Podcast: SME tech leader tips, from a successful serial startup CTO with Steve Books
Steve Books
CTO at Slingshot Technology
Podcast – Episode 16:
SME tech leader tips, from a successful serial startup CTO
Creating a startup culture in SME organizations for hyper-growth, innovation, and business survival
One of the consistent things we see here at IT Labs through our ‘Teams as a Service’ (TaaS) and Business Agility consulting is companies’ need to have a startup mindset. Especially if they are in a phase of innovation to get one step ahead of competitors. Some of you may be thinking when wouldn’t this be the case 🙂 Well, many SMEs know the lessons but have forgotten them through their journey of growth. It’s almost like growth creates some form of ‘wisdom amnesia.’
Though IT Labs target audience is not startup’s, but because we are learners, we actively seek out these nimble little organizations’ voices to see what they are innovating and how they work. We desire to pick out their gems of advice and understanding through the lessons of success and beautiful moments of failure, to garner revived thinking for our community of technology leaders.
“[Smart businesses intentionally] try to cannibalize themselves, because they know that’s how they win in the end.” (e.g., Apple iPad)”
Well, Steve Books, CTO at Slingshot Technologies, joined us for an enlightening discussion on his serial startup journey. He’s what we like to call a starter-upper. I know not a real word, but it’s what we call someone who consistently gets involved in startups and nurtures them to exit. So here’s your opportunity to get a look under the covers of someone with a startup mindset and see things in a little bit more detail.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Lessons from a series of startups and exits.
- Tips on getting the most out of teams.
- How to make remote working work for you as a tech leader.
- Why business cannibalism is bizarrely good for your organization.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest Steve Books
3. A brief history of Steven Books on his journey to CTO
4. Being a serial "starter-upper" (What's attractive about working in startups)
5. Seeing startups like a challenging fun game
6. Contrasting working with corporates and startups
7. The subject of equity: Advice on structuring investment into a startup
8. Getting the best of your tech teams (it's not about the rate of output)
9. Getting your teams to feel for the product and create customer-centric thinking
10. Creating the right balance of using sexy new technology and keeping developers engaged
12. The art of creating inter-team relationship building with remote teams (Baking in BS meetings)
13. The question of productivity (measuring and metrics)
14. Perspective on Agile/Scrum (Getting back to the roots)
15. Creating authentic Agile and reaping the potential rewards
16. Technical debt balloon (Avoiding the unpleasant pop)
17. How wide do you go with testing at the beginning (new product development)
18. Stopping innovation from petering out post-acquisition (going cooperate).
19. Innovators dilemma
20. Intentional cannibalism
21. Resisting the hype of sexy new technology
22. Steve Books key takeaways for tech leaders
23. TC Gill's Reflections
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Podcast: Leading technology with a toothbrush with Brian Hough
Brian Hough
CTO at Beam Dental
Podcast – Episode 15:
Leading technology with a toothbrush
How to create customer-centric innovation and market disruption
Tech leaders sit at the heart of an organization. They are the enablers of the businesses in this digital world we live in. Decisions they make, impact the present, and mold the future.
In this episode of CTO Confessions, we speak to the tech leader of a very niche business. They have taken the simple toothbrush and added an impressive dimension to it. Marrying the world of personal preventative dental health care with that of dental insurance, through a technology-enabled toothbrush. What you might call “smart dental care.”
“You have to view yourself as the connector. One of the responsibilities we have as CTOs is that our world touches everybody else’s world, and vice versa. That very rarely happens for other parts of the organization. And so, once you recognize this, you start to realize that you need to have a relationship with those folks. You need to have signals that you’re pulling in, and you need to share the responsibility for the KPIs those people have.”
Brian Hough, Dental Beams CTO, joins us to talk about his tech challenges and wisdom around creating a truly customer-centric product. He describes how, through organizational and tech leadership, Beam Dental creates a strong feedback loop between the development teams and the needs of the end customer. Forming tight awareness and close feedback loops to get the product offering absolutely right.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Why it’s important to invest in development that sets the groundwork for future innovation and product agility.
- Creating high performing engineering teams that fully own their work.
- What is ‘Sentiment Analysis’?
- How to improve the success of a product by having more eyes on the customer’s needs.
