Hi everyone and welcome to PriorityZero, a LeadDev Engineering Leadership Podcast. I am your host Scott Karean today, I'm joined by Dan Blundell from Gymshark, Dan. Thanks so much for being on. Can
you tell us a little bit about what you do? Hey Scott, yeah, of course I'm the Engineering Director at Gymshark, so I look after pretty much anyone that writes code at Gymshark, that's everything from e-commerce, D2C website, native mobile apps, backend systems, integrations, data engineering, reliability, quality, data science, so it's a really broad role, and yeah it's fantastic to be a part of it. Big old remit, for people who don't know about Gymshark,
tell us a bit about Gymshark. So Gymshark's a very community-driven brand, we've been around about 13 years now, founded by Ben Francis, he's still CEO very close to the product process, community-driven online brand D2C, it's kind of one of Britain's or the UK's been like fastest
growing brands and has been for a number of years now, but is across the globe in terms of territories, and we kind of blend a big investment in high quality sportswear product and a big investment in community, so how do we bring together people and their fitness journey, and the mission is really about uniting that conditioning community. Nice and you're wrapping a Gymshark,
who do you as we speak? Of course, yeah, absolutely. So I want to come back to that, and I really want to hear about that kind of crazy broad remit that you have in your current role and how you manage that, but before we do I want to go all the way back, so when did you become interested in software and software engineering? I'm just going to show a little bit of my age now, but probably around the Myspace era, we've had a lot of people on the podcast that are like I was like basically
programming a Commodore with basics, so they're going to hate you. Yeah, awful. So yeah, I played games really early on as a kid, but really in terms of writing code, making changes with computers and being able to do things, it was probably in Myspace era, it was very accidental. I was studying music, and I was playing in bands, and bands wanted websites, and wanted their Myspace pages to look cool and all these kinds of things, so started doing that, turns out I was someone who could
figure that out pretty quickly, didn't realise I was, so I did, and I kept doing that, and the more I kept doing that, and the more I kept doing that, the more bored I got, and troubled I got, we're traveling around in a van all the time, and realised I couldn't hack that anymore, and there probably
wasn't the money in it that I'd hoped to be able to, it just wasn't the experience you kind of expected to after probably doing it for a few years, and I sort of, I think give up being a musician necessarily, but it didn't become my goal anymore, and I started just, I actually started in the
customer support role, customer service role, and started automating my job away, because it was just really silly, I had to log into like five different systems and look up customer details, and I figured a way to automate that process, and I was quite lucky because I got picked out of
that team and got asked to go and work on a systems implementation, no idea what it's doing, and then people started asking me to figure out technology for them, so I built, taught myself to code, built websites for local sports teams and bands and all this kind of stuff, and progressing
that, and eventually ended up in a sort of very junior software engineer role, without ever really feeling like I was a software engineer at that time, and pretty much just said yes to everything beyond that, and just kept saying yes and kept saying yes, and kept saying yes. What was your instrument? I played drums and percussion, but I played across jazz or castoral, I played for theatre shows, and I played in the more traditional like grottie pub in the
back end of Camden somewhere. Nice, I tried to learn drums once, I would have loved to have been a drummer, but I was not good at it. I'd loved it, still do now, so yeah, it's one of those lost loves. And then the same question, but for where the different flavour, what was your programming language when you first came into it? PHP, because it was free and easy, and you could write really bad code and it somehow worked. I think that's probably still true today, but a lot of people
are going to say that. I love that, we're keeping that in. So who took that first chance on you? Obviously as an untrained, self-trained developer, you kind of landed that first role, who was it, took a shot? So it was actually sponsorship from the head of customer service at the time, so I was working in a customer service, customer support role, and they saw me as someone who was just
not behaving like everyone else in their team. Everyone else in their team was there to do the customer service role, and I was just trying to get rid of as much as the customer service role as I could while still being nice to people, and they were the one that made the introduction to people that worked in the IT department at that point, and then I kind of moved across. They
sponsored me to effectively be someone who knew about the business domain, about customers. I'd spent a lot of time talking through their problems, and so it's a person kind of also in the standard technology, and the more time I spent in that, the more I realized actually this was incredibly interesting. It was always different problems to solve, and actually this is where I was
going to spend more of my time. Yeah, there's actually someone really unexpected who I, at the time, very young Dan didn't even realize they knew my name, and yet at some point someone had had a conversation to go, I think you'd be great over here, which I think I'd do on some level carry that with me now to try and make sure that that shows up in how I lead teams and how I work
