Tech Leaders Hub

Why have one guest when you can have three?

Watch this episode of Tech Leaders Hub featuring industry experts Jan Pleszyński, Krzysztof Sopyła, and Marcin Zabawa. In this session, we delved into the latest trends and insights in the tech landscape, exploring the future of software development, emerging trends, and how tech leadership can stay ahead of the curve.
Our guests, a solution architect, an AI & ML expert, and a director of core services, shared their perspectives on balancing innovation with practicality. Specifically, we discussed the Python Tech Radar, its purpose, and any updates or changes since its release.

We also explored the future of Python and its potential in the AI field, as well as the importance of understanding machine learning and algorithms in the Python ecosystem.

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As the field of AI continues to explode, the role of designers is more critical than ever. But how do you design for a technology that is completely different from anything we've seen before? And how do you develop a team that can thrive in this fast-changing environment?

Watch this Tech Leaders Hub session with Stefanie Lauria, Design Lead at IBM, as she shares her insights on navigating the new frontier of AI design. Drawing on her 15 years of experience in the industry, Stefanie offers practical advice on everything from designing for enterprise vs. customer-level, through adapting agile methodologies, to the unique challenges of working in the AI space right now.

During the episode, we covered topics such as:

• The paradigm shift & role of a product designer in the age of AI

• The project vs. product mentality

• Developing a team that can thrive in a fast-changing environment

• Introducing changes in existing structures and implementing agile solutions

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Watch this special edition of Tech Leaders Hub as we said farewell to Jakub Grajcar, the creator and now former host of the show.

During the session, Jakub shared what he's learned from interviewing almost 40 tech leaders and his own experiences as one.

Discover what all great leaders have in common and gain insights on how to become a better leader yourself. Hear about Jakub's journey and the most memorable moments from the show. We also won't forget to ask Jakub about his #1 tip for tech leaders!

Don't miss this unique opportunity to be part of the exciting changes ahead and witness the torch being passed to the new main host of Tech Leaders Hub, Natasza Mikołajczak!

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What should tech leaders do about the uncertainty brought about by the changes happening in 2023?

We were talking about market instability, the effects of the recession, as well as the rise of AI tools.

How will these factors affect the way software is developed? How will they influence developers themselves?

To answer these questions and more, we invited three extraordinary guests to the latest edition of Tech Leaders Hub.

You may have met some of them before on the show!

Our guests were:

👉 Alvaro Moya, CTO & Founder at LIDR.co

👉 Andrew Beacock, CTO at Guidr

👉 Itai Rosenblatt, Engineering Manager at Google

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Unlock the secrets to striking the perfect balance between independence and control within your organization with Adrián Moreno Peña, Director of Engineering at SumUp, in this episode of Tech Leaders Hub.

With over 4 million vendors relying on their products, SumUp is a leading provider of financial services for small businesses. As the Director of Engineering, Adrian leads a team of over 50 people, including 30+ engineers, responsible for the development of online invoicing and accounting tools.

One of the key challenges facing Adrian and his team is how to balance the need for individual growth with the needs of the larger organization. By focusing on helping others grow and succeed, Adrian has been able to foster a culture of collaboration and success within his team.

During this episode, we explored topics such as:

• How to foster a culture of innovation and sustainability within a larger organization
• The benefits of allowing smaller units to operate with a startup mentality within a company
• The importance of setting clear investments and goals for each unit
• The role of teaching and mentoring in fostering growth and development within a team
• Strategies for balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the larger organization

One more thing that made this episode special was our new host, Natasza Mikołajczak, who was joining the roster of Tech Leaders Hub hosts alongside Jakub Grajcar. This episode marked Natasza's first time as a host, and we're excited to have her bring her unique perspective and insights to Tech Leaders Hub.

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You know that migrating enterprise systems is a huge technological challenge, but have you considered how it might affect your team culture?

If that challenge sounds in any way relevant, you should listen to this Tech Leaders Hub episode.

Our guest was Tsvika Naveh, VP of Platform Engineering & Product at WalkMe.

We've been discussing the topic of migrating enterprise systems. The technical challenges associated with such a change are just the tip of the iceberg; Tsvika was also talking about how such changes affect team structure and team culture, and how to navigate this situation as a high-level executive.

At WalkMe, Tsvika’s roster of team members includes over 100 people, with a wide range of responsibilities including product management, R&D, and DevOps. He brought a wealth of experience to this Tech Leaders Hub's episode.

We have discussed about:

• How to migrate enterprise systems
• How such migrations relate to lean product development
• How software architecture and team culture influence each other
• How to restructure teams when breaking up a monolith
• What it’s like to manage both R&D and product together and how leading the product management changes your development process and methodology

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As a cybersecurity expert with over 20 years of experience in tech, Avi Chesla has seen firsthand the rapid evolution of the industry. In this episode of Tech Leaders Hub, Avi joined us live to share his insights on the current challenges in cybersecurity and how to protect your company while maintaining cost efficiency.

Avi’s experience includes serving as the CTO of Radware (NSDQ:RDWR) as well as being the founder & CEO of empow Cyber Security, a NG-SIEM and XDR company later acquired by Cybereason.

He has been featured in articles and on the conference speaking circuit, and he also holds 40 patents in data analytics and cybersecurity solutions.