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest: Brian Hough
3. Tech leaders working with Sales and Marketing
4. Disrupting and re-inventing a market (How the hell do you re-invent a toothbrush)
5. A tech solution for dental insurance that supports the end-customer saving money
6. Being receptive to the challenges of Sales and Marketing from a tech leadership perspective
7. Communications: Tech people being introverted
8. Keeping up to date with the latest technology as a CTO
9. Continuous learning: The need for it to be in balance
10. Making sure your teams remain relevant and talented in a fast-changing world
11. Funding continuous learning (being ready to ramp up on new up-and-coming technology)
12. Tech leaders being Time Lords
14. Creating great customer outcomes (not outputs)
15. Having field trips for engineers (understanding the 'what', the 'why' and creating the 'Arrrr I see')
16. Using AI and Machine Learning (data to guide the business roadmap)
17. Creating, communicating, and delivering the vision
18. Coffee chat with a CEO turning into a 'Thing"
19. Creating MVPs (Lean startup)
20. Moving away from a Legacy system and selling the investment in time and money to the business
21. The tough conversation about selling removal of technical debt
22. Being responsible for the code developed end to end (unit/integration/end-user experience testing)
23. Continuous integration testing (you have to get there to turbocharge the business)
24. Outro and TC Gill reflection
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Podcast: Humanizing AI with Swathi Young
Swathi Young
CTO at Integrity Management Services
Podcast – Episode 14:
Humanizing AI
The future is not all AI dystopia & terminator (creating technology ethics, transparency, and fairness)
You hear a lot about AI. It’s a bit of a buzz word, right?! Often misused and misreported. One area that is starting to get a lot of debate space is the ethics around this mystifying and still futuristic technology. It’s an important subject that is starting to have an impact on our everyday lives. As we all know, the world we live in is full of data, and it’s creating more and more consistently and relentlessly. With big data comes opportunities to be one step ahead, to help, to enhance human life, and on the dark side, oppress and control. So the subject of ethics around this subject is an important one. One that we should all take heed of. Especially us tech leaders out there.
“I believe that the [AI] future is imminent and we all think about the future in multiple ways… Some of us think about the utopian future. Some of them think about a dystopian future … ”
Swathi Young shares her expertise in this Podcast, her hopes, and her vision for AI. Especially around the ethics and impact it has on us humans now, and in the future. Swathi is an expert in the field of ethics and AI. In fact, at the time of the recording of this Podcast, she was currently working with the US Government creating an ethics framework for this emergent technology.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- What is Humanizing data?
- How can we start considering the ethics of AI?
- What is ‘Sentiment Analysis’?
- Tips for tech leaders on where to start when considering AI in their products and organizations
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing the guest: Swathi Young
3. What is Humanizing AI
4. Talking about the AI Terminator (elephant) in the room
5. The skills of the future with AI in the space (do we know what they will be)
6. Everything gets disrupted! Embrace it! (the disruption of AI)
7. We will always need the human touch
8. Are leaders and end customers embracing the change now that AI has passed the AI hype cycle
9. Use cases for AI (not everyone is aware of the practical ones)
10. How can data be humanized and what does it mean to me as a person or individual? OK, so we about humanizing the data
11. Humanizing data is not a linear path
13. As a tech leader, where do you start to humanize the data for AI/ML
14. Ethics in AI is not just a technology problem
15. How can you make AI development easy (and not so costly)
16. The ethics of AI (Ethical AI framework Swathi is working on for the US Government)
17. Will we be able to rate a AI implenetation on ethic (fairness, transparency)
18. How do we avoid going down AI rabbit holes
19. An example of going down a huge rabbit hole
20. Swathi's hope for the future
21. Swathi's key takeaway for the tech leaders out there
22. Outro and TC Gill reflection
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Podcast: A new shiny large-scale simulation tool for the SME toolbox
David Freed
CTO at OnScale
Podcast – Episode 13:
A new shiny large-scale simulation tool for the SME toolbox
(Democratizing supercomputing power that’s easy to use, low cost, and on tap)
Whenever one reflects on huge steps in innovation, we usually see some disruptive democratizing of capabilities. Where the tools of the elite, and those with deep pockets, become available to the masses. Well, that’s what this Podcast is about! It’s about democratizing this ability to have large supercomputer platforms’ capabilities, brought to the toolbox of SME businesses.
“ … it’s just so difficult to go after the big prize right away. You want to set up an achievable development path that gets you some milestones and some wins along the way.”