with people. Yeah, and so then how did you kind of learn on the job? Did you, once you were put in that position, once you were given that opportunity, did you start thinking, oh I need to do some more formal training here? Did you start to just learn on the job? Did you start to do stuff in your spare time? How do you kind of bridge that gap? I'd love to say it was a really conscious effort to
structure it. No, I just did it because it was cool and it was interesting, it was fun, and it was at a time when it was before public cloud was a thing, it was before the internet was pretty, it was gathering momentum, and my space here was probably the first thing where it became something more than just looking up information and leaving it alone, it was much more, it became
a lot more transactional interactive. So that emergent part, it was such an interesting, such a fast pace time even compared to today I think that the natural curiosity was the thing driving me. I wasn't heading to any particular destination, I was just scratching each itch as it came along
and keeping going. I think that's the spark isn't it? I think that like I remember in sick form like when blogging a comic big thing I was an aspiring writer and I tried to like sell my own wordpress and I like found that agonizing and basically just immediately gave up where which is
why I'm not an engineer and I think that the people who don't immediately give up and think oh no I just need to keep going with this, I can fix it and you get that satisfaction from it, I think that's where you know that actually there's something probably in this, was that where you got
with my space and PHP and that. Pretty much it was I can do this thing and this change happens and I think there was a there's a strange familiarity for me from the off probably quite lucky thinking back then it matched the way my brain worked and I I felt like I ever had to you know that moment
in the matrix where like Neo just sees the code and kind of sees through it. It never felt like I was having to see through something it always sort of made sense so the thing I actually I think struggled with more was helping other people understand how things worked because I had to then
learn how to explain that and how to walk them through it and say because it was such a kind of natural fit for how I saw the world so I never really struggled with that bit and it was that thing of like I never thought about giving up I just wanted to know what the next sort of layer of
the puzzle was. Yeah we had Nick Means on the podcast recently and he was talking about kind of helping people identify their own superpowers and he was like it's really difficult because often people don't recognize them because it's just easy for them and then it's like your job as a manager as a leader to be like that thing that you're finding easy isn't easy for other people so you need to be able to kind of explain that to people it seems like you went through a similar thing.
Yeah exactly that is it's actually I think a big step in say a leadership journey I think way more than or it certainly featured a lot more in a leadership journey than it is in an IC or an engineering journey. Mostly I think because a lot of engineers I've worked with feel see fit the same kind of pattern in terms of how they've got there but it's also not necessarily a conversation that comes up that much very often the conversations have tended to be on how to just solve that
problem how you see this thing and it's more practical kind of working through a thing rather than the conversations that tend to get held in the leadership space of really deconstructing the methodology or the framework or the thought process that got you there so it's certainly a much more pivoting aspect of my career that towards that end is trying to find ways to explain things
that I didn't realise I did. Yeah and there's probably like a huge vista between that and your current role as director of engineering at Jim Sharp but let's try and traverse it so what happened
in that period there? So from effectively being someone who taught themselves to co-sale I said yes to an awful lot of things mostly because each thing was I didn't really know what I wanted to do yeah it is the honest answer and by saying yes to stuff it unlocks more opportunities and that became the pattern was well if I say yes to stuff the next thing happens and I get curious and I'll follow down that path for a while and now. Did you ever feel like the next thing wouldn't happen?
No, no because the the problems I was trying to solve along the way were just as much about how much I was learning as what I was doing for whoever I was working with or for anything else I think the most surprising turning point that crept up on me more than anything else was the day
I realised I was a manager. Yes and that happened that actually happened initially at the MeCom agency but I didn't really acknowledge it at the time and it was when I went into this as a strange transition and I can't really explain why either but moved into government
public sector and working in that that kind of environment and it was that journey of an accidental manager that was a lot more enlightening and surprising for me because I didn't notice it kind of that the notion of like putting a boiling of frog like I suddenly looked around one day and I had all these people sort of looking to me for answers or to direct them and I'd been doing
it for a while. Yeah but it was a very natural progression of taking on more projects in the hour so the more specific version is I moved from eCom agency into public sector and I worked with local authorities the NHS and general government to solve a heap of problems around what we call at the time service design it was much more especially in that sector it was like N2N.
