Discover the Best Final Bill Format for Product Quality

Final bill format for Product quality

on this episode of the podcast I have with me Bill press he's the senior VP of engineering at itable we're going to be talking about a few different things mainly we're going to be focused on product velocity and the drivers at early stage startups we're going to be talking about how external pressures Drive growth and we're going to talk about what Bill finds important in terms of finding his next job and I think he has great insights on that topic as well Bill thanks for being on the show thanks for having me Amir it's great to be here absolutely so I guess two things to start off uh one is if you could tell us what iterable does and then also you know what are your roles and responsibilities as the senior BP of engineering iterable is a cross-channel marketing platform and it provides a unified customer experience across channels and provides analytics to make it easier for our customers to understand what their users are doing awesome awesome and what in terms of being the SVP of engineering what do your responsibilities look like right that's a great question so I'm responsible for the engineering team as a whole both the management team and the individual contributors that report to them what I'm not responsible for is product management so we have a separate product management organization but my responsibilities do include both software developers and site reliability engineering awesome so I guess just to to to frame the conversation in terms of the current team maybe you could just talk about how it's currently set up and and how you guys manage teams you know as an overarching view of you know the internal workings sure so at iterable we have two main areas for engineering we have the product engineering group and we have platform engineering product engineering has a lot of the product development teams and the platform engineering has teams that are more devoted to high-scale infrastru structure and site reliability and I'm assuming you guys are some form of agile scrum something like that that's right we use both scrum and Comon we don't dictate the process across the organization for every team we do expect clear agile methodology for any given team and we align the boundaries between periods of work but we have some teams that are pulling tickets off of a combon board and some teams that are working in twoe sprints you know the topics about balancing team velocity and and obviously you know with appropriate levels quality I guess my first question would be is if there isn't like a defined overarching methodology everyone's adhering to how do you guys I guess level set expectations across different teams across different methodologies or different ways of accounting for work so actually I'm going to make a distinction between how we plan and execute and how we make decisions about quality versus product velocity because I think those are separable questions when I think about product velocity and delivering with quality the evolution that I normally see in small technology companies as they mature is that at first a startup will be really all about product velocity and trying to gain as much traction and Market penetration as they possibly can as quickly they can with sufficient quality sufficient can be for very early companies a fairly low bar so it's basically just what do we need to get by so that we can keep growing the business as fast as we can and this is a time when a lot of companies develop what I call Strategic debt so they're acquiring technical debt it's not because they're lazy it's because they're making a strategic trade-off between having rigorous robust 59 a system as they can versus enough customers that they can keep the business to Flat you can have an incredibly reliable platform as a small startup without sufficient customers and you won't succeed as a business obviously if you can't earn your customers trust then you're also not going to succeed at a business but in the very early days it's very common to see that tradeoff lean towards product velocity there's usually not a lot of process involved and even maybe decisions about it because everybody's moving so fast and they know that the next product is needed and then as the team starts to mature the company starts to mature then that starts going from a small group that is in touch with the founders and in touch with the need to continue to grow the market to a sales team that can sometimes Drive the engineering team to deliver product because they're agreeing to things before they're built so that's another way that as a company starts to mature I've seen product velocity basically get ahead of the need to build in quality but especially in Enterprise SAS which is my area as you start to move up Market which is kind of inevitable you're going to have to be prioritizing customer trust more and more and again you will often see engineering organizations mature because of external pressures okay so initially its external pressures to grow as fast as possible both from the founding team and then from the sales team and then external pressures from the customer success team trying to support customers that are larger than really the company's ready to support so the company's moved up Market or they're trying to move up Market hey we closed our first big customer and then we're not providing the level of customer trust we need to so now customer success is you need to prioritize reliability so again you have these external pressures that are coming in as competing pressures that's very natural it's very normal it's not where you want to end up where you want to end up is internalizing the need to both support the business and support your customers and ensure that they can trust your platform and have that drive come from within engineering and that's something that happens only after usually a company is mature to a certain point if you get a very experienced leader in early then it might look different and you might get that internalized drive for both theoc eting quality early on but honestly it doesn't often work out that way and so when a new leader comes in Midway through a company's Evolution as a private company they're having to take these external pressures and internalize them so now that it's internalized into a team it often takes the form of instead of coming from sales it's moving through product management it's still kind of an external pressure but they're a very close partner and then you also have started to develop a quality team or a site reliability team that's going to internalize this drive towards reliability so again the pressures are still a bit isolated and that you can describe them as coming from different functions but they're closer to core engineering what I see happen there is product managers will drive for product velocity and if you have a fairly junior team which often happens if you're growing your team very quickly they may not have the maturity to push back against product management pressure and so I have found that product development teams at this stage will want to deliver with more quality they've internalized the pressure they've gotten from these larger customers from