you perceive that everyone just sees all the work that you're doing right from the top from the ceo to the vpo engineering to the cto they'd all just check your tickets all the time right all the tasks that you're doing The reality is that nobody has time for that. Your focus these days has been very much on helping software engineers become great engineering leaders. What brought you to that? How did you get to that point where?
that's what is your focus yeah so um you know i started my career as engineer around 11 12 years ago and um i'm a self-taught engineer i didn't i don't have a cs degree And in my career, I grew from engineer then to senior, then to team lead, engineering manager, head of engineering, VP of engineering, and then CTO.
and there are two reasons why i try to at the moment help as many people to be great and dream leaders and the first one is When I became a manager, I made so, so many mistakes, a lot of mistakes that I could potentially avoid if I would have either a good mentorship or good resources like books, newsletters, courses.
tutorials and so on but back in the day there weren't like a lot of resources that we have at this time and i naturally made a lot of mistakes and i currently want to spare some of the mistakes to people who are reading my newsletter who are either joining joining my course and so on or maybe reading my my linkedin posts etc and the second thing is as soon as i grew
from engineering manager to head of engineering and then also became a VP of engineering. I started thinking what is going to be the next goal for me in my engineering career. And the next step would be CTO, would be kind of like the last step in the engineering industry, right? And, you know, myself, I always need some challenges, always need some goals.
in order to be driven and motivated to to progress and move forward so that's why kind of like i thought okay i like to help others inside my organization inside my team cross team and so on and I could also help others in general across the world as well. So that's how I started with LinkedIn posts, actively posting on LinkedIn, writing a newsletter, and also teaching the course.
where I help engineers to grow and to lead roles. So those two things were kind of like the motivating factors for me. That's cool. You mentioned right at the beginning there that you didn't do a CS degree. There's always this... topic and discussion going on in the community about do you need a CS degree do you need not need a CS degree I mean given where you are and that you've been that VP Engineer CTO you can clearly say that you don't need it you've succeeded without it
But if you didn't do a CS degree, what was the thing that brought you into software engineering? How did you find your way from whatever you were doing before to becoming a software engineer? Yeah, that's a really good question. And my colleagues, my fellow classmates in school are surprised these days when they hear that I'm actually in the engineering industry.
And because the reason is in high school and also primary school, I didn't really enjoy programming. I didn't like programming. Kind of like the first steps into programming was with Java. But it was very kind of like riding boilerplate and kind of like traversing characters. And that's something that I didn't really enjoy back in the day.
I started to enjoy programming when I started to learn HTML, CSS, and then JavaScript. And the reason is that I'm quite a visual learner and I needed some sort of like a feedback, especially on the screen. And you can do a lot of stuff, a lot of cool things with JavaScript. And what really brought me and what really excited me about programming was creating something with code that you can visualize on the screen, like animations.
like you know getting the data and and show it on the screen uh you know i was a big fan of also libraries like gsap animate that css i enjoyed building kind of like a nice visual uh animations that you know were were kind of exciting and so on and after that you know i was kind of like um i was hooked in into programming and i learned days and nights i learned then also php wordpress c sharp
and so on and never never stopped learning after that yeah i can relate to that i was the same it was so much more satisfying as soon as i could start putting something on the screen and seeing something visual so for me and people similar age to me That was when we could start creating graphics and building a computer game. That's what so many of us learned at the time through computer games. As the web and HTML and JavaScript and CSS became available, that became so much easier.
but it's great isn't it you can get that immediate visual feedback and see something you're doing rather than processing a bit of data and having it chucking and so that isn't that exciting when you're beginning is it cool so now you're doing course and you're doing your email newsletter Which is sublimely focused and what's a good way for people that are wanting to learn from you of how to become or how to transition from an engineer to a leader?
where should they start should they look at the course the newsletter yeah obviously the newsletter would be the first the first thing to go there's a lot of topics that that helps everyone to become great engineering leader there's also a learning track which is specifically designed for for people that want to become leaders so definitely my newsletter newsletter would be the first first thing to check
But also, you know, the number one thing with courses and especially with the cohort based courses is especially for people that want to learn inside a group, you know. Not everyone is very kind of like, how do I say, self-accountable. And we learn in isolation as we have talked before. It's, you know. Group-based learning is really great. You meet like-minded people. You get to know people that are on similar paths than you are.
