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**Break:** \[17:04\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I see intent as a direction towards which we agree to head towards. In my mind, the destination is the vision. Something that we'll never reach, by the way, but we will do our best to get as close as possible to it. If this sounds familiar to you - you being the listener - it's because Simon Sinek ... |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Oh, it's actually a great point. I'm also a big fan of Simon Sinek, and of course, one of his major books is called "Start with Why", which is exactly what we're trying to do. There is an interesting point about this in how we designed Echoes. When I started with this product, I got feedback from p... |
\[19:53\] The other thing is - I think it's actually great to ask people why they're doing what they're doing in the first place, as long, of course, as it doesn't take ten minutes for then on an hourly basis to respond to the question. But I think it's a good forcing function to make sure that both on the managers' pa... |
I do strongly believe, actually, that the best engineers that I've worked with - and to be fair, most of the engineers - they deeply care about the impact that they are having on their business. And I think it's a good thing to make this relationship between their work and the business goals explicit, rather than impli... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes a lot of sense to me... And I wanna ask you why do you do what you do. I'm pretty sure you've already answered it, but I wanna make it explicit. So why do you do what you do? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I do what I do because I'm passionate about developer empowerment. This is what drove me into engineering management in the first place, this is naturally what got me to work at Docker and to contribute to open source... And when I started thinking about what is the next thing that I could do for d... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a great answer. It makes perfect sense to me, and I'm rooting for you; I really am. That was before I knew that you're a Simon Sinek fan; now that you're a Simon Sinek fan - oh, yes. Go, Arnaud, all the way! It's super-powerful, the Why. |
Okay, so I'm thinking... What happens when you disagree about the Why? There's a fundamental difference of opinions about why we do what we do. What do you do in that case? What would you recommend? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** I think this is an important point, because the truth is most of the organizations that we're talking to that started to adopt Echoes, the starting point to using it is to actually agree on capturing the Why and agree on why are we doing what we're doing. It's interestingly not always an easy discu... |
But I think here, again, is a great forcing function. If as a management team you cannot agree on the objectives that are actually important for the company, how do you expect that anybody is gonna execute properly? Then when there's a mismatch between the Why as it was defined as a company vision, and the people execu... |
We don't have the pretention that we're gonna help companies build a vision. What we promise is that we're gonna help them close the feedback loop between the vision they have and what is actually happening on the field with the teams, and how the efforts are actually being invested. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** In my experience, usually when people disagree about the Why, it's when some number of people think about making money, and it's an example of Why which in my opinion is very poor... Because that's almost like a side effect, if you're doing it right. Or for example getting more followers. You shouldn'... |
So in your experience, Arnaud, what are good examples of good Why's, the right Why's, which are the opposite of the examples that I just gave? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** \[24:02\] As long as you're working for a company, the ultimate goal and the ultimate Why is always to make money. However, of course, there is hopefully a deeper mission and something that people believe in, and believe they're doing for the greater good. |
On a daily basis, you're not gonna motivate anybody by telling them that what they're doing is strictly to create shareholder value. This is not a motivational engine for any employee I've ever known. Thankfully, there's way more proxies to this that are actually actionable by engineers, and that are actually related n... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I 100% agree with that. 100%. Honestly. If this was a bull's eye, you've hit it. So I can see how shipping, getting it out there, whatever "out there" means, by the way - whether it's a product, whether it's a service, whether it's a utility, it doesn't really matter... Getting it in front of customer... |
So how can teams and companies resolve this tension between having the different layers, like sales, marketing, product management, or just product, engineering, and the customer? Because the bigger you are, the more complicated these interactions become, the slower the information flows, and the more difficult it is t... |
Autonomous teams - I can see how that would help, but what does an autonomous team mean? Does it mean like a group of ten people, one of them being a salesperson, a manager, a product person, a designer? What does that mean? What does an autonomous team mean to you? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** In my mind, the autonomous team is really the definition from Marty Cagan, the author of "Inspired" and other great books... It's really about having full autonomy on the delivery of value to the customers. So in a sense, you're right that it's not all-encompassing. It's not a small company that ha... |
Still, when we see modern engineering organizations adopt the product team model in its simplest form, which is to say that at least in a single team you're gonna find frontend expertise, backend expertise, QA expertise, potentially SRE expertise, a product owner etc. then you're gonna get something that at least is au... |
\[28:08\] I've never had the chance to work at one of the highly scalable engineering organizations such as Amazon or Microsoft or others, but they seem to have figured this out, in a way. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, okay... I know that many good books came out of different orgs, on different topics, including management... But it always comes down to the fact that what people report on or what they paint - it's usually not the reality. The reality is slightly more skewed, and it's very contextual. Maybe for... |
