Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:01 Right now it's not about having a single team go be able to go as fast as possible. Yeah. But about having many teams horizontally. So it's about horizontally scaling, uh, engineering teams and being able to have many work, uh, many teams working in parallel.
Speaker 2 00:00:16 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:00:16 Um, mostly related thing. So you're optimizing for a very different, uh, for a very different metric at this stage.
Speaker 2 00:00:27 Hey, there, you're listening to the scaling so far podcast. I hope you enjoyed our last episode with smiles gem, Paxton. It was definitely a goodie and we have another brilliant guest for you today. VoIP fond Vora, senior director of engineering and product board named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes for two product board was founded in two with a simple but powerful mission to help companies make products that matter fast forward to 2020, and over 5,000 companies use the platform. They have offices across the globe and some brilliant investors backing them too. I was super lucky to speak to VO tech about how they scaled their engineering teams, how they hire the right people to thrive in an autonomous, fast paced environment and how he drives communication and collaboration across a hybrid globally distributed engineering team. If you're a product and tech leader going through a scaling journey yourself, this is definitely worth a listen. I hope you enjoy it. Boy, really, really pleased to be chatting with you today. First off, thank you for joining us on the scaling so far podcast. It's really great to have you with us and really looking forward to hearing more about your own journey, um, and, and your journey at product board as well. So just for our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about yourself to kick things?
Speaker 1 00:01:49 Uh, sure thing, and, and thanks for invitation. Uh, this is exciting, uh, scaling product and engineering teams, uh, has been something that's been, that's been, that's been a huge topic for me and passion for years. Uh, I have, I have background in engineering doing, uh, all sorts of, uh, all sorts of engineering work as, as a, as a programmer backend frontend infrastructure. Um, the whole lot I've about seven years ago, uh, moved to moved to, uh, Berlin and in search of bigger startups, uh, fast growing companies, which have a global impact. Uh, I joined the startup called food Panda, doing food delivery, uh, had, um, became very popular. A lot of people started using it during, during the pandemic as well. Uh, we gradually grew from a team of 50 to, um, about 200. We got bought by a company that went public several months later. So I've gotta see, uh, a lot of transition points, a lot of, uh, inflection points that teams have to go through. Um, as I grow. And then, uh, two years ago, I've decided to move back to my hometown in Prague, um, together with my family and historically this wasn't, uh, a huge tech hub, but when I saw product board, uh, growing at and just raising their series a, uh, it has become this, uh, obvious, obvious option I had to join and an opportunity couldn't
Speaker 2 00:03:32 With background something or part of something like product board is incredibly exciting. <laugh> and something that you are, you are probably very passionate about. So on the of product, um, you obviously now senior director of engineering, the was found in, is that right? Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:03:54 Right.
Speaker 2 00:03:55 Brilliant. And, and can you tell me a little bit more about its mission and vision?
Speaker 1 00:04:01 So the Moto, uh, for product board is helping our customers make products that matter. And what does that mean? Uh, we see a lot of digital companies not making the right decisions, not making customer centric decisions, um, making decisions based on, based on, um, uh, immediate needs might be, um, an internal stakeholder that's particularly loud about something can be a go to market team or sales team that is particularly interested in a single customer. Yeah. But what we want our customers to do is have a really holistic understanding of their customer needs and problems, and be able to the design and then also deliver on the engineering side, the right solutions. So that is, that is our, that is our, that is our vision. That is our mission. And you, we're talking about tech startups and, and the audience of, of, of this podcast are people working in, in technical companies and digital companies where, where this is where this is where this is natural, but many companies are also going through digital transformations and simply don't have the muscle don't have, don't have customer center C in their DNA so far. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:05:20 That's brilliant. And I, um, I've, I've seen, heard of, um, tech companies previously that are very much driven often by the demands of one customer, potentially, especially in those earlier stages, right. Because you're doing as much as you can to, um, find that product market fit, generate successful customers, please them essentially. Um, but sometimes you can go too far down the track of just fulfilling the needs of one customer. And as you said, not looking at that holistic picture, um, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:05:54 You're absolutely right there. And this is, this is something we see, uh, and that we believe a lot of early stage companies are doing because, because the, because for example, the revenue growth coming from that one customer is so attractive. It feels, uh, you will get a little bit more security. You will get yourself on the growth path, but it can be a very short term gain. And, uh, you might be, may be missing out on, along, uh, on a much bigger opportunity out there. So yeah. When you were talking about product board being founded in 2014, in reality of the first three or four years, it was a very small group around hub and Daniel, the co-founders, the CEO and CTO, and first two, three founding engineers. And they've literally spent all of their time just iterating, iterating, throwing away concept after concept. And it took three, four years before they've actually felt confident enough to see they had product market fit and started scaling it out. Yeah. There were many concepts thrown, uh, out at the very beginning.
