THOUGHT LEADER: Kevin Goldsmith, CTO, Avvo

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CTO @ Avvo and former VP Engineering @ Spotify, the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit (BTOES17) will be welcoming thought leader Kevin Goldsmith to the Four Seasons Resort Orlando next year. In Kevin's unique presentation, "Agile Business Transformation: Using Operational Excellence Tools & Methodologies", the audience can hear about his experience including his time at Adobe, Microsoft, Spotify and now at a legal online marketplace, Avvo.

Tell us about your roles & responsibilities within your organization.

Responsible for all R&D, Operations, IT, and Data engineering.

What are the critical challenges your presentation will address?

Increasing innovation and velocity by building a fail-safe autonomous team culture.

After your presentation, what are you hoping the attendees will take away with them?

a new way to look at how their company culture can increase or retard innovation. Approaches to improve innovational velocity without losing accountability through autonomy and streamlined data-driven decision making processes.

What have been the biggest developments in Operational Excellence in the last 12 months, within your organization?

Following a period of extremely fast corporate growth over the last few years, Avvo struggled to execute on company priorities because it's processes hadn't evolved. My focus on joining the company has been to improve how we operate. We now have improved our execution significantly by reorganizing how our teams are structured, how senior leadership communicates and prioritizes and how information flows through the organization.

How do you see Operational Excellence developing over the next 5-10 years within your organization?

I see us continuing our evolution in our processes and structures as we continue to grow to keep a corporate focus on enabling innovation, by deepening our culture of continuous improvement.

What 3 key learnings would you like to takeaway from this conference?

1. Grow my playbook of techniques and approaches of operational excellence. *

2. Gain insights into how other companies approach their operational excellence initiatives *

3. Meet other professionals in this area to grow my network of thought leaders that I can discuss these issues with.

Kevin Goldsmith oversees the development and IT teams at Avvo. 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 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). You can learn more about Kevin's role at the summit here.