Staying Immersed in Technology as a Tech Leader with Hector Aguilar

CTO Connection Podcast

English - November 07, 2019 13:00 - 34 minutes - 23.7 MB - ★★★★★ - 20 ratings
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Previous Episode: Setting Up Infrastructure to Scale with Adam Miller

Next Episode: Balancing Delight and Metrics in Product Design with Adam Nash

According to Hector Aguilar, President of Technology at Okta, if you get too far away from technology, you can’t be an effective leader of technology. But when your day-to-day job is focused more on managing individuals, it can be hard to find the time to code.

On today’s episode, Hector and Peter discuss how making coding mandatory for all managers can help instill company values and culture. Hector also shares how he prioritizes personal projects and learning to ensure he stays on top of the technology at work.

[00:53] - Hector's origin story[02:42] - Stay close to the technology[04:02] - The challenge of keeping up[06:52] - Prioritizing what to learn and how[09:09] - The importance of credibility[09:49] - Interview code testing[16:38] - Measuring managers[19:23] - Clear expectations[21:41] - What does Okta do?[23:27] - Scaling an organization[25:52] - Keeping the quality bar high[27:49] - Culture of commitment[29:46] - Automate yourself and become a power mobile user

This episode of the CTO Connection Podcast was sponsored by Velocity by Code Climate. Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. In a few weeks, they're releasing Velocity 3.0 with Jira, which will combine Git and PR data with Issue data for the first time to give engineering executives a complete understanding of how their team works. You can now see the status of every initiative, without manual reporting, and know exactly which engineering projects get off track and why. You can request early access by going to https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
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Podcast episode production by Dante32.