“The way we gather matters.” The opening line of Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering elegantly and succinctly sums up the focus of this book, which is jam-packed with useful and inspiring information for anyone who hosts events. As someone who facilitates design sprints and innovation workshops for a living, I found Parker’s book to be incredibly enlightening, and in reading it, I added more than a few new tools to my repertoire.

One of the things I appreciate about The Art of Gathering is that it comes from a different perspective than many of the books I’ve read on the subject; namely, her book is not rooted in the design or innovation spaces. Trained in group dialogue and conflict resolution, Parker comes at the topic with a broad definition of gatherings — they can be big or small, personal or public, casual or high-stakes.

This book is relevant not just to those working in start-ups or corporate settings but to anyone. From dinner parties and baby showers to family reunions and funerals, Parker tells us how to gather more effectively.

There are many practical takeaways from The Art of Gathering, but below, I share the seven that I’ll carry forward with me in my work as an innovation facilitator.

1. Have a Clear Purpose

One of the first things Parker writes about is that before you gather, you should be crystal clear about why you’re meeting. You may think you know why you’re meeting, but Parker says: “A category is not a purpose.” In other words, a purpose is not: “I’m getting married” or “I’m hosting a meeting about our new product release.”

Parker urges readers to get really specific about what they want to accomplish and achieve through a gathering. She says: “drill baby drill” — ask “why?” until you find an articulation of what you truly need to accomplish. By doing this, you will move from a “basic, boring purpose” to one that is “specific, unique, and disputable.”

“The purpose of your gathering is more than an inspiring concept. It is a tool, a filter that helps you determine all the details, grand and trivial.” — Priya Parker

Parker shares that when you have a good purpose, it helps you make better decisions. Your purpose is your “bouncer.” It lets you know what is right and wrong for your particular event.

2. It’s Not “The More, The Merrier”

After you have your specific purpose nailed down, deciding who should be at your gathering is the next order of business. Parker writes about the need to exclude people from events. It’s completely ok and even necessary, she says: “Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering.” (This is a topic I often have to bring up with clients when planning design sprints; too many people lead to an ineffective sprint, so I’m always encouraging a limited and focused participant list.)

But, what’s wrong with over-including, if you can? Parker feels that overinclusion is a reflection that you don’t know and aren’t committed to your purpose. She urges those planning gatherings to ask themselves questions such as: Who fits and helps fulfill the purpose? Who threatens it? Who do I feel obliged to invite? Parker says we must be courageous enough to keep away our “Bobs” (the people we feel obliged to include). There’s nothing wrong with “Bobs,” but they don’t necessarily fulfill the event’s purpose.

“When I talk about generous exclusion, I am speaking of ways of bounding a gathering that allows diversity in it to be heightened and sharpened, rather than diluted in a hodgepodge of people.” — Priya Parker

3. Don’t Forget “The Chateau Principle”

Parker writes about something that I hold to be very true as well — where your gathering happens has a tremendous impact on the outcomes of the event. As Parker says: “venues come with scripts.” In other words, we will act more formally in a courtroom than in a meeting on a comfy couch.

“You should…seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening. When a place embodies an idea, it brings a person’s body and whole being into the experience, not only their minds.” — Priya Parker

Parker calls this “The Chateau Principle,” which means you shouldn’t host a meeting in a chateau if you don’t want to “remind the French of their greatness.” (The name comes from a story she shares about an ill-fated corporate merger meeting that was hosted in a castle in France.)

Spaces embody the vibe we are going for in our gathering. The surroundings we choose for a meeting or party can make or break the mood, support or undermine our purpose, and encourage or discourage attendees to escape from their typical mindsets.

4. The Non-Chill Host

We often think it is ideal to be laid back and relaxed as a host of a gathering, but Parker reminds us that this is not the case. Guests want their host or facilitator to be in control of the event. As she puts it: “Who wants to sail on a skipperless ship?”

It’s more than ok to set up rules and keep to the agenda that you have set for a gathering. When you don’t steer the ship as the host, you create a vacuum for others to fill, and they might not do it in the way you want.

