0:00
I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most. Hoarding credit.
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0:04
PMs, they tend to be the front-facing person for initiative.
0:09
Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard on.
0:18
I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting- The next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs, when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter, it just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing and I think it really can be very off-putting.
0:34
Is there any insight you can give about what people may be missed about the motivation of engineers, what gets them excited?
0:40
A lot of people assume that engineers just write code and don't underestimate the ability for your engineers to want to understand the business problem, want to understand the customer problem.
0:50
I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas.
1:00
Today, my guest is Camille Fournier.
1:00
Camille is one of the most respected technology executives in tech and the author of the Manager's Path, which many considered the definitive guide for navigating your career and moving into management.
1:11
Over the course of her career, she was CTO of Rent The Runway, VP of technology at Goldman Sachs, global head of engineering and architecture at JP Morgan Chase and head of platform engineering at Two Sigma.
1:21
She's also releasing a new book later this year called Platform Engineering, A Guide for Technical Product and People Leaders, which you can actually pre-order today and we get into this topic in the latter half of the conversation.
1:36
We also dig into what PMs do that most annoys engineers and how to stop doing these things.
1:41
Why major rewrites are often a trap.
1:41
Why you may want to be doing fewer one-on-ones.
1:41
What most surprises people when they become a manager and some really useful heuristics for how long you should stay in IC before you make the leap into management and tons more.
1:51
This episode covers a lot of ground and we'll help you think about management.
1:55
platform teams, team culture and the PM and end relationship in a whole new way.
2:00
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2:08
It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously.
2:08
With that, I bring you Camille Fournier.
2:13
Camille, thank you so much for being here, welcome to the podcast.
2:23
Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure.
2:24
I want to start by asking you a question that is on the minds of a lot of product managers is how to be less annoying as a product manager.
2:32
I know you worked with a lot of engineers over time.
2:32
I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most and how can PMs stop doing that?
2:42
I would say there are a few things that PMs do that annoy engineers and to be clear, I am sure that engineers annoy PMs, just as much.
2:49
So I've realized this is a two-way street.
2:54
So I think there's some things that are really easy to fix and some things that are maybe a little bit harder.
2:58
So the easy things to fix are hoarding credit.
2:58
Sometimes I think PMs because they tend to be the front-facing person for initiatives, they're talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever.
3:12
Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard on, right?
3:22
So making every effort to be credit sharing and inclusive of the engineering team and giving them the opportunity to speak about their contributions when it makes sense.
3:38
I think those are all things that PMs can do to avoid that kind of ...
3:38
What I consider a pretty easy annoyance, just like don't pour it all the credit.
3:45
This is not just you, right?
3:50
There's a lot of work has to go into that.
3:50
I think that sort of dovetails into the next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter and I think this is just a little bit of a cultural difference.
4:05
I mean, even managers, just normal managers, people like me who are looking across really broad areas or you have to be kind of big picture focused, and you forget that engineering done successfully really is all about the details and you don't necessarily have to understand
4:23
all of those details, but when you act like they don't matter and you don't care about them and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when you can get this done or why is it going to take so long? My god, this just seems like such a little thing. It just shows a real lack
4:31
My god, this just seems like such a little thing.
4:31
It just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing and I think it really can be very off-putting.
4:42
Even though I will totally agree that sometimes you're going to get details that don't really matter and you just have to be a little bit patient in those circumstances.
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7:10
The third is playing telephone.
7:10
Anybody in a manager role can fall victim to this, but I think PMs especially can be very annoying.
7:16
but I think PMs especially can be very annoying. So if you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know or because that's something that involves a level
7:27
of technical detail that only the engineers have that you just don't have, and you put yourself in this in-between position where people ask you questions, you turn around, you ask the engineers questions, you take whatever they say, especially when you don't really understand it, which happens sometimes, right? Go back to the original asker and sort of get in this middle-person scenario.
7:44
Go back to the original asker and sort of get in this middle-person scenario.
7:51
I think that is very annoying and frankly, it's a waste of time for everyone.
7:51
This is something that managers of all stripes do, but PMs definitely do it and that drives engineers, particularly senior engineers on projects, it's crazy.
8:02
And then, the last one that I wanted to put on this list is just when sometimes it feels like product managers want to hoard all the ideas for themselves, right?
8:12
They want to be the ones that come up with every single sort of product idea and every single detail.
8:18
What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things, because engineers are like, well, I need to take control of something.
8:30
I want to have some creative outlet, so I'm going to use my engineering skills as my creative outlet and I'm going to spend a lot of time obsessing over the right framework or the right this, that or the other.
8:39
That may actually not matter that much with products delivery, but when you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else and it's actually kind of bad for the product.
8:56
That's really interesting, the last one.
8:56
So you're saying if you keep engineers from having a voice in what you're building and prioritizing, that's what encourages engineers to rethink, let's just rebuild this thing, let's use a new framework, let's rewrite this system.
9:09
Yeah, I mean that's my ...
9:09
that happens without you doing that, sometimes. Yeah. I do think ...
9:16
I think when I see it worst and I can basically always predict what I'm going to see, a lot of that kind of engineers building stuff, finding creative outlets and kind of building stuff, maybe they shouldn't be.
9:28
I'm going to find that in places where they are so quashed their creativity for the actual business or product that they're building and their voice in that is so ignored that they don't have any outlets in that space and so, they are going to use the space that they have an outlet in, the place where they have some control and that's usually the technology choices and the details there. That's fascinating.
9:54
I want to actually dig further into that around rewrites.
9:58
You have a really interesting take on that, but before we get there, let me spend a little time on some of these. These are awesome.
10:01
So on this theme of not involving engineers in ideation and coming up with what you're actually building, what have you seen just very tactically, is there anything you've seen that PM do super well?
10:17
I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas.
10:22
They're not threatened by the engineering team being full of smart people because they realize that yeah, some of the engineers may have good ideas, but they still don't really know how to do the product job.
10:34
Just my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job that they would need to be successful.
10:43
And when product managers take the time to build those relationships, well, make sure that people do feel like they can both share their ideas, but also that they start to appreciate what the job of this product person actually is.
11:02
And what they're really bringing to the table in terms of really how do we measure this input?
11:07
How do we really understand the customers, how do we really think through the details of what's going to make this successful from a business or a customer perspective?
11:19
I do think that that creates just a much better interaction pattern and then, engineers can feel good about sharing ideas and understanding that many of them won't go anywhere, but there's somebody that's actually going to listen and take the time to care about them.
11:37
Coming back to some of the things that you said annoy engineers of PMs, this idea of playing the middle person, sounds like the solution clearly is there.
11:41
Just connect the engineer to the other engineer or your engineer to the PM that's trying to figure this out, right?
11:49
That one is not always easy because again, you have this tension of a lot of the job, of any management role is being in meetings and filtering stuff so that people who are in focus ...
12:03
individual contributor mode can focus and get things done and not spend half of their weekend in meetings.
12:08
You've just got to be very careful about knowing when you're crossing that line and when you're crossing it too often.
12:14
And if you're having to often say, "Let me get back to you, let me get back to you, I don't know, let me get back to you."
12:20
Maybe the person you're talking to is asking the wrong level of questions of you.
12:23
Maybe you need to connect them to the engineers directly, but just being aware that that shouldn't be a default behavior.
12:28
That will happen occasionally, but it shouldn't be a thing that happens a lot because if it's happening a lot, then you're likely missing something, you're likely losing something in that telephone game translation and that's going to cause problems over time. Awesome.
12:47
So basically, if you're just finding your middle person too much, then it may be time to connect people directly.
12:50
And I know the reason PMs often are afraid of this is the engineer may agree to something that they think is a bad idea for their team or may not understand all the ramifications on the product or just obviously, just spend their time in meetings and not be building anything.
13:07
Yeah, yeah, and sometimes you mean you do it in a group meeting.
