I recently appeared on The CTO Studio podcast produced by Etienne de Bruin of 7CTOs. 7CTOs is a CTO forum that is dedicated to training CTOs as effective leaders. They accomplish this by recruiting and building cohorts of approximately (you guessed it) seven CTOs. These cohorts meet regularly to discuss issues and obstacles they face as CTOs. This consistency and intimacy allow the forum members to become vulnerable which allows them to share and learn more deeply.

I first met Etienne, years ago when he was running a collection of local meetups and I attended the Austin CTO meetup. He disappeared from Austin for a few years and reappeared as the leader of 7CTOs where he is now running one of its forums. In addition, Etienne runs a series of conferences called 0111 Conference.

I gave my AI Readiness Canvas workshop at the most recent 0111 Conference in San Diego last November. While I was there, I was scheduled to record a session with Etienne, but San Diego traffic got the best of me. Instead, Etienne chauffeured me to the pre-conference dinner. Since we missed the recording, we reschedule it during his next visit to Austin. We recorded the session in my audio recording studio, which Etienne took great delight in. He kept saying “We are recording The CTO Studio in a studio!”

It was a ton of fun chatting. We talked about everything from creating emotion through music, complexity theory, Liberating Structures, and how decay affects the taste of food.

We started by discussing how, today, design is a way of thinking rather than just the visual practice it has been historically. Design thinking is about helping people make better decisions and then learning from those decisions.

I also shared my thoughts on the value of facilitation skills for CTOs in managing conversations so ideas aren’t sold to influence the outcome of a solution. Facilitation in conjunction with Google Venture’s Note-and-Vote technique helps companies to realize the power of a multidisciplinary team by preventing the loudest voice in the room from dominating brainstorming and allowing diverse ideas to make their way to the surface.

As we discussed complexity theory, I shared my thoughts on the power of diversity to transform complex problems into a simple, beautiful solution in a market environment that’s constantly changing. It’s not enough to focus on hiring many different kinds of people. Leaders also need to take measures to ensure those diverse people have a voice.

Then we discussed the impact of the rapid prototyping and learning cycle and how Jake Knapp experienced that during one of his first meetings at Google when the team was designing Google Glass.

I described to Etienne how using inverted thinking and Liberating Structures can help teams check their egos and push themselves to reveal their assumptions by purposefully coming up with solutions that might get them fired.

Finally, I shared my advice on CTOs coming together and how those conversations should be approached with a learning and curious mindset that embraces vulnerability.

Keep scrolling to read the full transcript from our talk:

Transcript from my conversation with Etienne de Bruin of 7CTOs:

Douglas: I have a wonderful electronic invention I want you to see. It looks something like this.

Etienne: Welcome to The CTO Studio. I’m your host, Etienne de Bruin. The CTO studio is where we chat with CTOs building amazing products with incredible teams. Have you chatted with a CTO lately?

Etienne: Douglas Ferguson said to me, “You should come to Austin and you should come hang with me in my studio so we can do the CTO Studio,” and my thoughts were, “Okay, I guess we could do it,” so I got in my Lyft ride and, at some point, I thought to myself, this looks like Texas Chainsaw Massacre territory, and I end up in this … you guys saw the synth and Randall and Elijah. This is the CTO Studio. Douglas, welcome.

Douglas: Thank you.

Etienne: When did you do this?

Douglas: Wow. It’s been a lifelong effort, but this particular room was built about ten years ago.

Etienne: Is it because you’re in pursuit of the perfect tone? What is the pursuit?

Douglas: I think the pursuit is lots of tones. I’m really fascinated by creating eclectic and different sounds and how you can juxtapose different things together.

Etienne: Something I read is that we, as children, our brains latch onto the music and the patterns and the tones that we love, and then we spend the rest of our adult life trying to find music that reminds us of those patterns or are actually those patterns. What do you think about that?

Douglas: You know, that’s interesting. I think there … I haven’t seen the research on that. It seems reasonable. For me, personally, it’s interesting because I think it’s tied to somewhat, my pursuits around learning. So, I’m always in pursuit of, “What’s someone created out there that’s interesting to hear and how is that going to unlock something inside me and make me think about things differently?”

Etienne: I wonder about music. As a musician, as well, I often wonder, “Are we just all doing G, C, D in many different ways?”

Douglas: You know, that’s … I certainly have deviated quite a bit from that with the ambient drone kind of experimental music that I do. A lot of it even becomes atonal.

Etienne: Atonal, yes, because it’s just … it’s like a Radioheadish noiseish filling sound.

Douglas: Yeah, and it can even get more noisy than what you might expect from a Radiohead.

Etienne: Now, what is atonal.

Douglas: Well, just that you’re not focused on the chromatic scale or any scale for that matter, so you’re not thinking about notes and melodies. It’s more about creating an experience. You could think about … I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of the stuff on soundtracks for movies, trying to create an emotion through the audio.

Etienne: So, have you experimented with doing soundtracks?

Douglas: I have done some soundtracks for movies: not for TV shows.

Etienne: When you say you’ve done it, are you saying you actually did it?

Douglas: Yeah, I’ve collaborated with filmmakers in the past, and the most recent one was a collaboration with two artists out of Engie, France.

Etienne: Oh, yes. You went to France for that, right?

Douglas: Yeah, exactly, yeah, and it was nice because it was a yearlong project where we were curating these files back and forth, and I got to include a lot of artists from Austin, both visual artists and audio artists, and we got accepted into a film festival and got to go present it.

Etienne: I think I remember you going. So, this is the CTO Studio, but, you know, we’re chitchatting. One thing I want to start doing — so, I don’t really gig anymore — is, I wanna start collaborating online with people. Are there platforms that I can use so I can lay down the bass tracks for artists who need bass tracks?

Douglas: You know, gosh, I haven’t looked at this in many years, and, a few have come and go over the years that are kind of these … we didn’t even have the word social network back then, but, yeah, the idea was that you could kind of connect with various musicians or producers, and, they had different models. Some of them were more along the lines of, “Here are these vetted studio musicians that you as a songwriter could get access to,” and then some of them are kind of more democratic, or just more community-based where anyone could kind of join and participate. But, I really don’t know who’s active in that space these days.

Etienne: I wonder. I think there’s a site called MySpace.

Douglas: Yeah, right? Yeah, that was a thing. What about … that’s kind of old school, right? Hasn’t Napster just come along and eat it for lunch?

Etienne: I don’t know, I think MySpace is going places.

Douglas: Okay, yeah, cool. Tom, right?

Etienne: Tom’s my friend. So, tell me: the thing I see a lot is that technical people are also either really into music or they tend to be musicians. Where do you think that comes from?

Douglas: Well, let me tell you a little story.

Etienne: “Glad you asked.” Randall, are you ready for the story? Good.

Douglas: I have this knack for hiring musicians, even when I don’t realize it. It could be influenced by the fact that Austin is so full of musicians. It’s hard to … sorry, I shouldn’t mess with that. It’s hard to throw a stick in this town and not hit a musician, so I’m sure that impacts it, but, so, there’s this running joke within a lot of the startups that I’ve founded where everyone’s been a musician, and so, then, I’ll hire someone and I’ll make a statement, “Oh, I finally hired someone who’s not a musician,” and then she’ll say, “I played the flute in high school.” I’m like, “Oh, of course you did.”