And then one of the perks that I offer as well is the paid subscription to the newsletter. So everyone who joins the course also gets automatically the paid subscription. So they get the access to all the articles so they can dive deeper as well themselves. So it's all up to, you know, everyone individually. Obviously, I first recommend a newsletter, but I understand that not everyone is the same. I'm more of a visual learner. Maybe you are more of a, how do I say?
you learn more from reading maybe another person learns more from from watching tutorials another person learns more from from group of people working together and so on we are we are all different so um yeah We go through a lot of different topics that are great for engineers to get and learn.
what to do and how to actually progress in their careers especially if they want to go to lead roles yeah i think the accountability on the course is something that so many people miss and is so valuable and that's why they're so worthwhile because
There isn't much these days that you can't find the information on the internet, you can't buy a book about it, or you can't get that information from some other way. But the value of the course is that all that information has been curated and you've got that collective people.
Same as when we talk about universities, there's a lot of criticism now of, you know, what's the point of going to Harvard with an MBA? You can buy the same course books elsewhere. You know, you could spend several hundred dollars instead of $100,000 getting the information. It's not just the information, is it? It's that accountability. It's that having to turn up and do the work. That's somebody holding a session. Is that dedicating the time to it?
that networking effects as well, the people you can talk to and you can meet and you can then build those relationships with Kuhn. So on the course, you talk about several topics and we've been through a quick list of what's listed on the course page. it's okay i wanted to pick through those in time and ask you a few questions about what people can do so not not the full course contents people should sign up for that if you're interested but let's start with credibility
What are a few tips that people should use to build credibility in the industry as a software engine? Yeah, you know, a lot of people focus, especially engineers, focus on fine details that they need to get better in their craft. in general, right? But that's only like 50% of the things that are going to help you to progress forward in your career.
Credibility consists of two things. One is your skills, and the second one is the way people perceive you. And everyone that has done any freelance work, freelance projects, work as either a consultant or a contractor,
You understand how important it is that you develop a great reputation of yourself. That's how you get more projects, right? And similar it is in any kind of organization and company. You need to... have good reputation about yourself you need to be reliable you need to be proactive you need to make stuff happen you need to get things done and after you do you do this consistently you will be able to to get more opportunities
which are going to be provided to you. So you need to focus on both the things. You asked me about giving tips about credibility. So the first one is obviously build up your skills. I recommend focusing on
being an expert in wanting, being the go-to person, you know, for example, in front-end, maybe on back-end, maybe with Python, maybe with React, Angular, and so on. Be known for something, for wanting, and then develop a broad knowledge on a lot of different topics like also a product or business business-minded quality assurance um you know if you're a front-end expert then also develop some decent knowledge and back-end as well and then you will have that and then you will have also uh
that and also also the the spectrum which is quite quite broad as well and the second thing uh which we're developing the way people perceive you yeah you need to be reliable you need to you need to be someone that you would love to work with One thing that also is very important is you need to build trust with others, which is admitting mistakes. We are never 100% right all the time in our industry, as you know.
consistency is very important, predictability, long-term good work is a lot more important than short-term good work, and also, as I mentioned, being proactive. And also, as we both know, writing online, public speaking, sharing your knowledge either via blog posts, newsletters, that goes a long way in people having a good...
you know, perceive you in a good way. Cool. So you mentioned freelance work there. Is that something you advise people to do? I think it's played quite a key part in your background, if I remember rightly. Yeah, you know, freelance work has been my secret. to be able to grow from engineer all the way to cto and the reason was that i learned a lot of skills that a lot of engineers don't learn just by doing their work right you need to
You need to be great at communicating. You need to be good at managing expectations. I like to say that you can do the best work in the world, but if you don't manage expectations the right way, it won't be perceived that way, unfortunately. So you learn a lot about planning, time management, just overall making sure that the project is going to get done on time and your client is going to be happy with it.
especially working with non-technical clients that's something that i highly recommend to everyone because you need to speak in a way that resonates with them you know you can't just talk about react you can't just talk about angular or or maybe
apis or python okay i'm gonna i'm using this database and so on but you need to really you know find out what do they want to hear what kind of business pain points do they have what is the motivation behind the ask and then a lot of times what happens is that The first thing that they think that they may need is actually the wrong thing. You need to be some sort of like a consultant and offer the right solution for them. So you need to really investigate the why behind it.
and find out the reasons why they actually need it and propose that. You need to sell it as well. You need to know how to sell this ask and kind of convince them that that is the right decision.
to move forward and if you do this correctly you also implement it correctly uh and you you do it with the right quality timely they will see that it's a right decision you will get unlimited projects after yeah so you really need to learn to speak their language don't you mean to to speak about what they care about what are their hopes and dreams what are they trying to achieve from the project
to really understand them and you know as you say get hold of their requirements and understand it years ago when i started my first business i came across the sales but it talks about when you're selling you should be asking questions and capturing requirements is the same because
The book used the example that if you're in a hardware store and somebody comes in to buy a power drill, they don't want a power drill. They have a problem they want to solve. They want to put up a shelf or they want to install something in their house. And they think...
that the solution is a power drill but it might not be they might need something else or they might want a power drill and some drill bits and a bunch of other things and so by asking asking them questions and establishing what problem they're trying to solve
you can then guide them to the right solution which is what good sales should be and it's also crucial for software isn't it we want to capture the requirements and build the right solution because building great software that solves a long problem Got an unhappy customer, haven't you? Yeah, funny that you mentioned the electrical drill because that's exactly what I was buying last week. And I made the mistake of buying the not strong enough drill.
