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• Key aspects of Echoes: its focus on being virtuous for everyone involved and improving quality of life for engineers |
• Importance of tools in reflecting an organization's culture |
• The need for feedback and help to make Echoes successful |
• History and meaning behind the name "Echoes" |
• Arnaud Porterie's background as a Pink Floyd fan and his use of band-related names for projects |
• Discussion on finding the right path or sense of direction in work, using intuition and foresight |
• Echoes does not access code or count lines of code contributed/deleted |
• Echoes helps capture interactions between teams and orgs, not performance reviews or grading |
• Value in combining goals (why), daily tasks (what), and progress towards them |
• Potential benefits for small teams with limited resources to focus efforts |
• Future developments: tying outcomes to metrics, integrating with HR systems |
• Gerhard Lazu's interest in using Echoes at Changelog and Arnaud Porterie's willingness |
**Gerhard Lazu:** One of the problems that I've been thinking in the recent months was the disconnect between what we should be doing, the vision, or the thing that feels right, but may be really hard to do because of different things of reality, which is really interesting; an interesting concept. What we actually do,... |
The demo was great, thank you very much, Arnaud. I really enjoyed it. And now, after a few months, I would like to know about your Y Combinator demo. How did that go? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, so the Y Combinator demo was probably the most stressful minute of my life. I'm not really sure if you're aware of the setup, but it's actually just a one-minute speech, with a single slide, in front of hundreds of investors. So trying to condense the message into 60 seconds, trying to conden... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[04:11\] I would love to see that slide, and I would also love to see those 60 seconds. Do you have them recorded somewhere? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** No, we don't. It was not actually recorded. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So if I asked you to do those 60 seconds for us, would you be able to? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I don't think I have them in mind anymore, and to be fully honest, it's not exactly the same pitch you do to an investor than you would do to potential customers or people who understand the field... You know, it's deliberately devoid of any jargon or anything like this, which makes it a bit bland.... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It would be interesting to me... So if you would like to do that, I would be very curious to hear what that even sounds like. As close as you can get it - the 60 seconds sounds perfect. No jargon. I'd love that. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** So let me try and do it again then. The 60-second pitch at Y Combinator sounded something like this... Hi, I'm Arnaud, and I'm the founder of Echoes. I've been an engineering leader for over a decade, I have worked as a deputy CTO at VeePee before that. I was running the core team and the open sour... |
By measuring how engineering work contributes to business goals, Echoes helps bridge the gap between technical and business teams. For example, Echoes can show you how much time we're currently spending on each of our OKRs, which helps engineering managers make the right decisions, and communicate the activity to their... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay... So let me go and get my checkbook. Is a blank check okay? \[laughter\] Because that sounded really, really good. Okay, that was really good. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Thank you. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I would love to see, again, that slide, and if we can, I would like to include it in the show notes, if that's okay with you, so that people, as they listen to those 60 seconds, they can look at the slides and they can, on the slide (the one slide) they can decide whether they wanna bring their che... |
So while doing a bit of research in Echoes - that was only recent - I noticed that you also appeared on Product Hunt. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that came before Y Combinator. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, that was during the Y Combinator batch. It's one of the things that Y Combinator really pushes you to do, it's to be public and to launch as fast as you can. That includes Product Hunt, that includes Hacker News, any other medium you can think of. And I think it's one of the most important le... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So in my mind, that translates to "Ship it, and let's see what happens." |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Literally, that. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** It is exactly that. It is shipping early, shipping often, and - you know, I had this conversation very early with one of the partners at YC about "I don't feel that I'm necessarily ready to launch", and what he responded I think was absolutely great. He asked "Do you remember the day that Airbnb la... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a really good story. I'm gonna ask Adam to see if he managed to talk to the founders of Airbnb, and if he didn't, I would love to hear that... Because you're right - getting it out there, getting the feedback will change everything, many times over. So with that in mind, how did Echoes change ... |
