Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most. Horting credit. PMs, they tend to be the front-facing person for initiatives. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really worked very hard. I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting.

Starting point is 00:00:22 The next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter. It just shows a real life. lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing. I think it really can be very off-putting. Is there any insight you can give about what people maybe miss about the motivation of engineers, what gets them excited? A lot of people assume that engineers just write code and don't underestimate the ability

Starting point is 00:00:45 for your engineers to want to understand the business problem, want to understand the customer problem. I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. Today, my guest is Camille Fornier. Camille is one of the most respected technology executives in tech and the author of The Manager's Path, which many consider the definitive guide for navigating your career and moving into management. Over the course of her career, she was CTO of Rent the Runway, VP of Technology at Goldman Sachs,

Starting point is 00:01:19 Global Head of Engineering and Architecture at JPMorgan Chase, and head of platform engineering at 2 Sigma. She's also releasing a new book later this year called Platform Engineering, a Guide for Technical Product and People Leaders, which you can actually pre-order today, and we get into this topic in the latter half of the conversation. We also dig into what PMs do that most annoys engineers and how to stop doing these things, why major rewrites are often a trap, why you may want to be doing fewer one-on-ones,

Starting point is 00:01:46 what most surprises people when they become a manager and some really useful heuristics for how long you should stay and I see before you make the leap into management, and tons more. This episode covers a lot of ground and will help you think about management, platform teams, team culture,

Starting point is 00:02:01 and the PM and end relationship in a whole new way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Camille Fornier. Camille, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure. I want to start by asking you a question that is on the minds of a lot of product managers is how to be less annoying as a product manager. I know you work with a lot of engineers over time. I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most, and how can

Starting point is 00:02:41 P.M. stop doing that. I would say there are a few things that PMs do that annoy engineers. And to be clear, I am sure that engineers annoy PM best as much. So I realize this is a two-way street. So I think there's some things that are really easy to fix and some things that are maybe a little bit harder. So the easy things to fix are hoarding credit. Sometimes I think PMs, because they tend to be the front-facing person for initiatives, they're talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM sort of takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really kind of worked

Starting point is 00:03:25 very hard on, right? So making every effort to be kind of credit sharing and inclusive of the engineering team and giving them the opportunity to speak about their contributions when it makes sense. I think those are all things that PMs can do to avoid that kind of, that, what I consider kind of a pretty easy annoyance, right? Just like, don't pour it all credit. This is not just you, right? There's a lot of work best to go into that.

Starting point is 00:03:52 I think that sort of dovetails into the next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter. And I think this is just a little bit of a cultural difference, right? So like if you are, I mean, even managers, just normal managers, right? People like me who are looking across really broad areas or you have to be kind of big picture focused. And you forget that engineering done successfully really is all about the details. And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details.

Starting point is 00:04:24 But when you act like they don't matter and you don't care about them and it's just like, I don't care. Just like tell me when you can get this done or why is it going to take so long? oh my God, like this just seems like such a little thing. You know, it just shows a real lack of kind of empathy for the work that engineers are doing, and I think it really can be very off-putting, even though I will totally agree

Starting point is 00:04:43 that sometimes you're going to get details that don't really matter and you just have to be a little bit patient in those circumstances. Today's episode is brought to you by DX. If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point, your CEO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics. But measuring engineering organizations is hard, and we can all agree that simple metrics, like the number of PRs or commits, doesn't tell the full story. That's where DX comes in.

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Starting point is 00:07:06 to Command AI. The third is playing telephone. Anybody in a manager role can fall victim to this, but I think PMs especially could be very annoying. So if you were being asked questions that you cannot answer

Starting point is 00:07:23 because you just don't know, right? Because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have, that you just don't have. And you put yourself in this in-between position where people ask you questions, you turn around, you ask the engineers questions, you take whatever they say, especially when you don't really understand it, which happens sometimes, right? Go back to the original asker and sort of get in this kind of middle person scenario. I think that is

Starting point is 00:07:52 very annoying. And frankly, it's kind of a waste of time for everyone. This is something that managers of all stripes do, but PMs definitely. do it and that drives engineers, particularly sort of senior engineers on projects, crazy. And then the last one that I wanted to go on this list is just when sometimes it feels like product managers want to hoard all the ideas for themselves, right? They want to be the ones that come up with every single sort of product idea and every single detail.

Starting point is 00:08:21 And what I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over engineer things because engineers are like, well, I need to take a control of something, right? Like, I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creative outlet. And I'm going to spend a lot of time obsessing over the right framework or the right this side or the other that may actually not matter that much for products delivery. But when you take, you know, the people that are that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, you just, you know, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else. And it's actually kind of bad for the product. That's really interesting

Starting point is 00:08:56 in the last one. So you're saying if you keep engineers from having a voice in what you're building and prioritizing, that's what encourages engineers to rethink. Let's just rebuild this thing. Let's use a new framework. Let's rewrite this system. Yeah. I mean, that's my, you know, that happens, you know, without you doing that, right?

Starting point is 00:09:15 Sometimes. But I do think, I think when I see it worst, and I can basically always predict what I'm going to see a lot of that kind of engineers building stuff, you know, finding creative outlets and kind of build. stuff, maybe they shouldn't be. I'm going to find that in places where they are so, you know, quashed their creativity for the actual business or product that they're building and their, their voice in that is so ignored that they don't have any outlets in that space. And so they are going to use the space that they have an outlet in the place where they have some control. And that's

Starting point is 00:09:50 usually the technology choices and the details there. That's fascinating. I want to actually dig further into that around rewrites. You have a really interesting take on that. But before we get there, let me spend a little time on some of these. These are awesome. So on this theme of not involving engineers in ideation and coming up with what you're actually building, what have you seen just very tactically. Is there anything you've seen at PM do super well? You know, I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. They're not threatened by, you know, the engineering team being full of smart people because they realize that, like, yeah, like, some of the engineers may have good ideas,

Starting point is 00:10:33 but they still don't really know how to do the product job. Like, just my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job that they would need to be successful. And when, you know, when product managers take the time to, you know, kind of build those relationships, well, make sure that people do feel like they can both share their ideas, but also that they start to appreciate what the job of this product person actually is and what they're really bringing to the table in terms of really, you know, how do we measure this input? How do we really understand the customers, right? How do we really think through, you know, kind of the details of

Starting point is 00:11:14 what's going to make this successful from a, you know, business or customer perspective? I do think that, you know, that creates just a much better, you know, interaction pattern. And then, you know, engineers can feel good about, like, sharing ideas and understanding that many of them will, you know, won't go anywhere. But like there's somebody that's actually going to listen and take the time to care about them. Coming back to some of the things that you said, annoy engineers about PMs, this idea of playing the middle person, sounds like the solution clearly is there just connect the engineer to the other engineer or your engineer to the PM that's trying to figure this out, right? That one's not always easy, right? Because again, you have this tension of a lot of the job of any management role is being in meetings, right? And, you know, filtering stuff so that people who are in, you know, focus individual contributor mode can focus and get things done and not spend half of their weekend meetings. You've just got to be very careful about knowing when you're crossing that line and when you're crossing it too often. And, you know, if you're having to, often say, let me get back to you, let me get back to you. I don't know, let me get back to you. Maybe the person you're talking to is asking the wrong level of questions of you. Maybe you need

Starting point is 00:12:27 to connect them to the engineers directly. But just being aware that that shouldn't be a default behavior. And will happen occasionally, but it shouldn't be a thing that happens a lot. Because if it's happening a lot, then you're likely missing something. You're likely losing something in that telephone game translation. And that's going to cause problems over time. Awesome. So basically, if you're just finding your middle person too much, then it may be time to connect people directly. And I know the reason PMs often are afraid of this is the engineer may agree to something

Starting point is 00:12:57 that they think is a bad idea for their team or may not understand all the ramifications on the product or just obviously just spend their time in meetings and not be building the thing. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you mean you do it in a group, you know, you do it in a group meeting. You know, I feel like Slack and other chat type things

Starting point is 00:13:15 actually make it a lot easier to kind of see. do you have the right people in a group in a thing? But again, that's distracting. You know, so there's not an easy solution to that one. Just I think it's important to be aware of it. Yeah, that's a really good point. And then in terms of hoarding credit, is there anything, any tactical thing you've seen PMs do really well here?

