Transcript: Measuring Technical Debt and Technical Investments
0:00 Scott As an industry,
0:00 Scott we still don't know a way to measure productivity.
0:09 Brad When the girls all protect me,
0:10 Brad sing the message to those who never tell,
0:13 Brad to become themselves.
0:17 Brad CEOs will share their stories untold.
0:20 Brad How many CTOs does it take to figure out how to record a video call?
0:25 Scott That's a great question.
0:26 Scott I thought the very first thing we should discuss is what the title of this podcast would be, and I had no ideas, but maybe how many CTOs does it take to
0:34 Brad I like that.
0:35 Scott do?
0:35 Brad I like that. How many CTOs does it take?
0:39 Brad How many CTOs does it take to approve a coding standard?
0:48 Scott Zero.
0:50 Brad Hopefully.
0:52 Scott I'm assuming there's a third-party coding standard out there that you could just code against.
0:56 Scott So, okay, but if it wasn't how many CTOs does it take, which is a good, that's a clubhouse leader,
1:01 Scott what would the other name be for it?
1:04 Brad I thought it was ho-rad and be-rad.
1:09 Scott Okay,
1:10 Scott sure.
1:11 Scott It could be that.
1:13 Scott That's good.
1:16 Scott Terrible.
1:17 Scott We need a marketing.
1:18 Scott We have a marketer we can reach out to.
1:20 Brad Yeah, yeah, we got definitely like a social media influencer.
1:26 Brad All right, welcome everybody.
1:27 Brad My name is Brad Hefta-Gaub and this is my co-host Scott Borad and this is the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
1:33 Scott So what's happening at Stealth Startup?
1:36 Brad Oh, it's great. It's the perfect time of a startup.
1:39 Brad It's free product,
1:40 Brad free customer,
1:41 Brad free MVP.
1:43 Brad So it's all it's like all blue ocean, just we're run, we're small team, we get to build stuff fast, we we don't have anybody complaining about it yet. Right.
1:56 Brad But it's fun.
1:57 Brad It's great.
1:58 Brad It's it's it's really interesting.
1:59 Brad I think that one of the things that
2:01 Brad that I'm doing with this, which was a little bit of an experiment, but I'm really pleased with the results so far,
2:12 Brad is
2:14 Brad we're small right there's there's essentially like eight of us working on the product if i keep counting myself and then the other uh the founder who's our product guy so we're really small team and you can with a team that small you could totally get away with just like completely freewheeling it no process you know you every everybody could just be kind of just doing their own thing kind of thing
2:38 Brad Um,
2:38 Brad but instead we're, we've kind of got a fair amount of process,
2:43 Brad right?
2:43 Brad We're, we're, we're doing two week sprints. We,
2:45 Brad um,
2:46 Brad we do, uh,
2:48 Brad like today,
2:49 Brad you know, at one o'clock today,
2:50 Brad we'll be doing our closing ceremonies for our current sprint that we're in.
2:54 Brad We do really, I think really great, uh,
2:57 Brad high quality retros where we kind of really, it's totally no ego,
3:02 Brad no holds barred.
3:03 Brad um what went well what went what didn't go well i'm super stoked about our dev stack we have this dev stack where it's like we're all using docker docker containers docker compose and like literally every single developer has can run the whole stack on their system on their on their local dev machine and as they're making changes to the full stack and when we do cicd we're basically when we deploy in github
3:31 Brad we've got little aws instances for each of the developers that are like their little sandboxes so they can they can like work locally but when they make their pull request against any of the repos because we're like not a mono repo we're multiple repos um they can basically be like hey i got that feature up and running go check it out in you know scott in scott's stack you know so scott.dev.startup and um
3:56 Brad anybody can go play with it and um and so the product the product guy can go play with it and give feedback or the qa guy that we have can jump in there and start basically doing early testing against it and um yeah it's pretty it's pretty cool i'm pretty stoked it's like i feel like it's it's way more process than i've ever had for a team this early and it's
4:20 Brad And everyone, but we're still moving super fast and everyone seems to really be in the flow of it.
4:29 Scott So I have so many questions for you, but the first one I'll ask is, well, if you don't need the process,
4:33 Scott why do you think it's why is it happening?
4:36 Brad I think that it, first of all, I think that teams that are this small can get away with very,
4:44 Brad with no process.
4:46 Scott Yeah.
4:47 Brad can get away with it but it it but you're you're constantly accumulating a little bit of debt and
4:56 Scott Yeah.
