Hi everyone, welcome to Priority Zero, a lead dev engineering leadership podcast. My name is Scott Carey and I'm your host today and I am joined by Melissa Depoit. Melissa, thanks so much for joining us. Can you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Yeah. So my current role is senior engineering manager at Medium, where I oversee our distribution team. So that's everything related to the way that content shows up in feeds, our post pages, our SEO, how we distribute.
content. For anyone that doesn't know Medium. Medium is a platform for writing and publishing online. It is free to write and it's a subscription product where you get access to thousands of great stories and writers for the same price. as one following one writer on another platform nice i wrote a travel blog on it seven years ago i love that i also kept a blog on medium uh way before i ever worked here yeah
Yeah, I was early on the medium train. So, Melissa, tell us a little bit about where you first got developed an interest in software and software engineering. Yeah. So I kind of came to engineering through, I guess, a side door. I first started learning how to code when the man who is now my husband started teaching me to code HTML and CSS as a way.
to flirt with me so this worked out super well for me i got a husband and a career ultimately everyone else's mileage may vary yeah it does is that normally a successful flirting method i I don't know. It worked for us. But after a bit, he was like... you're actually really good at this, you should take a class. And so I took a part-time front-end engineering class and I realized that it was really similar to...
my current career at the time, which was an editor and a writer. And so once I realized that coding is just. learning another language and learning another form of communication. Like, yeah, the light bulb went off in my head and I was just like, oh. Oh, I can do this job. Whereas before, like I lived with an electrical engineer in college and was not particularly technical, but I would.
see her in the morning, go to her computer science classes, and then see her at night programming like a circuit board, like hardware. And I was like, oh, I do not want to do that. And then, yeah, determined later that it was actually very similar to writing. And the process of editing is very similar to code reviews. And so there were a lot of natural... things that I was able to transfer in terms of my skills to engineering. And I ultimately decided to quit my job and enroll in a boot camp.
so how old were you when you really made that realization uh i was in my early 20s i was working for a startup in dc called 1776 and i was managing kind of their blog and publishing platform. Yeah. And we commissioned some research. We sent an analyst around to all these startup cities in the US and conducted this research.
And we were going to publish it. And I really wanted to do something with the data and do a cool online visualization or some kind of tool. And we didn't have the budget for that. And so I was told. We don't have we don't have money. What we can do is a PDF. And so we produced a like. 50 page PDF. And then it was my job to market it. And no one downloaded it. No one downloaded it, of course. And I just remember thinking.
If only we had a web developer on staff, we wouldn't have to pay for someone else to build this website. I had no idea how much work it was to build a website at that time. How hard could it be? I know, how hard could it be? It's only data visualization. And I was like, oh, wait, if I were a web developer and I had those skills, then I could be that person. I was like, oh.
Wait, no, that's what I need to do. And so, yeah, so within probably a week after that ill-fated PDF launched, I went to my boss and I said, you know, I think I'm going to quit and become a web developer. So up to that point, like everything was just journalism. Yeah. There was no science in your life.
journalism to the core like i have made it my identity since i was 15 i was like i am a journalist and i think it was exactly yes and i think it was like just one of the first things that i was good at that was like Well, this is beyond just like an academic subject. This you could make a career. And so I just grabbed onto that and never, ever looked outside of journalism. Yeah. But what I realized is that I actually loved.
editing more than i liked reporting yeah and i just thought we were all editors at heart and like tortured journalists yeah What I realized when I got into the industry is that actually it's the opposite. Most people, most reporters. really enjoy the process of reporting and going out and talking to people. And I realized that what I enjoyed was the process of working with a writer to craft a story idea, to take a first draft.
that is in no way publishable and like revise it with them and yeah build it into something that ends up being a great piece yeah i loved that aspect and so i got a lot of management experience early Yeah, this is not a journalism podcast. I am slash was a journalist. And I had that realisation too. Actually, I thought that I wanted to be a reporter. And then I realised that actually some of the qualities of being... a reporter were not qualities that I had. Basically being extremely like...
