Last week, Austin Tech Alliance hosted a “town hall” ideation gathering to discuss the threat of coronavirus during the upcoming SXSW Conference and Festivals and beyond. Members of the innovation community from healthcare, technology, and public policy came together to share their expertise and identify best practices and proactive measures that the Austin community can take to protect and prepare the city from the threat of COVID-19.

After hearing from professionals about the state of the virus and what processes and procedures public officials were planning to implement to control it, members of the community voiced their concerns and participated in a Voltage Control led session to workshop their fears. Note: during the session the group stopped to watch the live broadcast of Mayor Steve Adler announcing the cancellation of SXSW. Although SXSW was cancelled, the Hack Coronavirus event was used to address the threat of the virus in every day life as well as preparing for future events in Austin.

We’ve recapped the event below:

State of the Virus Address

The event was moderated by Evan Smith, CEO and Co-founder of the Texas Tribune. First, Rep. and Health Educator Donna Howard of the House Appropriations Committee spoke about the importance of establishing turnaround efforts so that the city can respond more promptly and effectively when the community is in need.

Then, Courtney Toretto delivered a statement for Congressman Lloyd Doggett, stating, “Community spread may be extensive, and disruption of everyday life may be severe.” He went on to explain that administration failures in Washington to properly handle the outbreak of coronavirus does not mean that we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. He advocated for initiatives to be made to allow people to get tested without cost and shared a few preventative measures for citizens to protect themselves, including adequately washing their hands and preparing for potential isolation.

Mayor Steve Adler then assured all attendees that administration is assessing daily risks of mass events, like SXSW, University of Texas’ new student orientation, the rodeo, etc., and how they will affect the Austin community. While the possible cancelling or altering of mass events such as SXSW will have significant economic impacts, he said, the only voice present at the table in the public health conversation is that of medical professionals.

“The only question is: what do we need to do in order to keep the people that live here the safest?” -Mayor Adler

He also iterated that the Public Health Officer and the Public Health Director carefully chose a panel of the top infectious disease specialists to answer this central question, and it was decided that what they say and recommend is what the city is going to do.

Panel: State of the Virus

Shakeel Rashed, Director, Accelerator of Capital Factory, moderated a panel discussion of three health professionals who explained the nature of the virus and its symptoms (debunking fake news), preventative measures for people to take to protect themselves, as well as the processes and procedures the medical community is taking to contain the situation. The panel included: Dr. Elizabeth Douglass, an Infectious Disease Specialist at Dell Medical Center, Dr. Spencer Fox, a Data Scientist at Yonder, and Nicholas Yagoda, Associate Chief Medical Officer at CommUnityCare.

The panel informed the room that it is important for the public and administration not to panic, and instead plan with Austin Public Health to create protocols and processes to best protect the city. Coronavirus, they said, isn’t new to us, but its rapid spread is. Therefore, it is imperative that we act with common sense and caution by educating human behavior–informing people with accurate information about the virus and how to properly avoid and deal with it instead of acting from fear.

Voltage Control Session

Voltage Control’s President Douglas Ferguson and Chief Product Officer John Fitch led a workshop that addressed and investigated the group’s worries about coronavirus. They felt it was critical to confront the emotional- and fear-based boundaries that influence or stifle behaviors during this time.

“The thought of using our tools to help the community mitigate a serious threat to our wellbeing and happiness spoke to me deeply.” -Douglas Ferguson

They invited the community to explore what frightened them the most about coronavirus to expose their fears and surface their deepest concerns. They used improv prototyping to improve various risky or critical encounters as it relates to public events.

Through several rounds of possible real-life scenario prompts–like what to do if someone sneezes on you in public or how to effectively communicate with someone who appears to have symptoms and wants to attend an event–participants were able to test and observe behaviors that served them well and others that did not serve them well.

This method allowed participants to move past the audible instructions to see and feel, enabling them to internalize the behaviors they need to mimic in daily life in order to combat their fears. Douglas and John felt it was critical for the group to consider and practice potential behavior changes if they expect to change them for a more positive, fear-free outcome.

After exploring these feelings and encounters, the session closed with everyone promising their biggest and boldest ideas and concepts for solutions. These ideas were given to the Hackathon for consideration.

Hackathon

For two days after the Ideation event, Experience Director at Mutual Mobile, Jessica Lowry, led a free Hackathon, bringing the tech community together with Mutual Mobile and Capital Factory to develop an intelligent way to detect the risk of exposure to coronavirus. Although SXSW was cancelled, the Hackathon was used as an opportunity to solve the wicked problem of how to help ensure Austinites and out-of-town visitors stay safe and informed about COVID-19.