Speaker 2 00:06:56 Yeah. Yeah. And that's interesting as well, because I think for, and, and did you say that you joined just after their series a,
Speaker 1 00:07:04 Uh that's right. In two 19?
Speaker 2 00:07:06 Yeah. So they actually spent a good amount of time in that like seed stage really obviously investing in trying to find the right product markets there and iterating before they then went on to, to scale a bit more significantly. Right. Um,
Speaker 1 00:07:22 That's true. And when I was, uh, evaluating and, and making the decision for whether to, to join product board, I think one of the biggest, like positive signals for me is that at that moment there was no go to market team. There was no sales team. Yeah. Very small customer success and support team, uh, to be able to support customers that found us signed up, started using product board, but all the growth was natural. So word of mouth people like championing it in between themselves taking product work to their next company. Yeah. And so you have like a very healthy foundation. And if you add a go to market motion on top of that, um, I think that's a combination set up for success.
Speaker 2 00:08:00 Yeah. It's actually, it's funny. It's that similar situation to seed? We, um, we didn't really look at scaling in the way that we have now, um, from like 2013 through to when I joined in 2018, I always get that wrong. Um, <laugh> but we'd just grown through happy customer referrals and word of mouth. And we had that really strong, foundational brand that we are able to say, okay, this is sustainable. And now we are ready to grow. And it's that inte it's product integrity, right. Knowing that like, we've got a set of happy customers <laugh> and we've grown through that. Like now let's look at building on top of that and, and scaling a little bit more significantly. So that's super interesting. And, and your product board is listed, um, in pro's world's best digital products, um, you know, genuinely helping the world make better products and for a product leader, as I said earlier, must have been a bit of a dream company to be part of <laugh> what's your journey at product board look like so far?
Speaker 1 00:09:07 So it, it, it was one of the main reasons I, I joined and also, uh, delivered here at the company I used to work for before product board. We were a customer, one of actually product board's biggest customers at that time. And when I was talking to my colleagues, uh, back then they were working in another department. They were absolutely in love with the whole interface, how it works, uh, the whole, the whole model that the application gives you. Yeah. That gave you a lot of reassurance. It, it sets, it certainly sets the bar high. So you will have engineering led organizations with a weaker, um, involvement from a product or design organization sometimes with stronger influence from operations or sales or other functions. And this is exciting and you need, but you also need to make sure that you hire, for example, the right people to work in such an environment, people where you, uh, engineers that are used to engineering led organizations can struggle sometimes in the current setup.
Speaker 1 00:10:10 Cause it requires a lot more involvement, a lot more discussion, a lot more engagement, especially in the discovery, in the discovery phase of launching a new future or exploring in your problem or opportunity. Yeah. Um, and not everybody is used to that. And, and it's a big, it's a big mental shift. So I think it is the right way to design product. I think it's, it's, it's long term, most successful way, but it's certainly, um, not something that, that is, that is, that is automatic or, or natural and, or works in every organization out there right now.
Speaker 2 00:10:41 Yeah, definitely. And so in your role now, what are some of the initiatives that you are really focused on? Um, you know, over the next few months year, um, what are you doubling down on
Speaker 1 00:10:55 When we were talking about that strong foundation in the, uh, in the early years of the company finding that really strong, uh, foundation, you were talking about product integrity for us as we're growing right now. Um, it's actually, we actually have to separate ourselves from it, uh, in a way, and there is a second chasm. You have the initial one with, uh, finding product market fit where a lot of where a lot of companies fail. Mm. But right now a lot of the initiatives and a lot of the problems we're trying to solve are actually different ones than our early adopters. And the, the, the customers that have been working with product work in the early days. Mm. It was typically smaller teams, single product, uh, single product teams, uh, a group, a small group of product managers or engineers and designers working together. And right now we wanna make sure that the whole companies can adopt product work.
Speaker 1 00:11:51 Yeah. And the set of problems and the set of solutions you need to provide, uh, is very different. And even bringing our own team along on that journey and making sure that we, that we, that we, uh, that we move in alignment is a big challenge. So for us right now, we're focusing on new personas. So it's now, uh, it's not only product makers. Yeah. Uh, it's gonna be product leaders, product executives, uh, help them effectively cascade their strategy into their organization, uh, understand where their investments are going. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and, uh, solving the need of organizational alignment, not just the product team alignment, or being able to collect, collect the research for a single domain oriented team. So, and then, uh, the second thing is, is we're a startup. And in the early days we accumulated a lot of engineering depth we've, uh, made, made significant trade offs in, in the early days, uh, very heavily focusing on the front end side of things. Yeah. Pushing a lot of data into the client and then doing a lot of calculations there. And that's no, no longer serving us. Uh, so well, so we've invested last year or two in making sure that we have like next generation architecture, so on both sides. Very interesting things.
