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list of curated candidates that meet your specific hiring requirements. You interview 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. The biggest value for us is to move purposely and slowly and hear what is going on before we make decisions. The second was, what is the biggest problem that we are coming into
soft? Why were each of us hired? It came down to and this was difficult for a couple of the department ads was, what's the biggest problem isn't in your area? I'm sorry. Yes, let's put together a plan of how do we improve and what do we focus on in your group. But quite frankly, the focus is going to be in this area. That was difficult for people to accept. 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. In this episode, Jamie Tishart, CTO at Better Cloud joins us to discuss how to identify inefficiencies within your engineering org and strategies for creating more efficient
teams. We talk about strategies for identifying and removing barriers that may be getting in the way of your engineering teams' success, making and communicating meaningful decisions throughout your organization, Jamie's experience navigating the impact of multiple senior hires at once. We're talking about multiple executives all coming on board at the same time and identifying inefficiencies within your cross-functional relationships. Let me introduce you to Jamie.
As the CTO at Better Cloud, Jamie's responsible for the broader technology strategy of the business, as well as the day-to-day leadership of development, quality, and architecture teams for the Better Cloud product suite, he served as GM and VP of software engineering of the Marketing and Growth Business Unit at Twilio and was VP of Technical Operations at Sengrid. Prior to that, he served as CTO at McAfee. Enjoy this conversation with Jamie Tishart.
A big welcome, Jamie. Thanks for joining us on the show. How are you doing? What's going on? It's a Tuesday. Tuesday, stormy weather in Denver. I'm doing good. I think the piece for me that's really interesting right now is what's going on in the tech world that we're all dealing with. Uncertain market conditions, and it's been a long time since we've had this much turmoil in the tech space where people are being negatively impacted by business conditions and so
much talent is being available. I am blessed with, you know, I still have a job and I'm still able to pay my bills and stuff and also in the thinking about how the world is evolving with all the people we interact with every day and how challenging it is. So on one hand, I'm really good. On the other hand, it's I'm hopeful that we can all get through this period and see some more positive in the tech space, right? It's such an up and down crazy
thing. It's interesting how things are evolving this year. That's for sure. Most, most certainly, and to draw thread over a theme the last couple months that we've seen within our community is that, you know, from the very get go with, you know, a lot of what's been going on in the tech industry is that there's been a big drive around
efficiency. And I was reading it votes interesting. I was reading a tweet today like connecting all the dots is like three months ago everyone's like, you need to make your engineering work more efficient. Like that's the mandate. And now we're starting to see sort of the impact of some of those shifts in the narrative, I'll say. So like one tweet I was reading
today was like teams are now being rewarded for doing more with less. So we've gotten past sort of the point from making the shift, but now the incentive structures are starting to catch up. This is one of those topics that people are sort of grasping for answers amidst the uncertainty in the shifts. You've seen a lot, you've done a lot, you've learned a lot around these challenges around shifts and efficiency. So we'll just get your take
Jamie. How are you thinking about efficiency in this drive right now? And what are some of the things that you're doing to both create more efficient organizations, but also to get the most out of people in your teams? Yeah, I think it's really challenging. It's funny as you're saying that I'm like, can I say, I don't know, I don't have the answers anymore. But the reality is like we're all in this together and thinking through different ways. And how do you, how do you get more
done? I truly believe that most organizations are quite inefficient in how we approach things. There's a lot of burden placed on things. There's a lot of distraction happening personally and professionally for everyone. And so some of the ways I look at it is just having open forums about what's working and not working and being really open to feedback to, I said it said it earlier today and us talking about efficiency at better class.
We need to look at things like, can we refine something to make it better, to give people more chance to succeed and move faster? Can we remove something that's getting in their way? Or should we reduce something? Kind of the three hours reduce, remove and remediate and look at everything we do to see if there's opportunity there. And so, you know, unfortunately,
or fortunately, I have a, you know, a long background in Agilent Scrum and Lean. So I think very heavily in the whole workflow and the flow of what's happening and really what's getting in the way and listening to people. I've got no means how it all worked out. If
you ask my team, they'd probably say I put a lot of inefficiencies on them. So I also have to look at myself and go, how much efficiency am I creating or inefficiency am I creating and creating an environment where everybody can challenge how we're doing it and see ways to improve. So no silver bullets, but just really thoughtful, focused, let's be efficient as our core and look for opportunities to impact that in a positive way.
Two follow-up threads I wanted to go down here. One of them were there any surprising areas like in the realm of refine, remove, reduce? Were there any surprising areas that you identified at Better Cloud that you wouldn't have expected in sort of this assessment? You know, I think as an executive leader, the things that you think are working really well are often the things that are working to work when you look at our individual contributors.