13:07
I feel like Slack and other chat type things actually make it a lot easier to see, have the right people in a group in a thing, but again, that's distracting.
13:23
So there's not an easy solution to that one, just I think it's important to be aware of it.
13:27
Yeah, that's a really good point.
13:27
And then, in terms of hoarding credit, is there any tactical thing you've seen PMs do really well here is it, just every time they're announcing the product, "Hey, these engineers were involved or-" It's more than just saying thank you to all these people, but it's actually sometimes stepping back and letting other people speak, especially if it's something that's a really, really big technical lift.
13:49
I don't think there's a super easy fix to that.
13:49
I think it is just really being mindful that that can be very much a sore point for engineers when they just feel like, "This is my work, I'm not getting any credit for it, and this person is hogging all the glory." I love that.
14:07
Yeah, I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting and announcing.
14:12
And so, I think that's a really good reminder is let your engineers do that. Okay, amazing.
14:16
So we talked a little bit about this idea of rewriting and how engineers sometimes just want to rewrite the system and I think a lot of PMs do too.
14:28
A lot of times you're building your features on a thing that someone that doesn't even work at the company and were built five, 10 years ago, and there's always this sense of, "Okay, maybe we should just rewrite this thing everything will move so much faster."
14:39
Do you have a really interesting take that I think a lot of PMs will love to hear, which is that rewrites are often a big trap and often don't end up being what you think they might be?
14:47
Can you just talk about your experience and perspective on this?
14:50
Yeah, so I mean I have personally overseen a number of, if not quite rewrites, re-architectures and major system evolutions.
14:58
So I absolutely do think they are sometimes a thing that needs to happen, but I also, have seen so many instances of cases where the engineers have convinced themselves that the only solution to the woes that they're experiencing with the system, it's hard to support, it's hard to change.
15:23
Nobody wants to work on it, because it's this old crappy technology, is that they just have to go over to the side, build the new thing that will replace this old system and that is going to sort of free them from their misery.
15:41
And I think projects where you acknowledge that you do need to do an uplift, but you make a very thoughtful staged plan as to how you're going to do that, and you really think through, okay,
15:53
we don't need to touch all of this stuff, but we're going to take the recommendation system, it really needs to be uplifted and that's a well-contained, you know, API and so we can start to fix that without having to change the whole whatever web framework, right? So I do
16:03
So I do think there are ways to do these evolutions, but people really underestimate.
16:11
They underestimate the time to migrate stuff from the old system to the new system, is a huge, huge problem.
16:24
Particularly when you're talking about systems where you have sort of external people using the system in some way, whether it's web UIs or APIs.
16:29
You think, "Oh, we kind of know what's going on, so it's not going to be that big a deal."
16:36
Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems.
16:48
By the way, you still have to support the old system while you're working on the new system.
16:52
So I doubt many of the PMs in the audience are ever happy when they hear, we need to go away for six months, a year, two years to build this new thing and we just can't really add any features to the system in the interim.
17:06
That's infuriating, I'm sure, and frankly that's a problem and I don't know that that should be an acceptable answer in many cases.
17:11
There may occasionally again be a case where that is what has to happen, but I think most of the time you can't really afford to just say we're going to go away and we're not going to touch the system for a long time and we're going to build something new over here.
17:27
So many things about why that doesn't make any sense.
17:32
So this is a little bit of field of the blog post that you're referring to.
17:32
So, if you've got a system that doesn't really need feature enhancement or development because it's just sort of fine and the users are using it.
17:44
And it's just annoying to the engineers, why in the world would you invest so much money in writing a new version of it?
17:51
There's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance that sometimes happens if you need to do new stuff and the old system literally is not ...
18:00
it's not possible to do the new stuff that you need to do, you need to figure out a path to get to a sustainable system or you can continue to add and evolve.
18:08
You should be investing and so there does need to be an investment, but you have to ask yourself, if I could go away and not touch this and not do anything to it for a long period of time without it really harming my business, is it worthwhile to change it at all?
18:28
Does it matter, and there's some questions there.
18:28
I also think that when people try to do rewrites, particularly again if it's something that you're really trying to just move to a new language for example or sort of modernize in a certain way, [inaudible 00:18:45] a lot of times people really underestimate what the old system does and how well they know what the old system does.
18:48
There's so much logic buried in legacy systems, it tends to be undocumented, it tends to be weird.
18:55
You haven't thought through all the business rules, you haven't thought through the data formatting and I think again, it's much, much harder to replicate all the important things from the old system to the new system than people expect.
19:14
So there's more than that, but I do think sometimes you need to evolve systems and my advice would be when you're struggling making an evolution plan, take pieces potentially of the old system, uplift them, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, clean up the tech debt, but trying to say we're going to just go away.
19:33
We're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works.
19:42
I think a lot of PMs will be like, "Yes, thank you so much for saying this, because I think that's also always a big struggle between the ENG team and the PM team."
19:46
So just to summarize what I think a lot of people miss or what you're saying a lot of people miss when they're thinking about let's rewrite this thing, is the migration to the new system, migrating customers, users, data to the new thing is going to take a lot longer than you expect.
20:00
You underestimate knowing what it actually does and you're going to miss features and you can introduce new bugs.
20:10
This actually is very similar to what I've seen with redesigning a whole product flow.
20:15
There's always this sense of let's just rethink this onboarding flow from scratch or let's rebuild this part of the product and always it ends up being a negative experiment result.
20:25
It always ends up being less good and then, you have to spend all this time clawing back to get to where you were and also, you forget the stuff that would ...
20:29
the features that you had and you're like, "Oh, shit, I forgot about that feature, I forgot about that feature."
20:35
So it's interesting, there's a very similar situation in the product side. Okay, amazing.
20:41
I'm going to go to a slightly different topic, which is around engineering leadership.
20:45
So I know you've written a lot about engineering leadership, you spent a lot of times with engineering leaders, so I have a few questions here.
20:48
One is that I know that one of the things that haunts engineering leaders most is finding the balance between staying technical and their technical expertise, and their leadership expertise and basically finding the right altitude of how high ...
21:03
where to be in the org and also how in the details to be, and also staying technical enough to be relevant.
21:08
What have you learned in your own experience of finding that balance and how do you advise engineering leaders as they struggle with this?
21:18
Yeah, so one piece of advice I give everybody is don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones.
21:27
You feel like you've got mastery that you could ...
21:27
if you know a second language fluently or if you played an instrument really, really seriously for a long time or maybe a sport really, really seriously for a long time, you'll be familiar with the ...
21:43
I haven't done that in a long time, but if I was to pick it up, it would be rusty, but I would get there pretty quickly, right?
21:48
Maybe physically, I wouldn't be as strong as I was or whatever, but I would get there.
21:52
You can do that with writing code.
21:58
You can do that with technical skills if you do it for long enough, I think you can develop sort of a baseline mastery, where you're not going to be as fast and a lot of the challenges of being technical is actually in all the tooling and all the tooling evolution, but you're not going to be necessarily as fast as people who have been doing it,
22:15
but you won't be completely clueless and I think that all the things you learn getting to that really comfortable mastery of some part of hands-on tech will stay with you and will help you just maintain a level of confidence in your own technical know-how and maintain a level of empathy for what it means to be a good engineer. And I think just make you a lot less anxious about
22:35
And I think just make you a lot less anxious about being hands-off, even though I think everybody who makes that transition for a year or two, especially if you're really have to be hands-off or you just don't have time to write code at all, you are going to be anxious for a while no matter what.
22:50
The things to then think about from that point is, being technical is also just about knowing what's going on and paying attention and being able to ask ...
23:02
what people care about with technical leaders in my experience is they want people who actually seem like they sort of understand what you're doing and can ask good questions and help guide you to better decisions without actually being the one who's like, "Oh no, you need to use this library instead of that library."
