Transcript: The Pace of Innovation: Systems Thinking for Faster Engineering
0:00 Brad Maybe another answer to your question of how do you get more innovation from engineering faster is make sure you really guard the ability for engineering to do true research and development.
0:32 Brad Welcome, everybody,
0:33 Brad to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast?
0:36 Brad My name is Brad Hefta-Gaub and my trusty co-host is...
0:39 Scott Scott Gorad.
0:40 Scott Brad,
0:41 Scott how are you doing today?
0:41 Brad I'm doing pretty good.
0:43 Brad I'm doing good.
0:44 Scott Were you just in Hawaii?
0:47 Brad uh that was like a month ago but yes i
0:49 Scott Then you were just in the mountains.
0:52 Brad was just in the mountains man
0:53 Scott What's happening up in the mountains?
0:55 Brad it was it was i got only got one of six peaks done it was it was quite an adventure there was some sketchy shit and uh we made safe decisions and came home
1:05 Scott That's good.
1:07 Scott That's the safe decisions is the victory.
1:09 Brad but it was a lot of fun we we uh we are in this zone called the chillowax it's incredible
1:14 Brad incredibly beautiful zone really rugged really beautiful though and we we um were camping under a glacier that we were watching like cav off and then tumble down cliffs into a lake nearby um that was kind of wild um and uh had beautiful beautiful weather beautiful scenery and uh yeah that's what we did it was fun uh
1:36 Scott That's awesome.
1:37 Brad what were you doing while i was away in the mountains
1:40 Scott I was having so much fun.
1:42 Brad Tell me.
1:43 Scott This will date our episode.
1:45 Scott This will probably come out in early to mid-August.
1:47 Brad Oh, yes.
1:48 Scott I went to two baseball games two nights in a row.
1:53 Scott and then i went to a world cup game in
1:56 Brad Wow.
1:56 Scott person in seattle and then after the world cup game i went to a bar and watched another world cup game and then that got me to wednesday what did i do on thursday i mean i don't even know it was just i had a great week of just doing fun stuff oh
2:12 Brad Awesome.
2:13 Brad Love it.
2:13 Scott i know i i know i concluded that week with a big long bike ride
2:19 Scott And, you know, I said to myself,
2:22 Scott if every week was like this,
2:23 Scott my head would probably split.
2:25 Scott It could just be too much fun.
2:27 Brad Too
2:27 Scott I'm not used to
2:27 Brad much having fun.
2:28 Scott that much fun.
2:29 Brad Too much winning.
2:30 Brad Love it. Well,
2:31 Brad the World Cup certainly was an exciting time.
2:33 Brad I think.
2:35 Brad You didn't even have to necessarily be a soccer football fan to just get the excitement coming off of all that stuff.
2:42 Scott That's right.
2:43 Scott This isn't a soccer podcast,
2:44 Scott but I think I finally figured out what constitutes a foul in soccer.
2:50 Brad Oh, no.
2:52 Brad I don't think I understand that.
2:54 Scott I haven't understood it. I've been following.
2:56 Scott I'm not a.
2:57 Scott I'm not a lifelong soccer fan.
2:59 Scott I started following soccer about five or six or seven years ago,
3:02 Scott and I've always been puzzled as to what constitutes a foul.
3:06 Scott I think as a result of watching so much soccer over the World Cup,
3:09 Scott I think I finally figured it out, and I think it goes like this.
3:12 Scott If you kick the guy before the ball,
3:15 Scott that's a foul.
3:16 Brad But if you are kicking the ball,
3:18 Scott If
3:18 Brad but
3:19 Scott you kick
3:19 Brad you hit
3:19 Scott the ball the first,
3:19 Brad guy.
3:20 Scott then you're fine.
3:22 Scott That's the first rule.
3:23 Scott The second rule is if you kick the guy or shove the guy, you can't shove or kick from behind.
3:29 Scott No from behind.
3:31 Scott Anything from behind, that's a foul.
3:34 Scott Otherwise,
3:35 Scott do whatever you want.
3:36 Scott Oh, I'm sorry.
3:38 Scott Number three,
3:38 Scott you can't touch it with your hand unless
3:40 Brad you can't touch the ball with your hand unless you're the goalie
3:43 Scott you're the goalie. Otherwise,
3:44 Scott do whatever you want.
3:47 Brad Love it.
3:48 Scott There I
3:48 Brad you go.
3:48 Scott think that's it. As near as I can tell, that's it.
3:50 Brad There you go.
3:51 Brad Yeah.
3:52 Brad Cool.
3:53 Brad Well,
3:53 Brad what you texted me right before we started this call and you said,
3:57 Brad Brad,
3:58 Brad I got a topic for you.
3:59 Brad We got to get on the call and we got to talk about a topic.
4:02 Scott Oh,
4:02 Scott I took a two hour at the beginning. I took we're starting a course course. I don't know if you call it a training situation at our workplace led by an external facility.
4:14 Scott facilitator about change management and
4:17 Brad Oh boy.
4:17 Scott it's very exciting well i mean it's exciting in a business context it wasn't like going to a soccer game or a baseball game exciting nevertheless uh so this person talks about um okay often when we want to change things we talk about technical aspects let's change this way we do something or this process or something like that you
4:39 Scott that and then she said you know then there's a level up there we try to change technological not technical the first is technological the second level it's like then we try to change like psychological aspects like we try to create core values and we try to create psychological safety and things like that and then she said the third level and this is what she wanted to get at this is what our like our 10-hour training course is all about is what she referred to as system
5:06 Brad Okay.
5:06 Scott And we know about systems and engineering because we deal with systems all the time. And she described a system as, I can't remember exactly words,
5:16 Scott but it was basically two or more entities with a boundary.
5:20 Scott So imagine you're in an elevator,
5:24 Scott it's just yourself.
5:25 Scott So it's you,
5:26 Scott that's one entity and there's a boundary,
5:29 Scott the elevator.
5:30 Scott And then I enter the elevator.
5:33 Scott And now there's two people and together we are a system and there are a set of norms and rules.
5:40 Scott There's a way that system works. For instance,
5:42 Scott we have norms both spoken and unspoken about how that elevator works and how we interact in that elevator.
5:49 Scott This was the analogy she used.
5:51 Brad I'm just cracking up over all the weird things you can do in an elevator,
5:56 Brad you know, like,
5:56 Brad for example, if you get in the elevator and you face.
5:59 Brad Face backwards,
6:00 Brad most people in the Western world are going to think you're a weirdo.
6:04 Scott Right. That is not how that system works.
6:07 Brad Right.
6:08 Scott And so one of the things she was talking about is if you're trying to change an organization,
6:13 Scott first she was saying, if you're really trying to change an organization, you have to change the systems.
6:18 Scott And one aspect that she was talking about was.
6:22 Scott If you want to change systems,
6:23 Scott you really have to get to the unspoken norms,
6:27 Scott the rules that everyone knows, but nobody has written down,
6:33 Scott that
6:33 Brad Okay.
6:33 Scott there's no user manual. No one ever gave me a user manual for how to go to an elevator.
6:38 Scott Right.
6:38 Brad Right.
6:39 Brad Yeah,
6:39 Brad but you figured it out quickly.
