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

25:39I mean, it's definitely a mixed bag of that stuff. I think like, but there are smart people. You sign 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 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 such a nerd. I just like really love tech. Like I'm in this industry because I'm just like actually genuinely very interested and certain corners, not every corner of technology, but certain corners of technology.

26:17I just like, I wanna know, I wanna know what the latest stuff that's happening and databases and infrastructure. And, you know, I just, I find it all very interesting and I find the problems interesting. So I think that makes me very successful because I just have that natural curiosity and passion and interest in it. 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 the Sky Levels IO on Twitter. Have you heard of this guy? He was just on Lex Friedman. Have you listened to that yet? I think maybe I saw a clip of him.

26:46Okay, okay. 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, no JS, learn Python. And I'm like, I'm too busy to build, 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 Neo Streamers. Yeah, no. I mean, look, I actually, I feel like I know a lot of smart engineers who are in that category.

27:21They're like, we built amazing things in PHP and, you know, relatively simple SQL and so much of tech is over -engineering things and, you know, and I think it, I don't totally show doesn't always work in a scaled organization. For better, for worse, for a different, like, you know, you've got to, you know, you've got to match like what makes one person really productive? Will it make a hundred people, a thousand people, even ten people, really productive? You know, it's always a little, that's always a little hard to tell. 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 fat.

28:15I 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 balancing 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 through a little bit of, and to kind of nerds night be 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, I'm very excited but this is not good.

28:52I will say this, one, 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 be fine and it just doesn't ever seem to work out that well for anybody who actually does it in practice.

29:55Again obviously it can work out that well because you know Facebook has made a great go of it on 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 or 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 don't forget it's actual name, Peter, I think. Sure, though, 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.

30:31And that's not necessarily going to be the best product. That's true. Although I will say that some of the most time -wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? For 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 a big company that doesn't have the rest of the context set. So, you know, I, but I don't think he's not wrong. I also just think like big companies, you know, share the blame on that one. I guess we should all just come back to PHP and JQuery and maybe simple.

31:09Maybe. 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? 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. 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 a 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 and some of them are still particularly good managers and look there have 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 and maintain that tech savvy.

32:18Don'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 he risked to think about or some way to tell you that you maybe you've hidden at that point? You know, I think this has been since disproven, but yeah, there was for 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 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.

32:54But I felt like I took several years of hands on work in a very intense undergraduate and graduate programs for me. So I do think it's probably a somewhere in the 10 -year range of really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and really understanding how to be a technical expert. Got it. 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 I mentioned many people are not doing that. And then in your experience, not doing what it could be.

33:34I mean, if you were programming a lot in high school and you got an undergraduate degree So, 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, on E3, they are just out, you know, 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 at a big company and somebody's like, you have great communication skills, why don't you start to become a manager?

34:07are often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager, which is actually also the worst, worst sort of path to real leadership in my opinion. If you don't feel like you've done, also if you just don't feel like you're done, if you're still having fun writing code, don't rush becoming a manager, writing code is awesome. Have fun. It's your way. I know exactly what you mean. I used to be an engineer actually. I was an engineer for 10 years. 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.

34:40That was very hard to give up. Imagine you still missed that. You know, I think I might have forgotten about it at this point. Yeah. But there is nothing satisfying as 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, Coda is my go -to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done. And Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OCRs with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas, you can also access hundreds of pressure -tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision -making frameworks.

35:39See for yourself by companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics. Run on Coda. Take advantage of this special, limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda .io slash Lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda .io slash Lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan coda .io 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 am sorry surprised by like oh man?

36:20I did not see this as part of my job of life Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few things. I do think assuming that they're actually trying to do it well, I do think there are a lot of people who live in a 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 be, own your time more and more, the more senior you become as a manager.

36:57I think individual contributors often think that if they become a manager, they will still have some of the freedom that they have as a senior and a visual contributor, but then they'll also be able to tell people what to do and they'll have all this authority. The reality is 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 help make things better. And that usually doesn't mean that you're making all the decisions. It usually doesn't mean that you snap your fingers and people jump.

37:40You know, 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. 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, PMs trying to have all the ideas, right? Like, you know, no, you've got all these brilliant people working for you on a team. Your job as a manager is on to tell them what to do in every single case, occasionally, yes.