“A gathering run on generous authority is run with a strong, confidenthand, but is run selflessly, for the sake of others.” — Priya Parker

Parker talks about “generous authority” as a guiding principle for hosts. It is a way to behave that protects, equalizes, and connects your guests. She suggests exuding what she calls “half-Egyptian and half-German authority” (inspired by a friend of hers), which combines the right balance of warmth and order during your gathering.

5. Pregame is Everything

Typically we think that events begin when they begin. Parker reminds us that events actually start long before: they are initiated in how guests are prepared for the gathering. According to Parker: “90% of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.” For example, you may take time to individually meet with stakeholders before a big meeting, or maybe you send an inspiring article to the attendees of an upcoming dinner party.

Parker shares helpful tidbits about how to positively “prime” your attendees before an event. It’s everything from how your name your gathering (is it a “lockdown” or “brainstorm”?) to how you greet attendees. and usher them into a gathering space. To illustrate the concept of ushering, she talked about the immersive theater experience Then She Fell, where the audience was seated in a small reception area and given a special elixir and a set of keys before entering the alternative world of the show.

Whatever you do, resist the urge to start your gathering with logistics and, instead, launch in a way that sets the tone for the rest of your time together.

6. Don’t Be Afraid of Heat

We’ve been told again and again not to talk about things like politics and religion during gatherings, but Parker has some contrary thinking here as well: “Good controversy can make a gathering matter more.” She feels that too much harmony can make an event dull. Furthermore, in shying away from difficult topics, you might not accomplish what you need to in your gathering.

“I bring good controversy to a gathering only when I believe some good can come out of it — enough good to outweigh the risks and harm.” — Priya Parker

Parker shared how she once encouraged well-mannered architects to dig into potentially controversial work topics. She designed a moment where the architects would have to participate in a virtual “cage match” to debate divergent strategies for the future of their firm. For Parker, “good controversy” can be just that, but it requires someone to design the structure and space for it to happen.

7. How to Say Goodbye

Finally, Parker urges us to think carefully about how our gatherings end so they don’t peter out with a whimper. “Close with a closing,” she says. She tells us never to start a meeting with logistics and we shouldn’t close with them either.

“A good and meaningful closing doesn’t conform to any particular rules or form. It’s something you have to build yourself, in keeping with the spirit of your gathering, in proportion to how big a deal you want to make of it.” — Priya Parker

She suggests a couple of natural ways to close an event. First, you can encourage the guests to make meaning and reflect on what happened. Second, you can have guests share how they are going to reenter the world with the new information they’ve received from the gathering. It’s about connecting our gatherings back to our daily lives. How can a piece of the event stay with attendees? Parker states: “Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.”

Interested in experiencing professional facilitation at your next event? Voltage Control can train your leaders and teams on how to plan, organize, and execute meetings and events that are innovative and built to unlock potential and unleash everyone.

The post My Favorite Learnings from Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering” appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was Jordan Hirsch, the Director of Innovation at Phase2, a Digital Experience agency that helps companies create meaningful experiences, develop and integrate systems, drive business results, and operate at speed and scale.

He presented on how to facilitate the fun in meetings by incorporating improv. Jordan led the room through a “yes and” exercise that demonstrated the value of accepting and responding, and how it translates to the mind of a facilitator to help them respond to the expected and unexpected.

He explained that accepting does not mean always mean agreeing, and that responding is greater than reacting. Jordan demonstrated that improv helps individuals be present and accept and build trust; it is a liberating structure in one’s mind.

Watch Jordan Hirsch’s talk “Facilitating the Fun”:

Read the Transcript

Jordan Hirsch:

All right. Thanks, everybody. The coveted post-break slot. Welcome back to the improv portion of the day. My name is Jordan Hirsch. I’m going to talk about bringing improv into your facilitation work. To get started, this might shock you, but could I get seven volunteers up on stage, please? It’s just the magic number for improv games. That’s how it goes. There’s one, thank you. Anybody else? Two, thank you very much. Three, four, five, six, seven. Oh my God, we did it. Yay. I liked the specificity. I had written in my notes six to eight and then I heard Shannon say seven. I was like, “That’s six to eight.” This is going to work out great. Could you all please do me a favor and just get in a circle? I will remove them. No, maybe the people towards the back. Just take a step backward that way so everybody doesn’t fall off stage.