6:41 Scott You figure it out, you know, you're a little kid and your mom, you go in there and you push all the buttons and your parents say don't do that and you learn,
6:48 Scott right?
6:48 Scott At some point you turn backwards and everyone's like, that's weird.
6:50 Scott Or you see somebody else turning backwards and your buddy says,
6:53 Scott that's weird that dude was standing there. You learn,
6:55 Scott right?
6:56 Scott Okay, so that was one aspect. But the aspect that I thought was interesting for this conversation,
7:01 Scott we have a culture.
7:04 Scott of providing feedback when a system isn't working we have a culture of providing feedback and asking other people or other parts of the system to change so that the system works better like we have a whole actually she used the word we have an industry built up around feedback which is true like i mean there's companies that provide tools and so it's an industry there's hr companies and systems and so she talked about getting other people to change is really hard
7:32 Scott And getting yourself to change is relatively much easier.
7:35 Scott And so if you want to change the system,
7:37 Scott actually first start by thinking about how am I operating within this system?
7:42 Scott And what can I change to start to get the dynamics of this system to work differently such
7:46 Brad Yeah, totally.
7:47 Scott that it'll get the better outcome?
7:51 Scott Okay,
7:51 Scott so that led me to another thought.
7:53 Scott And this is the one I want to talk to you about.
7:55 Scott Almost everywhere I've worked.
7:58 Scott People want the system to produce engineering output faster.
8:03 Brad This is like episode number two of the podcast.
8:09 Scott And so I thought to myself,
8:12 Scott and this is going to be a very, very meta question.
8:15 Scott If we were going to change the system, well,
8:18 Scott and I'm sorry,
8:19 Scott I need to point something out. And typically the way people say to get stuff faster is to say engineering, we need to do stuff faster.
8:28 Brad Right.
8:29 Scott And then engineering says,
8:30 Scott okay,
8:30 Scott well, we need to change processes or we need to change ways we do stuff.
8:35 Scott We need to change our technology,
8:36 Scott so on and so forth.
8:38 Scott But I thought to myself,
8:40 Scott okay,
8:40 Scott if we wanted engineering to produce stuff faster,
8:44 Scott if the company,
8:45 Scott if other people in the system wanted the engineering part of the system to produce stuff faster, but they couldn't ask engineering to change, they could only change themselves.
8:53 Brad Yeah.
8:55 Scott what would it be what would change now i get this is a little meta because i'm gonna be i'm the engineer saying you should change this part you should change this part so it's a little it's a little violating the principle of what this uh you know person who was leading this training was going out but it just that that thought came into my head was like oh interesting instead of department x or department y or whatever saying you guys go faster you guys go faster what
9:19 Scott What should, you know, finance,
9:21 Scott HR,
9:21 Scott marketing,
9:22 Scott product management, commercial operations,
9:24 Scott biz dev,
9:24 Scott customer service,
9:25 Scott legal,
9:26 Scott etc.
9:26 Scott What would those groups change and do differently to get us, the engineers, to be able to get stuff done faster?
9:34 Brad Man, that's a great, I love it. That's a great meta question.
9:38 Brad Do you have answers to this or do you, you just like,
9:42 Scott I have some snarky answers.
9:43 Brad okay.
9:45 Brad I mean, that's, that's at least somewhere to start.
9:48 Brad I mean, I guess, I guess, let me, let me just see if I'm, if I'm, if I'm picking up what you're laying down here.
9:56 Brad I mean,
9:57 Brad in the zeitgeist, especially in the world of AI coding,
10:01 Brad right,
10:01 Brad in the zeitgeist, there's this real this real question of like, if you make all of the code writing instantaneous,
10:10 Brad what else in the system breaks?
10:13 Brad And that's sort of where my mind is going to answer your question.
10:18 Scott How many minutes into the story before you got to AI?
10:22 Brad 10.
10:22 Scott Because I could play the other way around, which is right now companies want engineering to go faster.
10:27 Scott So they say they're telling us to change and use more AI.
10:30 Brad Right.
10:31 Brad But that's what I'm saying is, OK,
10:32 Brad yes.
10:33 Brad So agreed.
10:33 Brad So that's so I love your thought experiment of saying like,
10:36 Brad well,
10:37 Brad what has to change other than engineering in
10:40 Scott Yes.
10:40 Brad order to make engineering be able to go faster?
10:42 Brad And like I have a couple immediate answers to this question that I would say almost every single organization I've ever worked in would have.
10:50 Brad If all of a sudden the engineering building stuff was instantaneous,
10:54 Brad there's
10:54 Scott yeah yeah right
10:56 Brad two places that would collapse immediately or would become apparent immediately as the problems.
11:02 Scott because the instantaneous means you can't ask it to go faster right because it's as fast as possible it's the speed of light
11:08 Brad It's the speed of light,
11:09 Brad right?
11:09 Brad And so the first place that you'd have a problem is deciding what you want to build.
11:15 Scott Yeah, agreed.
11:16 Brad Right. Like, like, like,
11:17 Brad I mean, you and I, when we were at health tech company,
11:20 Brad right, like they had they put a ton of time and energy in their SDLC around the whole deciding what to build.
11:29 Brad And there was this all this process of like these these there was a little bit of like,
11:35 Brad you know.
11:36 Brad tps reports like forms in triplicate that had to get filled out you know and and who was the signer that was allowed to approve from security and from compliance and from medical and and um so that's an environment where oh my god like if we're coding like crazy now like we we're instantaneous speed of light like
11:58 Brad the bottleneck would be like what are we building like who's deciding what we're building like that would become a huge problem so if i flip so if i sort of flip the script there one might say like well if you want engineering to go faster make sure you have a like basically make your shovel ready plans come faster
12:16 Scott Yeah.
12:17 Brad Right?
12:17 Brad Like, how quickly could you produce your shovel-ready plans?
12:20 Scott Yes. Or you can push that further.
12:22 Scott Come with shovel-ready plans.
12:23 Brad Come with shovel-ready plans.
12:24 Scott Don't come with a line in a spreadsheet that says make a flux capacitor.
12:28 Brad Right?
12:29 Brad Come with shovel-ready plans.
12:31 Brad Right.
12:31 Scott Now, your hypothetical here about instantaneous code brings up something,
12:35 Scott there's an implicit,
12:36 Scott potentially something implicit in that hypothetical, which is, is the ability to create code.
12:43 Scott So in that hypothetical constrained.
12:46 Scott Because there's actually two parts to the going faster.
12:49 Scott One part is how fast can the team get a given piece of engineering done?
12:54 Scott And the other part is what is the overall capacity of the team to get things done?
12:59 Scott And so in this example,
13:02 Scott is there unlimited capacity?
13:04 Scott Because I think that I think one of the things that might change outside of engineering has to do with the capacity and utilization.
13:12 Scott You know, there's all sorts of research.
13:13 Scott research that which is if you want a system to operate most efficiently you can't run it at full capacity you have to run somewhere between like 50 and 80 percent in order to maximize your
13:23 Brad Sure.
13:24 Scott output right but in our industry we we really
13:29 Scott try to maximize the utilization of it we don't want our engineers sitting around but that's the worst thing possible to have an engineer sitting
13:35 Brad Right.
