Performance management has been a hot topic during this “year of efficiency”. In this Interview RC Johnson shares his experiences of building out, scaling and refining the performance management process at Indeed ..read more

In a world where getting everyone into the same office five days a week is increasingly difficult, offsites are becoming an essential tool for aligning and connecting teams, departments and companies. But all too often, the planning falls to someone with limited events or facilitation experience - on top of their day job - and substantial value is left on the table. Allison - (currently an engineering leadership consultant - previously VPE at QuotaPath and Head of Engineering at Forem) has been planning offsites for 25 years and in this thoughtful interview she shares advice on setting meaning ..read more

Over the last decade as Avant has scaled to an 800+ person company, town halls have been a consistent pillar of their interval communications strategy to support and reinforce culture. This week Paul Zhang shares his experience and approach to running both company wide and department specific town halls and demo days to better align his team ..read more

As engineering leaders, we have a responsibility to our organizations and their bottom line. At the same time, we’re leading humans, not automatons, and understanding and supporting the people in our org is both the right thing to do as a person and the most effective way to deliver business value.  In this wide-ranging discussion Rukmini Reddit, SVP of Engineering, Platform at Slack shares five questions she asks throughout her org to support herself and her team when dealing with change and how she leverages models like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous change model to better understand an ..read more

Kit Colbert has taken an atypical route to becoming the CTO of a large, publicly traded corporation. He started at VMWare 20 years ago as an individual contributor and worked his way up to CTO leading a 2,300 person engineering org. In this fascinating interview, we walk through Kit’s progression from junior IC to senior engineering leadership and reflect on some of the lessons learned ..read more

Over the last decade Josh Builder has led engineering at The Orchard (music), SoulCycle (fitness), Rent the Runway (fashion), and now Signify Health (healthcare). None of these were deep tech companies, but in each case, he found a core of engineering excellence and used that to entice and retain top talent to join his team - despite not being able to match big tech salaries.  In this interview, Josh takes us through his process for selecting the right CTO opportunities to accept, then building a compelling engineering brand, and using it first to retain and then attract top talent ..read more

In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for both incumbents and AI native startups, and the broader impact on the workforce and society as we deeply adopt Generative AI over the next 5-10 years.  According to Albert, right now we’re both in the middle of an unprecedented hype cycle for LLMs and starting to witness a transformation as profoun ..read more

Raji Subramanian brings a wide range of experience to the role of CTO at Opendoor (Nasdaq OPEN). She honed her technical chops culminating in a Principal Engineer role at Amazon and then ran engineering orgs at Yahoo and Amazon and cofounded Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor. In this wide ranging interview, we discuss everything from the trend towards single threaded leadership within technical orgs, sustaining innovation in larger technical orgs, the importance of respecting failure, and the three stages of value creation ..read more

This week I interviewed Yoav Grossman, VP of Product & Engineering at Spinach.io about how they went about identifying potential use cases for LLMs within their product, spiking, implementing, and releasing an offering. It’s a great mini-case study of the steps involved in adding GenAI to a product thoughtfully, but quickly.  Spinach is a smaller startup, but the lessons are applicable to companies of all sizes, and previously, Yoav was Head of Product for Asurion Health, Head of Global Business Process at Uber, and a manager for Walmart eCommerce ..read more

Just before our CTO summits in May I got to chat with Mike Boufford, CTO at Greenhouse about his experiences in getting up to speed with GenAI and LLMs as a non-expert. In this thought provoking interview Mike explains how he got up to speed with the capabilities of the latest LLMs and his thoughts on how CTOs should think strategically about engaging with Generative AI - both for improving the process of writing software and more broadly to rethink their product offerings and even their internal business processes ..read more