And I asked the salesman about, hey, is this drill good enough for drilling the hose in a wall? But what actually happened was that I brought it home and I... i tried to drill it and it wasn't strong enough so i needed to to go back and i needed to buy a different one so that's a great example yeah it is and i think it works in so many ways because it also demonstrates it can be more successful if you
If he talked to you properly, he could have upsold you a more powerful one, could have sold you the correct drill bits, could have maybe sold you, I don't know, whatever timber you want for your shelf or whatever else goes with your project. And it's a great chance to... then become a trusted advisor which again when you're a freelancer you want that trusted advisor status don't we you talked about the trust and your reputation and that's how you get more work um
On that note, a lot of software engineers, I can imagine as you were talking, saying, my work speaks for itself. I shouldn't have to do all these things. How do you feel about that? Yeah, it's a... It's a very, how to say, optimistic way of looking at it, you know. And I like to say, you know, good work consists not only of implementation.
but it also consists of making it visible so you can do the best work in the world but if nobody knows about it it's not going to be perceived that way unfortunately similar is with newsletter writing with you know uh with with anything that you're doing is you can write the best thing or you can be the best engineer in the world but if nobody would know that it unfortunately won't be perceived that way so
Both two things are very important. If you do good work, you need to also share it with others. You need to find ways to share the great work that you did. a good good solution to this would be you know you do something great then you share it either via learning sessions either via you know organize a talk maybe on a local meetup or maybe a conference or something like that and you share that great work you need to find ways to share how amazing you are if you don't do that if you don't
If you're not your number one cheerleader, who is going to be? That's what I like to say. It's really important to not believe just that they're doing good work and hoping that everyone is going to see it. uh that doesn't work you need to you need to actively take ownership of what you're doing and your manager sees like 60 or maybe
maybe 40% of what you're doing, 30%. And when it goes to leadership team, they see less and less and less. So nobody really knows like on the top exactly that you did this particular thing. You did this. You need to find ways to showcase that you're doing great work. Yeah, visibility goes a long way. Yeah, I like what you said about, you know, be your own cheerleader because no one else is as invested in your career as you are.
No one else cares as much about you as you do. And that sounds a little bit selfish, but it's very true. You've got to recognise it. Your manager is wandering around worried about their career, worried about whether or not they're going to get laid off, worried about whether or not they're going to hit their deadlines, whether or not...
they've got all their own worries all their own baggage because they're a human being just like you are so much is their job and if they're doing it well is to care about you and think about you They've got their own baggage. They're never going to be caring about you as much as you care about yourselves. Being your own cheerleader and promoting it and something is, you know, no one else has invested. So I was going to say,
One really simple thing you can do as well, which a lot of people miss is just send out an email at the end of each week. This is my accomplishments. Drop it to your manager. And again, potentially do it with your team. It's like, hey, three cool things I learned this week that might be useful to you.
A quick email to your team can be really useful and share that stuff. And the accomplishments, you talk about this on your course, don't you, with a black document and advise people to do this. So what would you advise keeping a black document and what are the benefits of it? Yeah, you nailed it with writing down and that especially is one of the reasons is because your manager doesn't know exactly what you're doing on your day to day. Maybe they have 40%, 50%.
They might know, but they don't know all the great things that you're doing. And BragList is a great way to make sure that you are showcasing all of the efforts, all of the great things that you're doing. I recommend to what you mentioned every week. Or you can also do it as soon as it happens, you know down the win that you achieved. And then what I also recommend is to share it with your manager on your one-to-one meeting.
And then obviously, of course, when there is a performance review meeting, you want to share all of the list of wins that you have achieved in this particular quarter or this particular from and to date.
dates um so um who else who else is going to to know if if not you right so you can expect that your manager is just going to automatically promote you but they don't even see all the things that you did right um hence yeah you know i also made that mistake and i thought that you know um i will just every everyone sees You know, when you're an engineer and when you're working on tasks and when you're working on specific features, you have that kind of perseverance that...