13:36 Scott around with nothing to do which i've never ever seen in my life by the way um i think there's a piece there about something that could happen outside of engineering is thinking i'm not exactly sure what but something about
13:52 Scott Maybe it's just the expectations or the standards for what capacity or I'm sorry, what utilization the organization wants to use of its engineering resources.
14:03 Scott And if it were committed,
14:04 Scott it was really disciplined about being in a more optimal zone,
14:08 Scott it might get more output.
14:10 Brad Sure. But to me, that just sounds like another way of saying make sure you know what you want.
14:16 Scott Mm
14:16 Brad like
14:16 Scott hmm.
14:17 Brad be good
14:17 Scott Yeah.
14:17 Brad at knowing what you really want exactly
14:19 Scott Yeah.
14:19 Scott It's a different layer.
14:20 Scott You're talking about knowing what you want for a given thing, have it show already.
14:24 Scott And then there's like also have your queue of things ready,
14:26 Scott have them in order and ready to go.
14:28 Brad so this is another thing that pops in my head immediately when you talk about like the idea of like engineering going really fast is i've been in many organizations where you know and again this happened with us at health tech company where
14:43 Brad The the primary users of the software platform,
14:46 Brad the medical team,
14:47 Brad they kind of were like,
14:48 Brad hey,
14:49 Brad stop giving us features like you can't give us features to if you give us features too fast,
14:55 Brad we have to get trained on them. Right.
14:57 Scott Mm
14:57 Brad So so,
14:58 Scott -hmm.
14:58 Brad you know, depending on how mission critical or how how critical the thing that the people are doing with your software like.
15:06 Brad Yeah, you got to be able to train people to use the software or you got to be able to make sure that your downstream release processes,
15:16 Brad right?
15:16 Brad Like whatever releasing looks like, right?
15:18 Brad Like if releasing looks like customers install it and customers use it and customers configure it, well, how good are you at that?
15:28 Scott And
15:28 Brad I mean, how good are you at taking the finished product and getting it in the hands of the real customers?
15:36 Brad Like that's another huge bottleneck I've seen in my career.
15:39 Scott yeah and attention to the related one like you've talked about installing software also like the integration with other parties right
15:48 Brad Yeah.
15:48 Scott that's often a big piece like hey we've got our api done and now there's a whole
15:53 Scott integration testing cycle thing and
15:56 Brad Yeah, totally.
15:57 Scott now we're getting in the engineering space because my answer to that is always like oh we got a good sandbox and good documentation and good you know good
16:05 Scott ways for these people to mock their stuff up or whatever and yeah
16:08 Brad like i'm just trying to say like blur the camera a little bit or you know kind of blur your eyes a little bit and and really whenever we talk about speed through a series of steps and so i love your system i love your point that this this um this uh trainer educator was trying to get you guys to think in systems and the thing i'm saying is like any one of these like if software if the building of the software
16:32 Brad software is a piece of a sequential system,
16:35 Brad then
16:36 Scott Mm-hmm.
16:36 Brad the things on both ends of that, to make the software go faster,
16:41 Brad the things on both ends of that also need to go faster and be ready.
16:47 Brad and be prepared and what's interesting is there's this really nice you know this there's this there's this thing that like i remember i've been frustrated in the past by product owners that didn't necessarily always sort of thought of themselves as like i invent things from whole cloth and i'm the one that has the vision for the product okay cool there's like some people are great visionaries but really you need to make sure that you're
17:12 Brad You know what your customers want,
17:14 Brad right?
17:14 Scott Mm-hmm.
17:16 Brad So that's another thing that I feel like, what other things do I need to make true to make software go faster,
17:21 Brad to make engineering build stuff faster,
17:23 Brad is I need to really know what my customers want.
17:26 Scott Mm-hmm.
17:28 Brad So what were your snarky answers to this question?
17:30 Scott Oh, you know, just like leave us alone.
17:37 Brad Okay,
17:37 Scott That's
17:37 Brad that's fair.
17:37 Scott pretty good.
17:38 Scott that just nonsense like that no
17:41 Brad By the way, I'm super curious.
17:43 Brad Are your other leaders, as soon as this conversation around systems change and systems changing came up, the first thing that they wanted to figure out how to do to change is make engineering go faster?
17:56 Scott no that was not at all part of our conversation this was this was you know actually this was my thought which was like oh well I know where all this systems thinking is
18:05 Scott going
18:05 Scott it's going to go it's all going to go towards engineering going faster and that even that I was reflective for a second I was like wait a second am I just stuck in a pattern of like you know Stockholm I don't know if this isn't Stockholm syndrome that's the right way of phrasing but am I stuck in a pattern of not having believing in good intentions of other people's good intentions here um and am I stuck in my world of engineering that I can't imagine that the finance person was thinking about how they could get accounting done faster and close the books
18:31 Scott The book's faster and the marketing person wasn't thinking about how they could get their creative done faster or not even shouldn't even say faster that I'm just, again,
18:40 Scott I'm stuck in my world.
18:41 Scott The accounting person might have said, how can I get.
18:46 Scott close the books more accurately and the marketing person might have said well how can we improve this system to make our creative for our advertising better or resonate with customers
18:54 Brad Yeah.
18:54 Scott more yeah we didn't have that this was just chapter one of i think like five of these sessions and um or about 10 hours of these sessions but you know i'm so like i think almost scarred from just a career a career of everybody saying engineering go faster
19:12 Scott faster that that's where my mind went to and it just and then I just sort of thought like okay if all these people want us to go faster how are they going to change
19:20 Brad Yeah,
19:20 Scott And
19:21 Brad exactly.
19:21 Scott so, and to that point, I even had a hard time imagining,
19:26 Scott like, I've been so beat, I got such the abused puppy syndrome, I've been so beat down, I couldn't even hardly imagine how other teams might change.
19:34 Brad You know what I think is interesting?
19:35 Brad Here, let me zoom the camera out a little bit more.
19:39 Brad One of the things I've been thinking about recently,
19:41 Brad and it's funny because maybe my LinkedIn feed has somehow been.
19:47 Brad I've been filled with like PE CTO recruiters or something like that. Right.
19:53 Scott Mm
19:53 Brad So so
19:54 Scott -hmm.
19:54 Brad this question of like like as a CTO, right,
19:58 Brad like there's so many.
19:59 Brad times that CTOs are like confronted with challenges of like you know maybe they're maybe they're working through like instability problems or maybe they're working through performance related problems like around the team being able to move quickly and maybe there's like years of backlog of features that that people you know wish were implemented and I think that like
20:24 Brad The harder problem is, are we building the right stuff?
20:29 Brad Like, is the stuff we're building actually going to move the needle of the business?
20:34 Scott Yeah.
20:34 Brad To me, like, that's where the really,
20:38 Brad you know, that's the juicy questions that are out there.
20:42 Brad And I think that, like, one of the things that I think is so important about,
20:46 Brad you know.
20:47 Brad being a CTO as opposed to being the you know VP of engineering or something is like being able to really be a business business technical thought partner right and
20:59 Scott Mm-hmm.
21:00 Brad helping like understand like so what if we built this stuff faster if we're just building stuff that's not actually going to move the needle of the business then that's not doing anybody any good either
21:14 Scott Yeah,
21:15 Scott I was really proud of our product management team.
