Event On-Demand: Tech CTO Chats

Two Tech CTOs, Doug Rathbone from Airtasker and Tony Young from Linkly chat about topics close to their roles and hearts.

The First 90 days in a Private Equity-Backed Firm

Tony will chat openly about what it is like starting as a CTO at a private equity-backed firm and the unique challenges posed, including covering:   

• Laying the foundations for growth
• Establishing ways of working as a CTO
• Best ways to set up goals for your team
• Is an MBA really worth it? 

Scaling Empowered Engineering Teams – Puppy Dogs and Wolves

Domesticated dogs are said to have the mental age of toddlers due to being fed and watered around the clock. Wolves hunt and survive as a pack and are true apex predators. Building and scaling effective engineering teams is just as much about building autonomous leaders with strong judgement as it is about technology choices. That starts with engineering leaders learning how to truly own their team’s success.

The Software Development business was started with a service mindset that has stuck; engineers get given requirements and asked to deliver features. This tends to force engineers to focus on what’s within their control, such as design and architecture, without truly understanding both sides of most engineering trade-offs around speed vs quality and customer impact.

Defining a culture of accountability and expectations around outcomes, not outputs, forces team members to build critical thinking skills left dormant in many roles.

By adopting an empowered product team’s operating model, you only need to add a few key artefacts and rituals to a team’s planning and reporting processes as a forcing function for org-wide success.