38:14A lot more and do trying to convince them of what you think should happen in some ways. You're sort of nudging, you're encouraging, you're directing, you're setting guardrails for processes or behaviors or whatever. But it's just, it's not this glorious, fearless leader, I make all these decisions and everyone looks up to me and And it's awesome kind of job. It's a much more grueling, much more, 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 management, particularly management when done well, when you're really trying to do it in a thoughtful kind, but also productive way, is a very hard job.

39:05I wonder if engineering is where the highest percentage of people are moving to management move back to IC. I've seen that a bunch and I wonder if engineers are the most common. I don't know, but after realizing what you just said is true. Do you not think product managers also do this? I think product managers also suffer from exactly this kind of... They do? They do. 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.

39:45PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to like, they're just so helpful. Like, it wants to do with this. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I have to say, I just like my ex -engine years are such a big. They are all pre -vidadas. They are all nuts. I love I love it. I am an engineer, but like he at my Appearance are more fun to manage by experience so actually you have a point you know but I wonder yeah Because I haven't seen a lot of PM managers 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.

40:30Yeah Yeah. 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. Yeah, so to be clear, you should have one on ones with your direct reports in 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 of the ones, one of the ones of the people that you are directly managing and with your own manager.

41:09But I think there is this, I think, I don't know if it's the remote work, you know, sort of explosion that's happened or it's big companies or what. But what I have seen, and I've heard a lot of friends that many companies are kind of complaining 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 I think that this is just not a scalable approach, right?

41:48Like the 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, 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 -slaunch company. I also think that people think that one -on -ones will solve all of their problems. And I think the reality is like, you know, we have, you have this one of 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, they don't really care about what you're doing.

42:37They're actually may not like it that you're asking them for a one -on -one. Let me show up because it's like, okay, well, I should do this to be a good, you know, 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 -one, particularly when you use them for a sake of stakeholder management. So when you're meeting with people that's not your team, but like other stakeholders, you know, that you manage 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'd go out and try to platforms as a big part of what my job has been in the last many years.

43:06Having 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, they're happy or unhappy with things. Your unhappy stakeholders kind of are 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 say, trust me, because I'd cite these other one -on -ones with all these people. And they're saying, it's fine. And it just kind of sounds whiny.

43:37And so, you know, when you're dealing with a lot of stakeholders, I think trying to 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. I just want to just say 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, 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.

44:24This is a little bit of my personality. I'm not a great like, I'm not a great like company networker. Like, you know, some people are really good. It's like, let's go to get coffee, let's go to lunch and let's like hang out and build a relationship. But honestly, those people are really successful in many ways that I am not. I do sort of envy that skill. I'm really good if I work with you. If I work with you on something, generally speaking, people really come to respect me because I'm very engaged and I'm a really good collaborator in various ways. But I'm really bad at just getting to know you random one on one where we don't have a purpose to the meeting.

44:57And that's not to say those are always bad. But I do think that a lot of people with that's your comfort zone. I felt 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 you know, 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. It's kind of pulling us threat of how you operate and how you work.

45:30Something 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 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. And it's hard to figure out what the most important things are.

46:05But older work 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 jingent buyer. And I was, man, I have mixed feelings about that, although I get what you're saying. If you don't regularly reset your expectations of 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?

46:41I just think, and the thing about that is it's not firing people where you do it once or twice and you regret it and you learn pretty quickly, unfortunately. I think you actually have to kind of regularly test the circumstances and challenge yourself

46:58with like, am I really getting the most out of myself? Am I really producing the best value? Or am I just making, swaging my internal guilt about like, I need to work 60 hour weeks and you to sleep in the office, and you 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 do does change over time. But you're never, if you're not regularly doing an audit of your time 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.

47:53And, okay, you don't want to work less. You love working a lot. That's fine. But you could probably be just beginning a lot more valuable stuff done if you would do these audits regularly, right? I also think people don't delegate enough. And 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 I'll surprise you and they're better at it than you are but you know maybe not and so you have to teach them but then you finally you freed yourself up to scale.

48:28So I guess I'm just like I'm just a real believer that working hard in a focused way for 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 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?

49:22You know, I think 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 it 4 p .m. or something, what's it? And I am not, or I'm not going to let myself work this weekend. Forcing yourself to log off, forcing yourself to like have have, you know, sort of boundaries and saying what a, you know, and then doing out of it, 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 that's one of the best ways to do it is really just saying, like, I'm going to law off.

50:04I'm going to law 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, 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.