4:57 Brad i think we have just enough process such that we're being much more intentional about whether or not we're accumulating debt
5:07 Scott When you say debt, you meant tech debt or like process debt?
5:09 Brad tech debt process i mean
5:10 Scott Any
5:10 Brad it could kind be all
5:11 Scott of debt.
5:11 Brad all the debt like um team dynamic debt
5:15 Brad Right.
5:15 Scott Mm-hmm.
5:16 Brad Like great example of this is like we.
5:21 Brad we implemented so like i said we're not a mono repo we have multiple repos it's like a multi-component stack and so we nominated a developer to be like the steward of each stack you know so every stack's got a steward and um or part of the stack has the steward and um yeah it was like the classic thing right like somebody puts up a poor request and it languishes and nobody does the code review and you know and and
5:46 Brad And that's like a classic example that when you're 150 engineers,
5:51 Brad right?
5:51 Scott Mm
5:51 Brad Like
5:51 Scott hmm.
5:52 Brad if that thing got built into your culture where you allowed that stuff to like languish, right?
5:57 Brad You allowed to build the cultural norm that it's okay not to do code reviews or not to do, right?
6:04 Brad But instead,
6:05 Brad boom,
6:07 Brad that comes up, that comes up in the retro and we're able to be like.
6:13 Brad hey wait a second like we said we wanted to do code stewards and have code reviews and now but the code stewards are like not doing code reviews like
6:21 Scott Yeah.
6:22 Brad and then I get to play like the I get to kind of play devil's advocate go why are we even doing code reviews
6:30 Brad let's not do like why are we sitting around slowing ourselves down waiting
6:33 Scott Yeah.
6:33 Brad for code reviews and everyone's like no we need to do them and i'm like okay then why aren't you doing them why aren't you and like you know and everyone kind of can have like a you know like a true i'm really proud of the team they're really not they've kind of gotten rid of their egos in this they're like they're like oh yeah that's that's screwed up like i should have you're right i was i failed to do my part
6:57 Brad Part that we agreed we were going to do.
6:59 Scott You're reminding me of the early days at Rover.
7:01 Scott I mean, it was a similar kind of vibe.
7:03 Brad Yeah.
7:03 Scott And I think, I think we, I mean, you're essentially saying, hey, we're choosing to do the process.
7:09 Scott And I think the team is choosing because they're professionals and they want to be excellent.
7:14 Scott And it's helping them be better.
7:17 Brad Totally.
7:18 Scott I had a comment about something you said, then I had another question.
7:21 Scott The comment had about like the no stress.
7:24 Brad Oh.
7:26 Scott I think it's actually,
7:29 Scott I'm going to make this comment in two different ways.
7:31 Scott The first is, I think the stress actually mostly comes from one specific place,
7:36 Scott which is, I guess I'm going to combine the two ways.
7:42 Scott It's when we're trying to break the iron triangle.
7:46 Scott Fundamentally, I think all the stress comes from when we're trying to break the iron triangle.
7:49 Brad 100%
7:51 Scott And I actually have this hypothesis that the entire purpose of business
7:56 Scott is to break the iron triangle.
7:58 Scott Like when you break the iron triangle, you have found a competitive advantage,
8:04 Scott which then the market catches up with you eventually and you don't have it anymore.
8:07 Scott But fundamentally what the business is trying to do is figure out, can I offer something better for a lower cost?
8:13 Scott Or can I offer something of the same quality that I make cheaper?
8:17 Scott or higher quality that I make it the same whatever they're just fundamentally trying to break the iron triangle in order to get that so you get an advantage and
8:24 Brad Totally agree.
8:24 Scott at least in software like we're in the middle of the iron triangle we feel that squeeze right we are the triangle and so I guess what the thought I had about why you're not feeling stress is
8:37 Scott for for whatever reasons I guess the phase you're in that you don't have
8:44 Scott You don't you're not you're not burning down your runway far enough yet or you don't have sales goals that you've said you've hit or whatever it is. You're not quite yet feeling the
8:53 Brad Yeah.
8:53 Scott strain of the triangle closing in on you,
8:58 Brad A
8:58 Scott right?
8:58 Brad hundred percent.
8:59 Brad A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah.
9:00 Brad And that I,
9:01 Brad yeah,
9:02 Brad totally agree.
9:03 Brad It's a, it's, it's the moment in time where it's still early enough.
9:08 Brad That, you know, and we're, I think it is.
9:13 Brad First of all, let me just say, I 100% agree with your assessment.
9:16 Brad And it's a little bit of a red flag that I don't feel that stress.
