I’m excited to announce that tickets are officially on sale for year two of our annual Austin CTO Summit. Take advantage of our super early bird pricing and grab your tickets today! If you know of any potential sponsors, please have them email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co.

After months of planning and recruiting speakers, Peter and I feel like the wind is at our backs. With over 90 speaker submissions it was no easy task to select the speakers as we had to reject talks we both personally wanted to see! We are announcing 15 speakers today, and more will follow in the coming days so check the ticketing site for more details soon.

Whether you’re an engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at this full day, single track summit you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front-end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.

Attendance to the event is strictly limited to engineering leaders. No recruiters, non-technical co-founders or other business stakeholders will be allowed (we enforce this policy strictly and will refund tickets of anyone we can’t admit). That said, we’re not hung up on job titles. Some of our best attendees have titles like CEO or VP Product. As long as you can perform a technical code review, know how to submit a pull request and are interested in more effectively hiring, managing and organizing developers, we can’t wait to meet you!

This year, our fifteen presenters include CTOs/VPE’s from NY Times, Keller Williams, Indeed, RetailMeNot, Artsy and Mode Analytics. Tickets will sell out quickly, so get yours now!

15+ Speakers

Refund policy: Unfortunately we are unable to offer refunds for tickets. We are, however happy to transfer them up to one week before the event to another engineering leader.

The post Austin CTO Summit 2019 appeared first on Voltage Control.

First I’d like to thank our speakers. Without them and the brilliant content they prepared and shared on Tuesday, we would not have had a successful event. Our volunteers were incredible and certainly kept my stress levels low! Thank you, Scott, Enrique, Kim, Chloe, Chandler, Alan, and Josh. I would also like to thank the Voltage Control facilitators. The facilitated networking sessions were a big hit, and I’m grateful that Anna, Jane, Daniel, and Reagan were able to help make that a reality.

A big thanks to all of our sponsors. They were all a pleasure to work with, and I hope you have an opportunity to work with them. I’ve included them at the bottom of this post.

It was an absolute pleasure working with Peter from CTO Connection. If you have an opportunity to check out one of his other summits, I highly encourage it. He’s an outstanding guy and puts on a super event.

“To get over 100 senior engineering leaders in a room for the inaugural conference was an incredible feat.” — Peter Bell, CTO Connection

For those of you that weren’t able to make it to the Summit, I’ve collected a few quotes from attendees and wrote a quick overview of each of the presentations. I hope you enjoy

“I’ve been waiting several years for an event like this in Austin. The conversations and presentations were great, and I’m already looking forward to next year!” — RC Johnson

RC Johnson is the manager of Indeed Labs and member of Austin Technology Executives. Tracing things back, one could argue that he’s the reason I know Peter. He introduced me to the New York CTO School and then years later I followed a CTO School posting about the NASDAQ CTO Summit which is how I met Peter. RC was the first person to register for the 2018 Summit and promised me that he’d be the first to register for the 2019 Austin CTO Summit.

“Great combination of networking, content, and presenters. The format was engaging with nice, short talks, and packed a ton of intel.” — Allen Darnell

The structure of the 2018 Austin CTO Summit consisted of blocks of 3 20-minute talks followed by a break. There were a total of 5 blocks, 2 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.

Jim Colson — Designing, Engineering, and Delivering Products for a Full Lifecycle of Engagement

Jim Colson, who recently retired as CTO of IBM Watson Customer Engagement, is currently advising startups on technology and business strategy. Jim talked us through a model of how to think about users and where a specific set of users are in their overall journey through your engagement lifecycle. I enjoyed his concise and accurate definition of the difference between product and offering. He encouraged us to consider how we might improve our customer experience by thinking about offerings rather than fixating at the product level.

“The Austin CTO Summit was an incredible event of information exchange, networking, and insights across both large and small companies. It is extremely valuable for any CTO and I am already looking forward to the next one.” — Jim Colson

Lynn Pausic & Chris LaCava — Vital Role of Humans in Machine Learning

Lynn and Chris of Expero warned us of the dangers of using bias data to train your ML models. They presented a case study in which their client was interested in a decision support system for determining creditworthiness. When training their model, they used income levels and inadvertently discovered that there was a major bias against loans for women. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a bit, and Chris mentioned something that I hadn’t considered yet. As AI becomes more ubiquitous and models are white labeled, developers without the statistical skills to identify or address issues are using these models will start to use them without understanding their origins and it will be critical that bias is easily exposed and mitigated.

“The intermingled networking exercises were a great way to connect with the many tech leaders who attended. I’m looking forward to 2019 Austin CTO Summit”- Enrique Ortiz

Cynthia Maxwell — Keeping Your Team in the Flow

I first discovered Cynthia Maxwell when I read “Track and Facilitate Your Engineers’ Flow States In This Simple Way”, an article she published on First Round. I enjoyed the article, and the concept stuck with me. As Peter and I began recruiting speakers, I reached out to Cynthia to invite her to speak. I was delighted when she accepted. Her presentation further elaborated on the concepts in her article. My favorite part was when she pointed out that many engineers are not accustomed to or trained on giving negative feedback. This simple visual feedback mechanism can be used to as a starting point to tease out more critical detail.

“The first Austin CTO Summit felt like an event that had already hit its stride — I look forward to seeing how much better the next one will be! “— Bryon Jacob

After Cynthia’s talk, Anna Jackson lead the room through our first of 5 facilitated networking exercises. The audience totally embraced this and the room erupted with conversation. As the exercise wrapped up, the energy spilled into the hallway and we took our first break of the day.

Bryon Jacob — Seeds of Scale — Lessons For Startups Learned Through Growth

Bryon Jacob, CTO of data.world, spent many years at HomeAway where he saw the company scale from 30 people to 2000 people and acquire 30 other companies. Upon reflecting on those years at HomeAway, there were decisions he appreciated and decisions he wished he could go back and change. When founding data.world Bryon sought to repeat the good ones and avoid the bad ones. His talk shared some of this wisdom. One of my favorites was the idea that technical debt is a measure of uncertainty.