But I do like that Echoes is trying to simplify some of this. It's going to maybe drive some uncomfortable truths and get people to have some uncomfortable discussions, and make them realize what is important, and more importantly, why those things are important. And as you mentioned, making money - well, that is almos... |
This reminds me -- I'm not sure whether you've read this book, "Drive" by Daniel Pink. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Nope. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I started reading it, I haven't finished it, but he touches on this aspect of what drives us - hence, Drive. Money? Yes. I mean, there's a couple of basic needs, and some maybe a bit more sophisticated, depending on where you are in life, and what your reality looks like... But there always has to be ... |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, absolutely. That's correct. And to your point also about how money flows, and the complexity of the relationship with the business - what we're seeing also today is that the most successful companies don't make a distinction between business and tech, and are starting to understand that actua... |
But no, collectively we have to change. It's not tech that has to change. And that's also what we're trying to get to with Echoes - trying to get both engineers to take a step towards business by making sure that their work is well connected with the intents of the company, and separately, helping the business take a s... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is a good one. I can see how intent is very closely related to communication. You can have the best of intent if you don't communicate it, or if you don't communicate it well... It doesn't really matter, or it matters very little. So how may we structure information differently, for different lay... |
\[32:04\] So how may we structure this information so it's more efficient as it travels up the top... And then obviously, the inverse is true - how do make it clearer? Because it's fuzzy at the top. The intent, it's meant to be vague on purpose, so that people can just fill in the dots? You don't wanna dictate, "Now we... |
So what are your thoughts about communicating this information, structuring it in a way that makes sense, and then expanding it or compressing it based on which layer it's at? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** Yeah, I think there's inspiration to take into the OKR model, and basically accepting the fact that organizations kind of have a fractal structure, when you can consistently zoom in and see more details appearing. But that doesn't change the fact that you can always zoom out and abstract away the d... |
**Break:** \[33:27\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How did your experience with Docker influence Echoes? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** A lot, in a ton of different ways. The first thing is that Docker was obviously about developer experience... And it made me realize a lot about how to build products developers love... And also about building a community, and creating enthusiasm about tech in a way that hopefully was positive, was... |
\[36:01\] The other thing is I was running the core team and the open source project for many years, and of course, the activity on the project was so high, and the number of maintainers comparatively was so low... We needed some tooling. And this is where I started building some analytics and some dashboards about the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So are those tools that you've built - I imagine they were proprietary, internal to Docker, that you'd never made public. Is that right? that's my assumption. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** No. Actually, one of them was open source... And it's probably still on GitHub, but of course, I'm not maintaining it anymore... But you know, to run an open source community, you wanna look at things that are significantly different than for running a company. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** In the case of an open source community you care about things such as being welcoming to new contributors, you care about things like fairness... For example, making sure that every contributor has somehow an equal chance of getting their pull request merged within the project, regardless of the fa... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And how did you do that? That sounds like a hard problem, by the way. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** It is a hard problem, but it's super-interesting, and it's a lot about just measuring, for example, how many review comments we're gonna get on a pull request, how fast it's gonna get merged, what is the likelihood of a pull request getting merged based on its size, and making sure that, for differ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That is really interesting. So how does this differ from a company, from a product which is commercial? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** The biggest difference is that the intent of an open source project cannot be easily captured. A company has a vision, a company has a mission, and ultimately, of course, a company's goal is to make money. An open source project, depending of course on the nature of the governance, doesn't have thi... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Fascinating. How do you reconcile a company that is built on open source, has an open source project, and also has a commercial product which is built on top of the open source project? How do you reconcile that? How did Docker reconcile that, by the way? ...which I know is a very hard question. |
**Arnaud Porterie:** \[40:08\] That's the question that everybody is trying to answer, basically... It is an extremely tricky question. Did Docker figure it out? I'm afraid to say it didn't, because the truth is the commercial success of Docker didn't match the community success of the project, and the industry-wide ad... |
To be fully transparent, at this point, when I'm discussing with startup founders and people who consider having bits of their product being open source, I tend to potentially push back more to ask "Are you really sure you need this? Are you really sure you know why you're doing it?" Because doing it for the wrong reas... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So is Echoes open source? |
**Arnaud Porterie:** No, in our case there's literally no good reason to make it open source. |
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