How to supercharge your engineering org | Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Adobe, Dropbox)

Kellan Elliott-McCrea is a Head of Engineering at Adobe, overseeing Frame.io, a newly acquired video review and collaboration platform. He is known for his experience and expertise as an engineering leader. He was previously a VPE at Dropbox, and CTO at Etsy where he built and led a team of 300 people, from tech and platform reboot through to IPO. Kellan also built and scaled teams at Flickr, and has a coaching and advising practice for companies looking to supercharge their engineering teams. 

In today's episode, we discuss:

• How software engineering has changed in the last 10-15 years
• The future of software engineering, and the impact of AI
• The importance of alignment and tactics for achieving it
• How to think about and enable engineering productivity
• Lessons on culture from Adobe, Dropbox, and Flickr
• Concrete tips for being a better manager
• Rituals for building business literacy throughout an org

Referenced:

Adobe: https://www.adobe.com

Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/

Frame: https://www.frame.io/

How Complex Systems Fail, by Richard I. Cook, MD: https://how.complexsystems.fail/

How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year https://review.firstround.com/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female-Engineers-by-500-in-One-Year

Where to find Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/kellan

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellanem

Website: https://kellanem.com/

Personal blog: https://laughingmeme.org/

Where to find Brett Berson:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/

Timestamps:

[00:02:58] Engineering orgs now vs 15 years ago

[00:05:57] Why engineering teams are bigger despite better tools

[00:10:45] How to think about engineering productivity

[00:15:50] Questioning common compensation models

[00:19:39] Slow teams are misaligned teams

[00:23:56] How to achieve alignment in engineering teams

[00:29:12] How to co-ordinate better across teams

[00:35:23] Why so few companies successfully go multi-product

[00:38:02] Which elements of successful orgs replicate?

[00:41:53] How to approach a new org system at a new company

[00:45:48] The value of information sharing and coaching

[00:48:55] Best practices for communicating with and across teams

[00:51:05] How to approach disagreements

[00:54:27] What high-quality engineering management looks like

[00:58:37] How to increase organizational capacity

[00:63:20] Tactics and rituals for enabling effective teams

[00:66:05] How to build business literacy

[00:68:30] Kellan's biggest inspirations