“Bryon’s talk featuring his “definition of done” criteria was clear and concise, perfect for sharing with my team. It will provide a great reference for assessing and formalizing our “done” criteria here at Capson Technology.” — Scott Artman

Vikas Parikh — M&A and Technology

Vikas works with business leaders to help who are buying, selling or reshaping a company. He offered the audience a bit of perspective into the M&A market and the things you should consider. His advice is to think far in advance and be prepared for the inevitable day.

“The short, fast-paced presentations revealed connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, opening up tons of new possibilities for me!” — Marcus Blankenship

Will Ballard — Scaling Self-Directed Development

I would hazard to say that Will’s talk was the most provocative. My pal and resident complexity junky, Daniel summed it up the best when he summarized Will’s talk as a case for disintermediation. Will presented and practices a system where all projects are approved based on the business merits and income potential. There are no estimates or deadlines enforced, and his team selects the projects they want to work on. Perhaps the most intriguing to me was Will’s comment that his system resulted in nearly 0 employee churn which was a problem due to lack of new ideas that typically come from new hires.

“It’s not often that CTOs get to take a step back from their day to day to learn from each other and be inspired. Austin CTO Summit did just that. Bravo” ~ Etienne de Bruin, Founder 7CTOs

After Will, Jane Westfall led us through another set of networking and lunch was served. During lunch, we provided supplies and topics for lean coffee. Attendees ate lunch while discussing a familiar topic with a dash of structure to keep things moving.

Heather Rivers — Lessons from the Black Box

I saw Heather Rivers give this talk at the NASDAQ CTO Summit last December. I enjoyed it so much that I asked her to come talk in Austin. She presented about the flight record which, once introduced, allowed officials to understand the root cause of airline crashes. These issues and the system implemented to solve them can be directly applied to software teams.

“Today, the day after the event, I was able to apply what I learned from Heather Rivers’ talk on Crew Resource Management and the communication model she proposed. Effective and timely information — I am looking forward to next year.” — Boyd Hemphill

Vivek Sagi — How to Dive Deep & Mechanisms to Help you Scale your Tech Org

Vivek began by pointing out that diving deep is easy when managing one team. We have tools like standups, 1:1s, design reviews, retrospectives, and demos. Then he posed the question: how do we replicate this for larger organizations? He presented a perspective that most leaders operate within the organization and product scope and never diving deeper down into the component level. He provided six mechanisms for diving deeper. My favorite was his warning to pay close attention to anecdotes. He recommends to assume anecdotes are correct and look for data to prove/disprove them.

I saw that there is increasing awareness of the importance of measuring the progress of software development teams and the obstacles they face more carefully and more rigorously. “— Eddie Reyes

Marcus Carey — If I Only Had A CEO

Marcus definitely racked up the most laughs. Marcus is the CEO of ThreatCare and told us the story of his struggles as a technical founder and not always getting the support and encouragement he deserved in the role of CEO. Through the lens of the Wizard of Oz, Marcus walked us through his advice on running companies. He also left us with a few book recommendations including the fifth agreement.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.”-Boris Portman

Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez — Toughest Words a CTO Says : Hold on the Code

Cherise provided a perspective on user testing and customer validation. As a Design Sprint facilitator and believer in user testing and solution validation, Cherise was preaching to the choir. I did find it new and interesting that she presented this work from the perspective of a CTO who was itching to write code and build things yet knew it was in the best interest of the company to pump the brakes and wait for more certainly on WHAT to build.

“ The support from the audience was overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.” — Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez

Meetesh Karia — Diversity in Team and Thought At The Zebra

Meetesh is an active member of the Austin Technology Executives group and often volunteers to run things when I’m out of town. I had encouraged him to start speaking publicly more often, and I was excited to host him at the CTO Summit this year. He absolutely killed it. I heard from numerous people that this was their favorite talk. He gave many actionable tactics utilized at the Zebra to improve their diversity numbers including working with Andela and adopting a policy that any candidate with an underrepresented background got an automatic pass on the first round.

“It is clear to me that the technical leaders of our generation deeply care about people. THAT really made my day.” — Qingqing Ouyang

Marcus Blankenship — Why Your Programmer Just Wants To Code

When Marcus published “Why your programmer just wants to code”, his bait worked, and I clicked. I was prepared to hate everything about this article and to my surprise, I was delighted. He was speaking my language. Marcus adapted the article into an interactive workshop where Summit attendees filled out notecards with ideas of how to improve the Summit next year. He then explained the overbearing process by which our ideas would be judged, including boosting ideas from more experienced individuals and pushing down scores for less qualified individuals. In the end, Marcus was painting a ridiculous picture to help shed light on how some of our own companies behaviors are indeed stifling sharing of ideas and ultimately our ability to innovate.

Eddy Reyes — Lessons From A Failed Startup — A Cynefin Retrospective

Eddy Reyes spoke to us about Cynefin. Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains”: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. These domains help you to identify how you perceive situations and make sense of your own and other people’s behavior. Each domain has a clear set of rules to identify which domain you are currently operating in and how best to function in that domain.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.” — Boris

Qingqing Ouyang — Unknown to Know: Building a Recognized Tech Brand for Recruiting

Qingqing’s presentation was also a house favorite. She recounted her experiences shortly after joining Main Street Hub and charged with the goal of building out the development team. After her first initial attempts at hiring, she realized she had a real problem as none of the engineers had heard of Main Street Hub and they were less than excited about working on a legacy PHP monolith. It was clear to her that she needed to focus on the reason she took the job and the Main St. mission. Diving deep into the why allow her to create a vision for the Main St. Hub engineering brand and to sell from the heart. At this point, she started to grow the team.

