From Twitter Spaces to Independent Artists: Leading Org-Based Innovation | Pablo Jablonski

0:00The thing that I've not only taken from Twitter to United Masters, but just have always believed my entire time as an engineering leader leader. is that you can't build effective teams if the mission statement is the technology. The mission statement has to be the people that we're serving and the customer problem that we're solving. That has to be where you start. And you have to build a team of people on engineering and cross-functionally that really are passionate about solving that problem for those people. That has to be where we start. At Dev Interrupted, we work to give engineering leaders actionable ways to improve their teams.

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1:13We are back on Dev Interrupted from New York City. This is your host, Connor Bronston, and I'm very excited to be joined by Pablo Jablonski. Pablo, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. You are the former head of engineering for Twitter Spaces. You're also the VP of engineering today at United Masters. You have a fascinating background. So I'm really excited to dig into some of your background and also the work you're doing today. Maybe we'll get some hot takes out of you, I think. Yeah, that's good. If you enjoy this conversation, make sure to take a second to leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

1:45It's a huge help to us. Pablo, let's dive right in, though. Yeah. I think a lot of folks will know you from your work at Twitter on this very high profile product feature that came out with Spaces. I have to admit, I'm personally a fan. I got a podcast, Mike. Come on, you know, go ahead and do it. How did that come about? Yeah. So great question. So my journey at Twitter actually started with Periscope, which is a live video application, which we started in 2015. I remember Periscope. Yeah, so that's where this all started. And so Periscope was this idea that people could use their video to basically the one sentence line was view the world through someone else's eyes.

2:21The idea is anyone could pick up their phone, point it at something and the world could see it. That was kind of where we were coming from. And it basically baked an entire product around video, live video specifically. And it was very interesting and very cool. And we've got a lot of learnings from that. And about three years after we launched it, we launched this kind of secret project within Twitter that we codenamed Kaleidoscope. And the idea was that Periscope is video, Kaleidoscope is anything, right? Like what are all of the different forms that this live technology could take if we were to remove video from the equation.

2:58What's the whole equation of things that we could do? And we spent about a year prototyping different ideas and audio emerged as the most promising next step. We found that audio was a much more comfortable way for people to engage in conversations than video was. We actually launched what we called audio-only broadcasts on Periscope about a year prior and found a lot of people were doing them because they didn't want to be on camera. So we built a bunch of prototypes and we found this idea of these audio rooms where people could really talk using their voice as a really compelling idea that really took that to be the prototype that we wanted to take next.

3:43That was the evolution of Periscope, the next step we wanted to take. It was towards the end of 2021 was basically where we decided that we wanted to take that prototype and actually make it a reality. And we built spaces. We took about four months at Twitter to take that prototype to a beta stage and actually launch it to all of the, to the whole user base at Twitter and actually, you know, really had a really successful product there. We had a lot of really interesting use cases and a lot of really amazing interactions that we found from different people to use a product. And it really sort of proved to be a new way for Twitter users to talk to each other, which is really the point of Twitter to begin with.

4:29What's for people to talk to each other? It's a really interesting strategic case study that a lot of folks have talked about because obviously, you know, Clubhouse came out and we're trying to do the same thing that you've been working on. And I think Twitter realized, hey, look, like we strategically, we've been working on this for a while. We have better distribution, better networks set up. Let's finish this thing up and get it live. And to do that, you had to cut through a lot of red tape that I think traditionally Twitter has struggled with, which is shipping features in a timely manner.

4:59How did you do that within Twitter's culture and what did you learn from it? Yeah, so that's a great question. So that's really what I'm here at Leadeth to talk about. That's kind of what I want to share, some of the learnings that we got from that. But essentially, it took getting a group of people together who were actually passionate about adding the human voice to the conversation, which is really what our mission was. It was really getting really crisp about why we're doing what we're doing. Not just the fact that, hey, we have to build spaces. And by the way, we should do it faster because, you know, we should do it faster.