So we actually just revamped our entire Agil process. We didn't have really formalized planning and we weren't really letting the individuals be part of the plan to figure that out. And so that was something that I put in pretty quickly. It was like, hey, the people doing the work should do the planning of the work and be the ones who are committed to doing it and figure out all the steps. As we saw, as I got feedback from the teams,
they're like, yeah, this is great. But do we really need everybody in the team to do this planning stuff? Or can we have a few of the more senior people? Or, you know, can we just pick and choose? So I always found it interesting of when you're putting in Agil process or when you're looking at how do you formalize an operating system for your organization, don't forget that what you think is great may not be great and get the feedback
of the reality of how it's being implemented. And quite frankly, I'd hear from my team of like, oh, I thought we were doing it this way. And it was totally tangent to how we were doing it. And it became my heavyweight overhead process rather than a lean, efficient thing that was driving an outcome that we are looking for. And something that just came up a couple of weeks ago is we're looking at some inefficiencies and opportunity was we're
doing design meetings in the spirit of definition of ready and getting done. But those meetings in some cases were taking like 20 hours of time with 20 people. And we're like, huh, that might not be the most efficient way for us to approach this. What is going on with that? And so, you know, we started retroing it and seeing it's like, ah, I see, we're trying to get really, really predictable rather than really fast. We're trying to really
understand everything, the full scope of everything or ever. And so we were able to take a look at and go, oh, team speed back is this might not be the best use of our time. Let's see how we are showing up with this and guiding and making sure we understand why. So I am constantly surprised Patrick on the things I think that are going to be efficient and how they really end up being inefficient across the organization. It's
good to constantly inspect and adapt. That example is so great. That design meeting that's go open to give so much time back is such a high leverage, just assessment activity. So in this like, because for me, I hear the involve individuals and the planning of the work and the defining of the work. And my initial gut reaction is like, oh, my gosh, that's
a lot more people that sounds more complicated. Sounds like it might take more time. How do you balance ensuring that having more people involved doesn't take more time and actually achieve the outcome of efficiency? Yeah, it's a great follow up and something I'm always worried about because, you know, we've all been part of exercises meetings, projects wherever that you have formal and you're just there listening so you can support or you
just don't want to be not in the loop. So what we really do on a lot of this is tell teams to self select. Like, if you do not need to be there and if you are comfortable, then don't be there. The other is we use some rapid decision making processes so we can say like, who is the accountable parties? Who is responsible for making the decision? Not saying that always works great for us, but it's at least a model to clearly identify
who is accountable for whatever aspects of the project or the decision is. And then I think the thing that we can always do better and we are working on is let the teams have the ownership of how to deliver it and how to plan it and then decide who is most important
to it. I know my team's right now would say we could do with more enablement and power man, but that to me is the thing where he really see the efficiency come is when the teams are enabled and empowered, have the guidelines they're working with structurally and organizationally and then let them run and they will figure out how not to waste people's time. I think the beautiful thing about running engineering is we all want to not waste time, right?
Like we are somewhat lazy and in perspective, but also very much like let's optimize this, right? Let's automate it. Let's write code to solve it. Let's not have 20 people sitting around with let's get our hands on keyboards. So I love that aspect of what I get to focus on every day. The guidelines practice that you mentioned are there specific guidelines that you found to be highest leverage or highest impact on your teams like in that quest to
provide more empowerment or enablement for a team. Are there any kind of particular structures that have been most helpful? Yeah, my Joe program managers would probably give me a little trouble with this. So that's all right. Often you talk about self organizing teams, right? I am not a big believer in self organizing teams because quite frankly organizations themselves don't allow for it. You will not allow any team to go and necessarily pick your reporting
time frame, right? That's either by the board or your customer base or your financial reporting teams often like, oh, I just want to work within one month long sprints and I'll report back every three months or six months or whatever. It's like, well, we have expectations where we have to deliver a progress report every month or whatever. So the guidelines that I try and give the teams are, here is what the business needs from us. Here is the
metrics. Here is the timelines within that construct. I always use the like not every company is going to let you as an engineering team select the database. Some of it you will. Sometimes you won't. There's business relationship. There's cost controls. Like there's lots of things that factor into empowerment and enablement and in the self organizing. The one that probably has the most angst to it is your tracking system, right? Your
agile tracking system. I think quite frankly, most teams would not choose to use any specific tool. They'd be just like whatever we're going to use, whatever we want. But as consistency from an organization, you want some centralized reporting and understanding of progress across multiple teams, there is a set of core things that we need organizationally to help the business. And you all need to fit into that. And beneath that, you have a lot of freedom
