Dave Rhodes, CEO @ Sauce Labs, joins the pod to discuss the value of great digital experiences & how/why quality issues affect companies’ bottom lines, and how to connect bugs to the business! Dave dissects strategies for addressing quality issues, examples connecting quality with the bottom line, best practices for quality testing strategies, and incorporating the philosophy of embracing the impossible within your eng teams. We also cover highlights of Dave’s recent report, “Every Experience Counts” exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. And to set the stage & magnify the stakes, the Crowdstrike & Microsoft outage coincidentally happened the day we hit record.

In our latest episode, we’re coming to you live from Config 2024, Figma’s annual design conference for people who build products! This is our first time ever doing a live interview from another conference, so we are excited to share it with you. We’re joined by Marcel Weekes, VP of Engineering @ Figma. In our conversation, we dive into topics including highlights from Config 2024 & reactions to Figma’s latest feature demos (like Dev Mode), how Figma’s eng teams are involved in product design iterations, why product support teams help preserve Figma’s community, strategies for incorporating feedback into design / product roadmaps, best practices for prioritization conversations, and more. Marcel also shares a preview of what to expect from his session on collaboration @ ELC Annual 2024!

Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar) is VP, and Head Engineering at Shopify via the acquisition of Helpful.com where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs via the acquisition of Xtreme Labs. Farhan is an avid investor and advisor to startups in Toronto and San Francisco, including being a mentor at yCombinator and First Round Capital. Previously, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering at Rotman and Computer Science/EE at Waterloo.

In Part 3 of the Top 10 Challenges series, we’re addressing the biggest org-level challenges that eng leaders face. We’ve compiled conversations from past podcasts and conference sessions that cover org-related topics, such as aligning engineering & business goals, team topologies & org resourcing, and thinking strategically. This episode features a slate of top eng leaders with valuable insight to share: Jessica McKellar @ Pilot, Andrew Lau @ Jellyfish, Samir Naik @ Plaid, Former VPE @ Robinhood Surabhi Gupta, Aaron Erickson @ NVIDIA, Mike Tria @ Gusto, Emad Elwany @ Docusign, and Scott Woody @ Metronome.

This is Part 2 of our Top 10 Challenges series! In this episode, we’re focusing on three common team challenges that eng leaders face: how to increase velocity without losing quality, measure productivity & create meaningful metrics, and work cross-functionally with other teams. We identified these challenges based on conversations with hundreds of eng leaders from podcast episodes, ELC events, and more. For this ep, we’ve pulled insights from various eng leaders, including Richard Wong @ enrich, Fatemah Alavizadeh @ Notion, Andrew Fong @ Prodvana, Randall Koutnik @ Jellyfish, Abi Noda @ DX, Barbara Nelson @ InfluxDB, Laura Fay @ L Fay Associates, and Jeremy Henrickson @ Rippling.

In today’s episode, we’re kicking off a four-part series on the Top 10 challenges eng leaders face based on feedback from hundreds of eng leaders. In Part 1 of this mini-series, we’re tackling the first four issues: developing & coaching team members, strategies for motivating & inspiring others, influencing / creating organizational buy-in, and managing up & sideways. This episode compiles some of the best insight we’ve gained on these issues from a collection of past ELC episodes, ELC Annual sessions, events, and more, with insight from Tara Ellis @ Netflix, Elaine Zhou @ SageCXO, Pete Peterson @ Riviera Partners, Johnny Ray Austin @ Best Egg, Jan Chong @ Tally, Matt Spitz, Laura Tacho @ DX, and Preeti Kota @ Atlassian, and Dan Kador @ Abridge.

Today’s conversation focuses on building scalable hiring processes as your org grows and creating systems that promote operational excellence, featuring Stephen Poletto, CTO @ Lattice. He shares examples of how they introduced & scaled their hiring processes to better articulate employee value propositions, implement experience differentiators, and created hiring rubrics & loop documentation. Stephen also reveals strategies for defining what operational excellence looks like within your org, how certain rituals impact company psychology / behavior, and steps for ending & replacing rituals that are no longer working. Additionally, we dissect frameworks for adding incentives within your eng org that improve organizational impact – and how to avoid bad incentives.

In today’s episode, we’re highlighting one of our favorite past conversations, featuring Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Included Health. We cover tools for increasing your capacity to win as an eng leader, getting unstuck in your career / moving forward, and applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity principles to the career. Wade shares stories of success – and failure – as an eng manager, best practices to measure success as an eng leader, and how to increase your team’s performance & potential.

We revisit an episode from the podcast archives – Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ Fox) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history! We cover Melody’s most important lessons negotiating on behalf of the tech org plus how they leveraged the M&A event to accelerate innovation and productivity. Melody will be joining us as one of our featured speakers @ ELC Annual 2024 (our two-day conference on 8/27-8/28! Check out our incredible line up of speakers, other conference experiences & tickets at [sfelc.com/annual2024](http://sfelc.com/annual2024) Use the exclusive discount code "**podcast10**" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount.

We discuss how to navigate the delicate balance between meeting current customer needs while also preparing for future tech trends & opportunities with Evan Welbourne, Head of AI and Data @ Samsara. Evan dissects the rapidly transforming pace of developing AI/ML products, sharing strategies for merging conversations around differing product-building processes, tips for moving seamlessly / gaining approval between product development stages, defining what customer success looks like, methods for working backward from problems, and best practices for avoiding friction throughout the product development process. He also shares frameworks for envisioning & working toward future tech possibilities while simultaneously developing hypotheses that inform future direction, creating diverse AI/ML team composition, and effectively communicating with stakeholders.