Speaker 2 00:13:02 Yeah, definitely. And I think that, as you say, there's, you, you always have to make a call in that early stage. Right. And sometimes you do end up with a bit of that debt <laugh>, but it'll all come out in the wash in the end and it'll be, uh, yeah. Adapted upon. So
Speaker 1 00:13:17 It, for people that joined today, they sometimes don't understand the choice, but it has served the company so well for five, six years. Yeah. And, uh, gave a lot of speed at the start.
Speaker 2 00:13:29 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:13:30 But obviously also, as you grow, um, there's different right now. It's not about having a single team go be able to go as fast as possible. Yeah. But about having many teams horizontally. So it's about horizontally scaling, uh, engineering teams and being able to have many work, uh, many teams working in parallel. Yeah. Mostly related thing. So you're optimizing for a very different, uh, for very metric.
Speaker 2 00:13:54 Yeah. And that ties the question. I know, teams in your engineering function are set up vertically. Um, can you tell me a little bit more about exactly what that means? And, um, second to that sort of TA and recruitment to
Speaker 1 00:14:16 I'm fan by Spotify, around domain oriented teams, it's a model that scales really well. Um, each tribe owning, owning, uh, a domain or, um, or problem problem domain, or, or domain in the sense of domain driven design and then teams or squads or pods, or, um, it doesn't really matter what they're called under dose tribes. Again, like owning a smaller part of that. So to be more concrete in our side, there's three main pillars in product board. One is insights understanding the needs of your customers prioritize, which is, uh, based on those insights, being able to prioritize the features you have, um, in your, in your backlog, uh, in your list of ideas and solutions, and then align, which, um, are represented by roadmaps. And that's aligning your organization on what you've prioritized just before that. And our first organizational, um, architecture actually copied these, what we call jobs to be done, jobs were helping our, uh, customer solve.
Speaker 1 00:15:26 And then within these, um, we had sub jobs. So in the insight stride, we had a team dedicated at collecting customer insights and the team at, uh, collect, understanding customer insights and what this, what this creates is, uh, specialization and domain knowledge. And it, it works really well if the teams can stay, uh, longer together, uh, longer together because they build up a strong internal domain knowledge. They make, they can make a lot of decisions on their own. They make better decisions than top of a management. Yeah. Um, it has caveats, uh, there is a risk you're gonna ship your organizational structure in the, uh, in the product because the teams might be, aversed working together. They're very happy with their end to end delivery capability. But for example, some use cases that like span the whole flow implement, and people will avoid them just because they require a lot of that cross organizational alignment.
Speaker 1 00:16:27 That's and that's maybe to try to actually answer, answer your question is, is we need to be worried about make, having the right mix of people. Yeah. Specialists, people that are have like deep passion for, for these individual domains. Sometimes it needs a special engineering skill. Sometimes it needs a special, um, domain skill. Uh, but also people that are that Excel in being able to organize teams and working, working with teams out of it, out with people outside of their immediate immediate group of people they work with every day. Yeah. Those are very different profiles. So when, one of the main things of how we do recruitment is we did a mistake in the past that we've hired, especially in our high growth phases, we hired into a pool, um, based on like a generic set of expectations we have. And then we've decided where the people would go to which team after they joined product board.
Speaker 1 00:17:24 Right. So this ended up is that in many teams, we didn't have the right set of skills. We had sometimes too many leaders, sometimes too many people wanting to focus on deep, uh, on, on, on, on deep work. And so right now we've moved a lot of the decision making to the, the tribe leads or the, or the product team leads. Yeah. Uh, they need to be very, very thoughtful about what's the right fit. What's the kind of right. Missing skill or competency in their team. Yeah. It actually means like, for example, me stepping a little bit away from, from making those decisions, because it's more important that the fit and composition of the is, is
Speaker 2 00:18:06 Makes, so I'm, I love this topic <laugh> because I'm really passionate about. And we had, um, one of our podcast episodes was with Nico, from Platypus. It's a company called Platypus and they've got this tool that is, um, it's essentially making culture and values of individuals within your organization, data driven. Um, and it's the centered on the concept of you need to build teams that aren't all driven by the same way of working value that their approach. Cause if you have an entire team that, um, places a ton of value on process, you might end up, um, being at a deficit when it comes to innovation and creativity. So actually, and especially in, in product organizations, like how are you getting the right balance, as you said, of people from a, a sort of competency level. And if everybody wants to be a leader, there's gonna be an imbalance in their team. So you've actually, there, there is, there's that, um, sort of the hard skills that you're obviously looking for, but then, you know, secondary to that or aligned with that, you do need to be looking at personality, um, and what they're driven by. So I find that super, super interesting. It must have been hard as well to reshape your process, to optimize for that.