A team of ten people of diverse backgrounds and skillsets focused on how to help inform the homeless about the virus through more accessible and contextual information tailored to their needs. According to Jessica, the best idea was to create toolkits that could be distributed at public libraries and public bus stations. The process would operate like Meals on Wheels, but with the addition of partner locations, like libraries. A user would go to the responsive webpage or physical location and either access instructions to build a kit or pick up a donated kit depending on their needs.

“I’m very proud of our small, but mighty, Hackathon team.” -Jessica Lowry

Hackathon group team leader Merida Elizondo shared her experience of the event:

“Even with SXSW canceled, chances are COVID-19 will touch our community. Jess at Mutual Mobile helped facilitate our early design thinking session and pointed out that since we were not working within the confines of solving for SXSW, we could shift our focus. Narrowing our scope was a big part of the challenge. With two days and a prompt that fed into the broader issues we face as a community, we hoped to create a resource hub that would be scalable… It was a whirlwind weekend filled with purpose and design that I hope will have an impact on how our community faces COVID-19.”

The Coronavirus Ideation event successfully informed attendees about the state of coronavirus and the efforts city and public health officials are taking to protect and prepare Austin for it. Community members’ concerns were also heard and workshopped with the help of Voltage Control, and the session encouraged effective behavior to navigate the virus’ threat, now and in the future. The Hackathon then produced innovation solutions to address the concerns of coronavirus in the Austin homeless population, further creating opportunities to help the community.

Executive Director of Austin Tech Alliance, Sarah Ortiz Fields, expressed the imperative value of hosting the event and bringing the public together:

“It’s important for us to invite the community, health care professionals, technologists and government officials to participate and create solutions that can inform and educate the public. Austin can be a best-in-class city by stepping up to help other conferences and cities around the world learn from our experience.”

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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.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the other articles here.

Growing up in Detroit, Jim Colson almost got his start as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. After learning that his dream job on the Robotics team at Texas Instruments (TI) wouldn’t be open for another year, Jim accepted a job doing vibration analysis for Rockwell International. During subsequent interviews in the automotive industry, Jim, unfortunately, learned the term layoff. “I interviewed with Cadillac and they said, ‘Here’s your offer and a one year guarantee against getting laid off.’ I said, ‘That’s great. What does ‘laid off’ mean?’”

The reality of layoffs quickly had personal significance when he learned that Rockwell International decided to downsize its workforce and revoke all college offers, including Jim’s. He turned again to TI and learned that they had opted to begin the robotics project a year early and offered him the job. “That’s what got me in Austin, that’s what got me to TI, that’s what got me into robotics. I’ve been in innovative opportunities ever since.”

After spending time in Robotics at TI, Jim realized: “the more interesting problem was — how does an application engineer write a program for a robot when they don’t understand how motion planning actually works?” This led him to move to IBM and begin working on a team building a menu-driven programming system. “I added in the ability to be computer vision guided so we could find things on a conveyor belt or loosely packed in a cardboard box, appropriately find the right position and orientation to pick them up and do the assembly without having to precisely position the objects for the robot to pick up. That got me into computer science.”

As it became clear to Jim that network connectivity was becoming ubiquitous even for non-computer devices, he and three colleagues wrote the seminal white paper for IBM called “The Tier Zero Strategy” about the phenomena now referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). The white paper questioned how IBM would respond to the emergence of what is now known as IoT devices. Following the white paper, a division was created and Jim was appointed one of the first four employees. “That was probably the closest thing I’ve had to a ‘sit and think’ job, but we had revenue and product targets. We had ecosystems to build and partnerships to establish. There were a lot of business metrics associated with that work.”

The limits of innovation measurement

Even very early in his career, Jim notes the presence of measurement. He shared that useful measurement can change based on an organization or program’s maturity. “It’s very hard to get [measurement] ‘right’ where ‘right’ means: repeatable with direct correlation to downstream success measures. Early in the innovation cycle, a number of ideas per employee is reasonable, but ultimately ideas need to be realized and that leads to direct success measures like revenue, profit, market share, etc.”

When I asked Jim about innovation programs that are shut down due to a lack of immediate ROI, he first acknowledged reality before offering a trade-off. “It’s hard to instill patience in somebody who is inherently impatient.” One way to mitigate the loss of information that comes from a program shut-down and contend with impatience is through patent filing. “Somebody will have an innovative idea. They’ll be able to describe its conceptual model sufficient for somebody skilled in the art to implement it, but they don’t have the time, resources, or the patience to implement it themselves so that becomes an invention disclosure. You submit that for potential protection from a patent standpoint, and if that idea, which really does represent a conceptual model and innovation, turns out to be valuable then there’s economic gain from that idea even if you never physically manifested it yourself. It’s a way to approximate instant gratification as compared to the actual realization and physical manifestation in the industry because you don’t have the resources to manifest all ideas.”

When it comes to funding the execution of innovative ideas, Jim points out that venture capital funding has an advantage over internal innovation programs in their increased tolerance of risk due to the economy of scale. In measuring the impact of innovative ideas and programs, Jim calls attention to the reality of innovation through some personal experiences. Through the Pervasive Computing division at IBM (today known as IoT), Jim and his team created a lot of IoT patents and technology innovation that is ubiquitous today. “The syncing of calendar entries and address book entries from your mobile device to the cloud and to other mobile devices was done through an organization that we helped create and lead, which was widely participated in called SyncML, Sync Markup Language. Virtually all the synchronization that occurs today is derived from that core intellectual property that we innovated in that body.”

“The syncing of calendar entries and address book entries from your mobile device to the cloud and to other mobile devices was done through an organization that we helped create and lead…”

Another example: “Deducing traffic by triangulating the position of cellular devices en masse on the highway, I patented with three colleagues and now it’s used everywhere. We implemented it, but we really couldn’t monetize it because it was just too far afield from a business standpoint to where the company was at the time. Had we been doing it now where there is a focus on IoT, maybe it would have been different.”

These examples illustrate that innovation is often disruptive and even great ideas fall apart because they don’t have a method of realization within the organization in which they were first gestated. While business goals and measurement are integral to innovation, it’s important to also recognize that not all aspects of innovation are fully measurable. The class libraries Jim and his team built for their clean room Java virtual machine, for example, were the foundational libraries used in Android.

“Innovation doesn’t necessarily get manifested and delivered through the organization in which the innovation occurred.”

Conceptual models in innovation and design thinking

In order for an innovative idea to be measured, it must first pass the test of understanding. Jim finds that taking an idea from the verbal stage to written form is the first step to vetting its value.

“I find that a verbal idea has to go through the crucible of writing. No matter how many times you say it to somebody, once you actually write something down, that crucible will force you to recognize whether the idea is cogent or not.”

Jim points out that the need for articulating an idea in writing is at the core of intellectual property as well. “When you write down a disclosure for potential patent submission, you have to write those kinds of things down to say this is the conceptual model of this activity.”

The writing stage then leads to the creation of a conceptual model. Jim finds that people practicing design thinking can get stuck on the visual aspects of a concept before exploring its functional value. “I don’t even like the phrase ‘look and feel’. If you interpret that phrase correctly it has proper meaning, but too often it’s interpreted to mean just the visual veneer of some conceptual idea.” Jumping to a visual representation too soon can have unintended consequences of causing engineering teams to check out of the design thinking process.

A conceptual model describes key artifacts of an idea, the relationships to those artifacts, and their movement or velocity — not just their starting point but the change in state over time as they are manipulated. A conceptual model for banking, for example, could be the idea of making a payment with a credit card. It’s not about the specifics of swiping a mag stripe, entering a number on a website, or inserting a chip. The model describes the overall concept — that you have a bank account with a certain amount of money in it. You may also have a relationship with another completely different bank who has given you the notion of credit based on your history of paying debts. When you make your purchase the credit card company makes the payment on your behalf knowing they’re going to send you a bill to pay them later and understanding that you will give them money out of your account to cover the purchases. Describing this process and flow is a conceptual model.

Jim learned how to best articulate his thoughts about conceptual models in the design process from a distinguished engineer at IBM named Carolyn Hyink. She gave him a conceptual model that, generally, describes any system design. A design is three-fold including a conceptual model of an idea (like the banking example above), a set of interaction models used to manipulate and move the conceptual model forward to execute its business process, as well as a set of visual models used with the interaction models to manipulate the conceptual model. “Thanks to Carolyn, once I had my own conceptual model around what a design was, then I could embrace the other things that were happening around design thinking that I was dismissive of because I looked at those as being only surface deep so to speak.”