You perceive that everyone just sees all the work that you're doing, right? From the top, from the CEO to the VP of engineering to the CTO. They'd all just check your tickets all the time, right? All the tasks that you're doing. The reality is that nobody has time for that. They check the story point, they check the amount of tasks that you have done, the sprint, but, you know, the more nobody really checks that.
They're all worried about the problems, all worried about, you know, business, organizational challenges, and so on. So, keeping a brag list ensures exactly what we were talking about. that people, right people, knows exactly what you have done, what you have achieved, and how you have contributed, and that you are good enough to take that next step in your career.
One other thing I will also mention is obviously imposter syndrome is very huge in our industry. And, you know, I feel imposter every now and then. You might feel it as well when you're doing something new. And if you have a list of wins that you have actually achieved throughout a specific timeframe, you feel a lot less as an imposter. You just check, okay, this is what I achieved. Okay, I onboarded this engineer.
i finished this particular project that that was a really hard project that i finished i finished i finished that specific course uh i helped that specific team to achieve success on that project and then we go through and say okay i'm not doing so bad right so um you know that that gives you that self-confidence in the time time of need and we all have ups and downs in
in every everyday life so as when you have downs you just check the list of wins and it will motivate you to to to get uh to get better yeah i mean i think well certainly speaking personally i feel a bit of imposter syndrome almost every single day
And in a way, I like that because if I'm not feeling that, I'm staying in my comfort zone. I'm not pushing myself. I'm not learning something new. I'm not trying to grow. So it's a fine balance between having it be too much and uncomfortable and finding that just enough so that i'm growing and stretching yourself one other thing that i really wanted to highlight about drawing up the blacklist and sharing it legally is
particularly in a big organization, if you want to get promoted, you need your manager's support and they need their manager's support for it. So if you're regularly sharing that email of like three things we accomplished this week, and particularly if you say, if you share just as you succeed on a particularly tricky thing or key project you know send a hey we did this we achieved this this is the outcome focus on the outcome not not the database not the technology but
how it helped the business that's very easy emails for your manager to then share with their manager for them to share with their peers again if you write it in such a way that it's very easy for them to distribute it's very easy for them to hit reply
say congratulations everyone and for cc and their boss and again it's part of managing upwards and it's part of making it very easy for everyone to to see what you're doing being your own cheerleader and make it easy if you're managed to and again in your one-to-ones you can encourage them say hey you know
When you see one of these successes, please share it with your peers, share it with your boss. Again, useful trick for managing that and making sure you're being your own cheerleader. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Awesome what you mentioned, yeah.
Cool. Thank you, Greta. Talking about your one-to-ones, the other thing you talk about is how to let your manager know your goal and aspirations. What are the kind of things that you focus on in that? Yeah, one of the things that I made a mistake, especially as a senior.
software engineer is i was kinda stuck i didn't know exactly where should i grow should i grow into architecture should i grow into being a manager or should i become should i grow continue to grow in the ic space and obviously it's important that you know that you have some sort of an idea where you wish to grow but at the same time you need to tell your manager as well you need to tell
first of all yeah you want to find out where you want to grow and it doesn't need to be 100% that certain you just need to have some sort of like a next goal for you and after that you need to tell your manager about it okay i want to become a team lead because of this this this and that i want to become a tech lead i want to grow to become an architect and so on and the reason is that if you don't do that your manager is not going to
to be able to put you in a position to showcase the skills needed same things as we are talking about brag list and you know they are not actually seeing all the work that you're doing is the same in is same in uh sharing your goals and aspirations uh they're not a mind reader and you know me personally i like to ask every every person that reports to me about okay what are your goals where do you want to grow
in your career but not every manager is like that so um you want to do that because they will have you know even if they might not provide you opportunities immediately they will be able to have have you in your hat, and maybe if there's going to be an opportunity for you to showcase the skills needed, they will be thinking about you. So, yeah, you should do that as soon as possible.
One trick that I would like to share is just overall, you know, have some, when you share your goal and aspiration, have some, back it up with some data, especially with OK.
i read this book i'm i'm doing this already i am i'm attending this course for example i'm you're attending my course and at the same time you're trying to grow to become a team leader attack lead and so on uh you listen to to to this podcast you listen you read this this this particular books and so on and at the same time you want to be excited as well you don't want to just share like in a way that you know
There's no emotion behind it, but you want to share it in a way that people feel excited. When you talk about it, you feel excited about it. So I recommend create like a pitch. when you're sharing that with your manager and you actually create, you wrote it down, what are you going to say and so on. That would be my tip for that. Yeah, I love that approach. And you've hit on a key part there. The manager is not a mind reader. And adding to that, managers are people.
