The Kyle Rowland Podcast

Delivering at scale is a challenging problem. Kevin Fleming joins us to give us some tips and tricks that will make our software delivery safer and more reliable, today and as we scale into the future. Join us on the Kyle Rowland Podcast as we dig into this interesting and important topic. -- With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Kevin Fleming brings a deep knowledge on how to successfully deliver complex technology and software. Kevin is currently a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft focusing on Azure networking delivering scale and reliability to some of Microsoft's largest customers.  Known for his strategic leadership and engineering excellence, Kevin fosters collaboration to drive impactful outcomes. His experience blends technical acumen with a passion for empowering teams, making him a driving force in Microsoft's success.

It emerges from a common set of conditions - and so in many ways it is an unsurprising thing to see in large enterprise. However, so-called "Enterprise Architecture", and really any software architecture that hardens into a role or department, is nothing but waste.  On this episode we discuss why that is, and what you can do about it. Like any other deep organizational wound - simply pulling the knife out isn't a great solution. Delicately and skillfully setting up your organziation so that it is no longer dependent on this antiquated solution is the path that the leader should follow. Thanks for joining us this month - please enjoy the episode!

Coaching is an indispensible part of the engineering leader's work. Knowing how to lift people with respect to both deep technical concerns and difficult people concerns can seem daunting. Though it really boils down to simply being interested in people - and in seeing them meet their potential.  Join us as we discuss this important topic with Danny Kirchmeier on this month's edition of The Kyle Rowland Podcast. -- Danny has 17 years of engineering experience and has a passion for solving problems and mentoring others to grow their passions. He enjoys most working in startups where he has the opportunity to lead, drive impact and make meaningful contributions to a goal. -- Mentioned in the podcast: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - https://a.co/d/1cxdCfa Good to Great - https://a.co/d/bae7VMg Wheel of Life - https://positivepsychology.com/wheel-of-life-coaching/  

Join in as we discuss with Molly Jaggers the implications we face as we adopt cutting edge AI technology. A key takeaway from this episode is what the adoption implies about the most constructive behavior for members of the workforce in these turbulent days. Ultimately, it's a time of great opportunity and hope - though as in any epoch - those that are lazy or slow to change will quickly be left behind. The biggest difference now is found in the definition of "quickly" - which will be much more severe than in prior days. >> Books Mentioned in the Episode A More Beautiful Question - by Berger The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People -  by Covey Good to Great - by Collins -- Molly has spent over a decade driving revenue growth and building product marketing functions from scratch across startups and corporations. What sets her apart is her dual perspective: she thinks like a strategist but executes like an operator, bridging the gap between business objectives and engineering reality to create products and GTM strategies that deliver cohesive experiences optimized for both user emotion and business outcomes.    Today, she's an entrepreneur focused on acquiring and scaling businesses, applying her deep expertise in customer experience optimization and GTM execution to unlock growth in diverse industries. She's also the host of the Protégé podcast, where she challenges conventional wisdom around women's leadership and explores what it really takes to break through leadership barriers and bring true equity to the workplace.    Known for her radical open-mindedness, systematic thinking and constant curiosity, Molly turns strategic visions into exceptional experiences that solve real-world problems.

Here at The Kyle Rowland Podcast we like to focus on the "Plateau of Productivity" (see Gartner's Hype Cycle) - as such, we bring you our latest episode on actually useful, highly practical artificial intelligence.  If you've ever asked yourself the question - "On what and how might I actually use this AI tech in real life?" This is the episode for you.  We start with basic definitions and move on to some real world examples, along with some principles that you can apply in your context.  So join me and my guest Jeff Mergler as we unpack this useful technology. -- Jeff Mergler is a data scientist and educator at Altair, now part of Siemens. He first began developing data analytics solutions in 2000, and began teaching in 2004. With master's degrees in Information Systems from Webster University and Statistics from Colorado State University, he has enjoyed developing and delivering solutions and courses across mathematics, software development, engineering, and the data sciences. Jeff has a passion for facilitating innovation, by empowering and enabling people. -- Book mentioned in the episode: Powerful, Profitable Software Products - by Kyle Rowland - https://a.co/d/2klqbDD  

