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

I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most. Hording credit. PMs, they tend to be the front facing person for initiatives. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work, because the PM takes all the glory and all the credit for the project, that they really worked very hard on. I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting. The next thing that engineers really get annoyed about with PMs, when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter, it just shows a real lack of empathy for the work that engineers are doing. I think it really can be very off-putting. Is there any insight you can give about what people may be misadvent, the motivation of engineers, what gets them excited? A lot of people assume that engineers just write code and don't underestimate the ability for your engineers to want to understand the business problem, want to understand the customer problem. I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. Today, my guest is Camille Fornier. Camille is one of the most respected technology executives in tech, and the author of The Managers Path, which many consider the definitive guide for navigating your career and moving into management. Over the course of her career, she was CTO of Renta Runway, VP of Technology at Goldman Sachs, Global Head of Engineering and Architecture at JP Morgan Chase, and Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma. She's also releasing a new book later this year called Platform Engineering, a guide for technical, product, and people leaders, which you can actually pre-order today, and we get into this topic in the latter half of the conversation. We also dig into what PMs do the most annoying engineers, and how to stop doing these things. Why major rewrites are often a trap? Why you may want to be doing fewer one-on-ones? What most surprises people when they become a manager, and some really useful heuristics for how long you should stay in IC before you make the leap into management, and tons more, this episode covers a lot of crown, and we'll help you think about management, platform teams, team culture, and the PM and end relationship in a whole new way. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Camille Fournier. Camille, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure. I want to start by asking you a question that is on the minds of a lot of product managers is how to be less annoying as a product manager. I know you work with a lot of engineers over time. I'm curious what it is that PMs do that annoy engineers most, and how can PMs stop doing that? I would say there are a few things that PMs do that annoy engineers. And to be clear, I am sure that engineers annoy PM best as much. So I know I realize this is a two-way street. So I think there's some things that are really easy to fix, and some things that are maybe a little bit harder. So the easy things to fix are hoarding credit. Sometimes I think PMs, because they tend to be the front-facing person for initiatives, they're talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work, because the PM sort of takes all the glory and all the credit for the project that they really kind of worked very hard on. And so making every effort to be kind of credit-sharing and inclusive at the engineering team and giving them the opportunity to speak about their contributions when it makes sense. I think those are all things that PMs can do to avoid that kind of, that that, what I consider, kind of a pretty easy annoyance. Just like don't afford all credit, this is not just you. There's a lot of work to go into that. I think that sort of dovetails into the next thing that engineers usually get annoyed about with PMs when they just don't understand the details and act like they don't matter. And I think this is just a little bit of a cultural difference. So like, if you are, even managers, just normal managers, people like me who are looking across really broad areas, or you have to be kind of big picture focused, and you forget that engineering done successfully really is all about the details. And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details. But when you act like they don't matter and you don't care about them, and it's just like, I don't care. Just like, tell me when you can get this done or why is it going to take so long? Oh my god, like, this just seems like such a little thing. You know, it just shows a real lack of kind of empathy for the work that engineers are doing. And I think it really can be very off-putting, even though I will totally agree that sometimes you're going to get details that don't really matter and you just have to be a little bit patient in those circumstances. Today's episode is brought to you by DX. If you're an engineering leader or on a platform team, at some point your CO will inevitably ask you for productivity metrics. But measuring engineering organizations is hard, and we can all agree that simple metrics like the number of PRs or commits doesn't tell the full story. That's where DX comes in. 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To try out Command Bar, you can sign up at commandbar.com/lennie, and you can unlock an extra 1000 AI responses per month for any plan. That's commandbar.com/lennie. By the way, Command Bar just changed their name to Command AI. The third is playing telephone. Any bloody and a manager role can fall victim to this, but I think PMs especially, because they'd be very annoying. So if you're being asked questions that you cannot answer, because you just don't know, because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have, but you just don't have. And you put yourself in this in-between position, where people ask you questions, you turn around, you ask the engineers questions, you take whatever they say, especially when you don't really understand it, which happens sometimes, right? Go back to the original asker and sort of get in this kind of middle-person scenario. I think that is very annoying, and frankly, it's kind of a waste of time for everyone. This is something that managers of all stripes do, but PMs definitely do it, and that drives engineers, particularly sort of senior engineers on projects crazy. And then the last one that I wanted to put on this list is, just when sometimes it feels like product managers want to hoard all the ideas for themselves, right? They want to be the ones that come up with every single sort of product idea, and every single detail. And what I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things, because engineers are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creative outlet. I'm going to spend a lot of time obsessing over the right framework or the right, this side or the other that may actually not matter that much for products delivery. But when you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, you just, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else, and it's actually kind of bad for the product. That's really interesting. The last one, so you're saying, if you keep engineers from having a voice in what you're building and prioritizing, that's what encourages engineers to rethink. Let's just rebuild this thing. Let's use any framework. Let's rewrite this system. Yeah. I mean, that's my, you know, that happens without you doing that, right? Sometimes. But I do think, I think when I see it worst, and I can basically always predict what I'm going to see a lot of that kind of engineers building stuff, you know, having finding creative outlets and kind of building stuff, maybe they shouldn't be. I'm going to find that in places where they are so, you know, quashed their creativity for the actual business or product that they're building and their voice in that is so ignored that they don't have any outlets in that space. And so they are going to use the space that they have an outlet in the place where they have some control. And that's usually the technology choices and the details there. That's fascinating. I want to actually