short byte

Griffin had a fairly traditional early career path, moving from sys admin and software development into engineering leadership. More recently he’s been scratching his entrepreneurial itch. In this interview, we discuss some of the things that make software development and engineering leadership a unique career, the importance of setting limits, and the value of therapy as an engineering leader.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this episode, I get to chat with Mark Porter, the CTO of MongoDB. Mark was previously the CTO at Grab and the GM for RDS at AWS and, after joining MongoDB as CTO in the pandemic's early days, has scaled the engineering org from 400 to over 1000 people over the last two years. In this wide-ranging episode we discuss everything from MongoDB’s “Future of Work” initiative for letting their teams decide how and where to work, the importance of providing air cover for Non-Functional Requirements, why you need a “zipper” connecting product and engineering all the way up and down the org and how to know when you’re halfway done with a change initiative.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Jeremy Johnson has been building globally distributed teams since before it was cool 😊. After co-founding 2U, in 2014 he co-founded Andela to help companies to more easily take advantage of top engineering talent - in Africa and beyond.

In this week's episode, listen to Jeremy as he shares his thoughts on hiring global talent, the benefits of remote vs. distributed teams, his thoughts on timezones, the benefits of global Professional Employer Organizations, and long-term trends in global comp for engineering talent.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In this episode, I got to talk with Ravi Mayuram, CTO at Couchbase. From edge persistence and self healing databases to quantum computing, we got to chat about a range of the trends he’s been seeing in the data persistence space.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Join me in this episode as I chat with Randy Kern, CTO at Marqeta about “bringing quality to your technology and your teams”. From code quality (Randy is a fan of strong typing and static analysis) to the value of early mentorship and the benefits of spending longer as an IC before moving to the management track. We also chat about what quality is in architecture, operations, and teams. It’s a great, wide ranging discussion with some fun takeaways for any engineering leader.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Wiz became the world's fastest unicorn last year when it raised $250m at a $6B valuation just 18 months after it was founded. In this episode, I chat with Ami Luttwak, Cofounder and CTO at Wiz about his experiences and model for building “the scalable startup”. With an unabashed commitment to hiring unicorns, managing lightly, and keeping any given engineering org within the Dunbar number, Ami shares a lot of fascinating wisdom from his experiences of founding and selling Adallon (his previous startup) to Microsoft and then working within the largest software development company in the world.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Arunava Bag is the CTO (EMEA) at Digitate and in this episode, he provides an introduction to the topic of AI Ops - how you can start to leverage machine learning to engage with the telemetry from your production systems to eventually provide for automated incident resolution and/or forecasting of potential issues as anomalies start to arise in the production data.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

If you’re a software engineering leader who has been less focused on the data analytics and data engineering space over the last few years, join me in this week's episode where Satish Jayanthi, CTO and Cofounder at Coalesce.io  gets me up to speed with the current landscape. Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of data warehouses, lakes, and meshes and best practices for persisting and querying against data at scale. It’s not enough to turn you into an expert in data analytics, but at least it may help you to understand what the domain experts are talking about!

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

In addition to being the SVP Eng at Ritchie Bros and previously being Head of Engineering, LATAM at Stripe, and VPE at Splice, Juan Pablo Buriticá is also one of the authors of the excellent Holloway guide to Remote Work https://www.holloway.com/g/remote-work/about (along with the also awesome Katie Wilde - VPE at Ambassador Labs and previously VPE at Buffer). In this week's episode, Juan Pablo discusses his experience in building out international remote teams and managing across the three dimensions of distance, time(zones), and culture.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

Writing code is seldom the hardest part of launching and maintaining an application. In this week's episode, I chat with On Freund - cofounder and CEO of Wilco and previously VPE at Handy and WeWork. He shares his journey from completing a degree in computer engineering to learning how to be a productive member of an engineering team and his thoughts on the skills required to help junior engineers become effective and productive.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 new team lead, but after three months realized that he needed a "plan B" to ensure he could keep the team growing and productive. In this episode we look at his approach, experiences and lessons learned.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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” framework for allocating and structuring projects based on the degree of certainty and alignment.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 Mastering DevOps. In this episode, he shares his thoughts on why "architecture matters, technology doesn't" and how to think about DevOps and technology challenges through the lens of business value.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 helping engineering teams to both think through risks associated with projects and deepen their team communications and levels of trust.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 at scale. In this episode, he digs into the value of a microservices architecture the benefits of containerization vs. serverless, the elements of a well thought out cloud architecture and some of the additional considerations if you want to up your reliability and flexibility by moving multi-region or multi-cloud. A little geekier than many of our other discussions, but if you are involved with the architecture of your application and cloud native infrastructure it should be a great overview of some of the topics you need to consider.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 Cloud about how best to think about supporting the growth of the engineering leaders already within your org.

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 DevOps report which provided a rigorous basis for focusing on four key metrics for tracking the maturity of an engineering org. When taken together, Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover, and Change Failure Rate provide a great starting point for engineering teams looking to improve their efficiency. But no metrics are perfect. In our chat, Michael shares how (and why) he defines DevOps for different audiences, how he thinks about each of the metrics, things to bear in mind when thinking about the survey responses, and the variability in developer experience even between companies that perform well on all four metrics. And he raises the question, “once you’re performing well on the DORA Metrics, what do you prioritize improving next?”

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.

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 connect with customers and stakeholders can be a superpower as a CTO. 

Learn how Mark first got his sales mojo as a technologist when all the sales people in his office quit, and the impact that a customer engaged engineering leader can have by shortening the product feedback cycle, and getting product feedback directly from customers.

Resources

• The Startup Founder Sales Series - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/the-startup-founder-sales-series-an-introduction/
• Daniel Pink, To sell is human https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087GJ8KM/

PARTNER
Thanks to our partner CloudZero — Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform. Control cost and drive better decisions with CloudZero cloud cost intelligence. The CloudZero platform provides visibility into cloud spend without the typical pitfalls of legacy cloud cost management tools, like endless tagging or clunky Kubernetes support. Optimize unit economics, decentralize cost data to engineering, and create a shared language between finance and technical teams. CloudZero helps you organize cloud spending better than anyone else.
Join companies like Drift, Rapid7, and SeatGeek by visiting cloudzero.com/ctoconnection to get started.