Connecting bugs & quality to the business bottom line w/ Dave Rhodes #190

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and hire on your terms and only pay for as long as you keep the engineer. To learn more, visit revelo.com forward slash ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. When you think about a technology investment that you make, I would start with the end in mind and really get clear on the business and or operational outcomes that you're really

trying to drive because ultimately you're creating a digital product. If you're a product first company or your world-classed product strategy, your building products that in fact drives the core needs of your overall business. Hello and welcome to the Engineering Leadership Podcast brought to you by ELC, the Engineering Leadership Community. I'm Jerry Lee, founder

of ELC, and I'm Patrick Gallagher and we're your host. Our show shares the most critical perspectives habits and examples of great software engineering leaders to help evolve leadership in the tech industry. If you've ever struggled with how to advocate for investing in quality or addressing bugs or even tech debt, this is the episode for you. In this episode, Dave Rhodes, CEO at Sauce Labs, shares how quality issues affect the company's bottom line

and how to connect bugs back to the business. And if you needed any more reasons as to why this conversation is so important, coincidentally, and I kid you not, coincidentally, the morning that we hit record on this episode is when the crowd strike and Microsoft outage happen. So this is the current event backdrop that really brings this issue into focus for us as we begin the conversation. And in our conversation, Dave dissects strategies for

addressing quality issues. We talk about examples for connecting quality with the bottom line. We get into different best practices for quality testing strategies and we talk about one of Dave's favorite frameworks, which is reverse engineering the impossible within your teams. Let me introduce you to Dave. Dave Rhodes is CEO of Sauce Labs, a leading provider of continuous testing and software quality solutions to deliver digital confidence to enterprises.

Previously, Dave held key leadership roles at Unity, whereas Chief Revenue Officer, he grew the company's revenue from 160 million to 640 million, which is about a 4x growth and navigated its public market debut in 2020. He then created and oversaw Unity's AI-powered business digital twins. He's also held leadership roles at Paradigm and Autodesk. Enjoy our conversation with Dave Rhodes. Dave, just first off, I wanted to say welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing on Friday? How are you feeling? It's an interesting and uncanny time for you and I to be talking this morning simply because the magnitude of what's happened overnight and how it ties to what we do and how I think

about the world today is super interesting. Absolutely. And the headlines for people listening in the headline that Dave and I were talking about going into this conversation was how bugs affect the bottom line and how engineering leaders can better advocate for or connect these issues to the business. And as you said, Dave, a very interesting day indeed with this massive outage and I think really elevates the stakes or I think

really puts it into focus. What exactly we're going to be talking about and why? You think it probably elevates the stakes, right? It does. I do screenshots and identify examples every day of where places where poor quality shows up in my digital interaction and I just use that to keep reminding myself that quality has a direct impact on developer productivity which has a direct impact ultimately on creating competitive advantage via your digital experiences

and driving business outcomes. Most of the stuff that I capture on a day to day basis is inconvenient. It generally costs somebody some money like an airline if I can't book a ticket immediately. I'm going to go book it somewhere else. It's the inconvenience level varies, but it's not like today. Today the entire airline reservation system windows platform based largely down and there are people stuck all over the world right now because of canceled

flights. That's big. There are people right now that are trying to pay their credit card online, a card that's payment that's due today and are not able to transact their payment right now and they might get a lengthy. They might get a day on their credit. This is a big issue today and it's a much higher stakes than even I normally catch on my own. Absolutely. I think about the second and third or business impact of something like this.

Specifically, I have two friends that were on flights either last night or today. One was going to negotiate a big business deal that was existential for their startup. They have a supplier. They need to negotiate terms or their startup may not work and they couldn't get to that meeting. Then I have another friend who's a wedding photographer and they have a client on Saturday who's doing a big thing. For them, that's probably one of 30 engagements that are able to do the

entire year. It's a pretty material impact on being able to make that work in terms of business on an opportunity. When I think about that type of scale, I think it's interesting. In the large scale of this particular issue, I think it's probably obvious. Most people look at this and be like, oh, yeah, this is a big deal. But there are so many examples of this that maybe are less obvious that have still a huge material impact either on the productivity as you're talking about or in terms