23:25
It's actually sort of annoying when somebody that's very senior and hands-off tries to tell you, don't use this library, use that library because I don't know about you, but I don't really believe people who have been hands-off for that long when they try to tell me what to do and the thing that I'm kind of the expert in right now, but I do appreciate it when I'm given more guidance around, well, have you considered this?
23:43
Tell me about how you're planning to handle that situation.
23:49
What are the major technical challenges with implementing this and that can actually spend the time to listen and ask thoughtful questions on the back of that.
24:00
The last thing I would say is surround yourself with smart technical people, also as much as you can, and be willing to listen to them, talk about tech and ask them questions about things.
24:14
I feel like that's part of the reason that I am able to stay technically savvy and credible amongst people who work for me is not that I'm writing code because I'm not.
24:26
But I am listening to a lot of very smart people talk about technology a lot, down to the level of I'm trying to debug this database issue, what the heck is going on?
24:32
And just constantly being interested in those stories and learning from them and learning what really smart engineers are thinking about and worrying about.
24:44
The more you can build that network of people that are still hands-on and stay in touch with that, I do think that helps a lot.
24:55
So on my last point, how are you actually doing that? Is it watching ...
24:58
going to conferences with friends, something else? Yeah, yeah.
25:01
I mean, I guess for me it started with going to conferences, meeting people.
25:01
Now, I'm in a lot of different chat groups where people are just sort of regularly communicating, staying in touch with ...
25:15
staying in touch with former colleagues.
25:15
I will admit I'm kind of a social person and I have a big network, so this may be easier said than done, but I do think being in the right group chats ...
25:27
I also think, I'm sure reading various tech news and tech sort of commentary and discussion boards, I mean it's definitely a mixed bag of that stuff I think that like ...
25:40
but there are smart people.
25:40
You find the smart people in there, you sort of follow what they're saying.
25:45
I think that's another good way to keep that perspective.
25:50
Is it a sign, I wonder if you're not interested in that anymore that maybe you should move into something else. I don't know.
25:53
If you're like, don't really pay attention to engineering technicalness.
26:00
It's hard for me to say because I'm such a nerd. I really love tech.
26:00
I'm in this industry, because I'm just actually genuinely very interested in certain corners, not every corner of technology but certain corners of technology.
26:14
I want to know what the latest stuff that's happening in databases and infrastructure and I find it all very interesting.
26:25
I find the problems interesting.
26:25
So I think that makes me very successful because I just have that natural curiosity and passion and interest in it.
26:31
But I don't know that that's a total prerequisite.
26:36
Yeah, but you've been talking about ...
26:36
it reminds me a little bit of this guy, LevelsIO on Twitter.
26:41
Have you heard of this guy?
26:41
He was just on Lex Friedman.
26:41
Have you listened to that yet?
26:44
I think maybe I saw a clip of it, but I haven't listened to it.
26:48
So I think one of the most successful indie engineers where he just works on his own thing all by himself, never raises money, just launch his products that make money.
26:51
And a funny thing about him is he works ...
26:55
all stuff is in PHP and jQuery.
26:55
He's just like, this works.
27:01
I've always had this to do, learn Node. js, learn Python.
27:01
And I'm like, I'm too busy to build ...
27:07
while I'm building to learn these new things and he's been incredibly successful.
27:11
So it touches on sometimes maybe you don't need to just keep rewriting to the newest frameworks.
27:16
Yeah, no, I mean look, I actually ...
27:16
I feel like I know a lot of smart engineers who are in that category.
27:20
They're like, we built amazing things in PHP and relatively simple SQL and so much of tech is over-engineering things and I don't totally disagree.
27:29
I think the challenge is though, of course, what works as a one person show, doesn't always work in a scaled organization for better or for worse, we're in different like, you've got to match what makes one person really productive.
27:51
Will it make 100 people, 1000 people, even 10 people really productive?
27:51
That's always a little hard to tell and that's why I do think you should be not ...
28:01
I think it's always a good idea to be keeping up with what's happening and what's changing in whatever kind of side of tech you're in, but not obsessively chasing every fad.
28:12
I think being aware of, but not necessarily chasing them, but particularly, if you're working in groups, teams, larger companies, even midsize companies, there is some amount of, you're balancing the tech that makes one person go fast with the tech that makes 10 or 100 people go fast and those are not always exactly the same thing.
28:35
Just to kind follow this thread a little bit and to kind of nerd snipe you a little bit, is there a platform or language or framework these days that you're either very excited about that you think is helping people move faster and do better work or the opposite just like this is ...
28:46
everyone is excited but this is not good.
28:52
I will say this, one example I actually put in my own notes for this conversation was GraphQL.
28:58
I would not tell a team to use or not use GraphQL at this point because it's a bit out of my expertise zone and my level of management.
29:04
It's not really my job anyway, but it is one of the things that is both popular and thought relatively poorly of by most of the senior people that I know.
29:19
And so, I guess I would say that's one where I would say if you're seriously thinking about it and you're not Facebook, you may really want to make sure you know what problem you're trying to solve because the impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front-end engineers that they don't really have to collaborate with backend engineers.
29:48
And they can just sort of build whatever and it'll all be fine, and it just doesn't ever seem to work out that well for anybody who actually does it in practice.
29:52
Again, obviously, it can work out that well because Facebook has made a great go of it.
29:56
I'm sure there are other companies that are, but that's one where it's not that new but it remains one of these things where it seems like an interesting fad that maybe is burning a lot of people. That's awesome.
30:13
I appreciate you sharing that.
30:13
I don't know if this is exactly an example of this, but on that podcast levels, I forget his actual name, Peter I think, shared that whenever there's a framework that has a VC funded startup behind it, that's not a good sign because their job now is to convince engineers to use it and then pay for it and that's not necessarily going to be the best product. That's true.
30:34
Although I will say that some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, or the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company that doesn't have the rest of the context set, but I don't think ... He's not wrong.
30:57
I also just think big companies share the blame on that one.
31:05
I guess we should all just come back to PHP and jQuery and be simple. Maybe.
31:10
Okay, so to close out this thread on engineering leaders, finding the right balance, just to summarize your advice here.
31:14
One is get to mastery before and is your advice here, get to this point before you move into engineering. Engineering management.
31:23
I will say part of this is also in particular, if you happen to be a woman or otherwise, underrepresented person in tech because people will tend to underestimate your technical abilities just unfortunately as a get-go.
31:36
I also think it's particularly important to kind of develop that internal confidence in your abilities before you make this sort of scary leap, which is scary for everyone of have a ...
31:48
if you have that mastery before you make the leap, I wish more people would do this because honestly, I do think there are a lot of people who never really gained the mastery.
31:58
They go into management, they lose it and some of them are still perfectly good managers and look, there are good managers who were never technical to begin with.
32:10
I don't want to say that that's impossible.
32:10
I just think that if you care about being technical, if you are technical now and you want to maintain that tech-savvy, don't just become a manager the first time somebody offers it to you.
32:21
Make sure you've really spent your good time writing code.
32:28
Is there a number of years heuristic you think about or some way to tell you that maybe you've hit that point?
32:34
I think this has been since disproven, but it was that 10,000 hours idea of mastery at some point.
32:39
For me, it was like an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree, and four or five years of full-time work.
32:44
So maybe I might be slow.
32:44
I didn't start coding a lot in middle school like people might do now, but I felt like ...
32:51
I took several years of hands-on work in a very intense undergraduate and graduate programs for me.
32:57
So I do think it's probably somewhere in the 10-year range of really having spent a lot of your time over those years writing code and really understanding how to be a technical expert. Got it.
33:17
So essentially if you're thinking about moving into management as an engineer, you may want to wait until you've done it for 10 years in some form, which I think is a lot longer than a lot of people would've thought.
33:28
And I imagine many people are not doing that.
33:30
And then, in your experience not doing it as well, it could be- If you were programming a lot in high school and you got an undergraduate degree, so let's say you've got six years- I see.
33:41
You may only need four or five years of work, 40 hour a week writing code experience.