“The CTO Summit was a nice reminder that we’re all after the same thing in the end — meaningful work, progress, belonging. I look forward to the next summit!” —Reagan Pugh

Jack Humphrey — Improving the Development Process with Metrics-Driven Insights

I’ve known Jack Humphrey since the early 2000s when we worked together at Coremetrics. He is one of the smartest people I know and cares deeply about his people. Jack shared a process that he’s been rolling out at Indeed. At Indeed they have a data collection and reporting system which they’ve open sourced called Imhotep. Using this tool they can ask lots of questions about whether any given change to the system should be made and when made if the desired outcome was realized. This same tool can be used to look at the number of defects generated by a specific developer and the nature of those defects.

I appreciated the diversity of viewpoint and opinion among presenters and attendees. It was great to share ideas with peers who are grappling with a lot of the same challenges. And as a presenter, I couldn’t have asked for a more engaged and appreciative audience! — Jack Humphrey

After Jack closed out the speakers section, Daniel Walsh stepped in as the final networking facilitator just after I gave a few closing remarks and thanks to our sponsors one last time. Then we all headed across the lobby of the hotel for a few cocktails to end the night.

“It’s impressive that this was the first year of this Summit. It ran like a conference that has been going for 5 years”. — Scott Brittain

Next Year

After such a successful first year, I’m more than confident in our ability to grow and deliver an even better summit in 2019. We’ve extended a 50% discount to 2018 attendees. Tickets are available for sale now!

Get your tickets for 2019.

“Truly inclusive communities are built with intention. It’s so good to see individuals and groups taking active care of the community they’re part of. The CTO Summit represented lots of intention for me.” — Angelek Marler

+ Platinum Sponsors

AnitaB.org

AnitaB.org is committed to increasing the influence of women on all aspects of technology. Our local community expands our efforts globally to help individuals all over the world — especially those who are considering or currently pursuing technical careers — to access the resources they need to reach their highest potential.

Members of the global AnitaB.org Local community network organize events and provide one another with resources to navigate careers in tech. They organize valuable meet-ups, code-a-thons, and one-day HopperX1 events modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration.

–

Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups is committed to connecting with people and building relationships that lead to growing local entrepreneur communities. We believe that people, not companies, matter most. People come up with ideas, build MVPs, raise capital, and ultimately launch Startups (companies). Our local team in Austin is focused on supporting startups interested in partnering with us to grow on Azure.

–

Reduxio

Reduxio is redefining data management and protection with the world’s first unified primary and secondary storage platform. Based on the patented TimeOS storage operating system, Reduxio provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, and the unique ability to recover data to any second, far exceeding anything available on the market today. Reduxio’s unified storage platform is designed to deliver near-zero RPO and RTO as a feature of its storage system, while significantly simplifying the data protection process and providing built-in data replication for disaster recovery.

Reduxio innovates with:

• Accelerated workloads with High Performing Flash Storage
• Self-Protecting primary storage
• Optimized storage utilization
• Built-in integration with public and private cloud services and object stores
• Protect and move data between on-premise storage and the cloud

Learn more at www.Reduxio.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

+ Gold Sponsors

Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations use our project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, Stride, Bitbucket and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

–

Creative Alignments

Creative Alignments is disrupting recruiting using a pay-for-effort model that creates a talent partnership with our clients. Aligned with growing tech companies, we place top talent at less than half the cost of traditional recruiters. Our senior team recruits across all functions in the tech space. Reinvent recruiting with us!

+ Registration Sponsor

Beacon Hill Technologies

+ Morning Break Sponsor

7 CTOs

+ Evening Reception Sponsor

Stride

Atlassian’s Stride is a complete team communication solution built from the ground up to help teams more effectively work together. Stride was built to solve the biggest problems of team communication by bringing together context, conversations, and collaboration into one powerful product, allowing teams to move work forward. Our brand new communication solution has best-in-class team messaging, audio and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

+ Community Sponsors

Ruta Maya Coffee

Allstacks

–

Austin Fraser Ltd

–

Beacon Hill Technologies

–

RetailMeNot

–

KungFu

–

IBM

The post Austin CTO Summit 2018 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve locked in some really great sponsors especially considering that this is our first year in Austin! I’ve also confirmed additional facilitators for our post session and lunch networking spots. You are in for a treat! They are all total pros.

We have also announced the official schedule. I’ve included it below, along with all our sponsors.

Now that we have met our sponsorship goals, we are able to offer even more scholarships for under-represented attendees. If you are part of an under- represented group please or are just having trouble affording the ticket price, please reach out! Email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co

If you haven’t gotten your tickets, it isn’t too late, Register Today!

+ Speakers

Bryon Jacob, Co-Founder & CTO, data.world
Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez, Co-Founder & CTO, SecurityGate
Cynthia Maxwell, Director of Engineering, Slack
Eddy Reyes, Cofounder & CTO, Mindsight Co.
Heather Rivers, CTO, Mode Analytics
Jack Humphrey, VP of Engineering, Indeed
Jim Colson, CTO E-commerce, Digital Marketing & Supply Chain, IBM
Lynn Pausic, Principal, Expero
Marcus Blankenship, Leadership Coach Adaptive Leadership Group
Marcus Carey, Founder & CEO, Threatcare
Meetesh Karia, CTO, The Zebra
Qingqing Ouyang, SVP Engineering, Main Street Hub
Vikas Parikh, Sr Manager, Transaction Advisory services, Ernst & Young (EY)
Vivek Sagi, CTO, Business Procurement Solutions, Amazon
Will Ballard, CTO, GLG