Being very resilient and being very annoying, very persistent. I much preferred editing. So I had a kind of similar realization to you. I think it's an interesting kind of corollary with like engineering when you have like the IC and the manager path.
you've got like the reporter and the and the editor path they're different they're very different but like they there's similar kind of moment of realization normally if you go down that career path that no one prepares you for and you just kind of figure out as you go totally um editors also tend to make
Well, the reporters say there is also a similarity. Yes. And I realized I had an intern at that job at 1776 who we had an event with a... a congressman and after the event she came to me and she was like melissa that was so cool i just chased down a congressman in the elevator to get him to give me a quote yeah And I was like, oh, no, I do not sign me up for that. And like that she was truly so enthusiastic and energized by that interaction was like.
It's not that I couldn't do it, but I was like, I don't think I want to do that. I wasn't very good at essentially harassing people, which is like kind of part of the job.
people talk about like sourcing yeah but like developing sources and i never really knew what it meant because they don't teach you that in journalism school yeah which i really think they should um and i i just never really knew how good reporters did it i was like how like you must be like how do you like get people to talk to you like yeah figure that part out so that's why i like pivoted
Right. So I became an engineering manager to totally shortcut that. I did not do the engineering thing. I'm still doing that. They're very similar. You could be an engineering manager. What was the hardest, like... part of that transition you obviously went and did a boot camp but like what was the the most difficult kind of thing um when you decided to make that shift yeah honestly just being a beginner again yeah because i had come to journalism in high school
and stuck with it throughout college and in my early career, I had never basically tried anything new. And so moving out of this... comfort zone where I was very confident in my skills into a role where I knew that I could succeed if I worked hard, but that it would be an uphill kind of challenge. I think that was the hardest part. I also.
Definitely had some misconceptions about how knowledgeable I would be coming out of a boot camp. Yeah. Again, it's data visualization. How hard can it be? It really should be much easier. It should. But. I had this vision of myself at the end of my boot camp. I thought like, I'm going to be like cruising on a yacht. I'm going to be so good at this. If I was that good after.
Like, you know, a part time class, I would be amazing. You're not cruising on a yacht after a boot camp. You are like in a rowboat, given a paddle. And what the boot camp gives you is like the course heading that's like paddled that way. And so it was still then after the boot camp, so much work to, yeah, come into a product engineering context, which I think I had a leg up because I do think it's really similar to the cross-functional nature of a newsroom.
But was still kind of a lot to learn about all of the things that are not the coding itself, but like the processes around it, like build processes. You don't really get into that in. a coding bootcamp, similar with like dependency management. I had never had to do that. And so, you know, the bootcamp you're spinning up your own code bases and starting them from scratch.
But coming into my first job as an engineer was at the Washington Post. They had a really large and sprawling base. And so it was also a challenge to kind of learn how to go spelunking in a code base.
and kind of like dig around and like... change things see what happened um so that was also kind of a challenge yeah you get a certain amount of like talking people who come out of boot camp so that like it's like hearing you speak about it it kind of makes sense because i feel like maybe yeah you come out with a certain
of confidence and actually there's like a lot of just like doing a job that you don't learn until you actually get yeah exactly it's like you learn the some of the skills and concepts and then You are a full time learner while you're working, like trying to skill up on the processes and all of the I hate the term soft skills, but all of the human skills that that go into working on a team. Yeah.
And I feel like you had like a bit of a leg up in terms of like the management path just from like your experience as an editor, your experience in the workplace before you'd moved over to software. I think typically.