9:22 Brad Like, you know, being completely transparent,
9:25 Brad like.
9:26 Brad As a C-level executive at this startup,
9:29 Brad I better,
9:30 Brad I should be feeling some level of stress, like let's move faster. Let's, let's, you know, what,
9:36 Brad what is the piece of the triangle that I need to be pressing on? Right.
9:42 Scott Well,
9:42 Brad Are we
9:42 Scott I don't
9:43 Brad moving?
9:43 Scott know if I agree Are with
9:43 Brad we
9:44 Scott that.
9:44 Brad not moving fast enough?
9:45 Brad Are we not creating quality?
9:47 Brad Why,
9:48 Brad why don't we yet have the, you know, you know.
9:51 Brad Why don't I feel this impending deadline of when are we putting this in front of a customer?
9:56 Scott But I don't know if I agree with that because let's just say you had the right product, you had the right product market fit,
10:03 Scott you had the right funding,
10:04 Scott you had the right team, you had the right pieces in place.
10:09 Scott Maybe you don't need to break the triangle in order for it to all work.
10:13 Scott Like this is this
10:14 Brad So
10:14 Scott is one
10:14 Brad wasn't
10:15 Scott of the things
10:15 Brad your point,
10:15 Scott I'm
10:15 Brad though, that capitalism definitionally is all about finding the.
10:23 Brad The advantage that you somehow figured out that your competitor didn't figure out and that that advantage probably was one of the sides of the triangle getting
10:34 Scott Okay,
10:35 Brad pushed.
10:35 Scott so that advantage might be on the quality side and a specific aspect of quality,
10:40 Scott which is we have made a better mousetrap. We have made a better product,
10:43 Brad Yeah.
10:43 Scott right?
10:44 Scott So it's not the dimensions of quality that people typically talk about, which is like.
10:49 Scott you know,
10:49 Scott is it well designed or well manufactured or whatever versus cheap?
10:55 Scott You might have actually just said,
10:57 Scott look,
10:57 Scott we've made a better Apple watch and
11:01 Scott We can work it's the market's going to adopt it just because it's a better quality item,
11:05 Scott right?
11:05 Scott And we don't have to try and build it for cheaper and we don't have to try and build it for faster.
11:10 Scott We can just build it and the market will adopt it.
11:13 Scott Right.
11:13 Brad Yeah.
11:14 Scott So that might be the case. And that would be ideal.
11:16 Scott Right.
11:17 Scott To me, I think one of the biggest strains is with these startups is that you're burning money.
11:21 Scott And actually, and the truth is with these startups is.
11:25 Scott It's actually not a business that works.
11:28 Scott So, right,
11:29 Scott this was a, when we were at 98.6,
11:32 Scott the thing that I said this to a few people and it didn't win me any friends, which is like, you know, the possibility exists that this business won't work.
11:43 Scott Right.
11:43 Brad Right.
11:44 Scott I mean, it's a great idea,
11:45 Brad Well,
11:45 Scott but it just
11:46 Brad 90
11:46 Scott cannot be
11:46 Brad % of businesses don't work.
11:49 Scott right.
11:49 Scott And people are like, we have to do this. We got to do this. We got to make it work. I'm like, you know, there is one,
11:54 Scott it might not be possible.
11:56 Brad Right.
11:57 Scott We have to accept that fact that it just.
12:00 Scott Now, no one wants to just go back to their investors and be like, well, we tried and here's your money back because we couldn't really figure it out.
12:06 Brad Right.
12:06 Scott That's not the that's certainly don't typically win that way.
12:10 Scott But I don't know, I feel like almost all the stress in my career has come from we're burning money.
12:19 Scott We're trying to make something work that isn't working correctly,
12:22 Scott that isn't working well enough. And so.
12:25 Scott we're we're that we're burning too much money and we're not growing fast enough and those are not those are not intersecting at the right spot right
12:35 Brad Right.
12:35 Scott in the places where it has felt successful to me those were intersecting at the right spot right and I was like oh this is sweet who's working this is great and
12:42 Brad Totally.
12:42 Scott so um maybe you've just got one that works
12:47 Brad Well, we like I said, we haven't released this to any customers yet,
12:50 Scott Yeah.
12:50 Brad so that's when the that's when the that's when the rubber is going to hit the road.
12:54 Scott Okay.
12:54 Scott And one more question for you.
12:55 Brad Yeah.
12:57 Scott Everybody's got their, you know, developer.startup, developer.dev.startup environment.
13:02 Scott Did you look at GitHub Codespaces?
13:06 Brad You know, we haven't been playing with GitHub. I haven't enabled that.