+ Schedule

8:00 AM Registration/Breakfast
8:50 AM Kickoff by Host
9:00 AM Jim Colson — Designing, Engineering, and Delivering Products for a Full Lifecycle of Engagement
9:20 AM Lynn Pausic — Vital Role of Humans in Machine Learning
9:40 AM Cynthia Maxwell — Keeping Your Team in the Flow
10:00 AM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
10:20 AM Break (30 mins)
10:50 AM Bryon Jacob — Seeds of Scale — Lessons For Startups Learned Through Growth
11:10 AM Vikas Parikh — M&A and Technology
11:30 AM Will Ballard — Scaling Self-Directed Development
11:50 AM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
12:10 PM Lean Coffee & Lunch (80 mins)
1:30 PM Heather Rivers — Lessons from the Black Box
1:50 PM Vivek Sagi — How to Dive Deep & Mechanisms to Help you Scale your Tech Org
2:10 PM Marcus Carey — If I Only Had A CEO
2:30 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
2:50 PM Break (30 mins)
3:20 PM Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez — Toughest Words a CTO Says : Hold on the Code
3:40 PM Meetesh Karia — Diversity in Team and Thought At The Zebra
4:00 PM Marcus Blankenship — Why Your Programmer Just Wants To Code
4:20 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
4:40 PM Break (30 mins)
5:10 PM Eddy Reyes —Lessons From A Failed Startup: A Cynefin Retrospective
5:30 PM Qingqing Ouyang — Unknown to Know: Building a Recognized Tech Brand for Recruiting
5:50 PM Jack Humphrey — Improving the Development Process with Metrics-Driven Insights
6:10 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
6:30 PM Closing
6:40 PM Networking & Drinks
8:00 PM End of Event

Get your tickets here!

+ Platinum Sponsors

AnitaB.org

AnitaB.org is committed to increasing the influence of women on all aspects of technology. Our local community expands our efforts globally to help individuals all over the world — especially those who are considering or currently pursuing technical careers — to access the resources they need to reach their highest potential.

Members of the global AnitaB.org Local community network organize events and provide one another with resources to navigate careers in tech. They organize valuable meet-ups, code-a-thons, and one-day HopperX1 events modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration.

–

Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups is committed to connecting with people and building relationships that lead to growing local entrepreneur communities. We believe that people, not companies, matter most. People come up with ideas, build MVPs, raise capital, and ultimately launch Startups (companies). Our local team in Austin is focused on supporting startups interested in partnering with us to grow on Azure.

–

Reduxio

Reduxio is redefining data management and protection with the world’s first unified primary and secondary storage platform. Based on the patented TimeOS storage operating system, Reduxio provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, and the unique ability to recover data to any second, far exceeding anything available on the market today. Reduxio’s unified storage platform is designed to deliver near-zero RPO and RTO as a feature of its storage system, while significantly simplifying the data protection process and providing built-in data replication for disaster recovery.

Reduxio innovates with:

• Accelerated workloads with High Performing Flash Storage
• Self-Protecting primary storage
• Optimized storage utilization
• Built-in integration with public and private cloud services and object stores
• Protect and move data between on-premise storage and the cloud

Learn more at www.Reduxio.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

+ Gold Sponsors

Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations use our project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, Stride, Bitbucket and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

–

Creative Alignments

Creative Alignments is disrupting recruiting using a pay-for-effort model that creates a talent partnership with our clients. Aligned with growing tech companies, we place top talent at less than half the cost of traditional recruiters. Our senior team recruits across all functions in the tech space. Reinvent recruiting with us!

+ Registration Sponsor

Beacon Hill Technologies

+ Morning Break Sponsor

7 CTOs

+ Evening Reception Sponsor

Stride

Atlassian’s Stride is a complete team communication solution built from the ground up to help teams more effectively work together. Stride was built to solve the biggest problems of team communication by bringing together context, conversations, and collaboration into one powerful product, allowing teams to move work forward. Our brand new communication solution has best-in-class team messaging, audio and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

+ Community Sponsors

Ruta Maya Coffee

Allstacks

–

Austin Fraser Ltd

–

Beacon Hill Technologies

–

RetailMeNot

–

KungFu

–

IBM

The post Austin CTO Summit Sponsors! appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m excited to announce that tickets are officially on sale for the first annual Austin CTO Summit. Take advantage of our super early bird pricing and grab your tickets today! If you know of any potential sponsors, please have them email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co.

After two months of planning and recruiting speakers, Peter and I feel like the wind is at our backs. With over 80 speaker submissions it was no easy task to select the speakers as we had to reject talks we both personally wanted to see! We are announcing 15 speakers today, and more will follow in the coming days so check the ticketing site for more details soon.

Buy Your Tickets Now!

Whether you’re an engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at this full day, single track summit you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front-end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.

Attendance to the event is strictly limited to engineering leaders. No recruiters, non-technical co-founders or other business stakeholders will be allowed (we enforce this policy strictly and will refund tickets of anyone we can’t admit). That said, we’re not hung up on job titles. Some of our best attendees have titles like CEO or VP Product. As long as you can perform a technical code review, know how to submit a pull request and are interested in more effectively hiring, managing and organizing developers, we can’t wait to meet you!

This year, our fifteen presenters include the CTOs/VPE’s Reddit, Amazon, data.world & IBM. Tickets will sell out quickly, so get yours now!

Refund policy: Unfortunately we are unable to offer refunds for tickets. We are, however happy to transfer them up to one week before the event to another engineering leader.

The post Austin CTO Summit 2018 appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m happy to announce that I am hosting the first ever Austin CTO Summit on April, 10th at Capital Factory. I am partnering with CTO Connection and 7CTOs to bring the CTO Summit Series to Austin. I’ve been working closely with Peter Bell, president of CTO Connections and host of the NYC Nasdaq CTO Summit, to help coordinate all the logistics to ensure that the conference is a success. Peter has done a fantastic job of packing up the critical components for a successful conference, and I appreciate all he has done to help.

While Peter has essentially assembled a conference in a box, I’m coloring outside the lines and adding a unique Voltage Control spin to the event. I don’t want to ruin all the surprise, but the main idea is that I will create legitimate and meaningful networking opportunities and encourage thoughtful dialog through the conference.

The conference is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, aspiring technical leaders, product manager, or anybody that wants to hang out with CTOs or better understand the CTO role. Most, if not all, of the speakers will be CTOs of recognizable companies. We will allow a few CEOs and other roles if the content is superb.

