#356 Dylan Etkin - Tools That Satisfy Developers & Managers, & Setting Clear Expectations as a Leader

Today we’re talking to Dylan Etkin, the Founder and CEO at Sleuth. And we discuss the challenges of creating developer tools that satisfy both developers and managers. Lessons learned on setting clear expectations as a leader, and tips for facilitating strong two-way communication with your direct reports. 

All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!

For more on Sleuth, check them out at https://www.sleuth.io/

About Dylan Etkin:

Dylan has spent the last couple of years at a small startup, StatusPage, following his passion for building engineering teams. There he was able to explore all aspects of what's required to run a growing, successful business and how best to craft an engineering team to fit.

Prior to that Dylan spent nine years building state of the art software development tools at Atlassian. Most recently, he led the development and operations teams for Bitbucket. Together with his team, they grew the site from 40 thousand to 2 million users, grew their storage array from four to 400 terabytes, all while pushing the envelope of software development practices with Git. Dylan was the lead developer on JIRA for five years during which he created JQL (JIRA Query Language).

As a leader, Dylan says he finds you must love your product and your team. You must have a vision of success and be articulate in your communication of that vision. You must sweat the details. You must inspire as well as hold accountable. You must lead by example and have a strong understanding of the technology. You must understand your costs. Most of all, you must build and ship quality code, early and often, that solves the right problem.

About Sleuth:

Sleuth is deployment mission control for shipping continuously. It helps developers coordinate and track the health and progress of deploys, so they can have the trust they need to ship code faster.

Sleuth makes it easy to understand what gets shipped and when it's safe to deploy or rollback, by giving developers a complete view of current and upcoming deploys and the impact of deployed releases. Sleuth empowers developers to streamline the process and spend less time shepherding deploys.