Speaker 1 00:19:31 It, it hasn't been easy and it's not certainly done yet. So it's, it's something where, um, any changes as, as, as we grow as a company. Yeah. I think one important thing, um, one important aspect is start from the constraints or start from the expectations you have on engineering managers. There are a lot of models, um, working in, in, in technical companies and some are more technically focused delivery focused, uh, project management. Sometimes some are very, uh, focused around architecture. Um, a lot of the times you get lead engineers, the most senior engineers promoted into the role and what lacks in those cases is people management skills. And maybe if I say it more inspirationally, for example, the ability to recognize people's strengths and being able to work with them, uh, which is what you talked about. Exactly. Just right now, for example, being able to recognize leaders, give them appropriate roles, being able to recognize thinkers, able to recognize innovators, um, being, uh, able to recognize people with desire, stability, and, um, um, work with them appropriately. And, uh, this is something that, for example, when I transitioned into an engineering management role for the first time I got zero support with. Yeah. And so oftentimes we try not to have a strict process on this, but rather try to invest into, into training, uh, our engineering managers and also bringing people if we hire them externally, already screen and, and, and make sure that we make this a core part of the interview process for engineering managers.
Speaker 2 00:21:11 Yeah. That makes sense. And, um, you mentioned a couple of times when you were speaking through your point previously, um, ownership and that sense of ownership. Um, I know you incredibly passionate about really giving talent trust and autonomy and, um, you know, this is how your engineering teams deliver it, both the pace and quality needed. How do you actually hire, um, for somebody who would thrive in that type of environment? How do you assess for that?
Speaker 1 00:21:41 It's very hard for you to imagine yourself in the role, if you haven't seen it before, or if you haven't had a degree of responsibility in the past, and this makes it hard for, to hire people that have the potential to do it, but haven't done it. And in, I, we focus a lot behavioral questions focusing on past experience, you know, questions that typically start with that. Tell me about a time when you
Speaker 2 00:22:07 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:22:08 Uh, demonstrated a trait, right. So like that, like, for example, tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager or tell me when you, when you about a time when you disagreed, uh, with, with a significant stakeholder and were able to convince them about a different situation. Uh, tell me about the last time when you made, made a tough decision. Yeah. And, um, these are things that are impossible to get from a book or get from a podcast, I think until you live through those, until you experience those, it's very hard to imagine what they're like, and it's only with practice that they become more natural to you. So that's one way. Yeah. The second thing is, of course, um, we also want to make sure that people can grow into that role and that's where like strong expectation setting, um, and like a strong sense of accountability comes into play, like in terms of process internally, because sometimes like autonomy can be, can be confused for, uh, you just let us live. Don't look, you know, under the lid what's happening in there. And any sort of, any sort of ask for transparency gets, gets misinterpreted as micromanagement.
Speaker 2 00:23:20 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:23:20 And it's not. And so internally it's, um, what is your experience for example, with strong goal setting and strong, um, uh, and creating a culture of accountability. So for example, in many of the initiatives, we do, we wanna invest a lot upfront before we start the work, what our assumptions, what are our expectations? What do we aim to imagine? We have a large initiative that will take several weeks, uh, what is desired outcome? What are we not solving for? How does success look like, but document it upfront and then like, you know, have an honest conversation evaluating it. And the goal is not to always like hit the goal, but not get into this sort of have, you know, paint, paint your original expectations in a different life if it's not working out. And it's just like adjusting the original plan to, to, to actually meet where you, where you, where you, what, what you came to. And sometimes that's actually internally a struggle for us. Like if people feel, oh, I need to document every decision I'm making, I need to, uh, I need to present every like step I'm taking. And, um, but the whole idea is actually, so we, um, together make the decision, we wanna invest into this, but then we have enough information to lead the team team deliver, keep on rolling. And, but that to be able to value it, was it a success or not?
Speaker 2 00:24:47 Yeah, it's about that communication piece as well. It's like setting those goals, moving towards them, but also making sure that it's communicated to whoever needs to know or would want to know. Um, no that makes total sense. And, uh, my, the next questions sort of around how you scale that culture of trust and autonomy. And I think you've sort of answered that in what you've just said.
Speaker 1 00:25:10 I think so we'll talk mostly about this. So it's um, before you start a significant investment, just write down the expectations. The, the second you start, you're gonna start saying a slightly alternative history of, of, of what, what your expectations were slightly lower than they originally were. And you're gonna start adjusting those as you go.
Speaker 2 00:25:29 Yes.
Speaker 1 00:25:30 Uh, and, but, but also it's, you can draw really what good parallels, for example, from, uh, tech outages. So there's postmortems, if you have an availability outage or something, that's very natural to every tech company out there, but for example, have tech postmortems, both in a positive and negative sense after an initiative is done is a really great thing to do. And it's slightly different than a retrospective, which is, which is, um, um, especially focused on how we would change the way we are working, but really go very technically into breaking down the individual steps of what happened minute by minutes, the same, like you would do in an outage or sprint by sprint or month by month.