Mark your calendars for April 10 8AM-6PM and stay tuned for more updates!

The Official Announcement

Voltage Control has partnered with the popular CTO Connection summit series to bring this great event to Austin. This will mark the fifth year for CTO Connection’s CTO Summits, with summits in Austin on Tuesday April 10th and in San Francisco on Tuesday May 22nd. CTO Connection is also launching an online summit series with monthly presentations and a weekly email with articles and interviews with top engineering leaders.

The Summits

Whether you’re a team lead, engineering manager, VPE or CTO, at these full day, single track summits, you’ll learn the latest tricks other companies are using to successfully build and run engineering teams. It’s not hard to find a gathering of technologists debating front end frameworks, containerization or the relative benefits of Scala, Clojure and Go. Finding a group of geeks talking about the hard parts of building a successful engineering team is more challenging. Whether you want to hire smarter, refine your culture, improve your processes, manage more effectively or adopt better engineering practices or architectures, the CTO Summits are designed to help you to learn from top practitioners and to share experiences with your peers.

Over the last four years we sold out the summit series and presented over 200 amazing talks from senior engineering leaders representing companies including Twitter, Stripe, Snapchat, Coinbase, Chef, GitHub, Atlassian, MongoDB, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Groupon, Blue Apron, Tough Mudder, CustomInk, Spotify, Amazon, Condé Nast, Computech, comScore, Australia Post, Cisco and Oracle amongst many others.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for experienced engineering leaders willing to tell a 20 minute tale based on their recent experiences in building or running engineering teams. A great talk is:

1. Novel
   We’ve read the books and most of the blog posts. We get the benefits of Kanban, know the basics of orchestrating Docker using Kubernetes and understand the importance of building an engineering brand. Tell us a story that will provide new information to experienced engineering leaders who have the basics down cold.
2. Anecdotal
   If you’re got data, that’’s even better, but the best talks are based on hard won experience building and managing your own engineering team. If you can abstract a theoretical framework to make sense of your experience that’s great, but we’re looking for stories based on experience, not untested theories.
3. Relevant
   Is this relevant to or at least interesting to most engineering leaders. We love monads, but a talk on Haskell probably won’t be broadly appealing enough (unless it’s showing how to take the principles behind QuickCheck and apply them to other types of languages!)
4. Actionable
   What will the attendees be able to do better by the end of the talk? There should be specific, actionable takeaways to help the attendees better build and run their teams.
5. Concise 
   Twenty minutes — back to back, including setup, tear down, and any Q&A. It’s a tight format but one that the attendees love as you have to get straight to the meat of the content.
6. Diverse
   We’re committed to continuing to improve the diversity of our presenters and attendees. At our last summit over 40% of the selected speakers didn’t identify as male and 25% identified with ethnicities that are traditionally underrepresented in technology in the US. We are committed to a speaker lineup representing the diversity of gender, race and thought that we should expect in our community and are doing our very best to improve the diversity of our attendees as well. If you know anyone who might make a good speaker and would bring valuable diversity to the event, please feel free to email me — douglas@voltagecontrol.co I’m happy to connect personally and help them to plan and submit a presentation.

If you have multiple ideas for presentations, please feel free to make as many submissions as you’d like. If you’d like to get some inspiration for what kinds of talks are popular, check out our two most recent summits:

Submit your presentation now!

The post Austin CTO Summit — Call for Presentations appeared first on Voltage Control.

Last week I attended the Nasdaq CTO Summit in New York City. Peter Bell of CTO Connection has run this summit in New York and other cities for the past four years. The impressive list of speakers included the CTOs of Reddit, Meetup.com, Flatiron Health, Vimeo, Ellevest, LaunchDarkly, RainforestQA and the NY Times. Bell established CTO Connection as a vehicle to provide engineering leaders with a much-needed network to help them connect with and learn from their peers. In addition to hosting CTO Summits, CTO Connection runs CTO School, a network of local meetups and hosts a library of videos and other resources.

Even though I live in Austin, I am a member of the New York CTO School, and I participate in the CTO School email group. Jean Barmash, the organizer of New York CTO school, posted a notice of the CTO Summit back in November. I quickly signed up as I am a fan of hyper-focused single track conferences and the list of experienced professionals scheduled to speak presented both learning and networking opportunities.

I arrived in New York around 2 am on Sunday night after a series of unfortunate events courtesy of United Airlines. After arriving, I caught an Uber to Brooklyn where I was staying and prompted called it a night. Running on little sleep, I spent all day Monday meeting with prospective clients and catching up with old colleagues.

On Tuesday morning I arrived at Nasdaq and got checked in. There was a beautiful banquet table of breakfast foods, and Peter was welcoming everyone to the summit. I immediately found myself in an engaging technical conversation. When you are in a room full of CTOs, you don’t encounter usual small talk.

Peter kicked off the summit with a brief introduction and warm welcome. Each speaker had 20 minutes to speak and many of them reserved 5 or so of their 20 minutes for Q&A. They presented back to back with a lunch and only a few additional breaks throughout the day. The breaks and the end of day happy hour were all excellent opportunities for more connecting and networking. In fact, I bumped into Brian Aznar, an old friend from college and Etienne from 7CTOs.

The networking was excellent and the speakers were engaging. Some were good storytellers and others had relevant and actionable advice to share. With only 20 minutes of airtime, I was impressed at how much each speaker was able to share. Here are a few highlights below from the speakers that made the biggest impression on me.

The curious state of serverless platforms

Nick Rockwell the CTO of The New York Times gave a humorous and spirited talk on serverless platforms. Nick pointed out that serverless goes way beyond cloud functions such as lambda and includes fully managed services (SQS, S3, PubSub, etc) and Runtime as a Service like AppEngine and Heroku. He also opined that Containers are not serverless as they still require an OS. With serverless, you get true autoscaling with no capacity management and no idle. He dispelled common objections to serverless platforms and encouraged the audience to leverage serverless platforms to increase developer productivity. He advised us all to learn to know less, embrace lock-in, and allow the OS dinosaurs to rest.