21:17 Scott They've started a practice of going back.
21:20 Scott It's a two-quarter lag because when something goes into production, they need some time to get some data.
21:25 Scott But of really comparing.
21:27 Scott what did we predict this investment was going to do
21:30 Brad Oh, and cool.
21:31 Scott what's and what's the actual outcome been and I've seen that in other places but I've seen it I'm seeing it be done very well where I'm at now at TaskRabbit and like that is
21:42 Scott that's the name of the game like they're not going to get it right i understand that in
21:45 Brad Sure.
21:46 Scott this business if you get it right a third of the time you're a hall of famer it's like baseball and so um but the key is to go back and look at it and say okay what happened here we thought if we did this then this was going to happen and then some change would happen in user behavior and we would get these results and so um i think it's really really valuable to i really appreciate that they're going back and looking you
22:09 Scott looking at and then the most important going back and looking at it's only the first step in fact it's not even meaningful it's meaningful but what's it's not even impactful what's impactful is saying okay how are we going to learn from this what are we going to do about it how are we what assumptions are we making about investments going forward that we're going to change based on this and i'll give you an example it goes both ways i'll give you a positive example
22:35 Scott We made a change to how we pre-authorized credit cards up front.
22:41 Scott um minimize fraud and
22:45 Brad Sure.
22:45 Scott instead of just doing a like an ordinary credit card pre-off we were actually billing for an hour of time and this was pretty complicated because the amount of somebody's job on TaskRabbit is variable so there's all sorts of after the work gets done there's all sorts of adjustments you got to make the make it all sum up so it's kind of a complicated project and the team has been working on it for quite some time
23:06 Scott But there was a lot of fear about this is going to impact like
23:10 Brad Yeah.
23:11 Scott our conversion rates because people are going to see that they're going to get charged for an hour up front and they're going to be apprehensive.
23:17 Scott I don't think I'm pretty sure if I recall,
23:20 Scott the fear was overweighted.
23:23 Scott And the benefit to minimizing fraud,
23:25 Scott basically fraudsters using fake credit cards and stuff like that, was even greater than projected.
23:30 Scott So, you know, as we have the conversation and I say a minute ago,
23:34 Scott you know, you'd get a third of them right, you're a Hall of Famer. Here's a case where we learned,
23:37 Scott oh, actually, we don't have to, you know, we're too fearful of some of this stuff, right?
23:42 Brad Yeah.
23:42 Scott And the upsides of managing fraud is even, there's even more fraud than we thought going on on the platform.
23:47 Scott And so there's not, I need to clarify.
23:49 Scott especially for the lawyers out there Ben there's not that much pride going on the platform and we're doing a great job preventing it and so but uh but
23:57 Brad But the
23:58 Scott the point point
23:58 Brad is
23:58 Scott is
23:58 Brad this,
23:58 Brad the point is that this change.
24:01 Brad The team was there.
24:03 Brad I mean,
24:03 Brad I've been in these meetings,
24:04 Brad right,
24:04 Brad where someone goes,
24:05 Brad hey,
24:05 Brad if we make a change to credit card processing,
24:08 Brad a small change there can have radical impact on numbers.
24:12 Brad We're going to see breakage. People are going to you know, we're going to see that's going to scare people away if they find out they're getting charged,
24:19 Brad you know, and.
24:21 Brad you know is there really that much like cases where we're getting these chargebacks you know is that really happening that much you know and so but you develop this model where you're like okay we're going to do it carefully and because we are afraid it's going to like
24:35 Brad cause problems.
24:36 Brad And it's, is this really that big a deal?
24:39 Brad And then next thing you know, you've implemented and it turns out you go back and you measure it and you go, wow,
24:44 Brad not only did we not get the breakage, not only did people not, you know, cancel orders,
24:48 Brad but it had no, it had minimal effect on that. And it had net very clear positive impact on cases where there would have been chargebacks.
24:58 Scott That's right.
24:58 Scott That's right.
24:59 Scott I think so often we're attuned what I would refer to looking for, you know, we're so attuned to trying to avoid,
25:07 Scott you know, look for our mistakes.
25:10 Scott avoid making your mistakes you've talked about this before when we talked I think we've maybe talked about retrospectives and you've talked about this looking at what did we do right can we do more of that I don't remember exactly the context you brought that up in but we're so attuned at looking at what went wrong and trying to fix it that we often don't try to learn from what went right
25:31 Scott And
25:31 Brad Yeah,
25:31 Scott so,
25:32 Brad and I think that – yeah,
25:33 Brad 100%. I'm a big believer in that,
25:35 Brad that like a lot of times when things go right,
25:38 Brad people say,
25:39 Brad oh,
25:40 Brad that went great.
25:40 Brad We don't need to talk about it.
25:42 Scott yeah,
25:43 Scott yeah.
25:43 Brad And the reality is I believe that when things go right,
25:47 Brad that's the best time to pause and really interrogate. Like what did we do differently here or what did we – what is it in our system?
25:56 Brad um that contributed to this success that we had oh
26:00 Scott Yeah, that's right.
26:01 Scott We were probably talking and now that I think about it, I think you're bringing that up in the context of avalanche awareness and
26:07 Brad yeah
26:07 Scott you
26:07 Brad we do that all the time in avalanche
26:08 Scott do
26:08 Brad awareness all because
26:09 Scott the time, right?
26:09 Brad we're like trying because like every time you every time you don't have an accident right you're asking yourself was i lucky or did i make good decisions
26:20 Scott Yeah, that's right.
26:21 Scott Okay,
26:21 Scott so actually we have stumbled into,
26:23 Scott I think, a huge thing that every team, including engineering,
26:27 Scott but also all the teams outside of engineering can also do,
26:29 Scott which is build really good learning feedback loops.
26:33 Brad Yeah.
26:34 Scott Right.
26:35 Scott And we have those feedback loops in engineering,
26:38 Scott as you know. In fact, I'm giving an all hands presentation on Monday about one of them. They're Tuesday.
26:43 Scott Not that that's relevant to our podcast listeners, but about our incident response process and our postmortem process and how all that works and how, you know.
26:54 Scott I'm starting out my presentation by saying if failure is our measure of success then we have achieved victory because we have problems we have problems all the time in engineering the systems are failing all the time and the name of the game is to get really good at learning about how you made those and if you think about or not how you made them but what caused them how to fix them if you think about our entire industry
27:16 Scott I started building online services, we called them websites back then,
27:21 Scott 30 plus years ago.
27:24 Brad Yep.
27:24 Scott And the stability of online services today,
27:29 Scott knock wood,
27:30 Scott is incomparable to what it was 30 years ago.
27:37 Scott right even to what it was 10 years ago it's incomparable and so that's all because as an industry we made mistakes we learned from we made mistakes we learned from we kept them building layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of learnings so we can get to a point where knock on wood we can keep these systems that are now kind of vital to really every aspect of our lives
27:59 Scott up and running.
28:00 Scott Can I detour for a second
28:02 Brad Yeah.
28:02 Scott on systems that are vital to every aspect of our lives?
28:05 Brad Okay.
28:05 Scott This is a total ADD side quest we're going to go on.