to exercise. So I get a bit of a kick out of it. I've done agile coaching for a long time. And so the scrum master and me is cringing as I say these. And the executive me is like, of course, there's guidelines that we need as a business to follow. Right? So that's kind of the way I look at it. The best of everything is you have clear reasons why you're doing stuff and the teams understand that. And then they get to approach those and solve
them together. Right? The other follow-up question I wanted to get into was you'd mentioned recognizing where you may be introducing inefficiency or opportunities for you to become more efficient. I was wondering if you had like a self-assessment process or how you go about assessing like those areas of where you might be introducing the inefficiency or you might become the bottleneck
within the organization. Yeah. A little bit of unfortunate self-realization that every level that you approach in a new role in an organization has both positive and negative. Right? I realize that is CTO coming into a planning meeting can just wrap that planning meeting just by me being there. Just potentially for having people adjust their behavior or their openness or their questions. So a lot of times I will ask the teams how they feel
about my interaction and door input into something. I often look at like is this a great learning opportunity for individuals or teams? And if so, do I let that happen? Is it a potentially kind of bad choice and negative to the customer base or to the company and I need to give a guidance so we don't go down that path. So the terminology of one way doors versus two way doors, right? Like is this a decision that if we make it's going to set us down to
path that nobody's going to enjoy in the future? You know, we just had a recent incident where the team was working really hard in long hours and you know, I had some ideas on there and I filtered them through somebody else so that I wasn't interrupting the team or getting them nervous or stressed out. But I was there watching and making sure that they had the support they needed and like, hey, are we taking some breaks and are we switching
out people who are working hard and over time? And that comes to a lot down the psychological safety. And so, you know, and I talked about it before of, you know, I've been studying a lot on neuroleadership and thinking how people respond to any type of input or interaction and how I can be triggering different things with people just by showing up. And so I try and preface that with some thought and also giving everyone the first thing I do with
anybody we hire is I get in and try and know them personally. So my intro meeting with every engineer that joins the company is about how did you end up at Better Cloud? What do you love to do? Tell me a little bit about your family and your hobbies and your interests and tell me which video games or board games or books you're reading. Like I don't talk about the business other than saying, look, there's lots of problems here. Don't waste
you and your new perspective in asking questions so we can get better. Because quite frankly, within 90 to 100 days, we get used to all the stuff in the companies we join and it becomes comforting almost the things that you're just like when you start, you're like, why would we do this? And so I like to give people the support and guidance to question me and everything we're doing so we can get better with the understanding that most people won't
take you up on that because of hierarchy. It's quite interesting as I've grown and learned in my career. Just my title and my level in a company can drastically change how people are thinking and or behaving. And so I'm very, very purposeful of how I approach anything with any of my levels and teams in my group. There's such a counterintuitive perspective.
I'm in a handful of executive or head of engineering peer groups and you know, if some folks have changed companies and gone in different, lead different organizations and usually the sentiment is you go in, go on a listening tour, get a lay of the land and here what you're talking about is inviting people to share their perspective right away and setting that expectation. I think that's really interesting. I think what's cool about that is how you invite people
into that. And instead of where I think issues may come in is when people are sort of prescribing their experience onto something without an invitation and that seems like where the conflict comes in. Yeah. And it's funny in that regard because I will tell them exactly what I said. Like, I am offering this to you. There is not one thing you cannot contact me about, ask me about criticize, give feedback on whatever. Like I'm here and that doesn't mean I don't
have human emotions, things that are sometimes hard to hear. But it's always interesting to see the people who take that to heart. And you know, I just had somebody last week who started and gave them that and within an hour and a half, the new person was asking me a question about something and then we started talking about books where we were reading and interesting stuff like that. But I go ahead and tell them, I'm like, I am giving you
this permission, this support. Like, do it. Please, this is what I need and what I want. And I know that 95% of people will not do that, right? There's just the whole triggering your mentality and your risk factors. And like, am I really going to tell the head of the engineering group that they're doing a poor job? I don't know if that's a great solution
or a great idea, right? I can live with them doing a poor job. But I look at it as my role in the organization and my role for the people is to make sure they are set up to do great work efficiently as possible and successfully as possible so that our business and our customers are getting what they need. So to me, I see myself as the multiplier and I don't have the
depth of knowledge that everybody has anywhere. I'm working at different altitude. I saw one of your intro questions was, tell me about when you start coding and I'm like, oh, I don't remember the last time I wrote any code. But it's interesting that people as they see different levels think like, oh, you know all the stuff or opposite, you don't know anything. And it's really somewhere in between, right? I have good depth in some areas and
I just kind of know high level stuff. And so I need people who feel trusted and can just tell me what's going on because so much of it is potentially risky for people to say that in their status and in their protection of their own psychological safety. So it's an interesting evolution that I've had as a leader over the last five or six years.