of dollars for the business. Part of how I think about this is I think about it in two buckets. I want to talk about both sides of my mouth for a minute. I'm going to come back and defend CrowdStrike for a minute here in this process. We think about it in two ways, the quality problem and testing strategy. The first way is it's kind of intuitive for anybody out there that's listening right now that is an engineering leader or an individual contributor developer who has been at

some point in time in their career hands on keyboard. Look, nobody likes to test. It's a fact. We like to innovate. We like to ship on time. We don't like to take the time that it takes to go make sure that quality is at the level that it needs to be. That's a bucket. And what we're attempting to do at sauce is work very hard to just make it easier and easier and easier to do that so that

doesn't get in the way of innovation. The bigger idea here that CrowdStrike and the whole industry is dealing with is the idea that digital experiences are becoming more and more part of everyday lives. They're becoming richer. They're becoming more complex and they're becoming cross-platform. So in this particular case, the issue that is surfaced really is limited to the

Windows operating system. But if you extrapolate that out to the fact that there's multiple platforms, there's Windows, there's Android and all kinds of flavors of Android like the Peloton I just talked about. There's the Apple ecosystem. There's the Linux system that runs a lot of industrial string applications in this world. And then you strike that out across the different versions of that operating system. And then you marry that up with network connectivity of varying speed

and quality. And ages of devices, this is a one-year-old device. But if I'm shopping on a high-end e-commerce app and I'm going to about to buy, I don't know, $10,000 watch, which I wouldn't. But if I wanted to, but I was on a five-year-old phone, the experience would be very different. So this second bucket is all around enabling the developer community to deal with the massive

complexity and richness of what's happening in software development and innovation. It's something that I brought with me from the gaming industry where, again, everything is hyper-realistic, running at least 90 frames a second. It's cross-platform, massive amounts of people are interacting in real time. And that's what CrowdStrike's having to deal with today because there's a platform out there that introduced a complexity that they didn't anticipate testing for.

I think it was a great framing of the stakes and complexity. Before we dive in deeper, I want to zoom out a little bit because you're talking about your experience in the gaming community. And I think people can hear the passion that you have for these immersive digital experiences. And so I wanted to go back a little bit into, you know, why digital experiences became such an important focus for you. And some of the things that have shaped your perspective on digital experiences

now and how they're evolving. Well, the real story is when I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an accountant. And I'm so old that I was doing T-accounts and balance sheets with grid paper, a pencil, and a tin key. This is reality. I couldn't afford the school I was going to. And so I transferred to a school that didn't have an accounting program, but they had a computer science program. And I took a class in which I found out that all this could be done on an IBM PC.

You could balance your balance sheet, your devets and credits, like everything was automated. This was in the 80s. That is carried me through my entire career watching software innovation, drive industry transformation. And, you know, so I've seen it as the computer industry has evolved and as applications have driven massive productivity, massive interconnectivity, massive intelligence, business intelligence, and world intelligence, etc. in our world. And it's still what gets me up at,

you know, something around 5 a.m. every morning. Now, rewinding the clock about eight years now, I realized that there was a set of technologies that were powering the gaming industry that in fact, today are have found their ways into all kinds of other industries outside gaming. And there, everybody's transformational is that story about my accounting experience. And so I knew then, nine years ago, eight years ago, that what we jokingly call the metaverse, you know, was being

built one Lego brick at a time. And it continues to be built that entire time I saw one week at a time, a new application here, another application there. And businesses, you know, these days are racing like crazy to strike the balance between manage their investment and innovation, but differentiating themselves in driving business outcome through these digital experiences. As a US company, hiring remote engineers can be time consuming, expensive, and frustrating.