5:33It's like, why should we do it faster? What is the value here? What are we bringing to the company? and really getting super crisp about the value added and then really getting a group of people who are super passionate about making that happen. And then really just organizing as a team within Twitter. You know, a lot of people say a startup within a big company, it's obviously something I've said many times, but really living that to its core and actually approaching things differently so that we could ship something like a startup would. Even though we were in Twitter, you know, we really wanted to move like a startup would And the way that all started was what we called sort of like a manifesto of how we worked, which is like it was just a one page Google Doc.

6:17It was called How We Collaborate. That's all it was, was 10 rules. It was 10 rules about how we were going to work together, how we were going to collaborate and how we were just going to operate. And those 10 rules really served as the backbone that allowed us to move in a much faster way than other teams at Twitter were able to for the specific purpose of what we're trying to achieve. right like obviously you move faster and you you there are ramifications to that right there are situations where that may not may be the best idea but given what we were trying to accomplish that was what we were trying to do and these rules really allowed us to operate in the way that we had to to achieve our goal which is really to get something to the world in we gave ourselves a quarter.

7:03You know, it took us four months, but I still think it's pretty good in terms of what we're able to accomplish within the Twitter world. Absolutely. What were those 10 rules for communication? I'm going to see if I can remember all 10 of them, but I know most of them. So one of them, which was very controversial at times within Twitter, which is kind of obvious if you're in a startup, which was we are self-reliant. That was a single rule that basically played played the part of saying, whenever we can do things ourselves, we will. And at Twitter, there was basically the idea that, you know, Twitter has spent a decade building different teams of people who are able to accomplish different sets of things.

7:46And the expectation is that you sort of work with those teams of people to accomplish those things, because it creates a better sense of just like overall unity and also just being able to like have the code base to have a follow-up more defined pattern, right? But for every group that you work with, it's another group you have to communicate with. It's another set of dependencies you have to operate it within. And it also means that if something breaks, it's another set of people who have to then understand how to fix that thing that went and broken. Right. We took the more sort of radical approach of saying, if we can do it ourselves, we will, which means we actually maybe didn't employ some of the different functionality or team usages that other teams at Twitter might have provided for us, but it allowed us to really internalize the knowledge of what we were building.

8:36It allowed us to move faster from a dependency perspective. And when we launched quickly and we had bugs as we expected to have them, our team knew how to fix them. We knew what we were doing. We knew how to fix them because it was our code. So that was one that was kind of controversial at times because there were definitely teams at Twitter that thought we should have taken more advantage of what Twitter might have already built, but that was one that was kind of necessary for us to move in the pace that we did. I'd say that was the most controversial of all of them. The other ones are pretty non-controversial, but important.

9:06Another one that we talked about a lot was the idea that collaboration is key. Collaboration, cross functions, collaboration between engineering, product, design, research, that is absolutely key to a successful product. However, we also need to recognize that it will be impossible to always reach consensus. We have the idea of collaboration is key. Consensus is not. We have to go into it understanding that we will not always agree across all the functions about what we should do. And that's OK. We have to timebox ideas. We have to timebox decisions. We have a conversation and then we have to make a decision and we have to move forward.

9:47So we had a very hard rule that every decision has one approver. That's like, there's one person who makes a call and that person is always the subject matter expert, right? If it's a product decision, the PM is the final approver. If it's an engineering decision, the engineer has a final decision. And if we had that rule upfront, it allowed for this cross-functional collaboration, but we all had an agreement, hey, the product person might disagree with the engineering decision, but it's an engineering decision. So the engineer has a final call, we're good with that and we're moving forward. And that really allowed us to move a lot faster and allowed us to move at a pace that we weren't like spending weeks discussing the same thing over and over and over again, which is something that you would see quite a lot at Twitter because there were so many groups and so many different stakeholders that these conversations could go on for weeks.

10:31And that was something that we knew we had to get ahead of. So we really wanted to get this out on time. So that's one, that's another really big one. Another one that we had that was also very important, and this is actually the number one rule, was the first one. Yeah. The first rule was take care of yourself first. It was us acknowledging that we were going to be asking a group of people to work very hard for a period of time to get something out. If people didn't take care of themselves first, things would fall apart. I feel like that has sometimes been ignored in Twitter's recent history.