Jordan Hirsch:

There you go. Now let’s complete the circle. Excellent. Thank you so much. So we’re going to play. There it is. We’re going to play a quick game called the yes circle. Can you guys take as many steps back as bad. There you go. You take one back for me. Oh, beautiful. I love it. You go back. Perfect. Thank you so much. So, the yes circle. Let’s close up the circle once again, the yes circle doesn’t mean to get closer. There you go. The yes circle…

Daniel:

[crosstalk 00:01:34] Was this perfect or are we good?

Jordan Hirsch:

You are. This is it. Thank you for the circle, no. The yes circle has one objective. Your objective is to take someone else’s place in the circle. To do it, there’s only two rules. It is so easy you could not possibly fail. All you have to do is point at someone else in the circle, whose place you want to take.

Jordan Hirsch:

Could you point at someone else in the circle? Beautiful. You are going to make…

Daniel:

If I’m a target, I’m dead.

Jordan Hirsch:

You are going to make eye contact and you’re going to say, yes.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

As soon as you get that yes, you may begin walking towards his place in the circle. Guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to point at someone else in the circle.

Daniel:

Okay.

Jordan Hirsch:

Go for it. And you’re going to say?

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Here you go. Now you’re going to point at someone else in the circle. No, no, no.

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s only two rules.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

There you go.

Speaker 3:

I’ve got it. I’ve got it.

Daniel:

Yes. No, wait, that’s wrong.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yep. That’s alright. Alright, let’s reset real quick. There’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. So here, come on over here. Let’s get back into our beautiful circle. So you’re going to point to someone else in the circle.

Speaker 3:

Okay.

Jordan Hirsch:

Go ahead. And you’re going to say?

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Now you’re going to point to someone… There you go.

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

Yes.

Speaker 7:

Yes.

Speaker 8:

Yes.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Okay. So there’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. You guys want to try it one more time. [crosstalk 00:02:55] Okay, great.

Speaker 7:

Oh, watch yourself. You alright?

Jordan Hirsch:

Watch your step. Don’t worry about me. I’m a professional. I fall off stages all the time.

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:03:03].

Jordan Hirsch:

Why don’t you go ahead. Point to anyone in the circle.

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

Yes.

Speaker 7:

Yes.

Speaker 8:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

So there’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. Folks, can we please get a big round of applause for our volunteers? And, before you all dissipate, a quick question. First of all, thank you very much. Second of all, why did we do that?

Speaker 7:

Why did we do that?

Jordan Hirsch:

Why did we do that?

Speaker 3:

Because directions are hard to follow.

Jordan Hirsch:

Because directions are hard to follow.

Speaker 3:

And, it creates habit when we don’t give the directions.

Jordan Hirsch:

That’s a good reason. Anybody, what were you starting to say? You said communication.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Jordan Hirsch:

What about it?

Speaker 5:

Direct eye contact. Setting a clear purpose.

Daniel:

Assent.

Jordan Hirsch:

Assent, such a Daniel answer. Permission. Yes. Permission is good. We’re leaving… Great answers, all of you, now I’ll give my answer while you get off the stage. Thank you so much. Seriously. All of those answers are correct by the way. We do that, because we can take many lessons from it. My personal favorite thing about that game is that it really nicely illustrates the concept of the importance of building a shared reality.

Jordan Hirsch:

If we are not agreeing on a shared reality, we cannot move forward with things. If you move forward without getting or giving a yes, you are trying to move into a house that’s not for sale. You are violating the shared reality that we have, and shared reality is the basis of that most famous of improv concepts, yes and… Show of hands, I’m sure it’s going to be every hand, who here has heard of Yes and…? Awesome. Could anyone give me a definition? No professional improvisers allowed. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker 9:

Definition is, taking someone’s idea and building on it, rather than dismissing their idea and putting your idea.

Jordan Hirsch:

Very well put. Thank you. Anybody else?

Jordan Hirsch:

Alright. You did… Oh yeah.

Speaker 10:

Accepting a gift and then giving a next one.