Etienne: “You’re fired!”

Douglas: Yeah, outta here.

Etienne: Do you play something?

Elijah: I played the recorder in fourth grade.

Etienne: I don’t think that counts, brah, seriously. Doesn’t everyone have to play it?

Elijah: Yeah, it’s a requirement in Texas.

Douglas: The recorder?

Elijah: I don’t think.

Etienne: So, I love the bass. From an early age, I was into the bass notes. I don’t like slapping. I’m not really a Victor Wooten kind of player, but, I absolutely love the John Paul Jones melodic bass lines as part of, like, three instruments, you know, the guitar, the drums and the bass, but I am fascinated that so many coders and tech people tend to be musicians, atonal.

Douglas: Yeah, and, you know, I like to think about it as structure, right? There’s a process. There’s a structure. There’s math to music, certainly, and so, I think folks that really get inside that and really embrace it, then their brain is naturally trained or inclined or kind of set up to be able to do this other kind of work as well, so they’re naturally, I don’t know, drawn to it.

Etienne: So, we met about … was it like, ten years, now?

Douglas: Maybe.

Etienne: No, 2009–10ish.

Douglas: Yeah, somewhere in there.

Etienne: So, I feel like you’ve reinvented yourself a bit in the sense that lead engineered, VP, CTO roles, and now you’re sort of into design thinking and design workshops. What is design thinking? Do you subscribe to the IDEO brothers design thinking stuff, or, when you talk about design workshops, are you talking more about product design as sort of a discipline? What draws you to this concept of design?

Douglas: Well, for one thing, I think we have to think about what design means, right? So, a lot of folks will hear the word design, and they immediately go to graphic design or UX design or UI design, these very visual types of design, but, I’m sure you’ll remember, this language has kind of left the vernacular, but we used to talk about having design meetings when we would make software. I don’t hear that so much anymore.

Etienne: You’re right. You don’t hear that so much anymore.

Douglas: But, you can design anything. And, in fact, when I meet designers that I really fall in love with, nine times out of ten, I find out they have an industrial design degree, and I’m really enamored with industrial design. I think it’s an amazing way to teach people how to think, and that’s the design that I’m really motivated and excited about, and, if you think about the path that I’ve been on, my life has been pretty much dedicated to creating solutions. I’m addicted to solving problems. As a young kid, I was fascinated by word problems. Not only do we learn these techniques, but we’re presented with this unique scenario and we have to kind of tease out how we approach it, and so, that’s, I think, the common thread that I see in my work. And, as I see new opportunities, I look at where the challenge lies, and: are we really being presented with challenges that can allow us to find unique solutions?

Etienne: And so, you’re guiding … through your workshops, you are guiding established teams through some sort of one- or two- or three-day process to kind of step out and then embrace the design side?

Douglas: Yeah, I think that sometimes, we’re not even leaning heavy on the word design in some of these workshops, but there’s definitely an element of that that we kind of, let’s say, tailor in or bake into the process, and, it’s always a group of people coming together to solve a problem or challenge, and, sometimes, these are newly formed teams and the workshops actually help them build a rapport and trust they need to get the work done. Sometimes, it’s an established team and we need to rebuild that rapport and trust, right, because maybe it’s on shaky ground.

Douglas: Ultimately, we’re helping people move past bad behaviors, make really good decisions and also not belabor the decisions. Maybe we’re thinking about, “What’s a good decision right now? Not a perfect decision, but something that at least we can put in in the ground and we can maneuver around it. We can look at it from this perspective, from that perspective, and then decide, “Are we comfortable with what?” versus just endless debate and circular conversation, and then we’re like, “Well, we’ll decide that next week. Let’s make a decision now, and then let’s respond to it.” And so, that’s a general archetype of most of these workshops is there’s some ideation, there’s some exploration where we’re gonna crack things open, unpack it, understand it better, and then make some rapid decisions and try to learn from them.

Etienne: And, do you think … how do you see CTOs … what role do they play, generally, from your experience, in those processes in those meetings?

Douglas: As you know, the CTO role can vary quite drastically. In some organizations, they’re the technical spokesperson. In some organizations, they’re actually writing code, and then there’s lots of … that spectrum is wide, and so there’s lots of different varieties along the way. At some larger companies, they might be the sponsor, you know, so they might realize … they might see the gap and the need in their team, and so they bring this work in.

Douglas: And, some opportunities or some situations, they might be the decider. They might actually be participating in the workshop and ultimately the one that’s gonna take this, whatever this work is, to life, afterwards. And then, in other situations, the CTO is the one that’s there for logistics, ’cause a lot of times we’re looking at desirability and imagining the art of the possible, but we also need to understand the limitations, the physical limitations of what’s even … the constraints, and so, making sure that someone is there from an operational standpoint or a logistic standpoint’s highly important, so, often the CTO is playing that role.

Etienne: Do you think that CTOs should be able to take their teams into any of these messy situations and facilitate that, facilitate the group out of that sticking point or impasse?

Douglas: Absolutely.

Etienne: Or, do you think that the CTO should just know people who know people?

Douglas: Well, I think yes to both, because there are going to be moments that just happen in the office and regular meetings, so I think that having some facilitation skills is really valuable as a CTO, and in fact, the design sprint has a really incredible process that I’m … I think it’s the biggest innovation that Jake created through the design sprint process. He calls it the Note & Vote, and it’s basically taking individual work and pairing it with group work.

Douglas: And so, I love to use this in staff meetings and in my fractional CTO work, which I still do a little bit of. I love to coach my teams or my clients to use this in regular meetings, and so, the way it would work is, let’s say you’ve got 30 minutes or even an hour to solve a problem, and, you might be looking at a design for a database model, or there might be some architectural change you’re wanting to make and you wanna bring the whole team together. So, rather than being the CTO and saying, “I mandate this is what we’re gonna do,” we’re gonna bring together the team to work together, to collaborate, which is great. That’s a fantastic way to lead the team. But, if you just stand up in front of the room with the marker and then start writing, then there’s a huge risk of follow-the-leader. So, even though you’re asking for input and soliciting advice, they’re just gonna go, “Yeah, yeah, that looks good,” or they’re just gonna agree.

Douglas: And then, if you do turn it over, even hand the marker over and things, it’s the person with the most amount of confidence, the person that can sell their ideas the best, and so, the way the Note & Vote works, is, everyone spends some time … generally, cut the meeting in half. Spend the first half of the meeting working on individual work, and so, everyone’s fleshing out their ideas. Because, if you think about it, we’re all so busy and we all have all these demands. Even though we know that architectural thing is coming up, we might have processed it in our subconscious, but we haven’t necessarily really articulated it. So, if we’re asking people to articulate it in that session, it’s like having Tourette’s, right, ’cause you might have a thought and you’re like … you have all these-

Etienne: It’s like you’re processing it out loud.

Douglas: Yeah, so, instead, process it individually. Now, you could say, “Well, why not just give them homework,” but then, we’re not doing it together.

Etienne: I totally agree.

Douglas: There’s some magic in the room even though everyone’s silent and doing it individually.