Typically, most engineers just stay on the IC path until they take a real interest in management or they kind of see a ceiling and then they kind of... decided to try it i feel like you kind of had more of a natural propensity towards them because of your previous roles is that how it worked out yeah i i kind of had a sense going in that i would end up on a management track
one day. And I really actually for the first couple of years had to fight really hard to stay on the individual contributor track. My team within the post was called ARK. We were the SaaS arm of the post, essentially selling the content management software that... The post built and used. Was this pre or post Bezos? Bezos acquired the post and then...
essentially came in and suggested that we like spin up a SAS product, a SAS technology product. It's quite a Bezos movie. Exactly. Yeah. So it was a very Bezos. But it's, yeah, it's kind of like riding a rocket ship. Yeah. It's essentially a Bezos.
startup at the time and you know the post in the journalism world carries a lot of cachet and so a lot of really large publishers from around the world wanted to like get on our software and start using it kind of like it's good enough for the post of course it's good enough for me your marketing does it so yeah exactly we did not have to work very hard um
But my team grew really fast. I was the only professional services engineer when I was hired. And by the time I left, my team had grown to like more than 40 engineers. So I was the person who. was hiring that team. And I was the person who kind of was the de facto manager at first. And I really liked the team culture building aspect of it. And I realized, though, that I was like not I did not feel qualified to.
advise people on their careers because I was so new in my career as an engineer. And so, yeah, for the first couple of years, I really fought to stay on the IC path. so that I could gain the technical expertise and have put in the reps to feel confident then going and managing people who will always be more experienced than I am.
Yeah, it's funny how like this comes up in quite a lot of the conversations I have on this podcast where people become de facto managers and then become managers. And I do think it is like a wisdom of crowds element here where people do just recognize it, whether they do it. on purpose or whether it just kind of happens where they recognize someone.
being a leader or being a natural manager and then yeah you definitely a lot of engineers i think to push back against that like you did because you feel like you need to have that credibility until you can take the role like do you think that that is a like a good assumption or do you actually think that that's like not like that you can do it without having the credibility i mean i think the credibility that you that you build really
really does help it not for the credibility but for just like my own like stability as like in my mental health yeah to be like no i i have done these these really hard things that that would be challenging for most engineers. And yeah, I think you can definitely do it without having built the credibility. You see lots of engineering managers or like... especially in the higher levels of leadership, lots of people who oversee engineering, but really are like product or design experts.
And so so it's definitely possible. But I also think there's a lot of value in having lived the experience that the people on my team are going through of just having. like navigated those really tricky technical challenges has has done a lot for my own confidence. Yeah.
And you mentioned in your tool this morning of suffering from imposter syndrome. Yeah. You submitted a tool for Lead Dead West Coast and then kind of like had a crisis of confidence in your own words. It feels like that imposter syndrome.
isn't amusing it feels like it was something that was kind of afflicting you at that time as well have you like found a way to overcome it or do you think it's like actually not something to overcome like what's your relationship with yeah imposter syndrome been like yeah I've definitely struggled with kind of perfectionism my whole life. And then moving from a career where I was really comfortable and confident, again, had like 15 years of journalism experience.
Moving from that to a field where I was like a complete beginner, my imposter syndrome just like worked over time. And I think. It's clearly something that I like still deal with, but I think my relationship to it now is much more. It's a voice in my head that I can listen to and be like. Thank you so much for pointing that out. We're going to do something different. And yeah, so I've definitely, it's not something I would say I've overcome. It's something I've learned to manage.
You know, I've thought a lot about like, what is confidence? Yes. Like my confidence has only come from like experience and like repetition of things and looking back and kind of thinking after the fact, like, oh, wait. you know what I'm doing. And so now when I'm going into situations, you know, like today, giving a talk at Lead Dev New York, where it's presenting my idea, which is, I think, just a very vulnerable.
thing to do to be like, I have an idea and I think 600 people should hear it. It just comes from the knowledge that if I can help one person with my experience. then that will have been worth it. Yeah. And yeah, it's important to me to be transparent and honest too. I don't want anyone thinking like, oh, I could never do what she did because I'm too anxious or too. Yeah. like unqualified and it's like no
Do it scared. That's like real earned confidence rather than bullshit. Yes, exactly. So yeah, I think you're thinking of it like a voice and then being able to kind of unpick, okay, why am I feeling this way? Do I need to go away and learn more? Do I need to go away?
