Empower Your Business with Lead Opportunity Management in Affidavits

How to create outlook signature

[Music] so welcome everyone thanks for joining us to our discussion today on influencing without management authority as a senior individual contributor that's a long topic but hopefully it's also an interesting one and so this webinar will last about 45 minutes and after which all of us are going to head over to the lead dev slack to answer your questions so please join us there to ask questions afterwards we're also going to try to take some questions live so you can use the q a feature in zoom to submit your questions and we will try to get to those towards the end we'll see how that goes and so let's get started with some introductions i can start my name is matt hawthorne i'm a senior principal engineer at comcast where i focus mostly on improving the architecture of messaging systems that drive our customer engagement paulina do you want to introduce yourself next sure i'm currently a staff software engineer at squarespace i work in the data group building and maintaining pipelines that help democratize our data in a safe and scalable way nelson yeah my name is nelson i'm a software engineer i'm currently at a ml research group called anthropic i think my experience most directly relevant to this topic will come from i spent seven years as an engineer at stripe working on infrastructure and developer tooling all over the place diana hi i'm diana uh i'm a staff software engineer at slack um and in general i have experience with building distributed systems um and focusing on large scale application mostly with a focus on on the data platform side um i've been on slack for almost six years and i joined as one of the founding members there and i had of the of the data engineering team and i had the the opportunity to build uh to build and grow that team from from the ground up and most recently in the last year i joined slack customer protection team under the security work where we're focusing and using data to make slack more secure for our users and last but not least bert go for it hi i'm bert i'm a senior staff engineer at slack working on the platform team and i think a lot about how people can build apps and integrations on top of slack that's pretty much it okay so thanks for introducing yourself everyone um so we have a bunch of questions we put together that we thought help us best explore this topic so uh let's get into them shall we so first question i'm curious uh what does having influence without authority mean to all of you and also what are some of the things you that you use it for in your day-to-day work and it doesn't have to just be technical stuff it can be you know cultural improvements process improvements whatever comes to mind for you go ahead dinah i think you're on mute for sam hi uh so for me like influencing without authority just one one area of admins convincing others and getting buy-in uh when you're not in a position of power and authority and like maybe some of the concrete examples um that i um that i usually on my day-to-day basis are basically getting buy-in from leadership or peers uh when we once certain projects founded or get prioritized and when when i'm not thinking about the technical side of things i think influencing the direction and the vision of the team or where you want to go long term is another aspect um and also there's you can influence on on the product product direction also helping on the management side so another thing that's usually very important and dear to me is being an ally for other engineers like once you you have uh build more trust in the in the environment you're in you can influence the leadership to help maybe other people grow bring invisibility to them kind of uh you you are in the room where it happens so you can bring other people there too go ahead nelson yeah i think one thing i i i heard mentioned there a little that i think a lot about is uh is having having a sort of prioritization of an organization or a team in some level ends up measured by your staffing decisions like which teams get funded which teams have people working on them what are people working on and so one broad area of influence without authority is sort of finding some way to turn your beliefs about what the organization should be working on what systems need to be built what systems need to be improved into projects that actual humans are working on even though you're kind of you have no official authority over uh team assignments or or potentially the or the organizational prioritization mechanism and that can come i think from and and from both sort of a bottom up bottom up and top-down approach of either you can find individual engineers and get them really excited about whatever project or vision you have but it also comes from having relationships and trust with the management teams and managers and whoever sort of runs your organization's actual prioritization and staffing decisions so that you can have soft influence there about setting priorities encouraging the creation of teams or the focus of teams anyone oh paulina go ahead i totally agree with everything that was said but to add a little bit more to nelson's answer one way is that some of the ways i found to do some of that top-down stuff is through strategy writing and getting into our okr setting process so kind of getting in at the beginning and kind of aligning the vision and the strategy and turning that into outcomes that we can agree on as well as you know influencing via like rfcs and other cultural processes cool okay let's move on to the next question uh i've seen two extreme versions of influence and neither of them were good in my opinion one is when nobody trusts your opinion so effectively your job title might suggest that you should have influence but in practice you don't have any uh the other is when everyone trusts your opinions so much that they just wait for you to tell them what to do i'm curious have any of you experienced either of these extremes and also how do you find the right balance between them um sorry i don't know if you called on me um