11:06Yes. Yes. Take care of yourself first was not the primary mantra at Twitter right now. Yeah, that is correct. but it was one that was really important for us because we were asking people to spend, you know, hours and working nights and sometimes weekends, but it was within limits. It was saying, hey, we're going to ask you to work really hard, but if you need time to yourself, go take it, right? And as leaders, that was super important. I had to also show, like, we're in the middle of this three-month push. I'm going to go take a week off because I'm burned out. And I'm going to show you that I take a week off.

11:39I'm going to sign off from Slack. You're modeling the behavior. Yeah, I'm going to sign off from Slack. You're not going to see me online. If I don't do that, no one else thinks it's okay to do it. And that creates the problem of burnout, right? Which is, I always say burnout is a lot like dehydration. It's a lot easier to drink water when you're thirsty than to actually fix it when you're dehydrated, right? Burnout is very similar. Like if someone is stressed and tired, them taking a day or two off then is a lot better than they actually burn out. And then they got to take a month off because they need to reset.

12:14So that's where we're coming from. Giving people time along the way is a much more sustainable solution than working them until they're completely gone and then having to get them back maybe. You know, like that's something that we really wanted to model. I have to admit, I struggle with one of those behaviors you mentioned. So I agree with you, like modeling these behaviors is really important. But, you know, you mentioned logging off Slack and actually being off. I find that really challenging sometimes. And it's something I struggle with with my team where I know I'm modeling that wrong behavior when I'm on time off because I'm so invested and interested and I have to really fight with myself to do that.

12:52And I'll shout out my producers here. Thank you for reminding me when I need to do that sometimes. Are there behaviors that you felt like were super impactful as part of this Twitter space initiative that you've now brought to your work at United Masters? Absolutely. I think modeling, again, the fact that it's OK to work hard and it's also OK to take time is really important. This is maybe something that's controversial from my perspective, but I know the unlimited time off gets a lot of hate online. Twitter had that. United Masters had that. I'm actually not against unlimited time off because I believe in people taking it when they need it.

13:28I think a lot of people give it a lot of, it gets a bad rap because they think people don't have said days so they don't end up taking it. But I believe as long as leaders model the right way and say, what unlimited time off really means is take the time when you need it. And as long as you get the work done, take the time to have fun, take the time to be with your family, take the time to do other things. That is such a more humane way of doing things for me than saying, I agree, here are five days in the year, take them in the time that you think is best. But like, by the way, if you need that sixth day, because it's really important to be with your daughter, you don't have it.

14:04That doesn't make sense to me. So that's something that we have at United Masters as well. And I tried to recognize that it might have a bad rap and really push the teams to really take it for what it is, which is really, this is the flexibility that we're giving you to take the time you need to be the best version of yourself at work and outside of work. What do you think about required minimums as part of this saying, hey, we're going to give you unlimited time off, but we require you to take X number of days per year? Yeah, that's totally fine. I think if a company wants to have that to make sure that's being applied across the board, that's totally fine.

14:41I think as leaders, we should have that for ourselves. Like on Spaces, for example, it took us four months, like I said, to go from like a beta to a full launch. We worked really hard. At the end of those four months, as the leader, I told everyone it's a week off. Like literally I told the entire team, like you did this, we made it, we're celebrating. It's a week off for everyone. I'm sure we'll have an incident when we get back to evaluate something that got wrong, but like we need to take a second. We're taking a week off both because I knew the team needed it, but also because I knew launching something isn't the finish line.

15:14That's just really the beginning. And there was going to be a lot to come that we needed to like have that. So if you don't have leaders who think about this and make sure that their teams are taking really the minimum required to succeed and to be successful, sure, a minimum at a company level to sort of enforce that is not a bad idea. But again, as long as I think it's, it's more on the leaders themselves to like understand what the team needs and make sure that you're really modeling the right bit for behavior there and getting people to really understand that even though work may ask a lot, it's really just part of your life and you need to make time for the rest of it.