33:41
I'm sure it depends on the company, but I do think when you see people that are 23, they are just out very recently out of school, it's a different thing if you're a founder and that's a whole different life, but if you're at a big company and somebody is like you have great communication skills, why don't you start to become a manager?
34:05
Often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager, which is actually also the worst sort of path to real leadership in my opinion.
34:09
If you don't feel like you're done ...
34:16
Also, if you just don't feel like you're done, if you're still having fun writing code, don't rush becoming a manager, writing code is awesome. Have fun, enjoy it.
34:28
I know exactly what you mean.
34:28
So I used to be an engineer, actually I was an engineer for 10 years.
34:31
I definitely don't have mastery at this point.
34:31
I moved into product from that and I definitely so missed actually just sitting there and writing code and building stuff, that was very hard to give up.
34:40
I imagine you still missed that.
34:45
I think I might've forgotten about it at this point, but there is nothing as satisfying because you get the fast feedback loop. It's just wonderful. Yeah.
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36:01
On the topic of moving into management, you wrote maybe the definitive book on engineering manager career path, and so when someone moves from IC to management, what do you find is the most surprising thing to them?
36:14
What do they most often not understand or are surprised by like, "Oh man, I did not see this as part of my job or my life."
36:24
Yeah, I mean I think there's a few things. I do think ...
36:24
assuming that they're actually trying to do it well, I do think there are a lot of people who move into management and then just don't really understand the job at all and aren't even self-aware enough to know that they don't understand it, but for those who are trying to do it, trying to do it well.
36:38
I think a few things that tend to surprise them are the fact that you really don't own your time as a manager.
36:43
Your team and your management and the company owns your time.
36:50
More and more the more senior you become as a manager.
36:56
I think individual contributors often think that if they become a manager, they will still have some of the freedom that they have as a senior individual contributor.
37:08
But then they'll also be able to tell people what to do and they'll have all this authority.
37:13
And the reality is, management is much more ...
37:13
I'm not a huge fan of servant leadership exactly, but management really is a service job.
37:21
You are serving the team, you are serving the company.
37:26
Your job is to help make things better and that usually doesn't mean that you're making all the decisions.
37:35
It usually doesn't mean that you snap your fingers and people jump.
37:35
Because if you try that, especially in tech, right?
37:41
People are just going to revolt.
37:41
They're not going to listen to you.
37:45
It's just too hard to have ...
37:45
that's not the culture that we live in.
37:53
And I don't think that's a good culture.
37:53
I don't think that command and control, I tell you what to do and you do it.
37:56
It just doesn't create creativity, right?
37:56
It's the same thing as like PMs, trying to have all the ideas, right?
38:00
No, you've got all these brilliant people working for you on a team, your job as a manager is not to tell them what to do in every single case.
38:11
Occasionally, yes, a lot more.
38:11
If you're trying to convince them of what you think should happen.
38:18
In some ways, you're sort of nudging, you're encouraging, you're directing, you're setting guardrails for processes or behaviors or whatever, but it's not this glorious fearless leader.
38:36
I make all these decisions and everyone looks up to me and it's awesome kind of job.
38:36
It's much more grueling, much more ...
38:43
you are really just sort of reacting to things in the moment. And it can be very ... it's a hard job.
38:51
I do think particularly management when done well, when you're really trying to do it in a thoughtful kind, but also, productive way is a very hard job.
39:06
I wonder if engineering is where most ...
39:06
where the highest percentage of people that move into management move back to IC.
39:10
I've seen that a bunch and I wonder if engineers are the most common.
39:14
I don't know, but- After realizing what you just said is true, like, "Oh, what I done-" So do you not think product managers also do this?
39:21
Because I think product managers also actually suffer from exactly this kind of- They do.
39:28
Maybe sometimes- They do. Yeah.
39:30
But interestingly, I was an engineering manager earlier in my career.
39:30
I really did not like it.
39:36
I was very unhappy in that role.
39:36
As a PM manager though, I was very happy, it was a lot easier.
39:43
Yeah, because PMs are way easier to manage.
39:43
PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to ... they're just so helpful. They want to do this ...
39:50
they're good communicators. I love managing PMs.
39:57
I have to say, I have to say, just my experience, engineers are such a pain.
40:00
They're all primadonnas.
40:00
I am an engineer, but PMs are more fun to manage my experience.
40:07
So actually, you have a point. You have a point. But I wonder.
40:12
Yeah, because I haven't seen a lot of PM managers move back to IC product management.
40:16
I find that once you can build product through teams and not sit there all day in Excel and check in on deadlines and things, it's hard to give that part up.
40:23
You kind of enjoy being higher up in that chain. Yeah.
40:28
Kind of along these lines, something that you have a really interesting perspective on is one-on-ones.
40:34
Most people are like have one-on-ones with everyone, have them regularly, they're really important.
40:38
You actually have this contrarian take that maybe you should have less one-on-ones, especially as an engineering manager, you talk about that.
40:47
Yeah, so to be clear, you should have one-on-ones with your direct reports and your manager and you should hold those sacred ...
40:55
I tend to do my weekly or maybe every other week.
40:55
So this is not about that set of one-on-ones.
41:02
So the one-on-ones of the people that you are directly managing and with your own manager.
41:07
But I think there is this ...
41:07
I don't know if it's the remote work, sort of explosion that's happened or it's big companies or what, but what I've seen and I've heard a lot of friends at many companies complain about is this idea that everybody is doing one-on-ones with everyone else.
41:28
So the manager is doing one-on-ones with their team.
41:28
They're also doing one-on-ones with all of their peers.
41:33
They're doing one-on-ones with all of their stakeholders.
41:37
They're doing one-on-ones with product and design.
41:37
And I think that it's just not a scalable approach, right?
41:46
Linearly scale with the number of relationships you have.
41:46
And so, as your company grows, as the number of things your team supports grow, as the team grows, you just can't scale that way.
42:00
You cannot expect to maintain a one-on-one approach to kind of organizational relationship building and awareness passed a fairly small team/company.
42:08
I also think that people think that one-on-ones will solve all of their problems.
42:17
And I think the reality is you have this one-on-ones with people that don't really want to have a one-on-one with you.
42:30
If they're not in the mind to invest in your relationship, if they don't really care about what you're doing, they actually may not like it that you're asking them for a one-on-one, let me show up like, because it's like, okay, well I should do this to be a good corporate citizen or whatever.
42:44
But they're just like, why are we doing this?
42:44
What is the point of this?
42:47
I also think that one-on-ones, particularly when you use them first of stakeholder management.
42:51
So when you're meeting with people that's not your team, but other stakeholders that you may need to deal with, if you have a lot of stakeholders ...
42:54
so I've been in a lot of positions where I have a lot of internal stakeholders because I build internal platforms is a big part of what my job has been in the last many years.
43:06
Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're happy or unhappy with things, your unhappy stakeholders aren't hearing that.
43:17
So you may have one really unhappy stakeholder and five really happy ones and all you're saying to your unhappy one is, "Well, everybody else is happy and they're not seeing it for themselves."
43:27
And they're just having to say, "Trust me, because I've had these other one-on-ones with all these people and they're saying it's fine."
43:33
And it just kind of sounds whiny.
43:37
And so, when you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders and trying to just rely on one-on-one management of that is actually not very productive in a lot of ways.
43:43
So in general, I guess I just think people should respect their own time more.
43:50
As much as I just said management, you're kind of at everyone's mercy and that is true, but also respect your time.
43:58
Don't just load yourself up with meetings because you're a manager and that's your job.
44:05
Do you really have something to talk to a person about?
44:10
Do you really need to ...
44:10
when you have a one-on-one meeting with someone, you are asking for their time.
44:16
You shouldn't just be doing that kind of haphazardly for fun.
44:24
This is a little bit of my personality.
44:24
I'm not a great company networker.
44:24
Some people are really good at just like, let's go to get coffee, let's go to lunch and let's hang out and build a relationship.
