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**Rachel Potvin:** Isn't there some quote or something that like recognizing the problem is half the battle, or...? I'm terrible at quotes, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. That's GI Joe, I believe. |
**Jerod Santo:** I think it GI Joe, "Knowledge is half the battle", or something like that. Yeah. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Oh, it's GI Joe? My goodness... \[laughs\] We're going way back there then. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Wow... Okay. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, half the battle, I believe, is from GI Joe. Everything else is from something else. I think it was a combined -- |
**Jerod Santo:** It's a remix. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Either way. Yeah, either way. |
**Rachel Potvin:** Let's just say it's a Rachel original then maybe? I don't know... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure, why not? |
**Rachel Potvin:** But no, I'm sure it's not. I'm sure it's not. |
**Jerod Santo:** There we go... I think you've just coined it. |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[laughs\] But recognizing that things are changing, and that you have to work differently, and that the way things have gone before will no longer continue to work... It is something that people realize; and whether they realize it sooner or later, they will realize it, because again, you're going t... |
A failure mode I see a lot of companies get into is being way too user-facing-focused. And it's great to celebrate launches and product launches and great feature launches and so on... At Google there was an expression, "Landings, not launches", which I really liked... Because -- you know, I was talking to the Copilot ... |
So yeah, I mean, I think people will always hit that pain eventually... And so I'd love to help people notice it sooner, and be ready to address it sooner. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It seems the somewhat secret sauce might be the concern and care for actual people in the mix, right? Like, one thing is clarity and expectation... This is something you've said several times, and part of the way you lead is-- |
**Jerod Santo:** Very clearly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, exactly. |
**Rachel Potvin:** \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But it seems like this desire to care for individuals - it's different whenever you lead with, like you had said, a launch, not a landing. A landing is safe, intentional, or at least it's desired to be safe and intentional. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, not always... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[38:01\] If you're landing, it's like "Let's make it soft. Let's not make it abrupt. Let's not damage our knees." I'm thinking airborne for the Army, for example - when you come out of an airplane and you've got a parachute on, it's easy to damage your knees if you don't land properly. So landings ... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Well, I would say also the way I define landings is you achieved what you wanted to achieve, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Rachel Potvin:** So you can launch, you can get top of Hacker News, whatever, and that's cool... But six months after launch, have you got the usage that you wanted to see? Do you have the retention that you wanted to see? Are you perhaps generating the revenue, if it's a revenue-generating product, that you wanted t... |
**Jerod Santo:** One of the challenges that I am seeing is this competing concerns with -- I don't know, just like our propensity to build the wrong thing, or to yak shave... We have YAGNI, which - when it comes to scaling, a lot of us aren't going to need some of the scaling things. But when we do, we really do need t... |
So it's difficult to like fake what's worth building upfront, because some of these things you said can - if you're prepared to scale, if you rolled out a Kubernetes cluster from the beginning, and it turned out that you had this huge launch, and now you're scaling, and "Wow, it's amazing. We can just get more nodes, o... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Such a good point, Jerod, because I've said over and over again, to my teams and to various folks that I'm advising and coaching - everything's a trade-off, right? And it's not obvious. You have to assess the cost and the benefits. And a lot of times for startups, being first to market really matters... |
\[42:06\] And so being able to be thoughtful and intentional and make those decisions, I think a lot of the times -- like, definitely don't try to over-engineer something if you don't even know if you have product-market fit. Get something lightweight out there; get a prototype out there and see what kind of reaction y... |
GitHub has -- one of the sort of philosophies, I guess, is called ship to learn. And I like it, and I hate it. I kind of wanted to burn it down, but I also appreciate it, right? But it's like, what I want to do is add nuance to it, which is ship to learn the things you should ship to learn, and be really deliberate abo... |
I love ship to learn for like UI features and UI changes. I think that's really healthy and good, and where you can iterate quickly. But then there's changes where like "This is gonna be really hard to back out of." I'm writing this data schema, and it's gonna be difficult to undo this. Or I'm adopting this new infrast... |
I'll tell you, I set up this engineering-wide design review process at GitHub. It's really good. Half of it is a communication tool, right? Sure, people got really good feedback on their design docs. And by the way, not every little thing needs to go to engineering-wide design review, right? There's layers. We think ab... |
And so yeah, everything in life is a trade-off decision, and so I would never advocate for always building for scale from the start, always addressing your technical debt immediately. No, there's very legitimate reasons to make concerted decisions there. |
I think the challenge I see is -- I've definitely talked to some startups recently who maybe were intentional about saying, "Hey, look, we're gonna just not worry about this technical debt. We're gonna hack together this feature and get it out quickly." But then do you lose track of that technical debt? Did you forget ... |
And so I'd always advocate for being intentional about the choices you're making, and having a way to track decisions and understand where you have things that you're probably going to have to look at later. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Wow. |
**Rachel Potvin:** And also, by the way, thinking about what scaling, sort of throttling type limits can you put into your product initially, so that -- you know, I can't tell you the number of times it's happened where I wasn't paying attention to that API, and suddenly, like "Oh my gosh, a bunch of people have used i... |
\[46:32\] I'll tell you one that is a personal sort of concern of mine that I've seen at GitHub. GitHub has about 40 repositories that go into the GitHub platform, and it's sort of a lot of the newer product areas are in their own repos, and are separate services... But there's also the GitHub monolith, which is a Ruby... |
**Jerod Santo:** I can definitely imagine that. Going back to the decision-making, do you use and/or advocate for like a decision log, or some sort of place of record? I've never done this, but I imagine at scale you'd want to have like "Here's the decision - we want CosmosDB for this product. Here's the analysis we di... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Yeah. Look, any tool like that is as good as it is findable, and as good as it is clear. And part of the culture - and I'll give you an example at Google... You may have heard of GoLinks. GoLinks is a company I think that was created based on the way linking worked at Google, where basically if you k... |
I've talked to someone who was working at DuckDuckGo recently, and they use Asana for everything, and they do decision logs, and they have just a very clear process, and everyone knows to look there, and everyone does it. So you can't just have a decision log without the culture to go along with it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. You've gotta have buy-in. |
**Rachel Potvin:** You've gotta have buy-in, and you show people that this works, and that it's usable, and then it becomes advantageous, and then people buy into the culture. I spoke recently to the CEO from a company called Dream Team, and they have a project called Cata that I'm keeping an eye on, because it looks r... |
I think one of the challenges I've often seen is like "Yeah, let's document this decision in a Google Doc. Or maybe this one's in a repo, or maybe this one is somewhere in Slack." And that's cool, but if it's not findable, it sort of doesn't matter. |
\[50:15\] So to answer your original question - yeah, I'm a fan of lightweight decision logs. I'm a fan of design documents also, and chances are your design document points to your decision... But even more so is that culture you need around "How are we doing things, and where are things found?" It could be a really b... |
I'll say even -- even an org chart, right? At GitHub there wasn't a great org chart, and one of the engineering directors on my team wrote a new org chart; it's the org chart we use now, and I was like "Oh, Harry, thank you so much for doing this", because even just being able to find who's working on what, what person... |
I think when you have that informal culture of network, and "Oh, I'll just so and so who will know", then you propagate meetings... In this remote culture, it's never just a five-minute question. You always book a 30-minute meeting with someone to ask them maybe the one question that you've had... And so then you're su... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I'm kind of glad you went that direction, because Jerod, I was thinking that same thing, but your question was slightly different than how I would have asked it... It was more like "How do you choose the tools to communicate?" Because it seems like you're a clear communicator. If you can find ... |
**Rachel Potvin:** Well, don't feel bad... |
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