Etienne: You feel like you’re part of something.

Douglas: Yes. So, then, that’s the first half. The second half, everyone goes around and shares their idea. And, as a facilitator, you have to make sure they don’t sell it. So, if they start trying to pitch it and talk about why their idea is so great, be like, “Just tell us your approach. What are you proposing?” And then, after everyone proposes their work, then we will do a session of voting. It’s sort of like planning poker. We’ll go, “Everyone got their votes locked in? Okay, reveal your votes.” And then, we start to talk about … then it starts to look more like brainstorming

Etienne: Because you’re tapping into … if there are eight heads in the room, you’re first tapping into eight different ways of doing it or eight opinions as opposed to coming in and saying, “We’re collaborating,” and then, like you said, the loudest voice is the one that prevails.

Douglas: That’s right. So, back to your original-

Etienne: But, let me just clarify: on the voting, do people vote on their notes as well or do you raise hands or, what have you seen is most effective? ’Cause I might raise my hand and I might see who else is voting.

Douglas: Yeah. Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll use sticky dots, ’cause people have written down their stuff and so we’re going around and putting sticky dots on it, but it really depends on how you’ve kind of arranged space and how you provided opportunity for them to create and share their ideas. So, sometimes, we might be just putting tick marks up on the whiteboard, but the important thing is that everyone votes at once, so they might write it on a piece of paper. They might have their sticky ready, their little voting dot, whatever. So, but you’re absolutely right. We don’t wanna just go around in a circle, ’cause then everyone can influence other people’s votes.

Etienne: And, does that also assume that everyone’s vote is equal, ie., everyone’s voice and experience, and, therefore, their opinion is equal?

Douglas: Yes.

Etienne: Does that work, though?

Douglas: Yes. Here’s the thing: clearly, there might be a hierarchy in the organization, and you have to embrace that at some point, but for this work and this moment, we’re going to be completely democratic and let everyone’s ideas have equal value, because if you do not create a scenario like that, then people will start to learn that their ideas don’t matter and they stop sharing them, and if they aren’t sharing their ideas, then you don’t truly have a diverse workforce. So, I’m a huge fan of diversity, and it can be proven scientifically that the importance, not only when you look at the numbers that HR groups will publish around how more effective a diverse organization. That’s great and I fully support that, but I’m also super interested in complexity theory and this notion of a requisite diversity, ’cause in a complex environment, if you don’t have requisite diversity, you will not prevail. So, it’s super critical not only to think about not only are we hiring different kinds of people, but are we allowing them to have a voice? Are we including them?

Etienne: What is requisite diversity?

Douglas: It’s a complexity theory term that says, “Do you have enough diversity to get past the nature of complexity?” So, the tricky part about complexity theory is … well, can you tell me the difference between complicated and complex?

Etienne: Complicated is a convolution of thoughts that couldn’t necessarily be simple. By nature, it’s opposed to simplicity. Complexity, to me, can still be beautiful and simple, but it just consists of a complex arrangement or system or something like that. So, for instance, One World Trade Center doesn’t look complicated. It’s beautiful and it’s simple in its design, but it looks damn complex in terms of how they did it. We’re going to cut all of that out, by the way.

Douglas: If I were to tell you that a mayonnaise … let me back up. So, if I were to tell you that a jumbo jet is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex?

Etienne: I would feel like a jumbo, a Boeing is complex, but it’s just a beautiful design.

Douglas: And mayonnaise is just some egg and what-

Randall: Oil.

Etienne: Oil. Thank you, Randall.

Douglas: So, the reason-

Etienne: The recipe for mayonnaise is: take an egg, take some oil and whip it.

Douglas: I think we should cut to a little Betty Crocker-

Etienne: Hey, Eric, cut into a little bit of a mayo recipe. Randall can narrate.

Randall: “First, you crack the egg.”

Douglas: So, I’m gonna get through this eventually.

Etienne: Yeah, but I want to know about the complicated … so, you’re saying a Boeing is complicated. Mayonnaise is complex. Explain that.

Douglas: So, in order to build a jumbo jet or to repair it, you need an expert, and you can actually take it apart. You could put it back together. You could put it in a hangar and come back tomorrow and it’ll be exactly the way you left it.

Etienne: A mayonnaise, once you make it, you can’t unmake it. If you leave it on the counter, tomorrow, it’s not gonna be the way it was today.

Douglas: It goes great on my hotdog though.

Etienne: Yeah, it does … not a jumbo jet. Not great.

Douglas: It’s the second-day mayo.

Etienne: Oh, right, yeah, the little spicy kick, yeah.

Douglas: The green edges.

Randall: That’s nasty.

Douglas: Man, I once heard a … so, Steve Albini, bringing back the music reference, he’s a real accomplished chef as well as an amazing music producer, and he has an awesome blog on cooking, and he has this blog that super long about what he calls … well, it’s about decay, essentially. And, he said that the flavor in food is all about how much the protein has been allowed to decay, and so that’s why a lot of these aging techniques are … we let it mold up and then we carve off the mold. So, anyway, if you’re interested in getting deep into some food chemistry and science with Steve Albini, he’s got a great blog.

Etienne: I’m very interested in that. Have you ever aged a Charles Shaw red wine, the Two Buck Chuck?

Douglas: Okay, the Two Buck Chuck. Man, so-

Etienne: If you open that bottle and you just uncork it and you put that cork back in and you just come back to it about a week or two later, dude, that is some serious contention.

Douglas: So, that reminds me, I went to this party in Oakland. Gosh, it was about 12 years ago, and it was a Halloween party.

Etienne: Uh oh.

Douglas: Yeah, it was crazy. There were people on stilts and there was a maze. Anyway, in the far, far back room of this warehouse that was set up for Halloween, there was a Jacob’s Ladder. Have you ever seen one in person? You know what I’m talking about?

Etienne: I haven’t, no. I mean, I haven’t.

Douglas: So, the two electrodes coming up in a V, and so it’s like the Frankenstein, zzt, zzt, zzt, zzt; zzt, zzt, zzt, zzt.

Etienne: Yes, yes.

Douglas F.: And, so they had this thing set up, but what was unique about this Jacob’s ladder was there was an opposite V going down, not quite as wide, a little more narrow, and it was just something about it, I just instantly was like, “What’s that?” And so I went over to check it out and they were taking … they had this gallon-

Etienne: At this point, were you completely sober at your senses or had you … did you take a little something?

Douglas: What kind of something?

Etienne: You know, the thing that makes red redder and yellow yellower and green greener.

Douglas: There were some substances in mind.

Etienne: Okay, so, anyways, back to the story.

Douglas: So, I’m over there and I’m looking at this thing and I notice that, beside it, there’s this big gallon of tequila. Actually, it wasn’t tequila. There was a big gallon of whiskey, and it just looked like the kind of whiskey that you just move on past when you’re in the liquor store. You look at it and you go, “That’s not gonna sit well.” And so, it was clearly part of the whole setup, so I started to investigate a little more, and, what they were doing is they were taking this gut rot whiskey, and they were putting it in the electrodes, so they were running 10,000 volts through the whiskey, and, apparently, it’s a way of removing impurities. And, apparently, back in the day during the bootlegging prohibition era, they used to use this technique, and they made it illegal ’cause it’s probably super dangerous to run 10,000 volts through a liquid.