Starting point is 00:13:33 Is it just like every time they're announcing the product, hey, these engineers were involved. It's more than just like saying, you know, thank you to all these people. But, you know, it's actually sometimes like stepping back and letting other people speak. especially if it's something that's a really, really big technical lift. I don't think there's like a super easy fix that because I think it is just a like,

Starting point is 00:13:56 you know, just really being mindful that that can be very much a sore point for engineers when they just feel like this is my work. I'm not getting any credit for it. And, you know, this person is hogging all the glory. I love that. Yeah, I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting and announcing. And so I think that's a really good reminders.

Starting point is 00:14:17 Let your engineers be that. Okay, amazing. So we talked a little bit about this idea of rewriting and how engineers sometimes just want to rewrite the system. And I think a lot of PMs do to you. A lot of times you're building your features on a thing that's someone that doesn't even work at the company anymore built five, 10 years ago.

Starting point is 00:14:34 And there's always the sense of, okay, maybe we should just rewrite this thing. Everything will move so much faster. You have a really interesting take that I think a lot of PMs will love to hear, which is that rewrites are often a big trap and often don't end up being what you think They might be, can you just talk about your experience and perspective on us? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:51 So, I mean, I have personally overseeing a number of, if not quite rewrites, re-architectures and, like, major system evolutions. And so I absolutely do think they are sometimes a thing that needs to happen. But I also have seen so many instances of cases where the engineers have convinced themselves that the only solution, to the woes of their experience with the system. It's hard to support. It's hard to change. Nobody wants to work on it because it's this old crappy technology

Starting point is 00:15:29 is that they just have to go over to the side, build the new thing that will replace this old system, and that is going to sort of free them from their misery. And I think projects where you acknowledge that you do need to do an uplift, but you make a very thoughtful staged plan as to how you're going to do that. And you really think through,

Starting point is 00:15:53 okay, we don't need to touch all of this stuff, but we're going to take the recommendation system really needs to be uplifted. And that's a well-contained API. And so we can start to fix that without having to change the whole whatever web framework, right? So I do think like there are ways

Starting point is 00:16:13 to do these evolutions, but people really understand, they underestimate the time to migrate stuff from the old system to the new system is a huge, huge problem, particularly when you're talking about systems where you have sort of external people, you know, using the system in some way, whether it's, you know, web UIs or, you know, APIs. You think, oh, we, we kind of know what's going on, so it's not going to be that big a deal. Engineers notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system. And that causes a lot of problems. By the way, you still have to support the old

Starting point is 00:16:51 system while you're working on the new system, right? So I doubt many of the PMs in the audience are ever happy when they hear. We need to go away for six months, a year, two years to build this new thing. And we just can't really add any features to the system in the interim. Like, that's infuriated, I'm sure. And frankly, that's a problem. And I don't know that that should be an acceptable answer. in many cases. There may occasionally again be a case where that is what has to happen. But I think most of the time, you can't really afford to just say, we're going to go away, we're not going to touch the system for a long time, and we're going to build something new over here. So many things about why that doesn't make any sense. So this is a little bit of field of the blog post that

Starting point is 00:17:35 you're referring to. But, you know, so if you've got a system that doesn't really need feature enhancement or development because it's just sort of fine and the users are using it and it's like, it's sort of like, it's just annoying to the engineers. Why in the world would you invest so much money in writing a new version of it?

Starting point is 00:17:54 There's a little bit of like a cognitive dissonance that sometimes happens. Like if you need to do new stuff and the old system literally is not, it's not possible to do the new stuff that you need to do, you need to figure out a path to get to a sustainable system

Starting point is 00:18:08 where you can continue to add and evolve. You should be investing. And so there's a, you know, there does need to be an investment. But you have to ask yourself, like, if I could go away and not touch this and not do anything to it for a long period of time without it really harming my business, is it worthwhile to change it at all? Like, does it matter? You know, and there's just a little, there's some questions there. I also think that when people try to do rewrites, particularly again, if it's something that you're really trying to just like move to a new language. for example, or sort of modernized in a certain way,

Starting point is 00:18:44 a lot of times people really underestimate what the old system does and how well they know what the old system does. There's so much logic buried in legacy systems. It tends to be undocumented. It tends to be weird. You haven't thought through all the business rules. You haven't thought through the data, you know, the data formatting. And I think, you know, again, it's much, much harder

Starting point is 00:19:08 to kind of replicate all the important things from the old system to the new system than people expect. So there's, you know, there's more than that, but like there are a, I do think sometimes you need to evolve systems. And my advice would be when you're, when you're struggling, making an evolution plan, take pieces potentially of the old system, uplift them, you know, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, you know, clean up the tech debt. But trying to say, we're going to just go away, we're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new and it's going to solve all our problems. It just very rarely works.

Starting point is 00:19:42 I think a lot of PMs will be like, yes, thank you so much for saying this, because I think that's also always a big struggle between the NG team and the NPM team. So just to summarize, what I think a lot of people miss, or what you're saying a lot of people miss when they're thinking about, let's rewrite this thing, is the migration to the new system, migrating customers, users, data to the new thing is going to take a lot longer than you expect. You underestimate knowing what it actually does and you're going to miss features and you can introduce new bugs.

Starting point is 00:20:09 This actually is very similar to what I've seen with redoing, like redesigning a whole product flow. There's always the sense of like, let's just rethink this onboarding flow from scratch. Or let's rebuild this part of the product. And always it ends up being a negative experiment result. Like it always ends up being less good. And then you have to spend all time clawing back to get to where you were. And also you forget the stuff that would, like the features that you had. And you're like, oh, shit, forgot about that feature.

Starting point is 00:20:34 I forgot about that feature. So it's interesting. There's a very similar situation in the products. set. Okay, amazing. I'm going to go to a slightly different topic, which is around engineering leadership. So I know you've written a lot about engineering leadership. You spend a lot of times with engineering leaders. So I put a few questions here. One is that I know that one of the things that haunts engineering leaders most is finding the balance between staying technical and their technical expertise and their leadership expertise and basically finding the right altitude

Starting point is 00:21:04 of how high where to be in the org and also how in the details to be and also staying technical enough to be relevant. What have you learned kind of in your own experience of finding that balance? And how do you advise engineering leaders as they struggle with this? Yeah. So one piece of advice I give everybody is don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones. You feel like you've got mastery that you could, if you know a second language fluently or if you played an instrument like really, really seriously for a long time or maybe a sport really, really seriously for a long time. You'll be familiar with the, I haven't done that in a long time, but if I was to pick it up, it would be rusty, but I would get there pretty quickly, right?

Starting point is 00:21:50 Maybe, you know, physically I wouldn't be as strong as I was as, you know, or whatever, but like I would get there. There, you can do that with writing code. You can do that with, you know, technical skills. If you do it for long enough, I think you can develop sort of a baseline mastery where like you're not going to be as fast. And a lot of the challenges of being technical is actually in all the tooling and all the tooling evolution. But you're not going to be necessarily as fast as people who have been doing it. But you won't be completely clueless.

Starting point is 00:22:17 And I think that all the things you learn getting to that really comfortable mastery of some part of hands-on tech will stay with you and will help you just sort of maintain a level of confidence in your own, you know, technical know-how. maintain a level of kind of empathy for what it means to be a good engineer. And I think just make you a lot less anxious about being hands off, even though I think everybody who makes that transition for a year or two, especially if you're really like, have to be hands off because you just don't have time to write code and all.