During the live stream, we discussed about:

• The latest trends and developments in the cybersecurity field
• The concept of “data gravity centers”, and the risks and inefficiencies involved in using them
• Why some parts of cybersecurity should shift left and move closer to data sources
• How to stay ahead of the curve with predictive models and expert systems in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity

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For our next session of Tech Leaders Hub, we were pleased to welcome Yakov Becker, Chief Technology Officer at Investing.com.

Yakov has a wealth of experience in the technology industry, including leading the development of multiple product lines and managing teams in various roles. At Investing.com, his teams are responsible for everything from product development through DevOps up to support for production.

We were exploring the topic of why you should skip team leads in your engineering organization structure—an approach Yakov has successfully tested in the past with good results.

As always, we also took the chance to draw from Yakov’s deep experience and unearth other pieces of advice tech leaders can benefit from.

If you want to benefit from his lessons learned and become a better leader for your engineering org, you need to watch this session!

During the live stream, we discussed:

• The benefits and drawbacks of skipping team leads in engineering organizations
• How this structure can impact team dynamics, communication, and decision-making
• Yakov's experiences with this approach and the lessons he has learned

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New technologies like Web3, blockchain, and the metaverse are finding new advocates and critics every day.

The challenge for tech leaders is to know which technologies you should invest your time in, and which you should approach with caution.

Perhaps there are even some technologies that are simply a distraction, and the less time you spend on them, the better. 

But how can you tell which technologies have potential, and which don’t?

That’s the question we tried to answer on the next Tech Leaders Hub session.

Our guest was Espen Sande Larsen, Senior Vice President Of Technology Exploration at DNB, the largest bank and financial services group in Norway.

We discussed about:

• the hype trains tech leaders are on
• whether you should really be excited about Web3, blockchain, the metaverse, and other technologies
• what the history of Web 2.0 can teach us about the hype for Web3
• who actually wins in the hype cycle
• additional advice from Espen on hiring, management, and team composition

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If you want to harness the power of AI & machine learning, how do you get started building a team and setting your department up for success?

And if you’re a fresh Head of ML tasked with building a team from scratch, how can you make sure you haven’t missed any steps?

More importantly, how do you ensure that your initiatives end up in production creating value to your company instead of in the trash can?

During this session, we talked about AI strategy, team building, data science roles, data product development, data productization, the most common bottlenecks to avoid and more!

Benjamin Biering, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, can tell you all about it—he’s done it more than once.

Benjamin’s machine learning journey has taken him through various roles (Digital Analyst, Data Product Manager, Head of Data Science) at various companies (@Creuna, @Ebay, @2021.AI) all the way to becoming Head of Machine Learning at Podimo.

If you haven’t heard of Podimo yet, they’re on the path to building the equivalent of Netflix for the audio stories space: their platform offers podcasts, audiobooks, news, and more.

We discussed about:

• The specific questions you need to ask yourself before building a machine learning team
• How to synchronize your ML team with the overall strategy of the business
• How to hire the right ML talent
• How to support teamwork between your ML team and the rest of the organization
• How to create the right conditions for success
• The importance of thinking about productizing ML-based data products

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“When I’m building a team, what I want are team members who can take on any task.” – Harlan Beverly, VP of Engineering at Mercado Labs, author of “Navigating Your Way to Startup Success”

The key to a successful startup—and a successful business in general—is the team that’s leading it, as well as the teams of individual contributors delivering great work every day.

If you want to learn how to build a well-rounded team that can take on any challenge, this Tech Leaders Hub session is for you.

Our guest was Harlan Beverly, VP of Engineering at Mercado Labs and author of “Navigating Your Way to Startup Success”. Harlan has a wealth of experience in building and scaling startups, and was sharing his secrets to repeatable startup success.

We've discussed:

• How Harlan managed to build five successful startups
• How to balance engineers and QA
• How to balance in-house team members vs contractors
• Why the full-stack approach allows you to address the market faster
• How you can apply Agile outside of engineering to make the whole company move faster

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You’re facing way too many challenges as a tech leader to be able to deal with them all—so where do you start?

Perhaps it makes sense to listen to someone who’s in the business of working with technology leaders around the world to help them negotiate leadership challenges and achieve their optimal career impact.

Jason Noble, Co-Founder at CTO Academy and our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, has spent years engaging with high-level tech executives in 86 countries and has a highly nuanced understanding of the challenges they face.

For this talk he identifies three of the key challenges consistent to tech leaders he has worked with around the world and he’s agreed to join Tech Leaders Hub to tell us how to address them.

We discussed about:

• The most important problems Jason has identified by talking with CTOs and through building CTO Academy
• Why the most popular CTO Academy modules say a lot about mindset, as well as challenges
• Why effective tech leadership is rarely about the tech
• The unknown unknowns that tech leaders might not even know how to identify

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When you’re an engineering leader in the business of transporting critical parcels like human organs across the world as fast as possible, can you still approach your software development in an agile way?

Thilo Seliger, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, is the Director of Engineering Europe at @Airspace, where his team is building software for one of the most high-stakes industries in the world: emergency logistics.

Airspace arranges transportation of critical spare parts to make sure that factories can keep running—and your airplane can take off when there’s a sudden malfunction.