And so a lot of problems to self. Yeah and it wasn't we wanted to change the narrative it was a big help having worked in eCom because it was going into a space in public sector that people were so focused on big technology projects and implementing tech to solve things
and it hadn't been enough time spent on what was the N2N service what was the customer experience and we were bringing these not new concepts but new concepts to that sector and working through those so I built out teams working with a local government shared service I'm working with
the NHS and care providers and these kind of things to to navigate N2N services that were incredibly complex mostly about politics and people and regulation with like a sprinkle of technology but the biggest you go back to like the superpower element the biggest superpower
we didn't realise we had as a team in that space was we knew how technology works we knew what it was possible like what it was possible to do with it but we weren't selling that we weren't advocating for that we were advocating for better service design yeah and then underneath we were playing
the kind of long game of well we can automate all these things as long as we understand and as long as we protect the customer and I probably learnt more in that seven year period than you're probably ever realised I did yeah but along the way I went I built a team from four people
to 65ish yeah did a lot hiring did a lot of hiring but quite slowly it was every about four year period and then we also I had to learn an awful lot about how to then divvy up that team split it scale it back down so it had redundancies change working with people teams and really learning how a
business operates and at the end of that period I it was the end tail end of that period was Covid and then the kind of year after which I'm sure has probably come up a lot on this podcast on previous occasion about the impact that's had on people changes and decisions but the end of
Covid especially working in that sector we rebuilt a lot of the test and trace stuff because it was terrible we had to rebuild rebuild the entire thing in about three weeks so it actually worked so you're working on all that well we worked on parallel versions the central version that was
done people try to use and remember people try to use it just didn't really make any sense it didn't work it was rushed and nonsense the date was terrible and it was going to be things so we rebuilt a local version for a specific region of the UK and we rolled out there within sort of three to six
week period to try and compensate for that we linked up with the care system we provided volunteer services all with very fast paced very unpublic sector working of technology I genuinely was just exhausted by the end of that thing I think it did eight months working at
that pace in that environment but it was the emotional drain it was the emotional drain that accumulated more than anything else was the software I'm building at this point determines whether people live or die and for that period of time was too much too much pressure too much
over that intensity with that little support and everything else and again one of those days where you get up look around and go I didn't realise what I was actually dealing with what I was carrying and what I'd learned but that was a later probably reflection there I think else it was more
I'm not doing a great job here I need to do something for me I spent seven years doing this because of the public good I can do and the skills I can bring on with stuff it became a I had to look after me for a little bit so I'm going to make a decision and try and go and work somewhere fun
so I went somewhere fun and Jim Shark was a place that as soon as I researched what it was really about you see it in the news you see the brand and everything else but I did my research on who the company was and what it stood for and the values of Jim Shark plastered on the walls but lived
every single day stuck out a mile compared to a lot of other companies I was looking at going working with yeah and that for me was the big draws I need something fun but more importantly I need something that I believe in about how that brand is run and Ben and the whole team at Jim Shark
live and breathe every single day and I don't see that many places so it was it was a wonderful experience even through the hiring process and that reassured me that actually they've kind of walked the talk of this isn't just something we've slapped on the wall or used for brand marketing
this is this is real and I went in as head of core engineering which is essentially back in the integrations and infrastructure it was fun it was stuff I was familiar with but I was absolutely terrified because I'd worked in public sector which has a reputation of being slow regulated
politicized confused and just doesn't work I kind of walked in on day one and was like what on earth can I help this brand do compared to what I've been doing three months in it's actually there's an awful lot here about the pace at which this brand is scaling that I've already been on
the other end of and know how to do a lot of these things at scale so a lot of the past couple of years has been navigating that scale up journey and about two years ago I got the opportunity to kind of put myself forward for the engineering director role and was successful in doing that and
and I've kind of not really looked back since well spend the biggest change going into that director role from your previous role biggest change is how something to be honest something I've only really recognised in the last six months is just how much how impactful I can be if I look out
and across the whole company rather than focusing on what tech and what engineering do does that feeling you can kind of get drawn into very quickly of just running on that infinite treadmill like you just keep going it doesn't matter how much you deliver it will never be enough
kind of thing that shift of going to know what I need to create the capacity where that just happens and create my own personal capacity to look up out and support my peers other directors and other departments the exact team how do we go and work with them to help understand what their real