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Absolutely. When you're talking about brick by brick, like I going back to our earlier conversation, we were talking about like Peloton and Zwift and like these immersive digital experiences that provide connectivity. They almost seem like those are primaries to a more evolved sort of metaverse, I guess, to use that word, metaverse oriented experience, where those may become more and more indistinguishable from the real thing or more immersive and more and

more connected to other people. As if you're doing Peloton and you're in the room as if you are with other people or you're doing Zwift as if you are racing on the Tour de France with other people, I think that's really inspiring to think about. Well, and it has so much potential to do good for the world. It has so much potential to

drive bad for the world. One of the things that we want to do again, just in our little piece of the puzzle, our puzzle piece, is make it so that testing and ultimately poor quality or a quality strategy is something that doesn't get in the way from either the innovation or making the decisions on what to put in digital experiences to make them compelling. I had a Patrick, I want

to come back to your question real quick because I didn't fully answer it. I think one of the things that has happened to us that occurred during this eight year period that I described a minute ago was we hit COVID and as we were coming into COVID, there were some other innovation that was already happening. Cloud computing was becoming cost effective and then you take that a step further, GPU-based cloud computing was starting to become mature enough. It wasn't cost effective yet,

but fast forward to today, it is. So cloud computing has been a big driver that accelerated software innovation, high speed, bidirectional connectivity, getting insanely fast gigabit bandwidth, even further across the globe and again across a large number of different types of devices.

And then, you know, kind of similar to the metaverse hype cycle that we were in for a short period of time there, I wouldn't call this a hype cycle at all, but the real practical application of AI, specifically large language models and machine learning, accelerating all kinds of different innovation. Those three things coming together combined with the fact that you and I were, this was our everyday deal, this is how we ran our businesses. You know, I supported taking a

company public from literally this chair. We did our entire road show virtually. We rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange virtually without having seen each other for months and months. And so all that kind of woke up the world to what is possible, those four things in terms of digital software innovation and it created this craving and this confidence to invest even more to create competitive advantage. And so the cycle is just, but quality is important.

Quality is important. This element of massive richness and like the emergence of more and more complex cross-platform, massive interaction, hyper realistic experiences. And you were talking about like within like the developer communities that are responsible for delivering these and

ensuring quality and reliability for these. We just talked about a massive example of what happens when there can be an incident or a major issue when there is not sort of a, or I don't want to make a lot of assumptions, but like when maybe the testing strategy does not go as planned or the result that people want doesn't go as planned. If you could share a couple other examples that maybe are not the category of like major outage like what we're seeing today and are more ones that are

directly ones that developers are dealing with that then affect their businesses bottom line. Like if we're telling the story of like stories and examples of how digital experiences can really drive and impact the businesses bottom line. And then I want to dive into how can we empower engineering leaders or those developers to advocate for those types of conversations that advocate for testing strategy or advocate for more focus in time and resources on like quality related issues.

Gosh, what a rich subject. You know, I think a lot of one of our major industries that we spend a

lot of time in is banking. And I won't name names today about particular banks, but the banking industry, particularly the part of the industry that's focused on consumers, getting consumer deposits into the bank, writing underwriting a loan for a new home or a new car, you know, getting access to a consumer in a way where you could offer additional financial products like access to the equity markets, etc. And you know, the banking industry is really challenged because

they want to innovate. You know, consumers are fickle. They expect great service. And just the same way I interface with Netflix and I can get instant gratification. I want it in my banking experience as well. So they're faced with, you know, this huge innovation challenge and opportunity. At the same time, they're highly regulated. And if you have those two things coming together, it becomes yet even harder to make sure that you're innovating at the speed of people that may

not be in a regulated industry. But being so hyper careful because most governments out of around the world, when they find a bank out of compliance, they become punitive very quickly. And an example might be accessibility. You know, banking apps, although they are visual and you interact with them on your phone, usually with your eyes and your thumbs, banking apps must be

accessible to people with hand physical handicaps just because you roll out an app. And I can see it doesn't mean that they don't need to support some form of voice to text capability, both directions. It must run on devices that in fact are designed for handicapped people to access that kind of information. And so the testing strategies that the banking industry has to put in place while still keeping up with innovation is just insanely hard. And there's only one way to do it. And that's

through automation. And that's what we do. Another example that I think about is the retail industry. You know, I could give you an example at the very high end. Again, I talked about watches in jewelry a few minutes ago. I could give you another example where you've got a big box retailer who has an ony channel strategy. They want to transact with you online. They want to make sure that when you're in store, they have a way to interact with you in some way that's personalized,

unique to you. And they want opportunities across promote, again, in a very hyper personalized way, and show up in other places that I'm at, like my banking app as an example. And so being able to deal with that level of complexity and the disparate systems that power that experience all at the same time, making sure that once I put something in the shopping cart that I can transact at speed, you know, it's a hard problem to solve. And there's only one way to test for it. And that's through