We make mistakes just like anybody else. Some managers are new to it. They're not necessarily aware of how they should be helping you. They're not necessarily aware of how they can help you. So again, feel free to manage up.
That doesn't mean you have to be assertive and big-headed about it, but you can go in to your manager and say, am I one-to-one? I want to talk about my career goals and aspirations this week. Here are some of the things I want to achieve. As you said, the data-driven approach. Back it up, something.
And then, you know, make a clear ask. I would like you to help me achieve this goal. Can you, and then ask to be put on a suitable budget, or ask for advice about how you navigate the organisation, but have that clear ask. and manage your manager to a certain extent because much as they may know what they should be doing they've got their own hopes fears dreams concerns or maybe their own skill issues that they're working through themselves
Yeah. So make it easy for people to help you. You know, one thing is also that it's very, very great if you can map what your goals and aspirations to the problems that your manager is having. You mentioned this, and I want to share an example on this, which is exactly like if your manager is having a problem, like if they are managing too many teams, you can say like, hey, I would love to relieve some of the burden.
that that you're facing and i would be more than happy to take additional responsibilities and i would be happy to manage wanting and relieve some of the burden that you're facing so you can focus on on more important things. So you map kind of like the challenge and the problems with also your career aspirations and growth. That works the best way.
that work the best way and it's kind of like a win-win situation for both yeah absolutely and you're getting that experience and aren't you so when you come a few months later to your promotion cycle you can say to your manager
I've been doing it before X-Men was helping you out. And you're managing the position to say to their manager or to whatever viewport you've got. Yeah, I've got evidence. They've been doing it. We can see the results and we can see that they have the skills. They've proven it.
You make it a lot easier for them to do it. You also mentioned becoming the go-to person or the expert. What's kind of your advice on how you build and demonstrate that expertise? Yeah, I recommend for everyone who wants to grow.
in their career especially to lead roles to staff to team lead tech lead to engineering manager you need to be known for something you need to you need to develop a reputation in a certain either for a project either domain or a specific technology because that gives you obviously a good amount of credibility, but then also it gives you the visibility that we have been talking about before because everyone thinks
a lot differently about you when you are the go-to person for something you know people are asking you questions you are you are uh you are uh having presentations either on local meetups on learning sessions inside a company and you're sharing that knowledge with others, and you're evangelizing it throughout the company. That gives a lot of visibility to senior leadership executives, executive level as well.
And the more you do a great job you're doing, doing that, the more chances and more opportunities you're going to have in your career. And you can do really, really simple. You can do a really simple thing.
Like, for example, like Jordan Cutler, he created a Slack channel, which was like front-end tips, and he was sharing daily front-end tips on Slack in terms of how to be more productive, how to get a better... front-end developer and what happened was that also other other people chimed in and started to share daily tips so he was kind of like the initiator and that got him to be promoted to a senior software engineer
So, you know, you want to pick something that you're already doing. I became the go-to for React, for example, when I was working for React. I became the go-to for Angular when I was working with Angular. something that you're already working with it's kind of natural for you to get better at and you know share knowledge with others as soon as you do this you will you will people will start asking more questions to you
And you will naturally kind of grow to become that person. So the natural objection that most people have to that is, but I'm not an expert at X. You kind of hinted at that, Greg, and you don't need to be, do you? Yeah. Yeah, you're never an expert enough, how to say, you're never a perfect expert. You're always learning, you know, so the intention is what matters, right? And we both know that.
and if you have the right intentions if you want to help others to get better if you want to make other lives other others lives easier that's that's more than enough you know so we are all learning new things and at the same time when you're sharing knowledge you're also learning So it's a win-win situation for you and everyone else. And now you don't need to be the best. You don't need to have...
You don't need to be on a React core team in order to share knowledge about React in your company. Yeah, absolutely. You're right, Gregor. And the other thing you mentioned was that people come in there and start asking questions. And all those questions are a great opportunity for you to learn because you'll look at them, you'll think about them, you may know the answer, you'll explain it.
the explanation might not get understood so you'll have to clarify your explanation or you might realize that there's a gap in your knowledge and you'll go away and fill that gap so it kind of becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't it the more questions you get the more you're going to learn the more of an expert you become
by starting to behave a bit like an expert. So you don't have to have the expertise, you just need to have the passion and the curiosity and the willingness to become the expert. Then you start acting that way, as we say. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy low-flight. It also helps you grow quicker yourself. We touched a little bit a moment ago on managing up as well. So how important is managing up? What tips would you have for somebody to become better at managing up?