Speaker 2 00:26:11 Yeah. And,
Speaker 1 00:26:12 You know, be able to track, oh, this is where it went wrong. And just kind of like understand that root cause. Yeah. So we've kinda successfully with, with, uh, a few initiatives that, you know, took twice or three times as long as we originally anticipated. Nice. And only by really pinpointing that root cause I have confidence, um, confidence, you know, where, where we will be able to learn from it, or at least the team involved. I think the next step would be being able to, to somehow transfer that learning to, to teachers. Yeah. But I have yet to figure that one out,
Speaker 2 00:26:42 But I think as well, it's so important in, especially in that fast growing, like startup scale up whatever phase of growth that you are at, like, you can end up feeling like you're in a bit of a hamster wheel, right. Where you're just running, running, running, shipping, shipping, shipping, it's so healthy to be able to, or to even just give team space, to pause and reflect and whatever you wanna call that. Whether it's a retro postmortem, whatever the process is around that, like you've got, give your teams that space because otherwise mistakes will continue to be made the positive things that have happened. Aren't scalable learnings from certain experiences aren't scalable. And at that early stage things like learnings, you do want to share them with the team. You want to be able to kind of democratize access to that knowledge that that individual team has had, or, you know, make sure that it's, um, it's something that is documented so that it can be passed onto the, the next generation or passed on other team members.
Speaker 1 00:27:42 Exactly. And that's why I was saying the postmortems also in the positive sense. So there was a really successful initiative. The team nailed their estimate, um, or the, it went better and expected, or it's also just good to stop and reflect on those. Yeah. And it will feel just like a pat on the back, but I think it's well deserved. Yeah. And so many organizations will just go and chase, uh, like evaluations of things. They feel didn't go. Right. But it's, but it's good to, to integrate that also into initiatives or like does blocks of effort that, that really, that really, that really worked well. And so this is, this is something we're trying to, trying to make sure that happens as
Speaker 2 00:28:26 Well. Yeah. Brilliant finding that balance. <laugh> um, so awesome. When, when it comes to, um, sort of attracting talent, um, what are some of the most effective ways you've found, um, that work when it comes to attracting the right engineering talent to join product board
Speaker 1 00:28:48 For every small company or for every startup? Um, you know, if few hundred employees, I think you're always trying to work on having more inbound applications, more people knowing about your responding than you having source approach is example here in the Czech Republic. I believe we have a really strong employer brand and we're, we're able to, we're able to capitalize on that. We're able to leverage that. But for example, when we, uh, kicked off our new engineering side in Vancouver, uh, about half year ago, yeah. We went with this assumption. It's gonna work the same class way as here in Prague. Yeah. And they weren't really, it was, it was a bit of a cold shower to, to see how hard it is. If you have no name, if you are new to the market, if you're not present in the local community. And it's something that takes long time to, uh, to actually come into effect.
Speaker 1 00:29:53 So I believe all, all the inbound sources are really valuable and that's kind of where the biggest, uh, where, where the, where the, where the best talent comes, comes in. Those are referral are events are meetups. You invest into that from a very early, you build that brand down road. We have dedicated people inside product board, helping us organize communities here in local events. We're trying to also partner with other companies in product to build communities around engineering leadership around backend, around front end around infrastructure. And this has been, has been paying off. And we see it when we're entering a new market, trying to open a new location. We don't have that. And, and it, and it's really painful. And it requires just so much more effort for us to build, to build it, build a strong team in, in those locations. Yeah. And that referrals, um, you need to invest into company culture. Like people are only gonna refer people if, if there's actually something worth coming over for us. I,
Speaker 2 00:30:57 Yeah, definitely though. That makes sense. It's funny. We, um, we launched in the us or north America, um, at the end of last year and exactly the same, like you, you underestimate how long it really takes to build up that brand. And especially, you know, at similar with product board in those early stages, when you've got that brand integrity, <laugh> because you've got product integrity and you've sort of scaled quite organically through word of mouth. Sometimes when you're launching new locations, you don't have the time for that. So actually, how do you, how do you recreate that sort of word of mouth that brand integrity in a brand new market? It's tough. <laugh>, that's what I do know. It's tough. <laugh> um, awesome. And you've got, I think about four odd people around the world now, is that right?
Speaker 1 00:31:48 That's right.
Speaker 2 00:31:50 And in San Francisco, Vancouver, Dublin, London Prague, um, I read that you also have a fully remote team sort of spread across Europe. Um, how have you found building hybrid teams and, and what would you say have been some of the necessary foundations to make this a success, especially within engineering
Speaker 1 00:32:13 Originally, we were an onsite team based around a single office in prag. We believe, uh, unless you remote first culture, you build your whole company processes around it. I think for example, GitLab, I think is a great example or GitHub. Yeah. Two very similar companies, but one thing they have in common is being remote first. Yeah. We're gonna have a tough time. Uh, and for us, we need, we needed a lot of collaboration, especially between the different functions between product, between design, between engineering and our way of starting product board was a heavily onsite team meeting together very often. And working together, this changed because of two reasons in the past years. And one was the necessity to go and approach a wider market to hire, hire more experienced talent, actually product managers, product designers that have experience in companies similar to ours. And arguably there's, it's a simple fact that like around here, there are not so many.