They also provide critical healthcare shipments, where speed of delivery can mean the difference between life and death.

Thilo built Airspace’s European Engineering team from scratch and not only is the team working in a very complex domain, but they also need to collaborate with development teams on the other side of the world while trying to be as autonomous as possible.

That’s the challenge that Thilo and his team have been engaged with, leveraging his experience brought in from companies like @Temenos @ING Deutschland, @time:matters, and @Zettle by PayPal

Watch this episode to learn about Thilo’s approach and benefit from his experience!

We discussed about these topics:

• Learnings from building engineering teams from scratch and leading in different business domains
• The unique complexities of software development in the emergency logistics industry—and how to navigate them as a leader
• The lessons from emergency logistics that can be applied to other software development situations
• Challenges with Agile in conservative industries like logistics and banking and how it developed over time
• When you shouldn’t use an Agile approach

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Question: What is something that JPMorgan, McDonald’s and Snoop Dogg are all investing in?

Answer: The metaverse! 🥽🕹📹

In our latest Tech Leaders Hub session we’re diving deep into the cutting edge of tech and business. Our guest took us on a journey through the landscape of metaverse and Web3, and explained why it’s high time to become aware of what’s coming in the industry—and what’s already here.

Our guide was Keren Chavkin Lior, CEO at AIME, a startup building an AI tool for the metaverse.

Keren brings in a whopping 17 years experience from HSBC—where she was Head of Enterprise Architecture and headed up the Innovation Lab of HSBC Europe, among others—as well as 5 years of experience as an entrepreneur.

We had a lot to discuss with Keren! Including:

• What the metaverse and Web3 are, exactly
• Why companies like Nvidia, Apple, and Meta are making big investments in the metaverse
• Why you should pay close attention to the metaverse and Web3 even if you’re not planning to actively invest in them
• The opportunities the metaverse presents to business leaders
• How AI can help solve the challenges of the metaverse
• How crypto plays into the metaverse
• How analytics work in the metaverse

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The way we work has been changing at an incredible pace. When some members of the same team are dialing in remotely from different time zones while others are sitting together in a conference room, flexibility is the name of the game

On top of that, a new generation is joining the workforce who want more freedom in what they do at work and when they do it.

Put it all together and you get an environment in which leaders have to adapt fast to find new ways to improve the flow of information and get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Ender Yüksel, PhD, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, is a Director, Development Manager at SimCorp. He’s an experienced leader and manager with lots of actionable advice to share for anyone who wants to structure their teams better, make work flow more effectively, and keep employees from all generations happy and productive.

We’ve discussed:

• Why the career ladder has become more of a career jungle, especially for the new generation
• How working with Gen Z is different and how tech leaders should adapt to it
• How to create effective teamwork when working with distributed teams in a hybrid work environment
• How individual contributors can achieve higher ranks in an organization without becoming managers

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“Leadership should not be something reflected in the org chart. It’s something people do to each other.” – Anders Kring, Head Of Technology, Banking Operations at Lunar

At Lunar, managers don’t hire new team members. The team does.

Even before new hires join, they’ve already spoken with 4+ colleagues and begun to build a trust-based relationship with them.

And even though the manager serves as an initial filter of candidates, it’s the team that ultimately decides who joins and who doesn’t.

This is peer leadership in action. And it’s the topic that our next Tech Leaders Hub session revolved around.

Our guest was Anders Kring, an engineering leader with over 20 years’ experience currently serving as Head Of Technology, Banking Operations at Lunar, a Nordics-based fintech company building a single platform to control all of your finances so you can get more power from your money. The company has offices in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, more than 500.000 users and over 600 employees.

We've discussed:

• How to build trust within your teams through peer leadership
• How to get your developers to share in the responsibility of hiring new people and become deeply invested in new team members’ success
• How peer leadership helps address depression and burnout
• Why leaders should respect the gigantic impact they have on their people

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You can debug an organization just like you debug code. And breaking up monoliths applies not just to applications, but also to teams.

Intrigued?

We’ve got a very special Tech Leaders Hub session in store for you with Søren Bjørnbo Engel, Head of Engineering at Linkfire.

Søren has hands-on experience with making major technological changes happen in big organizations. The kind of changes that require everyone—from the CEO through team leaders all the way to junior developers—to pay attention and change the way they’re doing things.

The kind of change that would make any tech leader break into a cold sweat just thinking about the scope, and the effort and communication that will be required for it.

It’s also the kind of change that dramatically changes not just the organization’s software, but also the organization itself, including the way teams are organized and connected.

Bringing to bear his experience from Linkfire as well as companies such as Sitecore, Pentia, and Netcompany, Søren shared how to successfully navigate through such a transformation, down to all the details you may want to know about.

We've discussed:

• Change management: how to reshape people’s minds to think in a different way
• How to break teams down so they can work at a high pace with a controlled number of useful connections
• How to get sponsorship and buy-in for big tech changes from top leadership all the way to junior developers
• How to rebuild internal educational efforts to build the new skill sets needed by the change
• How to talk with other departments such as product, marketing and sales and bring them in on the change

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“Is this harder than it needs to be?” - that’s the guiding question that our next Tech Leaders Hub guest encourages leaders and team members to ask to identify systems debt in their organization.

