Kevin Goldsmith

Kevin Goldsmith is the Chief Technical Officer at Avvo where he oversees the development and IT teams. He has been building products, teams and organizations using agile and lean methodologies since 2000. Prior to joining Avvo, Kevin was the VP of Engineering at Spotify, the popular digital music service, where he led a team of 175 engineers, testers and agile coaches for the company’s mobile, desktop and web platforms. He also served as the Director of Engineering for Adobe Systems for nearly a decade. Kevin has been an industry forerunner in the areas of GPGPU for commercial applications, leading development teams for both Adobe and Microsoft’s Virtual Worlds (later social computing).

Kevin earned degrees in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Creating a culture of continuous improvement at Avvo

Avvo is a 10-year old company that is in high growth mode, having increased headcount by 100% in the past year. In June, Kevin Goldsmith joined Avvo as its CTO after three years at Spotify. He will share learnings of how the team is bringing a lean and agile culture to this rapidly growing company, which now has 400 employees. How do you scale the tools of transformation from the team to the company? In a company eager for change, how do you decide where to invest and how fast to go? Kevin will also share some of the programs that have been put into place to begin the transition from a top-down to bottom-up culture.

Slides Video

Workshop—Let's build a product development organization!

A workshop on building agile organizations from small single teams through large numbers of teams including discussions of long term organizational thinking and leadership coaching. Participants will use their current organizations as a starting point and will project them through future growth and challenges.