Strategic Thinking, Org Design & Aligning Engineering & Business Goals - Tackling the Top 10 Eng Leadership Challenges! #187

In this episode, we’re bringing listeners into the final conversations from the pop-up podcast booth at ELC Annual 2024! Patrick sat down with a few eng leaders attending the event to discuss takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 & eng leadership insights they want to share with others in the community. He chatted with Nick Hurlburt (Executive Director of the Aselo program @ Tech Matters), Manju Abraham (Vice President of Engineering, Primary Storage @ HPE), and Bhupesh Bansal (Head of Engineering - Product Server @ Square). These leaders share some of the guiding principles of their eng leadership careers, highlights from ELC Annual 2024, advice for first timers attending these types of events, and more.ABOUT NICK HURLBURTNick Hurlburt is the Executive Director of the Aselo program at Tech Matters, a nonprofit with a mission to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity. Aselo is an open source contact center platform used by crisis helplines in over 15 countries. After completing an MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Nick began his career developing early, large-scale AI software at Amazon. He then spent six years overseas working on conflict relief efforts in Burma and South Sudan before returning to the U.S., where he managed software teams at a San Francisco machine learning startup before building the initial version of Aselo as Tech Matters’ first engineer. He gets excited about systems thinking, understanding different cultures, and walking through forests reminiscent of his rural Wisconsin childhood.ABOUT MANJU ABRAHAMManju Abraham was VP of Engineering for Primary Storage products at HPE. She has over 25 years of experience leading Engineering organizations to deliver enterprise products of high quality, building, scaling and leading transformation, as an effective change catalyst, across companies like HPE, Delphix, NetApp, HP etc.ABOUT BHUPESH BANSALEntrepreneur and technical leader passionate about making a positive impact in the world. 18+ years track record of building teams, large-scale distributed systems, and consumer products scaling to 100M+ users.SHOW NOTES:Why it’s important to incorporate non-eng principles into engineering (1:52)Don't run if the people can't run (4:20)The importance of iterating & identifying patterns that work (5:57)Nick’s ELC Annual 2024 highlights (7:35)Advice for first-time attendees to get the most out of ELC Annual (8:10)Challenges around cultural transformations (9:33)How transformations incorporate structure & order (11:35)Manju’s experience at / takeaways from ELC Annual 2024 (15:14)Advice for folks on how to get the most out of an experience like this (18:19)Bhupesh’s roundtable on managing yourself & learning to let go (20:17)When Bhupesh started to embody the principle of managing yourself (21:52)Frameworks for making the shift to identifying yourself as a leader (24:17)Top ways you can invest in yourself & final takeaways (26:27)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/

We’re back with another episode live from ELC Annual 2024’s podcast booth! Patrick discusses the practices and rituals around effective hiring & recruiting with a few speakers and roundtable hosts from ELC Annual 2024, including Lawrence Bruhmuller (SVP of Engineering @ Great Expectations), Eric Fettner (Co-Founder @ Job Sauce), and Scott Swedberg (CEO & Co-Founder @ Job Sauce). Scott shares insights & takeaways from his roundtable conversation on assessing career growth & determining next steps during this trend of eng orgs continuing to become flatter. Eric and Lawrence also stop by the booth to share about their unique partnership, hiring best practices, ensuring candidates maintain your org’s engineering culture, and more.ABOUT SCOTT SWEDBERGScott Swedberg is CEO & Founder of The Job Sauce, a boutique recruiting firm for high-growth companies. He founded The Job Sauce as a career coaching company, and partners with ELC to support engineering leaders in their careers and talent acquisition. He and his wife, Lauryn, live in Denver with their daughter and cat.ABOUT ERIC FETTNEREric Fettner is co-founder of The Job Sauce, a high-touch recruiting firm serving Seed through pre-IPO startups. After helping launch the most successful vertical at Eventbrite (IPO September 2018), Eric was ready to take on something new. He began by building The Job Sauce as the premier provider of career services for tech workers. This focus on candidate experience revealed the horrible experience most recruiting firms provide, leading to the birth and success of The Job Sauce Recruiting, trusted by top startups funded by top VCs.ABOUT LAWRENCE BRUHMULLERLawrence Bruhmuller is currently the SVP of Engineering at Great Expectations, the open-source data quality solution used by thousands of data engineers in the industry. He has over 12 years of experience as an overall head of engineering, mostly focused on growth-stage startups. Previous roles include CTO roles at Pave and Optimizely, and VPE roles at WeWork, ClearSlide, and Symantec.Lawrence has been a part of small startups and also larger companies, and has developed products for individual users and also the world’s largest enterprises. In particular, he has focused on delivering cloud-first products in the B2B application and developer tooling spaces.Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership (https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time.Lawrence holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Amy, and their three daughters.SHOW NOTES:What brought Scott Swedberg to ELC Annual 2024 & how he supports eng leaders (3:12)Summarizing Scott’s ELC Annual roundtable discussion on career growth (5:39)Understanding how trends shift as technology evolves & investor priorities pivot (9:01)Final takeaways on exploring career growth & next steps (11:26)Eric Fettner & Lawrence Bruhmuller explain their recent partnership (14:19)Questions eng leaders should ask to aid calibration / alignment between partners (17:21)Ensuring new candidates reinforce the eng culture you’re aiming to build (18:29)Strategies for adopting / adapting cultural practices while hiring & onboarding (20:33)Effective communication between eng leaders & talent partners (22:49)Lawrence explains Great Expectations’ team structure (25:04)Recommendations for providing feedback between partners (26:37)The importance of timing when it comes to the hiring process (28:00)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/

