Engineering and the Customer – True BFFs?
Summary
Engineering is often defined as an organization that builds things that are defined by other teams, such as product or user research teams. While this classical way of defining roles can preserve valuable engineering resources, it also means engineers become further distanced from the customers they're building for. What if there was a way to do both? In this session, Allan will discuss techniques that he has used throughout his career to help engineering teams and their customers become BFFs. He'll share insights on how engineering teams and leaders can actively connect with customers, leading to more successful products.
Speakers
Allan Leinwand is Chief Technology Officer at Webflow, leading the engineering team that is building solutions to bring development superpowers to everyone. Prior to Slack, Allan was CTO at Shopify and Senior Vice President of Engineering at Slack. Throughout his career, Allan held senior leadership positions at multiple companies and was a venture capital investor for seven years. He founded Vyatta (acquired by Brocade), the open-source networking company, and co-authored “Cisco Router Configuration” and “Network Management: A Practical Perspective” and has been granted a patent in the field of data routing. Leinwand previously served as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught on the subjects of computer networks, network management and network design. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Kalpana Jogi is the VP, Engineering at Lyft, where she leads the engineering teams for the Customer organization. Prior to Lyft, Kalpana was the Sr. Director of Technology at Visa Inc, where she led global data product engineering teams in the United States and India. She started her early career as an engineer in storage & networking startups in Silicon Valley and over the last 20 years, has grown in engineering leadership roles of increasing responsibility. Kalpana has a Masters in Computer Networks and Distributed Computing from the University of California in Irvine and holds multiple patents in the field of merchant information. Kalpana is passionate about driving inclusion in the workplace as well as mentoring engineering leaders within and outside her teams.