Yeah, managing up can be the difference between you having a great time at work or having the worst time at work. So, you know, you can't... One of the big misconceptions is... that people might think that they can change the manager. But the thing is that you can't actually change your manager. They are who they are, and it will be really hard for them to become different.
different totally different person i made that mistake in my career when i had a manager that i got along really really well but then that manager left and then another manager came who was a totally different person totally different ways of working and we didn't get get along so well and yeah i would do a lot differently if i would in that situation once again so um
You want to make sure that you are collaborating with your manager, you build as good relationship as possible, good working relationship as possible. You're not here to change your manager and you won't be able to do that. That's one of the... biggest things. And if you manage up correctly, even if a manager, if you don't get along with them, you do your best to get into the good state.
where you have a decent working relationship and that is going to make your life easier at work and also your team's life easier at work. It's going to get easier to get stuff done, mutual understanding.
and so on at the end of the day you want to put your best foot forward and um yeah if if you do that um there there's gonna be uh there's gonna be good times for you at work if you don't if you don't focus on that then it's going to be a lot harder especially if you have a manager that is not so so prone uh how to how we call it like a good manager yeah you're absolutely like that it's very hard to change anyone whatever that's
Your partner, your family, somebody you meet on the street. It's very hard to change other people. We're better off a lot of times looking at ourselves because we're in full control of ourselves. We can change ourselves. So we don't have to become somebody we don't like. We don't have to compromise our values, but we can change our behaviors far more easily to change our manager. So as you say, we can adapt. We can try and understand them. We can try and be empathetic to their approach.
to their hopes and dreams that are different and try and find the best possible relationship we can have with a manager so we can all be successful and collaborate. Yeah, what I wanted to just add to that is, you know, the same thing we talked... before is you know as soon as everyone has problems and even if you don't get along with your manager if you are going to be proactively finding out problems they are having and put your best foot forward to resolve them it's
going to make any relationship a lot better. Yeah, absolutely. You know, we all have paints and willies and stuff. If you can help somebody to leave some of those, it's always going to improve the relationship, isn't it? And same for teammates. You talk as well in the course about collaboration. It's much the same, really, isn't it? You're maybe not managing it up, but you're dealing with your peers. So any tips then on how to collaborate?
quite effectively with the rest of your team. Yeah, you know, being a team player, I would say these days is mandatory. You can build great software inside of an organization if you have individualists. inside your team so you need to have people that that are going to help others that are going to be you know always trying to make others around them better and being a team player is something that i found
It's not that easy, especially for engineers, but you need to learn it. You need to get better at it. I had, how to say, I was quite... happy in terms of like I developed being a good team player over my teenage years growing up and also as a kid because I was always playing a lot of like basketball. I was also playing competitive basketball at that time, and I was always part of the team. You can't win a basketball game if you're...
If you're just being individual, if you're just trying to make all the shots, right? It doesn't work like that. You need to be extremely, extremely amazing at it if that's going to work, right? So I learned that you need to help others, you need to make others around them better. We are that. And also playing video games. I was playing a lot of video games growing up, especially in my teenage years.
I'm not maybe too proud of that, playing like five to six hours daily video games, but I played with a team of people and we played it versus other teams, right? So that kind of gave me that team-oriented mindset. And I learned a lot by doing that. We were playing, let's call it also competitively back then. And we were playing five on five. It was FPS games. The most game we played was Call of Duty. So yeah, that was a big thing for me.
And I learned a lot about it with that. But yeah, if you haven't done a lot of such activities in your life, I recommend finding a group activity at this time. try to either play a certain game or play a certain board game, do some sports together with others and so on. You also asked about how can you collaborate well, how can you work well with others. Focus on empathy, helping others, achieving team goals. That is something that is always going to go a long way.
your individual task is not as important as the success of the team and if you always think think of that way you're going to have a good time and one of the great things i also suggest and that is one tip that I can share is try to solve a problem that nobody wants to. You know, you may hear some recurring issues inside your team, inside the organization. Maybe people are postponing that because it's very, it's very, how to say,
Maybe it's a tough problem. Maybe it's something that nobody wants to touch. Maybe a piece of a legacy code or maybe it's a very boring task or something like that. You do something for the team. and you solve that problem and you know you you put your effort in it uh to make everyone's lives easier and better
And everyone is going to appreciate that. Those little points of friction are some of my favorite for when I'm a manager of a team. Those are the things that I like to tackle personally, because it gives you a chance to stay hand on, do a bit of code, still.
I'm a software engineer because I enjoy doing that. So it's a chance to do that, but also they're off the critical path. You know, if you, you get interrupted because you've got meetings and other things, you're not holding up the lesson team, you're not blocking people. So they're quite fun things for managers as well. But as you say.