44:33
And honestly, those people are really successful in many ways that I am not.
44:38
I do sort of envy that skill.
44:38
I'm really good if I work with you.
44:38
If I work with you on something, generally speaking, people really come to respect me because I'm very engaged and I'm a really good collaborator in various ways, but I'm really bad at just getting to know you random one-on-one, where we don't have a purpose to the meeting.
44:54
And that's not to say those are always bad, but I do think that a lot of people with ...
45:00
that's your comfort zone, if that getting to know you, random, relationship building one-on-one is your comfort zone, I should probably do more of them.
45:12
You should probably do fewer of them because you should always be pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone and are you really getting something out of that or are you just being able to tick a checkbox that says, I had eight meetings today, therefore I was productive.
45:26
Yeah, that super resonates.
45:26
Kind of pulling on this thread of how you operate and how you work something that I've heard you're really known for, is creating a work culture where people work really hard but also, have a really good work-life balance.
45:36
And when we were chatting, you, you actually told me you're not a great believer in working too hard.
45:41
Can you just talk about this philosophy on building a great culture where people don't work too hard but also, get stuff done and don't burn out?
45:51
I think we all understand that if we could just figure out and focus on really the most important things, we would just ...
45:58
everything would be better.
45:58
And it's hard to figure out what the most important things are, but overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.
46:11
I listened to one of your podcasts where you talked to someone who said, if you've never fired someone and regretted it, you don't know where the line is, of who you should and shouldn't buy.
46:20
And I will admit I have mixed feelings about that, although I get what you're saying.
46:25
If you don't regularly reset your expectations of what you should and shouldn't let slide, do you have any idea where the line of what is actually important to work on is? I just think ...
46:38
and the thing about that is it's not like firing people where you do it once or twice and you regret it and you learn pretty quickly, unfortunately.
46:47
I think you actually have to kind of regularly test the circumstances and challenge with, am I really getting the most out of myself?
46:54
Am I really producing the best value or am I just making ...
47:09
swaging my internal guilt about I need to work 60-hour weeks, I need to sleep in the office, I need to whatever, to show that I'm a hard worker and I care.
47:16
And so, I guess I do really think that people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the important stuff done and always be asking themselves what is important to do?
47:37
And what's important to do does change over time.
47:37
But if you're not regularly doing an audit of your time and trying to knock things off that list that don't matter, you're probably wasting a lot of time on things that don't matter and okay, you don't want to work less.
47:51
You love working a lot, that's fine, but you could probably just be getting a lot more valuable stuff done if you would do these audits regularly, right?
47:59
I also think people don't delegate enough.
47:59
So, if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything, because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegating, which actually takes more time initially, usually, you have to teach people whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do.
48:19
Not always, sometimes they'll surprise you and they're better at it than you are, but maybe not.
48:22
And so, you have to teach them, but then you finally ...
48:22
you freed yourself up to scale.
48:27
So I guess I'm just a real believer that working hard and a focused way for over fewer hours I think is a more productive way to approach work.
48:39
And I think I have lived my career that way.
48:52
I've been successful in it and I have encouraged it and people who have worked for me, and I think I've seen a lot of success through it, but it's not a thoughtless exercise.
49:02
It's an active process of constant reflection to get to that focus.
49:11
For someone that is listening to this and is like, I want to start doing this, is there anything ...
49:16
any specific practice you've found useful or any specific tactic to actually do this well?
49:23
I think there's different approaches you could take, right?
49:23
One approach you could take is just like every Friday I'm going to stop working at 4 PM or something, let's say, and I am not, or I'm not going to let myself work this weekend.
49:33
Forcing yourself to log off, forcing yourself to have boundaries and saying ...
49:40
and then doing out of what did I get done, I think can help. That's scary.
49:52
And people don't like doing that, but I do think that that's one of the best ways to do it is really just saying, I'm going to log off.
50:00
I'm going to log off every day this week at 6 PM. I'm going to ...
50:05
because your brain is probably going to keep thinking.
50:10
You might still be a little stressed out, you're still thinking about work, you're still worrying about it, but there is a difference between thinking about it and doing it, and particularly
50:18
for those of you who are earlier in your careers, this was actually, I think one of the reasons that I did get to mastery was because I was extremely good at being focused when I was at work, when I was a hands-on programmer and really writing code for many of the hours of the day. And that meant
50:31
And that meant I was not ...
50:38
this was pre heavy social media.
50:38
I was much less distracted, which I don't know if I would be able to do it in the modern era as easily, but having that real heavy focus time because I was like, "I don't want to work on the weekend.
50:50
I don't want to stay here until 9 PM every night.
50:54
I just want to get this done."
50:54
And it meant that I didn't do quite as many copies.
50:58
I didn't go to lunch and chat with people all every day, but I was very, very productive and I learned to get a lot done in a short period of time.
51:05
And I do think learning those skills earlier in your career and then continuing to apply them throughout your career is another piece of advice.
51:16
In terms of staying and getting focused, is there anything that helps you focus?
51:19
Is it like headphones, a drink?
51:19
What gets you in the zone?
51:24
I mean, yeah, I have a lot of rituals.
51:24
I have my caffeination rituals. Say more.
51:32
Well, I mean I can't drink coffee anymore because my stomach got messed up at some point, but I drink tea in the morning.
51:36
I drink caffeinated water also.
51:36
I have a Diet Coke at lunch, so I have these rituals of my caffeine hits that help me.
51:44
I have to be in a quiet place.
51:44
I do find non-music that is ...
51:56
I really like Four Tet, for example, as music to focus or the new Andre 3000 Flute album is extremely good for focusing, where it's not quite predictable, no lyrics and not quite predictable.
52:10
For me, that helps me focus a lot.
52:10
I can't be listening to any words and focus.
52:16
My brain just cannot ignore words.
52:16
So those are some of the things I use to help folks. That is awesome.
52:24
I have a similar caffeine strategy.
52:24
I'm drinking tea always during these podcasts and this little thing I got here and then, my wife doesn't want me to drink Diet Coke because she thinks the sugar and it is not good, but I still drink it sometimes and it works great. I switched to green tea. That's my approach.
52:36
Start with black tea and then switch to green tea. That's smart.
52:41
Man, there's so many things you shared that I wanted to dig into.
52:41
Let me share a couple of things.
52:44
Your point about delegating I thought was really important, and there's another benefit to learning to delegate, which is team members feel empowered.
52:49
You give them a chance to take on responsibility and they feel like I have an opportunity to show I can do this other thing.
53:02
Yeah, and you're never going to scale if you don't delegate.
53:07
Yeah, and it's hard to start learning to do that, but once you get good at it, it becomes so great.
53:11
I love just delegate everything every time, and people enjoy it. They're like, "Amazing.
53:16
You're giving me opportunity."
53:16
The thing you said about how ...
53:16
if you're not sometimes regretting something you cut or potentially firing someone you don't regret, Elon actually, Elon Musk has a great approach to this.
53:26
I don't know if you've heard his philosophy on optimizing.
53:30
He has this whole five-step process of figuring out how to optimize something, and one of them is try to cut things like, do we need this thing or not?
53:34
And if you don't recognize that 10% of stuff you cut, it was a mistake, you're probably not cutting enough stuff.
53:45
You'll have to figure out your own metrics.
53:45
But I definitely think testing the limits, it's scary though. I'm going to be honest.
53:52
Doing that is always scary.
53:57
It brings up like, I forgot to finish the assignment nightmares of school, especially for the overachievers that often end up in these kinds of companies and jobs.
54:04
Again, you got to do things that scare you or you're never going to grow.
54:14
Okay, I'm going to go in a whole different direction.
54:14
You've got a book coming out about platform engineering and platform teams.
54:18
This is something that I get a lot of questions about.
54:21
A lot of people are thinking about moving to a platform team or struggling working on a platform team or struggling working with a platform team.