Jordan Hirsch:

Accepting a gift and then giving a next one. I love all of these definitions. Thank you. I think they’re both right. I think to me, yes and… is simply about accepting and responding. It is the basis, the fundamental foundation of all successful improvisation. And what does it have to do with facilitation? I believe it is a mindset. It fosters a mindset that is valuable both for you as a facilitator and for the people that you are facilitating. It helps you respond to the unexpected and to the expected, because it gives you a framework within which to work. Now, I think it’s important to back up assertions like that with math. So, please join me as we do some improv math. Yeah. Math. Awesome. Improv math is just like regular math, except I made it up. So, the first equation of improv math is that accepting does not equal agreeing.

Jordan Hirsch:

Oh no. If I say yes and… to a dumb idea, therefore, I too am a dumb person, because I agree with the dumb idea. I don’t think it works exactly like that. It is about accepting information that’s come before and an improv show, if two people were doing a scene on the moon and I entered the scene talking about, “Oh, it’s so nice to be back in Wisconsin.”, I have not agreed on a shared reality with these people. I have broken an agreement that they have set up on stage. In facilitation, yes and… is also about accepting an established reality. It does not mean that you agree with everything everybody says. It means that you accept that the people who are saying these things, actually hold these beliefs. You accept that you are living inside of a shared reality with them. You can accept something even if you don’t agree with it.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s one of the hardest things about becoming a grownup, but it does happen. It is a fundamental skill. To me, yes and… is the opposite of gaslighting, because it’s really all about honoring a shared reality and that builds psychological safety in groups and I think it’s a sign of respectful leadership. Improv math equation number two, responding is greater than reacting. We heard about this a little bit earlier. The power of response, instead of reaction. To me a response is simply a reaction filtered through a framework. The “and” in yes and… is where you get to be intentional about how you respond to something. Improv helps you practice and hone the skill of responding at the speed of reacting, but it really does take practice. Responding intentionally, I think, is how you want your workshop participants to be working and interacting with each other and it’s probably how you want to be acting yourself when you are facilitating a group.

Jordan Hirsch:

Think about when something goes wrong or when something goes off script in something that you’re facilitating. How do you react to that? By default, when we react instead of responding, I think we give away a moment where we might actually build something new, because it wasn’t in the script. Responding puts you in the driver’s seat. Reacting gives away a lot of your power and improv helps you hone that muscle of responding at the speed of reaction. Improv math equation number three, “Yes minus And” equals

[inaudible 00:08:07]

. Johnny, could you just please say yes every time I point to you.

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Thank you so much. Oh, see he’s got it. Nice day today, isn’t it?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s quiet in here, huh?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

What the fuck, Johnny?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Alright. Not really scintillating stuff as opposed to, nice day to day, isn’t it? Yes. Our alien overlords have finally flown home.

Jordan Hirsch:

Things are really looking up, not the best improv scene in the world, but there’s a lot more to it. Just agreeing. Just accepting, stopping there is not fulfilling the promise of yes and… accepting and building is the key to doing something really wonderful. And, I know as facilitators we are meant to be neutral parties. So, building does not mean steering. It doesn’t mean telling everybody what to think, what to say, what to do. It means creating and holding space for generative engagement and is, I want to say it’s the more important part. It’s nothing of course without the yes, but I feel like a lot of people who learn about yes and… they stop at the agreement piece and they really miss an opportunity to do something new and interesting. Finally, improv times facilitation equals awesome. You want your participants to be listening to each other to be building on each other’s ideas, to be collaborating creatively and improv works all of those muscles.

Jordan Hirsch:

It is like a workout for your brain and if you’re getting sematic about it also for your body, you are literally practicing new ways of doing these sorts of things. It also helps you as a facilitator. It helps you be present. It helps you be accepting and it helps you to quickly build trust with a group of people. Not to mention brain scans of jazz musicians, while they were improvising, showed an increase in activities in the area of the brain associated with creativity and with language, and a decrease in activity in the areas of the brain associated with self-censorship. Which means, get ready for some facilitator inside baseball here, improv is literally a liberating structure for your brain. Truly, it liberates you from your own self censorship and it activates your creativity. The act of creating and engaging, wakes up the parts of your brain that like to do creating an engaging and it shuts down the critic and that is a great mindset for facilitating or for being facilitated. Could I please get a volunteer one each from each table? Just pick a quick table facilitator and come on up.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yes, good. Cheer each other on. This is going to be great. All right. You guys are awesome. Thank you. Do we have all our tables represented? Okay.