Speaker 1 00:33:18 So this is something that forced us to go looking out in Europe. The second is the pandemic as, as anybody else. So suddenly, suddenly, uh, the world has changed and, and we've adapted to that during the pandemic. We were, we were searching for our spot and we were trying to see what one model would work well for us. Yeah. And it was from the full range of completely onsite in the future to fully remote, remote first distributed time zone in the world. Um, and what we've settled on right now is that we are hybrid in, I think it, it, it's good to go a little bit deeper than just hybrid. There's two things that are important for us. We are concentrated like in close proximity to a few hubs. So that'd be Vancouver that being CRO that being in the future London as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:34:10 And you don't have to live necessarily in the city, but it has to be somewhat convenient for you to come. At least every few weeks, meet the people, um, around planning sessions, kick off for new features, those kind of more, more, uh, collaboration, heavy, uh, parts of the year. And then, uh, you know, you might work from home. You might work from, from a different, uh, location from a remote, uh, workspace or from one of the smaller offices that we have, like, like in burnout. Hmm. And so that's one thing. Uh, and the second thing is, for example, like work from home remote, I think that's something that has shifted and, and nobody's expected anybody to be in the office five days a week. And that's something, that's something that's just, just fundamentally changed, but we acknowledge that we don't have a good process. We don't have a, we, we don't have a good company processes to be able to support a fully distributed global global team. And I think it's fair to set that expectation with new candidates, with the existing team, because otherwise it will just cause internal conflicts and people won't be happy in the end.
Speaker 2 00:35:15 Yeah. That makes sense. That does make sense. And I, I, um, yeah, I think having that sort of hybrid, like, well, as you say, deeper than hybrid approach and being very intentional has to happen, especially now. I think what you, you, you've done a similar thing to what we have at seed, which is concentrate. We're remote. We are remote first and we actually always have been since 2013, but we very intentionally built hubs like virtual, essentially virtual hubs where people are in certain areas so that if they want that sense of community, if they want to meet up in the office, they can do that. And there's, there's a group of people within seed that they can do that with. So it's a really, really, really positive way of approaching it. And what sort of tools do you have any tools that you use, um, within your teams, especially to really collaborate and lead your teams remotely?
Speaker 1 00:36:17 I think we were lucky in a sense that from the very beginning we had Huber the CEO in San Francisco and Daniel, the CTO in Prague. So every decision we've made, every meeting we've we've had, had to be written down recorded, had to be zoom and enabled. So for example, when the pandemic hit in March, 2020, for us, it wasn't a big change because we had all the necessary infrastructure in place. Yeah. Which wasn't the case for a lot of companies, um, had a lot of conversations just happening in person. So for us, like from the very beginning, um, I don't think we have anything specific, like specifically different than other companies, but just like the whole set of productivity tools from, from slack to, to Figma, to Miro. Yeah. To notion, uh, we've always invested in having, uh, a good information architecture set up in all of those strong conventions, uh, easy to onboard into if you're not in the office, if you're not talking to people. So even if you join from a remote location, you can quickly quickly find yourself in like locate yourself in slack, where your team is in notion, be able to sort of like consume information from, from, from the top level company strategy down to the granularity of the team you're working in.
Speaker 2 00:37:34 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:37:36 Um, we've struggled to keep that information architecture sane as we grew. So I think we might be at a science where we actually hire a dedicated person just to help us, uh, help us structure that. Uh, but, but that's, that's actually a problem we're actively trying to solve right now.
Speaker 2 00:37:53 I hear you're, you know, when you do have this amount of information and you make it's access to everybody, like that's, somebody's full-time job <laugh>. And to make sure that it's up to date digestible, you know, it's a pleasant experience. Um, yeah. I, we are having a similar <laugh>. We, we have some commonalities here between seed and product board on a few things. So, no,
Speaker 1 00:38:26 But it's always reassuring just to hear somebody else's is, has the same issues as
Speaker 2 00:38:31 You. Yes. But I think as well, this sort of talks back to your about, um, like documenting decisions and, um, you know, the retros or what was it that you called them? The
Speaker 1 00:38:44 Posts, for
Speaker 2 00:38:44 Example posts. Yeah. Like that is also incredibly important in if you have a distributed team and that information is accessible. Um, you do have to document a lot of this stuff to make sure that yeah. Everybody has access to it. Should they need to have access to it? Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1 00:39:04 You're, you're actually making one point and that's that's transparency and the level of openness, I think, you know, some simple metrics are like the ratio of public and private channels in slack, the number of private Google groups, the number of, um, the number, the, the ratio of information that goes through DMS and then threads just containing, containing several people that has been one of the things I've got used to working a product board for the past few years, but it has been one of the things that surprised me when I joined, like how open and how transparent you have to be. And that 80, 90% of your communication will be in a completely public channel to the whole company.