As you're sharing all of the things that have to happen for these these ideas that come up and you said 95% of people don't necessarily share this and the narrative maybe that's in their head as they're wrestling with should I share this or not as an opportunity for the organization to do. Right. Good ideas have to overcome so many hurdles to surface.
And like when you're sharing about some of the practices behind neural leadership and your role to help remove the barriers for people to be able to contribute their best as like the main function of the role. Like there's so many barriers for good ideas to come to surface. And so I think it's really sharing these practices.
Yeah. One of the things that I heard for so many years when I was growing and learning and you know, there's a terminology that really disrupts me the wrong way as always had. And it came to fruition for me as CTO of Classic Curated Intel that don't bring me problems bringing solutions. And this was not Intel's method whatsoever. Right. It's the best way to solve problems is with a group of different minds and diverse minds thinking about problems
different ways. Like you know, innovation comes in group form in most cases, right. And gets really refined well. And so that's one of the guidelines I give everyone is bring up problems. You don't have to have a solution for them. We can we can ideate solutions together. And we can ask the group and the community of what are potential solutions
this stuff. But if people don't bring up problems to your point, it's so hard even to get an idea out there and so much overhead to think about and worry about everything that may go wrong or go right or create work for yourself or whatever. That is my biggest suggestion and guidance for people is just bring up problems. We can figure out if it's worth while solving together. I think that's also interesting is, you know, from an inclusion perspective,
lots of people think that I'm not included if my ideas are not accepted. Lots of times you think through and you hear everything that somebody says or in shares or the problems that they have. And you make assessments whether that's what you should be focused on or not. Even with great feedback and you still sometimes go, oh, that's not our biggest problem right now. Right? So we're not going to focus on that. But I heard it and the team
heard it and we're going to collect it. So as when this is priority, that's one of the big struggles. I'm always really thinking about how do we make sure everyone is included to bring those barriers down to get those ideas. But then there's this trade off of is when those ideas are shared, what if what if you don't do anything with a thing that I continuously I'm working on improving and I have a lot of room to continue to improve on it is the
why right? Like, hey, that's a great idea. And this is why we're not doing anything with it right now. So it's an interesting dilemma that's that thought as you brought up the it's hard to get ideas across an organization, right? Yeah. And in that exchange, like in facilitating that conversation with somebody, more ideas probably get turned down because of all of the reasons that could possibly exist closing
that that loop with that's a great idea. But here's why we can't do it now and explaining that like helps close that loop, but then also leaves invitation for more ideas to surface in the future. Yeah. And I am definitely the thing that always challenges me with that is the timing of response as well. Right? It's like, have a great idea. Oh, no, we can't do that. And here's why if the timing is not close enough as well, it also becomes a demotivating
for somebody of like, I don't know what happened with that idea or that feedback. But as we all know, especially in the remote working world, you're on zooms and meetings and web access and teams and slacks and you know, you're busy pretty much all day long doing some form of digital communication. And sometimes you forget to close the loop and those things. And that can be just as demoralizing for people as not even being receptive to the idea.
So it's a constant balance of how do you foster great thinking and how do you get the feedback loop on that so that you are creating a really highly innovative organization and idea generating organization without people just going like, forget it. I don't I'm not even a bother. As a US company, hiring remote engineers can be time consuming, expensive and
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Revello.com forward slash ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. One topic I wanted to revisit was the practice you shared at the beginning of constantly understanding and listening to your teams to learn what's getting in the way. And I was wondering if you could bring us into what does that meeting look like? Like what are some of the key parts of it to how you can really get the valuable insights from them and then take action on it?
Yeah, it's a great question. I use a couple of different formats knowing that people will not always bring up issues in front of other people. They either have safety concerns or they want to think through questions and process them more. Then there's the people who are just like, I have a rapid response and I can answer something like within two seconds of thinking about it. So I try and balance it a little bit. I do listening to
her on a quarterly basis meet with every one of my teams without their managers. So it's not a manager feedback session. It's just like, don't have to worry about bringing up issues and how your manager may or may not respond to it. It's hard enough having the CTO in there. Are they going to be open or not open? So I do that. But I also pick and choose different people, different levels throughout the corridor as well and just do one-on-ones
and get a sense. And then I do some cross-referencing because often you hear an individual's perspective on something and that's always interesting. But organizationally, you can be really quick to respond to an individual and have the opposite effect. This is a classic one for us. We're looking at like, how do we improve our online meetings? There's 125 people getting on a call every month for an hour. One, it's an expensive meeting.