In the context of this disruptive story is an interesting and passionate tech leader, David Freed. CTO of OnScale, a company leading the way in achieving the democratization of high-level computing for large scale simulation. David is a self-confessed computer engineering geek with a background in Physics, chemical engineering, and a Ph.D. in fluid dynamics (in the context of Nuclear waste disposal). A heady mix of subjects all converging on a passion for bringing disruption to a niche market, thus gifting groundbreaking capabilities to the SME market.
David shares his desires and vision for OnScales platform, his leadership style to achieve this, and what he wishes for tech leaders out there.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- How novel solutions can bring historically expensive, out of reach capabilities to the masses by being bold, creative, and establishing cost-reducing ideas.
- How businesses can accelerate innovation through affordable large scale simulations (removing complexity and need for deep expertise)
- How to be a leader in a disruptive business and getting the best out of your teams
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introducing David Freed
3. David Freed's science background (Nuclear waste disposal)
4. OnScale the startup (the vision and funding)
5. The history of large scale simulations (the now and the future)
6. In the Cloud and Cloud-agnostic
7. The benefits of abstracting out the underlying Cloud provider
8. The target market for the solution OnScale is providing
9. The technology solution is all about reducing the cost for the customer (infrastructure and software)
10. Democratizing high-end simulations and making it easy
11. Designers and engineers able to focus on the problem and not needing to work on the simulation tool setup
13. Test, improve and iterate (Beta testing)
14. Truly listening to the customer
15. Leading engineers to be customer-centric
16. Making sure everyone is aligning to the vision and customer experience
17. Team setup and leadership style
18. Everyone on the team should care about everyone's feature success (Team culture)
19. Davids favorite part of his role (Cultures taking hold)
20. David Freed's key takeaways for the tech leaders out there
21. TC Gill's reflections and key takeaways
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Podcast: Tech-ing up the construction industry with Jeff Olin
Jeff Olin
Vice President of Technology at HomeSphere
Podcast – Episode 12:
Tech-ing up the construction industry
Do you think the building industry is tech-savvy? It’s a good question. To some degree, it’s yes and no. Through this Podcast, we shine a light on the current state of affairs. It seems that the industry is on the cusp of a step-change. Its finally making attempts to bring technology and infrastructures that have advanced so many other sectors into its arena. Bringing technology, new tools, and the use of big data to strengthen its ability to create thriving, innovative, and efficient businesses.
Well, Jeff Olin, Vice President of Technology at HomeSphere, is a person with many years of experience from software programming, to project/product management, to leading technology groups. He joins us in this Podcast to share his thoughts on leading tech within his current role, in an industry that’s finding its feet in the modern digital world. Jeff is clearly passionate about doing his part to help the construction industry catch up. Find out about what HomeSphere do, and the tips that Jeff has to offer on creating highly flexible architectures for customer-centric products, at two ends of the building industry (builders and their building suppliers)
“The construction industry has not improved in efficiency in the same way as most other businesses over the last 50 years. So there’s lots of room for technology improvements to make the construction industry more efficient.”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- How the construction industry is picking up the technology pace, and how it can improve its bottom line
- Creating an architecture that makes it easy to maintain and deliver customer-centric outcomes
- Leading as a CTO with Agile in mindset
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Introduction to Jeff Olin
3. What does the HomeSphere software do?
4. How HomeSphere use their data
5. Making tools easy to use
6. What kind of software architecture are you using? (microservices)
7. Moving from a monolithic architecture (the blob) to a new microservices architecture
8. How HomeSphere created effective support of their platform
9. What triggered the leadership to create a platform and strategy that is truly customer-centric and low maintenance
10. Technology and Product teams working together
12. Agile value of collaboration in place and in action
13. Avoiding Big bang changing the product
14. Finally turning off a legacy system (HAL: I'm scared)
15. Where do you see technology going in the construction industry
16. Room for improvement in the construction industry
17. Why has they been slow in getting up to tech speed
18. Key takeaways from Jeff to the tech leadership community
19. TC Gill's key takeaways
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Podcast: CTO's voice from the Banking as a Service Industry with Taylor Lilley
Taylor Lilley
CTO at Global Payroll Gateway
Podcast – Episode 10:
CTO’s voice from the Banking as a Service Industry
(Setting up high performing resilient remote teams and architectures)
Tech leaders today are multi-faceted. There is the obvious requirement to understand technology, at least from a high level, but also a need to be business-minded and understanding what creates the best high-performing teams in one’s leadership scope. In this episode, Taylor Lilley joins us to give us an insight into his lessons over varied his journey. Taylor is the CTO at White Label MFG with a straight-talking style that gets the nub of where the challenges are and what the options are. Rewinding his timeline on experience, you get to see a colorful journey, one that started in the United States Marine Corps.
