In Action With Wendy

Erick and David are West Coast CTOs and Advisors with an extensive background in negotiating. From Options to Lawyers, they have a well rounded strategy to ensure everyone wins in the deal.  Episode Breakdown: 0 — introductions 5:00 — leadership and teams 8:15 — importance of negotiation beyond salary 9:15 — how to think about negotiation (“win win or no deal”) 12:30 — focus on goals 13:30 — Are these options valuable? 17:15 — Adjusting for market 19:40 — Changing perspective on where you add value 24:00 — when to bring in an attorney 26:00 — Losing fear of hearing “no” 28:00 — What does an unreasonable ask look like?   David Subar  David has served as at Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer at several companies, including at Break Media (as CTO), before its merger with Alloy to become Defy Media, and at Zest Finance, where he served as CPO. David has served as an interim CTO/CPO at a number of companies, including Lynda.com (sold to LinkeedIn for $1.5B), PlutoTV, AirMedia and a major studio, wh

What started as a discussion between some folks about the VW scandal, became inspiration for this episode about ethics. Related Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_side_of_the_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_law Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship.  

Uncle Bob is a software developer, speaker and author. He has been writing code for 50 years and has written several books about software craftsmanship. This is a great episode if: You want to be a better developer You want to better support your development team You need a push to write better code and say "no"   What you will hear about: Common mistakes developers make The ethics of being a software developer Impact of the fast growth of the software industry   Related Links: Clean Coders

Randy Rayess is the co-founder of VenturePact, a service that helps companies build remote software teams and execute on software projects. He is passionate about remote work, outsourcing and software development. He previously worked in private equity at SilverLake Partners, in machine learning and in payments.  This is a great episode if: You are researching your offsite/offshore options You want to understand how to ensure a good ROI from offsite teams You want to understand how to mitigate the risks of offsite teams What you will hear about: The impact of cultural differences The value of investing in the team Ways to ensure alignment    

Chad is a developer, founder, and the CEO of thoughtbot. He has coauthored the books Rails AntiPatterns and Pro Active Record, and presented at conferences around the world. Thoughtbot works with companies of all sizes to build successful products that people love to use.   This is a great episode if:   You are a leader who wants to create a strong culture in your company You want to perform user testing in a sustainable and valuable way You are looking to outsource a project   What you will hear about:   Thoughtbot culture, history and process User Testing What happens when you invest in your people    Related Interviews: Robert Richman Debbie Madden

Host Wendy Closson interviews technologists, founders, and coaches on novel ways to find success.

Jean Barmash is currently VP of Engineering at Merchantry, an eCommerce Technology startup.  He has over 15 years of experience in software industry, and has been part of 4 startups over the last seven years, 3 as CTO / VPE and one of which he co-founded.  Prior to his entrepreneurial adventures, Jean held a variety of progressively senior roles in development, integration consulting, training, and team leadership.  He worked for such companies as Trilogy, Symantec, Infusion and Alfresco, where he consulted to Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Toyota, Microsoft, Adobe, IHG, Citi, BofA, NBC, and Booz Allen Hamilton.  Jean is passionate about raising the level of technical leadership, and for the last five years has been organizing CTO School meetup, an organization he co-founded and grew to over 1,600 members.  Jean speaks frequently at conferences, meetups, mentors at startup accelerators (ERA, Techstars), blogs (infrequently) at http://hellofoobar.com, and tweets almost just as infrequently at @jbarmash.  Jea

Esther Derby is an expert in organizational dynamics and a leading thinker in bringing agility to organizations, management, and teams. She has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. In addition to this work, she’s written over 100 articles, and co-authored two books–Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. Relevant audience: You are a technical leader who cannot get the resources, people or buy in you need. You want your teams to learn and make decisions independently Your team(s) are having trouble collaborating What you will hear about: Tactics to gain influence Retrospectives Experiential Workshops Training and Learning with Esther: Problem Solving Leadership (http://estherderby.com/workshops/problem-solving-leadership-psl) Monthly teleconferences (http://www.estherderby.com/qa-teleconferences) Agile Retrospectives (http://amzn.com/0977616649) Related Podcasts:

Joseph Benson is a brand strategist with over thirty years of experience.  He defines and expresses the brand strategies for financial services, educational institutions, non-profits, healthcare, high technology, entertainment, and retail clients. Joseph also trained as a filmmaker. His films have appeared in over a dozen festivals and have been licensed to HBO. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982. You can find out more by visiting: www.bensonbrandstrategy.com www.linkedin.com/in/josephbensonbrandstrategy Notes From Interview Becoming the “Clear Choice”  Differentiate clients/customers in minds of customers  Understand occasions of choosing company Center message around a single word Client Profile Statistics and demographics Look at the “stories they tell themselves about themselves” Understand how they make decisions and why they chose competitors The Best Stories Tells the consumer their need will be fulfilled Come in many forms — pictures, colors, fonts, sounds, words You have to define the stor

Robert Richman is a culture architect and was the co-creator of Zappos Insights, an innovative program focused on educating companies on the secrets behind Zappos’ amazing employee culture.  Robert built Zappos Insights from a small website to a thriving multi-million dollar business teaching over 25,000 students per year. Through his work, Robert has been responsible for improving the employee culture at hundreds of companies like Procter & Gamble, Whole Foods and Amazon.  Previously a Zappos spokesperson and authority on employee culture, Robert is a sought after keynote speaker at conferences around the world and has been hired to teach culture in person at companies like Google, Toyota, and Eli Lilly. He has pioneered a number of innovative techniques to build culture, such as bringing improv comedy to the workplace. His new book, The Culture Blueprint, is a systematic guide to how a workplace can help people grow, inspire amazing service, and ultimately drive revenue through amazing culture. More inf

Debbie Madden has built five companies from the ground up, is a lead generation istructor at General Assembly, and a sought after public speaker and writer, appearing in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox Business TV, the HuffingtonPost, Inc. Magazine, and more. Prior to Stride, Debbie was the CEO of Cyrus Innovation, an Agile software development consulting firm, which she grew Cyrus into a 60-person, multimillion-dollar, five-time Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies winner, and Crain’s NY Best Place to Work.  How does a team realize their best? Improve in small steps, not trying to change the world overnight Expand on strengths Identify risks, past success, factors in control Make the process of software development more reliable   Honesty What are your goals, are they realistic? Adding value is making product better People’s opinions are based on past life experiences   Risk Decisive — set tripwires “Liftoff” meeting — Diana Larson, Liftoff Create working agreements, risk assessment Proactively m

Jessica Barnett is a Product Manager at a startup called Medivo. At Medivo, they’ve adopted Trello to organize just about everything, including their retrospectives. After seeing the positive impact of retros, there was company-wide adoption, starting with the c-suite. Not only has the company embraced some agile practices, the team has been able to influence business to reduce overwhelm, staying aligned with their top priorities. Trello Retrospectives See Jess’ post detailing their process Its the one time the whole team is focused on improving our lives Influencing Business Retros pulled across company, starting with c-suite Creating visibility on overwhelm Many different ways to tell the same story How can we ensure if this is the most important thing it is what we are focused on? What worked Demonstrated velocity improvements with focused efforts Pushed back on requests Gained clarity on top priorities If you want us to do great work, this is the way we’re going to do it Needed support to say “no” VP of T

John Shiple  — Freelance CTO, technology advisor — triages businesses, help business scale, launches new businesses. John's been in technology over 20 years and loves building websites.      In Part 2 of this interview, John and I continue our discussion about founders and startups needing (or not needing) CTOs. Red flags to watch out for (both the founder and the CTO) as well as some stories and philosophies based on John's experiences and expertise.   Part 1 can be found here.

  John Shiple — Freelance CTO, technology advisor — triages businesses, help businesses scale, and launches new businesses. He's been in technology over 20 years and loves building internet sites.  In Part 1 of this interview, John and I discuss important topics for non-technical Founders to consider including recruiting challenges, expressing ideas, and the importance of a technical leader. This is a great episode for both founders and technical leaders to get an understanding of common challenges and misalignments. Notes from Interview Collection of Videos about CTOs, recuriting and startups by John (created by DocStoc) Common weaknesses (business side) miscommunication on product needs lack of background in technology  fragile relationships between business and technology technology is the least important - you need to have the right people building the right things Recruiting Help more challenging than other domains if you have a good friend from college that knows CS, get them onboard every techie is wor