Two, it's the people responsible for getting new product and keeping the platform stable and performant and reliable. So you're taking them away from doing that. So we wanted to be highly impactful. Well, we just did a little survey of like, what's working, what's networking. We always kind of start off with stupid dad jokes just to have some fun and set the stage. Oh, we got some people are like, please stop the stupid dad jokes. And so
there's the healthy balance, right? Of some individuals like that, some individuals don't. It's hard to please everybody all the time. But what we took away from it was maybe doing something the same way all the time is not the most motivating. We're not catering to everybody in that. We're doing the same thing. And so that can get a little bit repetitive,
a little bit boring. And for those people who don't really like it or appreciate it and are maybe really irritated by it, we just keep poking that that source bot every month, right? So what we took away was, well, we're not going to stop totally, but let's think of different things that may be more motivating for the group. So those are things that I continue to learn and go, I got to talk individually, people I got to talk with people with groups.
And then I have to cross reference without breaking anybody's trust or causing anybody concerned, but just see what the larger group is feeling about some things as well as I learned them. I think it's really dynamic to be a leader in this day and age and think about all the things that we have to think about and think about all the individuals that we are responsible for in our care and figure out how do we create a great environment for as many people as possible.
I love it. I want to get into one specific area of inefficiency, one specific story that you had brought up. And that's the inefficiencies that can come up between different relationships within an engineering board. Primarily because like that seems like an area that is very opaque
and hard to identify. And it's it oftentimes can be less clear. And so I was going to be told like about the experience of some of the inefficiencies within different relationships, what you identified and what maybe some of the solutions were there. Yeah, and I think we started off talking about this when I started with Better Cloud within a month period, there's a new CTO, a new VP of SRE, a new VP of software development,
a new VP of engineering operations. And we all started within 30 days of each other and talk like I truly apologize to my teams having to deal with all of us quite frankly gathering 80% of the same information all at the same time, different methods, different madness, different techniques. But a lesson learned for me and something I'd love to share with everyone is when you have a lot of new people coming into the mix, there's a high level
of duplicity that you are driving in your organization. And quite frankly, wearing out people would change fatigue of, oh wow, I just answered this question with the CTO now I'm answering
there for the VP of engineering and now I'm answering it for the VP of operations. To me that was a takeaway of something you should think about when any new person comes in the mix, especially a new leader who is responsible for an area and has to work cross functionally is have a plan, a very good onboarding plan of here's information that we readily know and
that you can self-service and understand. Here are areas that you should poke out with your peer leaders and get information for because we've already gone through this process within other departments and here are areas to just go, right, like run and track this down, things we have not solved very well, things that we're still struggling with, areas where we don't understand whatever department or area you're taking over that would help us all level up and that we could
stop asking multiple questions about and digging for information. I think the coordination of that was a really underappreciated area for me. I'm not sure I would suggest having a new leader in every department within a 30 to 45 day period created a lot of stress, a lot of turmoil, a lot of learning curves and duplicate inefficient work. So I've thought about that a lot more of
how do I bring on new leaders and how many do you bring on at a time. For me having a plan of hiring and timing, like we talked about it because of that I held off for a long time of getting a chief architect because they were going to come in at a period of time where everything was changing where we had four new leaders reviewing every aspect of engineering already and we
had not really made a lot of progress. So I purposely said I'm going to hold off for six months to nine months before I bring another person in and part of that plan was like after nine months of change and impact and improvements and that's a great time to get some fresh eyes and devaluate how effective are we being and what are areas where we have gotten complacent whether
missed in our evaluation. And so I do think when you're thinking cross functionally understand the interaction points from a workflow perspective, like where do you run into efficiencies, map those out, doesn't have to be heavy mapping, just you know, mind map it out, have a conversation of like is this where we intersect from a roles and responsibilities perspective and know that every new person coming in is doing their own evaluation and trying to gather data to help them be successful
and help them prioritize what to do and with multiple of those going on it can be quite interesting. So plan that out maybe this is just my fault Patrick. I'm not always the best planner, you know, plan that out more effectively and and have a organizational level plan rather than a departmental
level plan. A couple areas I want to poke into here because I think as you said, there were stressors, stressors involve a lot of pressure and something I'm thinking about a lot about recently is, a quote I love, it's the you don't sink or you don't rise to the occasion you sink to your level of training or you sink to your your system. And so in moments of stress, I'd almost reveals your core sort of behaviors habits operations. And so the dilemma is that like in these moments,
like then you learn a lot about that. So there's a couple elements of this that I wanted to get into a little bit. So one, bringing a lot of leaders at this level, I imagine then decision-making and communication there, like there's there's just a lot going on. And that way, so I was wondering, how did you approach making meaningful decisions or when you reflect on this like making meaningful decisions, communication, prioritization, where there are things that were revealed there or how would
you approach that differently? Yeah, I will say I'm pretty sure I've frustrated every one of my leaders at different points of time with that because it was really dynamic, right? And we had one of our leaders is like really structured and I wanted to plan and metrics and measurements. And I'm like, I don't even know what these should be yet with all of us investigating and figuring out