customer success but they're not yet mature enough in terms of where they are and their engineering career that they feel like they withstand the pressure of their PM pushing for more features and that's where Engineering Management comes in to help support Engineers have them know what it means to be fully responsible for what they're developing and the quality of the product that they're shipping and create a more healthy dialogue and tension within the team between these roles to really have the team as a whole start to have a deeper understanding of the need to move fast and the need to deliver customer trust I would say that's a good place for a maturing say mid-stage Enterprise task company that's mid-stage pre-ipo like startup and then the next area of evolution is to formalize the balance of quality and velocity in some kind of structure and the one that I'm really drawn to is having site reliability indicators and objectives and actually being able to talk about error budgets and how much error a given service can withand before you need to invest in reliability because you're going to breach the site reliability objectives that you've set and if the product managers are involved in setting those objectives then it's something objective that everybody on the team can look at to say we need to invest more in reliability or we've got tons of room in our eror budget we absolutely should be accelerating the amount of features that we're developing that's awesome and I think to kind of step back I know we want to talk a little bit about the team level but to stay at this level actually I am curious when you stepped into iterable it's been a year in change and I know you um you know people look you're LinkedIn but you come from some larger organizations as well when you come into that startup environment and you're trying to you know survey the land and you're trying to understand this balance between the sales-driven growth the product management you know driven growth how did you start observing that or or was it already kind of flushing out and was it already kind of maturing before you even got there uh that's a great question it was already maturing before I got there and I have to say part of the reason why I chose iterable is it has an amazing culture it has an incredible culture the level of communication and Trust within the teams and across functions and across the leadership is really it's not something that I've seen at this level before so they've already been having really great conversations about are we making the right trade-offs with sales pressure are we providing the level of trust that our customers need what's product Management's role in themselves being able to both as normally drive for product velocity but also advocate for investments in reliability to improve CR customer Trust actually to take a step back about that you know the culture because I think a lot of times people talk about you know Communications and there's the right type of culture I join for that sorry we're gonna take a complete Divergent question I love this this is great when you were interviewing and obviously you've you've held you know roles at Great companies what were you looking for to determine that before you started right because it's different once you're there and you're like well I can see the culture but through the interview process you have a couple of hours a half a day day and and at this point you know I think you did you join pre-pandemic or during the uh actually you were on the cusp of pandemic so yes how did you start understanding what you valued in in the culture so that it'd be the right fit for you when I was looking I started looking in January of 2020 and I interviewed at a lot of places I interviewed at really small startups I was talking with very large public companies and I talked with you know mid to late stage pre-ipo so I talked with companies all across the board different kinds of roles and I took a number of months for the process as I did last time I looked actually and I when I went from Salesforce optimizely I took about half a year so I like to take a long time when I'm looking for my next role I want to make sure it fits and what I looked for was three things number one I was looking for a company with an incredible culture and by incredible culture I mean a company that is kind more than nice and has woven within it a deep sense of compassion and humanity and that really it's got heart and that it respects that building software is a human endeavor that to me was singly the most important thing and it's really hard to assess that in like a six-hour interview panel but I will say I didn't do that like I talked with many people over the course of a number of months I actually had first talked with iterable fairly early on in my search and had continued to talk with them throughout my search and ultimately the number one reason why I chose iterable because they had absolutely hands down an incredible culture and one that was really both very driven to create a strong thriving business that provides uh high value to every single customer and a trusted experience and also valuing the people that are making that happen numbers two and three are still important and they were part of my decision-making number two was I wanted to join a strong business I wanted to join a business that was growing fast and iterable is a very successful business they're doing really well and they were back when I joined and number three was I needed to believe that the executive team was seasoned and talented enough to go the distance and by Go the Distance I don't mean just taking the company public but having it Thrive as a public company but number one was culture I could actually talk all day about culture awesome I think that was a great explanation in terms of you know what you were looking for in your you know next job I think it's super important for people to have a clear understanding of uh those indicators and to actually be looking for them and to kind of go back to what you were talking about I guess earlier about you know external pressures driving growth and shifting from a sales driven growth to product management driven growth I guess talk about engineering's involvement in that partnership with product management as the PM functionality starts maturing within a growing driving organization well I mean I think engineering's role with product management is one of partnership and one way that engineering supports product management is basically supporting the creation of process that controls how requests come into engineering early on sales is going to be going directly to engineering to make requests or to say we've already sold this so please build it and um the role of product management is to understand what customers really need not necessarily what they're asking sales for and to prioritize those and that's really hard to do if they're going directly to engineering so one way that engineering can support product management as they mature in an organization is to partner with them on creating processes that funnel requests away from Engineering in into product management and that can include requests from like a board that captures requests from sales and they