54:25
So I have a bunch of questions along these lines.
54:30
The first is I asked a bunch of people that worked with you what to ask you and someone that worked with you shared this quote about his frustration working with platform teams that he's often complaining to you about and he works on customer-facing products.
54:44
And so, he said platform teams that are often slow.
54:48
They're often pushing us to compromise on features to adopt their systems.
54:48
They often get infinite funding even though they don't have to show any ROI.
54:51
And so, maybe from the perspective of working with a platform team, say you're building something customer-facing, any tips for effectively working with a platform team and building a great relationship there.
55:08
I'm very sympathetic to anybody who feels that way because part of the reason that I wrote this book, I co-wrote it with a friend, Ian Nolan, is that so many platform teams are guilty of all the things that he's complaining about, that my friend was complaining about, that they don't listen, they're not delivering effectively, they're not explaining their value to the company.
55:26
And it is infuriating when you're dealing with that.
55:34
And honestly, I'm very sympathetic.
55:34
The thing that I would say though is the more you can, first of all, spend the time understanding that the platform team's problems a little bit and trying to collaborate and work with them and be clear about what it is you actually need and how you're willing to work with them, I think the better.
56:01
I think if you get mad and you just try to avoid them or undermine them or whatever, that may work in the long run, but it's just going to make everything worse in the short run.
56:11
So I do think that if you've got a platform team that you're frustrated with, some tips, I would put are like, "Look, find the parts of that team that are good because I'm sure there are some," right?
56:24
Maybe the databases team is awesome.
56:28
And really make sure you are maintaining a good relationship with that part of the team and you can point to how you are collaborating extremely well with that part of the team.
56:40
Help give them product feedback.
56:40
This is annoying but sometimes needs to happen because a lot of companies, I actually think product ...
56:46
you need to have a product mindset and frankly, you need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms.
56:53
A lot of companies just don't do this.
56:53
They don't believe that they should waste head count on product managers for internal teams.
56:56
So you end up with this platform team that has a lot of smart engineers, but they don't really know what to build.
57:02
So they're just sort of building whatever they think is right.
57:06
And so sometimes your job is to product manage them, is to tell them, these are the problems that we have and this is what we need.
57:16
And the clearer you can be about that, particularly when they don't have a product team, oftentimes, you can kind of lead them from the side in that way.
57:21
And so I think that's another approach that I would take when you're in that situation.
57:26
Find the parts of the team that are working and working well with your team and make sure you develop those relationships and try to just get over the anger and frustration and just be clear about what it is that you need and help them understand what they should really be doing and building.
57:48
That is really interesting advice.
57:48
So especially, you're saying if they don't have a PM helping, make sure they're guiding things well, is you can help them ...
57:52
basically help them think through stuff that will benefit them and also, help the stuff that you're trying to get done. Yeah. That's awesome advice.
58:03
Okay, so what about from the leadership perspective, trying to build an effective platform team, do you have any advice on how to structure these teams and incentivize these teams to help them be successful?
58:17
First of all, I'm a very strong believer that platform engineering has to involve software engineering.
58:22
If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team and you only have more operations systems engineers, DevOps, SRE, which I realize there are some SREs that are software engineers, but they tend to not want to write big software.
58:34
I think you're kind of missing the picture.
58:38
Platform engineering is not just maintaining cloud infrastructure and doing small scripts or blueprints or enablement projects for other teams, because that doesn't really create a cohesive and coherent platform.
58:53
It doesn't create products and frankly you need to be ...
59:01
platforms are products, ultimately.
59:01
You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?
59:07
So you need software engineers.
59:07
Yes, you need sort of operations systems, SRE specialists as well.
59:13
And of course, you need product people.
59:18
I had product teams on ...
59:18
product managers for all of my platform teams.
59:26
I've really developed out that practice in the companies that I've worked for doing this because I just believe that you're not going to get great results if you just believe that to engineers and engineering management.
59:39
They will do their best and you do occasionally find engineers that have really great product instincts in this space, but the actual details.
59:49
And focus of the product work is just you can't write a bunch of code and/or manage a big software engineering team and be a product manager at the same time.
59:55
That's actually just asking, I think, too much of people to do that really well, at least for very long.
59:59
So I think when it comes to structuring a team, recognize this is not just like SRE V2. This is more than that.
1:00:04
You want software engineers, you want systems engineers, you want product people.
1:00:11
And then, one of the reasons you want product folks is because you want to be thinking about impact-based, outcome-based approaches, not just like, "Well, we built this thing that seemed cool, we adopted this technology from this company because that's what everybody on the internet is talking about."
1:00:36
Whether it's VC funded or big company.
1:00:36
We actually thought about what are the problems the engineers at my company are facing?
1:00:44
How can we improve their productivity or deliver leverage to this business through whatever it is we're building, right?
1:00:51
Are we reducing the cycle time for engineering tasks?
1:00:56
Are we solving problems that are preventing products from launching and scaling?
1:00:56
Are we making really meaningful cost reductions or efficiencies and, in our products or in our platforms?
1:01:04
These are some examples of measurable contributions, but I think one of the challenges is that people create these platform teams and think that they can be sort of divorced from having an impact focus because it's like, "Well, you just got to run the infrastructure and make sure it works."
1:01:29
And it's like, "No, you actually do still have to do ...
1:01:29
if you do that OKR stuff or goal setting," or whatever, you've got to take a lot of the best practices of product.
1:01:33
It's a little different in the internal world, but it's still very important if you want to do platforms.
1:01:45
On the line of having PMs within the platform teams.
1:01:45
Some of the best PMs I've ever worked with where PMs on platform teams, and that just tells me, it's not like where you put PMs that are just meant like that's ...
1:01:52
where you could have some of the highest leverage because platform teams enable the rest of the company to move faster. Yeah.
1:02:02
And one difference there, I'm curious if you agree, is your ratio of PM to engineer can be a lot higher.
1:02:06
You can have a lot more engineers per PM on platform teams. Yeah.
1:02:10
Yeah, I think that's right because I think so much of the work in a platform team is not exactly product work.
1:02:15
A lot of it is like scaling or really deep kind of technical, like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing or I've got to do this performance efficiency and you don't always need a product spec for that, right?
1:02:30
It is often just a very engineering heavy task.
1:02:35
So yes, I think the ratios do tend to be a bit different.
1:02:42
We dove over right into this topic.
1:02:42
Maybe it might be helpful to help people understand what is a platform team, just what are examples of teams that would be considered platform teams.
1:02:51
I mean, I guess the high level definition that I have of platform engineering is if you are developing and operating platforms that ...
1:02:55
where they're trying to manage overall system complexity and deliver leverage to your business.
1:03:01
So a lot of the teams that people think about nowadays and when they're talking about platform teams, they're talking a lot about teams that may have formerly been called dev tools.
1:03:11
For example, so your CI/CD tooling for the company, a lot of the cloud infrastructure provisioning and tooling.
1:03:28
If you're at a company with certain technical problems, you may very well be building semi bespoke storage systems.
1:03:35
For example, maybe part of your platform teams.
1:03:35
I actually think that there are ...
1:03:40
And then, actually web frameworks ...
1:03:40
Web mobile framework and support for that.
1:03:50
That set of engineering can also be part of a platform offering.
1:03:50
I actually kind of believe that there's also sort of what you might call integration platforms or platforms that are in between that infrastructurey developer tooly stuff and products.
1:04:01
So billing platforms for example, if you have a single billing platform for all of the different products in your company, that shares a lot of overlaps in the challenges of those more dev tools, infrastructurey platform teams because you're probably supporting lots of different product lines that are using this system that needs to be able to scale with certain efficiencies.
1:04:23
You need to still do the product discovery.
1:04:31
You probably have a little bit more of a business product focus than the pure internal tools teams, but that gets to the blended area.
1:04:44
For founders that are earlier stage or companies that are smaller hearing this and they're like, "Oh, shit do I need a platform team?"