LARS scale automation. Another thing you mentioned is around like quality and how that has a direct impact on developer velocity. And so I was wondering maybe if you had a story or example tied specifically to that challenge or that particular outcome? I deal with it in my own business every day. You know, one of the things that we try and do is stay ahead of the Apple ecosystem relative to their

iOS releases and relative to the changes that they make in their physical hardware. And one of the transitions that's been going on for a couple of years now has been their transition from Intel based silicon to ARM based silicon. And all the unlock that that brings to us as consumers. And then you take that a step further and you look at this release that's out in beta right now and that will be, you know, on our phones and, you know, all our Apple based experiences in the

next few months. And that's iOS 18. Massive investment in AI and the personalization that AI brings to how we interact with our with the Apple platform. And so my unique situation is if I'm out there in the world with literally the same team, my same engineering and product team that's working on supporting iOS 16, iOS 17 on, you know, multiple hardware platforms. And I've got regressions bugs that somehow I haven't surfaced. Sauce hasn't surfaced even as a quality company, which it does

happen occasionally. That takes away from my ability to have support for iOS 18 when it ships NGA on the very first day. And it's something as a CEO I care greatly about. It's taking a step further. Our customers want to have working content on the day that iOS 18 becomes a GA ready. So a bank, a retailer, a B2C or B2B software company can't wait two, three, four weeks to have their app support iOS 18. They need it on the day of shipment. And back to banks for a minute. I have one

customer that likes to release a feature within 24 hours. They like to release it out in production. 24 hours from completion. And if you think about the magnitude of getting your code done, submitting the pull request, running the tests to make sure that all the corner cases have been covered so that you can ship it tomorrow when the iOS 18 releases is out. So your banking Apple work and there's

no disruption. It's massive problem. I think maybe we could use this as a great launch point into empowering engineering leaders to talk about connecting quality and bugs to the business bottom line and how to empower them to have that conversation for more investment and that this is an issue versus like maybe spending more time on feature work moving faster or maybe how to combine them both.

So I guess maybe we could use this this iOS example or we can pick a different one. But the major question I'm hoping we can answer is how to help people connect their issues with quality and bugs

to the business bottom line. And so I'm wondering if you have any favorite examples like maybe from your internal conversations or ones you've seen with other companies about how they're able to directly reference here's a quality issue or a bug issue that we're facing and here is how this impacts our business and what that conversation looks like to be able then to advocate to address that and prioritize that over maybe other other actions going on. Yeah. First let me make a general statement.

And that is that in some companies particularly the ones that we deal with because we deal with the largest enterprises in the world, you know the Fortune 100 those companies have made massive investments in technology as a way to create competitive advantage and drive business outcomes.

And we're just a very small piece of it. And so when we go in there a lot of our customers if you find the right person the SPP of engineering enablement or engineering productivity sometimes the head of DevOps, always the CTO sometimes heads of P&Ls in digital centric businesses they understand the magnitude of what poor quality can do to their developer velocity and their their ability to

drive great innovation. And so sometimes the discussion is generally very easy but other times if you're a dentist I suppose a patient will come in and they have poor oral hygiene and the dentist will say well you really need to floss that would help a lot. The patient would probably say yeah but I don't have time and gosh you know I just I'm so busy and I just and I don't like it and it

hurts and I just I'm not and next thing you know that patient's teeth are falling out. So you know it's it's something that again sometimes gets in the way from what people really want to do but if you don't stay on it it catches up with you and ultimately you know it particularly

back to the business world you have a real issue on your hands. Now you want a real example let me give you a real example there's a gaming company who historically has built communities of game players who are now generating new content to go into the game and their game players exist on all different levels if you will of sophistication and age. So I'm a player on that particular platform there are you know young kids who are in probably middle school who are creating content

on the platform. There are people that I know are older than me believe it or not that are also on the platform. This particular S. B. P. knows that more and more of their players are moving from traditional PC based and console based gameplay to mobile based gameplay and again you know

