Realistic Product Roadmaps and Other Lies | Best Egg’s Johnny Ray Austin

0:00We talk a lot about velocity and just moving quickly. And I think a lot of teams get caught up in moving quickly that they, you know, forget that they need to have a direction as well. That's right. They're on the treadmill of doom, essentially. Right. Moving real fast, looking real busy, but ultimately not getting to the outcomes they want. So you can easily burn out a team for a year and accomplish absolutely nothing. And then the idea is like, oh, you work really hard, but we didn't actually achieve what we wanted to because, you know, I as a leader did not give you the right context and I give you the right prioritization.

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1:10Hey everyone, we are back at Dev Interrupted here live at Leading Engineering West Coast. I'm your host, Connor Bronsden. And today I'm joined by Johnny Ray Austin. Johnny is Senior Director of Product Connected Digital Experiences at Best Egg and former head of technology there. Johnny, great to have you with us. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I mean, it's a distinct pleasure to have you on because honestly, you have the best talk title that I have heard in a long time. Space aliens are among us. Your product roadmap is realistic and other lies you believe. And you're an experienced engineering leader who's built and led high-performing teams, globally distributed engineering teams.

1:48You understand the pressure that engineering leaders face, pressures we're all feeling, growth, product innovation, efficiency, what competitors are doing. I'd just love to know, how did you come up with that talk title? Yeah, I mean, I knew the concept of what I wanted to talk about pretty early on, but given what's going on in the actual real world. So the concept probably started back when, you know, the New York Times released images of like UFOs, like real UFOs. And so I was just like, that's not a UFO. That's a dot on the screen. That's not real. And so I was just like, all right, whatever.

2:23So that's where it kind of, you know, originated from. I am not lost on the fact that we just had a congressional hearing and this might actually be a thing. But, you know, I figure if I'm wrong about aliens, then we have a lot more to figure out than go to market strategies. Yeah, at least he'll be funny about it, right? Like, we're wrong. I mean, honestly, we're we're here on a convention floor in a spaceship looking dome. Yeah. Yeah. It's all right. It all fits. And, you know, the rest of it is just all about pulling from, you know, my day to day experience. You know, you talked about pressures of delivering.

2:54And, you know, sometimes those pressures are fine and reasonable. Sometimes they're completely unreasonable. And, you know, if you can get a few engineering leaders into a bar with a few drinks or whatever, and, you know, they'll talk to you about the ridiculous things they've been asked to do in the past. And so it's a big tongue in cheek. There's a little bit of comedy in there. So I'm hoping to kind of lighten the mood a little bit. So what's one of the ridiculous things you've been asked to do? So I guess I was asked to launch a 3D world for a conference with like a month's head of time. What was the value driver behind that, let me ask?

3:29Was it just this will be cool? Yeah, that's it. It would be really cool. It'll look great. You know, we'll show up real nice. We'll get people to look at it. Yeah, people will look at it. They'll be like, who built this? And yeah, that's it. How'd you handle that? I mean, I had to do it. I mean, I'm saying me, but I had a fantastic team who was really behind it, really great engineers who really came together under a tremendous amount of pressure to kind of pull that together. To this day, I don't know how we did it, honestly. Even then, as a manager, I had to kind of jump in and do most of the dev myself on the back end.

4:04And so it was classic all hands on deck type of situation. So what's the advice you have for engineering leaders who are struggling with these same problems as they try to grapple with product roadmap realism? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's really all about aligning to your, so this is the conclusion I draw on the talk, right? It's about aligning to your common delusion. So even up until last night, I was struggling with how to close this talk out. And the reason was because I wanted to end on a how do we stop lying to ourselves type of note. But even then, I was lying to myself because we won't.

4:40This will continue in perpetuity. And so my task then was to figure out, well, how do I justify that? How do I walk off the stage with that message? And if we're going to continue to tell these stories about what we can do or what we should be doing, and some of them are valid, we just need to be aligned in that vision. And so if you're going to do the really hard stuff and ask reasonable things, just have a transparent culture about it and let people know what they're walking into. Some people thrive in that situation, in that scenario. So just better to know up front. Why is it that you think we share this collective delusion about what our product roadmap is going to be and how realistic it is?