1:04:49
So yeah, you're shaking your head, if people aren't watching on YouTube.
1:04:53
What's a sign that's time maybe to start creating a platform team and setting aside resources for something like that?
1:05:00
So first of all, I think it gets to be like, you have 50 plus engineers.
1:05:00
I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are 10 engineers, right? But when you are ...
1:05:06
so there's a lot of ad hoc coordination that's probably happening amongst your engineering groups right now, where maybe you just have one ...
1:05:23
you have your GitHub and somebody is making sure that all of that stuff is sort of working.
1:05:30
You have a few cloud databases and you got a couple of people on each team and they kind of share notes to figure out what's going on or whatever.
1:05:40
Okay, it's all good, but at some point, you hit either a lot of inefficiency where you're seeing the same people across a bunch of different teams.
1:05:51
Each team has the same kind of people having to solve the same kinds of problems.
1:05:57
It just seems like why do I have three people in every team, dealing with this instead of centralizing it and making it a little more efficient.
1:06:02
It also could be that you hit some core scaling issue that starts to really need a dedicated team to solve.
1:06:13
Again, that could be developer productivity.
1:06:13
Every development team is trying to do it their own way and everybody is just super slow because you just can't get code released and it all has to be coordinated across every different team and it's just like, what is going on?
1:06:24
We need to fix that or you actually have a technical challenging area that needs a focused team to fix the scaling.
1:06:36
Those are some of the signs that you may want to start thinking about a platform team, but it's really like ...
1:06:40
generally speaking, I would not jump into it early.
1:06:40
This is something for companies that have matured where it's worth investing and making people internally more productive and centralizing certain functions just from a cost and efficiency basis at minimum.
1:07:02
Say you're on a platform team, say you're an engineer or even a PM, any advice for how to be successful and thrive within that environment and be a great platform team.
1:07:11
If you want to do platforms.
1:07:11
If you're an engineer, certainly if you're an engineer or an engineering manager, you've got to remember that half of the work is actually the operational quality, operational excellence of these things.
1:07:24
Platform engineering is not just writing code and then throwing it over the walls to someone.
1:07:28
Being interested and passionate about the operational challenges and scaling bits of systems I do think is fairly important, if you want to be a great platform engineer from a software engineer perspective, if you're more like a product manager, "Look, you've got to really care about ..."
1:07:47
I think you got to be really both interested in working with really smart engineers who are going to know way more than you do about things.
1:08:01
And almost being a really good, not necessarily zero to one but past one person because actually a lot of the best platform type offerings in companies start in individual application teams.
1:08:16
An application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves and it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem.
1:08:26
So a good platform team is often looking around for those and then sort of taking them and then assimilating them and making them available to more and more people.
1:08:30
And so, I think if you want to be in that kind of zero to one building the brand new stuff all the time, you may not be as happy in a platform team.
1:08:43
But if you're really interested a little bit more of taking things over, stabilizing, scaling them, making them efficient, making them evolve as a company evolves, I think you'll be happier in that circumstance. Awesome.
1:09:01
Is there anything else along these lines before we wrap up and yet a very exciting lightning round that you think might be helpful for folks working with platform teams or working on a platform team, building platform teams?
1:09:14
I think there are two things that we haven't touched on or maybe three that are really hard about platform teams and that I think don't get much press, which is running platform projects is a little bit different than running agile projects.
1:09:24
You can take a lot of the best practices you may have learned from agile type product delivery, but you are running longer, running larger scale, more complex builds because a lot of the stuff that you build at the platform level just takes longer.
1:09:44
It's a little bit more complicated.
1:09:44
So you've got to be willing to get into that kind of stuff, especially if you're in a management job in that space.
1:09:55
You are going to deal with a lot of migrations as well. So it is very annoying.
1:09:55
Migrations happen, even if you don't force them on people, your a cloud provider is going to say, oh, you've got to migrate from EKS view 19 to 121 or whatever, and that may require changes in code and then that's a real pain in the butt for all of the application teams.
1:10:16
So people who are interested in how to smooth over the customer and company impact of this underlying change, I think we'll be very happy in platform teams.
1:10:32
If you're not interested in that, you may not enjoy the work as much.
1:10:37
There's just a lot of detail oriented work and platforms.
1:10:37
And then of course, the final part is the stakeholders are a nightmare.
1:10:42
My friend who wrote the question about how his product or his platform partners drive him crazy.
1:10:48
I have no doubt he drives them crazies.
1:10:55
Because you've got all of these stakeholders, your peers and tech, maybe product managers, maybe executives that are like, what is this team?
1:11:01
Are they really worth the money?
1:11:01
Why are we spending so much on it?
1:11:07
I don't understand what they're doing.
1:11:07
I could do it better in some cases.
1:11:11
So there's actually a big part of the job, particularly as either product managers or engineering leadership is stakeholder management and really learning how to do that well.
1:11:25
And that is not always, that's probably I think universally agreed to be the least fun part of the job.
1:11:30
I don't think anybody loves it, but it is certainly a skill set. I'm glad that I have.
1:11:34
And so, I think if you are thinking about building one of these teams.
1:11:40
And you're like, I can just do the fun tech stuff or the cool product stuff, I'm really passionate about engineering productivity or I'm really passionate about state scale storage systems and I don't want to think about any of the other stuff.
1:11:50
You may not actually be happy in the long run in leadership positions.
1:11:56
It may be fine as an individual contributor, but for leaders in particular, there's a lot more to it than the fun tech problems, the fun operations problems, even the product.
1:12:07
You said there's a few things we haven't touched on. Is there anything else?
1:12:10
That's the fastest and anybody who's interested, my book will be coming out in the next couple of months from O'Reilly and covers all of this depth.
1:12:22
Yeah, is there a date specifically people should watch out for?
1:12:25
I think it's actually pre-order on Amazon now.
1:12:25
It's called Platform Engineering, and then, there's ...
1:12:29
I think it's like a guide for technical product and people leaders, something like that.
1:12:33
But I think the release ...
1:12:33
I don't know exactly when the Kindle release will be, but we're still in copy edits, but it should be done pretty soon. Okay, amazing.
1:12:42
So you can pre-order it now.
1:12:42
Rolling to it obviously in the show notes and description, it's called Platform Engineering.
1:12:45
Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, I want to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast that I call AI Corner.
1:12:50
AI is very top of mind for a lot of people and I'm always curious how people are finding it valuable in their work or in their life.
1:13:00
So the question is there anything you've found AI to be helpful with ... in your AI work?
1:13:07
Any way you use it in an interesting way?
1:13:11
I find it helpful, for example, if I've written a sentence and I'm like, I like this sentence, but I feel like, I don't like the phrasing or the format that I've used, it needs to be edited, but I can't quite figure out how.
1:13:23
I will often put it into ChatGPT and be like, "Can you reframe this?
1:13:27
Can you rephrase this for me?"
1:13:27
It doesn't always work well, but sometimes it does.
1:13:32
It's like, "Oh yeah, if I just switched this around or changed this word choice, it's a much easier to read sentence." I do think it's ...
1:13:36
I think it's just before that and small.
1:13:41
I think it's large, lots of texts I haven't had as much luck with.
1:13:41
I'm a little bit of an AI novice still, I would say.
1:13:49
What I will say is that AI is really bad, if you try to ask it for quotes or at least ChatGPT is.
1:13:54
I haven't used a lot of the other ones that much.
1:13:58
I actually saw there was some Twitter or some social media thing that's like, did Francis Ford Coppola get fake reviews from ChatGPT of the new, what is it, Agopolus. Yeah. Agopolus maybe. Yeah.
1:14:16
And I was like, I actually had that scenario where I was like, I need a quote ...
1:14:16
I was looking for quotes for the book and I was like, maybe ChatGPT knows, but I was like, "Can you give me any good quotes on ..." I forget what it was.
