“Finding Flow” in Engineering Leadership with Rob Zuber #71

The quest to “find flow” as an eng leader can be elusive! Rob Zuber (CTO @ CircleCI) shares about his personal quest to find flow, refining/refocusing responsibilities as CTO, and why he brought on an SVPE to support. Plus some of the personal discovery frameworks & executive-level delegation practices that may aid your own quest to find flow as an engineering leader.

ABOUT ROB ZUBER

Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

Before CircleCI, Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Distiller, Continuous Integration and Deployment platform for mobile applications acquired by CircleCI in 2014. Before that, he cofounded Copious an online social marketplace. Rob was the CTO and Co-founder of Yoohoot, a technology company that enabled local businesses to connect with nearby consumers acquired by Appconomy in 2011.

Rob holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and lives in Oakland, California with his wife and two children.

"When you start a company or you end up leading a very small company, the decision about how many people you end up managing is external forces on the company. The company just grows and your team grows to support it. And no one is saying, ‘Hey, it looks like you're ready for this...’

And so I think so often what you see is early leaders end up exiting because that transition happens faster than they were prepared for. To me, that's a really fascinating dynamic because a lot of people coming into organizations are both opting in and getting selected in for the stage of the organization that you have...”

- Rob Zuber   

SHOW NOTES

• Rob’s reflections on recapturing the “first-time coding” experience (3:08)
• On finding flow as an engineering leader (6:48)
• How Rob thinks about his role as CTO & why he brought on an SVPE to support (10:48)
• The “One Thing” moment & finding flow leading engineering teams (15:21)
• How do you intentionally protect maker-time (20:14)
• Balancing challenge & support to create flow (24:21)
• Frameworks for personal discovery or delegating executive responsibilities (29:35)
• On introducing resets & retro-ing your org (34:41)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (38:37)
• Takeaways (43:28)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller (book)
• First Team concept (definition)
• How CircleCI modeled it’s security training after DEF CON’s capture the flag (article)