text stringlengths 0 2.46k |
|---|
So I started with that, and like "What am I going to do to make this common culture?" We talked a lot about focusing on the experience of all developers; so not just open source, not just enterprise, but because all developers are people, and they all deserve great productivity experiences, and fulfilling lives, and so... |
\[09:57\] So one of the first things I did when I came in, and which I never expected I would be doing, was I wrote and published and socialized career ladders, for both managers and individual contributors in engineering. I've worked really closely with HR on that, which was, of course, super-important. But I also -- ... |
So there's lots of stuff like this... I established a design review process, and expectations around what kind of things needed to go to design review. And design review is often a communication tool, as much as it is, to get specific feedback on your design; it lets a team over here, on one area of the business, under... |
I created something called our Principle Council, which I'd love to talk about maybe a little later when we get into healthy things to do to scale engineering teams... But this group was eventually renamed to the Architects Group, but what it did was it really helped support the difficult cross-engineering technical de... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It does... |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[laughs\] ...like an internal facing survey to find out from all the engineers at GitHub, like "What are your biggest pain point points? What are the things that are slowing you down? What are you dissatisfied about? What's hurting? And what's good? Where can we celebrate progress, so that we can re... |
I also set up operational reviews, I rolled out an engineering-wise strategy that talked a lot about balancing technical debt, developer experience work, privacy and security work, along with feature work, to make sure that it was clear that these things were valued, and that highly impactful work that's not directly t... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a lot of things... |
**Rachel Potvin:** It's a lot of stuff... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it is. If we've got a good person on the show to discuss this topic, I think all doubts should be removed; you obviously have a wealth of knowledge in this space... And one of the reasons we're doing this show, Rachel, and we're happy to have you here, is because our audience requested you, not j... |
**Rachel Potvin:** I'm so flattered. Thank you! |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm glad to have you here. There's so many things we could dig into, of the different things that you did in order to succeed; I don't know where to start... I do want to ask about just that manager bit... And if we just might like pull that out, and then maybe just set it aside and move on... But this... |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[14:13\] You know, something I've never been good at is blogging and publishing. I wish I would have written more about this while I was still at GitHub, because I think it's really important. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of saying there's two separate careers. There's a manager career, a... |
One thing I did at GitHub, I also developed the promotion process for engineering, and I talked a lot about that staff engineer promo, as well... And I know there's lots of writing out there and so on about staff engineering, but always have to be careful when you make your career ladders. It's never a checklist, right... |
If a manager of ICs can't jump in and help coach their individual - maybe you don't need to be the deepest domain expert on everything, but you at least have to be able to understand the work that's happening on your team, and be able to give good coaching advice, or hook your person up with someone who can give them g... |
And then I love seeing -- I'd love to see at GitHub a distinguished manager; just that someone who's got a small team of people working with them on the hardest problem that GitHub has. Some people call that maybe the surgeon model, right? You're the tech lead, but you're also working so closely with this group of peop... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. What is the difference then when you go from senior engineer, to staff, to technical? What are some of the differences between those three opportunities, I suppose? |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, I think it's like I was saying... It's how much agency and accountability are you taking. I remember having a great discussion with a principal engineer who reported to me at GitHub. His opinion was - and I fully agree with this -there's a little bit of confidence that comes with those levels, ... |
And so there is that experience and confidence that comes into these levels, but then it's also sort of the nature of the type of problems that you're taking on, and how much agency and accountability you're taking for the solutions yourself. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[17:59\] I guess the importance is to not move away from tech even further. Like you had said before, moving to, say, a director role, which is, like you said, a completely different thing; you still keep them closer to the technical problems. It's kind of similar to -- since we kind of know about ... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, I've gotta tell you, I'm talking to a lot of startups now, and there's a good group of unhappy CTOs out there who are kind of turning into people managers for the largest teams they've ever run, and their joy is actually from doing the hands-on technical stuff... And so I've been talking to a l... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is that advice generalizable at all? Like, can you say to a typical CTO of a growing or hyper-growing company, like "Here's how you accomplish that", or "Here's the highest-impact things you can do"? Or is it always specific to this person, in this place? |
**Rachel Potvin:** Look, if I see an individual who's in a management role, and they're really unhappy... You know, we all have a certain amount of agency in our own lives, and I think we all have one life to live, and it's okay to take one for the team for a while, if let's say you're a co-founder, or a founder, and y... |
There's a lot of great managers out there, and so finding a really good partnership between an engineering leader and a CTO, or the top technical ICs in the company - that's a partnership that really needs to form. So I think -- I encourage people to find their happiness. That's what I'm trying to do... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, find your happiness. |