Removing that friction from your team really helps, doesn't it? And it's a good way. On the team sports aspect, somebody mentioned it to me, or I've read about it in a newsletter the other day, the comparison to music. Go and play a musical instrument in a band. And you can't have a band and it's terrible if you don't collaborate. If you're not all in time with each other, you're not all playing in the same key, it will sound atrocious. It really emphasizes that collaboration and being together.
You need to have a feel for others and when are they playing, when they are starting and so on. And you need to jump in at the right time. Yeah, absolutely. It's all about working collaboratively together, isn't it? If you go off and...
or in a different direction, it all falls apart quite quickly. So another part of the course that you talk about is how to become business and product minded. This is something that really resonates with me because I've highlighted throughout my career to people that we don't like code. I mean, yes, we do like code, but that's not the focus of the job. The focus of the job is we're working in an organization. That organization has an issue to solve.
business wants to make money so we're building a product to do that so the focus of what we do is we solve that issue we enable that solution that can be solved And yes, quite often as we're software engineers, we fulfill that by lighting code, but lighting code is not the goal. It's a mechanism to achieve that. So I've talked a lot about understanding the business value, understanding what the goals of the business are.
how do you approach it what are your tips if people to become business or product focused yeah it's it's it's all about uh changing the mindset first right and uh you need to understand that uh we Engineering is not here without a business. So if the business is not doing well, there's not going to be any engineering as well. So we are all here to provide business value and also delight our customers.
get more customers, have happy users because happy users are going to promote our product and so on. So you need to think that way. And again, that kind of mindset comes from either working on a freelance project or building your own project, building your own company, building a certain application that you want to monetize.
you learn the pain points that way, right? But for example, if you're an engineer and if you get assigned like a certain problem, uh that maybe the company is having organization is having maybe a new feature right the worst thing you can do is just go straight into code right and just try to develop it but maybe that that may be our first instinct because we are problem solvers
and we may think like hey okay that is going to take uh just five minutes to solve it in reality it never takes five minutes but also at the same time you shouldn't do it do this right you should always try to understand the why behind it try to understand the motivation behind it what is the pain point that we are trying to solve right and that is the business oriented product oriented mindset that you should have as engineer not go straight into building
really see how you can map this solution to the larger problem that the organization is having, the business is having. How can this problem that you're going to solve get us more customers, get us more users, help the business to be more successful? And if you do this, that's where you're going to provide a lot of impact. And a lot of times, the first solution that may come to your mind is not going to be the best one.
Ask as many questions as possible. That is going to be the first thing, what you should do to get a better understanding of the business, of the product. You know, while rebuilding this thing, ask this to your product manager, ask this to your to the stakeholders. What is actually pain points that we are selling? What is the business value behind it? How can we increase the user experience by delivering this feature?
how is this going to help our customers, our users, to get more done in less amount of time to solve their pain points. Start always with that. That is the best thing. the more questions you ask the more understanding you're gonna get and um you know overall what i also recommend is um if you if you want to get better at being being product minded and being
business minded. You need to talk with other people across the organization, across the business. Talk with the marketing managers, talk with sales managers, talk with product managers, talk with designers. talk with, maybe with compliance, compliance managers, you know, everyone can give you some insight of their pain points that they might have, you know, that they might have, and you can potentially solve them.
and that is going to be exactly what is going to provide value across the organization and so on obviously you need to get better at domain knowledge understand the industry that you're working with You want to know exactly, you know, for example, if you're building a payment processor, you need to understand how payment processor works in general. Why do we need them? What is the actual...
business logic behind it. Why are we building it in the first place? What are the competitors doing? What other payment processes are available in the market? How can we get better than others? And as soon as you start thinking that way, you will start thinking of, you know, making your technical solutions also accommodated to those pros that maybe other competitors don't have.
You may structure your data differently. You may structure your models differently. You may structure your tables a lot differently. You may use different technologies because you understand the domain a lot better. Yeah, that's very, very impactful. Yeah, thank you, Greg. And to tie that back to our original conversation and the power drill, you know, the person in the shop asked why and really talked to you and understood what you're trying to solve.
they'll sell you the right power job they'll sell you the right solution or maybe they'll sell you a different tool that's more appropriate So yeah, understanding that why it's incredibly powerful, isn't it? And you make sure we build the light solution. You also mentioned getting to know the salespeople, the product owners, the marketing people. Spotify has a great blog post on this where they recommend
I think once a month, pair with non-engineers, as they put it. So go and pair with somebody in the marketing team, get to understand what they do, get an understanding of what concerns they face. I've seen this work very well in more product-focused companies where you go and pair with somebody from customer success or from technical support. And it's something that I did partly by accident earlier in my career in that the technical support people sat a meter away from me.
just the other side of my monitor and I could hear their technical support calls and I could hear when they were getting people moaning about this and the other issue. So I got to hear all those calls and I could hear repeated patterns and then I got to the point where I could start helping them by going.