13:15 Brad We are deployed in AWS.
13:18 Brad Of course, GitHub Actions run the whole thing.
13:22 Brad For the most part,
13:24 Brad it.
13:25 Brad You know, you know, the GitHub actions build the Docker containers and build everything and then launch it into a AWS domain.
13:34 Brad So I have not played with code spaces. I thought codes,
13:36 Brad I thought code spaces was more like an instance of an editor,
13:42 Brad like it runs
13:43 Scott Sort of.
13:43 Brad like Visual Studio or
13:45 Scott Either
13:45 Brad something.
13:45 Scott you're going to think it's stupid or it's going to blow your mind. And I'm excited for you to go look at it because you might come back.
13:50 Scott I come back and just be totally geeked out on it. This is how I understand it.
13:55 Scott It seems like Microsoft with GitHub has put together a trifecta, which is GitHub,
14:00 Scott your repo,
14:00 Scott and
14:00 Brad Mm-hmm.
14:01 Scott then VS Code.
14:03 Brad Mm-hmm.
14:04 Scott I guess you need to have containers in there as well.
14:09 Scott And then code spaces. And basically, what code spaces does.
14:13 Scott Code Spaces does have an online editor,
14:16 Scott but it's the same as VS Code on your desktop.
14:19 Brad Yep.
14:19 Scott And basically,
14:20 Scott you can run your containers locally.
14:26 Scott Or you can run them in a quote unquote code space,
14:28 Scott which is just a container in the cloud.
14:31 Brad Yeah.
14:31 Scott It's basically kind of what you're doing, but it's totally integrated and automated through VS code where you can just say,
14:38 Scott OK,
14:38 Scott here's my project. I just want to run these in containers.
14:41 Scott They just run up there.
14:44 Scott I think you can expose them to other people to look at, and you can edit them in your editor,
14:49 Scott and it's got whatever sync mechanism is,
14:51 Scott or it has to rebuild it, or it does whatever it does, right?
14:54 Scott But I think they're trying to create this really elegant world where, as a developer,
15:00 Scott you know, you go from repo to editor to...
15:05 Brad Deploy.
15:05 Scott to well this i don't think you deploy like a production version in code space it's just i think it here's one problem i think it solves which is i'm running an environment with x number of containers and to run them all on my local machine is just like we're having to get these developers machines with 64 gigs of ram now because they they need to work on one container but they need to be running 14 other containers
15:27 Brad Yeah,
15:27 Scott in
15:28 Brad yeah, totally, totally.
15:28 Scott order to like
15:28 Brad Right,
15:29 Scott so
15:29 Brad exactly.
15:29 Scott um
15:31 Scott I think what this allows them to do is it solves that problem,
15:33 Scott which is I don't need to have a huge local machine because the containers are all running.
15:39 Scott okay now cloud um and now you need to have internet speedy internet probably um so it's kind of i think a similar solution and i think you could you know you can have multiple branches right this branch has this thing running in this branch and so and
15:52 Brad so Yeah.
15:53 Scott forth so i think it's kind of similar to what you've done you've just built your own and i think github is trying to just build it for us and
16:00 Brad Yeah,
16:00 Scott for sure just by the minute for whatever
16:01 Brad yeah, of course. Exactly.
16:03 Brad Well,
16:04 Brad and I.
16:04 Brad So I definitely want to check it out then. I'll chat with our DevOps-y, our full stack guy that is our most DevOps-y guy who's built all the GitHub actions. I'll ask him if he looked at it and see if there's value there.
16:16 Brad We, you know, one of the other things, too,
16:19 Brad that we have,
16:20 Brad you know, I always, so part of the reason I'm proud of what we have and code spaces might be a good piece of this is I recall that.
16:30 Brad At least at 98.6, one of the challenges that we faced there was that it was a very, you know, lots of small components were involved in the whole architecture and the developers who were like the front end focused developers couldn't really run.
16:54 Brad the back end components when they needed to do development and so the only way they could kind of test their stuff was to deploy it into this dev space that was a shared dev space which had everybody else's partially implemented code in it and it was a it was a disaster and um i remember
17:16 Scott Solutions and layers are like code spaces would solve that.
17:19 Brad exactly
17:20 Brad Exactly.
17:21 Brad And we solved that problem early on, right?
17:25 Brad Like
17:26 Scott Yes.
17:26 Brad when it was just two developers,
17:28 Brad they were just doing deploys into a single hosted environment and it was like the two of them just didn't, you know, made sure not to step on each other.