Starting point is 00:22:50 You know, you are going to be anxious for a while no matter what. The things to them think about from that point is like, you know, being technical is also just about like knowing what's going on and paying attention and, you know, being able to ask, what people care about with technical leaders in my experience is they want people who actually seem like they sort of understand what you're doing and can ask good questions and help guide you to better decisions without actually being the one who's like, oh, no, you need to use this library instead of that library, right?

Starting point is 00:23:25 Like, it's actually sort of annoying when somebody that's very senior and like hands-off tries to tell you, don't use this library, use that library, because I don't know about you, but like, I don't really believe people who have been hands off for that long when they try to tell me what to do and the thing that I'm kind of the expert in right now. But I do appreciate it when I'm given more like guidance around, you know, well, have you considered this? Like, tell me about how you're planning to handle that situation. What are the major technical challenges with implementing this? And that can actually spend the time to listen and ask thoughtful questions on the back of that. The last thing I would say is like surround yourself with smart technical people also as much as you can.

Starting point is 00:24:08 And, you know, be willing to like listen to them talk about tech and ask them questions about things. I just, I feel like that's part of the reason that I'm able to stay kind of technically savvy and credible amongst people who work for me is not that I'm writing code because I'm not. But I am listening to a lot of very smart people talk about technology. a lot down to the level of like, I'm trying to debug this database issue, like, what the heck's going on, and just constantly being interested in those stories and learning from them and learning what really smart engineers are thinking about and worrying about, you know, the more you can build that network of people, you know, that are still hands on and kind of, you know, stay in touch with that. I do think that that helps a lot.

Starting point is 00:24:55 So on the last point, how are you actually doing that? Is it like watching, going to conferences that friends, something else? Yeah, I mean, I guess for me, it started with like going to conferences, meeting people, you know, now I'm in a lot of different like chat groups where people are just sort of, you know, regularly communicating, you know, staying in touch with, you know, staying in touch with former colleagues. It's, you know, I will admit I'm kind of a social person and I have a big network. So this may be easier sent than done.

Starting point is 00:25:27 But I do think like, you know, being in the right. group chats. I also think like, I'm sure reading various, you know, tech news and tech, tech sort of commentary and discussion boards. I mean, it's definitely a mixed bag of that stuff. I think of like, but there are smart people. There are, you know, you find the smart people in there. You sort of follow what they're saying. I think that's another good way to kind of keep that, keep that perspective. Is it a sign? I wonder if you're not interested in that anymore that maybe you should move into something else. I don't know if you're like, I don't really pay attention to engineering. You know, it's hard for me to say, because I'm just like, I'm such a nerd.

Starting point is 00:26:03 I just, I really, I really love tech. Like, I'm in, I'm in this industry because, like, I'm just, like, actually genuinely very interested and certain certain corners, not every corner of technology, but certain corners of technology. I just, like, I want to know. I want to know what the latest stuff that's happening and databases and infrastructure. And, you know, I just, I find it all very interesting. I find the problems interesting. So I think that makes. makes me very successful because I just have that natural curiosity and passionate interest in it.

Starting point is 00:26:33 But, you know, I don't know that that's a total free requisite. Yeah. But you've been talking about reminds me a little bit of this guy, Levels I-O on Twitter. Have you heard of this guy? He was just on Lex Friedman. Have you listened to it yet? I think maybe I saw a clip of... Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:26:46 But I haven't listened to it. So I think he's one of the most successful indie engineers where he just works on his own thing all by himself, never raises money, just launches products that make money. And a funny thing about him is he works, all stuff is. in PHP and JQuery. He's just like, this works. Like, I've always had this to do. Learn Node.js.

Starting point is 00:27:04 Learn Python. And I'm too busy to build while I'm building to learn these new things and he's been incredibly successful. So it touches on like sometimes maybe you don't need to just keep rewriting to the newest frameworks. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:16 No, I mean, look, I actually, I feel like I know a lot of smart engineers who are in that category. They're like, we built amazing things in PHP and, you know, relatively simple SQL and so much of tech is over-engineering things. And I think I don't totally disagree. I think the challenge is, though, of course,

Starting point is 00:27:37 like what works as a one-person show doesn't always work in a scaled organization. For better, for worse, for indifferent, like, you know, you've got to match, like, what makes one person really productive. Will it make 100 people, a thousand people, even 10 people, really productive? you know, it's always a little, that's always a little hard to tell.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And that's why I do think you should be like not, I think it's always a good idea to be keeping up with what's happening and what's changing in whatever kind of side of tech you're in, but not obsessively chasing every fad. I think that, you know, I think being aware of, but not necessarily chasing them, but particularly if you're working in, you know, groups, teams, larger companies, even mid-sized companies, you know, there is some amount of like, you're bound. in saying that the tech that makes one person go fast with the tech that makes 10 or 100 people go fast, and those are not always exactly the same thing. Just to kind of follow this thread a little

Starting point is 00:28:36 bit and to kind of nerdsnipe you a little bit, is there like a platform or language or framework these days that you're either very excited about that you think is helping people move faster and do better work or the opposite, just like, hmm, this is, everyone's excited, but this is not good. I will say this. One example I actually put in my own notes for this, for this conversation, was GraphQL. I would not tell a team to use or not use GraphQL at this point because it's a bit out of my expertise zone and my level of management. It's not really my job anyway. But it is one of the things that is both popular and thought relatively poorly of by most of the senior people that I know. And so I guess I would say, like, that's one where I would say, if you're seriously thinking about it and you're not like Facebook, you may really want to be, you may really want to make sure you know what problem you're trying to solve. Because the impression that I have from sort of listening to people talk about it is that GraphQL is kind of trying to promise front-end engineers that they don't really have to like collaborate with back-end engineers and they can just sort of build whatever and it will all be fine. And it just doesn't ever seem to work out that well for anybody who actually does it in practice. Again, obviously it can work out that well because, you know, Facebook has made a great go of it.

Starting point is 00:30:00 I'm sure there are other companies that are. But that's one where like it's not that new, but it's, you know, it remains one of these things where it seems like an interesting fad that maybe is burning a lot of people. That's awesome. I appreciate you sharing that. I don't know if this is exactly an example of this, but on that podcast levels I own, I forget his actual name Peter, I think. that whenever there's a framework that has VC-funded startup behind it, that's not a good sign because their job now is to convince engineers to use it and then pay for it. And that's not necessarily going to be the best product.

Starting point is 00:30:34 That's true. Although I will say that some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Or the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company that doesn't have the rest of the context set. So, you know, but I don't think he's not wrong. I also just think like big companies, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:02 share the blame on that one. I guess we should all just come back to PHP and J. Query and might be simple. Maybe. Okay, so to close out this thread on engineering leaders, finding the right balance, just to summarize your advice here, One is get to mastery before, and is your advice here get to this point before you move into engineering?

Starting point is 00:31:23 Engineering management. You know, I will say part of this is also like, in particular, if you happen to be a woman or otherwise underrepresented person in tech, because people will tend to underestimate your technical abilities just unfortunately as a get-go. Like, I also think it's particularly important to kind of develop that internal confidence in your abilities before you, make this sort of scary lead, which is scary for everyone of like have it, you know, if you have that mastery before you make the leap, I wish more people would do this. Because honestly, I do think like there are a lot of people who never really gained the mastery. They go into management. They lose it.