50:36That meant I was like, not, you know, this was free, free, 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 night. I just want to get this done. And it meant that I didn't do quite as many copies. I didn't go to lunch and chat with people 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 learning those skills earlier in your career and then continuing to apply them throughout your career is another piece of advice.

51:16In 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, like, you know, I have my, my, my, my caffeination rituals. Same or? Well, I mean, like I, 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 half a needed water also. Um, you know, I have like a diet coke at lunch. So I have like these like sort of rituals of like, you know, my, my caffeine hits that helped me. I have to be in a quiet place.

51:55I do find like non music that is like, like I really like 4Tec, 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 used to help us. 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 diacoe because she thinks of the sugar and it is not good but I still drink it sometimes and it works.

52:36I switched to green tea. That's my approach. Start with black tea and then switch to green tea. That's smart. Oh man, there's so many things you share that I wanted to dig into. Let me share a A couple things, the 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, like, you just, you're never gonna scale if you don't delegate. Yeah, and it's hard to start learning to do that, but once you get good at it, it becomes so great.

53:12I love just delicate everything every time. And people enjoy it. They're like 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 hit Elon Musk as 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 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.

53:45You'll have to figure out your own metrics, but I definitely think testing the limits, it's scary, though. I'm going to be honest. Like, doing that is always scary. It brings up, like, you know, I forgot to finish the assignment. Nightmares of school, you know, especially for the overachievers that often end up in these kinds of companies and jobs. But again, you gotta do things that scare you or you're never gonna grow. Okay, I'm gonna 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.

54:22A lot of people are thinking about moving to a platform team or struggling working on a platform team or struggling working with a platform team. Save 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 that are often slow, they're often pushing us to compromise on features to adopt their systems, they often get infinite funding, even though they haven't, they don't have to show any ROI.

54:56And 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 friendie in Nolan is that so many platform teams are guilty of all the things that he's complaining about that that that my friend was complaining about that like they don't listen. They're not delivering effectively. They are not explaining. leaning their value to the company.

55:33And it is infuriating when you're dealing with that. And honestly, I'm very sympathetic. 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 problem's 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, 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.

56:15And 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 cards of that team that arm 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. This is annoying, but sometimes it needs to happen because a lot of companies, I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset, and you probably need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms.

56:54A lot of companies just don't do this. they don't believe that they should waste headcount on product managers for intral 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 sort of going 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 have a product team, oftentimes you can kind of leave them from the side in that way.

57:25And so I think that's another approach that I would take when you're in that situation. You'll find the parts of the team that are working working well with your team and make sure you develop those relationships and try to just get over the anger and frustration and just be clear about what it is that you need and help them understand 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 them.

58:03Yeah. That's awesome advice. Okay, 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 very strongly believe with that platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team, and you only have more operation systems, engineers, DevOps, SRE, which I realize there are some SREs that are software engineers, but they tend to not want to write big software. I think you're missing the picture.

58:40Platform engineering is not just maintaining cloud infrastructure and doing small scripts or blueprints or enablement projects for other teams. Because that doesn't really create a cohesive and coherent platform. It doesn't create products. Frankly, platforms are products ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive. So you need software engineers. Yes, you need sort of operation 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. I've really developed out that practice in the companies that I've worked for doing this.

59:32Because I'm 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 or 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, you know, when it comes to structuring a team, recognize like this is not just like SREV2.

1:00:09This 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 that's what everybody on the internet is talking about, whether it's VC funded or big company. We actually 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 through whatever it is we're building?

1:00:53Are we reducing the cycle time for engineering tasks? Are we solving problems that are preventing products from launching and scaling? All right, are we making really meaningful cost reductions or efficiencies in our platforms? These are some examples of 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 make sure it works. And it's like, no, you actually do still have to do. You have to do that OKR stuff for goal setting or, you know, whenever you've got to take a lot of the best practices of product, it's a little different in the internal world, but it's still very important if you want to do platforms.

1:01:45On 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. like that's where you could have some of the highest leverage because platform teams enable the rest of the company to move faster. 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, so much of the work in a platform team is not exactly product work.

1:02:19Like a lot of it's like, you know, scaling or really like deep kind of technical. I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing or I've got to do this performance efficiency. And you don't always need a product spec for that. It's often just a very engineering heavy task. And so yes, I think the ratios do tend to be a bit different. So we do over 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 of platform engineering is like, 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.