think about this or are or should I ignore it on this occasion yeah like some learning curve yeah and most of the time it's not do I need to go away and learn more although sometimes it is yeah but I think there's self-awareness that comes there to be able to say okay I actually do need to go get those skills so often yeah it's it's just my own voice being like what if you didn't embarrass yourself and it's like but
what if i did and would it matter yeah like no it's it's probably fine that's great i remember like i remember having that distinct feeling when i got my first journalism job yeah and it was like oh you're going to publish a story with your name on it And I remember having that feeling of like, why does anyone care what I write or what I publish? And then I actually took a really similar view to you, which I kind of carry through today at Lead Deb, which is like, if this can help one person.
then I'm okay with it. Obviously, that's not how my industry is measured because normally it's paid fees. But like I genuinely think that one person can learn from this piece or this talk or this video that we put out or this podcast, then I'm happy. Yeah, I love that because that's like the whole philosophy.
behind what we're building at medium is like a place for telling human stories and this idea that every person is an expert in their own life and their own lived experience and You might not reach hundreds of thousands of people, but if you write something that like you understand deeply because it's your story, like.
that can reach the right person at the right time and have a huge impact, a much bigger impact than, you know, distribution. Yeah, I truly, truly believe, and I've told so many journalists this, that if you... Like think something is interesting enough to write about someone else. Yes, yes, exactly. And that was like the whole, I think, journey that I had to go on with this talk, my Scrappy and Scale talk is.
It doesn't have to resonate for everybody. If it can just resonate for one person, then that's great. And even last week, I was still struggling with being like, OK, is this good enough? I gave a test version of it as a lightning talk to my team. Afterward, one of my one of the other engineering managers, one of my peers wrote me on Slack and he was like, Melissa, I feel like you were speaking directly to me. And he was like, I.
I'm going to go away. I'm going to do this exercise. And I think it's going to help. And I was like, OK, yes, that was the one person in that audience for whom it really resonated. And it was what he needed at that moment. Yeah, so rewarding. Let's talk about your talk a little bit. I'll post a link to it in the show notes so that people can go and check out the whole thing because it should be out by then. But I just think it's such an interesting way of thinking about engineering management.
today about the scrappy versus scale framework. Just kind of give us a nutshell of that. Yeah. So the scrappy scale framework is what I describe as my mindset for gauging how I show up in different situations. So. Basically, in that first job that was the Bezos backed startup, I was in a very scrappy situation. For a while, we could not launch a new client on the platform without.
taking down the entire platform and crashing all of the other sites that were on it. Yeah. Great. Just what you want. And it was my job to basically go and be on site with the client and be like. Everything's fine. And find a way to make them feel heard and seen while all of the backend engineers were like scrambling behind the scenes.
I got this experience. I must have launched dozens of clients that, again, every time it crashed. And these are publishers, right? These are publishers. Yeah. So they're like, traffic is going down. And you're like. Indeed it is. There's nothing we can do. Yeah, so I had to find ways to reassure them, to make them feel like their concerns were the most important thing.
to us and so i basically describe it as like it was a lot of experience running into walls again and again and again and yes engineering exactly and so i got this really scrappy experience and learned how to eventually climb over walls and instead of just hitting them and falling down. Yeah. And so, yeah, it really came in.
Trying to reflect on what I had learned from that job. And then my next job, which was my first role as an engineering manager, which was a very different environment. It was very, very chill, very. You're like, we're working in our agile sprints, but however long it takes is fine kind of thing. And. That's more where you're talking about that kind of scale environment. So you've got the scrappy where things are kind of happening, whereas you've got this scale, which actually...