17:40 Brad I got there and had the third developer. I was like, wait a second, we need to solve this sooner rather than later.
17:47 Brad This is a path to ruin.
17:50 Scott Yeah. And well, then it becomes very expensive to fix later.
17:54 Brad Oh,
17:54 Scott So
17:54 Brad yeah.
17:54 Scott that's actually that's actually the world that I'm in now.
17:56 Scott Right.
17:56 Brad Yeah.
17:57 Scott Is that.
17:58 Scott I since the last time we talked I think so now I'm leading all of engineering for TaskRabbit so
18:03 Brad Yeah.
18:03 Brad All right.
18:04 Scott it's about it's about a hundred and twenty engineers thank you to be careful what you wish for it and I was like a moth to a flame I was like you know what this is gonna be really hard and it's gonna be type two fun and why am I doing this I don't need to do it
18:24 Scott I'm fortunate enough in life that I don't have to do it, but I couldn't stay away. I couldn't resist.
18:30 Brad Built for punishment.
18:31 Scott I just a masochist. Yeah, that's why we do it. So it's about 120 engineers plus another,
18:41 Scott say,
18:41 Scott 30 or 40 kind of product people and designers and all that stuff.
18:45 Scott Right.
18:46 Scott And hacking on one single monolith.
18:52 Scott And I've only been doing it now. This is the end of my fourth week.
18:55 Scott I don't think there's a great development environment. Like all these things we're talking about aren't there.
18:59 Scott It's a 14 year old company,
19:01 Scott right?
19:01 Brad Yeah.
19:01 Scott And so the challenge they're facing is, well, it's just they're not tech debt bankrupt yet.
19:08 Scott Like they're not like, hey, we just have to throw out this code.
19:10 Scott It's not that kind of situation.
19:12 Scott But the velocity of things are just really slow because it's just years of accumulated.
19:19 Scott check debt and process debt and not having the tooling in place like you're talking about to make it easy things like that actually it reminded me of something that i want to see if i can get you to put something into your process there
19:32 Brad Mm-hmm.
19:33 Scott while you're young while you're just a handful of people I
19:35 Brad Yeah.
19:36 Scott want you to create a debt register you could do it in your retros where you somehow basically start while it's cheap while it's easy start accounting for the cost of that debt right so that you know right now everybody knows we have this big debt but you can't quantify it you can't quantify how much it's really slowing us down well we can do it I've done it before
19:59 Scott It just takes a bunch of work to go through everything and like add it all up, right?
20:04 Scott But you're at the beginning where you can start building that foundation now,
20:07 Scott which What is every,
20:07 Brad does that look like?
20:08 Scott well,
20:10 Scott I can tell you how
20:11 Brad What
20:11 Scott I did
20:11 Brad are
20:11 Scott it the before.
20:11 Brad unit? I guess what are the units?
20:13 Scott Let me tell you how I did it before.
20:14 Brad Okay.
20:15 Scott We did project retros. So after our project was over,
20:18 Scott I sat down with the engineers and we went through.
20:23 Scott Everything that had to be built,
20:24 Scott kind of almost like a ticket level.
20:26 Scott And I asked a few questions.
20:28 Scott First of all, how easy or hard was this to build?
20:32 Scott You know, you know, essentially,
20:34 Scott like how much longer did it take if this took you for if this took you two days to build or a week to build or a month or whatever it was, how much longer did it take you because of the tech debt and stuff you had to deal with?
20:45 Brad Okay,
20:46 Scott Right.
20:46 Brad so it's like you subjectively ask the engineer,
20:49 Brad what's your estimate of the friction?
20:53 Scott Friction.
20:54 Scott Yeah.
20:55 Scott And so and then I said, so Okay, well,
20:57 Scott it took me a week and I
20:58 Scott Can I, if this was just better written, I could have done it in three days.
21:01 Scott And then if I didn't have to deal with this other thing over here.
21:04 Scott And then I asked the question.
21:06 Scott Um,
21:06 Scott okay,
21:07 Scott well,
21:07 Scott how would we fix this other thing over here that was a problem?
21:10 Scott And they would say, well,
21:11 Scott if we did this other kind of thing, and I said, okay, cool.
21:13 Scott How about estimate in a t-shirt size? How much work do you think it would take to fix that thing?
21:19 Scott So now what I knew was I knew the cost of the tax.
21:22 Brad Right.
21:23 Scott Let's just use my example.
21:24 Scott It was 40% cost.
21:27 Scott I knew the amount.
21:30 Scott I knew this and I knew a project to reduce that tax,
21:34 Scott right?