Lessons from the black box

Heather Rivers the director of Engineering at Mode Analytics told the story of the flight recorder and wisely drew parallels from the airline industry to software teams. The first black box recordings began to shed light on the fact that human error caused a vast majority of accidents. In an effort to eliminate as much of this human error as possible, the airlines instituted Crew Resource Management (CRM). The three components of CRM are situational awareness, effective communication, and group dynamics. These three areas of focus and the tactics applied to them can benefit software teams in the same way they helped flight teams.

Scaling data — monoliths, migrations, and microservices

Randy Shoup, the VP of Engineering at StitchFix, spoke on monoliths and microservices. He wisely pointed out that it is crucial not to overbuild when first launching a software product and to instead focus on the customer’s needs. “If you don’t end up regretting your early technology decisions, you probably over-engineered.” Randy pointed out that microservices aren’t micro because they are small or have minimal lines of code, they are micro because they are single purpose. They have a simple, well-defined interface, and they are modular and independent. One critical component to this modularity is isolated persistence. When migrating from a monolith to a microservice, you can take incremental steps by introducing the microservice and then incrementally adopting it throughout the monolith. Once the microservice is the only method of accessing the data, extract the persistence layer. Randy also shared other approaches for dealing with isolated persistence such as a materialized view and events with a local cache.

Gender diversity in tech hiring

Debbie Madden, the CEO of Stride, spoke to us on the importance of hiring diverse teams, a topic that is near and dear to me. Diverse teams are 35% more likely to perform better than non-diverse teams. Debbie reminded us of our hard-wired biases and encouraged us to think carefully about our job descriptions, to make training participation voluntary, and to create a workplace culture that ensures everyone shares their opinions. She also advised us all to boldly share our views and values to lead from a position of strength and integrity as she has found this to be an effective way to attract diverse candidates. Debbie also shared, S.A.F.E, her framework for success.

1. Start the conversation
2. Assess your status quo
3. Formulate a plan
4. Execute and iterate

One story she told that stuck with me was about an orchestra’s goal to increase the number of women they hired. To reduce basis, they had applicants perform behind a curtain only to discover that women’s high heel shoes still created bias.

Triple your team size without losing control

Nick Caldwell, the VP Engineering at Reddit told us a story about his last year and a half at Reddit and how he tripled the team without destroying the culture. Nick started by clearly defining and assigning roles. Using RACI charts to assess and a custom test inspired by Voight-Kampff to eliminate the tech lead role by identifying which engineers should be managers and which should be architects. He created Reddit’s first org chart to document and communicate the new structure to everyone. When it came time to add a new process, Nick borrowed from the Toyota Production System Andon cord and provided opportunities for everyone to share issues and concerns and only introduced process based on feedback from the team.

I had a great time and I look forward to attending more CTO Summits in the future. Peter did a fantastic job of curating a diverse and engaging set of speakers. Even though I only mentioned a few of the speakers I enjoyed all the talks. There really weren’t any bad speakers. Which is no small feat. Kudos Peter!

The post 2017 Nasdaq CTO Summit appeared first on Voltage Control.

Last week I attended the 1st 0111 CTO Conference in San Diego. One full day of Chief Technology Officers sharing insights & experiences, building relationships and geeking out!

The conference is organized by 7CTOs; a social enterprise focused on training CTOs as effective leaders in building businesses and technology team and providing them the necessary resources and tools to support a thriving community. After four years of flying around the country to host and promote grassroots CTO dinners, Etienne de Bruin founded 7CTOs with Michael Saul 2013. Michael is a seasoned executive coach with years of consulting software companies on leadership and organizational development. Combined with Etienne’s technical leadership and passion for building collaborative communities they make a fantastic founding team.

The 7CTOs experience includes:

1. “The Innovative CTO Lab” — A day-long experience that invites CTOs from cities across the USA to share their thoughts and insights.
2. Facilitated SEVENs forums — Seven hand-picked CTOs meet monthly to develop a tight-knit group that offers peer advice, builds trust and acknowledges common challenges.
3. Lunch & Learns — All SEVENs forum members unite to enjoy stimulating presentations while breaking bread. It’s a group atmosphere where additional connections can be made.

I met Etienne back in 2012 when he was hosting a CTO dinner in Austin. I enjoyed spending time with fellow CTOs and was inspired to start Austin Tech Executives. After about four years, Etienne and I reconnected, and he brought me up to speed on 7CTOs. He encouraged me to attend the conference which was just weeks away. It was short notice, so I had to do some surgery on my calendar and quickly lock in some flights. After a few short weeks and a long flight through Denver, I arrived in San Diego late on Tuesday night.

The next morning I arrived at the Bahia Resort, and I promptly checked in. Etienne recognized me and introduced me to his co-founder Michael Saul. It was immediately clear to me that Etienne and the 7CTOs team were fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment. I felt at home.

I made my way through to the room where breakfast was served and began to introduce myself to some of the other attendees. After some engaging conversations with other CTOs, I heard Etienne announce that the opening keynote was about to begin.

Matt Aimonetti, Co-Founder & CTO of Splice, gave an engaging keynote titled “Your Identity Is They Key To A World Class Team”. One slide particularly caught the audience’s attention; Aimonetti made the comparison of a CTO and a Chef and informed us all that we were Chef Technology Officers. Matt focused the core of his keynote around what he believes to be the 3 OKRs for CTOs: Inspire, Respect, and Attract. All three components are building upon a foundation of Tech, Values, and Vision. I agree that you must clearly communicate your values and live those values.

After the keynote, we split into two tracks, leadership and technology. I found myself switching between tracks throughout the day while I noticed others seems to stick with one track. Although, I did spend more time in the leadership track. 