what it was. That drove them crazy. And so it was pretty constant. I tried to be really open with everyone of like the number one thing that we have to do right now together is understand the state of the business and the architecture and the product and the team. That is the number one priority. And what I tried to impress upon everyone was look at the most we can do at the start is listen. So I'm giving you all the 90 days before making rash judgments and before feeling the
pressure of I have to make my impact, right? On the company, I just was hired. I want to be in good light and I want to make difference in my value. And like the biggest value for us is to move purposely and slowly and hear what is going on before we make decisions. And that can be a really difficult thing for myself or anybody new. You want to show why you're valuable and why the company trusted to hire you and your greatness and your impact that you can have. And so that was
the first thing of like let's think about this purposely. The second was what is the biggest problem that we are coming in the soft like why were each of us hired. And let's make sure that we are tackling whether that is or is not the biggest issue that we see and also how are we approaching it. And so it came down to and this was difficult for for a couple of the department ads was look the biggest problem is in your area. I'm sorry. Yes, let's put together a plan of how do we improve and
what do we focus on in your group. But quite frankly, the focus is going to be in this area. That was difficult for people to accept and also for new leaders to align to, right? Like you're building trust and communication patterns and working patterns with a whole group of new people. And quite frankly, one department head is a lot more focused because that's the biggest problem in the business. And the other people may be feeling a little left out or a little discounted or not as valued.
And so I just tried to continuously have that open communication definitely could have improved it. But that was the most interesting thing of bringing in that many new leaders at that time and setting the expectation and highlighting. And quite frankly, you know, every every month or two there were times when I was like, Oh, that's not the biggest problem. We just figured out there's a bigger problem. And so having that dialogue and that impact and that understanding that always
we were serving better cloud as the company and our customers needs. And that would always be the deciding factor. One other element of this that I think is so interesting because again, five senior leaders all come on board six, including you. It's a big one and it's all right. A big shift multiply that by six. Yes. It's an expediential equation. I don't know how to write it out,
but that's an exponential equation for sure. One of the dilemmas that I have to imagine may have been present or in present a lot of transitions is like as a leader, if you're bringing on new senior leaders and you're trying to get them up to speed, there's sort of this tension in that the time you spend getting them up to speed versus the time you spend on other priorities or things
that you have lined up, there's a lot of tension and tradeoffs in navigating that. I'd love to learn just like your thoughts on like switching between the two in terms of you getting up to speed in your own right, supporting the onboarding, getting other people up to speed or executing on the priorities that you have defined like doing the things that you need to do to move the business forward versus
getting a handful of other folks also up to speed. I would say a couple of the lessons that I learned is it's really difficult to set the expectations and set the culture that you want bringing in that many new people at the same time as you're getting the lay of live land of the business and the
company and the customers and so I think it's strategically important to just be open about your own struggles with that right like where I was doing as much coaching and feedback sessions with the executive team as I was with my leadership team and trying to be clear with them of what I
was learning and how it was adjusting my approach to something or the expectations with something that was an important thing and then just being able to foster good communication path was really one of the biggest challenges like how do you get very different individuals to trust
each other you know at one time I mapped out we had in progress 250 changes within my organization in progress just like whether it was new career levels compensation guidelines management structure roles and responsibilities career paths you know I mapped it out one afternoon and I was like wow we
got 250 changes in flight that are going on across every group that was my hey team my leadership team let's get together like we need some focus and we need some maybe some better approaches because I'm not sure how everyone's responding to all these changes and quite frankly we were we're
really getting feedback of like whoa everything all new leaders all new process all new people all new new people operations HR policies just like a lot in change it was a very difficult thing because I didn't really have a baseline for the people to web themselves too as well and and be able to go
like oh this is what Jamie knows this is what Jamie expects because I was learning it all as well but what I did do pretty early on is let's define our core working principles together like what we expect I expect us to be proud of everything we built and I don't know if we can be for for what
we built in the past so let's let's make that work we don't trade off quality for speed we find ways to automate and improve our quality as we go faster we care mostly about the customer like that is the number one customer success is a is a pillar for us and we don't have the expectation
that we're going to be perfect we're going to innovate and improve and continue to learn from what we did well and what we did wrong and and learn and so we got pretty quickly I'd say in the first 30 days of everyone starting of yeah we are all aligned to this so we had that as a practice
the most interesting thing was the year and a half long debate on what metrics mattered which quite frankly continues to this day but we did get to a finally like okay we all agree that these are things that we're going to measure and look to affect and things like the dev ops metrics
and things were pretty easy and less stressful the you know the fun ones are always how do you measure velocity when everything is an input and output to velocity within engineering but those ones were the ones where there's a lot of conflict of sussing out everyone's different attitudes