“…make sure that your [soldiers] in the trenches know the battle plan.”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Try not to treat your highly intelligent engineers as task doers
(get the best out of your high IQ people) - Communications is the key to making remote teams deliver the outcomes you want
- High-level tips on creating high volume resilient architectures
- The importance of having a business head as well as a tech one
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Tech solution for City planning and making better, less costly decisions
3. Enter Google Maps… we're screwed
4. Big data then and big data now
5. A business mind married to a technology mind
6. Tech leaders learning about the business
7. Cheeky IT Labs Plug (How happy Taylor is with the work IT Labs do)
8. Offshoring teams that you can trust
9. Tell the engineers what's going on in the business (they can handle it, and need it)
10. Dealing with large volumes of credit card transactions
12. Considering disaster recovery in the Banking-as-a-Service industry
13. Do you need multiple paths in your system? (redundancy)
14. Seeing the business perspective from tech leaders eyes
15. Creating high performing teams
16. The ability of any engineer to press the big red stop button
17. What Taylor learned from his time in the military about making sure all the troops know what the overarching plan is
18. Key Takeaways from Taylor
19. Closing comments and key takeaways from the host
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Podcast: CTO's roles in driving revenues for SaaS Companies with Gene McNaughton
Gene McNaughton
President of Growth Smart Consulting
Podcast – Episode 10:
CTO’s roles in driving revenues for SaaS Companies
(In sales, seemingly small things can make a huge difference)
Selling is an art, and like any art, we can use techniques to improve or suppress the probability of creating the desired result. In the modern world and COVID19 crisis, interactions in the digital world are becoming the norm rather than the exception. The normalities of face to face meetings have, at least for the short term, turned into a rarity. Thus, impacting the ability to develop a healthy rapport between the seller and potential client. Gene, a thought leader in the space of sales and company growth, shares his wisdom on how technology leaders can set up their sales representatives to tip the scales towards success. What appears to be small things can make an impact on online meetings, which smooth the path towards a sale or, at a minimum, a stronger client relationship. Gene is an author on the art of selling, who has lots of experience working with many large organizations to drive revenue growth, and a man with many years of experiential success for his clients. So, what Gene has to say to Tech leaders holds weight. His advice will help your organization’s bottom line.
“What a seller should be doing is bringing in their engineers [to their sales meetings], bringing in their technology thought leaders. … [the] technically inclined people whose job is to ask the hard questions. Whether it’s the CTO, an engineer, or a subject matter expert, they are vital in today’s buying and selling processes.”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Tech leaders can drive sales revenues in more ways than you initially think
- Partnerships with Sales, Marketing and technology offices create a powerful synergy
- The disruption of the COVID-19 crisis highlights an opportunity to employ technology to reduce Sales function costs and increase customer engagement
TDLR: Straight to the point
(Quick Links)
We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Three factors that support Sales.
3. Factor #1: Sales processes and methodologies.
4. Factor #2: Metrics.
5. Factor #3: Get Marketing team involved in growth.
6. Identified best practices need to be trained with rigor.
7. It requires all three factors so that you know you are moving in the right direction.
8. Setup educational briefings with engineers, tech leaders to support sales.
9. Tech leaders can offer two big bonusses to the sales teams.
10. Be aware of the sales new norm and how technology can help (Everything has changed).
11. Tech leaders and their teams, can and should support, the sales people to drive revenue.
12. Seeing the companies that are going to thrive in this new era of selling (Technology leaders role).
14. Standardize on the platform for your sales people and train everyone to use them effectively.
15. The difference that audio quality can make in a sales call.
16. The difference that camera quality can make in a sales call.
17. Look behind you, is what's behind you giving the right impression in a sales conference call?
18. The impact of brand representation by using cheap free conferencing tools.
19. Standardize on the tools to create the weapons your sellers need to compete.
20. New technology is an enabler (or an unfortunate disabler).
21. CTOs partnering with sales and marketing to help them to be more effective.
22. CTOs or senior techs leader being involved in the sales conversation.
23. Bring tech people into the sales meeting.
24. Free resources from Gene and his company.
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Podcast: CTOs as Champions for Innovation with Jeremy Basset
Jeremy Basset
Founder and Managing Director of CO:CUBED
Podcast – Episode 9:
CTOs as Champions for Innovation
(Providing innovation to enterprises in uncertain times)
Large corporations attempt to innovate internally, sinking vast amounts of money, balancing high levels of risk, and rarely succeeding in achieving the innovation opportunities they crave. So what can tech leaders within these organizations do?
