How is Gearset able to create such a vibrant and healthy culture? By having a healthy feedback culture.
In this episode of my #podcast, I speak to Kevin Boyle, co-founder of Gearset about his journey from his techie beginnings into the world of entrepreneurship and heading up this great company.
If you’ve read Dilbert books such as the E-myth, there will be doubt as to whether great software engineers, developers or coders can become equally good managers. The skillset is different, as well as the mindset and attitude…. one would think.
However, there are those who are able to adapt and flex, and being self aware helps a lot as you are then able to identify your strenghts and areas which you may need support. Building outstanding teams and ensuring the culture is maintained as the company grows is a challenge that Kevin takes on seriously.
We talk about the importance of making sure you have the right people on board, and I found myself nodding vigorously throughout the conversation.
Transparency, coaching, feedback and a genuine desire to make what we build better for everyone (without ego being in the way) is crucial in ensuring healthy culture.
I learned so much during our conversation, and I hope that you will enjoy it too.
#OnThePeiroll
Transcript
Pei Mun Lim
Hello, good morning, Kevin. Welcome to my podcast today OnThePeiroll. How are you today?
Kevin
And they’re very well, so lovely sunny ish morning here in Cambridge and the days after good start. Thanks for having me on your podcast.
Pei Mun Lim
Excellent. Thank you so much. I’m, so I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. And I see that you started with Microsoft. And that’s kind of where I started as well. Okay, what I’d like to get into is if you can just sort of like walk us through your journey, because it’s a really interesting one, from where you started as an intern at Microsoft to right now heading up your very own company. So I would love to hear the story. Yeah.
Kevin
I guess my love of computing and software goes back even before you know, my college education and internships and things from really big families with five brothers and four sisters. And my old I’m the, the second youngest of my family. So I owe my older brothers were into computers and things when I was growing up. So I was lucky enough to grow up in a house that had you know, it was an Amstrad CPC, it was like a really old beast computer. And so I got exposed to computing really early in my life. And then what was super about computers without generation was, so if you wanted to play video games, or do whatever it is that kids want to do with computers, you get bounced out to like a programming environment, you get bounced out to a basic prompt to do anything. So you got exposed to programming languages early. And then yeah, I just ignited a love for it. So I grew up going through school, loved computers, loved playing games, loved building PCs, got exposed to more programming. So that was a fairly easy choice. When I went to university, this is the thing this, you know, I would happily do this thing for free building building software and writing code. And then did that Queen’s in Belfast, that was really good fun. And one of the really nice things about my university course was, I think a lot of computer science courses do this, but it was two years of taught education, and then a full year internship out in industry a year of professional experience. And I did mine in Dublin, and Microsoft on the office team there is that Microsoft have a big European Development Center and a lot of localization work, a lot of like the translation work. So I worked there really enjoyed that really enjoyed being part of the team, getting some industry experience. And then off the back of that I got another internship the following year with Microsoft in Seattle, and that was working on, again, Office Online translation stuff, but they’re sort of the platform that underpins it all. So when you go to office.com, all the systems that, that that’s backed by, that was really, really good fun. So those two ensure internships showed me like University of like my time here, but I shouldn’t stay in academia, I got to get out to industry. So then I finished up and went out and try to find a job. That first that then took me to Cambridge, I was finishing my university in Belfast, and do the classic thing that grads are doing, you know, you got all the careers fairs, interviewed with a company in Belfast. And the final stage of recruitment for that company in Belfast was telephone call at that final screener with their head of r&d, you happen to be based in Cambridge, and did the phone call. He said, Yeah, I’d like to offer you a job. Would you like to be based in Belfast? Or would you like to be based in Cambridge? And I’d done three, four years in Belfast at that point thought it’s been an awesome city to be a student in. But I’d like to go somewhere else. No. So I come to Cambridge, I spent a couple of years in Cambridge, and 10 years later, I’m still I’m still thinking rich. It’s a it’s a really nice city to get stuck in. So that’s how I ended up here and ended up sort of that, then I’d knock on for all the things I’ve done since.