Michael Saul, Co-Founder of 7CTOs, presented on emotional intelligence. Michael spoke of the work by Peter Salovey and Daniel Goldman and of phenomena like the amygdala hijack. Saul spent time explaining the belief pyramid and how our paradigms cloud our judgment. He also provided an interesting anecdote about Swiss watchmaking industry getting disrupted by Japanese companies using technology from their engineers that they refused to release. He ended with Goldman’s Emotional Intelligence model which says that you must start with self-awareness and self-management before moving to relationship management.

Although I didn’t attend the session I did learn about mob development which is a new concept to me. Mob programming is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer. Both Woody Zuill & Matt Ferguson gave talks on Mob program, one more theoretical and the other practical.

Jeff Sippel shared some insights into dealing with technical debt. I found his talk unique in that he spent a small amount of time on his slides and quickly opened up the floor for the group to talk about challenges they are facing and solutions they have tried. During his slides, he did talk about the importance of not overbuilding when you start and taking the time to capture enough metrics to help you understand the health of the code base.

Artin Avanes, Director of Product Management at Snowflake Computing, walked us through SnowflakeDB, a cloud analytics database built on top of S3. He included a few use cases including Localytics. If you are looking for a more cost-effective columnar store, you might want to check out SnowflakeDB.

Krijn van der Raadt, CIO of GreatCall, spoke on the topic of Diligence in a session titled “Ace Your Technical Due Diligence.” Krijn has participated in numerous rounds of M&A tech diligence. Raadt summarized the process into two buckets: value assessment and liability assessment. On the liability side, while security and scalability are always a concern he has seen more companies have issues with poor open source license control. A service called Black Duck and others like it detect inappropriate use of open source. He reminded us that they are also evaluating you and your team.

Eric Weiss, Chief Technology Officer at Rock My World, Inc, gave a talk titled “Develop & Execute A Strategic Product Road Map”. Eric’s prioritization process was new to me. He uses Pirate Metrics as a rubric along with scaling factors selected based off of current business objectives to rank and score each feature idea. During Q&A, one attendee pointed out that he’s had success in creating hierarchical feature lists based on affinity groups. The grouping allowed him to prioritize the groups and then decide which components in that group would solve the current need.

The conference wrapped with a dinner cruise around the Mission Bay. This is way a fantastic way to end a small conference and aligns with Etienne’s vision to foster a collaborate community. The dinner allowed me to introduce myself to speakers and attendees that I missed earlier in the day and I had the opportunity to follow up with others who I had limited time with during the conference. It was a beautiful and relaxing way to finish the day.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference. My only regret is that I didn’t find out soon enough to speak at the conference! I’m already twisting Etienne’s arm to participate in the next one.

If you are a CTO or hope to be one sometime, I encourage you to follow 7CTOs and consider joining or attending a 0111 CTO Conference. Etienne plans to have a conference every quarter in a different city.

The post 0111 CTO Conference appeared first on Voltage Control.

Over the last 20 years, as I have observed, advised, and launched numerous startups, I’ve come to the conclusion that early to mid-stage companies don’t require dedicated executives for every function. A CTO is a role that doesn’t require a full-time commitment for many modern software ventures. If you are curious to learn more about what a CTO does, including quotes from some of Austin’s best CTOs, check out my story “What is a CTO?”.

As I was considering what I would do after Twyla, I kept coming back to this idea that most software companies don’t require a full CTO and the possibility of a market opportunity for me as a fractional CTO. As I would do when launching a new product, I decided to put my hypothesis to test. I began to meet with VCs and CEOs of Austin companies to better understand their needs and where I could provide value. These conversations allowed me to both validate the opportunity and to discover the 5 most common scenarios when companies need a fractional CTO.

When to consider a fractional CTO

The key business benefit of retaining a Fractional CTO is that they provide the same expertise and capability of a full-time CTO without the associated level of salary, benefits and overhead associated with adding a top level executive.

You are launching a new company or product

Most founders that I speak to, have been given the advice that they need a technical co-founder to be successful. Armed with this advice, they either hire someone who lacks leadership and business experience, or hire an experienced CTO with the expectation that they will spend a lot of time in the weeds. Both of these situations are not ideal. The junior CTO will have gaps and must learn as she goes and the senior individual must context shift between the strategic and the hyper tactical; this dynamic shifting is difficult and rarely executed well. Additionally, they will likely focus on growth and will be a drain on the resources needed to execute the tedious detail work needed to test your market and grow your business.

A fractional CTO is especially valuable in the early stages of a company or new product, as you are validating your market and testing various product strategies; allowing you to keep your burn low while you adapt and learn.

My clients hire and retain me to assist them with testing and validating potential solutions, assessing the technology landscape to highlight risks and opportunities relevant to their business, creating their product roadmap, and determining the most cost-effective way to quickly make progress towards business goals. They also include me in their pitch deck to help them as they progress through the necessary milestones to raise money and eventually grow to the point where they need to hire someone full-time.

You desire more visibility or confidence in your existing team

If your team is struggling but you are unsure of the cause, have a fractional CTO conduct a holistic technology assessment. They will help you understand why you are consistently missing deadlines, why the team’s not getting along, or why you have a general feeling that you’re not getting your money’s worth from the team.

In addition to a standard technical audit focusing on assessing operational excellence such as competencies and capabilities, I conduct a thorough audit with attention on organizational health. I’ve often found that most problems product teams face stem from relationships and lack of coherence or focus, so I’ve learned to start there first. This approach helps me guarantee that any changes made will become habits and truly transform your organization.

I’ve often found that most problems product teams face stem from relationships and lack of coherence or focus, so I’ve learned to start there first.

Your existing team needs some oversight or guidance

If you’ve opted against hiring a senior leader and instead hired junior developers, a lead developer, or outsourced development, you probably lack confidence in their ability to make the right strategic product and long term architectural decisions. Likewise, when a technical cofounder or junior CTO is struggling or simply lacking some of the skills now required of them, a fractional CTO will help them learn and adapt to the new skills required of them as the organization grows.