sorry i'm having a bbc amusement okay um uh so like i would say i've experienced both of these and i think the first one is that if no one trusts your opinion it's probably because you haven't proven yourself to them or you've or you've built their trust up and i think an example of this is when you're reviewing tech specs like when you reach a certain level of seniority you are asked to review textbooks all the time and but you've got a million things going on and you may be tempted to skim it you know and give your gut reaction on certain things i'm guilty of that as well and but i think you have to be cognizant that it erodes people's trust and you if you're not putting in the effort you know engineers spend hours or days writing textbooks that if you don't have time to properly review it you should probably just refuse to review it because if you can't dedicate yourself to it um when i was a junior engineer i used to go in these reviews all the time sometimes they called like senior tech councils and you would present to a bunch of people and they would ask you questions like did you think of x and you'd say yeah i thought of x or no i have to think about that more or what's x you know there's nothing inherently wrong with that interaction but i think there's nuance in how you have that conversation like if you're being a jerk about it like people react to that and junior engineers they interact with the person of seniority like once a year and that's becomes the impression they have of you that's how they talk about you you know and for the other extreme the flip side of it of people wanting you to make decisions or sign off and everything the way you fix that i think is again about trust it's it's this time it's about you telling other engineers that you have trust in them and of faith in their technical decisions um one thing i've been thinking about the last few years is what what i think and say when internally i'm thinking i wouldn't have made that design choice and many times you just have to let go and let people go their own way and sometimes they'll make mistakes and sometimes they'll surprise you go ahead paulina i've also experienced both of these extremes throughout my career i think i experienced the first one earlier in my career and where um there wasn't really a lot of trust and i didn't really have the title and this is one of those things where i think titles really do matter a lot i mean it depends on your experience and the culture of the company and the size of the company everything else i think in a smaller company you can kind of go in and start influencing and i think at a larger company it's harder without a title but you end up spending a lot of time trying to convince people and it gets really frustrating especially if in the long term they realize you were right all along and you could have saved all this time and if that happens multiple times and you still haven't gotten that trust it starts to feel really bad and it makes you feel really insecure um so you know make alliances i think some somebody once said push through friction um try to try to see why people don't trust you or or why they're making you spend all that time convincing them that they should trust you or find a different job if it's not working and you've tried all those things on the other flip side i think if you have the title or you're the lead on a project or team it's hard for other people necessarily to disagree with you sometimes especially if you if you give your opinion first you say this is what i'm thinking as for for the designer this is what i think about the priorities um some people don't want to disagree they're uncomfortable confronting you and groupthink takes over right so i think it's really important to coach the team and let other people talk first let other people share their ideas first um step in at the end if you strongly disagree but like bert said no know when to let go and know when it's good enough it's not the way i would have done it but it still works it's good enough i think your mic is nelson go and then diana until matthew fixes his audio yeah sure we can we can step in while matt figures out his mic um i was going to say i've seen both of these i think i've struggled a lot more with with uh in part just due to the organization i worked in with sort of not having as much trust for my opinion as i as i wanted or or felt merited but i think one one big place one big lesson i have i think is that if if you don't have the trust or the influence you want often you need to start by sort of stepping back scoping more narrowly and doing more of the work yourself is sort of you need to just pick a project and jump in and do a bunch of execution work and sort of do good like object level work rather than org level prioritization setting strategizing and sort of prove your your worth in some way um i think that there's a balance here i think a lot of it is very specific to the organization and what and maybe that's the other part is is you have to figure out what your organization trusts or what the teams or people around you trust some organizations uh just temperamentally or due to the personalities their structure put a lot of weight in titles some of them put a lot of weight in prior experience some of them kind of trust people only by their accomplishments at this present company you know have you shipped impressive features or have you fixed concrete problems at this company if you haven't i don't care what your title is or what your background is and so you have to figure out what what is it that your organization trusts and how to get it and i think as polina says in in the said in this work in the last resort if you think the organization is like trusting the wrong things doesn't want to give you respect and sort of no way to get that sometimes it means you need to find a different role or a different company if if there's no path to it i think on the other side of people trusting your opinion too much or sort of you know waiting for you on all decisions i think as you get more senior and build that authority being very explicit about delegation or about