Today's guest is Aviv Ben-Yosef!
Aviv has more than 20 years of experience in tech. He is an executive coach working with hundreds of engineering teams and leaders.
With Aviv, we talked about profitable engineering, what makes engineering valuable, why impact is hard to measure, and what are the cultural and organizational traits that make engineering teams successful.
🎙️ Episode
You can watch the full episode on Youtube:
Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.
🥇 Interview Summary
If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below.
It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat.
Here is the agenda for today:
🎯 Journey into Tech & Consulting (02:04)
💰 Profitable Engineering (11:37)
👥 From Tech Manager to Business Executive (27:26)
📊 Measuring Engineering Impact (38:32)
🤖 AI's Impact on Engineering Teams (53:06)
Let's dive in 👇
1) 🎯 Journey into Tech & Consulting (02:04)
Aviv's journey in tech began at age nine when his parents enrolled him in a Pascal programming course. What started as a hobby evolved into a deep passion for making computers execute his ideas.
After military service at 18, where he worked with "crazy, brilliant people," Aviv's career took him through various roles including IBM and several startups. His transition to consulting happened organically:
"When I did coding, we worked with dozens of companies here in Israel... I noticed that the founders got so much value just from chatting and seeing what I was seeing across different companies."
This observation led Aviv to transition from freelance coding to "CTO as a service," and eventually to executive coaching, where he helps good leaders become better.
2) 💰 Profitable Engineering (11:37)
Aviv emphasizes that engineering teams must be profitable for their companies - a concept many startups overlooked until recently. He identifies the key aspects of profitable engineering:
