Episode 30 wraps up our third season of the Scaling Tech Podcast! Every 10 episodes, we do a recap episode of lessons learned from our guests. In this special episode of the Scaling Tech Podcast, we review some of our favorite clips from episodes 21-29. In this episode, we share favorite clips with our guests covering topics such as site reliability engineering, probabilistic forecasting, mentoring, software estimation, offsites, engineering team health, AI, and more!
If you are new to the Scaling Tech Podcast, this episode will provide a quick way for you to get a sense of our recent guests from Season Three, and you can also refer back to our previous recap of Seasons One and Two linked to below. You can use the links below to find the show notes and links for each of these episodes for the guests and topics you want to explore next!
We’ll be back in 2024 with more episodes and fantastic guests on the Scaling Tech Podcast!
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Show notes with links to jump ahead are below
Show Notes from Episode 30 – Lessons Learned and Season Three Recap
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- 02:15 Episode 21 – Jen Dary on Mentoring First Time Managers Getting promoted into management can be the most exciting and terrifying moment of a person’s career. In this episode, we speak with Leadership Coach Jen Dary about her work training and mentoring managers, and the particularly difficult aspects of being a first time manager.
- 06:35 Episode 22 – George Dinwiddie on Software Estimation Without Guessing Most of us have a love/hate relationship with software estimation. Estimation is an important skill, but it’s often misused and misunderstood, especially in unhealthy team cultures. When used properly, it can be a powerful tool for team communication and to enable good business decision making. In this episode, we speak with author George Dinwiddie about the value of estimation, and the biggest mistakes organizations make when asking their teams for an estimate.
- 10:00 Episode 23 – Kelly Shortridge on Security Chaos Engineering and Resilience To achieve software resilience, you must design in security, and treat it as part of software quality. In this conversation, author and security expert Kelly Shortridge shares with us exactly how to do that – covering topics such as the philosophy of software resilience, Evaluation and Experimentation, Self Serve Security, and what it means to be “Safe to Fail.”
- 14:20 Episode 24 – Dr. Barbara Wixom on Data is Everybody’s Business In today’s world, data is no longer the purview of data scientists alone. Data is Everybody’s Business, which is also the title of Professor Barb Wixom’s new book from MIT Press. In this conversation, we learn how to monetize data via Improving, Wrapping, and Selling. Barb talks with us about acceptable data use, and shares details on her framework of Capabilities, Initiatives, and Connections, for generating business value from your data assets.
- 18:25 Episode 25 – Vijay Parthasarathy on AI and the Future of Work What is the future of AI, and how will it affect the way that we conduct work? In this episode we speak with an expert in the field: Vijay Parthasarathy, Head of AI and ML at Zoom. Vijay will draw on his experiences in AI at Zoom, Meta, and Apple, as well as the unique industry perspective of Zoom. By virtue of their position as a leading video chat application used by businesses and individuals globally, their Zoom AI Companion will no doubt affect the future of work, and we as engineering leaders need to be prepared for these changes in our own workflows as well as in the products we build.
- 28:00 Episode 26 – Allison McMillan on Engineering Team Health and Offsites Building a good team is like solving a puzzle, as our guest Allison McMillan describes in this episode of the Scaling Tech Podcast. Allison is an engineering leadership consultant who works as a fractional VP of Engineering, and also consults to companies on Engineering Team Health and highly effective Team Offsites. Allison shares with us her experiences at GitHub and what it taught her about building teams, and how she has translated that knowledge into audits of engineering team health for her clients.
- 33:15 Episode 27 – Dr Vladyslav Ukis on Site Reliability Engineering How do you engineer your systems to be highly reliable, especially in a regulated environment like healthcare? Dr Vladyslav Ukis joins us to explain the concepts of Site Reliability Engineering, how to choose and manage Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets, and how to combine it with Continuous Delivery.
- 36:50 Episode 28 – Jurgen Appelo on How to “unFIX” Agile Scaling Scaling technology is one thing, but scaling technical teams is quite another. In this episode, we talk with author Jurgen Appelo about his “unFIX” pattern for scaling agile teams. We talk about the challenges of scaling agile teams, team empowerment, innovation, managers and mentoring.
- 43:35 Episode 29 – Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh on Kanban and Probabilistic Forecasting Forecasting is inherently probabilistic – meaning that we cannot say anything definitively about the future, we can only give the probability that something may happen. This is intrinsic to software development but a hard concept to convey to those who just want to know “when will the work be done?”. In this conversation we speak with Kanban experts and the co-hosts of the Drunk Agile Podcast: Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh. We talk about flow, forecasting, service level expectations, work item aging, and more!
- 48:55 Conclusion Arin and David wrap up this episode and Season Three, please join us in 2024 for our next season the Scaling Tech Podcast. Thanks to all of our listeners, and if you haven’t already, please give us a 5 star rating and subscribe to the Scaling Tech podcast on Apple, Spotify and YouTube to keep up to date with our upcoming interviews!
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Links from Episode 30 – Lessons Learned and Season Three Recap
- Episode 21 Jen Dary on Mentoring First Time Managers
- Episode 22 George Dinwiddie on Software Estimation Without Guessing
- Episode 23 Kelly Shortridge on Security Chaos Engineering and Resilience
- Episode 24 Dr. Barbara Wixom on Data is Everybody’s Business
- Episode 25 Vijay Parthasarathy on AI and the Future of Work
- Episode 26 Allison McMillan on Engineering Team Health and Offsites
- Episode 27 Dr Vladyslav Ukis on Site Reliability Engineering
- Episode 28 Jurgen Appelo on How to “unFIX” Agile Scaling
- Episode 29 Dan Vacanti and Prateek Singh on Kanban and Probabilistic Forecasting