Pei Mun Lim
So what were you doing there your first job after? after you finished your internship and finished your degree?
Kevin
Yeah, we’ve got to be diplomatic, but this one because that was a kind of a love hate relationship with that, with that period of my life. So I worked for a company called autonomy systems, who were acquired by HP A number of years ago. And autonomy had a really interesting culture. So I was on the team that was building system for a large British Broadcasting organization. And the system would ingest data sources from like, all of the news feeds around the world. And then if they wanted to say, Hey, what’s happening with the tax rise in the UK, then it will have all of the data sources ready and they could do a search for it and pull up all of the previous interviews that all the key stakeholders that, you know, the politicians had given in the past and could put together a briefing pack really quickly for for their stakeholders. So it’s a really interesting project. It was loads of big data stuff before that was, you know, really a thing. And it was tons of interesting challenges. And the team I was on was incredible. It was a baptism of fire, we worked in hindsight things that I would never recommend anyone do. But, you know, we work crazy long hours, and we had pizza late at night in the office and just had an absolute crunch mentality to get this thing done. All terrible, I would never promote that, as an engineering manager. This is this is a terrible way to build software. But when I was a 21 year old grad, and didn’t really know what I was doing, I kind of thought this was normal and trusted the folks around me, and the team was incredible. So I learned so much that first year, but ultimately, the culture of the company wasn’t one for me. So I, I left and I was going to leave Cambridge, I was planning to, to go, I found moving to Cambridge, a little bit hard to adjust to, because I’d come from Belfast were nothing like a party animal. But there was like a pretty good nightlife. And, you know, there was lots of nice bars and live music and things. I came to Cambridge with a certain expectation of like this massive University time, it’ll be, you know, crazy. All night nightclubs, and things. And Cambridge, if you’ve ever visited is not that. It’s, it’s a lovely, sedate city with great restaurants, nice museums. And it’s a very different style of place, which I have grown to love. But again, at 22, I was stupid and didn’t know what I was doing. And it didn’t match what, what I expected. So I’ll try to leave Cambridge. And there was a local company offering iPads if you interviewed with them. And this was before a pas, I think, before they were available in the UK. So all you have to do is interview with them. And you got a free iPod. And I was planning to leave Cambridge anyways, without I’ll take this interview that I’ll get my iPod and and be on my merry way. And yeah, they’re the whole premise of their marketing campaign was they knew if they got folks into the building for an interview, lured by an iPod, that they’d love the culture so much, and then love the folks they interacted with. And they’d love the challenge of the role. That, you know, you wouldn’t just take the iPod, you take the job if you’re offered as well. And that worked for me. So I took my iPod I, I took the job, and I stayed there for a number of years now, that’s really where the pre gear set, that’s where the biggest chunk of my career was spent at a company called Red get in Cambridge, which was, was and is an amazing company, which I love my time there.
Pei Mun Lim
What made you leave a company that you really enjoyed to start your own company?
Kevin
That’s a good question. The Yes, there’s a sort of theme in my different choices in my career where Microsoft was an amazing company to work for you had, it was, I was part of great teams. I was Microsoft carries a certain rate of status, and kudos. And you can talk to your family about the fact that you work for Microsoft. And they get that because they know who that is. So working for a company of that scale, with that level of sort of pattern penetration, everyday life is cool, because people get it. But I felt the sort of classic like it’s harder to make an impact of 90,000 person company, there’s, there’s, it’s it’s much more easy to get lost in the maelstrom of what’s happening. And then autonomy, I moved to it. So that was way after university I didn’t I took this job with autonomy, a much smaller company, they were about two and a half 1000 people at that time, and wanted to try a smaller company first. And then I thought I didn’t like that I’ll go back to the the sort of bigger, more obvious companies. So I went to the smaller company and autonomy, didn’t love the culture, love the team and really started to understand the impact that you can have on a smaller team that then sent me to read good, which was smaller again, and you could have more of an impact. That was one of the reasons I stayed and every 18 months or two years, I would effectively change jobs within the company. So I kept getting just learning new and new stuff with a smaller tighter group of people. And I think that was eventually you know, What really made me want to go and do gearset was we spotted this really interesting. This really interesting opportunity, a really interesting set of people with challenges and problems that we could solve that we sort of saw route to fix them for them. And I had around me at that point, you know, six or seven people, I thought this would be an amazing group of people to go and do this thing with. So that was that was I think that was the that was the thing that gave me the confidence to go and quit my job or quit a job that I loved to go and, and do something new.
