Upcoming Talks

• CavnessHR Seattle's Got Tech (Seattle Tech Week) - July 30, 2025 - Seattle, WA, United States
• LeadDev - October 16, 2025 - New York, NY, United States

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Current Talks

• Architecture and Organization
  Over 50 years ago Melvin Conway wrote an article identifying a correspondence between the structure of our organizations and the structure of the software we produce. We still talk about Conway's Law today because of the fundamental truth of that observation. This talk goes beyond that article to examine why this happens, and how you can take advantage of it to make better software.
• Don't Quit Your Day Job (Unleashing Creativity: The Inspiring Synergy between Software Developers and Emerging Technologies)
  Technologies like No-Code/Low-Code platforms and Large Language Models (such as ChatGPT) can make developers question low long they will be employed, but this talks put those technologies in their historical place with everything else that was supposed to get rid of software developers.
• It's teams all the way down: Design patterns for engineering organizations
  While there is no "one size fits all" solution for organizational structure, there are patterns for the different stages of startups that can be adapted to your culture and best practices to leverage.
• How do you keep growing when you are the leader of the organization?
  Your organization looks to you to be the expert, and you are often the most senior around. However, reaching senior leadership doesn't mean that we no longer need to grow professionally. On the contrary, we should never stop trying to improve and get better at our jobs. We should always be striving to learn and grow. We now need to take full responsibility for it.
• Fail Fast, Fail Smart... Succeed!
  Software development has been evolving. When I started in the industry, working at companies like Microsoft, we would bet many person-years of development and many millions of dollars into the development of products that would sometimes be hits and sometimes be total duds. We were building blind. This blindness was partly due to our waterfall processes, but also to how software distribution and marketing worked then. A flop for a smaller company could mean the end of the line. The cost of failure was incredibly high. Over the years, we learned how to take some of that risk out by switching to agile software development and now Lean. Working this way we can learn quicker, and take smaller risks. However, there are other things we can do in how we architect our software or roll it out that can also reduce the technical and product risk and help us fail smarter and learn faster. In this keynote, I speak about my experiences building waterfall products at Microsoft, building agile and lean at Onfido, Adobe, Spotify, and Avvo; and I give real architectural, cultural, and organizational tools you can use to make your projects and company more failure safe.
• When, Why and How to Stop Coding as Your Day Job
  As you progress in leadership, more and more of your responsibilities have less and less to do with coding. When is it time to make coding your hobby instead of your job? How do you do it?
• Presenting to executives
  Presenting to executives at your company is different than giving a presentation to your team, other teams, at a meetup, a conference, or customers. This talk presents some concrete strategies for planning your presentation, preparing the attendees, handling unexpected questions, going down rabbit holes, driving the attendees to a decision (if that is your goal), and following up afterward.
• Leading Distributed Teams
  Distributed teams can help find the best talent wherever it is and bring opportunities to developers away from the tech centers. However, leading a distributed team presents unique challenges, interpersonal and technical. What makes distributed teams especially challenging? How can we address these challenges to make our distributed organizations more effective? In this talk, Kevin Goldsmith discusses four main challenges: Conway's Law, Amdahl's Law (as applied to organizations), Empathy, and Communication.
• Developing Your Developers: Constructing Career Paths For Your Technologists
  How you construct development paths in your company can support and deepen your company values. Doing it well means heightening employee engagement and improving retention. This talk gives technology and people team leaders a place to start their conversations.

