You can't crack company culture with code. And so the 'WTF is Cloud Native?' team at Container Solutions brings you Hacking the Org–30 minute conversations with software leaders to share case studies of organisational structures and management techniques that don't suck. See what it takes to build company cultures that put the people first, and get practical steps to inspire you to hack your org.
Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors on Code Rewrites, Acquisitions, Observability, and Team Performance
Charles Humble talks to Honeycomb CTO and co-founder Charity Majors. They talk about her experience at Parse: re-writing Parse in Go, and her lessons from Parse’s acquisition and shut-down by Facebook. They also discuss Scuba, why Charity went from CEO to CTO at Honeycomb, places where dashboards make sense, and how to think and talk about technical team performance.
31 Mar 2023
Jennifer Mace on How Google Does SRE
Charles Humble talks to Jennifer Mace, aka as Macey. She gives us her definitions of "site reliability engineer" and “toil”, discusses how google recruits SREs, explores how to manage risk and speed, and the pros and cons of having a centralised SRE function and why that model, vs. the “You build it, you run it” model preferred by Netflix, works well at Google. She also offers advice for junior SREs and tells us what it is like when the pager goes off.
3 Mar 2023
Syntasso COO Paula Kennedy on Platform Team Responsibilities, Patterns and Anti-patterns
Charles Humble talks to Paula Kennedy about the rise of platforms. They discuss platform definitions; common anti-patterns and how to guard against them at both a team and organisational level; proving the value of a platform team to the business; setting up a platform team; lessons learned from Pivotal; and the Syntasso product.
3 Feb 2023
Adrian Cockcroft on Serverless, Continuous Resilience, Wardley Mapping, Large Memory Systems and Sustainability
Charles Humble talks to Adrian Cockcroft, ex of AWS, Battery Ventures and Netflix. They discuss: memes in computing, serverless first, chaos and ideas around continuous resilience, strategy and Wardley Mapping, using large hardware such as AWS ultra clusters, and sustainable software.
9 Jan 2023
Toli and Andy Norton from Cinch on Team Topologies, Theory of Constraints, and Serverless
Charles Humble talks to Apostolis Apostolidis (aka Toli) and Andy Norton from Cinch, arguably one of the UKs most successful start-ups. They discuss: how the company got started, how Team Topologies, the Spotify Model, and the Theory of Constraints influenced how the organisation was designed; building a learning organisation; migrating from Kubernetes to Serverless; and observability and SRE practices at the firm.
2 Dec 2022
Silicon Valley Product Group’s Christian Idiodi on Product Management Skills and Product Discovery
In this episode Charles Humble talks to Silicon Valley Product Group partner Christian Idiodi about how he got started in product management, the Certified Scrum Product Owner and MBA pathologies, how product management is badly taught, the skills you need, and how to improve.
28 Oct 2022
Sudden Compass Co-Founder Matt LeMay on Effective Product Management and Conducting User Research
Charles Humble and Matt LeMay explore what the job of product manager entails, common A/B testing pitfalls, conducting user research, dealing with senior stakeholders, and managing prioritisation.
12 Sept 2022
GitHub Director of Engineering Liz Saling on Pausing Feature Development to Focus on Tech Debt and DevEx
Charles Humble talks to Liz Saling, Director of Engineering at GitHub. They discuss the role of developer experience at GitHub, why the firm paused feature development for an entire quarter to focus on making developer experience improvements, service ownership, and handling feedback.
5 Aug 2022
Sarah Wells on The Role of a Tech Director, Internal Tech Conferences, and Developer Enablement at the FT
Charles Humble talks to Sarah Wells, Former Tech Director for Engineering Enablement at the Financial Times. They discuss the role of the tech director, explore what Developer Enablement (AKSA as Developer experience/DevEX and Developer Productivity) is, examples of DevEx tooling, running an internal tech conference, her upcoming book and reading recommendations.
1 Jul 2022
Courtney Kissler on Driving Technological Transformations at Nike, Nordstrom, Starbucks and Zulily
Charles Humble talks to Zulily CTO and SVP of Technology Courtney Kissler about experience in driving technological transformations at Nike, Nordstrom, Starbucks and Zulily. They discuss Courtney’s journey within DevOps and how her experience leading transformations at large enterprises including Nordstrom, Starbucks and Nike led her to Zulily. Topics include the importance of fixed capacity; creating a generative culture where team members feel they can be honest and supported; the 90 day framework; Value stream mapping and how this can help teams increase the flow of value to customers; technical debt and more.
1 Jun 2022
Manuel Pais on Using Team Topologies Patterns for Remote Working
Charles Humble talks to Team Topologies co-author Manuel Pais. They discuss how the rapid adoption of Team Topologies may be being driven by companies seeking a new competitive advantage as DevOps and Cloud become ubiquitous; applying software engineering thinking to organisational design; the challenges of cross-team collaboration in a remote context; and using Team Topologies patterns for remote working.
4 May 2022
Susanne Kaiser on Joining the Dots Between Wardley Mapping, Domain Driven Design and Team Topologies
Charles Humble talks to Susanne Kaiser, an independent tech consultant from Hamburg, Germany, supporting organisations with building socio-technical systems. They explore her thinking on combining Wardley Mapping with Domain Driven Design and perspectives from Team Topologies, and how this thoughts into broader ideas around socio-technical systems and optimising for fast flow.
Transcript and show notes
1 Apr 2022
VP Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay Randy Shoup on Improving their Developer Velocity
In our first "Hacking the Org" podcast, Charles Humble talks to Randy Shoup, VP Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay. They discuss how eBay’s architecture has evolved, discovering problems in engineering using value stream mapping, measuring engineering team velocity, and making cultural change. Transcriot and show notes.
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