Becoming a startup VPE: challenges, stories and actions

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Becoming a startup VPE: challenges, stories and actions

Name: Becoming a startup VPE: challenges, stories and actions
Start: 2019-10-31T12:30:00
End: 2019-10-31T04:00:00
Location: Harness

Speakers Agenda Venue

About this Event

Moving into the VPE job at a scaling startup means adding a set of skills and approaches, and de-emphasizing others, some of which may have been very successful up to now.

We will look at the issues that come up in coaching VPEs at scaling startups and the actions that work to overcome them. Some of the topics we plan to cover (if time permits):

View horizon, and time vs strategy. You now need to own some part of the company strategy - your "view horizon" needs to be at least two years. But you don't have any time to spend on creating it. How do you handle that?
Hiring. It's just hard, time-consuming, frustrating. What works?
Being on the executive team. Running your function is now table-stakes. What do you bring to the executive team?
Creating culture. the culture of your org is being formed daily. You can consciously shape it, or let it become what it will become. Consciously shaping it is better

About this Event

Moving into the VPE job at a scaling startup means adding a set of skills and approaches, and de-emphasizing others, some of which may have been very successful up to now.

We will look at the issues that come up in coaching VPEs at scaling startups and the actions that work to overcome them. Some of the topics we plan to cover (if time permits):

View horizon, and time vs strategy. You now need to own some part of the company strategy - your "view horizon" needs to be at least two years. But you don't have any time to spend on creating it. How do you handle that?
Hiring. It's just hard, time-consuming, frustrating. What works?
Being on the executive team. Running your function is now table-stakes. What do you bring to the executive team?
Creating culture. the culture of your org is being formed daily. You can consciously shape it, or let it become what it will become. Consciously shaping it is better

Speakers (4)

Joe Dunn

Executive Coach, ex VP of Engineering

Joe is a leader, mentor and coach with over twenty years of experience at every level from engineering contributor to SVP of Engineering. Joe was a key early member of three startups that became successful public companies, and a fourth that was sold for $250M+. He currently coaches founders, CEOs and other leaders in tech to build great products, companies and cultures.

Prashant Pandey

Head of Engineering @ Asana

Prashant Pandey is the head of engineering at Asana, a leading work management platform for teams. Before Asana, Prashant started and led the bay area team building Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service.

Previously, he led engineering for mobile advertising startup Vdopia, and prior to that, worked on storage systems at IBM Research. Prashant has an MS in Computer Science from UIUC, and a BTech(Hons) in Computer Science from BITS, Pilani (India).

Joann Chuang Anderson

VP of Engineering @ Scoop Technologies

Joann Anderson is the VP of Engineering at Scoop Technologies. Previously, she was at Slack where she oversaw the Core Product teams: Internationalization, Backend Foundation, Calls, and QA. Joann honed her skills in streamlining engineering processes to accelerate release delivery at Adobe and Symantec. In her free time, she channels her inner child playing Magna-Tiles with her two kids, is learning Muay Thai, and hopes one day Marie Kondo will come into her life.

Benjamin Liebald

Head Of Engineering @ Branch.co

Ben is the Head of Engineering at Branch International, a startup providing financial services to millions of customers in emerging markets (India, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria). At Branch, Ben leads the Engineering & Data Science teams and is closely involved in setting overall company strategy.

Prior to Branch, Ben founded Rep, a startup focused on revolutionizing how customers communicate with businesses via messaging (funded by Accel, First Round, and others) and held senior engineering leadership roles at Google, where he led YouTube's Recommendation and Personalization teams and helped YouTube scale to over 1 billion users.

Agenda

5:30 PM - 6:20 PM PDT

Check-in, food, networking

6:20 PM - 6:30 PM PDT

Opening remarks

6:30 PM - 6:55 PM PDT

Keynote

Joe Dunn

Executive Coach, ex VP of Engineering

6:55 PM - 7:30 PM PDT

Panel

Prashant Pandey