Etienne: You only do that once.

Douglas: Yeah, and so-

Etienne: Wow.

Douglas: So, I tried it and it was tasty. I literally could sip on it neat.

Etienne: Now, what’s up with the Jacob’s Ladder on that?

Douglas: I think that was just for visuals. That’s what pulled me across the room.

Etienne: So, let’s get back to complexity and complicated as far as design sprints or design meetings go.

Douglas: So, you asked about requisite diversity.

Etienne: I think the audience did. I knew exactly what it was. I think there was someone in the audience who asked it.

Douglas: Oh, of course, yeah, those pesky audience members, yeah.

Etienne: Yes. I was a voiceover customer in that scenario.

Douglas: So, when you think about complicated environment, or when you think about the complicated domain, we’re looking at things that are knowable, but they require an expert, right, versus the simple domain where it’s one known solution and you don’t really need an expert. People can just kind of repeat this … fill out the same form over and over and over again. It’s like having an SOP and someone follows it, but when the SOP fails us and we have to step back and adjust this SOP, now we’re in the complicated domain ’cause we have to have an expert that knows enough to adapt the SOP.

Douglas: But, imagine that we’re in a domain where we can’t even expect that SOP to work tomorrow ’cause we don’t know what tomorrow will be like, and so, when you think about startups, this is very prominent, right? We don’t know how customers of the market might behave as these dynamic situations are fluctuating and changing, and so, in that domain, we have to use what we call probes. So, we put a probe out to make some sense of our environment, and then we understand what’s happening and we can adapt and change our behaviors based on what we’re learning.

Etienne: Is that something that one can then use to explain it to stakeholders who don’t quite understand why we can’t estimate or predict the outcome quite as clearly as they would want us to?

Douglas: I would caution folks to just bust out complexity theory in that conversation, but I think it’s a great thing to understand as a technologist, and as someone, anybody living in this world, the startup world, this unpredictable world, to know that we’re moving between these different domains of complicated and complex, and using that understanding to frame some of the conversations they have.

Etienne: And, is this … so, if I can bring it right back to everyone’s voice in this design meeting, ’cause I think that’s where we kind of got started: is everyone’s participation and everyone’s equal voice then contributes towards the complexity of the design or-

Douglas: Ideally, the design helps us move. A perfect design would help us move; take this complex situation in and get us to a simple, an obvious, but the process has to get us there, and so, and that comes back to the requisite diversity. We have to have enough people in the room with enough different perspectives to be able to corral this complexity and have all of the understanding we need to get to a solution that is ultimately, simple, obvious and knowable and repeatable.

Etienne: Fascinating. Yeah, because I think it’s too easy to just get sort of a homogeneous crowd to discuss something, and it could be everything from domain expertise, but also, experience, ’cause what I find is sometimes a meeting, some of the most valuable insights come from someone who has been the least exposed to the problem they’re trying to solve or the iterations of the solutions you’ve been trying out.

Douglas: Absolutely. That reminds me of two different pieces of innovation advice I got early on in my career. One is: once a year, attend a conference that is completely outside of your domain, because they’re going to be doing things and using language that’s totally alien to you, but it’s going to make the light bulbs go off like crazy because you’re gonna realize, “Whoa, I could totally borrow that,” or, “It’s weird that they’re doing that that way,” or, you know? So, very, very cool. Go to a conference totally unrelated. Go to the car show. Go to the International Association of Attractions and Museums or whatever. The other piece of advice, or the story that I love is how the 3M Innovation Center, actually here in Austin, they put whiteboards outside the bathrooms. You know why they did that?

Etienne: Because we have our best ideas when we shizzle?

Douglas: Shizzle? That’s a new one for me. I haven’t heard shizzle before.

Etienne: I don’t use that word that often.

Douglas: Okay, yeah, sure.

Etienne: Is it because when you go out … no, why, why?

Douglas: So, when you have two different departments working on completely different polymers or whatever they’re making at 3M, the most likely place they’re going to run into each other is outside the bathroom, ’cause that’s when they’re coming and going from their labs.

Etienne: It’s the one place everyone has to go to.

Douglas: Same thing. It’s like the water cooler. You put whiteboards in the break rooms and the cafeteria, and ultimately, what happens is, “Hey, Bob, haven’t seen you in a while. What are you working on?” And then it’s like, “Whoa, really, are you kidding me?” And then, all of a sudden, they realize they can apply that for their thing and then-

Etienne: I love it. So, tell me about … so, you’ve run a couple design workshops in Austin with Jake Knapp, right?

Douglas: Yep.

Etienne: Tell me about that.

Douglas: So, with Jake, specifically, we brought him to town and held a one-day event. It’s sort of like a conference kind of setting. We have about 100 people in the room and we’re kind of giving them a bit of a history on how the design sprint was created. And, Jake’s an amazing speaker and storyteller, so he kind of tells his story from his start at … it’s really incredible. He was working at Microsoft and he was working on Encarta. Do you remember Encarta?

Etienne: I do.

Douglas: Yeah, and so, he said that they spent, gosh … it was something like a year-and-a-half … they had these amazing features they had dreamed up and it was really, really cool and the design was incredible and the technology was awesome, and it was time to launch it. They got it all buttoned up and it was working really well and they were really, really proud of it, and they brought in marketing and they said, “Hey, this is what we’re doing.” They showed ’em everything and marketing was studiously taking notes and pulling everything together. And then, it was something like a month later, they see the proofs for the packaging, ’cause this was something that you would go into a store and take off the shelf.

Douglas: And, they looked at the packaging and they thought, “Well, this is only a third of what we’ve built. In fact, this thing that we were super excited about is not even on here,” and marketing said, “Well, users don’t want that,” and they made that discovery almost two years after they started building it, and so, that was the impetus for him thinking in these terms, right, around how we can expedite the learning. This even predates Agile. I mean, Agile was starting to form around that time, definitely predates Lean, and when you think about the Lean methodology, it actually beats the socks off what happened at Encarta, but it’s still not ideal because it assumes that we’re gonna build something, launch it, test it. And so, the innovation that Jake did with the design sprint was taking all these varied design thinking methods and baking them into a very structured repeatable process that anyone can do, and delivering a result that basically bypasses the build part of that, like: idea, build, launch, learn. So, we’re just gonna go: idea, prototype, learn; idea, prototype, learn; so we can do that on a 24-hour cycle.

Douglas: In fact, I was speaking at Google. Gosh, that was in September, and there was amazing prototyper from Google there gave a talk, and he was talking about his first day on the job at Google, and he had just left Yahoo!, and he’s in this meeting, right, the first day. He’s thinking to himself, “This is amazing, so much different than Yahoo! It’s everything Yahoo! wasn’t. I love Google, so great to be here, and it was an hour-and-a-half meeting. And, somehow, halfway through the meeting … we’re like 45 minutes in. Something changed, and so it went from the best meeting he had ever had to the worst. And, he said that what happened was they shift it from this kind of productive exploration of the problem space to this guessathon. They were all just trying to figure out what color the heads-up display should be for the Google Glass.