two-year-old phone or one-year-old phone. People are playing games on that platform on iPhone and Android based devices that are at least 10 years old I'm not kidding you and this particular game reasonably hyper realistic but massive amounts of players playing concurrently all around the world and this particular company has a challenge in making sure that when they launch a new capability in there what's called their game engine then in fact it's performing

on this wide array of devices. They could choose to literally physically procure a bunch of different devices and then run those devices across a bunch of different operating system platforms

and do it all themselves in a physical data center. Fortunately for that firm we met up and they understand that through sauce we have data centers all over the world that have a massive array of permutations and combinations of physical devices set next to literally cellular repeaters such that we can basically replicate on demand testing across this broad platform in real time so that they can start to do production monitoring and really understand how a new feature is

going to impact gameplay. The stakes in the scale of that example are really powerful and so speaking to that SVP engineering so like let's say they're right before they get the go ahead for the investment from maybe their CEO. For them in mind like what is the benefit argument that they need to make sure that they have when we need to make sure that our launch is performing across all of these devices and operating systems like how do they how do they communicate like the business

impact when it comes to usage for something like that. Well in the game industry it's really easy particularly in this particular sub segment which is called the free to play part of the industry where this particular publisher only makes money when a game player buys a sword or buys a new

you know a car or buys some get out of jail free points and so if you take a step back the goal for this particular publisher is to keep players in the game that's all that they you know really aspire to do is play is make sure the players are spending all their time in their game versus somebody

else's game. If they do that they are more and more likely to purchase tokens or other things that enabled this particular publisher to monetize their business and you know there are simple calculations you can do where if you slice off some sub segment of your your player base then in fact can't play on their devices that particular day because your feature is not performant your live ops team looks

at and says okay we we just lost 50 million dollars in the last two hours you know we can't let this happen again and so this particular engineering VP has the foresight of saying I can't build this physical form of devices in a timely manner and then keep it up in a cost effective way. It's not my core comprasy I'm a publisher I'm a I'm a game publisher game studio game publisher I'm not a testing company and so I'm going to pay somebody else who's world classed that to do that really well.

That's a great example to tell that out I want to look at a couple other sort of like business scenarios for like maybe different elements that different engineering orgs are like optimizing for or like problems that they're trying to solve so maybe I think another one that I think you have

some good examples for this with customer turn and because I think at some point like the engineering org is like we have to address like the top okay R which is turn and so I was wondering if you had like a story that comes to mind of customer turn in this example and then how you might advise or guide an SVP of engineering when they're going to approach the investment to make an investment to

address quality issues that are affecting customer turn how how they might do that. The first thing that comes to mind is less about customer turn and more about I think about the retail industry for example and particularly large scale retailers that have a digital e-commerce experience that is operating on massive scale globally so think about companies from Arkansas that might be running

running an e-commerce site along their their big box retail business. You know they're literally split seconds count if I'm a customer who found some who found a particular thing that I wanted. I'm here for my motorcycle. I found it I put it in the shopping cart I'm ready to click the buy button but for some reason the credit card processing system because there's a lot of load on the system won't let me buy okay I'll go off and do my thing for two minutes I'll come back and try again

the second time I try if I can't buy it I'm done you just left the mirror in the shopping cart $17 and I went somewhere else this is a real story not I'm telling you a story of somebody who a customer who told me this story if you take that $17 and you multiply it by a million and a half units in a one week period the number adds up very quickly and so this is an example where we know these experiences a take place we know that our customers work very hard to make sure that

the shopping experience particularly the transaction experience is both fast and accurate number one rule and retail even in a retail store is never let somebody who's ready to buy wait in line to give you money that's like a big rule in retail it exists online and so you know that particular

engineering leader said okay we're going to do something called synthetic monitoring where we in effect simulate at peak times on you know a a sauce testing infrastructure what kind of loads we should expect when we go into black Friday and we're going to make sure that we have a

efficient compute capacity that the code that we've written to transact with you know multiple financial systems is running effectively and it is you know redundant in nature and any outages that we might expect to have because of these cross-platform and and highly complex transactions

we're identifying that well in advance as if it were black Friday the peak time and the way you talk about scaling out those transactions I love I love the retail rule as a way to kind of think about anything is like never wait never let people wait in line that kind of scales really well