which things you're not going to involve yourself in becomes really important powerful and kind of explicitly say such and such person or such and such team is in charge of this thing and you know i'm i'm gonna stay out of it i'm gonna i'm not gonna step in and then in general just being becoming more careful with your words and where you choose to comment um it can be tempting to kind of offer an opinion on everything or jump in and be like you know this is exactly what i think about all this system but you but if people are gonna take your word sort of very seriously you need to pause and think about like all right i'll only comment if i think it's really important or really adds value and kind of otherwise i'll let i'll let these processes play their course i'll step in if i think they're catastrophically off course or really missing something or if it's one of the sort of small number of projects that i've decided is really my focus but otherwise i'm going to deliberately make the choice to step back a little bit how's my mic any better cool uh go ahead diana well so from my side uh first like paulina's answer really resonated with me too like i fully found myself in your answer to like also earlier in my career definitely was more struggling and figuring out how you can build that trust and some some things that i usually advise people and like tell them like hey these are something that works for me uh is learning what your leadership or people that you're trying to influence cares about like um or do they have any goals that they care about what's your org vision like learn what those things are and frame your your points relative to those those things uh take advantage of time and and go to office hours again if those people have it like get one-on-ones get up maybe sometimes if some those people are way senior than you it might be uncomfortable but if you're getting yourself if you put in the time and get prepared for those one-on-ones you can really have really great conversations with people and they're also more than welcome to learn and listen um on the other on the other side of like uh of the boat when you're kind of like okay now i'm in the room and like people are waiting for my opinion since i'm more senior or so on uh one thing that i found in person is like having self-awareness in those meetings like being mindful of like if you're a very senior person in that room most likely all the juniors will kind of try to wait for your opinion before they would have the courage to see something so kind of ask yourself are you the one talking the most there uh how are you you talking there are you probing for ideas are do you ask mostly questions like you should leave people to find their answers uh you want to create space for other voices in those meetings um just don't be that person in the room that tells people what to do um kind of those are some things from my side got it so let's move on to the next question i'm curious about uh all of your processes for getting buy-in to a project what advice would you give senior ics who feel blocked from making progress because their management counterparts are not aligned with them go ahead nelson yeah i think i i have kind of two maybe two takes here two reactions i think one is that uh personal relationships with counterparts in management or having an ally who is somewhere in you know the relevant management chain or or relevant kind of you know position of explicit authority that you have a good relationship with that you have some amount of personal trust with that you can be an ally is is often uh sort of i think in some ways sadly but but kind of often the only way things get done is sort of having a couple of personal connections of people that you know and influence um and that that sort of trust your opinion and can kind of take your opinion and and present it in the official planning venues or in the official those sort of more formal uh channels of authority and the other thing i'd say is echoing something diana just said is figure out what management values what what is important to them do they care about are they really worried about stability right now are they really worried about selling into a new customer vertical and there's some set of features that are really important there and figure out a way to connect whatever it is you care about with whatever it is they care about of you know this this pro this architecture project or this rewrite will contribute to their goals or maybe kind of maybe they're right maybe you're the project that you believe in or the things that you believe in are important but now isn't the right time for them because they don't line up with with company priorities if you're i think if you're trying and failing to convince people or influence people or or pushed in your direction um you have to consider the possibility that that maybe now is not the right time for for whatever it is you're you're pushing for or or maybe you need to rephrase it if that's sort of the conclusion every time then you know you need to consider whether this is the right role or whether you sort of want to try something at a higher level but try to be empathetic and understand what it is that they value and either connect the things that you value things they value or you know maybe try something else for the moment diana well i'll be fast on my side so basically it reiterated a part on coming with clear data on how certain projects will improve those metrics or things that the leadership or management side cares about uh it's super important um and circling back to the trust and the relationship i think it's really important to try to build those things way ahead of time before you start working on projects so then you have those relationships and trust built um so then it's easier to have those conversations and kind of lastly focusing on the why question why are we wanting to build this why why am i blocked on this thing like the why question would usually help on like debugging the situation paulina yeah i totally agree with with most of what's been said i mean there's so many projects right you kind of have