Speaker 12:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

This part’s just for you guys. Huddle around, huddle around, huddle around. Okay, so you are going to go back to your… Talk amongst yourselves. You’re going to go back to your tables and facilitate an improv game. Easy enough. Not that hard. Has anybody ever done a yes and… story before?

Speaker 13:

Oh, yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Have you? Okay, so a yes and… story is very simple. You’re going to start off a story, I’ll give you the first line. Once upon a time this thing happened, people contribute with one line at a time, to the story. I want to be very clear about this. Instructions are tricky. One line, one sentence, at a time. Every sentence must begin with the words.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yes and… consider how you, as a facilitator, might guide people, if and how, you might guide people if they, perhaps, negate information that came before in the story or if they don’t say yes and… at the beginning, how are you going to handle that? How will you yes and… what they are doing. Any questions? Alright, you’ve got five minutes to go back to your tables, explain and run the activity. Wait. The first line of everybody’s story is, “Once upon a time there was a duck who was afraid of water.” And begin. [crosstalk 00:12:17] What was the last line that this table came up with?

Speaker 7:

“And there was another duck Memorial.”

Jordan Hirsch:

And there was another duck Memorial. What was your last line?

Speaker 14:

“And that’s why we all might drink too much”

Jordan Hirsch:

And that’s why we all might drink too much at the company picnic. What was your last one?

Speaker 15:

“The humans and the duck went on a giant firefighting expedition to Australia.”

Jordan Hirsch:

Yeah, sure. What was your last one?

Speaker 16:

“Yes and he kept paddling.”

Jordan Hirsch:

He kept paddling. Oh, what was your last line?

Speaker 17:

“And the animal activists went to Washington DC, after

Jordan Hirsch:

This is amazing. And your?

Speaker 18:

It was, “Yes and, the business ended up going under and now he’s a homeless duck.”

Jordan Hirsch:

So the clock tells me I don’t have time, unfortunately, to hear from every table, as much as I would like to, but if you could hear it, you all arrived at very, very, very different places and the reason that I pushed you after several tables were like, “Hey, we’re done. We won the exercise, we finished the story.” is that there is often much, much, much more, much more ground to be uncovered, after you think you have scaled the mountain. Yes and… to me, is about once you scale the mountain, Hey, the clouds are partying. Oh, there’s another huge mountain right there, and I really want to see it. I want to see what’s on the other side of it. So what do we learn? This graphic here of these very simplistic things was chosen deliberately, because this is basic foundational stuff.

Jordan Hirsch:

However, it goes against all of our cultural conditioning. We are not conditioned to do this. The yes circle is super hard, so we’re not used to having to wait for permission, and we’re not used to having to give permission. It is learned behavior, which is why we make comedy out of it, because it’s challenging. If time permitted, I would love to know from all of you how you think you might have used this skill in the past or how you might use it in the future of your facilitation work. The clock says, no. Douglas is standing here, so just think about it a little bit on your own. And thank you so much for playing with me.

The post Facilitating the Fun appeared first on Voltage Control.

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.

As always Next Gen Summit kicked off with fantastic energy and enthusiasm. Justin Lafazan and Dylan Gambardella welcomed everyone new to the community by giving them a moment to introduce themselves to whoever was next to them. Young entrepreneurs from across the globe gathered at Convene to collaborate for a weekend of networking, panels, and talks about how to be the best entrepreneur possible.

Swan Sit, VP of Global Marketing at Nike gave one of the early talks where she discussed barriers to innovation at large organizations. Her presentation consisted of thoughtful perspectives on connecting the various channels of engagement to maximize value to customers. For two hours follower her talk, she met with and advised entrepreneurs, The energy was infectious around her and is typical of the types of experiences I’ve come to expect of the Next Gen Summit.

Brennan Stark, who is working on the “I Choose Extraordinary” documentary spent some time with me talking about my entrepreneurial journey. Our interview centered around thinking big and taking risks. We discussed the challenges of starting a creative agency while still in school, choosing to leave graduate school, and overcoming all the obstacles along the way. We concluded with my current role at Voltage Control. Our mission is to help businesses bridge the knowing doing gap and to apply human-centered design methods that allow them to build better products and experiences. We look forward to seeing the documentary and are thankful for Brennan and his team for including us.