dig further other into that around rewrites. You have a really interesting take on that. But before we get there, let me spend a little time on some of these. These are awesome. So on this team of not involving engineers in ideation and I coming up with what you're actually building, what have you seen? It's just very tactically. Is there anything you've seen a PM do super well? You know, I think the product managers that have done the best, they're not threatened by other people having ideas. That's threatened by the engineering team being full of smart people because they realize that like, yeah, like some of the engineers may have good ideas, but they still don't really know how to do the product job. Like at just my experiences, they're plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job that they would need to be successful. And when product managers take the time to build those relationships well, make sure that people do feel like they can both share their ideas, but also that they start to appreciate what the job of this product person actually is and what they're really bringing to the table in terms of really, how do we measure this input? How do we really understand the customers? How do we really think through the details of what's going to make this successful from a business or a customer perspective? I do think that creates just a much better interaction pattern. And then engineers can feel good about sharing ideas and understanding that many of them won't go anywhere, but like there's somebody that's actually going to listen and take the time to care about them. Coming back to some of the things that you said, annoy engineers about PMs, this idea of playing the middle person, sounds like the solution clearly is they're just connecting the engineer to the other engineer or your engineer to the PM that's trying to figure this out. That was not always easy, right? Because again, you have this tension of a lot of the job of any management role is being in meetings, right? And filtering stuff so that people who are in focus, individual contributor mode can focus and get things done and not spend half of their weekend meetings. You've just got to be very careful about knowing when you're crossing that line and when you're crossing it too often. And if you're having to often say, "Let me get back to you, let me get back to you," I don't know, let me get back to you. Maybe the person you're talking to is asking the wrong level of questions of you. Maybe you need to connect them to the engineers directly, but just being aware that that shouldn't be a default behavior. And we'll happen occasionally, but it shouldn't be a thing that happens a lot because if it's happening a lot, then you're likely missing something, you're likely losing something in that telephone game translation, and that's going to cause problems over time. Awesome. So basically, if you're just finding your middle person too much, then it may be time to connect people directly. And I know the reason PMs often are afraid of this is the engineer may agree to something that they think is a bad idea for their team or may not understand all the ramifications of the product or just obviously just spend their time in meetings and not be building with them. Yeah. And sometimes you do it in a group meeting. I feel like Slack and other chat type things actually make it a lot easier to kind of see, have the right people in a group in a thing, but again, that's distracting. So there's not an easy solution to that one. I think it's important to be aware of that. Yeah, that's a really good point. And then in terms of hoarding credit, does there anything, any tactical thing you've seen PMs do really well here? Is it just like every time they're announcing the product, hey, these engineers were involved there? More than just saying, thank you to all these people, but it's actually sometimes like stepping back and letting other people speak, especially if it's something that's a really, really big technical list. There's not, I don't think there's a super easy fix that because I think it is just like, just really being mindful that that can be very much a sore point for engineers when they just feel like, this is my work. I'm not getting any credit for it. And this person is hogging all the glory. I love that. I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting and announcing. And so I think that's a really good reminder is let your engineers be that. Okay, amazing. So we talked a little bit about this idea of rewriting and how engineers sometimes just want to rewrite the system. And I think a lot of PMs do too. A lot of times you're building your features on a thing that someone that doesn't even work at the company anymore built five, ten years ago. And there's always this sense of, okay, maybe we should just rewrite this thing. Everything will move so much faster. You have a really interesting take that I think a lot of PMs will have to hear, which is that rewrites are often a big trap. And often don't end up being what you think they might be. Can you just talk about your experience and perspective on this? Yeah. So I mean, I have personally overseen a number of, if not quite rewrites, rearchitectures and like major system evolutions. And so I absolutely do think they are sometimes a thing that needs to happen. But I also have seen so many instances of cases where the engineers have convinced themselves of the only solution to their, the woes they are experiencing with the system. It's hard to support. It's hard to change. You know, nobody wants to work on it because it's this old crappy technology is that they just have to go over to the side, build the new thing that will replace this system. And that is going to sort of free them from their misery. And I think projects where you acknowledge that you do need to do an uplift, but you make a very thoughtful staged plan as to how you're going to do that. And you, you really think through, okay, we don't need to touch all of this stuff, but we're going to, you know, we're going to take the recommendation system really needs to be uplifted. And that's a well contained, you know, API. And so we can, you know, start to fix that without having to like change the whole, whatever web framework, right? You know, so, so I do think like there, there are ways to do these evolutions, but people really underestimate, they underestimate the time to migrate stuff from the old system to the new system is a huge, huge problem, particularly when you're talking about systems where you have sort of external people, you know, using the system in some way, whether it's, you know, web UIs or, you know, APIs, you think, oh, we, we kind of know what's going on. So it's not going to be that big of a deal. Engineers notoriously notoriously, notoriously massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system. And that causes a lot of problems. By the way, you still have to support the old system while you're working on the new system, right? So I doubt many of the PMs in the audience are ever happy when they hear we need to go away for six months, eight years, two years to build this new thing. And we just can't really add any features to the system in the interim. Like that's inferior to my I'm sure. And frankly, that's a problem. And I don't know that that should be an acceptable answer in many cases. There may occasionally again be a case where that is what has to happen. But I think most of the time you, you can't really afford to just say we're going to go away and we're not going to touch the system for a long time. We're going to build something new over here. So many things about why that doesn't make any sense. So this is a little bit of field of like my, the blog post that you're referring to. But you know, so if you've got a system that doesn't really need feature enhancement or development because it's just sort of fine and the users are using it. And it's like, it's sort of like, it's just annoying to the engineers. Why in the world would you invest so much money in writing a new version