Douglas: So, eventually after all this debate, Sergey said, “It’s gonna be red. It’s the lowest energy photon, so it’s gonna be less strain on the eye.” Well, he leaves the room thinking, “That’s great, but is that right?” And it just like, “We need to test this!” So, literally, that afternoon, he had built a prototype of Google Glass. It was literally a piece of glass and a screen protector and it had a coat hanger and all this stuff, and they put it up, and you know what they discovered? Red was the worst color for the same reason they thought it would be the best, because, since it’s low energy, it could not compete with all the other light, so it’s really dim.

Etienne: Oh, so it wasn’t coming out…

Douglas: It was hard to read. And so, he has this awesome quote, “Smart people come up with smart reasons for their guesses,” so we should all remember that. Don’t assume … we gotta check our ego at the door. I was at Tech Stars last night, and I hadn’t noticed this before: they were having their holiday party and I popped in for a little bit, and I noticed they had this little pot by the door. It was almost like a little urn looking thing, and on it was printed, “Egos,” so, it’s check your ego at the door.

Etienne: Ego at the door. I think you don’t realize your ego’s driving the show when it’s too late.

Douglas: Yeah, well, that’s … I mean, okay, we, for years, talked about trying to uncover our assumptions, and really, as engineers, we should understand our assumptions and know it’s assumption versus fact or truth or require … or, let’s call it fact, right? And so, I think that it’s important for folks to realize that sometimes ego will cloud our vision into our assumptions, and that’s where a lot of the psychological aspects of the workshop methods that we use come from. How can we invert thinking and let people’s ego … they don’t even realize they’re checking their ego because we kind of tricked ’em. We flipped it around so that their ego’s over here and distracted, right?

Etienne: So, what I do is Post-It Notes. Whenever we do CTOs forums, which is also a collaborative space, I have found more and more that instead of opening the conversation for some … whether it’s issue processing or whether it’s, “What do you guys think of the ideation CEO that can never stay focused on the product roadmap? Instead of opening that up immediately for the group discussion, to use the Post-It Notes or notebooks and just first write your own thoughts down, and then, when it comes time to share, like you said, it’s not like you gotta make up and engage in conversation. You’re basically just reading what you wrote.

Douglas: Absolutely.

Etienne: Do you think that that is a natural inoculation against your own ego?

Douglas: That specifically is not … I think it can help get past egos from the selling point that was making earlier. So, you’re right; if they’ve taken time to articulate their thoughts, then they’re just reading back their thoughts, so then they’re not in this posturing this position where they’re on the fly trying to do the tap dance and sell their stuff, but what I was getting at around methods to check the ego would be more like things like the distraction, how we distract the brain. So, some folks refer to it as inverted thinking. There’s an interesting method called ideas to get you fired, so you actually think through these crazy things you might do that would get you fired, but, it kind of frees up the mind to pursue these things like, “What might I suggest the company do that is so crazy and bold that they might actually get rid of me for saying it?” And then, you look at that and go, “Well, where might there be opportunity, there that I’m not letting myself see?”

Douglas: There’s also an amazing liberating structure called TRIZ, that invites us to find things that maybe once worked well but are no longer productive. So, what are these counterproductive behaviors? ’Cause, usually, what happens is we will adopt patterns and behaviors because they work today, right? They suit the need. And then, we start to ritualize them, habitualize them. They get into our DNA and we do them just because we do them. “That’s the way we do things, here,” and, sometimes they far outlive their necessity, you know? So, when that happens, it can be helpful to think about how we might change things, creative … embrace or welcome in creative destruction. And so, TRIZ is a way to do that, and so, what we do is we ask folks … and, typically, we’re gonna look at a specific problem, so a great example is: let’s say we have a really bad meeting. Our meetings are horrible. We don’t get anything done in them. Then, if we’re gonna use TRIZ to figure out how counterproductive behaviors that are preventing us from having good meetings, we would start off TRIZ by saying, “Let’s list out some things that we can do to ensure that we have the worst possible meetings ever.”

Etienne: Yes.

Douglas: So, you’re laughing, and that’s very intentional because since it’s playful and crazy and we flipped our thinking, our ego’s not gonna get in the way, and also, we’re not gonna be … the politics aren’t going to get in the way, ’cause we’re not asking what should we stop doing? We’re gonna say, “What should we do to ensure the worst possible outcome?” So then, after we do that and share around … we typically layer, especially a big group, we’ll layer in one, two, four, all. So, everyone does the individual work, then, in groups of two, then in three, and then everyone, or … and so, after the sharing and we see this crazy list and some good laughs and there’s some crazy ridiculous stuff up there, then we shift our focus to, “Okay, what on this list resembles anything that we do today?” So, then we get serious and we’re drawing parallels. We’re not saying … we’re not passing any judgment. We’re just saying, “Oh, yeah, we kinda do that.” I mean, this is a ludicrous, crazy parabolic version, or hyperbolic version of the same thing, but we do it. So then, the third-

Etienne: An example could be: guaranteed way to have the worst meeting ever is to show up 20 minutes late. Then, ha, ha, ha, or 30 minutes late, or don’t show up at all, and then, but when you get serious, you’re like, “Well, I’m actually always late to meetings, even if it’s one or two or five minutes.”

Douglas: Yeah. Or, you could say that the guaranteed way to have horrible meetings is to dial in from your cellphone from a place that has really bad reception. And then, we say, “Well, we don’t intentionally do that, but, sometimes the wifi’s not great, and that, in fact, impacts this.” It opens you up to look at, “Well, what are some of these little micro things that we might be able to do, these 15% solutions that can have a big impact?” And, actually, that predicates and underlies a lot of the stuff, the work with liberating structures. You’re looking for these things. They call them local solutions to global problems. So, how can we do little things here and there, that, when they add up have a huge impact to the individual or the organization.

Douglas: So, then, the third step in TRIZ is we then look at those things that we’ve identified and say, “What are we gonna sign up to stop doing?” ’Cause, at so many meetings, and even well-structured meetings come with this understanding that we’re gonna come up with an action list. We’re defining things we wanna start doing, you know, creating our to-do list. So, the unique thing about TREZ is we’re making a commitment to stop doing something, and, guess what: when you stop doing stuff, it frees up space.

Etienne: So, you’re making a commitment to not do stuff, but to stop doing stuff, ’cause you started at the very worst end. Is TRIZ that Russian thing?

Douglas: So, there’s multiple Trizzes out there, and this is the Liberating Structures version of TRIZ. Liberating Structures is Creative Commons, and a lot of their work is republishing or repackaging academic research and whatnot, and so, they’re very much a, let’s call it, self-organizing group, and so, they road-test these ideas, and some of them might be inspired by other things, and so TRIZ is an example. There’s another body of work called TRIZ. And, in fact, it stands for … it’s a Russian acronym, and I don’t speak Russian, so it’s really hard for me to even remember how to pronounce it, but it stands for like, creative innovation, group innovation.