Speaker 2 00:39:42 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:39:42 It required me to just a lot of my communication. It required me to think a lot more about what I say, what I write.
Speaker 2 00:39:49 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:39:51 It's not about, and it's not necessarily about hiding things, but be like, in terms of clarity, in terms of brevity. Yes. Uh, in terms of actually thinking about what is the point I'm trying to, trying to, trying to, trying to make.
Speaker 2 00:40:03 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:40:04 But I, I completely got used to that, but I realized when I joined, this was one of the big, big surprises, uh, when I joined.
Speaker 2 00:40:11 Yeah. That level of, of transparency. Yeah. Awesome. No, that's great to hear. And, um, from your experience, are there any sort of big standout learnings apart from transparency <laugh> that you've had when it comes to, to building and scaling engineering teams?
Speaker 1 00:40:29 There's like the cliche that every plan you you make will, will fall apart very soon, even if you account for that. Yeah. For, for example, in more concrete terms, I think if I look at the past six months, the biggest learning for me was building out a new engineering site in a different time zone. We're talking about Vancouver that has been, that has been, uh, I had so many learnings over the past six months, assuming that our current processes would work. And any, any engineer leader you talked to who've went through, this will tell you about that. That launching a new site will be five times as hard as you imagine and plan to be. But I don't think you appreciate that statement until you try it out for yourself. And that's for example, a great point where I actually have a lot of the assumptions that we've gone into it written down, and many of them simply simply simply underestimated a lot of the facts.
Speaker 1 00:41:25 So opening a new location, boots, trapping it, making sure that people are onboarded, you're able to transfer, transfer to culture. Yeah. We talk about how easy or not easy it is to hire in, in the new location. Um, all of those things suddenly come together at the same time. Yeah. And that, that's, that's a great challenge. But for if you are, um, sort of in the scale up phase, I think it's not a matter of if, but a matter of when to do that. So I think this is something many engineering leaders and, and growing companies will encounter remote. First companies actually might have, um, might have an easy, or might have a way out here because that's something collaboration, onsite collaboration or help centric
Speaker 2 00:42:18 Organized there's engineering
Speaker 1 00:42:29 For companies. It will not be their decision because it'll come through M and a and it'll come from an acquisition of a different company. So that is, I think where many engineering leaders will encounter that problem. And it's not gonna come at a time convenient for them. Um, that has been my experience cause delivery hero and the food delivery food delivery world is, um, is consolidating very fast and the markets are shifting all the time. So we've had new people in different cities join, uh, several times a year. Mm. If it's, uh, a calmer environment in, in the B2B, uh, SA world cons a world consolidation doesn't happen as often as, as in the seed world, I think overall to give a number, we made the decision at about hundred engineers in one location.
Speaker 2 00:43:22 Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:43:24 I'm sure if that's the right time for us. It was also, uh, based on, based on our, uh, based on us being located in San Francisco and Prague, and we wanted to have engineering, uh, and product and design in the same time zone as we have to let rest of the leadership in the go to market teams. So that was an aspect that made us make that decision at this time.
Speaker 2 00:43:46 Yeah. And I suppose also talent ties in here as well, like ex having accessibility to that talent. And if you do a market mapping exercise in terms of like, where do we have a concentrated amount of engineering talent where we would want to open up a new hub market mapping is something that we're, we're doing, um, pretty consistently with our partners, but that can drive your decision making. Right. If you feel like you are growing, you've grown in a certain hub and you're looking elsewhere, like, yes, where is that talent? And where can you, where do you think that you can sort of hire, hire those people?
Speaker 1 00:44:26 One? Exactly. And one specific skill, uh, for us that we felt was very hard to, to combine, uh, in Europe was product like growth. So in, in B2B software, a lot of the, where a lot of the go to market or revenue growth comes from from sales Mo sales led motion. Yeah. We're looking at product led growth and that's a specific skill and people which have done that successfully in the past. Uh there's. There's not a lot of them.
Speaker 2 00:44:52 Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes, makes sense. So you went to them <laugh> um, and are there any, maybe you sort of covered this off in the last one, but are there any real pitfalls, um, that you feel people need to be aware of? Um, when it comes to building teams and, and leading people in that fast growing scale up environment,
Speaker 1 00:45:15 One thing that comes to mind immediately is not leaving new joiners behind in terms of context, you as even after a year or two, you'll feel like an old timer as an OG, as somebody who has been with the company for years. Yeah. And every new joiner is starting with a blank slate in terms of context around the product, around the business. Um, and so for you will receive feedback from many of the old, uh, for, for people which have been around for years, that you keep on repeating yourself. I've heard that before, but you're not sharing the company strategy, the engineering strategy for them, you're sharing it for all the new joiners and constantly reminding, um, new people of why we're here, what are we trying to achieve? And it's very easy to assume that people will have that same, uh, amount of context. So being able to effectively, that's why their onboard effective onboarding comes into play. Yeah. For example, not feeling awkward about repeating the same message over and over again. Um, which is very unnatural is for example, is, is, is, is an example. I, I encounter every day.