Starting point is 00:32:01 And some of them are still perfectly good managers. And look, there are good managers who were never technical to begin with. I don't want to, I don't want to say that that's impossible. I just think that if you care about being technical, if you are, if you are technical now and you want to maintain, that tech savvy, don't just become a manager the first time somebody offers it to you. Like, make sure you've really spent your good time, you know, writing code. Is there like a number of years heuristic you think about or some way to tell you that maybe you've hit and hit that point? You know, I think this has been since disproven, but, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:37 it was sort of that 10,000 hours idea of mastery at some point. You know, for me, it was like an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree and four or five years of like full-time work. So maybe I might be slow, right? I didn't start coding a lot in middle school like people might do now. But like, you know, I felt like it took several years of hands on work and a very intense undergraduate and graduate programs for me. So I do think it's probably a like somewhere in the 10 year range of like really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and, you know, really understanding how to be a technical expert. Got it.

Starting point is 00:33:17 So essentially, if you're thinking about moving into management as an engineer, you may want to wait until you've done it for 10 years in some form, which I think is a lot longer than a lot of people would have thought and imagine many people are not doing that. And then in your experience, not doing it as well, it could be. You know, if you were programming a lot in high school and you got an undergraduate, degree. So you, you know, let's say you've got six years. I see. You know, you may only need four or five years of like work, 40 hour a week writing code experience. I'm sure it depends on the company. But like, I do think when you see people that are like, 23, they are just out, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:55 very recently out of school. It's a different thing if you're a founder and you're, you know, that's a whole different life, right? But, you know, if you're in a big company and somebody's like, you have great communication skills, why don't you start to become a manager? Often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager, which is actually also the worst, you know, worst sort of path to real leadership, in my opinion. Like, spend, you know, if you don't feel like you're done, also if you just don't feel like you're done, right? If you're still having fun, writing code, don't rush becoming a manager. Like, writing code is awesome. Have fun. Enjoy it. I know exactly what you mean. I used to be an engineer, actually. I was an engineer for 10 years.

Starting point is 00:34:32 I definitely don't have mastery at this point. I moved into product from that. And I definitely so missed actually just sitting there and writing code and building stuff. That was very hard to give up. I imagine you still missed that. You know, I think I might have forgotten about it at this point. But it is, there is nothing as satisfying because you get the fast feedback loop. It's just wonderful. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests to storing all my research to managing my newsletter content calendar, Cota is my go-to app and has been for years.

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Starting point is 00:35:47 Head over to coda.io slash Lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.coma.com slash lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan, coda.coma.com slash lenny. On the topic of moving into management, you wrote maybe the definitive book on engineering manager career path. And so when someone moves from I see to management, what do you find is the most surprising thing to them? What are they most often not understand or are surprised by like, oh man, I did not see this as part of my job. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few things. I do think, assuming that they're actually trying to do it well,

Starting point is 00:36:30 I do think there are a lot of people who move into management and then just don't really understand the job at all and aren't even self-aware enough to know that they don't understand it. But for those who are trying to do it, trying to do it well, I think a few things that tend to surprise them are the fact that, like, you really don't own your time as a manager. Your team and your management and the company owns your time more and more, the more senior you become as a manager. You know, I think individual contributors often think that, like, if they become a manager, they will still have some of the freedom that they have as a senior individual contributor,

Starting point is 00:37:08 but then they'll also be able to tell people what to do and they'll have all this authority. And the reality is, you know, management is much more, I'm not a huge fan of servant leadership exactly, but management really is a service job. You are serving the team. You are serving the company. Your job is to, you know, is to help make things better. And that usually doesn't mean that you're making all the decisions. It usually doesn't mean that people, that you snap your fingers and people jump.

Starting point is 00:37:40 You know, and because if you try that, especially in tech, right, people are just going to revolt. They're not going to listen to you. You know, you don't, it's just too hard to have, that's not the culture that we live in. And I don't think that's a good culture, right? I don't think that command and control, I tell you what to do and you do it. It just doesn't create creativity, right? It's the same thing as like PM's trying to have all. the ideas, right? Like, you know, no, you've got all these brilliant people working for you on a

Starting point is 00:38:06 team. Your job as a manager is not to tell them what to do in every single case. Occasionally, yes, a lot more to do you're trying to convince them of, you know, what you think should happen in some ways. You're trying, you're sort of nudging, you're encouraging, you're directing, you're setting guardrails for, for, you know, processes or behaviors or whatever. But it's just, It's not, it's not this like glorious, you know, fearless leader. I make all these decisions and everyone looks up to me. And, you know, it's awesome kind of job. It's a much more, it's much more grueling, much more, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:47 you are really just sort of reacting to things in the moment. And it can be very, it's a hard job. I do think like management, particularly management when done well when you're really trying to do it in a thoughtful kind, you know, but also productive way is a very hard job. I wonder if engineering is where most, where the highest percentage of people that move into management move back to IC. I've seen that a bunch. And I wonder if engineers are the most common. I don't, you know, I don't know, but after realizing what you just said is true. Yeah. So do you not think product managers also do this? Because I think product managers also

Starting point is 00:39:25 actually suffer from exactly this kind of thing sometimes. They do. They do. Yeah. But interestingly, I was an engineering manager earlier in my career. I really did not like it. I was very unhappy in that role. As a PM manager, though, I was very happy. It was a lot easier. Oh, yeah, because PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to like, they're just so helpful. They're like, wants and do with this. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I have to say, I just like, my engineers are such a big.

Starting point is 00:40:02 They are all prima don'tas. They are all, no, I love, I love it. I am an engineer. But like, PMs are more fun to manage my experience. So actually, you have a point. You have a point. But I wonder, yeah, because I haven't seen a lot of PM managers

Starting point is 00:40:14 move back to IC product management. I find that once you can build product through teams and not sit there all day in Excel and check in on deadlines and things, like you it's hard to give that part up. You kind of enjoy being like higher up in that chain. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:32 Kind of along these lines, something that you have a really interesting perspective on is one-on-ones. Most people are like, have one-on-ones with everyone, have them regularly. They're really important. You actually have this contrarian take that maybe you should have less one-on-ones, especially as an engineering manager. You talk about that.

Starting point is 00:40:46 Yeah. So to be clear, I, you should have one-on-ones with your direct reports and your manager. and you should hold those sacred. I tend to do mine weekly or maybe every other week. So this is not about that set of one-on-ones. The one-on-ones of the people that you are directly managing and with your own manager. But I think there is this, I think, I don't know if it's the remote work, you know,

Starting point is 00:41:15 sort of explosion that's happened or it's big companies or what. But what I've seen and I've heard a lot of friends at many companies, you know, kind of complain about is this idea that like everybody is doing one-on-ones with everyone else. So the manager is doing one-on-ones with their team. They're also doing one-on-ones with all of their peers. They're doing one-on-ones with all of their stakeholders. They're doing one-on-ones with product and design and, you know, and I think that this is just, it's just not a scalable approach, right? Like, linearly scale with the number of relationships you have. And so as your company grows as the number of things your team supports grow as the team grows,

Starting point is 00:42:00 you just can't scale that way. You cannot expect to maintain a one-on-one approach to kind of organizational relationship building and awareness past a fairly small team slash company. I also think that like people think that one-on-ones will solve all of their problems. And I I think the reality is like, you know, we have, you have this one-on-ones with people that don't really want to have a one-on-one with you. If they're not in the mind to invest in your relationship, you know, they don't, if they don't really care about what you're doing, they're actually may not like it that you're asking them for a one-on-one.