to read the room and see you know which ones are going to be easiest to get buy-in for there's too many projects going on all the time there's too much work to do to spend all that time fighting with management about it so find something that you can agree on i usually start by asking like what's your number one priority right now what's your number two priority right now what's the thing you wish was solved already um just kind of feel out like where the buy-in is going to come naturally because you're already aligned and i might not be interested in working on their number one or the number two thing but maybe their number three thing is the thing that really resonates with me right um as was already mentioned timing is so important right not everything's worth fighting for at the moment come back to it in six months and i think also something i would add is figure out what information that person would need in order to support that that decision or that project right like if i come to you with this insight or this metric or whatever is that going to change your mind and sometimes you need to know from them like what is that metric that would change their mind so it's useful to help or to ask upfront okay let's move on to the next question when you transition to a new role within a company or if you switch companies you often leave behind some or all of the social capital and credibility that you've built up do you have any tips on making that type of transition and re-establishing your influence i don't know if you can see my hand over the background oh yeah i think it like blends into the background that's a good point oh yeah go for it uh this one's super hard i think um the only advice that i have is i think you really have to nail your first project um when you join a company like often they don't really know what your capabilities are and so sometimes they'll give you like a softball project but you kind of have to take that as seriously as any other project that has the same uh that has like more gravitas or has more importance to the company um and and and sometimes you get unlucky and you join a project that's just a train wreck and you kind of have to like guide that back to where you think it should be so yeah that's my small contribution to this question i will look extra hard to see the hand in the corner next time of your background diana go ahead uh surprise i have a bit of a different take and mostly focusing like when you join a new company uh i think when you're more senior and thinking you're about staff plus uh i think it's really important at the beginning to spend time to understand what are the expectations of your role in that new environment because it's very different in or in different orgs in different companies uh and i think also in many cases to properly um execute at the level of a staff class it takes time at the beginning because you need to develop the relationships you need to spend the time to understand the the environment um so maybe sometimes that might not be intuitive it's like it's not like you join a team and in the first month you're already operating at a level it takes a little bit of time to to ramp up um and another aspect i think especially when you're joining a new org or on your team you're coming with fresh eyes into that new environment and because you have some experience you can easily spot some areas that maybe are very fast to bring productivity and up level the team or like maybe improve the services you can maybe oh there's no metrics on availability and figure out how the service is working maybe that's something or like oh build time takes so much time maybe we can have everyone you know development focus be faster or something like there's for sure some projects that are very low amount of work that you can do and have huge impact in that initial time and that will help on building that trust nelson yeah i think the the the last thing diana said really resonates with me is is find find places where you can get quick wins when you come in and you can and i think sort of as as burt said you kind of you have to knock a project out of the park was he was how he put it but i would put his order you have to demonstrate with like some sort of concrete delivery whether that's shipping a new feature whether that's fixing some process or system that that rapidly kind of increases team productivity or team happiness you know find find some wins that you can some very concrete wins you can deliver is is really valuable in building credibility and then i think also in line with what diana said about it it taking time to come up to sort of you know full performance staff plus whatever you have to approach a new role with the expectation will take some time and sort of come in with uh humility and curiosity about what what is this team how is this team different i i if i'm a senior person i'll probably come in with a lot of strong opinions of this process that we're using to do deploys like seems absolutely batshit to me why are we doing that and you have to temper that and say okay this seems bad to me but my job is to understand why it works this way what the upsides are why we haven't changed it and i have to have that curiosity and build the understanding of what is actually going on here and why that's way and i might be right that it's batshit and i can improve it and but i i if i am i have to sort of demonstrate that by by running the project that improves it or finding the quick finding the quick wins to improve it definitely not by coming in and just sort of telling everyone that i meet of like it sort of seems like we're doing something obviously wrong like have we considered not doing that that's a great way to tank your reputation i think that approaching it with curiosity is is it a lens i really like of okay why is the system like that what are the upsides that that we're getting out of this if any how is this system different from systems that i've worked on in the past such that that maybe the the kind of constraints are different or there are concerns that i'm not used to thinking about and then kind of once you understand