of it? There's a little bit of like a cognitive dissonance that sometimes happens like if you mean to do new stuff and the old system literally is not, it's not possible to do the new stuff that you need to do. You need to figure out a path to get to a sustainable system where you can continue to add and evolve. You should be investing. And so there's a, you know, there, there doesn't need to be an investment. But you have to ask yourself like, if I could go away and not touch this and not do anything to it for a long period of time without it really harming my business, is it worthwhile to change it at all? Like, doesn't matter, you know, and there's, there's just a little, there's some questions there. I also think that when people try to do rewrites, particularly again, if it's something that you're really trying to just like move to a new language, for example, or, you know, sort of modernize in a certain way, a lot of times people really underestimate what the old system does and how well they know what the old system does. You know, there's so much logic buried in legacy systems. It tends to be undocumented. It tends to be weird. You haven't thought through all the business rules. You haven't thought through the, you know, the, the data, you know, the data formatting. And I think, you know, again, it's much, much harder to kind of replicate all the important things from the old system to the new system and people expect. So there's, you know, there's more than that. Like there are, I do think sometimes you need to evolve systems. And my advice would be when you're, when you're struggling, making an evolution plan, take pieces, potentially, of the old system, uplift them, you know, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, you know, clean up the tech debt. But trying to say we're going to just go away. We're going to rewrite. We're going to build something brand new. It's going to solve all our problems. It just very rarely works. I think a lot of PMs will be like, yes, thank you so much for saying this because I think that's also always a big struggle between the engine team and the PM team. So just to summarize with I think a lot of people miss, or what you're saying a lot of people miss when they're thinking about let's rewrite this thing is the migration to the new system, migrating customers users. data to the new things, going to take a lot longer than you expect. You underestimate knowing what it actually does, and you're going to miss features, and you can introduce new bugs. This actually is very similar to what I've seen with redesigning a whole product flow. There's always the sense of, let's just rethink this onboarding flow from scratch, or let's rebuild this part of the product. Always it ends up being a negative experiment result. It always ends up being less good. Then you have this spend all this time clawing back to get to where you were, and also you forget the features that you had. You're like, "Oh, shit, forgot about that feature, forgot about that feature." It's interesting, there's a very similar situation in the product side. Okay, amazing. I'm going to go to a slightly different topic, which is our engineering leadership. I know you've written a lot about engineering leadership. You spend a lot of time with engineering leaders, so have a few questions here. One is that I know that one of the things that haunts engineering leaders most is finding the balance between staying technical and their technical expertise and their leadership expertise and basically finding the right altitude of how high where to be in the org and also how in the details to be, and also staying technical enough to be relevant. What have you learned in your own experience of finding that balance and how do you advise engineering leaders that they struggle with this? Yeah. One piece of advice I give everybody is, "Don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones." You feel like you've got mastery that you could. If you know a second language fluently or if you played an instrument really, really seriously for a long time or maybe a sport, really, really seriously for a long time, you'll be familiar with the. I haven't done that in a long time, but if I was to pick it up, it would be rusty, but I would get there pretty quickly. Physically, I wouldn't be as strong as I was as. Or whatever, but I would get there. You can do that with writing code. You can do that with technical skills. If you do it for long enough, you can develop a baseline mastery where you're not going to be as fast and a lot of the challenges of being technical is actually in all the tooling and all the tooling evolution, but you're not going to be necessarily as fast as people who have been doing it, but you won't be completely closely. And I think that all the things you learn getting to that really comfortable mastery of some part of hands-on tech will stay with you and will help you just maintain a level of confidence in your own technical know-how, maintain a level of empathy for what it means to be a good engineer, and I think just make you a lot less anxious about being hands-off. Even though I think everybody can make that transition for a year or two, especially if you're really like, you have to be hands-off as you just don't have time to write code at all. You are going to be anxious for a while no matter what. The things to then think about from that point is like being technical is also just about knowing what's going on and paying attention and being able to ask what people care about with technical leaders in my experience. Because they want people who actually seem like they sort of understand what you're doing and can ask good questions and help guide you to better decisions without actually being the one who's like, "Oh no, you need to use this library instead of that library." It's actually sort of annoying when somebody that's a very senior and hands-off tries to tell you, "Don't use this library, use that library because I don't know about you, but I don't really believe people who have been hands-off for that long when they try to tell me what to do and the thing that I'm kind of the expert in right now." But I do appreciate it when I'm given more like guidance around, "Well, have you considered this? Tell me about how you're planning to handle that situation. What are the major technical challenges with implementing this?" That connection has been the time to listen and ask thoughtful questions on the back of that. The last thing I would say is surround yourself with smart technical people also as much as you can and be willing to listen to them talk about tech and ask them questions about things. I feel like that's part of the reason that I am able to stay kind of technically savvy and credible amongst people who work for me is not that I'm writing code because I'm not. But I am listening to a lot of very smart people talk about technology a lot down to the level of like, "I'm trying to debug this database issue like what the heck's going on." And just constantly being interested in those stories and learning from them and learning what really smart engineers are thinking about and worrying about the more you can build that network of people that are still hands on and kind of stay in touch with that, I do think that helps a lot. So on our last point, how are you actually doing that? Is it like watching, going to conferences that friends? Yeah. I guess for me, it started with like going to conferences, meeting people. Now I'm in a lot of different chat groups where people are just sort of regularly communicating, staying in touch with former colleagues. I will admit I'm kind of a social person and I have a big network so this may be easier sent than done. But I do think like being in the right group chats, I also think like I'm sure we're reading various tech mues and tech sort of commentary and discussion boards. I mean, it's definitely a mixed bag of that stuff. I think they're 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, "We don't really pay attention to engineering." You know, it's hard for me to say. I'm just like, I'm such a nerd. I just like, really love tech. I'm in this industry because I'm just like actually genuinely very interested in certain corners, not every corner of technology, but certain corners of technology. I just like, I want to know what the latest stuff that's happening and databases and infrastructure and, you know, I just, I find it all very interesting 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 this guy at LevelsIO on Twitter. Have you heard of this guy? He was just on Lex Friedman. Have you listened to it yet? I think maybe I saw a clip of him. 