CTO Hour with Peter Bell: Beyond the Sprint—Organizing Engineering for Agility and Innovation
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Ask Peter Bell and panelists your questions about organizing engineering and senior engineering leadership
Engineering orgs today are wrestling with unprecedented complexity and the relentless pace of change. In this environment, rigid organizational structures and outdated workflows can stifle innovation, slow decision-making, and hinder your teams’ ability to adapt to evolving technical and business demands, all blunting your competitive edge.
In this CTO Hour, Peter Bell and an expert panel share actionable insights on a range of ways you can structure your engineering organization to adapt and thrive in the face of change. From Kanban and Shape Up to mob programming and dynamic reteaming, you’ll learn practical strategies to align team structures and workflows to address your organization’s unique challenges. Join in to benefit from the experience of seasoned leaders who have spearheaded these changes and get firsthand guidance that will help you avoid common pitfalls, minimize disruption, manage change, and measure the impact of new team configurations.
CTO Hour is a quarterly live event that brings together a panel of senior engineering leaders to discuss with expert and host Peter Bell how they’ve approached timely technology or business challenges. This dynamic event will feature ample time for questions, as well as polling of the audience to steer the discussion toward the topics you care the most about. Active and aspiring senior leaders will learn valuable insights from top VPs and CTOs and ultimately be prepared to make better-informed decisions as heads of technology.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Discover how methodologies like Kanban, Shape Up, and mob programming can be leveraged to create flexible, high-performing teams
- Learn practical approaches to continuously realign and optimize your team configurations in response to changing business and technical demands
- Gain insights into setting up metrics that help you assess the success of new workflows and organizational changes
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a CTO or senior tech leader seeking to understand different ways of organizing engineering to be more adaptive in the face of change.
- You’re finding that traditional organizational models are slowing innovation in your engineering org and you want to learn how to break free with frameworks tailored to evolving challenges.
Prerequisites
- Have a pen and paper handy to capture notes, insights, and inspiration
Recommended follow-up:
- Read The Engineering Executive’s Primer (book)
- Read Think Like a CTO (book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
March 10, 2025, at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (60 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Peter Bell
Peter Bell is the founder and CTO of Gather.dev, the definitive global learning community for senior engineering leaders, and Dev Tool Collective, which connects the builders, buyers, and backers of next-generation developer tools. A frequent speaker and advisor on engineering leadership, developer productivity, and AI, he has led teams at Flatiron School and General Assembly and taught data science at Columbia Business School.
Crystal Hirschorn
Crystal Hirschorn is the CTO at Zoa, a green energy tech startup, and an engineering leader who has served as VP and senior director of software engineering during her more than 20-year career. Her experience includes technical leadership, hands-on software engineering, and engineering management, and she has managed managers for several years. She advocates resilience engineering and is a longtime practitioner and advocate of Lean, XP, and DevOps practices to build successful engineering cultures.
Sander Hoogendoorn
Sander Hoogendoorn is an independent dad, traveler, and developer, who with more than 40 years of experience, still writes code daily—why stop now? As CTO at iBOOD, he's known for his post-agile mindset and a knack for shaking up the status quo and keeping teams on their toes. A prolific author and speaker, Sander shares his ideas on disruption, microservices, software architecture, and the fine art of writing elegant code while championing small steps and big thinking.
Ilya Sterin
Ilya Sterin leads product and engineering at Medidata, where his team builds software to accelerate the development of innovative drugs, making the process safer and more efficient. He has pursued his passion for organizational design and the systems that drive effective work over a 25-year career designing, developing, and launching products across various industries. Ilya loves everything about the process of discovering struggles and building solutions to help people make progress.