3/20
Culture work is part of a developers jobAt Flatiron Health, the team thinks that getting IC’s to invest in the team culture is so important that they’ve built it into their career ladder. So I’ll be asking Cat why “culture work” (from on...
Using ML/AI to Analyze Your Log Files with Christian Beedgen
According to Christian Beedgen CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic, there is no magic bullet when it comes to innovation. His brain child, Sumo Logic, was founded to empower digital business throu...
Using Data Science to Deliver Tangible Business Outcomes with Ian Wong
Companies have largely figured out software. Data science, however, seems to be the new frontier. Many data scientists are coming from largely academic backgrounds and maybe don’t understand how to function at jobs in the private sector. Today’...