21:34 Brad Yep.
21:34 Scott Let's say it was a large project.
21:36 Scott I knew that to get rid of that 40% tax,
21:38 Scott I could spend money to do this large project.
21:40 Scott And so if you think about it in that financial model of tech debt,
21:45 Scott I knew my interest payment,
21:46 Scott which was the tax.
21:47 Brad Yeah.
21:47 Scott And I knew and I knew my principal,
21:49 Brad Yeah.
21:50 Scott which was the cost to fix it all.
21:52 Scott And I had.
21:53 Scott And with those two things together,
21:55 Scott I had ROI.
21:57 Brad Yeah.
21:57 Scott I knew if I invested this, I would get this return,
22:00 Scott right?
22:01 Scott Now, I wouldn't get this return until I knew one other piece of information,
22:06 Scott which was hard to know,
22:07 Brad How
22:07 Scott which
22:07 Brad many other
22:07 Scott is
22:08 Brad projects will overlap on that same tax?
22:10 Scott bingo.
22:12 Brad Yeah.
22:12 Scott But what I was able to do was I would get a lot of pressure from the finance and pressure isn't the right word.
22:18 Scott Like the financial team would be like, they didn't understand why I wanted to invest in these things.
22:22 Scott Why do you need engineers to do this? What's the ROI on it? How does it affect our revenue?
22:27 Scott And I can go back and say,
22:28 Scott look,
22:28 Scott we did a bunch of project retros, you know, for the last six months we did a project retro and everything.
22:33 Scott And on average,
22:34 Scott 40% of our effort goes to dealing with debt.
22:37 Brad Yep.
22:37 Scott So if I invest in some of these projects,
22:40 Scott I'm going to bring that down and you're going to know you're not going to spend less money engineers because we're not going to just lay people off,
22:46 Scott but you're going to be getting more for your engineering dollar.
22:50 Brad I
22:50 Scott So
22:50 Brad love
22:50 Scott that's
22:50 Brad it.
22:50 Scott how I did it. And the reason I said it was expensive to do is because we were kind of going in.
22:56 Scott in retrospect figuring out what the debt was where
22:59 Brad Yeah, yeah,
23:00 Scott you're in this early stage where you're saying as you're creating the debts you can actually write them down and say hey we're making this choice we think it's adding this tax to it and this is what it would have really cost in order to avoid the tax and
23:12 Brad cultural
23:13 Scott so you can start to create that register and now i was doing it just for tech debt and you talked about process debt or whatever kinds of you could do debt it for all of them yeah you could do it for all of them
23:23 Brad Yeah.
23:23 Scott and just start from the foundation of we're building essentially a balance sheet here of what is principle and what is interest on these things doing
23:32 Brad I love it.
23:33 Brad That's a great idea.
23:36 Scott it now now where I'm at with I want to start doing something similar that with TaskRabbit is every time they make a choice getting this added to a big list of debts we have
23:47 Scott But I still think I need to get to what is the tax,
23:50 Scott because the debts don't matter if you're not, as you said, if you're not touching that area of code ever again,
23:56 Brad Right.
23:56 Scott the debts don't matter.
23:58 Brad So,
23:58 Scott It's
23:59 Brad exactly.
23:59 Scott low interest debt,
24:01 Scott right?
24:01 Scott The interest is higher when you touch the different areas of code.
24:05 Brad I'm going to plant a seed and we won't be able to do a deep dive on this,
24:08 Brad but I want to plant a seed that I think is very related to the idea that you just talked about.
24:13 Brad I like and I'm going to try to think about how to turn this into an investment model as well.
24:19 Brad But one of the so here's the seed in the retrospective.
24:24 Brad Pay just as close attention to the why did it go well?
24:31 Brad as the why did it go like what could have gone better and
24:35 Scott Mm hmm.
24:36 Brad to really try to interrogate yeah but why did it go well like what specifically did we do differently that made this thing successful right
24:47 Scott Yeah.
24:48 Brad And this is something that I feel teams really struggle with because
24:53 Scott Mm-hmm.
24:54 Brad they want to just go,
24:55 Brad yay,
24:55 Brad we did so many stories. We got so much stuff done this sprint.
25:00 Brad We got so much shit done.
25:02 Brad Yay us.
25:04 Brad But then to say, wait a second,
25:05 Brad great,
25:06 Brad love it.
25:07 Brad Congratulations.
25:08 Brad But why?
25:09 Brad What was the choices we made that made this one successful?