Is systems debt the same as tech debt? Not quite. But you can be sure that the more systems debt you have, the more likely you are to accumulate unmanageable amounts of tech debt—as well as grind delivery to a halt.

To save tech leaders worldwide from this very scenario we’re teamed up with Alishah Novin, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, as our next Tech Leaders Hub guest.

Alishah to bear over a decade of engineering leadership experience and a history of making a tremendous impact at companies such as Cognizant and Celero Commerce. He’s also extremely passionate about helping people find jobs as software engineers.

But that’s not all. If you’ve ever seen someone on LinkedIn with the #OpenToHelping frame on their profile, Alishah is the one who came up with it—and got a modest 2 million views / 21,000 reactions on his LinkedIn post when he did!

Be sure to tune in to our session, where we have discussed about:

• What systems debt is, how it differs from tech debt, how it’s accrued, and how you pay it down
• What your Seniors should be doing to help you handle your systems debt
• Why you should plan for your Juniors leaving after as little as 18 months
• Why the way your team takes (or doesn’t take) breaks can help you diagnose systems debt
• Why you should hold Stupid Questions Only meetings

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The tale of fintechs vs banks has captured the imagination of many in the financial sector. But should it be considered a straight-up rivalry, or is there possibility for co-existence and cooperation?

This question is especially interesting to ponder given the recent volatile movements in stock prices. So we decided to bring in an expert to comment on the current situation—and share advice on what fintechs should do to succeed (or even survive) in 2022.

Meital Raviv, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, brings 20 years of experience in the financial market and deep insight into its inner workings.

Meital is currently Deputy CEO of Wallter, a leading European Electronic Money Institution licensed by the Bank of Lithuania and placed among the top 10 leading EMIs in Lithuania.

But Meital’s career started on the tech side of things as a developer before transitioning to gradually more business-oriented executive roles at organizations including Bank Leumi (CDO), KPMG Israel (Head of Fintech & innovation), and Bank Hapoalim (Head of Digital Strategy, Open Banking, Innovation Lab and Fintech innovation).

Meital is also a Member Of The Management Board at CityTLV - The Gateway to Greater TLV International Financial Center, which is a partnership for the promotion of Greater Tel-Aviv as an international financial and fintech center.

We've discussed:

• How to handle the increased risk resulting from the current situation in the market
• Why fintechs vs banks is a love/hate relationship
• The mistakes Meital has seen fintechs make over and over again, and how to avoid them

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Itai Rosenblatt is an Engineering Manager at Google where his team works on complex database migration solutions.

He was also the guest on Tech Leaders Hub!

Our session was focused on the struggles of first-line managers, and how best to navigate the transition from individual contributor to first-line (and eventually second-line) manager.

Itai knows exactly what that's like. Before Google he went from being a Senior Software Engineer at Cisco to starting on the leader’s path at ScaleIO (a software defined storage company), which is now part of Dell technologies.

He was also a startup founder and he still runs Ace the Code Interview, providing mentorship for technical interviews.

Taking all of the above together, Itai brought with him a real treasure trove of knowledge that you can benefit from by watching this session!

We've discussed:

– Why you need a support group as a manager (and how to find one)

– What to do to create your own opportunities in your career

– Why you need to stop chasing cows and build fences

– Itai’s current #1 book recommendation for managers

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“Everyone on the team should understand that they are the product owners. They are responsible for the product.” – Ron Zionpour, R&D Group Lead at monday.com

At monday.com, the culture is all around being impact-driven and creating the best product for the customers. It’s understood that great engineering should be a tool to build and empower a good product and great user experience.

When we heard about monday’s approach to product development, we knew we had to get them on Tech Leaders Hub—and we’re happy to share that we have the perfect guest for our upcoming session!

Ron Zionpour is currently R&D Group Lead at monday.com, where his team is growing the monday workdocs product. He also worked at Amdocs and spent 8 years at Innovid, where he rose through the ranks all the way to the role of VP of Engineering.

If you want to avoid getting distracted in your software development and deliver the most value to the end users as quickly as possible…

If you care about having your engineering team focus on what's important…

And If you want to reduce the tension between the engineering team and product management team to have everyone work together towards a common goal...

…you would do well to join our discussion on this Tech Leaders Hub episode and benefit from Ron’s experience.

We touched upon:

• How to handle product management without a Product Manager
• Building a “team of product owners” where some of them are in engineering and some aren’t
• What it means to “connect the world straight into the team’s face” and how it leads to better prioritization and a huge motivation boost for developers
• Specific tactics for building, propagating, and maintaining a product-focused culture

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If you’re serious about growing your business, at some point you will face the challenge of taking it to the international level.

This Tech Leaders Hub session is for anyone who wants to get priceless, practical tips from someone who has actually done the work of starting a new company branch on another continent.

Jose Mendoza is Managing Director Latam at STX Next, and the pioneer in charge of our new delivery center in Mexico.

We discussed about:

• How to get buy-in from the leadership of the company
• How to conduct the research and preparation that goes into starting a new global office
• The not-so-obvious steps that sped up the whole process

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“What people get wrong about fintech is that on the surface it seems like an industry that is very easy to disrupt because a lot of the current players are so bad at what they’re doing. But to do real innovation without harming customers is actually really complicated, more complicated than it may look like from the outside.” – Ron Shteinberg, CTO at Bounce

Ron Shteinberg is a powerhouse of fintech expertise.