Starting point is 00:42:40 Let me show up because it's like, okay, well, I should do this to be a good corporate citizen or whatever, but they're just like, why are we doing this? Like, what is the point of this? I also think that like one-on-ones, particularly when you use them for stakeholder management, so when you're meeting with people, you know, you're meeting with people that's not your team, but like other stakeholders, you know, that you may need to deal with. If you have a lot of stakeholders, so I've been in a lot of positions where I have a lot of internal stakeholders because I've built internal platforms is a big part of what my job has been

Starting point is 00:43:05 in the last many years. Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're happy or unhappy with things, your unhappy stakeholders kind of aren't hearing that. So you may have like one really unhappy stakeholder and five really happy ones. And all you're saying to your unhappy one is, well, everybody else is happy. And they're not seeing it for themselves. They're just having to say, trust me, because I've had these other one-on-ones with all these people. And they're saying it's fine. And it just kind of sounds whiny. And so, you know, when you're when you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders, I think trying to

Starting point is 00:43:42 just rely on one-on-one management of that is actually not very productive in a lot of ways. So in general, I guess I just think, like, people should respect their own time more. As much as I just said management, you know, you're kind of at everyone's mercy, and that is true. But also, like, respect your time. You know, don't just load yourself up with meetings because you're a manager and that's your job. You know, are you, do you really have something to talk to a person about? Do you really need to, you know, these are, you're, when you have a one-on-one meeting with someone, you are asking for their time. You are, you shouldn't just be doing that kind of haphazardly for fun. This is a little bit of my

Starting point is 00:44:24 personality. I'm not a great like, I'm not a great like company networker. Like, you know, some people are really good at just like, let's go to get coffee. Let's go to lunch and let's like hang out and build a relationship. And honestly, those people are really successful in many ways that I am not. Like, I do sort of envy that skill. I'm really good if you want to, if I work with you. Like, if I work with you on something, generally speaking, people really come to respect me because I'm very like engaged and you know I'm a really good collaborator in various ways but I'm really bad at just like getting to know you random one-on-one where we don't have a purpose to the meeting and that's not to say those are always bad you know but I do think that a lot of people with that's your

Starting point is 00:45:04 comfort zone if that like getting to know you random you know relationship building one-on-one is your comfort zone like I should probably do more of them you should probably do fewer of them because you should always be pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone. And are you really getting something out of that? Or are you just being able to tick a check box? It says, I had eight meetings today, therefore I was productive. Yeah. That super resonates.

Starting point is 00:45:28 It's kind of pulling on a thread of how you operate and how you work. Something that I've heard you're really known for is creating a work culture where people work really hard, but also have a really good work-life balance. And when we were chatting, you actually told me you're not a great believer in working too hard. can you just talk about this philosophy on building great culture where people don't work too hard, but also, you know, get stuff done and don't burn out? I think we all understand that if we could just figure out and focus on really the most important things, we would just, everything would be better.

Starting point is 00:46:02 And it's hard to figure out what the most important things are. But overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place. You know, you, I listened to one of your podcasts where you talked to someone who said, like, if you've never fired someone and regretted it, you don't know where, like, the line is of, you know, who you shouldn't, shouldn't fire. And I will admit I have mixed feelings about that. Although I, I don't get what you're saying. If you don't regularly, like, reset your expectations of, like, what you should and shouldn't let slide, do you have any idea where the line of what is actually important to work on is? Like, I just think,

Starting point is 00:46:42 And the thing about that is like it's not like firing people where you do it once or twice and you regret it and you and you learn pretty quickly, unfortunately. I think you actually have to kind of regularly test the circumstances and, you know, challenge yourself to challenge yourself with like, am I really, you know, am I really getting the most out of myself? Am I really producing the best value, you know, or am I just making, eshaging my. internal guilt about like, you know, I need to work 60 hour weeks. I need to sleep in the office. I need to whatever to show that I'm like a hard worker and I care. And so I guess I just, I do really think that people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the important stuff done and always be asking themselves, what is important to do? And what's important to does change over time, but if you're never, if you're not regularly doing an audit of your time

Starting point is 00:47:46 and trying to knock things off that list that don't matter, you're probably wasting a lot of time on things that don't matter. And okay, you don't want to work less. You love working a lot. That's fine. But you could probably just be getting a lot more valuable stuff done if you would do these audits regularly, right? I also think like people don't delegate enough. And, you know, so if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegating, which actually takes more time initially usually, because you have to teach people whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do. Not always. Sometimes they'll surprise you, and they're better at it than you are, but, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:23 maybe not. And so you have to teach them. But then you finally freed yourself up to scale. So I guess I'm just like, I'm just a real believer that working hard and a focused way for level, but over fewer hours, I think is a more productive way to approach work. And I think it, you know, and I think I've, you know, I have lived my career that way. I've been, you know, successful in it, and I have encouraged it and people who have worked for me, and I think I've seen a lot of success through it. But it's just, it's not a thoughtless exercise. It's an active process of constant reflection to get to.

Starting point is 00:49:08 you know, that, that focus. For someone that is listening to this and is like, I want to start doing this, is there anything, any specific practice you've found useful or any specific tactic to actually do this well? You know, I think there's different, there's different approaches you could take, right? Like, one approach you could take is just like every Friday, I'm going to stop working at 4 p.m. or something, let's say. And I am not, or I'm not going to let myself work this weekend.

Starting point is 00:49:37 forcing yourself to log off, forcing yourself to like have, have, you know, sort of boundaries and saying, what did, you know, and then doing out of like, what did I get done? I think can help. You know, that's scary and people don't like doing that. But I do think that that's one of the best ways to do it is really just saying, like, I'm going to log off. I'm going to log off every day this week at 6 p.m. I'm going to you know, because your brain is probably going to keep thinking. You might still be a little stressed out. You're still thinking about work. You're still worrying about it. But there is a difference between thinking about it and doing it. And particularly for those of you who are earlier in your careers,

Starting point is 00:50:21 like this was actually, I think, one of the reasons that I did get to mastery was because I was extremely good at being focused when I was at work when I was a hands-on programmer and really writing code for many of the hours of the day. And that meant I was like not, you know, this was pre pre heavy social media. I was much less distracted, which I don't know if I would be able to do it in the modern era as easily. But, you know, having that like real heavy focus time because I was like, I don't want to work on the weekend. I don't want to stay here until 9 p.m. every night. Like I just want to get this done.

Starting point is 00:50:56 And it meant that like I didn't do quite as many copies. I didn't like go to lunch and chat with people all, you know, all every day. But I was very, very productive and I learned to get a lot done in a short period of time. And I do think, you know, learning those skills earlier in your career and then continuing to apply them throughout your career is another piece of advice. In terms of staying and getting focused, is there anything that helps you focus? Is it like headphones, a drink, like what gets you in the zone? I mean, yeah, I have a lot of like rituals. You know, I have my caffeine rituals.

Starting point is 00:51:31 Say more. Well, I mean, like, I can't drink coffee anymore because my stomach got messed up at some point, but I drink, I drink tea in the morning. I have, I drink caffeinated water also. You know, I have like a diet Coke at lunch. So I have like these like sort of rituals of like, you know, my caffeine hits that helped me. I have to be in a quiet place. I do find like non-music that is like, I really like fortet, for example, as like, music to focus or the new Andre 3000 flute album is extremely good for focusing where it's like not quite predictable no lyrics and not quite predictable for me that helps me focus a lot like I can't be listening to any words and focus my brain will just you know cannot like ignore words so those are some of the things I use to help folks that is awesome I have a similar caffeine strategy I'm drinking tea always during these podcasts and this little thing I got here and then My wife doesn't want me to drink Dietko because she thinks of the sugar and it is not good, but I still drink it sometimes and it works good.

Starting point is 00:52:36 I switch to green tea. That's my approach. Start with black tea and then switch to green tea. Oh, that's smart. Oh, man, there's so many things you share that I wanted to dig into. Let me share a couple things. Your point about delegating, I thought was really important. And there's another benefit to learning to delegate, which is team members feel empowered. You give them a chance to take on responsibility and they feel like I have an opportunity to show I can do. this other thing. Yeah. And like, you're just, you're never going to scale if you don't delegate.