1:03:07So a lot of the teams that people think about nowadays, and when they're talking about platform cubes, they're talking a lot about teams that may have formerly been called like like DevTools, for example, so you are CICD tooling for the company. The lot of the cloud infrastructure provisioning and tooling, if your company with certain technical problems, you may very well be like building semi -bispoke 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 as a part of a platform offering.

1:03:54I 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, you develop or truly stuff and and products, so like billing platforms, for example. If you have a single billing platform for all of the different products in your company, that's all, that sure is a lot of overlaps in the challenges of those more dev tools, infrastructure -replatform teams, because you're probably supporting lots of different product lines that are using the system that needs to be able to scale with certain efficiencies.

1:04:31You need to still do the product discovery. you probably have a little bit more of a business product focus than the pure internal tools teams, but that gets the blend in area. For founders that are earlier stage or companies that are smaller, hearing this and they're like, oh, should I do any 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 tends to be like, you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are, you know, 10 engineers, right?

1:05:14But when you are have like sort of, 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 have GitHub and somebody's making sure that all of that stuff is sort of working. You have a few cloud databases and you got a couple people on these teams and they share nodes to figure out what's going on or whatever. Okay, it's all good. But at some point you hit either a lot of the efficiency where you're seeing 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.

1:05:58It just seems like why do I have three people on 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 like developer productivity, like every development team is trying to do it their own way. and everybody's just super slow because you just can't get code released and all has to be coordinated across every different team and it's just like what is going on. You need to fix that or you actually have a technical challenging area that needs sort of a focused team to fix the scaling.

1:06:36Those are some of the signs that you may want to start thinking about a platform team, but it's like generally speaking, I would not jump into it early. It should, you know, this is something for companies that have matured where there is, it's worth investing in making people, you know, internally kind of more productive and centralizing certain functions just from a cost and efficiency basis 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 If you're an engineer, certainly if you're an engineer or an engineering manager, you've got to remember that half of the work is actually the operational quality, operational excellence of these things.

1:07:26Platform engineering is not just writing code and then throwing it over the walls to someone. Being interested and passionate about the operational challenges and scaling bits of systems, I do think it's like fairly important if you want to be a great platform engineer from a software engineer perspective. If you're more like a product manager, look, you've got to really care about, you've got to be really both interested in kind of working with really smart engineers who are going to know way more than you do about things. and almost being a really good, not necessarily zero to one, but like past one person, because actually a lot of the best platform type offerings and companies start in individual application teams.

1:08:19Like 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 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 wanna 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.

1:08:56I think that's gonna, you know, you'll be happier in that circumstance. Stan. Awesome. Is there anything else along these lines before we wrap up and yet they're very exciting waiting around that you think might be helpful for folks working platform teams, working on a platform team, building platform teams. I think there are 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.

1:09:45It'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. 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 EKS view, one, one nine to one to one or whatever, right? And that may require like changes in code and then that's a real pain in the bud for all the application teams. So people who are interested in how to smooth over the customer and company impact of this underlying change, I think will be very happy in platform teams.

1:10:34If 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 how his product is a platform partner is to 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 and 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.

1:11:10I could do it better in some cases, right? There's actually a big part of the job, particularly as either product managers or engineering leadership is stakeholder management and really learning how to do that well. 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 I can just to the fun tech stuff or like the cool product stuff. I'm really passionate about engineering productivity or I'm really passionate about scale storage systems.

1:11:49And I don't want to think about any other stuff. You may not actually be happy in the long run in leadership positions. It may be fine as an individual contributor, but 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's the that's the that's the fast listen to anybody who's interested the my book will be coming out in the next couple months from O 'Reilly and amazing covers all this at depth. Yeah is there dates specifically people should watch out for?

1:12:25I 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 leaders something like that but I think the 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 for some. Okay, amazing. So you can pre -order it now, rolling to it obviously on the show notes and description. It's called platform engineering. Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, I want to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast that I call AI Corner.

1:12:55AI 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. So the question is, just as there anything you've found AI to be helpful with in your AI or 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 phrase, 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 put it in the chat CBT and be like, can you reframe this? Can you rephrase this for me?

1:13:30Doesn't always work well, but 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 end like small. I think it's large, large box of text I haven't, I haven't had as much luck with. I'm a little bit of AI novice still, I would say. 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 some social media thing is like did Francis Ford Coppola get like fake reviews from like chat GPT of the new what is it?