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 as in PHP and JQuery. He's just like, this works. Like I've always had this to do, learn, know 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 newest frameworks. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I actually, I feel like I know a lot of smart engineers who are in that category. And we built amazing things in PHP and relatively simple SQL. And so much of tech is overengineering things. And I think I don't totally disagree. I think the challenge is though, of course, what works as a one person show doesn't always work in a scaled organization for better, for worse, for a different, you've got to match what makes one person really productive. Will it make 100 people, 1000 people, even 10 people really productive? 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. I think that, you know, I think being aware of it, not necessarily chasing them, but particularly if you're working in, you know, groups, teams, larger companies, even midsize 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 thread a little bit 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, this is, I'm very excited, but this is not good. I 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. Again, obviously it can work out that well because Facebook has made a great goal of it on 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 own" for you, it is actually a name-peter, I think, sure that whenever there's a framework that has VC-funded startup behind it, that's not a good sign 'cause their job now is to convince engineers to use it and then pay for it. And that's not necessarily gonna be the best product. - That's true. Although I will say that like some of the, some of the most time-wasting frameworks have also just come out of big companies, right? Or the context of the big company that may have made that framework super useful within that context doesn't translate to startup or small company or even big company that doesn't have the rest of the context set. So, you know, 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. - Maybe. - Okay, so to close out this thread on engineering leaders, finding the right balance, just to summarize your advice here. One is get to mastery before, and is your advice here get to this point before you move into engineering? - Engineering management. You know, I will say part of this is also like, in particular, if you happen to be a woman or otherwise underrepresented person in tech, because people will tend to underestimate your technical abilities just unfortunately as a get go. Like I also think it's particularly important to kind of develop that internal confidence in your abilities before you make this sort of scary lead, which is scary for everyone of like have a, you know, if you have that mastery before you make the leap, I wish more people would do this, 'cause honestly I do think like there are a lot of people who never really gain the mastery, they go into management, they lose it, and some of them are still perfectly good managers and look, there are good managers who were never technical to begin with, I don't wanna say that that's impossible. I just think that if you care about being technical, if you are technical now and you wanna maintain that tech savvy, don't just become a manager the first time somebody offers it to you, like make sure you've really spent your good time, you know, writing code. - Is there like a number of years 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, that 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 like full time works, so maybe I might be slow, right? I didn't start coding a lot in middle school like people might do now, but like, you know, I felt like I took several years of hands on work and I'm very intense undergraduate and graduate programs for me, so I do think it's probably a like somewhere in the 10 year range of like really having spent a lot of your time over those years in writing code and you know, really understanding how to be a technical expert. You 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 we could be. - You know, if you were programming a lot in high school and you got an undergraduate degree, so you know, you'd 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, when these three, 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? Often they're actually pushing you to become a project manager which is actually also the worst, you know, worst sort of path to real leadership in my opinion. Like spend, you know, if you don't feel like you've done, also just don't feel like you're done, right? If you're still having fun writing code, don't rush becoming a manager. Like writing code is awesome. Have fun. It's your way. - I know exactly what you mean. So 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. That was very hard to give up. Imagine you still miss that. - You know, I think I might have forgotten about it at this point. But there is nothing satisfying as 'cause you get the fast feedback loop. It's just wonderful, yeah. - This episode is brought to you by Coda. 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Head over to coda.io/lennie and sign up to get six free months of the team plan that's coda.io/lennie to sign up and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lennie. - On the topic of moving into management, you wrote maybe the definitive book on engineering manager career path. And so when someone moves from I see to management, what do you find is the most surprising thing to them? What are they most often not understand or are surprised by like, oh man, I did not see this as part of my job 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 move into management and then just don't really understand the job at all and aren't even self-aware enough to know that they don't understand it. But for those who are trying to do it, trying to do it well, I think a few things that tend to surprise them are the fact that like, you really don't own your time as a manager, your team and your management and the company owns your time more and more the more senior you become as a manager. You know, I think individual contributors often think that like if they become a manager, they will still have some of the freedom that they have as a senior individual contributor, but then they'll also be able to tell people what to do and they'll have all this authority. And 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. You know, because if you try that especially in tech, people are just going to revolt, they're not going to listen to you. You know, 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 when you do it. It just doesn't create creativity, right? It's the same thing as like, PM's trying to have all the ideas, right? Like, you know, no, you've got all these brilliant people working for you on a team. Your job as a manager is on to tell them what to do in every single case, occasionally, yes. A lot more to do trying to convince them of, you know, what you think should happen in some ways. You try, you sort of nudging, you're encouraging, you're directing, you're setting guard rails for, for, you know, processes or behaviors or whatever. But it's just, it's not, it's not this like glorious, you know, fearless leader. I make all these decisions and everyone looks up to me. And, you know, you know, it's awesome kind of job. It's a much more, it's much more grueling, much more, you know, you