I think into the world to be commerce or even like waiting for a webpage to load is like the longer we're waiting for people to load than the easier it is for people to go off to do something else that lets you just go somewhere else this is taking too long let's go somewhere else

you know the other the other thing that that I think of and again I'm struggling to think of a really good like recent customer churn example here and you know probably come to me when we finish this conversation but one of the things that I think about is you know one one of the things

that our customers routinely do is they think about the usability of their digital experiences what we do is end in functional testing part of which includes how usable a customer system is and you know again how it impacts how quickly a customer will select something how they will shop

and how they will choose to buy and I think about the fact that even today in this 2D mostly flat linear environment visual testing is something that's very important and really monitoring how users are interacting with your site and then being able to automate that in a way where ultimately

again as you introduce new rich capability you haven't moved a key part of that that consumer experience off to a different place where all the sudden they get lost or they can't pay their bill or whatever there's a lot of that that you know usability in general that's really important

and oftentimes we find ourselves with product managers or we find ourselves with you know the heads of e-commerce or the heads of digital delivery because they're thinking a lot more about the design and the user experience that comes through absolutely I wanted to transition to talk about the

recent report that you released every experience counts and I was wondering if there were maybe a couple important takeaways or implications that you uncovered in that report for engineering leaders or heads of engineering that are listening I have a couple notes of things that stood out to me

but I wanted to get a sense for you like when you think about that report what would be some interesting takeaways to share with the folks listening well they we were to you know just to build on what I just said three strikes in your out yeah a consumer will only put up with a whether it's

a short term disruption or you know a slow refresh or inability to connect and get their job done they'll only put up with it twice the third time it happens they're done they're going somewhere else you know let's stay on on resale any commerce for a minute access to products you know that what

what the internet has done is effectively lower the barrier for sellers anybody you can buy anything from anybody mostly anywhere in the world and so less so in banking where you'd actually have to take your money and move it etc consumers are fickle and you've only got basically three chances

to do it right and if you don't you're gonna lose that transaction you're gonna lose that sale customers are gonna go somewhere else that's the most important thing to me I think that comes out of that entire report I was gonna say that the one quote I wanted to share whoever wrote the copy

for the final page of like we fear bugs might break this one precious internet like I have to commend them because it's incredible and when they say like when bugs hacks and inconsistent experiences are this common 42% of the time and this expensive the three strikes you're out and

people churn there are multi-million dollar revenue sucker punch I was like I love that I love that whole line I like capturing just the pure stakes of why this issue is so important and why folks need to have a testing strategy as a part of their core operating I mean Patrick it's you

know back to some of your comments earlier part of what we're trying to do is enable the engineering leaders who listen to you for example not only to take it seriously some take it very seriously but they're caught in this conundrum around I can't afford to invest in quality because I got

to invest in all this innovation and the fact is if you get quality right the cost associated with doing it right the first time is much much much lower than having to go back and fix a regression even in you know in the term in terms of the software development life cycle the the impact on

developer productivity you know there's a direct impact there and then again this knock-on effect and then what you brought out earlier this second order effect on a company in its reputation when ultimately a consumer can't get done what they need to get done you know fly across the country

to go close a deal it's really impactful so what we're trying to do is create urgency create awareness and you know create some form of I don't want to call it anxiety but appreciation for the fact the quality matters and quality of texture velocity quality effects your ability to ship

differentiated experiences the drive business outcomes and again facts of this morning we couldn't ask for you know I feel bad for everybody impacted for sure but you couldn't ask for a better proof point absolutely I want to ask one question about about testing strategy and then and then I

want to move into an important leadership perspective that you have around reverse engineering the impossible for testing strategy for folks listening in that maybe are different stages of maturity in terms of the testing strategy they have in place so maybe they're in the early stages

or it's more informal do you have any advice or recommendations on maybe where to start to help them rethink or evolve their testing strategy to the next level so that they can address all of these opportunity that we've been talking about today yeah you know it's like it's like anything