1:14:12Megopolis yeah, yeah, yeah, and And I was like, you know, I actually had that scenario where I was like I need a I was looking for quotes for the book and I was like, maybe the chat GBT knows, but I was like, you can give me any good quotes on like, I forget what it was. What's to say? It was on complexity, managing complexity or something like that. And again, it gave me this really interesting quote that's like, that's great, but I better double check that. And they were not real. They were never real. Not a single quote, I mean, like, that's not actually a real quote. Oh, yes, if you're right, that's not.

1:14:44So here's a different one. It's like, that's still not a real quote.

1:14:50So, or if you do, make sure it's a real quote and not just an interestingly phrased, you summarize, I mean, good summarization in some ways of like the text it was sort of quoting from, just not an actual quote. That's a good reminder of just generally, don't assume what it's telling is true. Like generally it's not giving you real things, it's making things up, and usually the 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 feed it in there? Is it just, here's a line help me come up with a better version of it?

1:15:26No, I am not figured out the prop engine. Actually, I had, I tried to get it to summarize a paper from the other day and like it just saw, it 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. They're like, well, you know, first I told the AI that it was like an expert in the field and I didn't need to read carefully and that it was really smart. I'm just like, I don't, how do I have to manage the machine? But I already have to manage all these humans. It's like, why are you making me manage machines now, too?

1:15:58Please. I thought this was going to solve all of our problems. Yeah, the role. There's an acronym for how to approach engineering. There's always give it the role. Here's the role you're going to play for me. You are an amazing writer. Here's what I want for me. I'm also very bad at it. By the way, Klata here is really good at writing. That's like one of its superpowers. So if you want to try writing, let's work on the idea. On the second point, you made a fake quote. So yeah, Francis for 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, all his other movies that got father and stuff.

1:16:36And 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. And they actually took down on the trailer. I just read because he's just making up quotes by famous critics. Wow. Well, so, you know, that was chat GPT. You can get fooled. I don't know if it was chat GPT or or a cheeky intern or something. We can get or very intentional marketing extent or that. Yeah. Anyway, with that, Camille, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes. Amazing. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that recommended most to other people.

1:17:15So the first one is what got you here will 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 Wind Things Followup Art by Pemma 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 Are you really enjoying it?

1:18:08I loved Alien Romulus. It was great. You like a scary Alien movie? Fantastic. And I hate scary movies. So that's a new Alien movie, OK? Anyone else? I love it. Awesome. Is there a favorite product you recently discovered? You really love whether it's an app or even physical product? So I love the 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 fangirl 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.

1:18:50So 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, your family, find useful and work her in life? 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. And seeing open -minded and being willing to be wrong, you know, I think the happier you'll be.

1:19:23and the battery will be as a leader for sure. Final question on the topic of working out. You're blocking it with your head generally during the podcast when you moved behind you as a very significant looking barbell set or dumbbell set, I don't know which ones which talk about your work out regiment or anything along the lines of how you work out. I have been lifting rates probably for a longer than some of your podcasts as listeners have been alive, which says more about my age and then we can all expect. 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 and I was just a very, very strong person.

1:20:11Now of course everybody's into weight lifting, which makes the gym really annoying. So partly why I have a set in here, a small set with a baby sized bar is, that. 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, they've lived squat overhead press. That's that kind of, you know, very simple, the classic lifts. Okay. Amazing. Camille, this is awesome. It was everything I was hoping it'd be. We covered so much stuff. Two final questions. Working folks find you online. If they want to reach out, follow up on stuff and check at your books and how can listeners be useful to you?

1:20:51Yes. So with the weird state of social media now, that's actually a harder question to answer than it normally is. I do, 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. I also have, still use a medium when I write action like medium. So medium .com. Scamiel is my username. Those are two good ways. I have a Twitter or Sasha gets X account that is currently locked and I may not unlock it at some point. But you know social media as I said I've got has gotten weird.

1:21:28So I think probably LinkedIn is the easiest way for this kind of stuff. And I read somewhere that Scamiel is rooted in your love of Scott music back when you were younger. It was true. Yes, it was from high school. I was a big scoff fan. It's funny how our user names just like stick from we were really young. And that's like the way we were represented online now forever. Yeah. It's absurd. 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.

1:22:01I love when 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 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. Like if you're looking for people potentially to come talk to your company about platform engineering, I could be interested in that. But I always love to meet interesting people if you're in New York You know reach out who knows best this you know this has been an amazing Amazing time getting to chat with you Lenny.

1:22:40Thank 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's Podcast .com. See you in the next episode!