28:11 Scott TaskRabbit operates in Europe, and apparently the country of Spain,
28:15 Scott have you heard of Spain?
28:16 Brad I have heard of it. It's a country.
28:17 Scott You ever been there?
28:19 Brad I have.
28:20 Brad Yeah.
28:20 Scott What do you think of it?
28:22 Brad I love that we went to, we saw a lot of beautiful architecture.
28:25 Brad We saw a lot of beautiful art.
28:27 Brad We ate some beautiful, some delicious food,
28:30 Brad drank some delicious drinks. It was great.
28:31 Scott You did all the things you do in Europe. It's great. Well,
28:34 Scott apparently they have passed a law,
28:35 Scott which if you operate a business in the country of Spain,
28:38 Scott you must accept customer service inquiries by mail.
28:44 Scott And you must respond within 15 days in their approved languages, which I think are three different languages in Spain.
28:54 Scott And so a company like TaskRabbit now,
28:57 Scott I guess we have to go set up a mailbox and employ a person to go check the mail every day and then somehow get that translated and get into our customer support system and have someone figure it out and respond and then print out the response and fold it up and put it in an envelope and find a stamp and send it back.
29:13 Brad Love it.
29:15 Scott So the entire world is not online yet.
29:19 Brad it's just like that's just like awesome that sounds like a service somebody there you go there's a business for you
29:25 Scott It's funny you said that was literally just this week I was talking to someone at our company about having to do this.
29:31 Scott Engineering doesn't have to do anything for this. It was just they were talking about how they had to deal with this.
29:35 Scott And I was like,
29:36 Scott that's exactly what I thought.
29:38 Scott I was like, oh, that's an interesting little business.
29:40 Brad Right.
29:41 Brad Just have a bunch of mailboxes.
29:43 Brad I mean, that is the business,
29:45 Brad right?
29:45 Brad There is people that do that business,
29:47 Brad you know, in the US,
29:47 Brad you know.
29:49 Brad uh registry registered agents for llcs you know my my llcs
29:53 Scott Yeah.
29:53 Brad got a registered agent there's a mailbox there um and when any paper mail comes to me i get a email with a with a you know scanned copy of it
30:02 Scott Okay.
30:03 Scott So where did we, I don't know how we ended up here.
30:04 Brad we ended up there yeah oh you were saying all the systems the systems that just are working in the systems are in the working in the background are you were you going to talk about the postal service
30:14 Scott I was just going to say sometimes we go driving down the road and we end up at the
30:16 Scott You end up in a cul-de-sac.
30:17 Brad Yeah
30:20 Brad or around in circles in the cul-de-sac.
30:22 Scott Now, we were talking about, you know, if a company wants their engineering team to go faster, what are things that non-engineering teams can do to essentially facilitate that?
30:31 Scott You said one,
30:33 Scott have things shovel ready.
30:36 Scott You said two,
30:37 Scott be clear about the things that you want to have done.
30:39 Scott I don't remember if there was a third thing you added. I threw in there, have learning feedback.
30:45 Scott back loops somehow we got in talking about whether things worked or not so that sort of led to
30:52 Scott Having clear learning feedback loops all over the company,
30:55 Scott I think is another puzzle piece that I might add to it.
31:00 Scott Here's what I would add,
31:01 Scott which might ruffle the feathers of every single person not in engineering in the entire world.
31:07 Brad Okay, I want to hear it.
31:08 Scott In the companies I've worked at,
31:10 Scott it mostly the finances go something like this.
31:15 Scott Hey,
31:15 Scott we made $100 this year, and next year we want to make $120.
31:20 Scott So we think just by doing more marketing like we did this year,
31:25 Scott that that'll get us $10.
31:27 Scott And so now we need to come up with some new features and some new product ideas and some things like that, that'll get us the other $10.
31:33 Brad Yep
31:34 Scott And then, you know, there's product managers that facilitate that process.
31:39 Scott of deciding exploring ideas oh i'm sorry you talked about knowing your customer knowing what your customer wants is an important thing okay so i forgot about that one so okay so then there's product managers they go talk to customers they talk to stakeholders they decide this is what we should do they specify this et cetera et cetera and then you know if we need 10 more dollars we try to come up with 30 of ideas because we know that we're going to only get one in three of them right
32:06 Scott And in my experience, roughly speaking,
32:09 Scott a third of things succeed,
32:11 Scott a third of things actually make stuff worse, and a third in the middle just kind of don't have any impact at all.
32:17 Scott And so we come up with $30 worth of ideas, and then we try and do them all, and hopefully some of those are winners out of that process and we get our $10.
32:28 Scott And I've been fortunate in my career that typically that's work.
32:32 Scott Engineering is largely an R&D exercise,
32:35 Scott research and development exercise.
32:37 Brad Yep.
32:37 Scott And so...
32:39 Scott Probably if we wanted to get more out of engineering and have engineering get sipped and faster.
32:44 Scott I have this hypothesis,
32:46 Scott I can't tell you exactly the mechanics,
32:48 Scott but if we didn't have that $10 on engineering,
32:51 Scott if the company said,
32:52 Scott well,
32:53 Scott we have $100 this year and next year we think we can get $10 more by continuing business as usual and we're going to do some R&D and maybe that'll give us a windfall and maybe it won't, right?
33:05 Scott And there's something,
33:08 Scott I can't explain it,
33:09 Scott but qualitatively it just feels like it would lead to a dynamic that would result in a combination of,
33:18 Scott I think people would take bigger bets,
33:21 Scott but
33:21 Brad Yeah.
33:22 Scott simultaneously I also think people would be.
33:25 Scott much more focused on actual like customer problems not on here's the idea i think that can make us money but here's the thing that the customer is telling
33:32 Brad Yeah,
33:33 Scott me would be
33:33 Brad right.
33:33 Scott better um i think it might take some of the edge off that causes people to cut corners you know there's always this thing that people feel like well we made an mvp and then it didn't really deliver the results we expected was that because it was like the minimum viable thing maybe if we had built it more for full featured it would have worked
33:53 Scott And so it might take a little of the edge off that of, you know, just always rolling out an MVP kind of thing.
33:59 Scott So I don't know, just there's a little feeling there.
34:01 Brad Well, actually,
34:01 Brad that kind of strikes a nerve for me.
34:04 Brad I've been listening to the audio book of the book Incorruptible. I don't know if you've heard of it.
34:10 Scott Heard of it.
34:11 Brad It's a great book.
34:12 Scott Is it about Donald Trump?
34:13 Brad No,
34:13 Brad it is not. It's by.
34:17 Brad the author of the lean startup and it's a book about
34:21 Scott Oh,
34:21 Brad basically
34:21 Scott that's
34:22 Brad eric's
34:22 Scott Eric's new book, Eric Ries' new book.
34:24 Brad eric's reese's new book it's and um it's about how do you protect them how do you become a mission-driven company and how do you protect that mission and what kind of how do you what kind of what do you what does that mean to do that um but there's a really interesting one of the things that he talks a lot about in the book is this notion that um to have something worth protecting you need to have something worth protecting right
34:43 Brad Right.
34:44 Scott Mm
34:44 Brad So,
34:44 Scott -hmm.
