Looking for a guest speaker for an engineering offsite, a conference, or a seminar? I only have availability for a limited number of speaking engagements per year, but I’d love to help if I can.

Edmond's presentation provided a strong framework for understanding where to invest in building a great engineering culture. It felt great to see validation around some of the values we had already executed on well, but more importantly, we came away feeling even more energized to make progress on the values we hadn't. Edmond's own experience as an engineer shone through in every example and anecdote he shared, making it easy for the audience of engineers to relate. I would highly recommend his talk to any engineering teams looking to make the leap from good to great.
— Prakash Janakiraman, VP of Engineering at Nextdoor
Edmond provided a great framework for our engineers to dramatically improve their learning and the value of their activities. Attending Edmond's seminar was the highest leverage activity I've performed in a while.
— Chris Cholette, Senior Director of Engineering at Sunrun

What makes a great engineering culture?

What are the 3 most costly mistakes that engineering teams make?

What separates the most effective engineers from everyone else?

These are all tough questions. But if your team can build a shared vocabulary around the answers – what makes a culture great, what pitfalls to avoid, and how to productively deliver impact – you’ll dramatically increase your chances of building successful products, careers, and businesses.

The good news is that you don’t have to answer these questions on your own or start from scratch through trial and error. I can give your team a big headstart.

I’ve spent years interviewing engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.

Everyone’s story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes. And I’ve been on a mission to share those lessons and themes in my workshops at Pinterest, seminars at Silicon Valley companies like BloomReach and Google, and my one-on-one coaching sessions with engineering leaders.

Watch my recent, invited talk at Google to get a sense of what your team can learn by booking me for a talk:

To learn more, also read my post on What Makes a Great Engineering Culture? that’s received over 200k views on Quora, been republished on Slate, and re-shared within engineering teams at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other companies, big and small. The post is the culmination of interviewing over 500 engineering candidates during my professional career and asking engineers what they actually like and dislike in the engineering cultures that they’ve been part of.

If you’d like to invite me to speak at an event, reach out to me at: speaking <at> effectiveengineer.com.


At RelateIQ, we are at that seminal stage where making the right choices on culture will help us delight our users in the long run. Edmond's talk on "What Makes a Good Engineering Culture" was timely and useful. I'd recommend Edmond's talk to every startup in the valley; it pays to think about engineering culture early.
— Adil Aijaz, Co-Founder at Split Software, Former Principal Member Engineer at RelateIQ
Edmond was an inspiring and insightful speaker at our enterprise mobile summit. His experience as a practicing engineer in some of Silicon Valley's leading digital companies and interviews with 100's of top-grade software engineers gives him a knowledge base that is uncommon. Edmond adds to this a strategic perspective that enables him to distill his experiences into powerful insights about what makes a great engineering organization.
— James Kresge, Head of Mobile Payments Technology at Capital One
Photo credit: Jesse Fornear