Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Peter Bell - Refocusing the business and the podcast
We’re going to take a breath on the CTO Connection podcast for the next 3-4 weeks. When we first started the podcast, it was a “startup CTO podcast”. We’ve really enjoyed sharing the wisdom and experience of our guests on building and managing engineering teams at startups. However, we’ve seen over time that the challenges of running (say) a 5-20 person engineering team are very different from those involved when running a 200+ person org. And as many of our original startup CTOs have scaled their orgs to 200 people and beyond, we’ve decided to follow them.
Because of that, we’re going to refocus the podcast, the content, the summits, and the community on “geeks who lead at scale” - senior engineering leaders in larger companies with 200+ full-time employees in product/engineering. In that way, we’ll be able to provide information that is more consistently tuned to one of the most challenging tasks out there - leading engineering orgs at scale.
At the same time as we make the community more exclusive, we’re also going to make it more inclusive. Whether you’re running data, security, IT, or software development, there are many similarities when you’re working within a company of around 500 - 10,000 employees. I’ve been involved with a number of “CTO” clubs across the US and in each case, I’ve seen the benefits of having a range of roles (from CIO and CISO to CDO and CTO - as well as directors and VPs of Software, Platform, Data/Analytics, and Security), as many of the challenges are the same, and it means the community has deeper expertise in a number of key topics if a CDO wants to learn more about engineering best practices for their data team or a CTO needs a hot take on an AppSec challenge they’re facing.
I am disappointed that - given our limited resources - we won’t be able to continue the focus on content specifically tailored to startup CTOs, but I look forward to refining our focus so we can scale our ability to share experiences and insights from and between geeks who lead at scale.