34:44 Brad you know, you have to you obviously have to have a business worth protecting.
34:47 Brad You have to have a mission worth protecting.
34:50 Brad And he makes this point. He's talking a little bit about I think it was I think he was doing an example of 3M.
34:57 Brad But one of the things he talks about is and this kind of comes from the he kind of mentions it a little bit in lean startup, but like measuring things is a really important way to make sure you're on track. And so one of the examples he gives is if you're in.
35:10 Brad You're an innovation driven company, and I guess this was maybe 3M that did this for a while. They had this as a thing where they are an innovation driven company. And so they had a measurement that was how much of.
35:21 Brad This current year's revenue came from products that were invented or innovated in the last three years.
35:32 Scott Mm
35:32 Brad And
35:32 Scott -hmm.
35:32 Brad I think it was 3M that he was describing.
35:34 Brad So they had this like required metric that the board would regularly look at to be like,
35:40 Brad OK,
35:41 Brad how much of this current year's revenue is coming from new products basically? And they were basically trying to look at the idea of like.
35:48 Brad like how much are we innovating right because there's the there's another version of it's where it's like oh i just like i've got these great products they're these cash cow products they're like legacy products and i and i can just sell more of them or just you know goose the marketing on them and number go up right but if you're a if you're an innovation driven company then you want to find a way to measure like are we innovating
36:13 Brad Are we adding compelling innovations that the customers actually want?
36:18 Brad And so I thought that was a really interesting thing.
36:20 Scott It's really interesting, and I feel like it dovetails really nicely with what I was just saying in the sense of this, and it's great you brought up 3M because many people know but not everybody all there for our audience,
36:32 Scott the post-it note,
36:33 Scott which might be.
36:35 Scott I don't know for sure, but might be the most valuable thing that 3M has ever invented.
36:39 Brad Certainly it's one of the best stories they have.
36:41 Scott Right.
36:42 Scott It was an accident. Right.
36:44 Scott And so if 3M had been depending on that engineer to produce something that was going to have an impact right away and had not given them the space to experiment and fail and say,
36:58 Scott well,
36:58 Scott you didn't do it this year, but come back again next year and try again.
37:01 Scott Would the sticky note have ever been invented?
37:04 Brad Right.
37:05 Scott And so that's and that's why I think this dynamic where companies are depending on the research and development department to produce in your results.
37:16 Scott creates like limits maximization, if that makes sense.
37:21 Brad Well,
37:22 Brad so then let's restate this in your how would you make engineering go faster?
37:27 Brad So what if instead of how do we make engineering go faster,
37:29 Brad what if the mission is how do we get more innovation out of engineering?
37:34 Scott Yeah, that's a great, great way of putting it.
37:36 Brad Right?
37:37 Brad And innovation that adds value,
37:39 Brad right?
37:39 Brad Well,
37:40 Brad for sure, I think there's a lot of evidence that giving space for true research, giving space for failure.
37:53 Brad is a known way to have breakthroughs right so another great example right like we all know about glp ones right well glp ones were like a ton of research that was not at all obvious that there was any value that was going to come out of them went into that and you know i think it was novo nordisk that invented the first one and
38:19 Brad had they they have a strong culture of innovation a strong culture of research and development a strong like they're they're governance they actually are a for-profit company that's governed by a non-profit board that makes sure their mission and that non-profit board is the one that like decides like what the for-profit board is allowed to do so when the for-profit board you know like several years ago tried to say oh let's
38:44 Brad Let's merge with this other pharmaceutical company.
38:48 Brad The nonprofit board essentially was like nonprofit mission guarding and board basically was like, why?
38:55 Brad How does that actually move our mission forward,
38:59 Brad right?
38:59 Scott Mm-hmm.
39:00 Brad And the CEO at the time of the for-profit company basically failed to convince the –
39:11 Brad You know, the oversight board to allow that merger.
39:14 Brad And guess what happened? The company that they were going to get merged with or wanted to get merged with was out of business three years later.
39:20 Brad Right. So it's like that's a great example where like maybe in another answer to your question of how do you get more innovation from engineering faster is.
39:34 Brad Make sure you really guard the ability for engineering to do true research and development.
39:41 Scott Well, this is maybe a whole other podcast.
39:44 Scott You're bringing up a really interesting question implicitly, which is there are things that our business stakeholders want their innovation.
39:55 Scott We're seeing that all over with AI right now, but there's things they want.
39:59 Brad that i don't think are innovation i'll
40:01 Scott Tell me.
40:02 Brad give you an example i'll give you two concrete examples from our world right now this one's a little embarrassing to share actually we have categories on task rabbit somehow task rabbit arrived in 2026 and it still requires an engineer
40:18 Scott To add a
40:19 Brad category,
40:19 Scott right.
40:20 Brad somehow the entire rest of the world figured out in 1998 how to create a GUI for people to do that, but TaskRabbit waited until now.
40:29 Brad So that's the embarrassing part. And we're fixing that. That's the project we're working on.
40:32 Brad That's Project A.
40:34 Brad And that is not innovation,
40:36 Brad in my opinion,
40:37 Brad at all.
40:39 Brad There has been some kind of resource collisions in terms of people working on that with...
40:45 Brad people bringing conversational AI into our product to help a client better describe the work they want. We ask clients to come in and describe what they want and they don't do a good job out of it, then the worker has got a poor description,
41:03 Brad right?
41:03 Scott Right.
41:03 Brad Just like us as engineers.
41:05 Brad And if you go in there and say, I need some yard work, conversational AI can say,
41:08 Brad well.
41:09 Brad how big is your yard and it can it can help refine the description that you give to the the tester and so that's innovation or at least closer to innovation that i would to some degree even that these days isn't that much innovation i mean it's a good thing technology isn't moving fast so like those are a little bit in opposition right we have a commercial team saying could you please just give me this
41:34 Brad this basic feature like
41:36 Scott yeah
41:36 Brad the
41:36 Scott yeah right
41:37 Brad entire rest of the world had this 30 years ago and like we don't have it and then they got other teams saying could you please give me this innovative feature to help us move ahead and like our competitors are building this thing we got to build this thing and so it's interesting they're not always asking for innovation from us i guess there's an interesting thing yeah
41:53 Scott yeah that's fair well and again i think that really scratches that question of like know what you want know what you want and know who
41:59 Brad you get
42:00 Scott are that you want it
42:00 Brad it really does
42:01 Scott Yeah.
42:02 Brad Well,
42:03 Brad it scratches a different question,
42:05 Brad which is somewhere back in, I don't know, whenever TaskRabbit started 15,
42:09 Brad 18 years ago, someone created some tech debt.
42:11 Brad They
42:12 Scott Yep.
42:12 Brad said, you know what, let's just put this in a YAML file.
42:14 Scott Yeah.
42:14 Brad And here we are 15 years later paying back that loan.
42:20 Brad And you know what,
42:21 Brad at the time when they were trying to kick off this business,
42:24 Brad that might have been a great loan.
42:27 Brad That might have been I could spend two weeks trying to build this thing or I can have this YAML file ready by the end of the day and that was probably a really good trade-off.
42:36 Scott You know, it's super interesting.
42:38 Scott Okay.
