Plato blog

As an engineering leader, have you thought, “Is it okay to not be growing right now?” Typically, the answer would be “No, it’s not okay.” At most organizations, managers are expected to both deliver work and grow their engineers. But hasn’t the pandemic changed these expectations? According to Said Ketchman, Director of Engineering at the NY Times, it is somehow possible to help your team grow (and as a result, stay motivated) during these crazy times.

What guides your scaling decisions? Get tips from Vijaya Kaza, Airbnb's Head of Engineering for Trust and Safety.

Building diverse and inclusive engineering teams starts with a hiring process that limits bias. After all, hiring is the engine that builds your team. If you’re not hiring a diverse set of candidates, you can’t have a diverse team. And if you’re not cultivating an inclusive environment, even the diverse teams you build could begin to deteriorate.

Back in January, Karat partnered with Harris Poll to conduct a survey of 253 engineering leaders and hiring decision-makers. We used those results as benchmarks to compare to a second survey of 100 additional leaders last month to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on hiring trends.

A free mentorship initiative that connects people from underrepresented communities to world-class tech leaders through intimate group mentorship

Tips from GitHub's VP of Engineering on managing remote teams

Tips from an engineering leader who's been remote for 15 years — InVision's Director of Engineering

Get tips on leading remote teams from a seasoned VP of Engineering

Archana Chaudhary is an Engineering Manager at Adobe. In this episode of Women In Tech, Archana talks about her career path, some of the challenges she has faced as a woman in tech, and how she helps younger women by mentoring them.

Michael Lopp, aka Rands, is the VP of Product Engineering at Slack. At Elevate 2019, he gave a talk on the Product Triangle - his framework for building a successful organization.

During Elevate, Ammon Bartram, cofounder of TripleByte, talked to Denali Lumma, Director of Engineering at Robinhood, Tim Wagner, VP Engineering at Coinbase, and Prachi Gupta, Director of Engineering at YouTube, about best practices for hiring engineers.

For our third talk of the day at Plato Elevate, our recurring event for engineering and product leaders, Loïc Houssier moderated a panel with Dana Lawson, Luc Vincent, and Prashant Pandey, on how to survive rapid scaling.

This week’s episode of Decisive Moments is titled: “Fundamental Learnings for Engineering Managers” featuring DocuSign’s VP of Engineering, Loïc Houssier

From our Plato mentors

By our Plato mentors

In the opening Keynote of Elevate 2019, Reddit’s CTO, Chris Slowe, talked about his time from the early days at the company to today, and his strategy to lead during periods of growth and change.

Asanka Jayasuriya is InVision’s SVP of Engineering and gave a talk at our Elevate Conference on how to manage distributed teams across different locations.

Hear from senior engineering leaders from GitHub, Twilio, and Brex on best practices around managing distributed teams.

Luc Vincent was the founder of Google Street View and is the Founder of Lyft Level 5, the autonomous driving unit of Lyft. He hired 300 engineers in 18 months. In this live video AMA on Plato, moderated by Heather Rivers, CTO of Mode, and Brett Huff, Engineering Manager at Atlassian, Luc talks about how he sets goals for his team and ensures they stay on track.

It’s been an eventful week as Covid-19 dominates the news, and we hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. A lot of leaders are coping with changing circumstances, and we recently sat down with Loïc Houssier, DocuSign’s VP of Engineering, to talk about how to manages during change in our most recent episode of Decisive Moments.

Mo Bhende (CEO of Karat), Cathy Polinsky (CTO of Stitch Fix), and Chris Satchell (CTO of Zume) share their experiences on different topics, from their rise to the role of CTO to inclusion and diversity or building remote teams.

During his time at Coursera, their product and engineering team grew from 50 to 160 people. As CPO, Tom had to ensure that the team stayed motivated and continued to ship products at a rapid clip. In this AMA, he shares how he did that.

Chris Slowe, CTO at Reddit, was also the first employee back in the day. He started 3 months into the startup as a Senior Engineer, and stayed there as a Lead Architect and Manager until 2010. At Plato, we had the privilege of having him in a community AMA with our mentees. In this article, we’ll share with you the highlights of this AMA.

Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty, shares her insights on building collaboration between engineering and product teams, along with some delightful hockey references!

Gautam Prabhu, VP of engineering at PagerDuty, has been a startup person for a good portion of his 20-year career run. He began in the dot-com boom working at companies such as Fogdog and CenterRun and Sun Microsystems. In this AMA, he talks about what it takes to be an exceptional engineering leader.

Nicolas Dupont is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Akeneo, a Product Information Management solution for eCommerce websites. In this interview, Nicolas tells us about his challenges as a leader of a fast-growing engineering team, and how he solves those challenges via Plato.

Tido Carriero, CPO of Segment, talks about finding product-market fit for new features when your core product already has PMF. While leading product at Segment, Tido helped launch Personas and Protocols, two features that now account for a third of Segment's revenues.

At Plato Elevate, our recurring summit for Product and Eng leaders, Howard Sueing, CTO of Onramp, welcomed execs from LogDNA, Brex, and CZI for a conversation on measuring your team’s success as you grow or scale.

At Plato Elevate, Oded Shekel, HackerRank’s SVP of Product, moderated a talk composed of eng leaders from Netflix, Optimizely, and VMware about employee growth and career development.

Tyler Muse, CEO of Lingo Live, talks to Jen You from WeWork, Michael Spiegelman from Netflix, Sue Nallapeta from Apartment List, and Pat Poels from Eventbrite about how to increase team performance by communicating better.

Brian Zotter is the VP of Product Engineering at Medium. During Elevate 2019, he gave a keynote on how to build high-performing engineering teams.

One of the talks at our Elevate conference was a panel on building alignment between product and engineering teams. Tom Willerer, ex-CPO of Coursera, moderated the discussion with participation from Clara Liang (VP of Product at Airbnb), Josh Elman (VP of Product at Robinhood), and Madhura Dudhgaonkar (Senior Director of Engineering at Workday)

At Plato — we interview senior engineering leaders all the time, and this story comes from Skyscanner’s Engineering Manager, Ardy Dedase.

At Plato — we interview senior engineering leaders, and this story on managing remote teams comes from InVision’s Director of Engineering, Ryan Scheuermann.