Ron’s impressive experience includes such entries as Head of DevOps at Wonga.com, CTO at paze and Capitalflow, Director of Product and Engineering in Lending at Newable and Senior Director of Product Delivery at Cashflows. Now he’s co-founder and CTO of Bounce, a payments startup currently in stealth mode.

Since 2017, he has also worked as a technology and product consultant for fintech companies such as Tide, Tandem, Sugar, and Elsewhen.

During his career, Ron has seen the struggles of fintech businesses:

• the Build vs Buy conundrum,
• picking the right financial model for the business,
• creating a smooth and exciting user journey,
• ensuring compliance.

Ron has also seen how these struggles can be solved to unlock massive growth for fintechs.

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One of the largest food and logistics tech scale-ups (with investment from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust) is coming to Tech Leaders Hub!

Our guest is Daniel Gebler, co-founder and CTO at Picnic, a cutting-edge Dutch company revolutionizing the way people buy groceries in the Netherlands, Germany, and France

What makes Picnic special?

There are three general directions in which a business of this type can grow:

1. massive expansion,
2. massive robotized automation,
3. new business lines.

Most companies can only do one out of three at the same time.

But Picnic is not like most companies.

Their explosive growth in recent years confirms that their business strategy is working extremely well.

Just last year, they raised $706 million from investors including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. They were also named the number one startup in the Netherlands by LinkedIn.

Unlike most companies, Picnic is managing to grow in all directions at once: expansion, automation and new business lines are all happening in parallel.

On top of that, they’re managing to make it happen with 10x fewer developers than would normally be needed for such an effort.

Naturally, we decided to invite them to Tech Leaders Hub to find out how they did it!

Tune in to benefit from Daniel’s vast experience as a tech leader.

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“Many CTOs don’t realize that they have a huge impact on product strategy.” – Jarek Feith, Senior Product Consultant

What is product strategy? What impact do you have on it as a CTO?

In other words, how do you answer the “what to build next?” question at your company?

As a CTO, you need to know whether the features your teams are building are bringing business value. You need to know how to show the business impact of the code being shipped by your developers. And you need to know how to make plans that will lead your teams to provide maximum business value as soon as possible.

Thankfully, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest knows all about that—and is willing to share!

Our guest will be Jarek Feith, Senior Product Consultant at STX Next.

Tune in to learn:

• What product strategy is, why you should care about it, and how to drive it at your company as a CTO
• The unconscious product management competencies that many CTOs already have
• What to do if your tech department is an “internal agency” fulfilling the requests of the business layer
• Why you should build teams of missionaries, not mercenaries

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“At the beginning of your work as a CTO, it will feel like every random chat you have unearths more issues that you should be dealing with.

Do not become overwhelmed. Instead, diligently keep track of what you’re hearing and pass it along to the next steps in the process.” – Aviv Ben-Yosef, consultant and author of “The Tech Executive Operating System”

Our next Tech Leaders Hub guest loves what he does—and what he does is help CTOs create even better product engineering teams.

Aviv Ben-Yosef is a global advisor coach for tech leaders and author of “The Tech Executive Operating System”. In his book, Aviv lays out a set of tools and guidelines with which you can create highly autonomous delivery teams that make the impossible possible.

We couldn’t possibly cover everything in the book during one session, so we’ll focus on the beginning: your first 100 days as CTO.

When you take up the CTO role, everything can seem urgent and important. How do you filter out the critical issues from the noise? What are the most important moves to make in your first 100 days? What are the areas most often overlooked?

We’ll dig deep into all of that, so join us to become a smarter, more prepared CTO.

(And even if you’re way past your first 100 days, there’s a good chance Aviv’s framework will help you identify areas you’ve been neglecting all this time.)

Tune in to the session with Aviv to learn:

• The four areas you need to explore as you get your bearings as a CTO
• The four elements of an effective CTO’s plan for the first 100 days
• How to drive huge changes even when you’re in a large organization
• How to turn R&D from a cost center to an innovation center
• What tech capital is and how to bring it into your company

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“It doesn’t matter how good your code is if you aren’t meaningfully moving the needle for the company.” – Matt Greenberg, CTO at Reforge

The mission of our next Tech Leaders Hub guest is to help you avoid the Engineering Leadership Death Spiral.

What is that?

Early in your career as a line programmer, life is simple. You get a ticket in Jira, you do what the ticket tells you to do—your job is to figure out the “how”.

And even as you climb the organizational ladder and become a leader and manager, it still feels like “how” is your job: how the application works, how the teams are structured, how work flows within and between teams…

But in reality, as you move up, the “how” matters less and less. Software gets rewritten every few years anyway.

As you advance further to an executive position and you start having meetings with other departments like Product and Marketing, they’re all about the “what” and the “why”. Your “how” thinking turns you into the person who always shoots down ideas before they even have time to properly form.

The more you do this, the less you get invited to strategy meetings, and thus you get fewer opportunities to influence where the company is going… And so the spiral continues until you become sidelined in deciding your own company’s direction, even if you’re a CTO.