expectations strategies of what's important to them and quite frankly it drove lots of conflict in my leadership team for for a long time so listen to everybody there and then finally going like I am the decision maker on this and this is what we're going to measure and why ultimately had to be
one of the one of the ones where not everyone's going to agree we're going to get as close to agreement as possible and go here's why we're doing this and move forward so feel like I'm rambling off the topic no Patrick so I'll let you bring us back to it a quick follow up question about
when you said mapped out the 250 changes simultaneously like can you just give a quick what do you what did you mean by that like when you're mapping out those changes like what's what's the practice there yeah well it was a practice of desperation of wow with all of us here we are changing pretty
much everything for everybody within the engineering organization which at that time was you know 120 years people and so what what I did was I just I just took a list and I quite frankly I did it for a board meeting to talk through everything that I saw as an opportunity for us to improve and so
I just walked through it with each of my department has like walked through every change that you're implementing right down to the the smallest detail and I just quite frankly added a numbered list I'm like okay here's a unique one here's a unique one here's another one here's another one
and as I did that with each of my department as I was also doing it for myself of like here's what I'm driving change with with my leaders and across the organization at the very very long running list I'm just like okay there may even be more but I can't write anymore it's just
too overwhelming but what then I did do and what we did with that is we bucket them into you know the typical people process product type thing and said okay here's what we're doing in each of these areas in each of the departments where is their alignment where is their questioning like some of
them were cross organizational like during COVID we totally took a look at how do we do a remote work and how do we do that effectively and when I joined better cloud there really wasn't a lot of career pathing for anybody like how could you progress in whatever individual contributor or
management role and so we were just looking at every one of those aspects which ones were department level which ones were we're organizational level which ones were kind of high impact changes and low impact changes I always look at low impact changes of the teams are themselves are begging for
those changes and you know career pathing is one like I don't know what this looks like for me in this company so please help strangely enough you never get pushed back on those type of changes as they're getting implemented ones you get a lot of pushback on are like you are impacting my
ability to do work efficiently or effectively or I don't understand why we're doing it and so what we did with that process is just looked at all of them bucket them theme them and then prioritize them so we normalized our change rate but we didn't shy away from it we're like look at these
things have to be done they're not we're not just making change for change sake there are outcomes we're trying to drive and that was good we used it in our all hands meeting and talked about like we got a lot of change going on this is why we're doing it these are the areas we're focused in so
lot happening but also trying to be really open with why we're changing things and this moment of great reformation what are the things you walk away learning from it like focusing on creating the communication pathways and defining the core working principles map out the changes that are happening simultaneously and then from there like codifying defining so like identifying the impact prioritize them communicate the why are there other practices that you gained that you still leverage
today like things that changed you as a leader from that that moment of big shift one I very rarely now discount communication as the number one opportunity and the number one challenge that we have as leaders constantly thinking about the frequency of communicating change the understanding
of why we're making changes across the organization and quite frankly we still don't do it as well or frequently or clearly enough so it's something I've learned that we have to do it better and I learned that we need to keep trying to do it better with every change also it's not something that
was truly learned there but was really really driven home was there is only so much change an organization can adopt and not feel so unhinged and so displaced and so curious about what is going to happen creating lots of insecurity and a lot of just confusion and or it doesn't matter if the
change is a great change and something everybody wants that change in itself can be the tipping point where everyone is now like I'm over it it's really interesting coming in a new company as a leader you have you're there to make change right you're there for a reason you're there to improve
but also understanding sometimes the prudent thing is to wait and sometimes you have to think about I have to let this other change that we made percolate and see the results before coupling on it's very similar to making too many co-changes at once right and it's then very
hard to evaluate where something was successful or went wrong it's just a conclomerate of change and you're like okay for better or worse hopefully you don't have an incident out of it and you don't have to go replay everything and figure out what caused the problem but that means
started to be like part of the you have to pure review every change you're going to do and see what the compounding effect is of everything that's in flight already and is this the thing that tips the company and the team over or is it something that really helps you then stabilize and
accelerate and and improve so yeah that's probably the biggest thing I learned was think through the order of operations and the change and and making those in a thoughtful manner and sometimes the best thing is to hold off for a little bit and see how the other changes are being impacted
and helpful before making the next stage. And I'm just thinking about like the the power of that in of gaining that insight because communication it is something that you can discount very easily and so now to have the the profile inside of to rarely discount the impact of communication and
its role in inefficiency you know I'm thinking of like we began this conversation on this quest to identify the opportunities for inefficiency we started to go down this world of like the opaque relationships those kind of murky areas that that inefficiency can alert and I'm hoping people walk away listening to this to have a similar insight in that a great area of inefficiency likely can be how you're communicating with your team or the communication synapses that you have in place.
