When Your Team Breaks: The Messy Growth Stage of a Startup and How to Navigate It
Summary
In this presentation, Lawrence will cover the tensions that arise in an engineering team as a startup transitions from the “0 to 1” stage into a stage of growth, customers, and company building, and how you, as an engineering leader, can navigate the pitfalls and set your team up for success!
Speakers
Lawrence Bruhmuller is currently the VP of Engineering at Great Expectations, the open source data quality solution used by thousands of data engineers in the industry. He has over 12 years of experience as an overall head of engineering, mostly focused on growth stage startups. Previous roles include CTO roles at Pave and Optimizely, and VPE roles at WeWork, ClearSlide, and Symantec.
Lawrence has been a part of small startups and also larger companies, and has developed products for individual users and also the world’s largest enterprises. In particular, he has focused on delivering cloud-first products in the B2B application and developer tooling spaces.
Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership (https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time.
Lawrence holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Amy and their three daughters.