How can you escape this trap? How can you start having more of a say not just in the technical strategy, but the company strategy as a whole?

That’s what we talk about with Matt Greenberg on Tech Leaders Hub!

Matt is the CTO at Reforge, a company trying to reinvent the professional network for tech by building specialized MBA programs for product engineering. Reforge’s work helps tech leaders plug into expertise that they couldn’t access otherwise.

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“When you start to compromise on how you want to work, it leads to bad outcomes.” – Chris Thacker, Director of Engineering at PHMG

Have you ever considered what your unique approach to software development is?

In other words: what’s your software development philosophy?

And if you have one, does your team know about it? Do you check for it when hiring?

Chris Thacker, Director of Engineering at PHMG and our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, is here to convince you why you shouldn’t wait with defining your software development philosophy—especially if you want to build teams that work well together and to create better outcomes for your business.

Chris is part of PHMG, the largest audio branding agency with 23 years on the market. They make small businesses sound professional—and big corporations sound as impressive as they look.

(If you’ve ever heard the McDonalds “ba da ba ba ba” in your head, you know what audio branding is.)

Tune in to learn: 

• Why you need a software development philosophy
• Chris’ philosophy of software development based on the 4 Ps
• How to set (and enforce) high standards for your people
• How to build a team that you can trust to make its own decisions
• Chris’ surprising approach to interviewing (with no tech tasks involved)

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Tech leaders often wear lots of hats in their organizations and while we all know we’re responsible for the technical aspects of our jobs, evangelizing developers is often an overlooked area that can prove to bring great value to a product.” - Skyler Nesheim, SVP of Technology at Dwolla

Dwolla is a US-based fintech company specializing in sophisticated A2A (account-to-account) payment solutions that power innovations. With a single API integration, businesses can collect, send or facilitate funds through various A2A rails some tens, hundreds or even thousands of times per day—Dwolla’s powerful payment technology provides customizable solutions for these types of use cases.

Skyler Nesheim, Dwolla’s SVP of Technology, says the key to growing Dwolla’s business has been building technology with tooling and resources that developers love—and that’s a key responsibility of tech leaders.

Dwolla’s platform is designed to be API-driven and tailored so businesses can add rich payments functionality to their application while maintaining their own user experience. The consultative approach of integration experts, robust documentation and a strong testing environment has helped engineering teams maximize their speed to market with a rock solid integration. Dwolla’s platform is feature-rich and includes not only an API, but infrastructure that supports real-time webhooks, drop-in components and other tools to reduce the amount of work required of developers.

If that sounds like a goal to strive towards for your API, be sure to tune in to our upcoming Tech Leaders Hub session for tips on how to level up your evangelism and developer experience.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“As an industry, we haven’t nailed how to scale businesses in a people-friendly way.” – Dave Marsland, CTO at Finematter

When you’re hiring new people and helping them grow, you should think about their whole career—not just their career with you.

Great onboarding is an important piece of the puzzle, but it’s just the beginning of the employee lifecycle which runs from onboarding through development all the way to exiting the company.

Our Tech Leaders Hub guest Dave Marsland is big on focusing on his team’s career development.

“When people leave, you should have a brand ambassador in the industry”—that’s the standard Dave sets for himself in taking care of his people.

It’s the standard he applies as CTO at Finematter, a groundbreaking emerging marketplace for independent jewelers which is quickly becoming the authority for jewelry ownership.

Tune in to the session with Dave to learn:

• Why having a framework for hiring is not enough
• What the employee lifecycle is, why it’s important, and how to improve it at your organization
• The stages each employee goes through in their lifecycle, and how to excel at them
• Why leaders focus on the wrong timeframe when onboarding
• Why Dave is happy to see engineers break something on prod in their first week

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Engineers don’t get burned out from shipping too much. Slowness and context switching burns them out.” – Charity Majors, CTO at honeycomb.io

As humans, when we feel insecure, we freeze. We slow down to reassess.

But in software, speed is safety. It’s only when information is fresh in your mind that you can easily squash bugs and fix issues that may be frustrating your users.

To enable your developers to act quickly, you need observability. And to learn about observability, you can hardly do better than listening to Charity Majors, our Tech Leaders Hub guest!

We covered:

– What observability is, how it fits into DevOps, and how to get it right

– The importance of on-call developers and short delivery times

– Why throwing more people on a problem is one of the worst things you can do

– Why you should reward managers who say “no”

– Why interviewing engineers is broken—and it’s all Google’s fault

– What happens when you add high-performing people to low-performing teams

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Quality is a team-based thing. ‘My QA is my quality gatekeeper’ is a ‘90s mindset.” – Leigh Rathbone, Head of Quality Engineering at Gear4Music Ltd.

After having worked at companies like Sony (working on the Playstation), Sony Ericsson, and The Very Group, Leigh Rathbone decided to get involved with an industry he’s extremely passionate about: music.

Now, as the Head of Quality Engineering at Gear4Music, Leigh is responsible for improving quality within the 12 development squads working on their music gear web store.

But what does quality really mean, and how does the definition change for companies of various sizes?

And how can you structure your teams and workflows to bake quality into everything you do so you can delight your users?