In the late 2000's the phrase "breaking down the monolith" was being uttered in every corner of the tech universe. The passion was connected to technical features like scalability and performance - even spawning a number of techniques and technologies for operating these isolated runtime components. The real win seemed to have been largely missed - the ability for teams to be separate and thus faster in their delivery. Organizations were ridding themselves of the need to coordinate all change and delivery across all teams. They were beginning to realize their potential. That beautiful awakening has stalled out somewhat - join Bob Provencher and I as we discuss the benefits and some of the tricks to bringing it freshly into your organization. — Bob Provencher is the Chief Technology Officer at PDHI, a Health and Wellness Platform-as-a-Service provider. With a career spanning software craftsmanship, cloud architecture, and AI innovation, Bob leads initiatives that bridge traditional .NET and Azure development with cutting-edge artificial intelligence. He has a deep background in game development and low-level device driver engineering, giving him a rare blend of creative and systems-level insight. Bob is passionate about building scalable, intelligent solutions and exploring how emerging technologies can enhance real-world health and wellness platforms. — Books mentioned in the podcast: Monolith to Microservices: https://a.co/d/0gJxvsm The Mikado Method: https://a.co/d/3424eBK

Our guest today is Sean Merron - a seasoned software engineering leader. Together we dig into some of the unique challenges involved in remote work - a capability that has developed rapidly over the last several years. Because the expansion has been so rapid, it's useful to ask questions about its efficacy as a method for delivering software. With the agile manifesto, the idea of the superiority of in-person communication took hold. As we got experience with building asynchronously, and possibly more importantly, with the advancement of the tooling, that superiority may hold, but perhaps in a less absolute sense. Join us as we ask these questions and mine out some of the useful related techniques that come from the software development trenches.  -- With over 25 years of experience in software engineering, 17 working remotely, Sean Merron is a seasoned technology leader currently serving as VP of Software Engineering at Cloud Theory. He's also the founder of Zeal Technology, a consulting firm focused on scaling businesses through cloud-based automation and custom software solutions. Sean's career spans roles as software engineer, engineering director, CTO, and podcast host with millions of downloads. He's passionate about solving complex business problems with innovative tech, having led teams that delivered solutions for Fortune 100 enterprises and startups alike. Rooted in faith and community service, Sean brings a purpose-driven approach to leadership and innovation. For questions or conversations about software engineering, you can contact Sean at: seanmerron.com (his linkedin account).

From change management to marketing and product management, our guest Egil Østhus and I hit on a wide array of topics in our quest to understand and illuminate the humble feature flag. The idea of the feature flag is an important one because it's one of the primary supports to *actual* continuous delivery - it enables engineering teams to deliver with minimal friction. This multiplies creativity (that is to say "innovation"), the impact we're bringing to the lives of our customers, and through that, our own happiness and satisfaction with our work. While surprisingly powerful in their consequence, feature flags can - at times - also be surprisingly difficult to put into play.  Egil helps with tangible, practical advice on how to get over some of these challenges - and of course offers a powerful tool ("Unleash") that we can all immediately leverage. To start with the open source tool - or to even jump in all the way with Unleash - go to getunleash.io. About Egil -- Egil Østhus is the founder and CEO of Unleash. Unleash is the largest open source FeatureOps platform globally today, and is used by massive enterprises across the globe. Prior to founding Unleash, Egil has worked in different corporate jobs including Cisco, Accenture and Visma as an SVP. Egil is super excited about software engineering leadership and is all about building high efficiency organizations that have a lot of fun together. A fun fact: Egil holds 2 patents in the video conferencing space. When not at work, Egil loves to run and spend time with his wife and two boys, age 13 and 17.

Taking the step from focusing on tactics to delivering a well-crafted, world-class engineering organization isn't as difficult as you might think. It's a lot like improving your health, though - easy to talk about but takes relentless discipline to do.  Listen this month for some clarity on this topic - as we explain the move from Executive Tactician to Executive Craftsman.

Join in as our guest, Molly Jaggers, and I dive into the details of an emerging best practice - structuring organizations around a holistic product-engineering approach. Disappearing are the days when engineers can crawl into their coding corners only to emerge days or weeks later with some new bit of functionality. Disappearing also are the days when a product management organization disappears offsite only to reappear at a later time with a grand roadmap. The act of building a product - something that is actually useful to a human being - is an experimental one. It's an iterative thing. So those joining in on the invention must have imaginations and intellects that are joined - otherwise the invention they pursue will be ungrounded in either need or technical possibility....or both. We hope you are as excited as we are to start this important discussion - and hash out some of the details about how such an integration might be practically pursued. -- Molly is a seasoned product and marketing leader with over 11 years of experience driving revenue growth, scaling teams, and leading cross-functional initiatives across diverse environments, from nimble growth-stage startups to established corporations. What truly sets Molly apart is her unique ability to bridge the gap between product strategy and market impact, while keeping a close eye on the process and ensuring teams are focused on getting the right work done efficiently. She has been instrumental in establishing the go-to-market process and integrating it seamlessly into the product development lifecycle. 