15:50I'm curious as a former Twitter employee, someone who led teams there on crucial projects, what's your viewpoint on where the company is today as we're recording this in March of 2023? Yeah, I mean, it's no secret that there's a lot of turmoil happening there. It's not the easiest topic because I was there, I was at Twitter for seven years. You don't stay somewhere for seven years unless you really enjoy it. And there's a reason to stay there. You know, I interviewed probably 200 people while I was a leader at Twitter. And the question I got the most often is, hey, well, why are you still there?

16:28Like, you've been there for a while. Why are you still there? And every single time it was because the people here are amazing and because we're united on a single mission. And that mission was to elevate the public conversation. That was always my answer. and it's been sad to see what has happened there where a lot of people who really model that and really internalize that being their passion have had to go through some really hard times because of how the company has gone through things, because of the changes in the way that the leadership is going there. I just know firsthand how incredible the Twitter people are And it's been very unfortunate from my perspective to see the type of rap that some of them are getting online and just in general or just what they're having to live through to kind of uphold their real beliefs, which is building a product that unites public conversation is a public good that is necessary for the world.

17:29Right. And the new leadership group kind of expresses that also in words. They also say like, hey, Twitter is really a necessary good for humanity, but they're not, in my opinion, not operating in a way that really models that behavior internally. And that is something that I was very proud of at Twitter while I was there was that Twitter really modeled its internal behaviors as what it was trying to influence in the world. And I think that that has been disjointed now. it's challenging because I think most people can agree, particularly in the engineering world, Twitter had some flaws, right?

18:05And still does where features weren't typically shipping fast enough. I mean, to give the example of Spaces, it took you kind of getting outside of the typical Twitter model to find the right mix of bringing that culture in, bringing that mission orientation, and then also delivering this fantastic additional feature that's been very successful. Yeah. And there are various problems around shipping and other things in the org, I'm sure as well. But it does feel like the new leadership there has, at least from my perspective, gone too far in trying to flip that where they've lost some of the DNA of what made Twitter special and important and frankly, reduced reliability on the surface substantially.

18:46Like, you know, I may not be the only user feeling this, but this site is buggier than it was six months ago. I use it less. I don't feel that the conversation is as impactful, particularly the development community has for now migrated to places like Mastodon and elsewhere because it feels like I would say almost disrespected in a way where their concerns weren't necessarily listened to. And I think there was a better middle ground. At least, again, this is my opinion. No, totally. it's interesting using twitter as someone who worked on it for seven years it's very easy to see where the pieces are falling apart it's very easy as a developer to realize oh this is cracking like i think maybe most users may not realize the little things but the little things are there and really you're you are absolutely correct that one of the one of the biggest flaws of twitter was the ability to innovate and move quickly the reason that twitter in my opinion really struggle with moving quickly was because it was a company really made up of people who really care.

19:50And it was a lot of people who had a lot of strong opinions about what Twitter should be and really cared about those things. And those conversations, which are good ones to have, sometimes just really bubbled and took too long because there were so many really, there were so many people in the room who had very strong opinions about what Twitter should be. And that was always about how Twitter could do better. And you have to remember that Twitter has a direct effect to many people's real lives, right? So, and especially you would see this with the people who had been at Twitter for, you know, decades or not decades, but at least a decade, there were people who had sort of lived through some very hard times at Twitter and some moments were like the famous fail whale or this famous, like sort of like times that Twitter wasn't doing well.

20:36and over time these battle scars at twitter had sort of like grown into this set of rules which is like oh this thing happened in 2015 and it was horrible so we can never let it happen again so here's a bunch of stuff that we're going to our tissue kind of calcify right exactly here's a bunch of rules and processes that we're going to put in place so that thing that happened in 2015 never happens again now you multiply that by a hundred things that happened over the course of years. And it's all well-intentioned. It's well-intentioned rules that are meant to prevent catastrophic failures, so to speak.