needs are and how do we change up and prepare for what's coming that shift for me was probably the jarring surprising and again creeped up on me a little bit when you made that realisation maybe you're still making that realisation what what did you go and consciously do to try and correct for that I I went to the VP of marketing as a first book called and just asked for feedback yeah and I was scared of it yeah it was one of those and the reason I went to to Carly who's now our chief digital
officer should VP of marketing at the time and I said to her like the reason I'm asking you is because you're probably the person I've worked with the least and that seems like an error so what's your impression of me what am I doing well what am I not doing well what could I do better for you
and let's have that conversation and she was absolutely phenomenal because she took the time she took the time to turn around and give me something where she was incredibly supportive but at the same time said I don't get enough communication I don't get enough understanding and when I do
it's not necessarily about the right level of stuff so I want to understand from how we have better conversations about that and she did an incredible job of not making it my problem she made it our problem it was such a great introduction to that level of leadership alongside someone who went
I'm not just going to tell you you need to improve exercise aired I'm going to tell you how we're going to work together to do that yeah and at that moment of going okay this is how this can work has just accelerated all those other conversations and given me the support and permission to go and
do that with other VPs and directors across the business to go actually this is my peer group and I'm not spending nearly enough time working with them to the words out and mouth it's that moment where you realise that your peer group is no longer engineering your peer group traverses the whole
company and so you have to kind of work out how to speak their language a lot more is that what you've been kind of figuring out for the last six months yeah and learning which parts are shifting is there's something observed around things like job descriptions in in tech and a lot
of the time you see this line which is understands understands how to explain technical concepts to non-technical people and I'm like that's such a fallacy and they're patronising it is and it's also I think if you followed that advice of these kind of levels as you're moving through and trying
to work with the rest of the business it almost promotes this idea of like you need to go and educate people yeah you need to educate people you need to use your ears like go and listen and your job is to almost abstract or I've interpreted as my job is to abstract that complexity in the same way
that we would if we were building a piece of software building something that end users can consume we try and abstract all that complexity away so they've got this beautiful usable experience to go with do the same as a leader that explaining the technical concepts to people almost promotes this kind of false narrative around what you focus on for me that that big shift has been I'm just going to take in and you're I'm going to go and learn your part of the business I'm going to understand what
drives marketing what drives finance what drives the commercials of this business and I'm going to digest that into how we make decisions and build out a framework for an engineering team so that they know how to make better decisions based on where the business is heading we're not sat here going
well does this technical constraint is this technical constraint or it has to be built this way or you should care about like deployment time or anything no you don't need to care about that that's that's our job to figure that out it's our job to learn the business and abstract some of
the like complex to be the way to go and figure out and like what that also means is you get a little bit further away from engineering and I think as an engineer that's probably quite tough of you found that a difficult thing to kind of let go I did and I didn't I know a lot of people
that have I think I probably again I've had some really good support and really good inflection points in my career where people have kind of grabbed me or nudged me or I read and educated myself relentlessly to a point where I spent a lot of time on myself
and understanding that I could be my own biggest advocate I could be my own biggest challenger and so on so actually the transition of like I've taken my hands off my keyboard and everything else was less of a challenge for me because I'd accepted that I was never going
to be the best engineer whatever that means but I was I had a real big strength for understanding how technology worked fairly naturally I could work with people which surprised myself on certain occasions but I understood systems I saw everything as a system tell me more about that why did you
feel that working with people maybe wasn't your strongest suit because I made some very silly mistakes when I was much earlier in my career emotional and strappy and very teenager-y for probably longer than I should have been and that created a bit of a narrative in my own mind
it's like I'll actually that notion of like people are idiots you know you're getting your in head about like again back to the I've got to educate everyone how these things are it's really awful mindset to to be in now reflecting back and to then reverse that as a as a built
narrative the kind of earlier adult development of years it's quite challenging so I spent a lot of time trying to just rewire how I thought about the world and what I valued and everything else which again incredibly lucky to have had the feedback I did at various points in my career