You know it's such a challenge for everyone right like at any level of how do you communicate effectively in this timeframe where we are bombarded with information at the professional and personal level and how do you help everyone understand the reasons for everything and that
can be an exhausting process right. I look at myself often and go like if I can explain why we're doing this why are we doing it and so constantly questioning yourself on can I answer the why and like does it actually make sense or is it just BS I think that's a that's an interesting thing for all of us to think about the other thing that just one drives me a little bit crazy and two I see as an opportunity to continue to improve is what is the most effective way to communicate right.
People want to see it in Slack or you know a messaging app some people want to have a video some people don't want to hear it at all some people want to TLDR and then you know the details that they can follow up later some people will read an email some won't read an email like the constant
debate that we often have of what is the best way to communicate to all of our people so it's consumed and understood and how often do you repeat it so it sticks but is not just driving everyone crazy because it's so repetitive it's just communication in itself is so interesting of
all the things we can improve upon it just boggles my mind at times and it's just like okay I'm sending this out five different ways did see and then you'll still hear somebody like oh I'd never heard I never heard that or I never understood what that was or I didn't read it or you're
just like oh my gosh I tried so hard Jamie we've got some rapid fire questions for you to wrap up if you're ready cool I'm ready you asked this question a lot with the people that you bring into your teams what are you reading or listening to right now strangely enough this is what I'm
reading right now grit by Angela Duckworth I think it's an interesting book for for the times I'm a pretty big reader so I just read in the speed of trust kind of an interesting one I'm really focused on neuroleadership right now and some books by Dr. David Rock on how to think it work and
the quiet leadership and really understanding communication and what it triggers in each of us and how do you bring out the best in people thinking fictionally I've just been reading some Stephen King stuff I'm a pretty big Stephen King fan Wendy's blood in box just read that I pretty
typically have three or four things on the go at the same time so I do like to read and right now it's trying to learn more about communications what is a tool or methodology that's had a big impact on you certainly I've always been a big proponent of Scrum and Agile they're both tools
and the ability to look at things a little bit differently and and restructure them you know from a technology standpoint just the mind mapping and visualization of problems has been a great part of my repertoire of could be how I like to see things and visualize them to understand
them better but that to me like I give the advice to people of mind map your career paths and look at your different options of where do you want to go from this point forward but I think it is just as good as like prioritization and communication options just a really rapid fire visualization of how to think of all the different options so those it be ones that I
definitely leverage. Great recommendation next question what is a trend that you're seeing or following that's been interesting or hasn't hit the mainstream yet I was going to say AI but it is now by far the biggest mainstream topic I'm going to still say AI because I think it's so
interesting the excitement over something it's almost like the making of a star who in the background has been working for 10 years to become you know a fixture on television it's not like AI is just popped up right just we've had some good marketing and some good progress happened recently if you
talk to the open AI people would be like yeah this is 10 years in the making right but I do see what's very interesting in the spirit of efficiency as everyone's like hey can we use cogeneration to go like 30% faster it's like well maybe but I think what we're going to do is be spending that 30%
validating AI code that we have no idea whether it's going to work or not so I love the excitement I love the innovation and opportunity and I also see like we are rushing to a point of some stuff that's still pretty immature and we don't really know how to utilize it probably the other one
that's been rolling around since my time at Intel has quantum computing and when is that really going to start taking hold and when will we achieve some of the benefits of that I think what will happen what that is it'll be like it's been being talked about for a decade and then it's just
going to we're going to solve the problem of it and it's just going to become the biggest thing ever for everyone and so it's it's always interesting of how it takes 10 years for something to be an overnight success and something we're all interested in I love the perspective there and calling out
the emergence of quantum computing and it'll just it'll explode on the scene and it'll feel like it'll came out of nowhere but it's been multiple decades in the making so yeah exactly always from this tech industry that we're in absolutely you know they know how to make an entrance that's
for sure last last question Jamie is there a quote or mantra that you live by or a quote that's been resonating with you right now I haven't written right here worry about what matters we get spun up about so much stuff outside of our control or things that don't or will not matter and so
I think it's always good to send ourselves back on worrying about what matters I am also one of those people who can often just talk to Phil's space so I also have a mantra just breathe and take some time before speaking so two of the two of the things I'm trying to live by right now Jamie
thank you for an incredible conversation I mean just so many great practices and so many unexpected areas of inefficiency for folks to jump into and I think talking about worry what matters and breathe as a final way to close this off just an incredible practice so thank you for taking the time
and for some great stories thank you appreciate your time that's a fun if you enjoyed the episode make sure that you click subscribe if you're listening on apple podcasts or follow if you're listening on Spotify and if you love the show we also have a ton of other ways to stay involved with the
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