I think is, yeah, you'll explain it better than me, but I think it's that kind of like stability is that key element where it's like, yes, we're working to sprint and we kind of know what's coming. Exactly. Yeah. So the mindset came upon reflection, realizing that. this is what had allowed me to be successful in these different environments is that I had the skills and could apply them differently depending on what was happening for my team.
And so the idea is that everything that happens to our teams happens on a spectrum from moments of complete stability to moments of crisis. And so we can divide that spectrum essentially down the middle. And on the one side, the stability side, we have scale context and then we have scrappy context on the other side. And these are contexts that affect the way our team operates. And so we also as the leaders need to change how we're showing up in order to help. And so scale is not about.
The company is a scale up or it's not like your team is scaling. It's about scaling your efforts as the manager or the leader to. to grow the people around you, which is very different from scrappy mode where it's focused on implementation and task clarity and setting kind of like the immediate next steps for people. Yeah, and this might be a misunderstanding of it.
on my behalf but i feel like as a leader you typically want to be in scale mode until you're in scrappy mode and you want to get back to scale mode is that I had a lot of interesting conversations about this in the office hours after the talk. I think neither mode is good or bad. I think some teams are primarily scrappy. Some teams have scrappiness thrust upon them. And it's personal, too. Some people...
gravitate to one over the other. And I think many engineers, actually many people who become engineering managers and have been engineers before actually gravitate and are better in like the scrappy situations because like. That it's rewarding in some senses. Yeah. And many of us have to learn the like.
How do you actually grow people? How do you mentor someone? How do you manage their growth? And so it's not that as managers, we want to be constantly shifting our team into scale mode or shifting. like trying to get out of Scrappy. It's really about just being able to read the context and know until this context changes, I'm in Scrappy mode and that's changing how I show up.
one thing i sometimes hear from managers is yeah i think you're right i think a lot of managers have come through the scrappy side more than the scale side and one thing i think is quite important for those people to realize in some of the conversations i've had is that not everyone works that way yeah i think that sometimes there's kind of like a an internal bias towards that way you're like oh everyone
wants to work this way or is like keen to solve problems or to like keep this rocket ship going and so i'm going to help them do that where actually there are engineers out there that just want to pick the next thing off the pile and they want to do it and then we'll go home yes and that is okay you need those people yeah Like being able to kind of navigate that as a manager and knowing that that's okay, I think is a learning curve.
That reminds me of Kim Scott's Radical Candor. She talks about rock stars versus superstars. And your superstar is like the one who's probably much more like ambitious and like scrappy and like, let's go do something. a rock star is like the one who's like just a consistent, solid presence. And I think that's absolutely true with like there's scrappy engineers and then there are engineers who kind of gravitate toward the scale work. Yeah.
You see a lot of obviously scrappy engineers in startups and scale engineers in like really large companies. But I think that it's important to have people with both skill sets on your team. as you're developing both skill sets as the manager too, to be able to kind of complement each other. You want the engineer who's like, all right, what's the right way to build this feature? How could we do it? And you also want the engineer to be like,
And how could we do it like in a prototype? How could we do it fast? Yeah. Yeah, I thought what was interesting in your talk, and I thought this got a really good reaction, is that there's like, I think as a manager, you discover the triggers.
that suggests that you're going to be moving from scale to scrappy. And I think recognizing those as a manager and not panicking and being like, right, okay, we are going to have to shift there. And my job as manager is to bring the team along on that. And you mentioned like...
uh your manager saying like we can get this done in five weeks like that is an immediate like alarm clock right that you're shifting to scrappy yeah and it's not to say that you should just accept you know a deadline or a thing being forced upon you. I think it assumes that you as the manager or the leader are going to bat for the team and saying, well, five weeks, that's pretty tight. Here are all of the reasons why.
And also, if you can't change that context, just accepting that it's happening and be like, all right, well, then how do we, given this set of circumstances, how do we achieve our goal? And just shifting straight into like. Let's not dwell on this being hard and terrible. Let's accept it and figure out how we continue to operate well, given the new constraints. Yeah.