This episode came live from ELC Annual 2024! Local ELC chapter leaders from across the globe share some of their favorite leadership principles, covering topics like how to sell your ideas & gain buy-in from senior leaders, how to manage yourself and your regulate emotions, how to leverage curiosity in tough conversations, how to build psychological safety and more! Thank you Ali Littman (VP of Engineering @ Modern Health), Mehmet Sencer Kardayi (CTO @ Dexter Energy), Tarik Kilick (Engineering Manager @ Booking.com), and Liz Sink (Director of Engineering @ Amount) for sharing your insights + a huge thank you to all of our local leaders for what you do to make community happen across the world! Check out all of our local chapters & get involved here: elc.community/home/clubsABOUT ALI LITTMANAli Littman is the Vice President of Engineering at Modern Health, a mental health technology company with a global workforce of both full-time and contracted staff. She has 15 years of experience in health tech and a business degree from Haas at Berkeley. She specializes in scaling organizations and has a track record in taking companies through hypergrowth, navigating major strategic product development pivots, as well as running major department reorganizations to optimize for current delivery and future-state architecture needs.ABOUT TARIK KILICTarik is an engineering leader who loves building products and teams that love building products. Currently @Booking.com, previously at SurveyMonkey and Heineken.ABOUT MEHMET SENCER KARADAYIWith 15+ years of experience in the tech industry, Mehmet has worked both as an individual contributor and a manager in big-tech(Booking, Meta) and as a software consultant in both the private and public sector. He likes to call himself a "failed serial-entrepreneur"(0 to 1) 😅 and nowadays is focusing on scaling tech startups(1 to 100). Outside of work, Mehmet has a diverse set of hobbies 🎱🏀♟️🥽🏓🛹🤹 and likes adding new ones to the set every now and then.ABOUT LIZ SINKLiz Sink is currently a Director of Engineering at Amount, a digital origination and decisioning SaaS platform for deposits and lending. Liz also spearheaded the ELC Local Chapter initiative, collaborating with ELC to establish the inaugural chapter in Chicago, where she is working to build a community and leadership culture. Drawing on her diverse background in software engineering, education, and social work, Liz focuses on building cohesive, empowered teams, developing high-quality products, and driving progress and innovation in engineering leadership.SHOW NOTES:How to sell your ideas & gain buy-in from senior eng leaders (1:37)Strategies to help someone start building this skillset (3:05)Why building ELC San Diego is meaningful to Ali (6:58)How to discover which metrics are most relevant for direct-to-consumer (8:26)Learn to manage yourself as a leader (10:21)Leveraging curiosity to make tough conversations collaborative (12:14)Tarik & Mehmet’s perspective on the Amsterdam ELC community (14:09)Creating psychological safety & trust for eng leaders (18:42)Why this topic is important for employee retention, satisfaction & innovation (19:19)An invitation to ELC Chicago (22:29)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/