**Jerod Santo:** For sure. Well, if we go back to your laundry list of things that you did - and I don't mean to call it a laundry list like dirty laundry, but an epic list of things that you did... Where does the wherewithal, or the knowledge -- like, how did you know what to do in that circumstance? And where does yo... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Hey, I've been grinding in tech for 25 years... \[laughter\] So I have a lot of experience -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Grinding for sure, right? |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah... I've seen a lot of ways that things didn't work. Sometimes when you see a counter-example that's just as good as seeing a good example, and even sometimes more effective; and I've tried things that didn't work. But I've seen several common patterns in scaling my own teams over many years... I... |
\[22:01\] Then at Google I also lead the cloud platform and recommendations platform in Google Cloud, and scaled that team from something like 30 people to well over 100 people. And then within GitHub as well, I've scaled multiple sub-teams within my organization to over 100 people when my team itself, when I went to l... |
I can give you a quick story, which is when I first joined GitHub, Fantastic's team came to me... And you know, I joined two months before GitHub Universe, which is the big developer-facing conference every year. And this great team came to me, and they were working on a language feature, and they said to me, "Rachel, ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right... |
**Rachel Potvin:** I didn't know that that still existed, right? I had a lot of learning to do when I came to GitHub. And by the way, that team did nothing wrong, because that was the way things worked. I immediately said, "We're moving to cloud. This is not going to work", and they had a year of pain, actually, where ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Understanding constraints in that case was probably key, right? Because if you didn't ask that question, you just thought, "Well, both, of course", but you had to understand the fact that they were on-prem, and they had... You know, if you hadn't gotten to that part, you might have just made a prema... |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[26:06\] Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really happy that -- and again, it's a great team, great people. They didn't do anything wrong. That was the environment that they were in. But it also highlighted very early in my GitHub tenure, "Oh, interesting... This is how this is happening." And then I spoke ... |
I was asking around and trying to figure out, "Do we plan to migrate to Azure? What are we going to do here?" And it became really clear that because the product teams were so siloed, every product team was thinking of its own feature sets, and there wasn't really anyone thinking about that bigger picture of, "No, we'r... |
**Jerod Santo:** So when it comes to scaling these teams, one thing I've read from you is that you think that 100 people is kind of this threshold of engineers, where it's like the game changes... I'm wondering if that's just experientially what you've seen, or is that a magic number? And what changes, and why, in your... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah, absolutely. It is experiential; like, that is what I've seen myself. But I've also spent the last several months talking to a whole bunch of startups, which has been really a lot of fun... So many great people out there doing interesting, novel things... And it's held up, this 100-person thresh... |
So I'll talk first about kind of what I've seen. One of the main things is that eventually, you hit this scale where it becomes impossible for one individual to hold context for everything that's happening, both in the product, but especially implementation-wise in their head, right? And so certainly, the individuals w... |
Life is certainly easy when you have - let's say, it's a founder, or founding engineers, or a senior technical person who can effectively make final decisions for teams when they're stuck. But now you're hitting this scale where there isn't necessarily that individual who can do that. And obviously, we'll talk about th... |
\[30:00\] But then there's these decisions that go beyond team boundaries, and they start to spin. So if two teams are invested in a decision, they can probably hash it out. But it's these cross-engineering things, big investments... In many cases, you start to see these important technical decisions really stalling. A... |
I can give you an example from GitHub... And of course, GitHub is even at that next level of scaling, with the 1000+ person engineering team... And these problems get exacerbated at every order of magnitude, for sure. But an example from GitHub is it really took us too long to decide that we're going to be moving to Re... |
On top of that, Microsoft was giving us some pressure about accessibility, and making sure that GitHub respected accessibility standards, which is really important... Is React going to be the means to doing that, or are we going to have some other UI policies? |
And so that's something that took investment, experimentation, investigation, but then ultimately, GitHub was able to say, "Yes, this is the Northstar. This is the direction we're going to go." So then that gives a roadmap to every team when they're starting to think about a refresh of their frontend - well, now they k... |
But there's lots of other things that start to happen at that 100-person threshold at all. I would say also like the technical impact of scale may start to be catching up with you... So process and implementation that was like good enough at a smaller scale may start to become problematic. I have some examples of that ... |
I sort of mentioned this already, but beyond that, I think you see a lot of industry leaders who are starting to run the largest human organization they've ever run. And they're probably, like we were just talking about, no longer touching the code day to day, and they might be feeling insecure that they're not on top ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Maybe they're working with a CEO who is super-focused on customer-facing progress, who doesn't want to hear or doesn't think about infrastructure tech debt, developer experience etc, and so that starts getting less prioritized on the team... Or I've definitely talked to startups where the CEO was the... |
And so these are all things that I think start really getting exacerbated at that 100=person scale. And the good news is, there's a lot of things you can do, but it's interesting to see how prevalent it is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[34:00\] Yeah, for sure. How then do you get that person or persons that has that -- I guess you can kind of say it was confidence in one way, but the ability to see that there's a problem there, and then start to enact change? You'd mentioned they wouldn't see the problem anymore, they were too fa... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.