Jeremy Basset, Founder and Managing Director of CO:CUBED, a company providing an interesting bridge between the large corporates and the vast sea of startups. Previous to that, he was the innovation director at Unilever. In short, Jeremy has a vast amount of experience in the innovation space. With gratitude, he joined us for a conversation on how CTOs and tech leaders can be the champions of innovation by taking a rather different approach to invigorate innovation in an easy, de-risked way.
“… we’re going into a new era now where it won’t be… step-change transformation, but just ongoing incremental innovation that happens every day and over the medium to long term. [i.e. consistently] deliver[ing] ongoing transformation.”
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- How can tech leaders of large enterprises maximize their ability to innovate?
- How can corporates make innovation easy for themselves?
TDLR: Straight to the point
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We all live busy lives, and sometimes a long Podcast is too much of a time-footprint for our busy schedules. So, to help you get to the bit you’re more interested in, use our table of contents below. Quick links to help you get straight to the point.
2. Transformation and innovation married together.
3. Bridging the gap between huge enterprises and startups.
4.Democratizing how corporates can put out a challenge to the startup world.
5. Corporates being radically transparent about their challenges and how that can benefit them.
6. How do tech leaders innovate for the 'now'.
7. Horizon 1,2 and 3 academic innovation theory is starting to show cracks.
8. The example of Reckitt Benck (Partnership for fast track innovation).
9. Changing the perspective of innovation (leveraged growth).
10. Reckitt Benckiser success through synergy, results in it becoming the number one brain health brand within 12 months of launching.
12. Entrepreneurship or Intrapreneurship? It's difficult for corporates to play the startup game, you ideally need entrepreneurs.
13. There is a 90% chance you will fail with entrepreneurship.
14. Why corporate/startup partnerships are the best path forward for innovation.
15. Invite in rockstar founders to build the innovation.
16. Tech leaders importance in innovation and organizational change to bring it about.
17. How do you accelerate innovation? (Key takeaway from Jeremy).
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Podcast: Transformation for Innovation with Deal Daly
Deal Daly
Field CTO at Hammerspace
Podcast – Episode 8:
Transformation for Innovation
(Technical leaders part in the Innovation Game)
As a tech leader, how do you transform your organization for innovation? And why you need to be involved in the first place?
Deal Daly, Field CTO at Hammerspace, joined us for an enlightening conversation on the subject. With many years in mergers and acquisitions, looking at technology from the outside-in. His journey gradually led him to lead infrastructure groups. For this reason, Deal has a very interesting perspective. He’s a business person with an acquired technology angle. Now looking from the inside-out, he shares his learning and insights.
Key takeaways from the Podcast are:
- Why must technology leaders become partners in enabling the entire business, not just in the capabilities of a product?
- How to tap into the inherent curiosity of technical people, thus driving team performance and innovation.
- Using the multiplier effort to drive and spread innovating behaviors.
TDLR: Straight to the point
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2. Deal Daly's varied career from business world to tech.
3. Deal Daly's thoughts on transforming cultures in an organization for innovation.
4. It's easy to go shopping for new technologies; it's not so easy to align teams and get them on board [with new ways of working].
5. Breaking down siloes to raise the cross-boundary communications, and more fire up collaboration.
6. A cultural change by a process change.
7. All businesses are intertwined into the fabric of the digital world, and that's why tech leaders need to be steering them.
8. Businesses finding the need for new products in the market.
9. Understanding the product and the business model around it.
10. Using subject matter experts to help create technical architecture.
11. Finding the golden nuggets (people) in your organization.
12. The benefit of creating an organizational safe space to safely transparent.
13. Supporting internal people who are innovating and curious, while reinforcing the behaviors they are showing (for others to see).