those hopefully you're better equipped to present your pitch of i think we should change the deploy process in this way because of the following pain points that i've seen us go through and you know really ground it in the the details of the new team rather than then in your past experience or your sort of high level heuristics or or gut instincts yeah i agree i think it takes a lot of discipline to when you i guess when you go into a new team you tend to you can look at something and say like yeah that looks batshit like you said i think it takes discipline to say maybe i'm the one that's batshit and this was a totally normal decision in the context of this team so i think that was a really good point okay let's move on to the next one one quick response to that is another reason that i like another reason i like looking for quick wins is that they actually serve as sort of spot checks to yourself that you're that you're calibrating right if you look at a system you're like this system looks horrible if you're right that it's horrible there should be hopefully some way for you to make even even if it's an incremental improvement that that sort of pulls it a little bit towards better than like hopefully that that those are if you can make those quick wins then sort of you're validating that the thing you're seeing has some truth if you fail to find any quick wins at all then that's a good good point for for you to calibrate yourself of maybe i don't have as good a handle of what's going on here as i thought i did i also want to add something on the quick ones usually those are on the things and the areas that nobody wants to do it it's like the ugly work that's not fun it's not exciting for like any engineer to do usually those are there and they're very very low amount of time like it's it's very they're usually very straightforward to do but nobody wants to do them and they're not fine yeah to build on that um i i like to come in and do the tech deck tickets that nobody knows or wants to touch and then team is usually grateful because you're gaining all this context you're learning about how it works you're knocking out some of the tech debt they're like oh we like you so that's that's usually a good first impression yeah that's a good segue into our next question i want some i once worked on a team where we got a new architect and the architect came in and he embedded in our team and he said give me something to do and so we someone on the team jokingly said you can write some unit tests we don't have good enough tests and he said okay and he went and did it and that person that architect forever earned our respect and trust by doing that but our next question is about architects and it's about um how do you overcome or fix the poor reputation of software architects in our industry and to to qualify that a little bit um i think at least in my experience in my career a lot of architects are seen as being disconnected from the the practical reality of the day-to-day engineering work and that lends to having a poor reputation paulina go for it so i think the out of touch um part of it is is a big part of it um i think there's three other parts that i've identified thinking about this i think there's a certain tension that comes with giving away agency or control i think that's like one of the things that you know if you have an architect this person's making architectural decisions um they might be in a higher scope or a higher level than you you're you're ultimately giving them some control over the system you're designing so i think there's some tension that comes from that the accessibility piece which you kind of mentioned it's out of touch it's seen as gatekeeping they're not seen as hands-on necessarily they're not involved in the day-to-day work occasionally um the third thing i would say is sometimes it's perceived a little water folly there's there's a lot of connotation of like oh if i go to the architect it's just going to slow me down like let me just build this real quick and be done with it and i think the fourth one is they they have a perception of saying no to new things so i'll try to get those answers like my tips on tackling each one of those really quickly so i think with with the control thing i think you have to give people control over the things where you can i think you let people inform the process and best practices i think we talked about this and some of the other answers you got you got to get that buy-in as you go along right so you can't just come in and say this is how you're going to do it now without any of the context and i think saying that you're not doing it this way for a good reason and we're prioritizing system stability for example or we want to have long-term maintainability you know sharing that context and the trade-offs help build that trust so they're okay giving you that control because they understand that it's in the greater bigger pictures interest um in terms of accessibility and feeling like architects are out of touch i think what helps with this is having skin in the game right i think having the architect be embedded in a team i think having the architectural role be you know the team lead or you know staff plus engineers across the company without the actual titles i think helps a lot because then they are perceived as people with hands-on experience i think you can't really lead from the back right you can't come in at like the 11th hour of a project and say oh you're not allowed to deploy this i think that's like the wrong way to go about it and i think that's where a lot of these um the reputation might might come from you know at some point we decided we're all devops right like we all have to do devops work i think it's at this point we're all architects too right whether we have the title or not um you got to be in the room um for the slowing down perception i think like i take a lot of issue with people say oh it's going to slow me down because it's like what's your baseline you know i want to help you build something that's going to ultimately work better it's going to help you go faster it's going to have fewer bugs