5:21We're humans. We follow incentives. We have these incentive structures, right? You know, we live in a capitalist society. And, you know, ultimately, it all boils down to, you know, chasing those metrics quarter by quarter. If you're a publicly traded company, if you're a private company, VC back, you know, you got a hundred X to growth or whatever. And so we have this incentive structure that we all live in. And so ultimately, we're going to follow those incentives, but not just that, you know, they're going to be perversion of those incentives. Right. So now it's not just hit the metrics next quarter.

5:57It's, you know, what are the easiest metrics we can possibly hit for the next quarter? That sort of thing. And or what is the most audacious thing we can absolutely hit so that, you know, our investors have a 10x return on their investment. And so I think we kind of put ourselves in this situation, right? You know, we kind of look around and say, how do we get here? It's like, well, we put ourselves here, you know, and it's only partially our fault. You know, it's how we evolve. You know, we evolve this way to cooperate with each other so we can build societies. And we did that, but we haven't stopped.

6:26And so here we are. I think that nugget around cooperation is really interesting, too, because it's all about aligning incentives, to your point. And it can sometimes be challenging to kind of cut through the noise. We get so much signal today about, oh, this matters, that matters, let alone just speaking about the amount of information our, frankly, lowly evolved monkey brains are trying to handle. How do you cut through that noise and find not the metrics that don't matter, but the ones that do? Yeah, it's reorienting ourselves to what we're trying to achieve. I like to talk to my teams about being outcome driven.

7:00And I think one of the key mistakes we make when we talk about metrics is we tend to think about the inputs. right you know how many hits to the page do we get right i mean those things are useful for leading indicators but you know really thinking about what are the outcomes and focusing on those all the time relentlessly i think what you'll find is that the a lot of the metrics and the inputs we use to sort of try to get to those are changing right because the environment is changing all the time and so being focused on the outcomes and not what the inputs are are going to be like the most important North Stars for your teams.

7:36Do you also think about it as looking at the inputs as connected to those outputs? Or do you most say, hey, let's focus on the output and work backwards? How do you think about it? I think it's helpful to start with the outputs and work backwards. Because if you start with inputs, you make a lot of assumptions, right? And when you make a lot of assumptions, and you know, they may be true, but they may not be true, right? But if you start from the outcomes and work your way backwards, it's hard to kind of go wrong that way. Let's go run this experiment, see what it does. And I can go, okay, like, why did that happen?

8:05Let's understand. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, and the other thing is, you know, again, because we're evolved brains, we have a trouble deciphering, you know, causation from correlation, right? You get inputs, you start there and it's like, oh, this is correlated to this thing. It's like, yeah, but it didn't actually cause it. There's something else going on there. We don't know what it is. And so now we're busy moving that front end metric, but not really, you know, moving the needle on that outcome in the way in a degree of control we would like because we're unaware of what's going on in the middle.

8:37So starting from the outcome and working your way backwards is always a better idea. What are those outcome metrics that you think product and engineering teams should be focused on? It kind of depends on the stage of the company you're in and, you know, what your what your business is looking looking towards and looking to achieve. but I mean, you know, thinking about, you know, the average business, if you're talking about, you know, profits, that's a big one we haven't been talking about over the past 15 years, what we are now. You know, what does it take to drive an actual profitable business and kind of work your way backwards from there?

9:07And, you know, you're probably dealing with, well, what are your customers going to actually pay for? And how much are they going to pay for it? And why would they actually do that? Right? Are you delivering value to them? And, you know, none of these things are things that have to do with, you know, the funnel and things like that. Like, again, those are inputs and you should track those. But ultimately, I think you want to like keep those outcomes front of mind. So how do you build that focus on your team so that they're actually thinking about the right keys? Yeah, focus is super important.