I've heard you have five calls on that today, and you had five or six calls on it yesterday. Let me just see if we can put a solution in place that solves that problem more. Now, we're losing a lot of customers because of that. Let's do something about it. So pairing with those non-technical law.
Yeah, people outside engineering can be so very, very, very valuable. I've taken up a lot of your time, Gregor. So to close off, you gave a great example of Jordan earlier and how he's progressed and what he did with creating the Slack channel for any tips.
have you got another great example of somebody that has grown himself from engineering to legal and what they did yeah you obviously know my friend He grew from senior software engineer to tech lead and then also to team lead, from tech lead to team lead and his path to becoming a tech lead. was a lot different than me becoming a team lead. And I will share just really quickly about how I became a team lead. And it was more kind of accidental, more kind of a luck way.
And because I wasn't very confident in terms of like which particular path I want to grow toward. And the thing was that at that time, the company was going to restructuring and we were forming new teams and we needed new team leads.
in order to take on the additional responsibility and that's how i was offered the position of a team lead so it was more kind of a luck luck based approach but with with caleb he became a tech lead from a senior software engineer he he went to the manager and said exactly like we were talking about sharing his goals and aspirations and there his manager defined exactly hey what does he need to do in order to become a tech lead so um
He needed to onboard new engineers. He needed to become the go-to for product technical questions. He needed to nail all the projects that he was working with. He needed to provide useful code reviews and technical specifications code reviews he needed to.
to continue to get the respect and overall good credibility from senior leaders, from staff engineers, and so on. So that was kind of like the process that he took from around the two took him around seven months and then after seven months he became a tech lead and then you know how he grew from tech leads to team lead was then what
really really connects really well with what we were talking about uh was with um he saw that his manager was having you know was was managing too many different teams and he saw that his manager doesn't have a lot of time uh so he asked He said to his manager, hey, I want to help you to relieve some of the time from you and I would be happy to manage one team so you can focus on other teams and more important things that you're doing. So that's how he became.
the team lead at that time. And also, I can connect this story with my growth from team leads to engineering manager as well, which was kind of like similar, which was... My manager left, so the dream manager position was available. And my manager had a lot on their plate, so they needed to fill this position until a new person was hired.
So I automatically went to my manager of the manager and said that, hey, I would be happy to take on Morris possibilities and I would be happy to take on this role. And yeah, after three days, I got then good news that I was becoming an engineering manager. So it was the same that we were talking about, a win-win situation. I took additional responsibilities and also my manager was able to focus on
on different things, on more important things. So those are the two examples that I like to share. And I think it's very, it's kind of like realistic to a lot of different... examples that maybe others are also then having inside their their companies organizations two great examples thank you gregor i kind of can't help feeling that you're selling yourself short there by saying that you were lucky
If you've been going through and doing all the things you talked about, you'd already do it freelance. You're working to promote yourself. You're building that credibility and becoming the go-to person first on the act and then on Angular. That's not luck. That's when preparation meets opportunity, isn't it? You've been creating your own surface out of luck.
and building that opportunity and doing all the things you talk about. Yeah, I was doing all the right things, but I wasn't sure where I want to grow, right? That's what I was doing wrong. So I was building credibility. I had a successful project inside a company. I was building good relationships inside a company as well. I was known to be kind of a great teammate.
colleague i also worked with with a team that was with a totally different time zone than me and i was i was fine with it so um yeah i did a lot of things right but uh If you don't share where you want to grow and what are your aspirations and goals, it's going to be hard for the manager then also to put you in that position as well.
it was kind of like luck and also at the same time was doing good work. So I think I would eventually get some opportunity, but I think it may be a little bit later down the road. it became sooner and that that was very i'm grateful for that i wouldn't be where i am at the moment if i wouldn't i grew at that time i'm grateful for that that i also took that opportunity and
Then after it was quite a fast progression then from team lead all the way to head of engineering, VP engineering, and then CTO. So yeah, as soon as you have some new things and new... new things to learn new challenges to to to attack i mean i'm especially like that then i get very driven motivated to to kind of get better awesome walking the walk thanks very much for your time gregor been a pleasure talking to you any final thoughts to share
before we wrap up. Thank you. Thank you for having me, John. Yeah, you know, I would just like to say that leadership is a mindset and we all can be leaders in our own way. Even if you're a junior engineer, mid-level engineer, you can lead in your own way. There's many ways that you can help others. You are a team player. You make others around you better. You share your knowledge. and you don't need to be an expert in everything um always always have that in mind awesome thank you