**Arnaud Porterie:** \[08:17\] We launched during July, actually... And of course, yeah, a lot of things change, because you get to talk to a lot of customers, you get to talk to a lot of potential users, and to see -- I would say you can test the messages that work and the messages that don't, you can see what is trul... |
In this regard, I would say the clear thing that I have learned is that the problem we're trying to solve is absolutely universal. Any company that has, I would say, above 20 engineers, is struggling with too much to do, and a lack of visibility, especially in companies where the leadership is not necessarily technical... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So why is connecting our daily work as engineers to intent important? Why is that important? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Because I think that ultimately, the only thing that any employees within a company share is that they're putting efforts for the success of the company. And my strong belief is that if there was a way to express that simply, and to represent simply how our allocation of efforts actually maps to co... |
I'm really passionate about the boundary between technical problems and human problems, and I often feel that some of the biggest technical achievements are really solutions that have changed the relationship between different groups. |
With my background, working on Docker, there's been a lot of debate about what was the true value of Docker - is it the image format? Is it the container runtime? Is it the API? But when I look back at what we did at Docker, for me the biggest success and the biggest takeaway is that we got groups that beforehand were ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So let me see if I understood this correctly... What you're saying is that getting people to share more in a safe way, in both directions, from top to bottom and from bottom to top, is the key to success for Echoes. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I think it's one of the keys of success, and it's doing so by sharing the right level of information. Because you know, the thing we have with our industry is that we're doing tech, and tech is easily measurable, in that there's a lot of things we can instrument; there's a lot of things we can meas... |
One of the numbers that we have talked a lot, and that obviously at this point I think everybody knows is a bad idea, but just to illustrate as an example, is the number of lines of code. Everybody knows at this point that sharing the number of lines of code written is not a good proxy for anything meaningful. But I th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[12:24\] So this is really interesting, and I know that many people agree with that, and many people, when it comes to visualizing work, this is one of the things which they fear the most - fearing that they will be judged on the number of lines written - or deleted, because that happens as well - or... |
So it's almost like the things that we are measuring - they are wrong, and maybe the way we think about measuring from a technical perspective just doesn't work at these levels. So what does? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, so that's really the bulk of the reflection behind Echoes, is to say that there's a lot of things we could be measuring, but the only thing that truly matters is whether we are actually creating value for our business in a sustainable way. And this is why we believe that measuring the intent ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's okay... I have a follow-up question, which maybe we'll juggle the important part... How do you measure intent? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Well, what we're doing with Echoes is to give you a central way to define what are the things that we are working toward as an organization; what are the things that you value and that you are working for as an organization. By default, what we suggest is just a set of three outcomes that are extre... |
And then, this is entirely up for customization by the user. It's up to you to figure out whether you wanna map your OKRs, whether you wanna capture the word that is planned vs the word that is not planned... There's no good or bad answer here; it's really depending on what you value as an organization and what is it t... |
So in the very simplest case, this is just gonna be materialized as labels in GitHub, and for engineers it means that they can add a label to their pull request with why they're doing things... Because we're using this central definition of intent, that is applicable across teams, regardless of the operational details ... |
There's a trend today that I think is here to stay, which is that individual teams are getting more and more autonomous, and they want flexibility and autonomy in the tools they use, and in the way they operate on a day to day basis. The reality at this point is that most organizations that are beyond 50 engineers - th... |
\[16:06\] And then, regardless of the operational details, the operational diversity of the teams, you keep having a central view of exactly in which direction we're going and what is it that we're executing against. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So capturing the Why - very important, and we'll come back to that. Is it true that an issue or a ticket or whatever the unit of work may be, is a step towards a specific Why? Is that how you think about it? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** And you know, when we're talking about managing two outcomes, it's usually open-ended, in that, you know, when you're trying to influence -- let's say an onboarding time, a transformation rate, a number of active users, whatever... There's no ending to this; it's not time-bound, it's not scoped. Yo... |
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