9:39I think one of the things, particularly as senior leaders, we need to do is kind of recognize that our day-to-day thoughts are not the same as our ICs and frontline managers day-to-day thoughts. And so we have a lot of things to kind of keep in our head because we're always thinking about, you know, the far off future. But on any given day for your ICs and line managers, there's probably two things worth thinking about and probably one thing worth acting on. And so the way I tend to talk about it with my teams is, all right, this is a very simple device, but I find it helpful. It's like, all right, your number one your number one priority is thing one.

10:16Your number two priority is thing one. Your number three priority is thing two. Everything else is on the backlog. Now, this is obviously ridiculous, right? It's a mental framing. It's a mental framing that if you challenge your people to think about this every single day, it really gives them a sense of clarity that they wouldn't otherwise have, right? It gives them permission to not think about other things that are just not relevant or not the focus of the business today. And once you have those people focused, and then obviously this assumes you're prioritizing the right things and the right things are in the right order, you'll be surprised how fast people can move.

10:54Totally. And I just spoke with Rob Zuber from CircleCI, and he was talking about this too a little bit where he's saying, a lot of my job is helping people prioritize and giving them context. And then also providing context to other folks in the organization. And I see that same thread in what you're saying. How do we help our teams have the context they need to be focused on the right priorities? Because there's so much change that happens. Maybe it's going to be aliens are truly here. Who knows? And we need to make sure they're prepared for shifts by giving them context, helping them understand that shifts will happen, and then make the right decisions.

11:30Okay, we're moving faster, we're focusing on output metrics. How do we know if the outputs are right? How do we know if we're moving fast in the right direction? Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, and I'm glad you mentioned direction because, you know, we talk a lot about velocity and just moving quickly. And I think a lot of teams get caught up in moving quickly that they, you know, forget that they need to have a direction as well. That's right. They're on the treadmill of doom, essentially. Right. Moving real fast, looking real busy, but ultimately not getting to the outcomes they want.

12:02So that's why it's important to keep those outcomes front of mind because you know if you're getting close or not because you can kind of measure your progress towards them. So you can easily burn out a team for a year and accomplish absolutely nothing. And then the idea is like, oh, you work really hard, but we didn't actually achieve what we wanted to because, you know, I as a leader did not give you the right context and I give you the right prioritization. I just kept you busy for 12 months. And so, you know, we see that all the time, actually. Is that something you've personally experienced kind of learned from?

12:31Oh, yeah. I mean, I've experienced it, you know, as an IC in my career. I probably made some hard decisions that, you know, weren't the right decisions, particularly early in my leadership career. You know, just kind of making sure teams are really busy, but me, myself, not being able to kind of focus them on the right things, either because I didn't know what the prioritized things were or I didn't communicate it well enough. Right. I mean, all of these things are factors, but, you know, these are all lessons I, you know, draw from every day. Yeah, that constant learning and growth is so crucial.

13:02I'm curious, how do you think you should communicate this priority in context to your teams? What's the effective way that you've found to do it? It depends on the culture of the team. But written communication is really great. Meetings are good. You want to make sure you gather teams, especially for really important information. But what I've found, particularly teams of engineers, is that people really need to sit with information. you know kind of think about it think about what it means you know for their world so i really like written communication as well but also frequent communication um the joke i always tell you know leaders on my team is i need to say things so many times that i need to get sick and tired of saying it then i need to say it three more times then people will actually start to act on it that's that's good advice that i should probably listen to more yeah that uh that second that third time to say it again, I'm like, I really have to.

13:56Yes, yes. Because the focus that you have on that, you're like, oh, I've been hearing this from senior leadership for a while. I've been aware of this. But to your point earlier, your ICs, your developers, your PMs, they are in it. They are saying, hey, I have this one priority and you're helping them get on that priority. But it's hard for them to spend that time on the context that you do. And it's a very different role. So I'm pretty sure you bring that up because I think that is a challenge for a lot of us. Yeah, and it's not a defect, right? If your team is focused on the right things, it's going to take a lot to move them off of those priorities and get them focused on something else, right?