And going back to your career, I think that you've been really fortunate. As someone who came through the journalism and publishing media world, it seems like most of your... uh engineering jobs have also been in that world you were at the post um you were then another company in that world and now you're a medium obviously a publishing platform like is that something you value um you know being still having that connectivity to that world that you love
And do you think you'll ever make a shift and try and pick up a new domain? Yeah, it's funny you ask that because when I was in my boot camp, A real advantage that I think I had was that I knew I wanted to stay in the journalism world. And when you do a boot camp.
I think it attracts a lot of people who know what they don't want to do. Like, I don't want to do sales. I don't want to do marketing. So I'm going to be a developer. But within that, there are also still so many choices of like, what domain do you want to work in? Security is very different than content distribution. And you can work in any industry, you know, banking and publishing.
That's only two, but you can work in any industry and you can also choose between kind of a product engineering career or. engineering org um and an agency too and so actually after um a few years at the job at the atlantic i decided what if what if i need to branch out from journalism. And so my next job was actually at an agency. So I was an agency called Upstatement, which is a product studio with an editorial mindset.
Still kind of connected, but we did a lot of work with nonprofits, with higher education, building a creative vision for what their digital product experience can be. and that was a very different um type of experience again you know spinning up new projects like from scratch um every day basically versus coming and working on a
a code base that you're maintaining and evolving over time. So I did try to kind of like move out of the publishing space. And then I just realized, I think I'm meant to be in a product organization. And that's how I came to Medium. Nice. And this is the Priority Zero podcast. So we like to talk about what your Priority Zero is right now. What's the top thing on your priority list? Yeah. So it's a really interesting time to be at Medium.
If you're familiar with Medium, then you know that the story of Medium is kind of like told in pivots. And we want to stop pivoting. We want to really double down on being the best platform for writing and reading on the Internet. We're trying to shift out of being a 12-year-old startup to being a profitable, stable company.
And it's been a really interesting time because Medium is actually quite a large platform. We just passed the million member mark, which is huge. And we actually just had one of our first profitable month. profitable months ever, which is great. But we have kind of this sense amongst the engineering leadership that in order to achieve the things we want to as medium.
We have to work in a different way than we have been. The classic like what's gotten you here won't get you to the next level. And so there's a sense of like we have to level up our processes. And also there's a really big sense of pride in mediums identity as a startup and this like move quick, like ship things. I don't want to break things, but move fast, ship things.
And so we've been trying to come up with a way to level up the entire organization. And one of the challenges that I've encountered there is that we do not have a unified way of working at all. We have four different engineering teams at the moment. We call them durable teams. And so each of the durable teams have kind of been allowed to come up with their own way of working. And we don't have that shared language. across teams to say,
When we say a project is in the planning stage, what do we mean? It means different things for different teams. And that makes it really hard to have those collaborative conversations or to... Have an engineer shift between teams because they're completely different. So my priority zero has been to help fix the execution of the teams and get them to the point where they're executing very, very well. That is a big...
Does that even manifest in how you measure things? Yeah, absolutely. I think there are like... I'm looking at things on my own team and also on the larger team, like the entire engineering product and design org. We, because we don't have a way of... like there's a shared way of working and communicating, we're actually really not the best at measuring effectiveness. But like you can feel it in the vibes on the team.
And I do think that qualitative measurements really matter when it comes to how are things going? How are we executing? There's a lot that like can't be measured in a metric like. Time to pull request or like the feature, how long it takes a feature to develop. And so I really go by like, are the things that people are saying in one on ones shifting like am.
are we slowly moving the needle on this cultural change are people on board with it and does it feel good or does it feel like blush and obviously we want the former yeah but how do you measure vibes You can't. Of course not. And then in terms of like making like a shift like that where you've got to get four teams who are used to working in their own way, kind of all working in a similar way.