Starting point is 00:53:06 Yeah. And it's hard to start learning to do that, but once you get good at it, it becomes so great. I love, just delegate everything every time. And everyone and people enjoy it. They're like,

Starting point is 00:53:16 amazing. You're giving me opportunity. The thing you said about how, if you're not cutting, if you're not sometimes regretting something you cut or potentially firing someone you don't regret, Elon actually,

Starting point is 00:53:26 Elon Musk has a great approach to this. I don't know if you've heard his philosophy on optimizing. He has this whole five-step process of like figuring out how to optimize something. And one of them is cut, try to cut things like, do we need this thing or not? And if you don't recognize that 10% of stuff you cut, you was a mistake, you're probably not cutting enough stuff. You'll have to figure out your own metrics. But I definitely think testing, testing the limits, it's scary, though.

Starting point is 00:53:53 I'm going to be honest. Like doing that is always scary. It brings up like, you know, I forgot to finish stuff. assignment, nightmares of school, you know, especially for the overachievers that often end up in these kinds of, you know, companies and jobs. But, you know, again, you kind of do things that scare you or you're never going to grow. Okay. I'm going to go in a whole different direction. You've got a book coming out about platform engineering and platform teams. This is something that I get a lot of questions about a lot of people are thinking about moving to a platform team or struggling

Starting point is 00:54:26 working on a platform team or struggling working with a platform team. So I have a bunch of questions along these lines. The first is I asked a bunch of people that worked with you what to ask you and someone that worked with you shared this quote about his frustration working with platform teams that he's often complaining to you about. And he works on customer-facing products. And so he said platform teams are often slow. They're often pushing us to compromise on features to adopt their systems.

Starting point is 00:54:51 They often get infinite funding, even though they don't have to show any ROI. And so maybe from the perspective of working with a platform team, say you're building something customer facing. Any tips for effectively working with a platform team and building a great relationship there? I'm very sympathetic to anybody who feels that way because part of the reason that I wrote this book, I co-wrote it with a friend, Ian Nolan, is that so many platform teams are guilty of all the things that he's complaining about, that my friend was complaining about. They don't listen. They're not delivering effectively.

Starting point is 00:55:29 They are not explaining their value to the company. And it is infuriated when you're dealing with that. And honestly, I'm very sympathetic. You know, the thing that I would say, though, is the more you can, first of all, like, spend the time understanding that the platform team's problems a little bit and trying to collaborate and work with them and be clear about what it is you actually need and how you're willing to work with them, I think the better, right? I think if you just, if you get mad and you just try to avoid them or like, you know,

Starting point is 00:56:07 undermine them or whatever, that, you know, may work in the long run, but it's just going to make everything worse in the short run. And so I do think that, you know, if you've got a platform team that you're frustrated with, some tips I would add I would put are like look find the parts of that team that are good because I'm sure there are some right maybe the databases team is awesome and really make sure you are maintaining a good relationship with that part of the team and you can point to how you are collaborating extremely well with that part of the team help give them product feedback them it is this is annoying but sometimes needs to happen because a lot of companies I actually think product you need to have a product mindset. And frankly, you'd have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product managers for internal teams. So you end up with this like platform team that has a lot of smart engineers, but they don't really know what to build. And so they're just

Starting point is 00:57:06 sort of building whatever they think is right. And so sometimes your job is to product manage them, is to tell them like, these are the problems that we have and this is what we need. And, you know, the clearer you can be about that, particularly when they don't. don't have a product team, oftentimes you can kind of leave them from the side in that way. And so I think that's another approach that I would take when you're in the doubt situation. Find the parts of the team that are working and, you know, working, working well with your team and make sure you develop those relationships and, you know, try to just get over the, like, anger and frustration and just be clear about what it is that you need and help them understand

Starting point is 00:57:45 what they should really be doing and building. That is really interesting advice. So especially you're saying if they don't have a PM helping make sure they're guiding things well, you can help them basically help them think through stuff that will benefit them and also help the stuff that you're trying to get done. Yeah. That's awesome advice. Okay.

Starting point is 00:58:05 So what about from the leadership perspective, trying to build an effective platform team? Do you have any advice on how to structure these teams and incentivize these teams to help them be successful? First of all, I really am a very strong believer that like platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team and you only have like, you know, more like operations systems engineers, DevOps, SRE, which I realize there are some SREs that are software engineers, but they tend to not want to write like big software. I think you're kind of missing the picture. You know, platform engineering is not just like, you know, maintaining cloud infrastructure. and doing like small scripts or blueprints or enablement projects for other teams. Because that doesn't really create a cohesive and coherent platform.

Starting point is 00:58:57 It doesn't really create, it doesn't create products, right? And frankly, you need to be, platforms are products ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create sort of coherent offerings that make this company more productive. So you need software engineers. Yes, you need sort of operations systems. SRE specialists as well. And of course, you need product people. I've had product teams on product managers for all of my platform teams.

Starting point is 00:59:26 I've really developed out that practice in the companies that I've worked for doing this because I'm just, I just believe that like it is, you're not going to get great results if you just leave that to engineers and engineering management. They will do their best and you do occasionally find engineers that have really great product instincts in this space, but the actual details and focus of the product work is just you can't write a bunch of code and or manage like a big software engineering team and be a product manager at the same time. That's actually just asking, I think, too much of people to do that really well, at least for very long. So I think when it comes to structuring a team,

Starting point is 01:00:04 recognize like this is not just like SREV2. This is more than that. You want software engineers, you want systems engineers, you want product people. And then you, one of the reasons you want product folks is because you want to be thinking about, like, impact-based, outcome-based approaches, not just like, well, we built this thing that seemed cool. We adopted this technology from this company because, you know, that's what everybody on the internet is talking about, whether it's, you know, VC funded or, or big company, you know, like, we actually, like, thought about what are the problems they engineers at my company are facing, how can we improve their productivity or deliver leverage to this business

Starting point is 01:00:51 through whatever it is we're building, right? Are we reducing the cycle time for engineering tasks? Are we solving problems that are preventing products from launching and scaling? All right. Are we, you know, making really meaningful cost reductions or efficiencies and, you know, in our products or in our, you know, in our platforms? These are some examples of, you know, measurable contributions. But I think one of the challenges is that people create these platform teams and think that they can be sort of divorced from having an impact focus because it's like, well, you just got to run the infrastructure and, you know, make sure it works.

Starting point is 01:01:29 And it's like, no, you actually do still have to do. You have to do that OKR stuff or goal setting or, you know, whatever. You've got to take a lot of the best practices of product. It's a little different in an internal world, but it's still very important. you want to do platforms. On the line of having PMs within the platform teams, some of the best PMs I've ever worked with were PMs on platform teams. And that just tells me it's not like where you put PMs that are just meh.

Starting point is 01:01:55 Like that's where you could have some of the highest leverage because platform teams enable the rest of the company to move faster. Yeah. And one difference there. I'm curious if you agree is your ratio of PM to engineer can be a lot higher. You can have a lot more engineers per PM on platform teams. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right because I think, you know, a lot, so much of

Starting point is 01:02:13 the work in a platform team is not exactly product work. Like a lot of it's like, you know, scaling or really like deep kind of technical. Like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing or I've got to, you know, do this performance efficiency. And you don't always need like a product spec for that, right? Like that's often just a very engineering heavy task. And so yes, I think the ratios do tend to be a bit a bit different. So we do over like right into this topic, maybe it might be helpful to help people understand what is a platform team, just like what are examples of teams that would be considered platform teams? I mean, I guess the high level definition that I have with platform engineering is like,

Starting point is 01:02:55 if you are developing and operating platforms that, where they're trying to manage overall system complexity and deliver kind of leverage to your business. So a lot of the teams that people think about nowadays and when they're talking about platform teams, they're talking a lot about teams that may have formerly been called like dev tools, for example. So you're, you know, CICD tooling for the company, a lot of the cloud infrastructure provisioning and tooling. If you're at a company with certain technical problems, you know, you may very well be like, you know, building semi-bespoke storage systems, for example, maybe part of your platform teams. I actually think that there are, you know, and then I actually like web frameworks, you know, web, mobile framework and sort of like support for really, for that, that set of engineering can also be part of a platform offering.