Joanna Clay is a reporter for The Orange County Register. Previously she was working with the Los Angeles Register and covered the West Side with a focus on tech and the Silicon Beach phenomena. In this episode we discuss her takeaways and observations in creating the article on Why there aren’t more women in the tech industry (pdf version). Interview highlights Article Summary  1. Companies need to advertise opportunities in a way that is appealing to women 2. Girls need messaging from a young age that encourages exploration into engineering 3. Engineering needs to be discussed more in the media and schools Projects Creating Shifts Hopscotch — Getting girls excited about tech at young ages Changing the Conversation -- Initiative to change the way we speak about engineering Girls Explore Engineering Santa Monica Youth Tech Program   VC needs more women too! oasis summit -- vow to be chic Jesse Draper and Valley Girl Ventures  Have a good story about tech on the west side? Contact Joanna Past interviews mentio

Ryan Janssen has been creating and leading companies for the last 20 years. His latest venture, Collectively, aims to improve the way people work. Ryan and Wendy discuss the lonely entrepreneuer, the challenges around working by yourself as well as how his company, Collectively, is evolving. It is a fun conversation for anyone who has worked by themselves, started a company or likes the Borg. Notes from the Interview lonely entrepreneur corporate culture sucks…talk in a way, dress in a way, interact in a way with people that just isn’t you companies provide colleagues socially isolated environment bipolar role — company cheerleader and risk mitigator challenges we’re all afraid to get our stuff in front of people rabbit hole w/o outside opinions fear inhibits success evolve based on experiments  

Ken Judy has twenty years experience in development and over a decade of experience leading and creating agile teams. Currently he is VP of Technology at Simon & Schuster, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. This is a great episode for technical leaders and team members to understand how to create value on their technical team beyond pushing tickets. We also discuss how the day to day actions and behaviors of leadership impact the decisions and values of the team.  Notes from Interview Improv Theater Takeaways  in theater people have a good sense of the lifecycle adjusting expectations based on constraints and timeframe constraints support creativity you can’t get performance from an actor without interacting with the actor Typical Environments developers are creating the product and often don’t have say in what they are crafting kill yourself to get to date, not make the date and then its arbitrary, so they just set another date only way to have accountability is to have a date Team Dynamic

Luke Melia is a software developer, co-founder/CTO of Yapp who loves building great teams and communities. Luke helped create the first GORUCO and the Ember.js community in NYC.  In this podcast, Luke discusses Yapp’s early adoption of Ember.js, and its impact on revenue, community and recruiting. We dive into building community, unique takeaways about Ruby, and the many benefits of community. This is a great talk for people interested in speaking, teams who need to grow, and leaders who want to infuse a vision into their culture.   Ember History Adopted Ember from Sproutcore Ember consulting funds Yapp Ember.js meeting up NYC has over 1100 people   Ruby is Unique Community No big corp behind community, the driving force was individual Motivation, style, stems from roots Community takes responsibility to fix problems   Lessons from Ruby Community Matz is nice and so we are nice People talking about it made it true Took into Ember — together we help folks climb the learning curve After a while you are saying t

Dan Mezick is a management consultant, author & keynote speaker. His work includes The Culture Game, a book based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations. He is also the cultivator of Open Space Agile Adoption. This interview is a continuation of Part I Notes from Interview   After Open Space Proceedings are the beginning Adoption is learning through experimentation, inspected at next open space Stuart Kauffman, Santa Fe Institute — The Adjacent Possible (http://edge.org/conversation/the-adjacent-possible)   Coaching Change Coaching + experimentation => learning can take place Experiments make a space for learning Cannot inflict help   Power of Invitation Pull out of comfort zone rather than push through invitation Frame it like a party Let the teams pull changes instead of pushing on them   Play A lot of work is really serious play The opposite of work is not play Solving problems doesn’t have to be heavy process   Open to Failure Games dissolve tension, mak

Steven ‘Doc’ List 35 years in software development, business owner, facilitator, agile coach   Team and People technical practices take you so far Teams that work well together more productive Learn how a team collaborates by observing choice of words indicate culture and mindset   Red Flags  Difference between facilitated and run meetings should be multidirectional, conversation — purpose, learning we’re all in this together, how do we all contribute   Facilitation Antipatterns Gladiator, Benevolent Dictator, Superhero champion - great deal of responsibility for success or failure nice people in bad positions culture of blame, a culture of fault, a culture of heroism    Role of Coaches coaches role is teaching rather than wrong/bad, asking questions telling is not a good way for influence balance guidance, question and strong suggestion take it to the team   Help the Disenfranchised stickies on the wall give people tools/ways to democratize the process Agile Retrospectives  (http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Retro