21:11But at the end of the day, if you go too much in the side, if we can't let these failures happen on Twitter because it affects the world, you just can't do anything. Because anything you try and do, if you want to move quickly, you're going to break things. And that was something we believed at Spaces was, we're going to break things. We're going to do this. It's going to break. We're going to have failures and we're going to be okay with that and we're going to fix it and we're going to build in public so when we make mistakes we're going to own up to them it was difficult for the twitter company to accept that because they had seen sort of like oh but when it failed five six years ago it was really bad so we can't let that happen and i think that's really it all came from a good place it came from the place of not letting down our users and i think the new leadership now it's like screw that it doesn't matter let's just break everything and let's do it fast which is in some ways not a terrible mindset, but the way they're approaching it is, I think, not the best.

22:06It's going to be really interesting to see what happens there long term. It may prove out that despite all the turmoil and challenges, you know, they needed to kind of break the culture there in order to get back to like a very product innovation mindset and they'll rebuild it and they'll have success. And I mean, that's obviously the bet that Elon and the rest of that ownership group is making, but it's going to be a huge challenge. It'll be very interesting to watch. And I know So for all the tweets out there, it's a challenging thing to kind of go through because of so much of your work life has been kind of engaged with that company and the mission of it.

22:40And I also know that that same mission is part of what has driven you to United Masters and is leading your work today. And I'd love to get into that. I know that creators are very important to you. It's why you love this work on Spaces so much. Tell me about United Masters. For the folks in the audience who don't know, what is it? Yeah, absolutely. So United Masters is a music-based startup, which is trying to build technology to serve all of the independent musicians and artists in the land. The basic premise of the company is that the world has changed and that artists no longer need record label deals to be successful.

23:16And we've seen this proven time and time again. A lot of the most successful artists these days are independent. And we recognize that artists will tend to sign record label deals because they get certain services from labels. They get access to promotional tools and marketing and help with your touring and helping all those different things. But really, technology has come to a place where a lot of those tools can be automated. And we can really provide a lot of direction and support and education to artists that really want to own their own future and own their own art and be successful, as successful as they ever want to be while being independent.

23:57That's really what United Masters is. United Masters is a, as we like to say, a record label in your pocket. It's an app that can really provide everything a record label can for artists while still giving you full control over your music, over your future and your masters. That's really the premise of what we're building. and it's a really fun place to be. I've had a really good time being there. I'm going to put our audio engineer, Jackson, on the spot a little here because I can see him nodding along behind you. He's a producer himself who creates some fantastic electronic music and I know he's very passionate about this topic of independent production for music and distribution.

24:32And to your point, like technology has really enabled that, but record labels are not ready to give up that control. So I love to see this disruption happening in the industry. How big is United Masters now? I know you're a startup. Like, what kind of stage are you at? So we're a Series C, so we're pretty large. To give an idea of scale, the full engineering team at United Masters is about 50 people now, which is about the same size of what Spaces was as a team. So we have about 50 engineers on the team, and there's about 300 people at the company as a whole. And we were sort of, we're playing a part in this really disruption of technology and music where nowadays anybody can really be a musician, right?

25:15Like the trend we're seeing is that you don't need to go and buy the$1 ,000 synthesizer and spend two years learning how to play the piano and all of these different things to make music. Music really is only, it's as unlimited as the creativity allows. And people have all of these amazing tools nowadays to create music, to learn quickly different instruments, to really play around with things. and we're just trying to be the distribution mechanism and the sort of the second step for all those people sitting in their bedroom or their garage saying like, I have this creative juices that I want to express and I want to create something and I want to see if that creativity resonates with others.

25:56We're trying to be the path through which those people can test it out and actually put their art in the world and hopefully be successful at it. There's this clear through line in your work from supporting creators, helping build tools that enabled them. And I see why that transition was so clear for you to United Masters. What have you taken from your past at Twitter as far as leadership and skill set that you're applying now to the engineering team and product at United Masters? Yeah, I think first and foremost, the thing that I've not only taken from Twitter to United Masters, but just have always believed my entire time as an engineering leader is that you can't build effective teams if the mission statement is the technology.