it's going to take into consideration things you probably haven't thought about yet um if that's going to slow you down during the design phase or it's going to slow you down to wait a few days while people read your your spec like i i think those are problems worth tackling of where this perception of slowing down comes from and whether or not it's actually slow and i think there's certain projects you don't need this right it's too much it's it's there's too much overhead and it will slow you down and you just want to put a prototype out real fast i think that's the time to do that right i think faster is fine if that's if that's your requirements you need to go fast tell your architect this is the requirement up front and work around that and then as for the last one about the perception that architects say no i mean again i think there's a time and a place for experimenting and prototyping i think that's really appropriate i think you need to understand where the no is going to come from right you should be prepared to defend against the no you should um if you get a no and it's a legit no and other people also think it's a no then you should be able to accept that and move on if it makes sense right given constraints of the system um but i think if the thing needs to run in production and it's critical it needs to be structured right and and people who have vetted the design um and thought about the overall architecture and the integration points are worth listening to so i think that's how we start to repair the roles of the architects we get them more involved from the beginning we tell them and we share context really with them and then we build trust i appreciate that very thorough answer let's see go ahead burt i was going to say um i feel like one very long-term fix is that we just need to change the diversity of software engineers and like if you think about the software architects that you've met in your career they all kind of fit a certain mold for the most part like you you you see a certain mentality that sometimes it just doesn't align with the way that people think about things or people don't feel like they can make a connection um there and so i think like if we focus our work on diversity and inclusion eventually those people will become more senior and more senior until they become the architects that we want to have i guess in place diana the other thing that i would add is also all about attitude and how you're making other people feel like you want to build empathy and you want to to like basically if you're an architect you're like your success is other people's success so it's like how do we make other people feel like we're in this together and like we're not i'm like there's not this person that comes in and it's like this person has all the control and makes all the rules so it comes of like yeah to me it comes how do you make other people feel um attitude is important and i think in like the older style i think we're come kind of the poor um reputation comes from is is from from this go ahead paulina i have a quick story on this one as well like we follow an rfc process and an architecture review process um it's pretty pretty structured here at squarespace and occasionally we'll we'll get an rfc go through this that people have really strong feelings about that you know the design could be done differently right and we can take that as like oh no i can't believe this thing is being shot down but i think to diana's point like the attitude you go about it and you go hey we're in this together we all have to support this thing long term we all have a vested interest in building the best thing we can and we want to see this project succeed so if we work together and come up with improvements to that design improvements to the architecture and you know get that buy-in from the people that are doing the design that like these people are here to help and they're you know they're not just saying no and then moving back you know to do the rest of their work right they're they're invested and they're part of the team that's going to make this thing better um i think that that works really well and i've seen that um happen a few times here so far where we don't like the original design and we go back and in a week or so we have a much better design that a lot more people feel happy about and that's what gets implemented and i think the the alternative world is where you you kind of go with like the half-baked design and then you kind of grumble about it later and then five years later somebody goes why did they build it this way this doesn't make any sense right and and all that could have been avoided if you if you do that work up front and but you the attitude is the most important part about whether this process is going to succeed or not because it can go either way when you have a disagreement like it's it's hard you gotta you gotta solve that all right donna that's that's a great point um and like something to to add a bit on that is like kind of bringing a bit back like the theme of the self-awareness like if you're an engineers engineer you have your own biases on how certain things should be made done and i think it's important to catch yourself and be like hey am i really i don't know shutting this down or being very opportunity about this thing because i want it this way or is it because like it it is actually going to help like don't dismiss other people's opinion and try to be aware of your own biases in the technical direction so let's let's get adventurous and take a few uh audience questions um so the first one is for you paulina you had mentioned strategy writing i think as an answer to one of the first questions how do you go about that and do you have an example great question um so i think when i when i joined squarespace i was on the data team when it was just like a group of people we all had stand-ups together it was like a very small team now we've got like eight data teams i think that are all the size of the original data team that i joined so you know at some point you need a strategy is my point you don't need one necessarily right away and