Speaker 2 00:46:28 Yeah. That's a, I think that's a really, really good example because also like people are, um, much more now as well. We've found like they wanna join companies for the purpose and for the mission and they're driven by that. Um, so it's great when they're on board to be able to keep communicating that to them, making sure that they're fully bought into that. Um, so yeah, communicate, communicate, and then communicate again. <laugh> never over
Speaker 1 00:47:01 True's. Yeah, but it's very, I, I, I have set reminders for myself actually, so it's, yeah. It it's, it's not natural for everybody.
Speaker 2 00:47:08 Yeah. Um, if there was one thing that you could wave a magic w and, and fix when it comes to sort of building and scaling engineering teams, what would that be?
Speaker 1 00:47:22 I think like, just talk, like coming from the previous question about the pitfalls of being able to share the context with new joiners, if I could just, I don't know, have a thumb drive and just be able to like, upload all that context into people's hands. Like the moment, the day they join, that would be tremendous. Um, yeah. That's not happening anytime soon.
Speaker 2 00:47:42 <laugh> I like that. Or, or have, um, a piece of tech or Alexa <laugh> Alexa, just, just repeat the message on, on the odd <laugh>
Speaker 1 00:47:53 Alexa, that would like be able to arbitrarily answer any question that somebody has already figured out in the company in the past few years. Yeah. And we don't come revisit that decision. We don't come back revisit that research. That that would be another one.
Speaker 2 00:48:07 I love that. Right. There's a gap gap in the market. <laugh> um, brilliant. So just a couple of lighthearted questions to bring our chat to a close I'm mindful of, of time. Um, is there anything that you are really, really passionate about, um, that you just find unapologetic amounts of joy in this can be professional or personal or both
Speaker 1 00:48:30 On the, on the professional side, it's seeing teams that work well together, they're productive. Uh, they're delivering value. They, they have a sense of ownership is just a great thing to see. And so a big part of my job is venturing. That can happen. It's hard because you actually have to kind of stop and look and, and, and see it happening because nobody will like come to tell and tell you that's happening. Um, firefighting, a different problem at that moment, sort of like sometimes like stop and, and see, see the good things that are happening in terms of, in terms of team under personal side, I need to take a break from people sometimes. Uh, COVID has been actually, uh, has given me a new hobby, uh, in, in terms of woodworking. And it's a hobby where you cannot have anybody disturb you cause otherwise you're cut off, cut off your finger.
Speaker 1 00:49:20 Yeah. Uh, and so like, it's just like a really great way just to like, be with yourself. And it's one of the things that I miss moving from, from engineering to, to, to management. And that's, as an engineer, you have this very quick feedback loop, you have something tangible, you created that works, that lights up that gives you, I, that plays a sound that, that, that, uh, blinks a light. And it's, again, something that, you know, you have something in your hands that you've created and, and, and is there, it's like, you can prove it. Whereas with management, it's, it's very often, it's very often hard to do that.
Speaker 2 00:49:53 I love that. Absolutely love that. And yeah. Break from people is sometimes good having that, that space for yourself. So. Awesome. And is that really, to,
Speaker 1 00:50:13 I'll say to a solved it's I Don's it it's. I actually enjoy the fact when I don't know how to solve it. I sometimes enjoy it more than if I know how to, how to solve the problem. So yeah, that's actually, I think, um, one of the things that has led me to, to during leadership role that the set of skills that you've had in the past are no longer relevant in your, your role and you encounter like this huge variety of problems coming at you, um, every day, every quarter, uh, it's issues with, um, with its business related issues. It's, it's people, it's, it's organizational it's and just brings on challenges every day.
Speaker 2 00:51:07 Yeah. Brilliant. I, yeah, that's fantastic. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you today. I, um, I feel like I've learned a ton <laugh> so I'm sure our listeners will as well and spooky some of the, uh, yeah. The similarities between what you are experiencing and what we've experienced or are experiencing as well. So, no, it's really, really brilliant to hear more about, um, what you've been up to and, and the team at product board. So really, really appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 1 00:51:37 Yeah. And thank you for an invitation I already, and I'll say it again, it's, it's really reassuring. Also, always to hear other others are solving the same issues or living through, through the same problems. Uh, at least a little interesting. And, and to hear what other people's, what other people have, um, have in terms of solutions, ideas, how to tackle the.