Etienne: Yeah, one of my friends gave me the TRIZ manual, and I never read it because it’s such a difficult read, but, now that you’re mentioning it, I’m seeing the book in my bookshelf, and it’s TRIZ, or some unpronounceable … you’re saying TRIZ, but I think, when you read it, is it T-R-I-Z, or-

Douglas: T-R-I-Z, yeah. And-

Etienne: But, Liberating Structures is this model, right?

Douglas: Yeah, so, they have this notion. The reason it’s called Liberating Structures is ’cause they think of how we communicate and work together as a structure. “What’s the format or the nature by which we come together?” And, our conventional structures are the things we default to like presentations and status reports and brainstorming, and they have this one called the goat rodeo, which is chaos or whatever. They’ve created these liberating structures which seek to liberate us, unleash everyone, and they have two guiding principles. Well, they have a bunch of guiding principles, but, there’s these two elements of conventional structures that are not productive, and they are that they don’t include everyone in the shaping of the outcome or the solution, and they also don’t evenly distribute control of content. So, in a presentation, you’ve got one person presenting. They’re in control of content. Everyone else is invited to listen. So, liberating structures seek to optimize those two things. So, there’s 34 methods in the repertoire, TRIZ being one of them, and they’re all pretty awesome.

Etienne: Can you have liberating structures with groups of strangers?

Douglas: Yeah. In fact, the one thing that I find is really unique about liberating structures is that they scale quite nicely to large organizations, large groups of people. In fact, there’s a few methods that don’t really work well in small groups, which is fascinating to me. The one that comes to mind is 10/25 crowdsourcing. Because it’s a crowdsourcing tool and we don’t have a crowd, it’s a little awkward, but it’s really neat. Basically, we invite people to think about how we’re gonna solve a problem, so we’ll bring a challenge and say … in this one, we don’t invert it, so we might say, “How do we make the best possible podcast?” So then, everyone gets a postcard and they write down their idea on how to make the best possible podcast, and then we turn on the music. I really like to use Stevie Wonder, and we start shuffling the cards.

Etienne: You just cost this episode thousands of dollars.

Douglas: I know. Now we have to include it.

Etienne: Now I’m gonna get sued, and royalties, and-

Douglas: Yeah, well-

Etienne: Like, not Stevie Wonder the artist, another guy called Stevie Wonder.

Douglas: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Etienne: We were talking about Michael Jackson: people have different names, right? Elijah Wood is right there.

Douglas: Yep.

Etienne: Can I say Elijah Wood?

Douglas: Yeah.

Etienne: Or, is it … is YouTube gonna have a copyright strike against us?

Douglas: You know-

Randall: I think you actually have to play the music, and a certain amount of it.

Etienne: Oh, okay, okay.

Douglas: Yeah, I’m not an IP lawyer, so-

Douglas: Say my name.

Etienne: Okay, so you put on Stevie Wonder.

Douglas: We shuffle the cards, and-

Etienne: I preferably like to put on KoЯn.

Douglas: Okay, we could do that, but, I mean, so, well, but-

Etienne: So, this-

Douglas: No, this is important. I feel like, as a professional, I need to say this: oftentimes, we’re working with mixed environments, and some people are very sensitive, and so if you were to put on porn, it would make them feel uncomfortable.

Etienne: No, KoЯn.

Douglas: KoЯn?

Douglas: Not porn.

Douglas: Aw, KoЯn.

Etienne: Dude, not porn.

Douglas: Why would you say that?

Etienne: I said KoЯn, “Ka.”

Douglas: Ugh.

Randall: Yeah, I immediately thought, “Butter.”

Douglas: I’m not sure which word you heard, Randall.

Etienne: Okay, so wait, so, you put on Stevie Wonder and then, so, everyone’s written their best ideas on the podcast. You put on some music.

Douglas: And, then they start getting up and moving around and shuffling the cards, and when the music stops, you read the idea, flip it over.

Etienne: Someone else’s idea?

Douglas: Yes, and if you got your own, you just quickly exchange with someone else.

Etienne: And then, you flip it over.

Douglas: And then, you read it. And then, you flip it over. Vote, 1–5, 1 being, “No way, Jose,” 5 being, like, “This is incredible,” and then, after five rounds, if anyone has a card, the total is 25, they’re gonna share it.

Etienne: Wow. That’s fantastic.

Douglas: It’s fun.

Etienne: What’s that called?

Douglas: 10/25 crowdsourcing?

Etienne: Okay, so, you’re saying if you have a group of three people, that’s awkward.

Douglas: Yeah, it’s like, “Hey, let’s get around and dance and pass these cards around and, wait, I just saw this idea.”

Etienne: Wow. You’re like a model … you have all these models and frameworks baked in your brain. Is it because of Voltage Control?

Douglas: You know, I’ve always been fascinated by this stuff, and that’s how I began to create Voltage Control is out of this interest in being able to take some of these ideas and some of the stuff I’ve learned about and created within organizations that I’ve built and used on my teams. “How can I take this to other companies?” And, of course, once I started Voltage Control and it started to crystallize in my head that there is a real opportunity to do this work, and demand for it, then, I started to then learn even more methods and get even more seeped in it.

Etienne: What do you think CTOs should do when they get together? So, we’re all building our own companies. We’re all in different stages of our lifecycles. When we come together to either process an issue that we’re having … what would be the best way for us to collaborate and work together?

Douglas: Well, first of all, it’s the mindset. You need to come in with a mindset, a learning and curious mindset, and, even if you hear someone say something that you don’t agree with or does not apply to your company, use that as an opportunity to think about how that made you realize that your company’s different. Did you really think about the fact that you are … if this is a yin and yang thing, and this person talks about the thing they believe in or the thing that works for them and you’re like, “Oh, that never worked for me,” don’t just think, “That never worked for me,” and dismiss it. Think about, “Well, why wouldn’t it work for me, and how is that making me think about my situation different? What does this surface for me?” Really invite it and learn it in. So-

Etienne: I love that.

Douglas: It’s about being vulnerable, and we talk about being vulnerable all the time in these types of groups that we create, but I think the semantics get lost on people sometimes, right, and so it’s really about being open and really thinking about, “What it means for me,” and not just push the idea away because it doesn’t seem to fit within the paradigm you have in front of you.

Etienne: I love it.

Douglas: ’Cause your company might be different tomorrow.

Etienne: It’s like when we say, you know, “It starts with having awareness, or it starts with having a growth mindset,” or, like you said, it starts with being vulnerable. When we have those words, they get used so often and they get applied to everything so freely. We actually forget that to be those things is extremely hard and requires a level of determination to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or to choose to go there through vulnerability, and, I think, more often than not, we’re actually not willing to do the very things that we say we should be.

Douglas: I love that you said that because the word that was in my head that I was about to follow up with was commitment. So, and that runs deep because at one level, you have to come committed to yourself and the people that you’re meeting with. It can’t just be like, “I’m coming to check this thing out,” because, let’s be honest. It’s very lonely at the top. Once you’re the CTO, you’re the person that was hired to know it all, to have all the answers. So, you can’t, inside your organization, say, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” I mean, maybe you can, and I would invite you to try and figure out how because you will have an amazing relationship with leadership if you can get to that point, but, a lot of organizations can’t be there.