We’re back with another session from ELC Annual 2024! This episode features an engaging session on collaboration & innovation in the time of AI with Anurag Agarwal, VPE, Google Workspace @ Google, and Lizzie Matusov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Quotient! In this conversation, they dissect how AI is transforming not only the products engineering teams are building but also how teams work together internally. They cover how Google / Google Workplace specifically use AI both internally & externally, strategies for creating & maintaining alignment across a large org, how Anurag addressed challenges during this transitional period, and more.ABOUT ANURAG AGARWALAnurag Agarwal leads the Google Workspace engineering organization, overseeing products such as Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet that help billions of users and customers across the world to connect, create and build together.With over 18 years of experience at Google, Anurag’s expertise spans a wide range of consumer and enterprise products and technologies. His career began in the Display Ads team, where he played a pivotal role in developing publisher ad-serving products from the ground up. He then worked on the Search Ads team driving a number of large-scale infrastructure improvements and leading initiatives such as online-to-offline measurement and monetization of surfaces like Maps and Discover. Prior to his role in Workspace, he spearheaded some early stage incubation projects at Google like Google Health’s CareStudio project aimed to help clinicians get a comprehensive view of patient’s health information.Anurag spent his childhood in Delhi, India and now resides in the Bay Area with his family." One of the things we sort of tried to do from very early on is to make sure teams see their success in terms of overall workspace success, in terms of more users actually being able to accomplish their work more effectively using all of Workspace's tools, right? It's not about the individual tools, it's really about the whole together.”- Anurag Agarwal   ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOVLizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.SHOW NOTES:Anurag’s career at Google & what he’s currently working on (2:38)The evolution of Google Workspace & incorporating GenAI (4:31)Diving into internal AI use within Google / across teams (6:37)Challenges faced while creating alignment (9:47)Frameworks for setting goals & aligning KPIs more effectively (11:57)How Google ensures its team feel safe to fail & allow autonomy (14:03)Strategies for maintaining alignment across a large org (16:09)How Anurag’s leadership has evolved through technology transformations (18:07)Strategies for helping teams accomplish tasks & be continuously learning (20:33)Anurag’s favorite rituals / changes from this transition (24:09)Audience Q&A: What has been your biggest challenge shipping AI? (25:26)Defining Workspace’s corpus for the individual vs. the enterprise (27:29)How do you ensure content moderation when using AI features? (28:13)Build guardrails for LLMs depending on the context (29:18)How the center of excellence team distributed its knowledge across various orgs (30:48)Strategies for drawing a line where Gemini responds & ensuring determinism in the response (32:15)Quotient’s processes for QA & automation (34:02)Understanding the ethics / responsibilities behind AI usage (35:11)The evolution of developmental practices with deterministic code vs. apps written with AI (36:43)Anurag & Lizzie’s key takeaways (38:28)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/

One of the most important aspects of success is a team’s ability to collaborate – but it can also be one of the most challenging parts. In this episode, we’re highlighting a popular session ELC Annual 2024 on how to encourage collaboration, ultimately increasing productivity and creating more likely outcomes of success. This conversation features Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering @ Figma, and Arquay Harris, former VP of Engineering @ Webflow. This conversation also features a robust Q&A session from ELC Annual attendees on their most pressing collaboration questions – including diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate, how to measure the success of collaborative tools, strategies for building rituals / processes around collaboration, and much more.ABOUT MARCEL WEEKESMarcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect."A trait of product engineers that I have found to be successful in predicting positive outcomes is they view code as a tool to get something done. Engineers on the other end of the spectrum who might be more elite code engineers or more like, ‘I got this algorithm to go like .005 percent faster,’ frankly that's not what's going to get your product to product market fit. If you're not focused on the end goal here, you're going to make suboptimal decisions the whole way.”- Marcel Weekes   ABOUT ARQUAY HARRISArquay has held Engineering leadership positions at Slack, Google and CBS Interactive. A developer who also has a Masters in Design, Arquay loves the marriage of form and function. Following her most recent role as VP of Engineering at Webflow, Arquay is currently enjoying retirement. She fills her days with occasional mentoring and speaking engagements as well as pursuing her many hobbies.SHOW NOTES:Marcel’s definition of effective team collaboration (2:36)How Figma’s dev mode is reducing collaborative tension (5:42)Processes & rituals that increase productivity early on (7:12)Marcel & Arquay’s collaboration example: success with Slack Connect (9:44)Why collaborative teams are ultimately more productive teams (13:21)Audience Q&A: Frameworks for diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate (14:25)How to avoid over collaboration / communication (17:09)Strategies for creating collaboration standards early on in a project (19:33)Navigating the balance between collaboration & preserving autonomous teams (22:23)Encouraging engineers to care about broader outcomes & collaboration (26:54)Tips for measuring the success & productivity of collaborative tools (29:11)How to foster cross-collaborative respect between design & engineering (32:19)Building relationships across teams / functions to promote smooth operation (34:27)Recommendations to help developers & design to share more work in progress (36:52)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/