Topics we covered:

– Why you shouldn’t follow the big players when it comes to quality

– Why the QA tester shouldn’t own the quality of the product

– What a Head of Quality Engineering does and the goals of the role

– Why Leigh introduced a new name for his QAs’ role

– How to build quality into everything you do

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“There’s a strong focus on “ticking boxes” when hiring staff currently. LinkedIn encourages that style of recruitment. And you might be missing talent because of it.” – Chris Hares, CTO at Yoello

It’s the beginning of a new year and if you’re anything like us, hiring and growing your capacity are probably top of mind right now.

If you want to find great talent before the competition grabs it from the market, we’ve got a Tech Leaders Hub session that will help you succeed.

Our guest is Chris Hares, CTO of Yoello, a UK fintech company that is disrupting the payments market through leading mobile ordering and open banking technology. Following a successful 2021 which included 10 award wins for the company, and international growth that saw the platform land in 7 countries, Yoello are continuing their mission to support the hospitality space with cheaper, faster transactions whilst improving the ordering experience for customers.

In a way, they’re also putting the “let me grab another round” concept to rest.

We covered:

– How keyword-based hiring is limiting your talent pool

– The specific challenges of being a fintech CTO, and how to overcome them

– The three areas you need to be good at as a CTO

– Why companies should be more agile about being agile

– How Chris uses data for better hiring and greater team velocity

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Few people realize the pace at which cyber fraud and hacking are becoming industries.”

That’s just one thing we learned from Joshua Bower-Saul, CEO of Cybertonica, who is the guest of our latest Tech Leaders Hub session.

If cyber fraud is becoming an industry, companies like Cybertonica are doing their best to make that industry disappear.

In fact, Joshua and his team are helping bring along a new era of fintech and payments security through the power of data.

Topics we covered:

– Why identity, payment details and authentication will converge and become a key piece of the cybersecurity puzzle

– Why CTOs put too much stock in in-house cybersecurity solutions

– How tech leaders can avoid problems with multiple security vendors

– Joshua’s best advice for other leaders in the fintech space

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Just because everyone wants you in a meeting doesn’t mean you have to be there.”

Our next Tech Leaders Hub guest brings an enormous wealth of fintech software engineering experience… and a very clear stance against stuffing developers’ calendars with meetings.

Scott Priddy has a track record few others in fintech can boast of.

He’s worked at both Visa (as a Senior Enterprise Architect) and Mastercard (as a VP of Software Engineering).

Oh, and he just happens to be one of the four people who started the PayPal office in Austin, Texas. No big deal!

Now, he’s the CTO at U-Pledge, a startup gearing up to unlock billions of dollars of additional liquidity for nonprofits around the US.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.

That’s the approach that Junior Godoi’s team at Scurri has chosen, and it’s leading them to create unique processes to prepare for any possible outages of their software.

In Junior’s own words:

“99.99% of uptime with a system designed with failover in mind should not make you think that outages will not happen—they will. It’s how quickly you’ll recover when outages happen that will set you apart from the competition.”

Junior Godoi, Software Engineering Manager at Scurri, will be joining Tech Leaders Hub as our latest guest to discuss this and much more, sharing his tech leadership experience.

We covered:

– How to train your team for quick recovery

– The automations Junior’s team introduced to help developers take back their time

– How DevOps as a culture is helping Junior’s team succeed

– How to manage people when you’re “not one of them”

– How Parkinson’s law applies to team structure, and what that means for teams of teams

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Open Banking is taking the fintech world by storm, but how can you make sure that your product will be good enough for consumers to share their financial data with you?

And when regulations prompt you to ask for their permission to keep using their data every 90 days, what steps can you take to make staying with you an obvious choice for your users?

We’re happy to report that we found the perfect person to talk with about this challenge—and we interviewed them on Tech Leaders Hub!

Andrew Beacock is the Head of Engineering at Canopy, a UK fintech company looking to make the renting experience a breeze for renters, agents, and landlords alike.

We covered:

– What “Open Banking + X” is, and how it can create a dilemma for your fintech

– The areas to focus on to create a product users will be happy to feed their financial data into

– Tactics for managing multiple outsourced teams alongside an internal team

– What to do after the “iterate and learn and pivot” phase of growth as an engineering manager

– How to measure and optimize development and deployment processes using DORA metrics

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Software engineering teams that are unproductive and don’t work well together are a leader's worst nightmare. 

When the team is missing deadlines and you become a single point of failure in the team. 

Wouldn’t it be good if your team could work without needing your constant input?

What can you do to get there? You can start by listening to what Adam Craven had to say on our Tech Leaders Hub session about improving teams using software engineering principles.

Adam has spent the last 15 years helping companies like Nokia, McKinsey, and HSBC as a web developer and consultant—but the most exciting chapter of his career is just beginning.

As the creator of principles.dev, he’s on a mission to improve how engineering teams worldwide get work done. To make it a joyful experience.

Watch our conversation to learn all about it.

We covered:

– How habitual behavior and lack of principles can lead to total communication breakdown

– How principles can help you make better hiring decisions

– Examples of principles to consider for your team(s)

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

The path of a tech leader is riddled with tough decisions. How to structure your teams? What goals to set, and how to communicate them? What style of management will help your teams do their best work? 

Our next guest on Tech Leaders Hub Fintech brings a wealth of experience to help you answer such questions—and become a leader who gets extraordinary results. 