are really just sort of reacting to things in the moment. And it can be very, it's a hard job. I do think like management, particularly management when done well, when you're really trying to, to do it in a thoughtful kind, you know, but also productive way is a very hard job. I wonder if engineering is where most, where the highest percentage of people are moving to management, move back to I see, I've seen that a bunch and I wonder if engineers are the most common. I don't, you know, I don't know, but, um, after realizing what you just said is true. Yeah, what if I do? I mean, do you not think, so do you not think product managers also do this? Because I think product managers also actually suffer from exactly this kind of, they do. They do. They do. Yeah. But interestingly, I was an engineering manager. Earlier 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 and. Oh, yeah, because PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to like, they're just so helpful. They're like, wants to do with this. They're good communicators. I love managing pms. I have to say, I have to say, I just like, my answer is, The engine years are such a pain. They are all pre-modados. They are all nuts. I love it. I am an engineer, but like, he, my, hems are more fun to manage by experience. So actually you have a point, you have a point. - But I wonder, yeah, 'cause 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, it's hard to give that part up. You kind of enjoy being like, higher up in that chain. - Yeah. - 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 and 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 try and tend to do mine weekly or maybe every other week. So this is not about that set of one-on-ones, the one-on-ones of the people that you are directly managing and with your own manager. But I think there is this, I think, I don't know if it's the remote work, 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 at many companies kind of complain about is this idea that 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? The linear-only 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-slaught 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, you have this one-on-ones with people that don't really want to have a one-on-one with you. If they're not in the mind to invest in your relationship, they don't really care about what you're doing. They're actually may not like it that you're asking them for a one-on-one. Let me show up because it's like, OK, well, I should do this, be a good corporate citizen or whatever. But they're just like, why are we doing this? What is the point of this? I also think that one-on-ones 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 that you may need to deal with. If you have a lot of stakeholders-- I've been in a lot of positions where I have a lot of internal stakeholders because I'd go out and turn all platforms. This is a big part of what my job has been in the last many years. Having all these meetings as one-on-ones with those stakeholders can actually be kind of a weakness because when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one, they're happy. They're unhappy with things. Your unhappy stakeholders are hearing that. So you may have one really unhappy stakeholder and five really happy ones. And all you're saying to your unhappy one is, well, everybody else is happy. And they're not seeing it for themselves. They're just having to say, trust me, because I've tied these other one-on-ones with all these people. And they're saying it's fine. And it just kind of sounds whiny. And so 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. As much as I just said, management, you're kind of at everyone's mercy. And that is true. But also respect your time. Don't just load yourself up with meetings because you're a manager and that's your job. Do you really have something to talk to a person about? Do you really need to-- when you have a one-on-one meeting with someone, you are asking for their time. You shouldn't just be doing that kind of haphazardly for fun. This is a little bit of my personality. I'm not a great company networker. Some people are really good. It's like, let's go to get coffee. Let's go to lunch and let's hang out and build a relationship. But honestly, those people are really successful in many ways. 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. And that's not to say those are always bad. But I do think that a lot of people, with that's your comfort zone. If that's getting to know you random relationship holding one-on-one is your comfort zone. Like, I should probably do more of them. You should probably do fewer of them because you should always be pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone. And are you really getting something out of that? Or are you just being able to tick a checkbox? It says, I had eight meetings today therefore I was productive. - Yeah, that super resonates. It's kind of pulling on a threat of how you operate and how you work. Something that I've heard you're really known for is creating a work culture where people work really hard but also have a really good work life balance. And when we were chatting, you actually told me, you're not a great believer in working too hard. Can you just talk about this philosophy on building a 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. But older work kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place. - You know, I listened to one of your podcasts where you talked to someone who said, like if he's never fired someone and regretted it, you don't know where the line is. Who you shouldn't shouldn't fire. And I was, man, I have mixed feelings about that. Although I, yeah, I get what he's saying. If she 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? Like I just think, and the thing about that is it's not like 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 to challenge yourself with like, am I really, am I really getting the most out of myself? Am I really producing the best value? You know, or am I just making, swaging my internal guilt about like, you know, I need to work 60 hour weeks, I need to sleep in the office, I need to whatever to show that I'm like a hard worker and I care. And so I guess I just, I do really think that people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the important stuff done and always be asking themselves, what is important to do? And what's important to 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. And okay, you don't want to work less, you love working a lot, that's fine, but you could probably just be getting a lot more valuable stuff done if you would do these audits regularly, right? I also think like people don't delegate enough. And you know, so if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegating, which actually takes more time initially, usually because you have to teach people whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do. Not always, sometimes I 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. And so 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, you know, that focus. - For someone that is listening to this and is like, I want to start doing this. Is there anything, any specific practice you've found useful or any specific tactic to actually do this well? - You know, I think there's different, there's different approaches you could take, right? Like one approach you could take is just like every Friday, I'm going to stop working at 4 p.m. or something, let's say. And I am not, or I'm not going to let myself work this weekend. 