1:14:26
Let's just say it was on managing complexity or something like that, and it gave me these really interesting quotes.
1:14:32
I was like, that's great, but I better double check that. And they were not real.
1:14:35
They were never real, not a single quote.
1:14:40
And I'd be like, that's not actually a real quote. Yes, you're right.
1:14:43
That's not, so here's a different one.
1:14:43
I was like, that's still not a real quote, so don't ask it for quotes because ...
1:14:48
or if you do, make sure it's a real quote and not just an interestingly phrased ...
1:14:55
I mean good summarization in some ways of the text, it was sort of quoting from, just not an actual quote.
1:15:06
That's a good reminder of just generally don't assume what it's telling is true.
1:15:06
Generally, it's not giving you real things.
1:15:10
It's making things up and usually they're right, but often they might not be right.
1:15:14
That's a really good reminder.
1:15:14
On that first tactic, is there a prompt that you find helpful for how to actually feed it in there?
1:15:22
Is it just here's a line, help me come up with a better version of it?
1:15:26
No, I have not figured out the prompt engineering thing at all.
1:15:26
I tried to get it to summarize a paper for me the other day, and it literally gave me the summary of a different paper, and then I asked friends and they were like, "Well, here's a summary."
1:15:36
I was like, "Actually, that seems like a good summary."
1:15:40
And they're like, "Well, first I told the AI that it was an expert in the field and that it needed to read carefully and that it was really smart," and I'm just like, how do I have to manage the machine?
1:15:51
I already have to manage all of these humans?
1:15:55
Why are you making me manage machines now too, please?
1:15:59
I thought this was going to solve all of our problems. Yeah, that role.
1:15:59
There's an acronym for how to approach engineering, and there's always like give it the role.
1:16:04
Here's the role you're going to play for me.
1:16:09
You are an amazing writer and here's what I want from you. Yeah. I'm also very bad at it.
1:16:14
By the way, Claude I here is really good at writing.
1:16:14
That's one of its superpowers, so if you want to try writing, that's worth trying. Claude by Anthropic.
1:16:19
On the second point you made of fake quote.
1:16:24
So, yeah, Francis Ford Coppola is coming out with this movie with ...
1:16:27
As you mentioned, this trailer is just full of all these quotes that people supposedly said about all his other movies that Godfather and stuff.
1:16:32
And they're all like, these are terrible ...
1:16:37
They're all terribly mean quotes about his movies.
1:16:40
It turns out, yeah, they're all not real quotes, and they actually took down the trailer, I just read because he's just making up quotes by famous critics.
1:16:49
Well, so maybe- Maybe it was ChatGPT. You can get fooled.
1:16:52
I don't know if it was ChatGPT or a cheeky intern or something, but we can get- Or very intentional marketing stint. Or that. Yeah.
1:17:02
Anyway, with that Camille, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes. Amazing. Okay.
1:17:09
First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?
1:17:15
So the first one is, What Got You Here Won't Get You There. I love it.
1:17:15
I think anybody who is trying to challenge themselves and grow, should read it, it's fantastic.
1:17:21
The second one is called When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.
1:17:29
That is when you are ...
1:17:29
For me anyway, when I am struggling with whatever circumstances around me, I find it a very soothing or reminder that life is hard and the best way to ...
1:17:47
you just sort of have to breathe with it and be with it and let it remind you of how life is hard for everyone and sort of make you a kinder person in the process.
1:18:04
Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? I loved Alien Romulus. It was great.
1:18:08
If you like a scary alien movie, fantastic.
1:18:15
I hate scary movies, so that's a new Alien movie. Okay. Yeah.
1:18:19
Anyone know there was a new Alien movie. I loved it. Awesome.
1:18:21
Is there a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love, whether it's an app or even physical product?
1:18:27
So I don't know about recent, I'm a big Whoop fan.
1:18:27
I got it during the pandemic and it is one of my ...
1:18:34
I'm just a weird fan girl for it. I don't know. I just really ... I enjoy it. I use it every day.
1:18:39
Maybe it's totally inaccurate, but it seems accurate enough and I just find it a very interesting and cool product.
1:18:48
I know Whoop product, people listen to this podcast, so I think they'll be happy to hear that. Two more questions.
1:18:51
Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family, find useful and work around life?
1:18:59
If you don't challenge yourself, if you don't take risks, you'll never grow. That's a big one.
1:19:04
I think you've got to ...
1:19:04
challenging yourself, taking risks is how you grow.
1:19:04
I think the other one for me is stay curious.
1:19:08
The more you can remember that there's more that you don't know than that you do know, and staying open-minded and being willing to be wrong, I think the happier you'll be and the better you'll be as a leader for sure.
1:19:29
Final question, on the topic of working out, you're blocking it with your head generally during the podcast, when we moved ...
1:19:32
Behind you is a very significant looking barbell set or dumbbell set, I don't know which one is which.
1:19:41
Talk about your workout regimen or anything along the lines of how you work out.
1:19:48
I have been lifting rates probably for longer than some of your podcast listeners have been alive, which says more about my age than anything else. So I used be ...
1:19:56
I now have two kids, so I lift weights as sort of maintenance, but I used to be a very ...
1:20:03
I could deadlift than twice my body weight and I was just a very, very strong person.
1:20:07
Now of course, everybody is into weightlifting, which makes the gym really annoying.
1:20:12
So partly why I have a set in here, a small set with a baby sized bar is ...
1:20:18
so when I can't make it to the gym, I can at least lift a little bit at home.
1:20:26
What's your favorite workout, lifting wise?
1:20:29
I love really basic deadlift, squat, overhead press, that kind of very simple, the classic lifts. Amazing.
1:20:39
Camille, this is awesome.
1:20:39
As everything, I was hoping it'd be, we covered so much stuff. Two final questions.
1:20:42
Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, follow up on stuff and check out your books and how can listeners be useful to you?
1:20:51
Yes, so with the weird state of social media now, that's actually a harder question to answer than it normally is.
1:20:56
I am on LinkedIn, so you can always follow me on LinkedIn and I'll probably ...
1:21:02
I haven't traditionally put that much there, but I'm expecting I'll probably start putting more there in the coming months.
1:21:06
I also still use Medium when I write.
1:21:06
I actually like Medium, so medium.
1:21:12
com, scamille is my username.
1:21:12
Those are two good ways.
1:21:12
I have a Twitter/X account that it is currently locked, and I may or may not unlock it at some point, but social media, as I said, has gotten weird.
1:21:28
So I think probably LinkedIn is the easiest way for this kind of stuff.
1:21:33
And I read somewhere that scamille is rooted in your love of ska music back when you were younger. Is that right? It's true, yes.
1:21:39
It was from high school. I was a big ska fan.
1:21:43
It's funny how our usernames just stick from, we were really young and that's the way we're represented online now forever. Yeah. That's absurd.
1:21:50
And then, you didn't answer my final question, which is how can listeners be useful to you?
1:21:55
I have a new book coming out.
1:21:55
I have another book that I've already written.
1:21:55
Obviously, I love it when people buy my books so I love when people share my books with other people.
1:22:00
My first book is translated into a bunch of languages, which is super exciting, and I hope that if you read it and enjoy it and learn something from it, you will let me know.
1:22:12
Tag me on some social media.
1:22:17
I think that's just awesome and stay tuned.
1:22:17
Look, if you are looking for people potentially to come talk to your company about platform engineering, I could be interested in that, but I always love to meet interesting people.
1:22:29
If you're in New York, reach out, who knows.
1:22:29
This has been an amazing, amazing time getting to chat with you, Lenny.
1:22:38
Thank you so much for inviting me on the show. I feel the same way.
1:22:42
Thank you for agreeing to come on the show, Camille, you're awesome.
1:22:45
Thank you so much for being here. Take care. Bye everyone.
1:22:49
Thank you so much for listening.
1:22:49
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1:22:55
Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.
1:23:01
You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast. com.
1:23:06
See you in the next episode.