that you do when you think you think about a technology investment that you make I would start with the end in mind and really get clear on the business and or operational outcomes that you're really trying to drive and then secondly use data as is and to be data on what you expect a testing

strategy to bring to those objectives and you know the change in nature since so you know back to the comment I made earlier most development teams have a regression target most development teams have a time to production target those are underlying metrics that you know you should be is a

development team measuring today and being able to an automated fashion report out on and you probably in conjunction with your finance professional can model out if I just improve each of these metrics by 10% what would it actually mean in terms of FTEs or lines of code written or ultimately

the ability to reduce the cycle time of shipping new features so it's just very fundamental stuff that most engineering leaders probably on this call are are familiar with and then you know secondly I would tie it back to then okay what is my digital strategy I'd get connected with my business counterparts and make sure that I understand is it breadth of device breadth of end point platforms that were really wanting to deliver this experience on is it the level of sophistication

of the actual experience itself is it compliance and risk mitigation again back to regulated industries and what do we really need to prioritize relative relative to making sure that the transactions are in

fact safe they're accurate they're timely etc and really start to connect your your your development flow and these metrics back to the needs of the business because ultimately you're creating a digital product if you're a product first company or your world class product strategy your building

products that in fact drive the core needs of your overall business and so you know as engineering leaders you need to be really well connected with ultimately how your text being used to drive the big number if you will absolutely I think this is a great reverse engineer of outcomes back into

the business your strategy how your team operate thinking outside of the engineering organization you know I know one of the perspectives that you found impactful as a leader is to think about the possible and reverse engineer it and so I was curious if we could dive into a little bit about

what does this mean to you and what has this looked like in practice what have been some of the examples of you know imagining or observing some things that seem impossible and then reverse engineering it well I you know I again I take my inspiration from the real world and the true

innovators out there that have created things that I you know I saw on TV as cartoons as a kid and would have never ever thought were you know physically or practically possible and in fact here they are embedded in our world you know I think about the or a ring that I have on my finger and the fact

that it it tells me not only how good my sleep is but it tells me you know how to keep my eating habits under control and what happens when I have alcohol you know how that you know it tells me how to live a life when I'm awake that actually you know is an improving quality of life and so

I have this philosophy around nothing is impossible and I've seen it have an over and over and over again not just in innovation but I've seen people accomplish things that they didn't even think possible just because they started by imagining the end game imagining what if we could do this and then

starting to build like a work back where you begin to say well where are we right now and how far are we from that point and what would have to be true for that to happen I think about in our particular industry our industry is a forty three billion dollar industry but the truth in advertising

is thirty seven billion dollars of that come from manual testing life testing people using a mouse to literally traverse an e-commerce site or play games or literally flip page by page through a manual and step through you know an industrial application that runs a man manufacturing plant

etc. What if you could create machine learning based robots in software to in effect replicate how humans test and get that to a certain level of test coverage and then be able to then automate the balance of that and that's something that's that's going on today we're doing some of that some of our industry peers are doing that and what that does is really begin to lower the time barrier associated with driving up levels of quality and you know you you put it out to team you say

it's thirty seven billion dollars we need to go get it it's literally millions of people running manual tests in a in a sweatshop every day we need to go free them up to do more meaningful you know thought provoking work how do we do that well that's impossible well let's look at peer examples let's

look at where that's happening well that's happening in the game industry today in the game industry oftentimes I'm not playing against Patrick I'm actually playing against a robot if you will you know you know a massive role playing game is an example so I don't know did that answer your question

absolutely absolutely well I was thinking because the the following question would be you know how to export this mindset into other people that you work with on your team and and the three questions that I sort of think about as you're sharing this example is like is the what if question to first imagine the state of the world and the what would need to be true and to walk through that and then inevitably if somebody says well this is impossible then I love the question to look for other places

of inspiration or other converging tech innovations you know where else is this happening where else is this dynamic already true and how can we apply that into our particular case yeah you know hey as I I think about that I got two two things to say about this first of all in our industry again

we're squarely in software development and developer operations and that's what we do but I would say it's you know it's possible more more often than not quality is is not a life or death thing with most of our customers not all but most go to an oil rig I was in the oil business for