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's one of the best ways to do it is really just saying, like, I'm going to law off. I'm going to law off every day this week at 6 p.m. I'm going to, you know, because you're bringing this holiday 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. And that 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 weekend. I don't want to stay here until 9 p.m. every night. Like, I just want to get this done. And it meant that like, I didn't do quite as many copies. I didn't like go to lunch and chat with people all, you know, all, all, every day. But I was very, very productive, and I learned to get a lot done in a short period of time. And I do think, you know, learning those skills earlier in your career and then continuing to apply them throughout your career is another piece of advice. - In terms of staying and getting focused, is there anything that helps you focus? Is it like, headphones, a drink, like what gets you in the zone? - I mean, yeah, I have a lot of like, rituals, like, you know, I have my, my, my, my caffeination rituals. - Say more. - Well, I mean, like, I can't drink coffee anymore 'cause my stomach got messed up at some point, but I drink tea in the morning. I have, I drink caffeinated water also. You know, I have like a diet coke at lunch. So I have like these like sort of rituals of like, you know, my, my caffeine hits that helped me. I, I have to be in a quiet place. I do find like non music that is like, like I really like four tech, 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 folks. That is awesome. I have a similar caffeine strategy. I'm drinking tea always during these podcasts and this little thing I got here. And then my wife doesn't want me to drink diacoe 'cause she thinks of the sugar and it is not good, but I still drink it sometimes and it works good. I switched to green tea, that's my approach. Start with black tea and then switch to green tea. - I that's mine. - Oh man, there's so many things you share that I wanted to dig into. Let me share a couple things that you're point about delegating, I thought was really important. And I, 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. I love just delegate everything every time. And people enjoy it, they're like amazing. You're giving me opportunity. The thing you said about how some, 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 has a great approach to this. I don't know if you've heard his philosophy on optimizing. He has this whole five step process of like figuring out how to optimize something and one of them is try to cut things like do we need this thing or not? And if you don't recognize that 10% of stuff you cut, you was a mistake, you're probably not cutting enough stuff. - You'll have to figure out your own metrics, but I definitely think testing the limits, it's scary though. I'm gonna be honest, like doing that is always scary. It brings up like, I forgot to finish the assignment, nightmares of school, 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. A 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. So I have a bunch of questions along these lines. The first is I asked a bunch of people that worked with you what to ask you and someone that worked with you shared this quote about his frustration working with platform teams that he's often complaining to you about. And he works on customer facing products. And so he said platform teams 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 don't have to show any ROI. And so maybe from the perspective of working with a platform team, say you're building something customer facing any tips for effectively working with a platform team and building a great relationship there. - I'm very sympathetic to anybody who feels that way because part of the reason that I wrote this book, I co-wrote it with a friend, Ian Nolan, is that so many platform teams are guilty of all the things that he's complaining about. That my friend was complaining about. That they don't listen, they're not delivering effectively. They are not explaining their value to the company. And 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, spend the time understanding that the platform teams 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. I think if you just, if you get mad and you just try to avoid them or undermine them or whatever that may work in the long run but it's just gonna make everything worse in the short run. And so I do think that, if you've got a platform team that you're frustrated with, some tips I would add, I would put are like, "Look, find the parts of that team that aren't good "because I'm sure there are some." 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. It is, this is annoying but sometimes needs to happen because a lot of companies, I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset and you probably need to have product managers to build good platforms in general platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste head count on product managers for internal teams. So you end up with this 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 building whatever they think is right. And so sometimes your job is to product manage them is to tell them like, "These are the problems that we have "and this is what we need." And 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. And so I think that's another approach that I would take when you're in the situation. You'll find the parts of the team that are working and 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 done. - Yeah. - So I'll call some 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 that platform engineering has to involve software engineering. If you don't have any software engineers on your platform team, you only have more like 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 kind of missing the picture. Platform 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 really create products, right? And frankly, you need to be platforms or 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 because I just believe that 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 when it comes to structuring a team, recognize this is not just SREV2. This is more than that. You want software engineers, you want systems engineers, you want product people. And then one of the reasons you want product folks is because you want to be thinking about impact-based, outcome-based approaches, not just like, well, we built this thing that seemed cool. We adopted this technology from this company because, you know, that's what everybody on the internet is talking about, whether it's, you know, VC-funded or big company. You know, like, 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? Are we reducing the cycle time for engineering tasks? Are we solving problems that are preventing products from launching and scaling? All right. Are we, you know, making really meaningful cost reductions or efficiencies in, you know, in our products or in our, you know, in our platforms? These are some examples of, you know, measurable contributions. But like, I think one of the challenges is that people create a lot of different teams and think that they can be sort of divorced from having an impact focus because it's like, well, you just got to run the infrastructure and, you know, make sure it works. 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. On the line of having pms within the platform team, 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 me. Like, that's where you could have some of the highest leverage because platform teams enable the rest of the company to move faster. Yeah. And one difference there, I'm curious if you agree, is your ratio of pm to engineer can be a lot higher. You can have a lot more engineers per pm on platform teams. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right because I think, you know, a lot so much of the work in a platform team is not a is not exactly product work. Like a lot of it's like, you know, scaling or really like deep kind of technical. Like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing or I've got to, you know, do this performance efficiency. And you don't always need like a product spec for that, right? Like that it's often just a very engineering heavy task. And so yes, I think the ratios do tend to be a bit a bit different. So we do over like right into this topic, maybe it might be helpful to help people understand what is a platform team, just like what are examples of teams that would be considered platform teams. I mean, I guess like the high level definition that I have of platform engineering is like, if you are developing and operating platforms that, that where they're trying to manage overall system complexity and deliver kind of leverage to your business. So a lot of the teams that people think about nowadays and when they're talking about platform teams, they're talking a lot about teams that may have formerly been called like dev tools, for example. So you are, you know, CICD tooling for the company. The lot of the cloud infrastructure provisioning and tooling. If you're at a company with certain technical problems, you know, you may very well be like, you know, building semi bespoke storage systems, for example, maybe part of your platform teams. I actually think that there are, you know, and then I actually like web frameworks, you know, web mobile framework and sort of like support for really for that, that set of engineering can also be a part of a platform offering. I actually kind of believe that there are, there's also sort of what you might call integration platforms or platforms that are kind of in between that infrastructure, infrastructure, developer, tool, and stuff and products. So like billing platform. Sure example, right? If you have a single billing platform for all of the different products in your company, that's all that shares a lot of overlaps and the challenges of like those more dev tools, infrastructure, you platform teams, because you're probably supporting lots of different product lines that are using, you know, using this system that needs to be able to sort of scale, you know, with certain efficiencies, you need to still do the product discovery. You probably had a little bit more of a business product focus than like the pure internal tools teams, but you know, that gets the sort of the, the, the blended area for founders that are kind of earlier stage or companies that are smaller hearing this and they're like, oh, should I do any platform team? So yeah, so what's your, like you're shaking your head of people watching on YouTube? What's a sign that's time maybe to start creating a platform team and setting aside resources for something like that? So first of all, it gets to be like, you have 50 plus engineers. I don't think this is the kind of thing that you start when you are, you know, 10 engineers, right? But when you are have like sort of, so there's a lot of ad hoc coordination that's probably happening amongst your, your engineering groups right now where like maybe you just have like one, you know, you have, you get hub and somebody's kind of making sure that like all of that stuff, you know, is sort of working. You, you have a few, you know, a few cloud databases and you got like, you know, a couple of people on these team, they kind of like share notes to figure out like what's going on or whatever. Okay, it's all good, but at some point you, you hit either a lot of the inefficiency where you're seeing like the same people across a bunch of different teams, each team has the same kind of people having to solve the same kinds of problems. It just seems like why do I have three people on every team like dealing with this instead of like centralizing 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 way and everybody's just super slow because like, you know, 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 fix that or you know, you actually have a technical challenging area that needs sort of a focused team to fix the scaling. Those are some of the signs that you may want to start thinking about a platform team, but it's really like generally speaking, I would not jump into it early. It should, you know, this is this is something for companies that have matured where there is it's worth investing and making people, you know, internally kind of more productive and centralizing certain functions just from my you know, for a cost and efficiency basis at minimum. So you're on a platform team, so you're an engineer or even a PM. Any advice for how to be successful and thrive within that environment and be a great platform team if you wouldn't do platforms if you're if you're an engineer, certainly if you're an engineer or an engineering manager, you've got to remember that like half of the half of the work is actually like the operational quality operational excellence of these things platform engineering is not like just writing code and then throwing it over the walls to someone. The you know, being being interested and passionate about kind of the operational challenges and scaling bits of systems, I do think is like fairly important if you want to be a great platform engineer from a software engineer perspective. If you're more like a you know product manager, like you've got to really care about you got to really got to be really really both interested in kind of working with really smart like engineers who are going to know way more than you do about things. And and almost being a really good like not necessarily zero to one but like past one person because actually a lot of the best platform type offerings and companies start and individual like application teams like an application team has a problem and they solve it for themselves. And it turns out that that's actually a really good idea for how to solve that problem and so good platform teams often like looking around for those and then sort of taking them and you know assimilating them and making them available to more and more people and so I think you know if you want to be in that kind of zero to one like building the brand new stuff all the time you may not be as happy in a platform team, but if you really interested a little bit more of like taking things over stabilizing scaling them. You know making them efficient making them evolve as a company evolves I think that's going to you know you'll be happier in that and that circumstance awesome. Is there anything else along these lines before we wrap up and get to very exciting lightning round 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 I think you don't get much press which is like running platform projects is a little bit different than running agile. Agile projects like not there are you can take a lot of the best practices you may have learned from you know Agile type product delivery but like 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 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 my creations as well right so it is very. 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 butt for all the application teams. So people who are interested in like how to smooth over the customer and, you know, company impact of this underlying change. I think we'll be very happy in platform teams. If you're not interested in that, you may not enjoy the work as much. There's just a lot of detail oriented work in platforms. And then of course, the final part is like the stakeholders are a nightmare. My friend who wrote the question about like how his product is a platform partner is driving 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. I could do it better in some cases, right? Like there's just, you know, and so there's actually a big part of the job, particularly as either product managers or engineering leadership is like stakeholder management and really learning how to do that well. And that is not always, that's, you know, 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, you know, if you're thinking about like building one of these teams and you're like, I can, I can just do the fun tech stuff or like the cool product stuff. I'm really passionate about engineering productivity or I'm really passionate about scale storage systems. And I don't want to think about any other stuff. You may not actually be happy in the long run in leadership positions. It may be fine, you know, as an individual contributor. But like for leaders in particular, there is a lot more to it than the fun tech problems, the fun operations problems, you know, even the product. You said there's a few things yet we haven't touched on. Is there anything