We had a blast at ELC Annual 2024, so we wanted to bring our podcast listeners some of the best highlights from popular sessions! This episode features one of the ELC Annual sessions with Anupam Singh (VP of AI & Growth Engineering @ Roblox) & Maria Kazandjieva (Co-Founder @ Graft), as they discuss building AI/ML models at a massive scale. Anupam shares how Roblox – an immersive 3D platform with more than 77 million daily active users – scaled from zero to nearly 200 different AI models. They discuss strategies for deciding when to use open source vs. creating proprietary models; how to operationalize your models for 24/7 use; the importance of data pipelines; current and future challenges to keep in mind when creating / scaling AI models; and answer some questions from the live Q&A.ABOUT ANUPAM SINGHAnupam leads Roblox's AI & Growth engineering teams, which provide the infrastructure for high throughput AI services for safety, recommendations, and assistants. Before Roblox, Anupam was chief customer officer at Cloudera, where he led product, engineering, and field teams for Data Warehousing products. Anupam has co-founded two companies in the Big Data space, acquired by Cloudera and Marketshare, respectively. Anupam built his database expertise on the SQL Query Optimizer teams at Oracle, Sybase (now SAP), and Informix (now IBM). He graduated from Pune University in India and holds patents in the areas of automatic SQL performance tuning, object databases, and resilient query execution."The journey always starts with, 'Let's pick a model and first decide whether we want to build our own model or we want to use one of the open source ones.' The next step is, 'Do you want to do it on public cloud?' Roblox has 24 data centers worldwide and two massive data centers in America. We have hundreds of thousands of CPUs that we could use and so for us, it's very important to decide, 'Do we really need a large model? Can you take the 700 billion model, make it into a 7 billion parameter model, and magically get it to run on the CPU?'”- Anupam Singh   ABOUT MARIA KAZANDJIEVAMaria is a co-founder and an engineering leader at Graft, an early-stage AI startup. Prior to that, Maria worked at Netflix, where her team earned two Emmy awards for technical achievement. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. Outside of work, you can find Maria kickboxing & trail running, baking & eating carbs, or relaxing with a non-fiction book and her two feline supurrvisors, Foosball and Gemma.SHOW NOTES:How Roblox is being powered by AI (00:30)The process of scaling AI models from zero to 200 @ Roblox (2:34)Examples of Roblox starting with open source vs. building its own model (5:06)What AI models are doing in terms of safety for children (7:12)Strategies for deciding to use open source vs. building a proprietary model (11:19)Why Roblox is choosing to open source some of their own models (13:06)How to operationalize / engineer AI models for 24/7 use at scale (14:20)The importance of data pipelines in the AI journey (16:18)Current / future challenges as Roblox continues to scale its models (19:52)Tips for identifying use cases where implementing & scaling AI can be helpful (22:21)Audience Q&A: How do you make decisions when you’re lacking specific measurements / quantities? (24:29)When you deploy a model, how do you ensure confidence in its performance? (27:36)Recommendations for allocating / estimating the budget for a model (29:03)Anupam’s insights on maintaining so many models effectively (31:03)How do you imagine the multimodality of your 3D models moving forward? (33:11)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/

We’re taking a quick break from releasing episodes for a few weeks while we wrap up everything for ELC Annual. We’ll be back in late September with new guests! We have some excellent sessions at the conference - check out the agenda here: https://sfelc.com/annual2024#agendaJoin us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountThis 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/

Dave Rhodes, CEO @ Sauce Labs, joins the pod to discuss the value of great digital experiences & how/why quality issues affect companies’ bottom lines, and how to connect bugs to the business! Dave dissects strategies for addressing quality issues, examples connecting quality with the bottom line, best practices for quality testing strategies, and incorporating the philosophy of embracing the impossible within your eng teams. We also cover highlights of Dave’s recent report, “Every Experience Counts” exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. And to set the stage & magnify the stakes, the Crowdstrike & Microsoft outage coincidentally happened the day we hit record.ABOUT DAVE RHODESDave Rhodes is CEO of Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing and software quality solutions to deliver digital confidence to enterprises. He has a proven track record as a strong operational leader with success in building and scaling growth businesses. Previously, Dave held key leadership roles at Unity, where as Chief Revenue Officer he grew the company’s revenue from $160M to $640M (4x growth) and navigated its public market debut in 2020. He then created and oversaw Unity’s AI-powered business, Digital Twins. He has also held leadership roles at Paradigm and Autodesk. Rhodes holds an MBA in marketing and finance from the University of San Diego and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of California at San Diego.Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountThis episode is brought to you by Revelo!Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fitA payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and complianceA team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hiresWith Revelo, you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team.Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire.SHOW NOTES:The Crowdstrike / Microsoft news & how bugs affect the bottom line (2:31)Understanding the stakes & complexity of the Crowdstrike issue (5:05)Dave’s perspective on & passion for digital experiences (7:50)The impact of cloud computing, high-speed connectivity, AI / ML, and COVID on software innovation (10:10)Examples of how digital experiences drive a business’s bottom line (13:45)How the quality of a product impacts developer velocity & motivation (17:31)Connecting the bottom line with product quality / bugs (20:31)Strategies for communicating the business benefits of developing for scale (24:51)Addressing quality issues that impact top OKRs, like customer churn (26:48)Highlights of the “Every Experience Counts” report (31:51)Best practices for eng leaders looking to evolve their current testing strategy (35:13)What it means to think about the impossible & reverse engineer it (38:05)Frameworks for instilling this mindset into your eng teams (41:18)Rapid fire questions (44:17)LINKS AND RESOURCESEvery Experience Counts - Sauce Labs’ report exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue.Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life - The seven rules to follow to realize your true purpose in life—distilled by Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own journey of ceaseless reinvention and extraordinary achievement, and available for absolutely anyone.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/