42:38 Scott Okay. Now you got me. Now you got me thinking about AI.
42:42 Scott Okay.
42:42 Scott You know what I think is super funny?
42:45 Scott I see this with my AI agents all the time where they.
42:50 Scott will trade off tech debt intentionally they'll say out you know they'll say in their discussion i got i got these agents and they're doing code reviews of each other's code and one of them says oh well what about this like this is a little piece of tech debt and they'll they'll the agent will say the other agent will be like oh yeah that's a nit like i don't need to fix that gonna be deferred right and
43:15 Scott It's so funny to me.
43:17 Scott I feel like I'm constantly saying to them,
43:20 Scott no,
43:20 Scott don't defer.
43:22 Scott Like, fix it now.
43:24 Scott Like, I don't want the tech debt.
43:26 Scott Like, fix it now,
43:27 Scott right?
43:28 Scott It's so interesting to me that the way that these LLMs have been trained is they're trained across essentially the history of all the way that us humans have behaved.
43:40 Brad Mm
43:40 Scott And
43:40 Brad -hmm.
43:40 Scott so it's like you and I were joking the other day when when you ask Cursor or Claude for an estimate,
43:45 Scott it comes back with like two weeks or something,
43:48 Scott you know, and it's like that's so ridiculous because it's like going to take it, you know, 15 minutes to write the code.
43:54 Scott And so I do I do think there's so you've made me kind of remember that one of the things that.
44:03 Scott we're evolving through right now is the fact that the language of engineering,
44:11 Scott the
44:11 Brad Mm-hmm.
44:12 Scott language of estimations, the language of the decisions around technical debt,
44:19 Scott the language that we have around do we make that investment now or do we live with it for now,
44:27 Scott right?
44:29 Scott All of that language was predicated on the writing of the code taking a lot of time.
44:36 Brad Mm-hmm.
44:38 Scott And now that the writing of the code takes a lot less time,
44:41 Scott a lot of those decisions and the language around those decisions, I think, are outdated.
44:51 Brad Mm-hmm.
44:52 Scott And the LLMs are programmed on the old historic outdated way of talking about decisions.
44:59 Brad That's interesting.
45:00 Scott Right?
45:01 Brad Yeah, that's really fascinating.
45:03 Scott And so when you were talking about like,
45:04 Scott oh, you know, when the you know, whatever 15 years ago when somebody decided categories should just be in a YAML file,
45:10 Scott right?
45:11 Scott Like, yeah,
45:12 Scott you're right. Like at that time 15 years ago, that was probably the right decision because like coding up some user interface was was definitely like a two week project that you didn't really need to do at that time.
45:25 Scott Right.
45:25 Brad Yeah, you're trying to get your company launched and you're just like we'll deal with that later.
45:28 Brad We don't need to change a category right now We'll deal with it later.
45:31 Scott Exactly.
45:31 Brad They can call us and put it within a new category
45:33 Scott But now you can write that UI right out of the gate and and or you can, you know.
45:41 Scott have the agent go fix that ui you know it's it's funny again like if we're gonna if we're gonna go back to your original question like what would have to change for engineering to go faster i i man i i don't i hope i don't just sound like a broken record or or some kind of a you know complainer but man i just feel like know what you want built like go really get your product get get your
46:07 Scott Get your backlog in order.
46:09 Scott What do you really want me to spend my time on?
46:12 Scott Because I can write this stuff so much faster now.
46:16 Brad Yeah, but it's still I want it all.
46:18 Brad And there are still humans in the process,
46:20 Brad right?
46:21 Brad We're not yet at infinite code infinitely fast.
46:23 Brad I know there are teams that are going very, very fast, but like, we're still, I don't think we're yet at infinite code, infinite code
46:30 Scott No, I agree with you. I 100% agree with you.
46:33 Scott And I'm saying like,
46:34 Scott no matter what the system is, no matter how fast you're going,
46:38 Scott you still need to have a really good idea about what you really actually want and the order you want it in.
46:43 Brad Yeah, people wanted
46:44 Scott to me
46:45 Brad it.
46:45 Scott that's like that's like the that's like the main thing you know like i'm working with this i'm working with this client now and it's like they did some usability testing and got feedback on a prototype that they built and it was a real eye-opener of like all the assumptions that they made like no it like did not resonate with the customers you know and i looked at it and i was like this is great like we learned something we got some
47:10 Scott have some real signal here this is so good like now okay here's five ideas that people want to try to do to address the signal that we got great didn't we learn let's not let's not polish this let's let's get the five possible answers real quick and let's try to get signal on those things right
47:29 Brad Yeah,
47:30 Brad I may be a masochist, but like one of the things that brings me the most joy in my job is when
47:37 Brad An A-B test fails.
47:38 Scott Or what does that mean for that A-B test fails?
47:41 Scott Like, does that mean?
47:41 Brad We're running an A-B test.
47:42 Brad We've got the way it is currently on the system and we run a comparable,
47:46 Brad we run a new version against it to see. Everyone thinks the new version is going to be better,
47:50 Scott And
47:50 Brad right?
47:51 Scott when the new version is worse,
47:52 Scott that's when you that's what you meant by
47:54 Brad That's
47:54 Scott a fail.
47:54 Brad when you learn.
47:55 Brad Yeah,
47:55 Brad that's when you learn something when your previously held assumptions get overrun by a herd of facts,
48:01 Brad right?
48:02 Brad And I find that.
48:03 Brad As a person who I enjoy learning,
48:06 Brad I always find that really interesting. I'm like, well,
48:08 Brad look at that.
48:09 Brad I didn't know something and I learned something today.
48:12 Brad I think that's pretty cool.
48:13 Scott Wasn't that one of the stories that Kevin told us about Spotify or something like that,
48:16 Scott how they had developed this real strong culture of like test before you deploy and then on one big project like they didn't do that.
48:24 Brad Yeah,
48:24 Scott And it was just like they couldn't.
48:26 Scott and then you and then and then you're and then you like you have to test the parts right like again i was just talking to this this client where i'm like they had six ideas of things they wanted and i was like we need to tease those things out because if we if we try to test all six of those things at the same time you're you're gonna conflate the signal and you're not gonna know whether or not it was you know was which of those things was the good thing or
48:50 Brad Just like the avalanche.
48:52 Scott worse like if you
48:53 Brad Yeah.
48:53 Scott If it fails, like if you roll out the prototype with all five features or six features and it's a dud,
48:59 Scott now does that mean
49:01 Brad all No,
49:01 Scott five
49:01 Brad no.
49:01 Scott features
49:02 Brad You're lucky.
49:02 Scott were a dud?
49:02 Brad Here's something that I think could help engineering go faster.
49:05 Brad I don't know if this is possible.
49:08 Brad If all of us actually, including the engineers,
49:10 Brad had a longer mental time horizon about what we're doing.
49:16 Scott Yes.
49:18 Brad It's not this quarter.
49:19 Brad It's not even this year.
49:21 Brad If we're trying to build these businesses to be real enduring businesses,
49:25 Brad TaskRabbit's been around 15 or so years and we're doing a big investment right now to.
49:31 Brad modernize the platform refactor a lot of parts of it and you know there's a lot of impatience about that but i try to remind people hey the platform we're working on that we're frustrated with now because it's become brittle serve this company for 15 years the
49:46 Scott Yeah, totally.