Starting point is 01:03:54 I actually kind of believe that there are, there's also sort of what you might call integration platforms or platforms that are kind of in between that infrastructure, developer tooly stuff and product. So like billing platforms, for example, right? if you have a single billing platform for all of the different products in your company, that's all, that shares a lot of overlaps in the challenges of like those more dev tools, infrastructure-y platform teams, because you're probably supporting lots of different product lines that are using, you know,

Starting point is 01:04:25 using this system that needs to be able to sort of scale, you know, with certain efficiencies. You need to still do the product discovery. You probably have a little bit more of a business product focus than like the pure internal tools, teams, but that gets to sort of the blended area. For founders that are kind of earlier stage

Starting point is 01:04:47 or companies that are smaller hearing this, and they're like, oh, should, do I need a platform team? So yeah, so you're shaking your head if people aren't watching on YouTube. What's a sign that's time maybe to start creating a platform team and setting aside resources for something like that? So first of all, it gets to be like you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing.

Starting point is 01:05:07 that you start when you are, you know, 10 engineers, right? But when you are, have like sort of the, so there's a lot of ad hoc coordination that's probably happening amongst your engineering groups right now where like maybe you just have like one, you know, you have your GitHub and somebody's kind of making sure that like all of that stuff, you know, is sort of working.

Starting point is 01:05:33 You have a few, you know, a few cloud database and you got like, you know, a couple of people on these team and they kind of like share notes to figure out like what what's going on or whatever. Okay, it's all good. But at some point you hit either a lot of an efficiency where you're seeing like the same people across a bunch of different teams. Each team has the same kind of people having to solve the same kinds of problems. It just seems like why do I have three people in every team like dealing with this instead of like centralizing it and making a little more efficient. It also could be that you hit some core scaling issue that starts to really need a dedicated team to solve. Again, that could be

Starting point is 01:06:13 like developer productivity. Like every development team is trying to do it their own way and everybody's just super slow because like, you know, you just can't get code released and it all has to be coordinated across every different team and it's just like what is going on. We need to fix that. Or, you know, you actually have a technical challenging area that needs sort of a focused team to fix the scaling. Those are some of the same. signs that you may want to start thinking about a platform team. But it's really like, generally speaking, I would not jump into it early. It should, you know, this is, this is something for companies that have matured where there is, it's worth investing and making people, you know,

Starting point is 01:06:54 internally kind of more productive and centralizing certain functions just from a, you know, from a cost and efficiency basis at, at minimum. Say you're on a platform team. Say you're an engineer or even a PM. Any advice for how to be successful? and thrive within that environment and be a great platform team. If you want to do platforms, if you're an engineer, certainly if you're an engineer or an engineering manager, you've got to remember that like half of the, half of the work is actually like the operational quality, operational excellence of these things. Platform engineering is

Starting point is 01:07:27 not like just writing code and then throwing it over the wall to someone. the, you know, being, being interested and passionate about kind of the operational challenges and scaling bits of systems, I do think is like fairly important if you want to be a great platform engineer from a software engineer perspective. If you're more like a, you know, product manager, look, you've got to really care about, I think you've got to really both interested in kind of working with really smart, like, engineer. who are going to know way more than you do about things. And almost being a really good, like, not necessarily zero to one, but like past one person

Starting point is 01:08:12 because actually a lot of the best platform-type offerings and companies start in individual like application teams. Like an application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves. And it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem. And so a good platform team is often like looking around for those and then sort of taking them and assimilating them and making them available to more and more people. And so I think, you know, if you want to be in that kind of zero to one, like building the brand new stuff all the time, you may not be as happy in a platform team. But if you're really interested a little bit more of like taking things over, stabilizing, scaling them, you know, making them efficient, making them evolve as a company evolves, I think that's going to, you know, you'll be happier in that, in that circumstance.

Starting point is 01:09:00 Awesome. Is there anything else along these lines before we wrap up and gets are a very exciting lightning round that you think might be helpful for folks working with platform teams, working on a platform team, building platform teams? I think there are two things that we haven't touched on, maybe three, that are like really hard about platform teams and that I think don't get much press, which is like running platform projects is a little bit different than running agile projects. You can take a lot of the best practices you may have learned from Agile-type product delivery, but you're running longer-running, larger-scale, more complex builds, because a lot of the stuff that you build at the platform level just takes longer. It's a little bit more complicated. So you've got to be willing to get into that kind of stuff, especially if you're in a management job in that space.

Starting point is 01:09:55 You are going to deal with a lot of migrations as well, right? So it is very annoying. Migrations happen, even if you don't force them on people, you know, your cloud provider is going to say, oh, you've got to migrate from EKSV119 to 121 or whatever, right? And that may require like changes in code. And then that's a real pain in the butt for all the application teams. So people who are interested in like how to smooth over the customer and, you know,

Starting point is 01:10:28 company impact of this underlying change, I think we'll be very happy in platform teams. If you're not interested in that, you may not enjoy the work as much. There's just a lot of detail-oriented work in platforms. And then, of course, the final part is, like, the stakeholders are a nightmare. My friend who wrote the question about, like,

Starting point is 01:10:48 how his product or is a platform partners drive him crazy. Like, I have no doubt he drives them crazy. Right? Because you've got all of these stakeholders, you know, your peers in tech, you know, maybe product managers, maybe executives that are like, what is this team? Are they really worth the money? Like, why are we spending so much on it? I don't understand what they're doing. I could do it better in some cases, right? Like, there's just, you know, and so there's actually a big part of the job, particularly as either product managers or engineering

Starting point is 01:11:19 leadership is like stakeholder management and really learning how to do that well. And that is not always, that's probably, I think, universally agreed to be the least fun part of the job. I don't think anybody loves it. But it is certainly a skill set. I'm glad that I have. And so I think if you're thinking about building one of these teams and you're like, I can just do the fun tech stuff or like the cool product stuff, I'm really passionate about engineering productivity or I'm really passionate about scaled storage systems. And I don't want to think about any other stuff. You may not actually be happy in the long run in leadership positions.

Starting point is 01:11:56 It may be fine, you know, as an individual contributor, but like for leaders in particular, there's a lot more to it than the fun tech problems, the fun operations problems, even the product. You said there's a few things we haven't touched on. Is there anything else? That's kind of that. That's the, that's the fast listen. Anybody who's interested, my book will be coming out in the next couple months from O'Reilly and that covers all of this at depth. Yeah. Is there a date specifically people should watch out for? I think it's actually pre-order on Amazon now. It's called Platform Engineering, and then there's, I think it's like a guide for technical product and people leader, something like that.

Starting point is 01:12:35 But I think the release, I don't know exactly when the Kindle release will be, but we're still in copy edits, but it should be done pretty soon. Okay, amazing. So you can pre-it already now. We'll link to it obviously in the show notes and description. It's called Platform Engineering. Before we get to a very exciting lightning around, I want to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast that I call AI Corner. AI is very top of mind for a lot of people, and I'm always curious how people are finding it valuable in their work or in their life.

Starting point is 01:13:02 So the question is just, is there anything you've found AI to be helpful with in your AI work, any way you use it in an interesting way? I find it helpful, for example, if I've written a sentence and I'm like, I like this sentence, but I feel like it, I don't like the phrasing or the format that I've used. It needs to be edited, but I can't quite figure out how. I will often, you know, put it in chat chbt and be like, can you reframe this? Can you rephrase this for me? It doesn't always work well, but like sometimes it does. It's like, oh, yeah, if I just like switch this around or change this word choice, it's a much easier to read sentence. I do think it's, I think it's just before that and like small. I think it's large, large blocks of text I haven't, I haven't had as much luck with. I'm not, I'm a little bit of an AI novice still, I would say.