from people to go just just check in with yourself and really focus on that and you can be and I'd try and encourage support others to do that now because I think if you can understand your own principles what you own boundaries which is not it sounds really easy to do it's really really not
and take it upon yourself to understand those things inflection points in your career and different challenging decision or what might be challenging decisions become a lot less challenging because you know yourself you know what you value it's a description of like a principle stack that was
used with me a little while ago and I've held on to that which is like you can compromise those things but as you move down the stack they become easier to compromise but the things at the top of the stack absolutely stick to and that goes for career decisions, compositions what you work on
who you hire all kinds of things so you almost have a priority zero for your principles yeah absolutely so this priority zero so we like to talk about what is your priority zero right now in your role what's that thing that's stubbornly at the top of your list it's actually something so
slightly probably something is more or more abstracts than a kind of tangible deliverable the deliverables are growing ambitious bramack gym shark is such an ambitious brand and it backs it up in so many ways but the knock on effect of that in terms of what my priority has become
is about navigating that scale up and I've sat so many times and tried to remind myself about how lucky I am given how many companies don't get to the kind of scale that gym shark is at and certainly don't have the trajectory it's got in terms of its success and potential success
so I'm in a very privileged position to have the priority zero of figure out scaling in a very fast moving D2C e-commerce global brand which is not something that I think comes up many times in people's careers so I try and anchor myself in what a privilege that can be and I imagine that
manifests itself in loads of ways in the technology the scaling there in the team in geographies the complexity of like moving through like all of these things are just things that pop into my head when I think about scaling but what are the areas there that you're kind of really zeroing in on
so part of it is peeling back some of the assumptions that we've accumulated over say 12, 13 years say the the Shopify store that runs say gym shark UK is the same one that Ben opened 12 years ago the test orders are still in there if you can search for them but things like that build up a
whole set of accumulated assumptions right so peeling back and really checking in on some of those we're going into new geographies we're going into new channels we're doing retail wholesale at mass scale when a lot of people are pairing have been pairing back from the high street and we're
going into it so figuring out these things that gym sharks not are protected to do as an organization as a company it's not structured in that way it's structured on e-commerce online first D2C so retail on the high street and figuring out how to do that whole new arm of how we do business
how do we need to engage differently what other capabilities do we need within engineering to figure out what that looks like and there's an awful lot of case studies on things like a lot of brands that through the dot com boom and any commerce emergence went from high streets one line
there's loads of case studies about how to do that there's not so much out there about how to go the other way and go from online to bricks and mortar wholesale so we're doing a whole arm of wholesale and partners and this kind of stuff and again it's not something that as a business we
have a set of capabilities to navigate there's plenty of cautionary tales out there peloton definitely is the one that's popping into my head exactly so there's so many things of like the horror stories and the kind of challenges about what can go wrong and who to work with and not to
work with but equally from our point of view and for my my role in responsibility it's about figuring out what capabilities we do have that we can capitalize on and which ones we just don't and for the ones we don't do we need to own that it seems like do we need to own that capability or
can we get a supporting partner who who understands that much better and the big challenge of probably underserved challenges how do you help the internal conversation within the business about working more with partners in a healthy way because again we're kind of such a grassroots
self-grown brand everything happened in house for the longest time so actually how to again avoid in the kind of cautionary tales how do you work successfully with partners to make things happen and how do you do it in a way where you implore constraints on those partners to do it in the way
that you're going to be able to sustain that going forward yeah yeah I mean it becomes part of your culture to do things yourself you become a build not by kind of operation your engineers are kind of used to dealing with things that way so that's a difficult thing to shift right yeah and
it's managing the kind of threat that comes along with that so it's everything going to be out but it's trade-offs yeah and it's the cultural impact that kind of goes less seen it's much less visible it's the the tone of the conversations about what assumptions people are making in their mind
about what very innocent decisions and supportive decisions that made in support of the whole company get played down in a very different way which is absolutely not not the truth but if people have only got a snippet of the information and they're not supported enough with the right communication
it goes off on all sorts of tangents so I'm learning an awful lot about how to navigate that how to work with partners successfully but also how to change the culture of the business to embrace that in a in a really healthy way yeah and so that it's such a big priority zero it's such a like
there's so many elements to it like where do you start like what was where do you start to attack a problem like that for me it's been about avoiding what I would normally do by default which would be dive back into the detail really understand it and it's about how do I create a set of healthy