you can go for a long time without one um but i started asking the question of like what is the point what are we trying to do like what is the vision what is the strategy here and the more times i asked that question i got frustrated with the lack of an answer somebody threw it back at me and said well why don't you write one if you're the one that needs this so bad like go go write it you've got thoughts about this stuff right so um i kind of started to draft one and then and then as a company we decided to kind of invest more into strategy writing across all of our different engineering teams starting earlier this year so now we have a bunch of strategies that are in progress and we've been sharing um both like strategy writing process and getting the buy-in for those strategies getting reviews for the strategies um figuring out what are the overlapping parts of different strategies for different parts of the organization what should the scope of the strategy be like should it be time box to like the next year should it be longer than that so i think we're still pretty early on our journey as a company on strategy writing but i'm still all in for if you have good ideas and you want to present them to people um try to write them down whether that's an rfc or whether that's a strategy depends on the scope of what you're trying to solve so anyway to answer that question like we do kind of have examples of this but i don't think we're sharing them publicly but there's plenty of literature on this um a book that keeps getting excited is bad strategy good strategy a good strategy bad strategy so uh go ahead diana just one and i also wanted to mention that the good strategy of bastard and i also have seen um [Music] real larson has a blog post and he has a pretty good article there about engineering strategy i'll kind of post it in the chat but that that can also be a good starting point for things that i've seen reading online so let's go to the next audience question which is how to actually influence someone in a remote working environment i got the impression that people are most influenced by someone who they know in person or even have a personal relationship with but in a remote environment we don't have a chance to create such a relationship i i can go ahead oh sorry again i can't see your hand don't worry i i would say like you know we've been in this uh pandemic for a while now and i kind of disagree with the premise that you cannot create a relationship remotely like my my boss uh like i literally met her in person for the first time like last week but she's been my boss for like over a year uh the you can do it over zoom like you i think scheduling regular one-on-ones with people um it at ours at our company we have this slack app called donut which just pairs random people like once a week to meet um so you could do that like across your team across a certain area of work or engineering and i think that that's a great way to kind of get to know people that are outside of your regular sphere of influence and i think it's like important that you take the time to just connect on a personal level so dedicating a certain amount of time in the beginning of your meetings for just you know shooting the and uh talking about your life outside of work is important like i sometimes forget that as well go ahead nelson yeah i think i think bird actually covered most of what i was going to say which is but i think i agree with the premise that it's harder to develop relationships in a in a remote environment but it's not impossible and i think the big thing is you have to be a lot more deliberate about it than when you're in person there's often a lot of opportunities to go grab go go for a walk and grab coffee with someone you meet people around the lunch table and you have to just be pretty deliberate about replacing those but scheduling virtual lunches where you just you know eat your lunch on the opposite side of a camera and chat about whatever or virtual coffees that don't have an agenda and is just to get to know you i think running recurring one-on-ones with people that you work closely with are are super great you can even you can even even in some working relationships remotely you can have a like separate weekly like here's our work one-on-one where we're gonna talk specifically about what we're working on and then also on thursdays we get together for half an hour and just chat about whatever's top of mind and don't you know don't try to specifically focus it to work um yeah is that is that you you can build these relationships but you have to be a lot more deliberate about it and uh and sort of it can seem like it's taking a lot more time but often that's time that sort of at work you wouldn't have been working you know ever all of the eight hours you were in the office you'd be stepping out for coffee or chit chatting in the hallways and you have to block that time off in a little more structured way when you're when you're just you know on the other side of a zoom link or slack link diana also looking at things a bit from a different perspective now with more people working remote and being on zoom it actually evens the field for everyone like especially if you're in a company that has offices in other places like before the pandemic it was really hard for the satellite offices to get and have time with people but now with some and remote everyone is more of an even feel so actually everyone would need to be more proactive and reaching out and try to to build those relationships but on a good side everyone everyone has to do it and with that i think unfortunately we're out of time so hopefully we're all now inspired to use our influence to build great products and uh make our companies enjoyable places to work for everyone so let's continue the conversation on slack so please head over there ask us questions we will start answering them as soon as we can so thanks again to all the panelists for sharing all your experience and thoughts with us we definitely appreciate it and thanks to all the viewers for spending some time with us today have a good day everyone thank you [Music]