Douglas: And, in fact, creating the support group of peers where you have an environment where you can do that will make it more likely that you will have the confidence to go back and create that environment at home or in the company where you work. And so, there’s that level of commitment, commitment to the process, to yourself and to the people you’re coming to, but then there’s this commitment of in the moment. It’s sort of like: I think about skateboarding, and I remember the more complicated tricks that I used to be able to do them. Even though I could do them and I knew that I could do them, if, in my head, I was apprehensive or I thought I wasn’t going to make it, I would bail, or I would fall. Every time I hurt myself, it was because I thought, “Oh no, I’m not going to do this,” but, every single time that I went in knowing that I was going to hit that goal or do that kickflip or that pressure flip or that back heel and 180 or whatever it was, I nailed it. And so, committing in the moment is super critical.

Etienne: Yeah, and I feel like that commitment requires … you need to be okay with the time it takes to do it, and you need to sort of be oblivious to your environment. In other words, let me invert that. If you are thinking, “I don’t have the time for this commitment,” then you are not gonna commit because, “Hey, I have to …” or, if you are so consumed by your circumstance and environment, you can’t be in the moment to bring that sort of commitment to somebody because you’re thinking, “Well, I’ve got these emails. I’ve got this.” So, the struggle, I feel like, in this society, is to be able to give each other the time to actually commit.

Douglas: That opens the door for an awesome plug for Jake Knapp’s new book called Make Time.

Etienne: Oh, see what I did there, Jake? jakeknapp.com, see what I did? Is it jakeknapp.com?

Douglas: I don’t know. I don’t know the book. I think the book is maybe even maketime.com, but The Sprint Book is thesprintbook.com.

Etienne: So, yeah, I know Make Time came out. We had a long conversation about it yesterday, so, tell me about it.

Douglas: Yeah, you know, I think, again, Jake is taking … I think the real invention was that he took this body of work that’s like, difficult to navigate because there’s so much going on and distilled it down into a repeatable process that you can really own and understand and make personal for yourself. So, same thing he did for The Sprint Book. In The Sprint Book, he took design thinking and distilled it down into a repeatable set of steps, and Make Time, he basically took time management and productivity tools and processes and methods and baked those down into something that’s very easy for anyone to approach.

Douglas: And, the big idea is that you should pick a highlight, because there’s so much stuff going on. It’s less about, “How do we do more?” It’s about selecting the things that are important. It’s like working on the important things, not the urgent things. So, instead of … one of his things is like the distraction-free iPhone, so turning off all the little notifications. So, he went so far to the extreme that it’s just a phone, now. He has two modes. It’s like, all it does is text and call people, and then he’ll turn on some apps. But, even when he turns on the apps, all the badges and everything are disabled, so you’re not constantly like, durr, durr, durr.

Etienne: Does he describe that in the book?

Douglas: Yeah. And so, in addition to having this kind of high-level framework that’s pretty, I would say, pretty loose. It’s just this concept of a highlight and how you use it and a few components, but then there’s this giant list of recipes, if you will, of different little things that you could do. And so, if the distraction-free iPhone’s not for you, then maybe the back burner is an idea that might work. So, there’s just all these different little hacks and tricks and tips that you can fit into your framework.

Douglas: But, there’s actually … I interviewed someone from my innovation series, Maura Thomas, and she’s got a book coming out called Attention Management, and I think it’s a nice companion to Make Time, ’cause Make Time really is about attention management, but I didn’t wanna use that term without referencing her because she’s the first one that I heard that term from and I think it’s so beautiful, ’cause we talk about productivity and trying to do more and be more efficient, and, her thought is, “Maybe we should just manage our attention. Like, what’s the important thing for us to focus on?” And that’s the real idea around his highlight.

Douglas: So, for instance, you might say, “My kids are my highlight right now,” so, as long as I spend time with my kids tomorrow, then … so, as long as I spend time with my kids tomorrow, then tomorrow is a success. Or, maybe I have to get this proposal out, so, as long as I get this proposal out, tomorrow is a success. So, it’s all about just identifying the most critical thing that you’re gonna focus on no matter what.

Etienne: Well, I think the thing that … so, in Seven CTOs, we poll all our CTOs regularly, and, time management and productivity is, I think, the second highest issue.

Douglas: What’s number one?

Etienne: Number one is finances, company finances and investments.

Douglas: Interesting. So, is it about the understanding how to read PNLs and feel like they don’t-

Etienne: No, it’s more run rates and securing-

Douglas: Is it anxiety about that stuff or how they can impact it?

Etienne: It’s all of that. I would say, in its worst form, it’s anxiety. In other words, “When do I know that my company’s actually going downhill?” It’s easy to know that when you only have $100 and you’ve got $1,000 worth of commitments. It’s much harder to know that when you’re spending a dollar to make a 99 cent pencil and you’re like, “I’m not sure, if, are we, with external funding, with our current revenues, are we actually going backwards?” And so, I think at the CTO level, while we’re building these products and these teams, to know, on a personal level, is my CEO … do they know what they’re doing? But, on a business level, am I understanding the mechanics correctly to know that I’ve backed the right horse, so, the finances, the productivity and time management. And then, the third one is sort of a whole bunch of things closely related around building teams, like hiring, for instance, as a … keeping that hiring pipeline going. But, I love the time management stuff. I’m definitely gonna read the book. It’s a big one for me, too.

Douglas: Yeah, for sure. It’s a challenge. The more you … it’s both the more you grow as an individual and the more your organization grows, that problem gets more and more difficult, and, you can’t … again, it’s: the things that work today aren’t going to work tomorrow, so you might have one-on-one meetings to communicate the most important stuff. Well, that’s not gonna scale, and so, I think, a lot of times, time management comes down to practices that have kind of overstayed their usefulness, and how do we think about automating even communication and how information gets distributed throughout the organization.

Etienne: Well, and, like you said, the willingness to say, “This worked for them. This worked yesterday, but let’s just put it on the table and say, ‘Well, how is it not working today?’ or, ‘What other processes or ideas should we pursue today?’” I think, like you said, many times, we just do these processes because that worked once and then it became part of our DNA and now that’s just what we do. I think that’s very dangerous.

Douglas: And then, also, I’m a big fan of, if it hasn’t been clear already, just unleashing everyone, and I’m curious now … it’d be really interesting to know how many of those individuals have had that conversation with their teams, you know? I’m doing these things. What should I not be doing?

Etienne: Who’s me and who’s my team?

Douglas: Sorry. So, CTO … you said CTOs felt that their number two problem was time management.

Etienne: Okay, got it, got it.

Douglas: Have they discussed their time management issues with their teams?

Etienne: Probably not, probably not.

Douglas: And, you know, I had a buddy; he was a VP of engineering, but the company didn’t have a CTO, so, same kind of territory that I think a lot of your forum members are in, and, he did this interesting thing. He created a personal kanban for himself, and he made it public, so the entire team … talk about transparency: his entire team could see everything he was working on. You know what that did?

Etienne: Gave him more time.

Douglas: Yep, because, what happened, is the team were like, “You shouldn’t be doing that,” and they start taking stuff off his plate.

Etienne: Wow. So, listen: let’s wrap this up.

Douglas: Yeah.

Etienne: So, Douglas, who should people talk to? Can they reach you?