Hazel Olivier is a tech leader with over 30 years of experience in the field, 10 of which she spent as CTO at companies big and small. 

She’s currently the CTO of Nimbla, a UK insurtech changing the face of invoice insurance. 

We covered:

– Why the common logic leaders apply to promoting people is wrong

– The importance of performance reviews

– How to set goals that will get your teams fired up

– What tech leaders can do to better support each other

– The particular perks and challenges of being a tech leader at a UK insurtech company

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

When you have many direct reports and your company is growing fast, how can you lead your team to success? 

That’s what we tackled in the newest episode of Tech Leaders Hub.

All topics we have covered:
– What young managers should specifically focus on
– How ancient Greek philosophy can help you manage your team
– How to balance kindness and vulnerability with treating your team like adults
– The virtues (and pitfalls) of managing a big team
– How to save your team time to let them focus on high-impact work
– Finding projects that enable exponential growth

Our guest was Evgeny Sharypin, Software Development Manager at Sendcloud, Europe’s #1 e-commerce shipping platform.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

When you’re scaling fast, you need to learn to make things happen through other people: your team.

You may have been a “hands-on” CTO in the past, but that model won’t work when you enter into the hypergrowth phase.

If you feel it’s time to start empowering your developers to become leaders themselves, our next live session will be perfect for you.

Cybersecurity is more important than ever—especially if you’re in fintech.

Destructive cybersecurity attacks against global financial institutions have surged by 118% over the past year, according to VMware

It’s time for tech leaders to prioritize cybersecurity—which is exactly why we made it the topic of our next live stream.

Joining us will be Aleksander Czarnowski, CEO at Defenselayers and AVETINS, an expert with over 23 years of experience in cybersecurity.

Topics we covered:

– the common cybersecurity mistakes fintechs are making;

– how you might be misallocating your cybersecurity budget (especially past Year One);

– how you can introduce a secure development lifecycle with privacy by default to prepare yourself against future threats;

– container and serverless computing security;

– compliance, GDPR, and dealing with the strict regulations in the financial sector.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

There’s a strong typical career path in software engineering: junior, regular, senior, tech lead, engineering manager, and then somewhere down the line: CTO.

But the CTO is really a business role with a technical background.

As the company scales, it’s less and less focused on software architecture and technical challenges.

Instead, a CTO ends up managing 5-6 direct reports, their calendar is filled with 1-on-1s, and their time taken up by strategic meetings, budgets, and hiring policies.

Shouldn’t there be a separate track for a different kind of leadership—leadership on a technical level?

That’s we talked about with Stuart Kelly, Staff Engineer (and former CTO) at Zego, a fast-growing company changing the face of insurtech.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

What is a 100x engineer? How can you lead your team members to achieve 100x the impact of a regular developer? How can you become a 100x engineer yourself? Part of the answer is to go beyond sheer programming talent.

Zef’s CV is a long story of engineering leadership: from Developer through VP of Engineering (twice!) through Senior Engineering Manager at Egnyte and Director of Engineering at OLX Group. And just this month, Zef moved to Mattermost as their new Engineering Lead. 

We’ll talk about his career path, his advice for engineering leaders, and of course about having the greatest possible impact on software development projects. Tune in live to ask Zef any question you want about his experience!

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

“Ok Google, book me a test drive of the new Audi A3.”

You can now talk to your radio ads through your favorite smart speaker—all thanks to Wojciech Lichota, CTO at AdTonos.

Watch our interview, where we covered:

– What was the hardest part of introducing voice interface in advertising?

– In hindsight, what was his best move that helped him launch this new technology?

– How to get started with building software for voice assistants, like Alexa Skills and Google Actions?

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Getting what you want in a negotiation depends on your words, non-verbal cues, and your attitude. Get ready-to-use tips from Matthew Harris as he returns to our live show to help technical managers succeed in the toughest conversations.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Google Analytics is not enough to get a useful picture of how your product is performing.

Join us as we discuss what metrics you should track and what tools you should use to collect data you can trust.

Our guests today are: 

- Paul Jurdeczka, Product Strategy Consultant @ STX Next

- Daniel Kościelski, Marketing Manager @ STX Next

Tune in and we'll make sure you'll never fly blind in the area of product analytics.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

We negotiate 3-7 times a day, every day—and that's just the number for regular people. Technical managers need to negotiate with employees, peers, vendors, and clients. Improving your negotiation skills will pay off sooner than you think.

Join us as we go over two negotiation techniques that you can practice every day and apply to every conversation, whether it's with your coworkers or your spouse.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Is your company data-driven, or do you make business decisions based on gut feeling? You might want to think twice if it's the latter. After all, you can't improve what you don't measure. In other words, you need KPIs to make it happen. Join us for an episode where our VP of Engineering, Łukasz Koczwara, tells the story of how implementing KPIs transformed STX Next into a data-driven company.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!

Łukasz Nowak talks about the problems that large organizations with multiple Scrum teams face—and how to address them.

Łukasz is an experienced IT manager with a rich perspective; for starters, he was Director of Product for Poland's largest online marketplace for over 5 years. On the other hand, he's also worked in the trenches, e.g. as a Product Owner of a single team.

Get more guides, news, and videos from STX Next!