constraints and guardrails and guard lines for the team to operate in and a practice where we can check in more effectively about how we're doing to be more specific it's really about continuously assessing not just our org structure and how we're shaped and what we own but we did we've
done things like business capability mapping like very specific things to support people understanding what what do we really do but we've tried to do it in the very like unconsultancy way and do it a very gym shock way like we're going to talk about these things with real words and the real
things we do that you can point out and see map out the business in a way it's much more tangible and map out the dependencies between those things where do we want to draw the lines and split things and make sure that we can grow so understanding on a more continuous basis are we the right
shape size scale and distilling the backup to to the measurements for the whole company what's truly important to our success and what can wait because it's ambitious but we need to prepare towards it yeah so it's dual tracking some of that stuff about what do we need to do today to make
sure we're continuously moving and what do we need to start seeding a layering in to support the growth that we're going on yeah and I know you're still hiring at the moment because I saw he posted about it today what do you look for in a hire the things I can't teach it varies by team
varies of role but generally the values plays a big part in that and the reason the values play such a big part in that is I think is we talk about culture additive culture fit and realistically if you believe in the values very authentically that's not something you can train
someone to be you're about to printable stats and what you might learn about self awareness and what really matters to you as an individual I wouldn't prefer to suggest to ever try and change someone's belief or what's meaningful to them so if there's alignment there that's my first
port of call because the clash and the frustration that can come for that on both sides is something that's very very difficult to unpick and unpack and support but at the same time it's something that makes people much more successful when they're already aligned with the tone of a business or the direction and the principle and that like the way in which that's going to get approached
yeah and how do you measure that during the process? Very good question a lot of the time it's really about seeing if people can just talk to us honestly about what motivates them so much as conversations like this you start to hear and see different aspects of how people are more
tangible is by examples of where they demonstrate decision make people demonstrate decision making around compassion and caring and supporting a community and making sure that people around them are supported in the right kind of way and they're curious and they're like blame and those kind of aspects like can you demonstrate where that's part of your thought process in your activity?
We actually do coaching through interviews as well around just trying to explore and example a little bit more deeply so if to try and avoid this like you're just not good of interviews types in direct and that's a really unfair way of assessing so we do try and kind of coach people through an interview process in a way that if they've got the background the experience the belief
the examples will try and draw them out as well? Yeah you're not there to trip them up here they're actually there to help them a long time for sure and actually making a much more conversational process where it's appropriate to try and draw that out because there's you can very easily I think shut off some really great opportunities to work with people because they had an off day or
totally. Just being able to draw those example out and go I'm going to get curious about you just just talk to me about what your experiences are and just why you made the decisions you did and we'll be empathetic towards that as well right remembering that people don't necessarily make decisions like poorly on purpose so what information did you have at the time that sort of made you
met that decision? I'm personally looking for quite a lot of honesty in those spaces as well because I think it speaks volumes about how much thought and preparation you've done yourself about who you are, what motivates you, what you believe in but say we try and drive that in as an encouraging statement within in a hiring process because I want to know who you are as well.
And I tend to have this conversation on this podcast a lot but like the priority zero feels really big like how do you know like how will you know when it's no longer priority zero what
needs to happen for that to come down the list? To come down the list I think we measure teams down to not necessarily a granular level but I think try and structure it away where teams measure themselves and they're an opportunity but I try and focus on the amount of headroom we've got and if we've got a sustainable amount of headroom it's not necessarily something that's
the biggest priority at that point. So trying to match the ambition of the brand and the trajectory of the scale and decision making process we're going through with a sustainable amount of headroom where that's if that starts to no longer be a strained at any given point we start to be able to pair back on the amount of change we might need to implement. You can explain that a little bit more I'm really curious about that so how do you kind of measure
that headroom? So that headroom for me is really about the amount of capacity our leadership team have to deal with that sustained change so right now Bink they ask it's incredibly strained because we're going through so much change. There's not enough runway for us to be able to to make those decisions that the pace we probably should be doing we're hyper aware of that. So for me it's then measuring the well-being of the leadership team is incredibly important.