Older Talks

• A Software Career (2017)
• Adobe Revel and the Blissful Chaos of High Velocity, Low Process (2013)
• Agile Business Transformation: Using Operational Excellence Tools & Methodologies (2017)
• Apportioning Monoliths (2015)
• Autonomy For the Win: How Spotify Builds Product Balancing Alignment with Autonomy (2014 - 2015)
• Blogging Technologies History (2006)
• Build a fail-safe autonomous team culture to drive innovation and agility (2018)
• Building Lean (2014)
• Building Revel For Nine Platforms (2013)
• Building V-Chat environments (1995)
• Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement in Your Company (2016 - 2018)
• Building a Strong Engineering Culture (2013 - 2014)
• Building with Lean and Agile in the Real World (2013)
• CMU Alumni Journey: Kevin Goldsmith (2020)
• Chat with Kevin Goldsmith, Anaconda CTO (2021)
• Crafting a Mission and Vision for Your Team (2020)
• Culture Leads, Everything Else Follows (2014 - 2015)
• Do I know you? Identity on the Internet and the Question of Trust (2019 - 2021)
• Due Diligence in Funding & Acquisition: A CTO's Guide (2023)
• Empowering Your Engineering Talent (2014)
• Finding the right ingredients for the perfect team (2017)
• Firing like a human (2022)
• Focus on How You Build, Not Just on What You Build (2014)
• GPGPU in Commercial Software: Lessons From Three Cycles of the Adobe Creative Suite (2010)
• How Does Salary Work? (2019)
• How Spotify builds products (2016)
• Image and Video Processing Using Adobe Image Foundation's Toolkit For Flash (2007)
• Innovation and Organization (2015)
• Innovation, Autonomy and Accountability (2016)
• It Is All About the Benjamins: The Real World Economics of HPC (2013)
• Managing partly distributed teams (2021)
• Microservices @ Spotify (2015)
• Moving forward under weaker US net neutrality rules (2017)
• Organization, Architecture, Autonomy and Accountability (2016 - 2020)
• Pixel Bender (2011)
• Raising the subject of raises (2021)
• Scaling Up (2018)
• Steal from the best, lessons from three years at Spotify (2021)
• The (near) Future of Personal Computers (2008)
• The Inspiring Synergy Between Software Developers And Emerging Technologies (2023)
• The Spotify Tribe (2015 - 2016)
• The path from Director to CTO: How to follow it, or how to mentor it (2024)
• Using Agile Techniques to Build a More Inclusive Team (2018 - 2020)
• What Does Good Agile Look Like? (2017 - 2020)
• What Vulnerabilities? How (And Why) to Secure Your ML/AI Solutions (2022)
• What is Agile? (2017)
• You Are Doing Autonomy Wrong (2020)

Panels

• Making Distributed Organizations More Effective, Society for Information Management, September 21, 2022
• Investments for CTOs and VPs of Engineers, CTO Universe Webinar Series, February 24, 2022
• Data Science in 2021 - Deepfakes, AI Impact, Ethics, AnacondaCon, June 09, 2021
• Strategies for creating cultures of innovation in engineering teams, LeadDev: Strategies for creating cultures of innovation in engineering teams, November 11, 2020
• Fireside Chat with Kevin Goldsmith, BP Launchpad Guest Speaker Series, September 17, 2020
• Your Development Process is a Lie, The Live Series Round Table, July 22, 2020
• Codemotion Meetup - Building performing teams: The Spotify model is dead - long live the Spotify model, {Codemotion} Online meetup, June 25, 2020
• Building and Conveying Vision, LeadDev Live, April 08, 2020
• FinTech Discussion Panel, Annual FinTech and InsurTech Summit, February 27, 2020
• Tech Carousel: the new technologies revolutionising the financial ecosystem, The Financial Times Banking Summit: Disruptech - Strategies for intelligent growth in a Big Tech world, December 04, 2019
• Speaker's Panel, Agile by Example, October 24, 2018
• A Transformation leaders panel: Spearhead your transformation from people, technology and process perspectives, OPEX Week Summer 2018, August 27, 2018
• Hiring Partner Panel, Apprenti Forum: Creating Pathways to Economic Mobility via Registered Tech Apprenticeship, March 28, 2018
• The FCC's Dismantling of Net Neutrality, The FCC's Dismantling of Net Neutrality - Law Seminars International Webcast Panel, December 20, 2017
• Tech And... The New Workforce, General Assembly talk series, November 15, 2017
• Tech Apprenticeship: The Solution for Diversity and Talent Gaps, Tech Inclusion, October 18, 2017
• David vs. Goliath (Competing for Top Engineers Against Seattle Giants), Seattle Startup Week, October 02, 2017
• Hiring Company Panel, Apprenti: Tech Apprenticeship Summit, July 11, 2017
• Parallelism, the Cloud, and the Tools of the Future for the next generation of practitioners, SC (Super Computing) Conference, November 16, 2011
• Parallel Education Status Check – Which Programming Approaches Make the Cut for Parallelism in Undergraduate Education?, Intel Developer Forum, September 15, 2011
• Battle of the Cloud Sync Solutions, Adobe Technology Summit, May 12, 2011
• Parallelism and Education: Navigating Through a Sea of Cores, Intel Developer Forum, September 13, 2010
• Preparing the World for Ubiquitous Parallelism, SC (Super Computing) Conference, November 20, 2009
• Flash Platform Gaming Showcase, Adobe MAX Conference, October 07, 2009
• What Role is Technology Playing in New Business Opportunities? (P.S. It’s already happening...), Photographic Archive Council of America Conference, October 26, 2008

Workshops

• Best Practices in Apprenticeship Programs for Diverse Tech Talent, Tech Inclusion, October 18, 2017
• Let's build a product development organization!, Agile by Example, October 10, 2016
• Intermediate Pixel Bender: Pixels and Beyond, Adobe MAX Conference, October 27, 2010
• Creating Effects with Pixel Bender, Adobe MAX Conference, December 02, 2008
• Creating Effects with Pixel Bender, Adobe MAX Conference, November 18, 2008