Jim advocates starting with the conceptual design early in the process of innovation as a way to engage engineers and as a way to foster better communication between design and engineering teams. “Now I can effectively converse with designers. They may not have the vantage point in terms of all three of those elements of a conceptual model, but I can much more easily connect with folks in the design realm around what they’re trying to achieve. If I feel like they have a blind spot, I can, in a more informed, nuanced way, ask questions to tease out whether it’s truly a blind spot or it’s just not being articulated. Conversations are richer, the outcomes are more productive, and I think that when engineers get their head around that topic the engineering community itself will completely embrace design thinking.”

In addition to engaging engineering teams and improving communication, conceptual modeling also prevents teams from designing for a miracle.

“If you don’t really have some notion of what the conceptual model is and some reality check on what’s possible and not possible, it’s very easy to start on the outside in and design a miracle without even realizing it.”

Loose structure and a career path for innovation

In structuring innovation programs, Jim believes there are elements of culture and structure at play. To start, career paths must foster innovation. “Demonstration of innovative thinking should be rewarded just like delivering on your day job. The way you motivate people is by rewarding them in their career path that the more they swim outside of their swim lane, the more senior they can become because they are demonstrating that they’re working on behalf of the firm and not just doing a job.”

“The way you motivate people is by rewarding them in their career path that the more they swim outside of their swim lane, the more senior they can become…”

As seniority increases, reliance strictly on day job duties should be diminished in gauging job performance. “If you want to be part of a company that’s going to be innovative and transform itself multiple times in its life, you’ve got to be thinking about the next thing. Your leaders have to demonstrate that they’re thinking about the next thing and, at a minimum, at least communicating that and sharing that with others so that those ideas can build on each other and maybe find a way outside of a given budget and execution plan to execute and make something happen.”

Jim encourages organizations to allow motivated individuals to form teams around valuable ideas that catch a spark and drive innovation. “There’s some top-level guidance that has to be established to foster that mentality, but it’s almost purposefully void of any particular structure because you’re allowing people to do the very innovative self-discovery, self-forming of teams and execution that would occur in the wild outside of the place you work. That’s how startups happen.”

Barriers to innovation in large organizations

The day job is one barrier Jim sees to innovation in large organizations. “We’ve got more things to do than we have the time or people to do them.” Tasks of a day job are also more likely to be over-prescriptive when it comes to execution. Rather than telling teams what their tasks are and how to accomplish them, Jim advocates setting goals for teams and letting them innovate around achieving those goals as a way to demonstrate their ability to be creative in their execution. “You have to relax those constraints, and let people be creative.”

Jim also mentioned the influence of memory within an innovative organization. When it comes to evaluating individuals, Jim believes a more transient memory is appropriate. “If somebody has a string of ideas that don’t go anywhere, it shouldn’t become an anchor to them and it shouldn’t become a negative on their career aspirations.” As long as an individual continues to fulfill their day job and shows improvement Jim sees positive progress. “Sort of blur your eyes and recognize this person had several ideas, they’re trying. They’re motivated, they have passion, they definitely want to swim outside of their swim lane. They want to get something done. To that point, I say that’s sort of a transient memory.”

The flip side where memory needs to be more permanent comes in when tracking innovative ideas. “There needs to be some persistence of those ideas and some ability to find them, index them, and recognize them so that an idea that was created, evaluated, and dismissed isn’t ginned up from ground zero again. It might be reevaluated later because the timing was wrong. [Organizations] shouldn’t just cast away all ideas that are not being pursued at this point in time because history will inevitably be repeated. Part of the mitigation of this issue is motivation for invention disclosures we discussed earlier.”

Don’t innovate for buzzwords

“What I see happening, which often ends in complete disaster, is somebody will get so enamored with a technology that they’ll just try and make it fit everything.”

Innovation has to have a value proposition and a vision for some desired outcome. Innovating around the latest, popular technology is one area where Jim sees well-intentioned efforts go astray. “What I see happening, which often ends in complete disaster, is somebody will get so enamored with a technology that they’ll just try and make it fit everything.” When people tell Jim they need to implement AI or machine learning his first question is why. If they can’t articulate a reason, they’ve typically fallen prey to innovating for buzzwords. “They don’t look at it as a tool in the toolbox to use to drive an outcome. They just feel they have to do AI and machine learning. Some of those conversations have been so contorted that when I probe on it, they don’t even know what AI and machine learning are. They just know the buzzwords.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post He Knew About the Internet of Things Too Early 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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