You can measure the well-being of delivery teams and that's really like a big focus of conferences like Lead Dev and so on and there's so much talked about but measuring the well-being and health of a leadership team has really got something to become incredibly intriguing to me and something I'm experimenting with to try and assess what headroom of we've got to be able to build this runway of decision making to the lab.
Because anyone who knows me knows that I don't think these frameworks are perfect but we do have frameworks as you said for measuring the productivity of engineering teams we have Dora we have space we have various others but yeah you're right we don't have one for measuring the capacity of the leadership team and if that capacity runs out then everything grinds to a halt. Yep exactly so we do process it's under the guise of a career check-in with all kind of my direct reports and
the leadership team across tech. Career check-in actually has a section on kind of almost well-being as it is today like how are you doing what decisions you made last couple of months have been stretched what's challenging you what's keeping you up at night if anything and he's going to having
those kind of conversations assessing effectively what's our spare leadership capacity what's our disposable leadership capacity in terms of runway so if that starts to grow and that starts to ease too much that starts to drop on this because actually we've got to kind of fairly stable place I'll be a very happy human right now that state of change is obviously stretching and employing
different strategies to make sure that we can keep on top of it. Yeah I feel like you can do it short term but like it doesn't feel like it's a short term problem like so you can't just keep like charging towards that you're going to end up hitting a wall. Yeah and it becomes a kind of a really again a real privileged problem to have because actually I know there's plenty of brands and businesses out there that don't have this kind of challenge and they have they're very
much the opposite but at the same time it it cannot feel like that yeah it can really not feel like that when you're in the middle of it so constantly checking in with ourselves and supporting each other and actually bringing that whole leadership team across tech much much
closer together over the past six months I have run explicit workshops with all heads of tech so not just engineering across the whole of tech directors and heads off across the whole of tech to just bring them together so I did group coaching sessions with all of them initially with very
little purpose other than the question of how do you want to work together how do you want to be with each other and it was something that came out of working with Susan Bond as my coach and working with her we started exploring this problem this challenge and got to to the outcome
of go and try it and go and test it out so I tried it out with my team I tried it out with the wider tech team now it's been incredibly successful just bringing them together it's one of my core principles is about people having each other's backs but the question became well how do you
create an environment where that is true if I believe that's fine but it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's on board so I have to do some work as a leader to to create that space to create those relationships and group coaching became a mechanism for me to do that we did that
and the team has come together in much better ways as a result and I think that's helping us all navigate a time of great ambition great change and great opportunity but in a way that without those relationships and without that commonality would be a real bitch dog brilliant and Dan
we finished every episode on a recommendation so is there anything you've watched listen to red recently that you want to recommend are Kate Houston's book the engineering leader like it's strategies for scaling yourself and teams I think it's called if you got that right that's very
impressive wow so funny sorry I was actually on a podcast with Mary and Kate a few weeks back just I think it was around the same time the book was in fact I know it was around the same time the book yes on the webinar and Kate was talking about her book and it's like that sounds amazing I made
a note of like the books title and all these kinds of things it's quite scary if I don't remember it made no the books title it was like I must go and all of that everything else drove home that evening got back home Amazon parcel on the the desk walk past it followed two days later picked
up I completely forgot to say open it up Kate's book I pre-ordered it like three months before I think I messaged Mary I was like you'll never get and but I think I read it in about four days because it was just such an engaging funny relevant useful narrative it's written brilliantly and I
think anyone anyone who's managing managers probably useful to people that are managing a team to be honest but anyone that's kind of looking for that that career path and waste to support themselves it's an absolutely brilliant primer reminder it's great love it top takeaway that you
your current job is only a blip on your career nice love it well then thanks so much taking in time it was really great having you on and I'll see you again soon I really appreciate just got thank you again for listening to Prodci zero Elite Dev podcast remember you can get us wherever you get your podcast apples boss five but when you do please remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode we hope to see you at the next one