The role of engineering manager is often quite enigmatic.  It often finds itself in emergency mode - with little time to fix the broader structural issues that are hindering the team or teams being led.  Much more of this dilemma falls under the control of the engineering manager himself - much more than is immediately apparent.  Listen to this month's episode for a framework that will help to think about influencing and leading in the areas available, and understanding what progress actually looks like.

Looking into the future with our guest Erik Erichsen.  AI is already making a huge impact on our craft, changing the way we solve problems and even how we conceive them.  As Engineering Leaders it falls on us to prepare our people, and to keep our perspective broad enough so that the ongoing evolution of our industry is something that we can leverage and not something that crushes us. This means understanding the timeless principles that make for great software development - for great value add to our customers.  It simultaneously means not ignoring the new context or how those principles are expressed in the new environment. Join us as we explore this and more in this month's episode... --- Our guest Erik Erichsen: Erik has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry ranging from startups to the enterprise organizations in both the public and private sector. During this time, he's served in a variety of roles including software engineer, architect, technology leader, product manager, and Divisional CIO for a Fortune 500 organization.   His passion is leveraging technology to transform Mission-Led organizations and empowering individuals to have transformative impact.  While he has been in various management roles for more than a decade, he stays closely connected with emerging technologies and trends.

Working up from first principles, it becomes clear that code reviews (as typically conceived) do far more damage than good.  If we want to move past this legacy approach into the faster, better, more valuable world of continuous delivery, we do need to really understand these baseline principles. This episode works through this - and will help you understand how you can apply these principles in your context. The important thing, ultimately, is to be delivering the highest value to our customers.  To get there we do need to get past this all-to-common stumbling block.  All it takes is a little bit of courage and a readiness to do the work.  Are you with us in this?  I know you are. (Book mentioned in the episode: Powerful, Profitable Software Products: The Executive Guidebook)

Join us as seasoned engineering leader Chuck Goss pops the hood on his eminently practical but quite refined engineering practice.  Currently leading the engineering organization at the innovative Kizen Technologies, Chuck will share some key tactical tools that he's used to create a powerful and productive engineering machine - even in a highly distributed context.

Dr. Kyle Smith joins us today on this extra special episode.  This neuro-ophthalmologist turned technology executive explains the lessons he learned as he made the transition from customer to creator!  I know you'll appreciate his perspective as much as I do - and that you'll take some great wisdom away from his unique perspective. So grab some coffee and settle in as we take in what Dr. Smith has to say.

2025 is all set to be an epic year.   As 2024 is coming to a close the question is - what can I be doing to make sure my organization and I are nice and early to the party.  How can we be setting ourselves up to maximize the impact and growth that will be coming to us from this bright future.  As John Maxwell says, everything rises and falls on leadership.  That's even more true in technology, where we regularly define and redefine the nature of our business. How can we be Executive Craftsmen that build and lead great organizations.  Join us this episode as we dig into this. (Powerful, Profitable Software Products, The Executive Guidbook - https://a.co/d/gyRwMWj )  

There aren't a lot of metrics out there that actually work.  At least toward building up a great software engineering practice.  There is one that does carry a bit of signal with regard to health, and that's TBD.  Your maturity with TBD implies maturity with a number of the core practices involved in building software well.  Further, it implies that you are actually pretty good at those things (as a team).  As long as you avoid the pitfall of "cowboy coding" - there aren't a lot of dangers in measuring and even holding yourself accountable to your TBD maturity. Even if it turns out that your maturity is low - probing even a little at that will yield massive concrete, actionable improvement opportunities.  So join us this month as we dive into this unique and powerful idea.

Ask 5 people this question and you'll likely get 5 different definitions - "what is software architecture?"  It's a challenge because it originates from an very interesting metaphor; one that explains a lot, but that simultaneously opens a number of questions. In this episode with guest Erik Erichsen, we dive into what software architecture is, how it provides value for an organization, and some thoughts about how our practical approach has to be deeply considered in the face of theory. Our guest Erik has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry ranging from startups to the enterprise organizations in both the public and private sector. During this time, he's served in a variety of roles including software engineer, architect, technology leader, product manager, and Divisional CIO for a Fortune 500 organization.   His passion is leveraging technology to transform Mission-Led organizations and empowering individuals to have transformative impact.  While he has been in various management roles for more than a decade, he stays closely connected with emerging technologies and trends.