14:35And it should take a lot, right? You know, some Joe Schmo middle manager shouldn't be able to walk into a conference room or hop onto the Zoom and say, now you're focused here and all the stuff you've been doing for the past six months is out the window because someone said something, right? So it should take a lot to kind of move that focus and concentration. How do you deal with teams that are getting the wrong input somehow? Maybe they misunderstood the context or maybe you and your leadership failed in communication at some point. How do you realign that? Yeah, that's a good one. I think it starts with first acknowledging that.

15:08When those situations happen, there tends to be a big blame game that goes around. Who messed up? How do we get here? You should retro if you think that's important. but as a leader, I have to take ultimate accountability regardless of where it went wrong. It's on me. So I need to readjust, acknowledge to the team that I haven't been effective in setting those priorities appropriately and just being very clear about what my priorities are now and what the business's priorities are and be very clear about the things that they have permission to stop working on. A lot of times that's what people want to hear as well.

15:42It's like, I hear you, Johnny, we should be focusing on X, Y, Z but I've been doing this are you telling me I can just stop working on that? How should I think about it? You need to be specific about that and give people permission to do that. I think that's something to think about. I like that you're bringing up written communication here too because it increases clarity and it makes something people can look back to. To your point, maybe if something's unclear they can respond, hopefully. Whereas if you do it in a meeting, maybe you think you have communicated this and also this is a mistake I made early in my career as a manager.

16:18I was like, oh, I had a meeting with them. I talked to them about it. But did I write it down? Did I really clarify? Did they make sure they understand it? I asked them to restate it back to me how the priority stack worked. Because I found myself spending a lot of time being frustrated about how those priorities were still misaligned. I was like, I've been doing the communication. And I had to sit with it and realize, oh, I'm doing the wrong type of communication for the situation. Yeah, the wrong type of communication. I've been there before as well as, oh yeah, I just synced with such and such two days ago.

16:49We should be good, right? And it's like, no, it didn't work. You need to be a bit more deliberate. And sometimes, you know, delivering that communication in a one-on-one setting is not the best idea because, you know, you don't have any witnesses, especially if you didn't write anything down. It's just like, did you really say that? You know, that person forgot. You talk to them, then you moved on mentally because you have a hundred things going on. And so you don't revisit it. You just assume things are kind of moving in place, but they're not. so you know making sure that you're prioritizing that communication with the group written communication following up in one-on-ones to make sure that people understood it in a way that you understand it is important but kind of leading with that is not necessarily the best idea this is also where you need to understand your team's strengths weaknesses too right like sometimes you'll have a team member who's incredible memory they're like okay i think it was prioritization yeah and you bring in a new team member and you expect the same thing maybe you even bring them in a leadership role and it's a different style of communication.

17:44That adaption understanding of that is kind of crucial sometimes. And sometimes it's just the wrong fit, frankly, too. How do you make those kind of tougher calls when you're saying, hey, I'm trying to provide this context but it's not getting through. What do you do when there's that struggle happening? I feel like all my answers are, oh, it depends. Context matters, I think that's fair to say. If it's not getting through, there's got to be a specific reason. Either there's a competing priority that you haven't explicitly given people permission to not prioritize, or someone on your leadership team is delivering conflicting priorities.

18:23There's something else there that's not quite clear. Your decision-making framework is maybe off. I was going to mention a book by that journalist who used to work for Newsweek, and he used to work at HubSpot for a while. And he talked about a situation where he sat with the CEO of HubSpot and gave him permission to go like work on a thing. And then, you know, he came out and then like his boss was like, yeah, we're not going to do that. And he's like, wait, the CEO told me. He's like, what kind of place is this where the CEO says a thing can happen, but then like no one can listen. No one listens to them and there are no consequences.