can even say here's the amount of AR that's attached to these feature requests requests coming from customer success where customer success can get together and prioritize what they want to ask of product management again they can attach customers to that and ARR but all of it is done in the spirit of partnering with product management and I can't emphasize that enough to really common in organizations to find even an adversarial relationship between engineering and product management honestly I don't think that serves the organization it doesn't serve the customers there's a certain amount of healthy tension that's naturally going to evolve you want product management to have a strong opinion about what to build and that feature development is important and you want engineering to have clarity about what's needed for liability and customer trust tensions will naturally arise there but it all should arise within this container of partnership and I guess the Strategic debt you spoke about early on and that's a necessary tradeoff that companies need to make when do you feel a company should go back and revisit that should they I mean if things are working and uh you know growing and scaling I mean obviously we have stories of you companies have that have run into massive issues because of early on strategic debt but when would you revisit that uh I'm smiling because that's such a delightful and loaded question you know I've worked at large companies not to be named that never did or when they tried to address it it was too late and so they just kind of lived with it and I've seen that they've been able to be successful and also it can have a really negative impact on engineering morale and that's expensive because people are less efficient they're less effective they at trit you have to rehire that all represents great cost to the company but you also can't just do it when you're a young startup like I said you have to take on certain debts strategically so when do you handle it I would say there's no right answer at just the right time it's easy for it to be too late at some point and obviously you can't do it too early because you'll slow down so it's a judgment call and iterable is taking on that debt uh and they started paying it down before I got there and they're doing it we're doing it through strategically selected projects that have fairly High scope because we're solving problems in a fundamental way we don't do none and we're not trying to boil the ocean it's really taking them on as intelligently as we can and I always like to have at least one major strategic Debt Pay down in flight at any given time and then of course we're always paying down smaller pieces and I've also at times asked for separate funding to work on a project to pay down and that works as well I've seen that work at a number of companies where you are doing your normal product development uh large strategic project of paying down some debt as well as all the little pieces you have to do to make sure that you maintain reliability across the organization but also go to the executive team with specific funding request for another long-term initiative that works as well and it's hard because the old you know aage of if it's not broken you know and it's and it's hard if if the company's growing it's making money it's like do you divert resources and and I think the Strategic part that's you know that's interesting because I think then you're trying to attach an Roi of efficiency or you're trying to establish some return on that in that's right in the example that I talked about earlier where very successful company that didn't pay down some of that debt you know like I said you will see Engineers working in a certain part of the code base will have low morale and low productivity there the signal is very loud very clear happening all the time and very difficult to remediate and you can trace that back right like at some point it's not so loud and at some point before that you just have the inklings of it that you can sense in the organization that something is coming and before that you don't have a signal but you might have very experienced or mature Engineers who are looking a part of the codebase or part of the architecture or the infrastructure and saying this will be a problem down the road so ideally you're going as far to the left as possible in the timeline where you can identify before it even becomes a problem here's the list of projects that we're going to have to take on this is the time to start prioritizing and executing on the first one yeah it all comes down to being able to sense the signals and some of that may come before you get any feedback because you have somebody with that capability on your team or it just requires a leader to be sensitive to how people are spending their time and what they're saying to each other and it's amazing as technology is so you know structured and well organized it's the art side the people management side that actually you know in this case that we're talking about you know being able to understand your team the morale their productivity understanding those signals I mean that takes a good people manager otherwise I mean you could be driving off a cliff and by the time you notice it you know you're at the bottom yeah I've always love the Paradox that you know engineering we're we're ultimately doing work that comes down to zeros and ones it's very concrete and literal but the creation of this work is very complex unbounded and human and the management of it requires High EQ if you're going to do it well as opposed to sales where it's all about relationships and closing the deal is very soft and about like making connections and understanding people and so the work itself is sort of in that very like emotional human relational realm but the management of it is numeric right it's the exact opposite it's very like did you make your quota you know how many people on the team are have attained their quota like what's the production on average of your AES like how many more do you have to hire in order to get to this number it's math it's interesting to me the difference and it always uh I think leads to some misunderstandings on each side when they try to understand each other's organizations about what's needed absolutely awesome bill I I think uh we could probably dive into several of the topics and maybe we'll have you back on to kind of focus on another aspect of Engineering Management but thank you for being on if if somebody does want to reach out to you to pick your brain on anything you talked about is LinkedIn a good Avenue do you have a preferred way yeah linkedin's perfect linkedin's perfect and linkedin.com in Bill press all right there we go we'll make sure that's in the show notes but thank you for being on that's it for this episode we'll be back again with a different guest different topic uh until then I asked for two things one if you find the podcast useful share it uh that's how we it's been growing so it's been fantastic uh thank you for uh those that are sharing the podcast and secondly if you want me to talk about a specific topic reach out on LinkedIn let me know and I'll try to find a guest the best I can until next time thank [Applause] [Music] you