25:14 Brad And that comes from that comes from my experience in traveling in the mountains and traveling in avalanche terrain,
25:20 Brad right, where you really want to interrogate all your all of the good things.
25:28 Brad because did we make did we just luck out or did we actually make a decision that may and if we did make a decision
25:36 Scott You can
25:36 Brad then
25:36 Scott repeat it.
25:37 Brad we want to know it so we can repeat it yeah
25:39 Scott You can repeat it. Yeah, it's a very very smart very smart
25:42 Brad there might be a way to use your like
25:45 Brad interest and principle way of looking at it, not just on the negative side of the balance sheet, but
25:52 Scott Well,
25:52 Brad on the positive
25:52 Scott now you're getting
25:53 Brad side.
25:53 Scott now you're getting to the other side. Right.
25:55 Scott So the opposite of interest is leverage.
25:58 Brad Yeah.
25:59 Scott Right.
26:00 Brad Yeah,
26:00 Scott And so you're saying, where did we get leverage here?
26:03 Scott Where did we make it easier for us? Where did we get more work done with less effort,
26:07 Scott not less work done with more effort?
26:08 Brad exactly.
26:09 Scott Right.
26:10 Scott And so can you make a leverage?
26:12 Scott I love this idea.
26:14 Scott Can you make a leverage balance sheet also?
26:17 Scott oh this is now we're cooking with gas this is interesting uh i'm constantly preaching about how what we have to do has to create leverage the thing i've been saying now this is the third potentially fourth company in a row i've been at where like my job has been to help a team perform at a higher level
26:38 Scott Fundamentally, like if I was to boil it all down into like one saying,
26:42 Scott it is the fastest way to get out of a hole is to stop digging.
26:48 Scott And so, well,
26:50 Brad And to call in somebody with a backhoe to lift
26:53 Scott sure,
26:53 Brad you out.
26:53 Scott that's definitely one thing. But like everything,
26:58 Scott things we do either create debt or create leverage.
27:01 Brad Exactly.
27:03 Scott And I love the fact that you're talking about assessing that side of it as well, because that's actually even more positive. That is something business leaders really want to hear about.
27:17 Scott I did this thing, and now I can do something.
27:21 Scott faster or you can do some faster or you can transact more orders or whatever you want to do with
27:26 Brad And the fact that we attacked,
27:29 Brad for example, with this very small team,
27:32 Brad very early stages, the fact that we basically attacked how do we have our own personal dev stacks,
27:39 Brad right?
27:40 Brad How do we attack that early on?
27:45 Scott Yeah.
27:45 Brad That work,
27:47 Brad that investment that we did has provided leverage every sprint since then.
27:52 Scott But leverage and debt compound.
27:54 Brad Yeah.
27:55 Scott Look,
27:55 Scott when we think about interest,
27:57 Scott you can either be paying interest or you can be earning interest.
28:00 Brad Exactly.
28:00 Scott Right.
28:00 Brad This is earning interest.
28:02 Scott So and they both compound.
28:03 Brad Yeah.
28:04 Scott That's exactly right.
28:05 Scott They both compound.
28:06 Scott This is really sweet.
28:08 Scott The big challenge I always have that we all have.
28:11 Scott is conveying to the business leaders the value of these things.
28:16 Brad Yeah.
28:18 Scott That's the real challenge.
28:19 Scott And really the fundamental challenge is,
28:21 Scott I think, as an industry,
28:24 Scott we still don't know a way to measure productivity.
28:27 Brad Right.
28:27 Brad That's the number one question, like number one question you ask any engineering manager or engineering leader that you're going to hire into your organization. Right.
28:35 Brad Like is.
28:38 Brad How do you know? How do you know if your team is actually performing at their best,
28:42 Brad right?
28:43 Brad You can't say task completion ratio.
28:48 Brad They get 100% of their tasks done.
28:50 Brad Is that because they sign up for like the minimal
28:53 Scott Okay,
28:53 Brad amount
28:53 Scott well, now
28:53 Brad of
28:53 Scott this work? is very interesting.
28:55 Scott This is very interesting because if I was literally just talking with another person this morning about this.
29:03 Scott If I was to boil down the entirety of how an engineering team is performing into one proxy metric,
29:12 Scott and this might be controversial,
29:15 Brad lines of code clocks you're going to make the case for clocks
29:22 Scott if I was to boil down all of engineering management.
29:28 Scott To one thing, meaning how do I know if a team is performing well?
29:34 Scott I would, and if you said, Scott,
29:36 Scott you have to boil it down to one proxy metric and one proxy metric only.