a few years go physically to an oil rig and tell me the quality doesn't matter people die people die when quality is not adhered to look at the airline industry you know as much as bashing as Boeing has taken you know air travel is so much safer now than ever in part because of deep

quality practices that both manufacturers and the service service providers the the airlines themselves have put into place and so oftentimes when we're having a conversation with a customer around why they can't afford to invest you know more time in testing and why they don't think

you know with quality up front we oftentimes take our inspiration from some of these other industries where it's life or death it's literally life or death so that's one thing that I think about the other thing Patrick is is back to how do you get people to think about the impossible and

to take on that challenge you make it part of your culture you make it part of your cultural norms you know at the last company I was at our catchphrase in our values were great ideas come from everywhere and we walked and talked about in that anybody and everybody it wasn't even as much expected as

people felt an obligation if they felt like they had an innovative way to solve a problem or go after an opportunity wherever they were in the company they were almost they felt obligated to surface that idea and develop it into into a point where either got traction and you went on with

it or we went through it exhaustively enough to go maybe not right now but you know encourage that kind of thinking and so I think of from my boat what like my position in the boat today is the as a CEO in this company which is relatively small but you know being a leader at very large

companies you got to build it into your culture because if one guy thinks it's the impossible and it's trying to achieve it you're much less effective than when hundreds of people think like that Dave we've got some rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in okay okay let's do it

first question what are you reading or listening to right now uh I'm reading uh I just started reading a book believe it or not by Arnold Schwarzenegger I'm more enamored at the title which is why I bought the book and it's called Be Useful what's the tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you it's called the goal post methodology goal is what you're trying to achieve qualitatively P stands for profile what's the current state what you know evaluate both qualitatively and quantitatively

what's going on in your business or situation oh is objective what is the quantitative measure that tells me I've reached my goal S stands for strategies only have three at most what are the key things that you're going to go off and do to achieve the goal which is measured by the objectives

and finally tactics again usually three to four max uh for each strategy tactically who is going to do what and when are they going to do it uh these tactics that the drive the strategy goal post thinking it's just an easy way it's one of many formats that all kinds of business leaders can

can use it's my way of trying to organize a framework for execution and uh strategy and and help people you know come to align that on on the job at hand two more quick questions a trend that you're seeing or following that's been interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet you shared

ones the moment nine years ago with the gaming industry converging with a lot of other different elements is there anything right now that you're observing that you think is interesting I haven't seen it hit yet I'm I keep like every phone call I make to a call center I'm expecting my automated

uh experience to get so much better so much quicker because you know again large language models and and bots should be really driving so much of a better experience I haven't really seen it yet but I'm dying for that to be uh that to be true I am an introvert it's not that I don't like people

I don't want to talk to anybody and I don't want to talk to a robot that keeps asking me to press one or three choices what I need is number four which is not on there so let me just talk to you so that that's a trend I'm following I'm you know deeply interested in when we get to when we get to

that last question Dave is there a quote or a mantra you live by or a quote that's been resonating with you right now the first one that comes to mind is one that served me well for so many years and it's uh from Stephen Covey seek first to understand uh then be understood and it's just

you know so many of the quotes that I think of that are memorable you know I probably learned them through learning how to become a business leader but what I would say is many of these things I've applied to my personal life and I want to live with purpose and um that's one you know Stephen Covey

lived with purpose he made a massive impact on so many people in this world both personally and professionally see first to understand then be understood a powerful way to close Dave I just want to say thank you so much you know as we began like a world where digital experiences are

increasing in complexity sophistication you helped illustrate the stakes and some of the converging like exciting elements but like how hard this really is to get that right in this in this expanded world and how to advocate for a quality strategy or how to advocate for quality to drive this this

emerging world so thank you so much for for sharing everything with us my pleasure Patrick good to see you again if you like this episode make sure you subscribe to our new podcast series engineering founders the leap from engineering leader to founder can be terrifying filled with unknowns and

requires a completely different skill set we're going to be diving into the stories the pivotal moments and critical insights from former engineering leaders turned founders that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company check it out you can also find the link for engineering founders in our show notes thanks for listening to the engineering leadership podcast