18:58So anyway, that's a clear breakage in like how decisions get made. And it's not clear how that happens. And so if that happens in your organization, then yeah, people won't pick up on that clarity and those priorities. This can be really tough in founder-led organizations too, where you create this almost cult of personality around a founder. And it's like, oh, their decision goes. But sometimes the founder is lacking context too. Sometimes there's information the other team members have. And creating these communications and making sure that there's two-way flow of it is really crucial. But to your point, it can be hard to say, well, I mean, I was told to do this.

19:34and in the end I kind of have to do it. How do you think teams should navigate these kind of tricky communications where maybe you have context that you think you can provide as a leader and you're like, I don't think this director from the C-suite is right. How would you approach that situation? Well, don't communicate to your team. I think as a leader you need to figure out how to get in alignment with the C-suite. You don't want to deliver context or information to your team that is like, well, we've been told to do this. I think I disagree. It's a stupid man. Yeah, you put the people who work for you in a very precarious situation, right?

20:13Because they kind of want to please you as, you know, you're their boss. And so because they know what you want, but there's the mandate from on high. And then they're just like, oh, who do I listen to in this moment, right? Because at the end of the day, you're going to do their performance reviews. And so you really put them in a weird situation. So I would say don't communicate the ambiguity there. Align with the C-suite. I think ultimately as leaders, we just have to be comfortable with the fact that we won't always agree with what our bosses want us to be doing or mandating. And it's on us to either get into alignment or debate, but commit regardless of whether or not you agreed.

20:52And that's the job. Disagree and commit. That's crucial in a lot of these situations. What are other key lies you think we're telling ourselves as product and engineering organizations? One of the smaller ones I'm talking about in the talk is, you know, we need to refactor, right? This one comes up all the time, and I'm making fun of the engineers here. And I talk about three categories of lies, and this one is one of the delusions, right? You really, really do believe it, right? In your heart and soul, you believe it needs to be done. but really it doesn't. It's delivering the impact it needs to.

21:31It would be nice to refactor it. It's a brand new programming language, brand new framework. It'll make your developers happy. You'll look busy for a while. But the fact of the matter is, if you can't quantify the impact, positive impact to the business or customers, then you probably shouldn't do it. Ultimately, the dark secret here is that even with the modernization of banks being fintech companies, ultimately their call stacks lead to a mainframe somewhere. And so nobody wants to touch that. Yeah, there's that very famous XKCD comic of this giant technology stack and one senior engineer who knows Unix who's doing this little piece here and when they're gone, uh-oh.

22:16Yeah, exactly, exactly. What are the other delusions? You mentioned two other categories that we're kind of telling ourselves. Yeah, so there's the bold-faced lie. That's the easiest. That's just, you know, it's not true. You know it's not true. Your boss knows it's not true. You know, these are the ones that can get you in trouble, right? You know, misreporting earnings and users and all this other stuff. Then there's the betrayal, right? This is the one you know deep down inside is not true, but you have trouble articulating it, and you operate it in a world where you actually believe it. Interesting.

22:50Can you give me an example of what a betrayal looks like? If you build it, they will come. The idea that, yeah, I'm going to build this thing, it's going to be great. If you, like me, are in the audience and listening here and are a little triggered by some of these things, I'd say just sit with that, think about the impact. Johnny, I appreciate you bringing this up because you're holding our feet to the fire a little bit here. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's all it's all done in love. Right. Because, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. And, you know, over the past 10 years or so with, you know, 0 % interest rates, we've just gotten really out of hand and we're suffering the consequences of it right now.

23:30A lot of folks, you know, built their careers in an era that is just not reflective of kind of normal times where we're actually trying to build businesses to generate profit and deliver real value to users. And so they're finding themselves kind of struggling right now to know how to how to proceed. Right. You know, startups are shutting down. You know, venture capital money just really isn't there like it used to be. Just people are really struggling and they're searching within themselves for solutions. And, you know, I think we have to kind of show ourselves a little bit of grace here. But, you know, it's kind of time to wake up to reality and kind of, you know, take everything in stride.