49:47 Brad thing we're building needs to serve us for the next 15 years or not maybe doesn't even needs to serve us is going to serve this company for the next 15 years and so you
49:57 Brad If it takes a month or two longer to get us the right thing that will serve this company for 15 years,
50:03 Brad that's the right decision.
50:05 Brad But so many companies in America are very monthly,
50:09 Brad sprintly, monthly,
50:12 Brad quarterly,
50:13 Brad yearly.
50:15 Brad oriented,
50:16 Brad right?
50:16 Brad And there's very,
50:17 Brad very few companies that think in decades.
50:20 Scott I don't know if it's still in the code base,
50:22 Scott but like 10 years ago.
50:25 Scott a colleague of mine who worked at Microsoft said hey Brad I found some code you wrote and I was like okay that's hilarious because one I never worked for Microsoft and they were like yeah yeah it was like some copy pay it's like some undo buffer inside of some code that's like and it was and the where this code came from was it was code I wrote at Asymetrix
50:51 Scott in 1993 and then was a part of a project that got spun out and bought by Vizio and Vizio eventually got acquired by Microsoft and somehow like some code that I wrote lasted at least 25 years in a code base that
51:11 Brad That's kind of cool.
51:12 Scott I never worked for the company of right and
51:15 Scott So, yeah, I agree with your point that like – and by the way, the book Incorruptible, everybody check it out, Eric Ries' latest book.
51:23 Scott It talks a lot about that, this idea of like companies that really have a mission to live – to really make a positive impact on the world,
51:35 Scott then those are companies that want to live for –
51:42 Scott centuries
51:43 Brad Mm hmm.
51:44 Brad You know, that reminds me of another book recommendation I'll make on this podcast here called The Living Company.
51:50 Brad I think the author was Ari DeGuisse, like a Dutch name.
51:55 Brad And it was a study.
51:59 Brad of companies that had been in business for 200 years or longer so
52:03 Scott Oh, wow,
52:04 Scott that's cool.
52:04 Brad this guy had observed that the lifespan of companies was getting shorter and shorter and shorter and so he wanted to understand what was it about these companies that have endured for so long because if you're mitsubishi and you've been around for 200 years what you were doing 200 years ago and what you're doing now making automobiles and microwaves and stuff like
52:24 Brad stuff like that totally different right
52:25 Scott Yeah,
52:26 Brad so
52:26 Scott totally.
52:26 Brad something about your culture your dna is not about the product or service that you're offering it's about something else and fundamentally if i'm my recollection of the book and it's a short read i bet it's not even 200 pages um was that fundamentally these companies
52:45 Brad take their foot off the gas pedal of profits just a little bit like in my mind's eye as i like they're willing to earn 10 less in order and 10 wasn't a number that the author said that's just my kind of like recollection they're willing to earn a little bit less in order to
53:03 Brad and spend that money on thinking and optimizing for the long run. And that's the DNA of their company is we're not here to maximize profits for today.
53:13 Brad We are here to ensure that this company perseveres.
53:20 Brad We're just stewards of this company. Our job
53:22 Scott Yeah.
53:22 Brad is just to keep it going,
53:24 Brad not
53:24 Scott Yeah.
53:24 Brad to necessarily maximize today's profit.
53:27 Brad And that's a very un-American thing, an American way of thinking.
53:30 Scott It's rare in today's sort of like view of capitalism as it exists today.
53:37 Scott But it's not unique.
53:38 Scott Like Costco,
53:39 Scott great example of a company that has very, very focused vision around their customers are their customers.
53:47 Scott are their primary stakeholder right providing
53:49 Brad Yeah, yeah,
53:49 Scott to their customers is their prime and their second stakeholders their employees and third stakeholders are the are the shareholders like and they're adamant that it's in that order and that's the priority which is why they still sell the dollar 50 hot dog soda combo and when they first introduce that a big mac cost a dollar 63
54:13 Scott And their hot dog soda combo was $1.50.
54:16 Scott They have kept the price at $1.50.
54:20 Scott um and it includes that they've solved the problem of they actually make their own hot dogs right they've solved
54:25 Brad Yeah.
54:25 Scott this problem by you know making continuing to make that and they will never and it's like a you know apparently there's apocryphal story of like the cfo of costco trying to convince um uh the ceo to like let him raise the price and he's just like over my dead body you will not do that because that is like it's a commitment to the
54:45 Scott the customer that this is our truthful this is the truth we are giving you the we you are our priority and we will and so yeah there's a handful of companies out there that really focus on that kind of mission driven approach anyway this is this has been a long windy road to get to Costco and hot dog
55:02 Brad It is. Well,
55:03 Brad that's a great place to leave off.
55:04 Brad Maybe I'll go to Costco and get a hot dog tonight.
55:06 Brad I don't know if you know this, but I recently was applied and was.
55:10 Brad approved and selected to be a member of costco Are well
55:13 Scott you an exclusive member?
55:15 Scott Are you an executive member?
55:17 Brad i'm a gold star member
55:18 Scott You're
55:18 Brad so i haven't
55:19 Scott a gold graduated star member?
55:19 Brad to executive yet Oh, but
55:21 Scott wow,
55:21 Brad somehow
55:21 Scott man.
55:21 Brad but i was applying for my membership and the woman asked me she said so how long have you lived here i said actually i've lived in seattle my entire life and she said wow i'm impressed that you've lived here for so long it's a little bit of a comment on my age but she said i'm impressed that you've lived here for so long and you've never
55:37 Brad Never been a member of Costco.
55:40 Scott There you go. Welcome to the club. It's a great club.
55:43 Brad Yeah,
55:44 Brad I'm in now.
55:44 Brad I'm a card carrying member.
55:45 Scott Card carrying member.
55:47 Scott All right there.
55:48 Scott That's how we're going to end it.
55:50 Scott Scott, finally a card carrying member of Costco.
55:54 Brad Is that the title of this episode?
55:56 Scott Card carrying member of Costco.
55:59 Brad Brad, this has been really fun.
56:01 Scott The wild ride,
56:02 Brad What
56:03 Scott Scott.
56:03 Brad do
56:03 Scott It's been
56:03 Brad we
56:03 Scott a wild
56:03 Brad need ride. folks to do?
56:05 Scott Smash.
56:05 Scott Smash that subscribe button.
56:07 Brad Rate and review. We really appreciate it, gang.
56:10 Brad And we look forward to seeing you next week.
56:12 Scott All right. See you next week, Scott.
56:13 Scott This episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was produced and edited by Saffron Heptegau.
56:19 Scott Our theme song was AI generated by Brad.
56:23 Scott Please follow us on all the social media platforms.
56:25 Scott platforms at HowManyCTOsPod. You can find us on YouTube,
56:30 Scott LinkedIn,
56:30 Scott Instagram,
56:31 Scott Facebook,
56:32 Scott Threads, X,
56:33 Scott TikTok,
56:33 Scott and Patreon,
56:34 Scott or at our website at HowManyCTOsPod.com.
56:38 Scott And remember to rate,
56:39 Scott review,
56:39 Scott and subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
56:42 Scott Thanks for listening.