else? That's that's kind of that. That's the, that's the, that's the fast listen to anybody who's interested. My book will be coming out in the next couple months from O'Reilly and amazing covers all this at depth. Yeah. Is there a date specifically people should watch out for? I think it's actually preorder 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 preorder it now. We'll link to it obviously in the show notes and description. Before we get to a very exciting lighting around, I want to take us to a recurring segment on this podcast that I call AI corner. AI is very top of mind for a lot of people. And I'm always curious how people are finding it valuable in their work or in their life. So the question is, just is 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 it. I don't like the phrasing or the format that I've used. Like I, it needs to be edited, but I can't quite figure out how I will often, you know, put it in the chat, you can be like, can you reframe this? Can you rephrase this for me? Doesn't always work well, but like sometimes it does. It's like, oh, yeah, if I just like switch this around or change this word choice, it's a much easier to read sentence. I do think it's, I think it's just before that end, like, small, I think it's large, large blocks of text I haven't, I haven't had as much luck with. I'm not, I'm a little bit of AI novice still, I would say. What I will say is that AI is really bad if you're trying 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 somewhere, some social media thing that's like did Francis Ford Coppola get like fake reviews from like chat GPT of the new, what is it? Megopolis. Megopolis movie. And I was like, you know, I actually had that scenario where I was like, I need a quote, I was looking for quotes, you know, for the book. And I was like, maybe, you know, the chat GPT knows what I was like, can you give me any good quotes on like, I forget what it was. What's just say it was on complexity, or something like that. And again, it gave me this really interesting quote. I was like, that's great. But I better double check that. And they were not real. They were never real. Not a single quote. I'll be like, that's not actually a real quote. Oh, yes, if you're right, that's not. So here's a different one. It's like, that's still not a real quote. So double ask it for quotes because or if you do, make sure it's a real quote and not just an interestingly phrased, you summer, I mean, good, good summarization in some ways of like the text it was sort of holding from just not a lack of a 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 they're right. But often they might not be right. That's a really good reminder. On that first tactic, is there a prompt that you find helpful for how to actually feed it in there? Is it just here's a line help me come up with a better version of it? No, I am, I am not figured out the prompt engineer thing at all. I had, I tried to get it to summarize a paper for me the other day and like it just saw it's literally giving the summary of a different paper. And then I asked friends and they were like, well, here's the summary. 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. And I'm just like, I don't, how do I have to manage the machine? But I already have to manage all these humans. Like, why are you making me manage machines now? To please. I thought this was going to solve all our problems. Yeah, the role. There's like an acronym for how to approach prompt engineering and one like there's always like give it the role. Here's the role you're going to play for me. Like you are an amazing writer. And here's what I want for me. Yeah, I'm also very bad at it. By the way, a clotter 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 of anthropic 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. And they're all like, these are terrible, like they're all terribly mean quotes about his movies. Turns out, yeah, they're all not real quotes. And they actually took down the trailer. I just read because he's just making up quotes by famous critics. Wow. Well, so you know, you can get fooled. I don't know if it was chat G B T or or a cheeky intern or something. 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 you recommended most to other people? So 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 Fall Apart by Pemma Chodron. 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 let it remind you of how life is hard for everyone and sort of make you a kinder person in the process. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? I 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. 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 don't know about recent. I'm a big whoop fan. I got it during the pandemic and it is like one of my, I'm just a weird fan for it. I don't know. I just really, I enjoy it. I use it every day. Maybe it's totally inaccurate, but it seems accurate enough. And I just find it a very interesting and cool product. I know who product people listen to this podcast. So I think they'll be happy to hear that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends, your family find useful and work her in life? If you don't, 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 and the better you'll be as a leader for sure. Another question on the topic of working out, you're blocking it with your head generally during the podcast when we moved behind you is a very significant looking barbell set or dumbbell set. I don't know which ones which talk about your workout regimen or anything along the lines of how you, how you work out. I have been lifting rates probably for a longer than some of your podcast listeners have been alive, which says more about my age and the meeting hours. But so I used to be [BLANK_AUDIO] 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 Then I was just a very very strong person now of course everybody's into weightlifting which makes the gym really annoyed So partly why I have a set in here a small set with a baby sized bar is So when I can't make it to the gym I can at least you know lift a little bit at home What's your favorite workout lifting wise? I love like really basic like deadlift squat overhead press That's that kind of you know very simple the classic lifts Amazing Camille, this is awesome. It was everything is 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 out your books and how can listeners be useful to you? Yes, so with the weird state of social media now that's actually a harder question to answer than it normally is I do I am on LinkedIn So I 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 medium when I write actually like medium so medium calm Camille is my username. Those are two good ways. I have a Twitter or such like as X account that is Currently locked and I may I may not unlock it at some point, but you know social media as I said I've got has gotten weird So I think probably LinkedIn is the easiest way for this kind of stuff And I read somewhere that's Camille is rooted in your love of scommies like back when you were younger Is that right? It's true. Yes, it was from high school. I was a big scoff and 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 come out coming out I have I have a another book that I've already written Obviously, I love it when people buy my book so 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 and I hope that if you read it and enjoy it and learn something from it You will let me know attack me on some social media. I think that's just awesome and You know, stay tuned like if you if you're looking for people potentially to come talk to your company about platform engineering I could be interested in that but you know, I always love to meet interesting people if you're in New York You know reach out who knows best this you know, this has been an amazing Amazing time getting to chat with you. Loney. Thank you so much for inviting me 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 Hey, 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 calm. See you in the next episode