How to Build a Technical Strategy That Solves Business Problems | CircleCI CTO, Rob Zuber
Plus, how to measure your performance as an engineering manager, why it's harder than ever to learn in 2024 & why you need to make mistakes.
It doesn’t matter if you have an innovative technical strategy if you’re not solving problems the business cares about…
This week, host Conor Bronsdon sits down with Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI. They delve into the evolving role of engineering leaders, and the importance of building a technical strategy that aligns with overarching business goals.
Throughout the conversation, Rob emphasizes the importance of focusing on customer needs, gathering direct feedback and maintaining strategic flexibility. If you want to understand the balance between technical strategy and business leadership, this episode provides a wealth of knowledge, strategies, and real-world examples.
“For me personally, I even think of technical strategy as secondary. It allows me to focus more of my energy on my first team, which is the executive of the company.
My job is to solve the problems of the business, and if technology is helpful, I will apply technology.”
Episode Highlights:
01:38 Crafting technical strategy for teams at CircleCI
07:26 Making the most informed choices about your business
17:47 Using postmortems to fuel a growth mindset
22:39 Applying hypotheses to be prepared for worst-case scenarios
27:43 Solving Business Problems > Technical Strategy
33:17 Advice for ICs or Directors on becoming a business leader
39:17 Building trust & organizational design
44:36 Being a technical founder
55:12 What is CircleCI doing in ML?
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. How Do You Measure Your Impact as an Engineering Manager
Quantifying success for engineering managers is much less cut and dry than it is for their teams delivering software. Eugene Shulgaoutlined how he thinks about measuring performance for engineering management roles using a mix of quantitative measures like project delivery, and qualitative surveys of stakeholders/team members.
2. The “errors” that mean you’re doing it right
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems.” - Frank Wilczek, 2004 winner of Nobel for Physics
You need to be taking risks if you want to push your company or team to the next level. This inevitably includes making mistakes along the way: even if you have to pivot from the new strategy that you worked tirelessly on, it’s all a part of the growth process.
Read Jason Cohen’s “The “errors” that mean you’re doing it right”
The Engineering Leader's Guide to Goals and Reporting (Sponsor)
Efficiency is still top of mind for most companies, and software teams are no exception. Engineering leaders need to know — and be able to show — that their teams are delivering operational excellence and driving business impact.
Without clear, data-backed goals, companies cannot compete. Download this guide to learn how to leverage metrics program data, resource allocation visibility, and workflow automation to set and meet improvement goals.
3. Why It's Harder Than Ever to Learn Something New in 2024
Do you have an extensive list of books to read or videos to watch, but an inability to actually “do” any of it? Decision paralysis is all too common with today’s wealth of content, but thankfully, Lucas Chitolina has put together a practical list to help others learn in 2024.
Read: Why It's Harder Than Ever to Learn Something New in 2024
4. There should be a plus-minus stat for developers
Plus-minus is a stat in basketball that tracks how a team performs when a player is on the court, and there should really be an equivalent for engineering organizations. Not everyone can be writing code (scoring), you equally need people to review code or keep pipelines efficient (playing defense).
LinearB CEO and Co-founder Ori Keren was on the The Local MaximumPodcast where he talks about sports, engineering team dynamics, and LinearB:
Thanks for mentioning Conor!