“This conference makes you feel unstoppable. Everyone is passionate about the businesses that he or she has started, and when you add the fact that we all want to help each other succeed, we are so powerful.” — Rachel Gross, Director of Outreach for Next Gen Summit

Tayo Rockson, alongside female entrepreneurs and artists, led my favorite panel “How to get Women and People of Color into Entrepreneurship and the Arts”. The phenomenal conversation consisted of the accounts of unfortunate encounters these underrepresented indviduals face daily. The discussion was thoughtful and explored some uncomfortable topics. How can businesses build inclusive environments for women and people of color in genuinely diverse ways? We can all agree that an invitation to the conversation is not enough unless we are truly willing to change our behavior. After the panel, I shared the Voltage Control Diversity & Inclusion Resource Cards with the group. Attendees especially liked the list of Austin based VC’s that have a proven track record for investing in underrepresented founders.

Interactive VIP Networking

At the interactive VIP Networking event, we each pitched our offerings in lightning rounds asking for what we need from others in the NGS sphere. We all gathered into smaller groups of eight or less, where one person was the “Cowboy” that pitched who they are and their current hiring needs. Those who were not pitching, wrote their name, number and if they could help on a card and would give it to the Cowboy. After the group ran out of suggestions, the Cowboy would rotate and find an open group and repeat the process. Everyone in the small group was able to interact with a large number of attendees in a very engaging way. Now equipped with all of these fantastic new connections, it was up to everyone to follow up and get what they needed. This activity reminded me of several of the Liberating Structures that we utilize in workshops at Voltage Control.

“I love all the new people that are coming into Next Gen Summit. It’s inspiring to watch them experience this for the first time. Justin and Dylan could do this conference without the speakers, simply because of the power of networking provided by the conference. It’s the highest concentration of young entrepreneurs in one spot.” — Paul McNeal, Co-Founder at CryptoMarket360

Newchip is an aggregated marketplace of online fundraising platforms that make it easy for casual investors to gain equity in startups. Ryan, Travis and the team are from Austin and just closed a $2M funding round. Congrats to the entire team, we look forward to following your journey as you continue forward.

Morning Brew continued a successful day of spreading the word about their business newsletter. Alex Lieberman and his team at the Brew help entrepreneurs to stay in the know with important business news. Alex gave me great advice about maximizing time at conferences by focusing on the little interactions. I don’t usually sign up for newsletters, but the focus on business trends and relevant updates adds a lot of value and has become a great way to kick start my day.

Easy Point helps companies who frequently travel to optimize their credit card rewards programs. Easy Point understands your travel needs and generates a personalized travel plan for your year. These travel rewards experts understand how to reduce time spent and increase returns. Zach and Cameron can guarantee that they will return at least 2x your cost in point rewards.

At the annual Pitch Contest, ScholarMe stole the show. They are a new college financing platform for students to better control their finances via low-interest debt and scholarships. Students can submit a single application for thousands of scholarships and loans that ScholarMe aggregates into a single portal. The crowd loved the concept and personally resonated with the problem that they are trying to solve. I wish that I had ScholarMe when I was going to school. Their future looks bright! They were even awarded Recognition of Excellence from the State of New York. Congrats to the team at ScholarMe!

After the pitch competition, Jeff Hoffman the Co-Founder of Priceline.com led the last talk of the conference with a presentation on investment and the importance of execution. Justin and Dylan closed the conference with a thank you to the amazing community, and with that, Next Gen Summit 2018 was in the books. I look forward to next year and how we can continue to help support the NGS entrepreneurs.

Thank you to everyone who visited the Voltage Control booth throughout the weekend, and we hope to see you next year!

Voltage Control is an innovation workshop agency founded by Douglas Ferguson, an Austin-based entrepreneur and technologist with over 20 years of experience. With his unique combination of expertise in technology, product strategy, and design thinking, Doulas offers trusted guidance to companies who want to jumpstart their product or project with an impactful innovation workshop. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads custom innovation workshops and Design Sprints, as developed by Google Ventures.

The post Next Gen Summit 2018 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.

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!

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