I feel like that needs a certain level of top-down kind of support. Have you got that inside? Do you think that's an important factor? Yeah, absolutely. Having the buy-in from my boss, who is the head of product engineering and design to... come up with a way of working that works for all the teams has been huge. So he actually had me lead this working group to design a... process that would work for all of our teams that we could all follow.
And the goal was not to have like a super prescriptive, like this is how we all have to work. But really just again, that coming back to like a design system for our process where it's like a shared language for how we work. I don't think we would be able to actually make change if we didn't have buy-in from the top levels of leadership.
And that working group did ever get contentious. Obviously, each team wants to do it their way, right? I mean, I think people fall into two camps from what I've noticed. There's like the camp of like... The road to bureaucracy is paved with a single Jira ticket or begins with a single Jira ticket. Yes. And then there are the people who secretly have been great. Yes. Like there are so many people on the team who are like, I want to do good work. I.
I'm not able to do it because there's not clarity. Just tell me how I should do it. And so, yeah, we've we've worked on kind of a super lightweight process. The working group that we formed was cross-functional. So we had someone engineering management, engineering, product, design, and QA. And we also then had representation from each of the durable teams. And so I wouldn't say it got...
contentious because the people we picked for the working group were the ones who were like, yeah, let's come up with a process. We're in the process of rolling it out to the org right now. So stay tuned. Yeah. How are you preparing for that? What are your moves to try and make that softer landing as possible? Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about change management. Fun. Fun at cocktail parties. So fun. Yes. I'm a blast. Do you want to talk about your mindset? Yeah. That's great.
Yeah. So in terms of making it kind of a softer landing. We presented it first to the leads. So each durable team is headed by a product manager, a design lead, and an engineering manager. And so we brought it to that group first to get their buy-in and feedback. We were really careful to say, this is what we are like proposing. Yeah. What feedback do you have? And make that feedback representative of what the people on your team will say. Yeah.
And so then I think the second part is designing a presentation that. presents both the concept in like the abstract sense and then also walking through real examples. So we're going to take a couple of projects, past projects. and show how they would map onto this process and then the final thing um once we present to the teams and start to actually roll it out we'll be holding office hours as a working group
Because we're at the point where we're saying this is what we're going to do. I want to give people the opportunity to feel heard and to ask questions without inviting feedback and criticism from. a 50 person team. Yeah. Tricky, but yeah, I think that's a really good approach. Yeah. So we're, yeah, we're trying to be really thoughtful and the process we designed, you know, there were so many details we could have gone into. It's like. like there's so much to figure out like
What makes a good JIRA ticket? Do we use JIRA or Notion? How do we triage bugs? What makes a good bug ticket? And we decided that for this first round, we were... Not going to dig into all of those nitty gritty details. We are going to design, again, the high level process and workflow. And then we also kind of had some definitions around documents go in Notion.
Tasks go in JIRA. And they do go together, but you cannot track your tasks in Notion. That has to be in JIRA. That was the big thing. And so it's, yeah, we went at the high level first. And then my goal in recognizing that there's a lot of things we didn't figure out in this process, my goal is actually to spin up. many more working groups of other people on the team to come in and define some of those details.
At the end of the day, I'm not writing code. And so I have an opinion on what makes a good JIRA ticket. But I want to hear from an engineer what makes a really great JIRA ticket beyond a linked notion. Yeah, that's it. As we've discussed, a key step. Yes. I always like to ask, what will need to happen for that to no longer be your priority zero? Yeah. I'm a big believer in doing one thing at a time.
I get really overwhelmed by how many things there are to be doing. As you said, it's a big thing with lots of edge cases. Exactly. And so I'm really trying to like not... I know there are going to be edge cases. I know that this isn't perfect, which, again, for a perfectionist is pretty challenging. It's going to happen. Exactly. And so I'm really viewing this as kind of like.
our prototype phase and trying to say, like, let's validate that this workflow even works. So I think for it to not be my priority zero would be. We get it rolled out. I get the teams using it. And even if we just like have the same statuses on our projects or it's like a project in planning means the same thing. Yeah.
