The Engineering Leadership Podcast By cover art

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

By: The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
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  • Summary

  • We share the most critical perspectives, habits & examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. Join our community of software engineering leaders @ www.sfelc.com!
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Episodes
  • Harnessing Professional Strategies & Tech Performance Tools for Personal Growth w/ Chris Cravens #177

    Harnessing Professional Strategies & Tech Performance Tools for Personal Growth w/ Chris Cravens #177
    Apr 30 2024
    Chris Cravens (Former VPE @ Splunk and CIO @ Uber) shares practical tips for applying professional strategies / tech performance tools into our personal lives - to increase intentionality, goal setting, and habit formation in all aspects of our lives. He shares why it’s so easy to dedicate 90% of your time & attention to work while only dedicating 10% to your personal life and reveals from his own experience how he discovered a better work-life balance by applying OKRs, goal setting, postmortems, and deep reflection. We also cover frameworks for identifying feeling-based goals, building habits & accountability within your personal life, combating negative self-talk, and rewiring your brain to focus on the present & not dwell on past failures.ABOUT CHRIS CRAVENSChris Cravens is an industry veteran with a quarter century of successes delivering measurable value for high-growth enterprises in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. An avid change agent and catalyst for transformation, Mr. Cravens has led major global scale-up and transformation efforts for Software Engineering, Information Technology, Security, Facilities teams. As the first CIO at Zynga and Uber, he led critical functions that enabled scale from small startups to major global enterprises in record time. Mr. Cravens led digital transformation at Splunk, scaling revenue from $800M to $2.2BN in three years by reimagining and supercharging Go to Market capabilities with automation and high value software capabilities that drove greater deal size and velocity. Currently, Mr. Cravens provides expert consulting supporting Private Equity and Venture transactions and transformations and is an active Strategic Advisor, Coach, and Investor to startups delivering innovative, disruptive technologies to accelerate digital transformation.“I would just keep doing things like that because of that philosophy of in the absence of clear leadership, step in, be the one who is responsible and it goes back to that anxiety from childhood. There are people who have much healthier outlooks, and I've just never been wired that way. So I have to kind of question each decision I make as I go to do a new thing or take on more stuff. 'Is this the right thing for me to do right now, or am I making my life harder?'”- Chris Cravens We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world!Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job.New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now!We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community!SHOW NOTES:Chris’s experience of his first week @ Uber (2:02)Borrowing professional life tools & using them in your personal life (4:53)Why it’s easy to give 90% of time to work & only 10% to your personal life (8:26)How Chris navigated his own transition (14:34)Treat a sabbatical like a job (16:15)Adding OKRs to your personal life (19:36)Strategies for assessing feeling-oriented goals (22:05)Combating negative self-talk & treating yourself like you would a good friend (24:58)How Chris’s frameworks have shifted over time when setting personal life goals (27:11)Reflection questions to help illuminate where to center your focus (29:35)Applying positive self-talk within a work context to your personal life (32:39)Incorporate blameless postmortems into a personal context (35:38)Strategies for better habit formation (37:00)How to overcome feeling a lack of motivation to start a new habit (38:08)The significance of having both clarity & accountability (40:56)Tips for rewiring the belief that you can accomplish a goal (45:27)Rapid fire questions (48:21)LINKS AND RESOURCESChris’s Guide to Thinking ErrorsThe Satanic Verses - novel of Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie led Ruholla Khomeini, the ayatollah of Iran, to demand his execution and then forced him into hiding.This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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    54 mins
  • Cold outreach & strategically expanding your business model into services w/ Jon Perl & Scott Wilson @ QA Wolf #176