Starting point is 01:13:51 What I will say is that AI is really bad if you try to ask it for quotes or at least chat GPT is I don't, I haven't used a lot of the other ones that much. I actually saw there was like some Twitter or some somewhere or some social media thing that's like did Francis Ford Coppola get like fake reviews

Starting point is 01:14:09 from like chat GPT of the new, what is it, Megapolis? Yeah, Megapolis. Yeah. And I was like, you know, I actually had that scenario where I was like, I need a quote. I was looking for quotes, you know, for the book. And I was like, maybe, you know,

Starting point is 01:14:25 the chat GBT knows where I was like, can you give me any good quotes on like, I forget what it was. Let's just say it was on complexity, managing complexity or something like that. And it, you know, gave me these really interesting quotes. I was like, that's great. But I better double check that. And they were not real. They were never real. Not a single quote. And I'd be like, that's not actually a real quote. Oh, yes, you're right. That's not. So here's a different one. I was like, that's still not a real quote. So don't ask it for quotes. Because or if you do, make sure it's a real quote and not just an interestingly phrased. I mean, in good summarization in some ways of like the text it was sort of quoting from,

Starting point is 01:15:04 just not an actual quote. That's a good reminder of just generally don't assume what it's telling you is true. Like generally, it's not giving you real things. It's making things up. And usually they're right, but often they might not be right. That's a really good reminder. On that first tactic, is there a prompt that you find helpful for how to actually actually feed it in there? Is it just, here's a line help me come up with a better version of it?

Starting point is 01:15:25 No, I am not figured out the prop engineering thing at all. I tried to get it to summarize a paper for me the other day and like it just literally gave me the summary of a different paper. And then I asked friends and they were like, well, here's the summary. I was like, actually, that seems like a good summary. And they're like, well, you know, first I told the AI that it was like an expert in the field and that it needed to read carefully and that it was really smart. and I'm just like, I don't, how do I have to manage the machine? Like, I already have to manage all these humans. Like, why are you making me manage machines now, too? Please.

Starting point is 01:15:59 I thought this was going to solve all of our problems. Yeah, the role. There's like an acronym for how to approach prompt engineering and one of, like, there's always like, give it the role. Here's the role you're going to play for me. Like, you are an amazing writer. And here's what I want for me. Yeah, I'm also very bad at.

Starting point is 01:16:16 By the way, Clata here is really good at writing. That's like one of its superpowers. So if you want to try writing, that's worth trying to be anthropic. On the second point you made of fake quotes. So yeah, Francis Ford Coppola is coming out with this movie with, as you mentioned, this trailer is just full of all these quotes that people supposedly said about his other movies. And they're all like, these are terrible. Like they're all terribly mean quotes about his movies. Turns out, yeah, they're all not real quotes.

Starting point is 01:16:43 And they actually took down the trailer. I just read because he's just making up quotes by famous critics. Wow. Well, so, you know, that is chat GPT. You can get fooled. I don't know if it was chat GPT or or a cheeky intern or something. Or you can get. Or very intentional marketing stunt. Or that. Yeah. Anyway, with that, Camille, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Starting point is 01:17:08 Yes. Amazing. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? So the first one is, what got you here won't get you there? I love it. I think anybody who is trying to challenge themselves and grow should read it. It's fantastic. The second one is called When Things Fall Apart by Pema Children. That is when you are, for me anyway, when I am struggling with whatever circumstances around me, I find it a very soothing reminder that life is hard. And the best way to, you know, you just sort of have to breathe with it and be with it and, you know, let it remind you of how life is hard for everyone and sort of make you a kinder person in the process. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? I loved Alien Romulus. It was great.

Starting point is 01:18:11 If you like a scary alien movie, fantastic. And I hate scary movies. So that's a new Alien movie. at any other than you have a movie. I loved it. Awesome. Is their favorite product you recently discovered they really love, whether it's an app or even physical product? So I don't know about recent. I'm a big whoop fan. I got it during the pandemic and it is like one of my, I'm just a weird fan girl for it. I don't know. I just really, I enjoy it. I use it every day. Maybe it's totally inaccurate, but it seems accurate enough and I just find it a very interesting and cool product. I know who product people listen to this podcast, so I think they'll be happy to hear that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to, share with friends or family, find useful and worker in life?

Starting point is 01:18:58 If you don't challenge yourself, if you don't take risks, you just, you'll never grow. That's a big one. I think you've got to, you know, challenging yourself, taking risks is how you grow. I think the other one for me is stay curious. You just, you know, the more you can remember that there's more that you don't know than that you do know. staying open-minded and being willing to be wrong, you know, I think the happier you'll be and and the better you'll be as a leader for sure. Final question on the topic of working out. You're blocking it with your head during,

Starting point is 01:19:34 generally during the podcast. When you moved behind you, is a very significant looking barbell set or dumbbell set. I don't know which one's which. Talk about your workout regimen or anything along the lines of how you, how you work out. I have been lifting rates

Starting point is 01:19:50 probably for longer than some of your podcast listeners have been alive, which says more about my age and then anything else. But so I used to be, I now have two kids. So I lift weights as sort of maintenance, but like I used to be a very, like I could deadlift more than twice my body weight

Starting point is 01:20:08 and I was just a very, very strong person. Now, of course, everybody's into weightlifting, which makes the gym really annoying. So partly why I have a set in here, a small set with a baby-sized bar is so when I can't make it to the gym, I can at least, you know, lift a little bit at home. What's your favorite workout lifting-wise? I love like really basic like the lift, squat, overhead press. That's that kind of, you know, very simple, the classic lifts. Amazing. Camille, this is awesome. As everything I was hoping it'd be, We covered so much stuff.

Starting point is 01:20:44 Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, follow up on stuff, and check out your books? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yes. So with the weird state of social media now, that's actually a harder question to answer than it normally is. I am on LinkedIn. So, you know, you can always follow me on LinkedIn. And I will probably, I haven't traditionally put that much there, but I'm expecting I'll probably start putting more there in the coming months.

Starting point is 01:21:08 I also still use medium when I write action like medium. So medium.com. Scamiel is my username. Those are two good ways. I have a Twitter slash, I guess, X account that is currently locked, and I may or may not unlock it at some point. But, you know, social media, as I said, has gotten weird. So I think probably LinkedIn is the easiest way for this kind of stuff. And I read somewhere that Scamil is rooted in your love of ska music back when you were younger.

Starting point is 01:21:38 Is that right? It was true. Yes, it was from high school. I was a big scoff fan. It's funny how our username is just like stick from we were really young, and that's like the way we were represented online now forever. Yeah. It's absurd.

Starting point is 01:21:51 And then you didn't answer my final question, which is how can listeners be useful to you? I have a new book coming out. I have another book that I've already written. Obviously, I love it when people buy my books. I love people share my books with other people. My first book is translated into like a bunch of languages, which is super exciting. So, you know, I hope that if you really,

Starting point is 01:22:11 read it and enjoy it and learn something from it, you will let me know, tag me on some social media. I think that's just awesome. And, you know, stay tuned. Look, if you, if you're looking for people potentially to come talk to your company about platform engineering, I could be interested in that. But, you know, I always love to meet interesting people. If you're in New York, you know, reach out. Who knows? But this, you know, this has been an amazing, amazing time getting to chat with you, Lenny. Thank you so much for inviting you on the show. I feel the same way. Thank you for agreeing to come on the show. Camille, you're awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Take care. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next.

Starting point is 01:23:11 episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway)

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