In our latest episode, we’re coming to you live from Config 2024, Figma’s annual design conference for people who build products! This is our first time ever doing a live interview from another conference, so we are excited to share it with you. We’re joined by Marcel Weekes, VP of Engineering @ Figma. In our conversation, we dive into topics including highlights from Config 2024 & reactions to Figma’s latest feature demos (like Dev Mode), how Figma’s eng teams are involved in product design iterations, why product support teams help preserve Figma’s community, strategies for incorporating feedback into design / product roadmaps, best practices for prioritization conversations, and more. Marcel also shares a preview of what to expect from his session on collaboration @ ELC Annual 2024!ABOUT MARCEL WEEKESMarcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect.Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountThis episode is brought to you by Revelo!Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fitA payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and complianceA team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hiresWith Revelo, you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team.Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire.SHOW NOTES:Config 2024 as the “Coachella for designers and creatives” (3:47)Marcel’s favorite conference moments that represent the Config community (5:04)Reactions to the latest Figma feature demos (7:18)Defining Dev Mode & why it’s a highlight for Figma @ Config (13:00)Figma’s approach to building Dev Mode as an eng org (16:05)How eng teams are becoming involved in product design iterations (18:58)What eng leaders can learn from Figma’s “heavy lifting approach” (20:22)Characteristics of product support teams that impact the Figma community (24:20)Processes for closing the loop between product support & engineering (26:02)Figma’s feedback process & how it gets incorporated into releases now (28:23)Prioritization conversations & how teams operate together (31:47)Understanding the timing of feedback on the product roadmap (34:38)Previewing Marcel’s ELC Annual 2024 session on collaboration (37:08)LINKS AND RESOURCESConfig 2024 in review - A recap from Dylan Field, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Figma, that highlights all of the major news and releases from Config 2024.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/

Farhan Thawar, VP & Head of Engineering @ Shopify, was our first-ever ELC pod guest, so it’s fitting that he’s here to join us for this culmination of our series tackling the Top 10 challenges that engineering leaders face in a rapid-fire, high-energy format! Farhan shares insights into individual challenges, including motivating others after a reorg or period of uncertainty, why always being willing to learn & help is key for managing in any direction, strategies for creating buy-in, and best practices for coaching / mentoring. We cover team challenges, such as working cross-functionally to identify a shared truth and vision, using demos to measure dev productivity, and maintaining high velocity without losing quality. Farhan also dives into org-wide challenges, like understanding team topologies & building out your org’s resources.ABOUT FARHAN THAWARFarhan Thawar (@fnthawar) is VP, and Head Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. Farhan is an avid investor and advisor to startups in Toronto and San Francisco, including being a mentor at yCombinator and First Round Capital. Previously, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo.Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountThis episode is brought to you by Revelo!Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fitA payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and complianceA team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hiresWith Revelo, you’re in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team.Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire.SHOW NOTES:Strategies for motivating your team after reorgs, rifts, or other uncertain times (2:37)Farhan’s favorite quick wins & ways to re-engage with your team (4:48)Managing up & sideways by being transparent and always looking to help (7:31)Be dedicated to learning / bouncing ideas around with others (9:59)Frameworks for identifying the long-term, winning opportunities to pursue (12:13)How to influence & create buy-in around ideas (15:26)Navigating situations where your idea / perspective is facing resistance (18:18)Best practices for messaging a pitch when working cross-functionally (21:03)Utilizing individual frameworks when mentoring & coaching (23:10)Questions to ask when developing a personal career development framework (27:30)Approaching performance-related conversations (29:11)How to use demos to measure developer productivity (32:09)Methods for maintaining high velocity without losing quality (35:21)Insights on team topologies & identifying / building the needs of your org (37:14)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/