    Cold outreach & strategically expanding your business model into services w/ Jon Perl & Scott Wilson @ QA Wolf #176
    Apr 23 2024
    This is a special episode from our show “Engineering Founders” - Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive in to the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company. Check out Engineering Founders - https://hubs.la/Q02tq5ym0ABOUT JON PERLJon Perl is the co-founder and CEO of QA Wolf, a startup building the QA solution every engineering leader wishes for. Prior to QA Wolf, Perl led engineering teams in the healthcare and home services space, where he learned firsthand how difficult automated regression testing can be — and how critical it is for teams to have. His interest in software engineering comes from an overarching desire to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks and give people their time back. He has a dog named Finn and enjoys hiking."Your goal is simply to book a meeting. You're not trying to close a deal through one email. It's like, 'How can I just get on the phone with somebody?' That's the goal.”- Jon Perl ABOUT SCOTT WILSONAs co-founder and head of growth at QA Wolf, Scott Wilson is trying to upend 20+ years of stagnation in the QA industry. Before this he launched the marketing efforts at Wyze and helped acquire 6 million paying customers. If he’s not working, you might find him backpacking with Frank the dog, or learning a new illusion."It's not referencing the weather in Seattle or that you got promoted. Personalization is being contextually relevant to the person. This is how your mind should be thinking. It's like, 'I saw you're a hundred person company with nine engineers on your team and no QA engineers. You're probably going through this and here's a solution for it.'”- Scott Wilson We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world!Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job.New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now!We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community!SHOW NOTES:The origin story of QA Wolf & the desire to build an automated QA system (2:08)What got Scott excited about joining the QA Wolf founding team (7:14)Scott’s experience as the non-technical cofounder on the team (9:13)Learn enough to be dangerous & be willing to persist as a founder (10:38)The approach of paying people you can learn from & its impact on QA Wolf (14:11)Lessons learned about cold emailing & effective strategies to implement (17:12)Cold emailing strategies that don’t work (21:00)How to add value to email communication & incorporate experimentation (22:24)Why they shifted the focus from coding to sales / outreach / identifying solutions (26:23)Make accountability mechanisms a key component of early-stage teams (29:09)The false signal of free users & expanding product into services (30:45)Identifying a gap in the business & being open-minded to new ideas (33:20)What the initial testing for QA Wolf’s services approach looked like (35:22)Jon & Scott’s perspective on dealing w/ investors in the automated services space (38:31)Rapid fire questions (44:01)LINKS AND RESOURCES$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying NoHow to Hire a Product-Led Sales Leader – at Every StageThis episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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    54 mins
  • Building & leading a combined engineering & security org w/ Mike Hanley #175

    Building & leading a combined engineering & security org w/ Mike Hanley #175
    Apr 16 2024
    Mike Hanley, Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering @ GitHub, joins us to discuss how GitHub has successfully combined its engineering & security orgs and shares recommendations for how other orgs can pivot to this model. We cover why it’s so important for eng orgs to collaborate with security early on in the product development cycle and tips for educating your engineers on security best practices. We also discuss how the rise of AI tools / usage is changing how companies need to think about & practice security, why AI is providing opportunities for increased safety & security within product development, and strategies for encouraging your org to adopt AI tooling within engineering, security, and beyond.ABOUT MIKE HANLEYMike Hanley is the Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering at GitHub. Prior to GitHub, Mike was the Vice President of Security at Duo Security, where he built and led the security research, development, and operations functions. After Duo’s acquisition by Cisco for $2.35 billion in 2018, Mike led the transformation of Cisco’s cloud security framework and later served as CISO for the company. Mike also spent several years at CERT/CC as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff and security researcher focused on applied R&D programs for the US Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.When he’s not talking about security at GitHub, Mike can be found enjoying Ann Arbor, MI with his wife and eight kids."The idea that the security team is walled off or separate or not really connected, not just to engineering but the entirety of the business, you really can't have that. If you think about the pace of modern development, things are moving so quickly. It's so driven by software. The idea that you're like, ‘Hey, I got to walk down the hall and check in with somebody from security who has no idea what's going on in my roadmap, who has no idea what my day to day experience is living in engineering...’ That just doesn't work!”- Mike Hanley We now have 10 local communities of engineering leaders hosting in-person meetups all over the world!Local communities are led by eng leaders just like you, who wanted to create a place to connect, share insights & tackle critical challenges in the job.New York City, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto in-person events are happening now!We’re launching local events all the time - get involved at elc.community!SHOW NOTES:GitHub’s convergence of the eng & security orgs (2:33)Benefits of combining engineering & security org mandates (4:46)How the security team is involved with the internal product dev lifecycle (8:05)The downsides of engaging your security team as an afterthought (10:46)What an early-stage yes/and product conversation looks like (12:48)Examples of educating your eng team on security best practices (17:17)Expanding two-factor authentication externally (19:29)Stewarding security as a responsibility & value (21:59)Security & safety implications for orgs using / building AI tools (23:44)Why the rise of AI is a great time for eng / security collaboration (27:09)How to leverage security best practices using AI tools (29:53)Mike’s view that AI will create more opportunities & improve structural tech (32:14)Frameworks for getting to “yes” when it comes to adopting AI tooling (35:15)AI-powered tools GitHub is using to change workflows outside of eng & security (39:06)Considerations pivoting toward combining eng & security functions (40:35)Rapid fire questions (42:25)LINKS AND RESOURCESWhy Johnny Can’t Encrypt - Alma Whitten And J. D. Tygar’s argument that effective security requires a different usability standard that is not achievable through the user interface techniques commonly found in consumer software.The Space Trilogy - C.S. Lewis believed that popular science was the new mythology of his age, and in The Space Trilogy he ransacks the uncharted territory of space and makes that mythology the medium of his spiritual imagination.The Works of Peter DruckerThis episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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    46 mins
Management Economics
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