29:41 Scott I boil it down to estimation accuracy.
29:45 Brad Yeah.
29:46 Scott That's it.
29:49 Scott Because there's all sorts of things in the value stream that have to.
29:52 Scott be lined up in order to deliver an accurate estimate and if your software is unstable and you're having to deal with production fires all the time your estimations are off right because you're dealing with that kind of stuff so um i boil it down to that with one caveat i mean not a caveat but an asterisk at least the goal is not 100
30:15 Scott I can give you 100%. It's easy.
30:17 Scott We sandbag the estimates.
30:18 Brad Exactly. I was going to say, anything you measure can be gamed.
30:23 Scott That's right.
30:23 Scott The goal is 80%. You want to be 80 plus.
30:27 Scott And if you're at 100,
30:28 Scott you're sandbagging, right?
30:30 Scott You want to be at 80 plus. Now, look, there are, at least for the kinds of things I work on.
30:37 Scott I did work on health care with you for a year,
30:39 Scott but in general, I've never worked on things where there's a lot of life and death at stake.
30:43 Brad Yeah.
30:43 Scott I worked on pets for a while and there was, you know,
30:45 Scott there were pets at stake for sure.
30:47 Scott Very serious there.
30:48 Scott But for most of what I've done in my career,
30:51 Scott we we can get to 100 percent accurate by very detailed planning and specification and super.
30:59 Scott all that stuff but we're not i'm not launching rockets or airplanes in the sky so i
31:02 Brad Yeah,
31:03 Scott need that so to me i said look we want to be between 80 and 90 that means we're not sandbagging we're striving a little bit that's enough of an area that the business can handle it if we said it takes a month and it's really going to take a month plus four days it's not going to crush us right
31:20 Brad Or it shouldn't or it shouldn't crush us like the business also needs like if all sales forecasts were always within 80 percent, that would be a whole other.
31:30 Scott Yeah, that's right.
31:32 Scott So to me, like that's the foundation right there,
31:35 Scott which if we had a crystal ball,
31:37 Scott if we knew all the future,
31:39 Scott we knew when the DDoS attack was going to happen, we knew when somebody was going to be sick, you know, we knew when.
31:46 Scott you know the customer was going to call and be mad about something and had to randomize the team well then we could we don't have a crystal ball but so that's to me that's that's it and um i don't know how we got on this topic but that's i pretty
31:58 Brad Oh,
31:59 Scott much boiled
31:59 Brad we're talking
31:59 Scott all
31:59 Brad about
31:59 Scott team of engineering
31:59 Brad efficiency.
32:00 Scott team
32:00 Brad I love it. I love
32:01 Scott efficiency
32:01 Brad it.
32:01 Scott that's
32:02 Brad All right.
32:02 Scott it we're talking about measuring velocity that's the thing it's like we don't know how to do it but the best thing i've got is estimation accuracy
32:09 Brad Not 100%.
32:11 Brad If it's 100
32:11 Scott % Yeah.
32:12 Brad you're sandbagging.
32:13 Scott Maybe the name of this podcast should be called 80%.
32:17 Brad How many CTOs does it take to get to 80% accuracy?
32:22 Brad That's a long podcast title.
32:24 Scott Okay,
32:24 Scott well, don't forget to like,
32:25 Scott rate,
32:26 Scott and subscribe.
32:26 Brad Yeah,
32:27 Scott We have to smash say that.
32:27 Brad that subscribe button.
32:30 Brad Yep.
32:30 Scott Yep.
32:31 Scott You can go to our Patreon page
32:33 Brad Yes.
32:33 Scott to sign up for bonus episodes.
32:36 Brad Bonus episodes.
32:37 Brad We're not quite sure what the bonus episodes – well, bonus episodes are – we do code challenges.
32:44 Brad We do pair programming.
32:46 Scott We could do that would be fun or we could do office hours we'll be doing a live podcast recording
32:54 Brad Are
32:54 Scott We're
32:55 Brad we going to coming do
32:55 Scott to
32:55 Brad a we're coming to
32:56 Scott next we'll be in Chicago,
32:57 Brad We're
32:57 Scott Illinois.
32:58 Brad going to be in Chicago. Yes at the Symphony Hall
33:02 Scott Yes. Oh,
33:02 Brad All
33:02 Scott we would
33:02 Brad right,
33:02 Scott fit if we can fill the Symphony Hall with a bunch of engineering management nerds, we will have
33:08 Brad and
33:08 Scott made
33:08 Brad we will it'll
33:09 Scott a big time.
33:09 Brad definitely be big time
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