My clients depend on me to coach, mentor, develop and inspire their team, who I grow both personally and professionally to perform at their peak potential. I help my clients determine how and when they need to invest in growing the team. When it’s time to grow the team, I advise and guide them through proper recruiting, onboarding, and retention techniques. I have a well-established network and will leverage that network to assist in locating, attracting and retaining top talent. I draw from my diverse background to apply a broader spectrum of experience across many technologies when enhancing process and transforming culture.

You’ve lost or may lose your CTO

If you have abruptly lost your CTO, or need to end your relationship with them and don’t have someone ready to fill the role, or are struggling to attract the right full-time CTO, a fractional CTO can easily fill the gap. Providing this level of continuity is important for the health and focus of your team, the confidence of your customers, and the predictability of your software delivery.

One of my clients recently lost their CTO, and as their fractional CTO, I am providing all the value they need in 10 or fewer hours a week. They rely on me to attend weekly staff meetings, conduct one-on-ones as needed, audit technical designs, oversee DevOps, and provide sales support. They are delighted to have the confidence to tell investors that the product is still on track and the team is engaged while they have simultaneously reduced monthly burn.

You’ve never had a CTO and need a tech strategy

When your executive team lacks a seasoned CTO or CIO, your CEO, CFO, or COO is responsible for technology. They are often overwhelmed with technology vendors, technology strategy is unclear, releases lack predictability, quality suffers, and they find it challenging to make swift decisions. In today’s business environment, software is touching everything. Organizations of all types should consider how they remain relevant and grow with the demanding ever-shifting technology landscape.

I help clients to answer questions like:

1. “What do our customers actually need?
2. What should we build?
3. Should we hire or use a vendor?
4. How will this integrate with my other systems?
5. Can our systems support growth?
6. What do we need in order to invest in our team?

Many organizations lack a product mindset and instead think all of their software work as projects. In this case, I help my clients reframe their perspective from software projects to a product mindset. These clients benefit tremendously from this digital transformation which unlocks their ability to fully achieve their technology pursuits.

A fractional CTO can provide that trusted advice and guidance you require at a fraction of the cost, freeing up budget for individual contributors who will execute efficiently and effectively under their leadership.

Getting started with a fractional CTO

It will likely be a long time before you need someone full-time, but you simply can’t go without a CTO in the meantime. You need something more than an advisor but less than a full-time CTO. A fractional CTO can provide that trusted advice and guidance you require at a fraction of the cost, freeing up budget for individual contributors who will execute efficiently and effectively under their leadership.

If you are uncertain where to begin, start with a finite initial engagement and then move to a retainer after you’ve seen results and are comfortable with the working relationship.

Unlike vendors, I am independent, I am on your side and in it for the long term; I am a vendor agnostic trusted advisor.

Working with a fractional CTO

Every organization battles some level of uncertainty and risk. Meeting with a fractional CTO regularly, to establish a foundation of understanding, will allow them to quickly dive into any problem that arises and help you develop a swift mitigation plan.

Unlike vendors, I am independent, I am on your side and in it for the long term; I am a vendor agnostic trusted advisor. Even though I may not be on-site, I am always available and thinking about what you need and how to get it for you. Keep me updated regularly, so that when you have a critical problem, I am up to speed and can quickly help you address the issue.

Transition Plan

Once the time comes to hire a full-time CTO, I help my clients find the right person if they cannot promote from within. Sometimes I locate this person through my own network of CTOs. I run a meet-up for CTOs and generally know who is looking in Austin. If we need to cast a wider net, I will work with them to select the best recruiter for a retained executive search.

If you have questions about the fractional CTO model or are in need of my services, email me now at douglas@voltagecontrol.co. I’ll be happy to sit down and talk through your needs and challenges. The first meeting is always free.

The post Maybe You Need a Fractional CTO appeared first on Voltage Control.

In addition to my love for technology and how humans interact to build software, I have an immense passion for music. I’ve toured the US and Europe with bands and solo projects. I even own a professional operating recording studio, The Still.

In recent years, I have focused my obsession with music towards modular synthesizers, specifically eurorack synthesizers. This format was developed by a German audio manufacturer Doepfer in 1995. At a fraction of the cost of other modular synths, Doepfer’s made modular synthesizers more accessible and they quickly grew. At the time of this writing, there are over 200 manufacturers, each making anywhere from one to hundreds of different module designs. You can find everything from simple 70s era throw backs to esoteric digital insanity.

I began collecting modules in 2007 and have amassed a sizeable collection of modules. Currently my case contains around 200 modules. I tend to favor the more esoteric modules and love getting lost in the wormhole. I will patch for hours, refining and evolving the sound; enveloped in a sea of blinking lights.

Just like good software, modular synthesizers are modular, meaning they are comprised of many modules that perform specific roles. This gives you flexibility to adjust the order of components (modules). Adjusting the order of modules allows the modules to control or manipulate each other in new and interesting ways.

I’m sure you can imagine that connecting 200 modules together can be quite chaotic. Managing this chaos is the central element that draws me deeper and deeper into my eurorack synthesizer addiction.

As I began to think about naming my change consultancy, I was drawn to the parallels between how I work with my synthesizers and how I help companies. Adding order to chaos and extracting the full potential of what lies beneath a set of tacit resources is my superpower. Selecting a name related to my modular synthesizer obsession became my branding focus.

Synth modules have many knobs that allow you to control characteristics of the sound. A module is considered voltage controlled when you can remotely control it’s knobs using other modules. The control voltage is supplied from one module to another module through a patch cable. Rarely will you see a keyboard attached to a modular synthesizer, but if you do, it will use control voltage to set pitch and volume of the notes you play. Instead of keyboards, modular synthesizer patches run independently, after some initial input, much like a software program..

Control Voltage helps you harness your true potential.

I knew without a doubt that Voltage Control was my name when I began to think about voltage as potential. The word voltage is defined as an electromotive force or potential difference expressed in volts. Everything we do, from 1 hour online sessions to 12-month programs is in service of supporting our clients to capitalize on their full potential.

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