14. The multiplier effect (to increase the number of innovators).
15. Persuading senior leadership to bleed their leadership (and innovation creation) into the organization.)
16. The reason digital transformation is hard… because it's hard!
17. Grounding areas for cultural change and political upheaval.
18. The theory of small success to get business people "on side" for innovation.
19. The technological world innovates much more slowly than marketing and sales.
20. Greenfield innovation can be successful and can be a path for innovation, but be cautious.
22. Organizations becoming more Agile (nimble and iterative based on market input?)
23. Creating converged organizational functions like a DevOps.
24. For new, more nimble, and adaptive processes, don't dismantle development or IT, create a demilitarized zone.
25. Business Agility and safe zone (demilitarized zones).
26. Organizational cross-functional departments not being told what to do, but inspired to create the solution.
27. How do you persuade senior leadership to create "Business Agility" cross deparmental ways of working.
28. Circuit breaking applications, so if one module goes down, the others can still continue.
29. Breaking down monolithic applications.
30. Monolith applications into independent services, microservices, data meshes or using low code or no code methodologies.
31. Dealing with engineers who don't want to break up the monolith into elemental services.
32. Technical people creating a PR (Public Relations) mindset.
33. Two-way communication encourages people to create feedback loops.
34. Technology leaders becoming good communicators (start your communication plan).
35. Iteration of business changes.
36. Where does the market input for the organization to innovate come from?
37. Innovating while avoiding burning cash.
38. Funding innovation that pops up out of the blue.
39. Deal Daly's framework for tech leaders who want to fire up innovation.
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Podcast: A CTOs Epic journey with Charles Griffith
Charles Griffith
CTO at MileZero (a Capstone company)
Podcast – Episode 7:
A CTOs Epic journey
Charles Griffith, CTO at MilesZero, and previous to that, Technology Vice President of Transportation at Amazon, shares his journey as a CTO. An incredibly experienced tech leader with an interesting voyage. One that went something like this:
- Gaming industry
- To working at Amazon in the formative years
- And then to a Startup … and Exit
Through Charles’s story, be inspired to find the path for your own journey and see how making it varied can lead to long term success, thus creating a well-rounded tech leader. One of the key takeaways from the Podcast is that Investing in your journey from a place of awareness is a powerful success trick. Leading you to places where you want to be, rather than where you just end up.
“Ultimately, every day, ask yourself, is this what I should be doing and what is it I really want to do. I think if you’re not asking yourself to basically accomplish something that’s historic; you’re setting your bar too low. Because we only go through life once. So, you should always be moving forward. And I think that’s another reason I moved out of games after a certain point, and out of various companies where I got comfortable. [This] is because I said to myself, “what am I doing” “I’m not improving myself,”; whether that’s by challenging myself or by what I’m delivering. And so I will say, in retrospect, maybe I’ve hurt the world two times. Games, in terms of what I’ve seen from my kids being so absorbed in games versus the rest of the world. And now, perhaps with Amazon in terms of what that’s done to other retailers. But you can’t hold yourself responsible for how your deliveries are used, but you should hold yourself responsible for continuously improving.”
Key Points from the Podcast are:
- Designing a varied journey builds a strong foundation for your career
- Experimentation and failure leads to new deep learning and one that can have surprisingly long term successes (look at Amazon)
- Do what you love, and continuously learn from it (avoid comfort)
- Building high performing teams around you is a leadership art based on people chemistry
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2. Seeing the opportunity for automating the supply chain at Amazon
3. Making a conscious choice to move on from Gaming
4. It's an educated process and not just luck to get to where you want to be
5. The knowledge that Charles picked up from the gaming industry
6. Coaching and leadership
7. The makeup of teams (the passengers and the tech stars)
8. How you get the most from your people
9. On changing the culture
10. Dealing with interpersonal relationships
11. Amazon architecture, moving from monolithic to micro-services and pizza-teams
12. Roles and ownership
14. Are you solving a problem that needs to be solved?
15. Embracing failure for good intentions (Amazon)
16. Amazon never feared to go into an area that they didn't know?
17. How, as a tech leader, can you deal with teams experimenting and maybe failing?
18. Give the experts in your team the leeway
19. Everyday learn from the team
20. Ideas can come from anyone; listen and find the right way to funnel and focus them
21. Creating high performing teams
22. Engineers should have 2-3 jobs in their first 3-5 years
23. Fearful of losing an employee
24. Final wise words for tech leaders out there from Charles