That is how it will become not my priority zero. And once we also then spin up the other groups of people to come in and make the process their own, I think that's the other key thing is that. It will not be my priority zero when someone else feels like they can own it or own the next steps. Nice. Great. All right. We are at time, but I always like to finish the show on a recommendation. So have you got any recommendations? Yes, sure. I have two. Okay.
Lucky. The first is, of course, Medium. There are so many amazing writers and stories on Medium on virtually any topic. You know, I. I think a lot about like you go to like LinkedIn for like professional things and you go to X or TikTok for like your entertainment. But on Medium, you can really get like.
a feed of recommended content that is personalized to you where it's like it has the engineering management stuff it has like all these other things that make me a whole person yeah um and i just think it's I had no idea what an amazing community of writers there was on the platform. Yeah, my personalized emails typically have like engineering leadership and like baseball nerdery. And it's a really nice kind of combination. Exactly, yeah. There's these two.
food bloggers in the uk called top jaw who have started like branching out and they're really successful and they ask like chefs and bartenders like where they like to eat where they like to drink but one of their big things is no self-nomination so i think i might have to introduce that but again i'm gonna I'm not saying you have to follow me on the medium. I'm going to let it go. And your other one. My second one is to try horseback riding.
And I know that this is a little bit out of left field, but... I started horseback riding about a year ago. I had a realization that I needed a hobby that I couldn't monetize. Because my brain wants to turn everything into a hustle. And I didn't have anything that I was doing just for me. And so I started going once a week about a year ago. And then. More recently, I started leasing a horse. So I now go three times a week and I am learning so much about.
management from riding horses you know I have to build the relationship with my horse and what I'm learning is that like when you're riding The rider is not actually like in control. The rider is giving commands that hopefully like we're listening to, the horse is listening to, but you're not in control. You're guiding another living. And most of the time what I've realized is that if the horse doesn't do what I think I asked it to do, it's probably not the horse's fault.
It's probably my fault as the writer for not communicating as well as I could have. And so it's yeah, it's just eternally humbling to to be a beginner. But I absolutely recommend it if you can, even if it's just like a trail ride on a horse, you get there's so much to get out of it.
You'll do really well to get me on a horse because I'm terrified of that. But I think you made a really strong case. Yes. I think like as I just watched a lot of Olympics and obviously there's a lot of equestrian in there. And this is classic. This is very classic of the Olympics as a whole because you watch like the show jump.
and you're just and you watch them like time and time again be perfect and you're just like oh this looks really easy like surely that's just really easy but now that you've said that actually like to get to consistently get a horse to do lots of things that they probably don't want to do is a real art form. And like these people are obviously the best at it. Yeah. It's, it's truly like. testing my communication abilities. I think I'm a pretty good communicator generally.
But what I have learned is that when I have to communicate like with my whole body as a horseback rider, I'm actually not. Yeah, it's very different. And so, yeah, there's just it's it's teaching me so much about. showing up mindfully about not forcing things to be a certain way. The horse I ride is very kind of anxious. And so... I ride her to help show her like some rides can just be fun. We don't all have to go out and be at a show. We can just go go riding for fun. And so it's yeah, it's.
I'm learning and the horse is learning. And we're like both growing together, which I think is like the essence of a manager and direct report relationship. Nice. That is a great recommendation. It's definitely the most left field recommendation we've had on the show. Melissa, thanks so much for coming on. Great talk this morning. Really glad to have this conversation. Hope to see you again soon. Thank you. It's great to be here.
Thank you again for listening to Priority Zero, a Lead Dev Podcast. Remember, you can get us wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify. But when you do, please remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And we hope to see you at the next one.