Douglas: Absolutely. I’m a big fan of networking and I love helping people out. So, I would just encourage folks to find me on LinkedIn or just email me at douglas@votagecontrol.co, and I do a ton of writing, so definitely check out my website, votagecontrol.co, and I think this audience might really enjoy the Innovation series. If you just click on innovation, you can see all the articles I’ve written, basically profiles on amazing people like Etienne, which I haven’t convinced to come on yet, but, maybe soon.

Etienne: Okay, cheers.

Etienne: Have you chatted with a CTO lately? I thank you for listening to the CTO Studio. If you don’t mind, take a quick second and please rate and review the show. It helps us a lot. Go to thectostudio.com for more information on what we’re doing at Seven CTOs. We also have a video or two for you that could be a helpful resource for you as you’re managing your company. So, thank you for listening.

The post How Diversity Can Generate Simple Solutions to Complex Problems 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.

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 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!

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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.

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Voltage Control is a consultancy that provides companies and executives with trusted guidance in technology strategy, sustainable processes, and innovation workshops. Everything Voltage Control does is in service of empowering clients to reach their full potential.

“We brought on Voltage Control as a fractional CTO while we searched for a full-time CTO. They delivered a comprehensive technical assessment, helped us prioritize our technical strategy and even optimized some of our internal processes. When talking to investors, we’re proud to mention Voltage Control as a strategic part of our business.”

— Morgan Linton, Co-Founder & CRO at Bold Metrics

What Does a Fraction CTO/CPO Do?

I decided to launch Voltage Control to leverage my 20 years of experience and share my technology and product expertise with a broader audience. One of the main ways I engage with companies and executives is as a Fractional CTO/CPO. If you’re new to the term, let me explain…

A Fractional CTO/CPO can:

1. Collaborate to research, design and execute your technology strategy.

2. Assess your technology landscape to highlight the risks and opportunities, create your technology roadmap and help ensure they are delivered in a timely, cost-effective manner.

3. Work with your executive team to identify how technology can be used strategically to accomplish your business objectives.

“Douglas is one of the most impressive and versatile technology leaders I’ve had the privilege of working with. Hands down one of the best. Disciplined, nimble, and magnanimous — Douglas represents true Animal values, which is why we at Animal Ventures choose whole heartedly to work with him.”

— Tom Serres, Animal Ventures

What Are Typical Fractional CTO/CPO Services?

My clients vary in size, industry, and the challenges they face. But, typically, the companies I work with are: launching a new product, optimizing an existing product, looking for someone to augment their CTO, or backfilling a departing CTO.

The following services are the most common:

Holistic Technical Audit

Activities may include:

• Architecture Review
• Scalability Assessment
• Build vs. Buy Recommendations
• Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Capital Allocation, ROI Evaluation, and Budgeting
• Understand & Mitigate Risk, Compliance & Security

Product Strategy

Activities may include:

• Identify MVP
• Innovation Workshops
• Design Sprints
• Requirement Gathering
• Product Market Fit Assessment
• Problem Solution Fit Assessment
• Develop cohesive plan from Vision to Product Roadmap

Organizational Health Audit

Activities may include:

• Team Interviews
• Organization & Team Structure Assessment
• Recruiting & Hiring Strategy Definition
• Productivity, Process & Communication Audit
• Team ‘Health’ & Morale Appraisal
• Training & Onboarding Best Practices

Interim CTO

Activities may include:

• Technology Trend Insights
• Tech Evangelist for Important Meetings
• Software Development Management
• Define Key Performance Metrics
• Manage Vendor Selection
• Mentor Existing Technical Leadership
• Create Transition Plan/Vet Candidates.

What to Expect: My Process

Unless a client requests something custom, I usually tackle any project with my standard three-step process: (1) Discover, (2) Assess, and (3) Plan.

During Discovery, I interview the team along with business stakeholders, and attend as many internal meetings as possible. My objective is to take it all in, be a great listener, and record what I am observing. Next, I move into the Assess phase, which involves synthesizing my findings, conducting further research and presenting my results to stakeholders. Finally, I discuss final recommendations and deliver a Plan of action in collaboration with my sponsor and relevant stakeholders. Usually, the proposal highlights easy wins, targeting things we can accomplish in the next three weeks that will provide maximum impact.

Think You’d Benefit from a Fractional CTO/CPO? Let’s Talk.

If you’re interested in talking about how I might be able to assist you, let me know. (The first 30 minutes are always free!) I’d love to meet and hear about your goals and challenges. Please email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co to set up an initial meeting.

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We first met Douglas about a year after our company moved from Los Angeles to Austin. We getting to know the who’s who of the Austin startup scene and the name Douglas Ferguson kept coming up. What was interesting was the commonality in the recommendations for Douglas — he not only knows how to build a team, but he’s a real team player.

Fast forward to June of this year and we were looking for someone to consult with us part-time both to help make sure our AWS setup was rock solid, and to give insights into how we could better organize all things engineering. It was a hard combination of skills to find in a consultant and most we met with were more tactical and focused on writing code or building a system, not on helping an engineering team work better together.

When we met with Douglas and did a deeper dive into his background we realized, this is that special mix of skills we were looking for. Now the question was, would the team like him?

That’s the challenge with a consultant that goes beyond delivering code or solving a specific task, we were looking for someone that could look at our team, how we all worked together, and help us find ways to improve. We told our team, be totally honest, if you don’t feel like he’s a fit here, let us know, we only want to bring him onboard if we all feel like he can help.

After the first day with our team it was clear that Douglas had a really unique way of doing things. He didn’t come into our company with a set way to do things. He didn’t reference books he’d read that suggested we do things a certain way, instead he just listened.

The result was an almost instant level of comfort between our team and Douglas. Over time, this listening allowed Douglas to really take a step back and understand how we were working together and where we could improve. In a couple of weeks it was safe to say that Douglas wasn’t an outside consultant looking in, he was a real team player that we all felt was bought-into helping us streamlined the way we worked together.

Fast forward to today and Douglas really does feel like a member of the team. He’s gotten his hands dirty and learned the intricacies of our system, and at the same time, he’s created one seriously kick-ass Trello board that has helped us better communicate and prioritize engineering goals as a team. These goals are now alongside sales goals and marketing goals so that we’re all working together as a cohesive unit, rather than distinct and separate departments like we were before.

In short, Douglas is the definition of the team player. Sure, you can hire a consultant to do one specific thing, and there are plenty of amazing people out there that can do what you’re looking for. It takes a very special person to come in and not just improve how your team works together, but do so while becoming part of the team.

Startups are busy and hectic places, for some people that can mean disorganization and chaos. For people like Douglas, it is an opportunity to add a sense of calm, a feeling of organization, and a positive vibe that I think every company needs. The way we work together continues to evolve, and as our company grows so does our relationship with Douglas.

Originally we were looking for a consultant, I’m happy to say that what we found was someone that I think we all know is more than that — he’s a member of our team. He might not be there all day every day, but he always adds value and is always there when we need him. Now I’m just crossing my fingers he decides to continue to follow this path for years to come…but if not, I can tell you we’ll be competing with whoever is trying to take him off the market because it’s not easy to find people like Douglas.

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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.

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