Large swaths of our technology brethren have concerned themselves with "keeping the lights on".  That is, we want to apply technology, but only in proven, predictable ways that don't rock the boat.  Like the King's sycophantic advisor, we like our cushy life and we don't want to make waves.  Unforunately trying to ensure we safely and securely profit from our easy life is the best way to ensure we won't.  In Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" he shows that this pattern regularly repeats in business.  Business is markedly less successful when it rests on its laurels and attempts to milk previous success indefinitely.  So are businessmen. Success requires invention, and invention today is done with software. While many legacy businesses don't consider themselves "software shops" - successful businesses do.

This month we dive into the tricky topic of dealing with jerks.  Eric Williamson teaches us some tricks for dealing with difficult people.  More importantly, of course, he sheds some light on how to not be difficult people ourselves. I hope you enjoy listening in on this conversation as much as Eric and I did having it. Just for some background, Eric is a professional development consultant, business coach and keynote speaker. He is the author of the book, How to Work with Jerks: Getting Stuff Done with People you Can't Stand, and co-author of the best-selling book, When Work Works: Cutting Edge Solutions for the Contemporary Workplace. He has over two decades of professional development experience, speaking, and most importantly, real-life, hands on in-the trenches business experience in both the private and public sectors. He works with organizations to build more collaborative and harmonious workplace environments by building stronger customer and workplace relationships. (Brené Brown book mentioned in the podcast: Dare To Lead)

While you might have seen this month's topic - "Maximizing Innovation" - on corporate motivational posters, we assure you that we go deep in this month's podcast to uncover exactly how we can win in this arena.   The phrase we like, "Building more cool, useful stuff" maybe says it more aptly.  Whatever words you use though - a central part of software development is simply to figure out how we create the most value, the most usefulness for our customer.    So please join us as and listen along we dig into this important topic!

Improving in the art of software development can be intimidating.  With this month's episode we dive quickly into the basic algorithm that we've used repeatedly to realize powerful improvement on software teams!

Is this a feature? Or is it an implementation detail? It's easy to get the answer to this question wrong - and the wrong answer here can have profoundly negative consequences.  We'll look at three regularly mis-interpreted aspects of software development and talk about how to correctly think about them - ultimately, learning to leverage them better in order to enhance our ability to deliver software. Whether it's data, information security, or devops - join us as we dig into how to model these correctly and to put them to use well in our systems.

Join us this month as we dive further into team make-up - asking the difficult question, what is a senior engineer?  And more practically - how do we create and/or discover them? We have Bob Provencher - CTO at PDHI - with us again to help tackle these tricky but tactically terrific questions.  Last month he coined and defined a great term  - SINO - senior in name only.  This month he will help us learn to discern between top-shelf talent and the seat-warming knock-off (the SINO).  He will also provide us with some in-the-trenches advice to promote growth in those with potential and to discover premium talent as we look to hire. So sit back and enjoy - and be ready to be taken to the next level in your leadership journey.

How do we balance our engineering teams?  What are the challenges involved in getting that balance right? Join me as I dig into these questions with Bob Provencher - PDHI's Chief Technology Officer.  He offers  powerful insights mined from his many years of success in this arena. You will come away better-armed to optimally shape your teams and your organization!

In software architecture it's important to remember - sharing is not caring! There's a revolution underway - software organizations the world over have begun to realize that dependency-free teams are the way to deliver with speed and to innovate powerfully and regularly. The transition is difficult though - businesses bring with them powerful inertia, making the shift from old-style organization-wide architecture to modern, streamlined design difficult at times. Join me with my special guest, Anton Cagle as we explore several aspects of this revolution.

Leading software development is a unique challenge. We meld the very human activity of convincing others to work with us, but we do it on two separate platforms - as we create actual software, and as we create the people and technology system (of which we are a part) that creates the software. Both areas are vitally important - but wildly different in terms of the approach we might take to leading. Join us as we dive into this important topic.

As an executive leading a software development organization, mastery in software engineering isn't optional.   Understanding this fundamental truth and the powerful reality behind it will allow you to break free from operational mental models - and work in models more appropriate for developing software systems. This is, ultimately, a leverage point that enables leaders at all levels to continually be moving toward higher and higher levels of performance - radically impacting the lives and businesses of their customers.