Pei Mun Lim
How did that feel, though? The or how did that feel? It just sounds like quite a scary thing for lots of people to even think about.
Kevin
I think we were so caught up in it, we were so caught up in what we were doing. And reggy, it was a very, it was a very keen place to do the early experimentation. So we we actually got a little bit of time internally to create what was some of the prototypes and lucilla product management. So we had a good level of confidence that we weren’t a good level of competence, this thing was a good idea. You know, you’re still at the very infancy of it, there’s still lots of ways that things can feel. But we at least knew this was a This was there was something here. And then we were so caught up in the excitement of that I think I didn’t really the whole like scariness of quitting your job I didn’t really think about because I was so focused on on what we were trying to do together, I was so focused on this massive audience of Salesforce administrators and developers that have this problem that I think we can solve, and I think we can do in a novel way that’s different than what anyone else is doing. And I think we can do it really well. There was just that excitement of doing that. That Yeah, I didn’t really think much about the downside scariness, I only thought about the opportunity to do something new with a group of people that I really want to do that thing with.
Pei Mun Lim
So this group of people, they were, they were, they followed you, that’s just amazing to to start a company with a group of people that you’ve you’ve worked with, you know, for a while, what did what do your company think about that? exodus
Kevin
of a team of people it was it was all kind of agreed. So it was all it was all done, you know, amicably, and with, with the support of, of Reddit, at the time, the,
the,
Kevin
just turn off my notifications, sorry. Yeah, so it was all done amicably with the supportive read yet at the time, in terms of it being a case of them following me, it wasn’t really, from the very start, it was all of us work together. And that’s one of the things that’s been endearing, like an enduring value of gearset. Even on the 130 130 people that we are today, you have to have some level of structure has to be some level of hierarchy for the thing to work, or at least with me running it, you know, I don’t know how to run a truly 100% flat 130 person organization, but it’s pretty close, it’s pretty close to flat. And that’s been true from the very, very start. So I, we were totally peers, in terms of decision making in terms of what we were doing what we were building, who we were building it for how we were building it, all that stuff, we were peers, so it wasn’t a case of, of them following me, it was kind of us following the idea, it was us Following this, this thing we all wanted to do together. And we’ve tried to keep that culture as the company’s growing. We, I didn’t want any hierarchical stuff, I didn’t want the idea that you would end up with opinions carrying weight, because of their, the person that issued them, you know, didn’t I just don’t like that idea. Like the best idea to weigh in and, and all that sort of stuff resonates a lot more for me as a culture I I thrive it within. And it’s the one that I wanted to create for, for all the folks that would join us.
Pei Mun Lim
Tell me about it sounds like in your career, you’ve had the opportunity to work with different kinds of teams. And you’ve ended up with one that just worked really well. What do you think are some of the components that make so for example, you’re talking about the you know, the your your first job at autonomy. And what I’ve found is that when you have Have a team of people working towards a objective. And things get really hairy and stressing, you’ve got the right components. Everyone just knuckles down. And then you form the bond.
D,
Pei Mun Lim
how have you found that moving from team to team? And you know, at redgate, you mentioned that you worked in different divisions, learning different things. How have you found that while the components that make the kind of team that you currently have?
Kevin
Yeah, so I think it’s, it’s different strokes for different folks, and, you know, horses for courses, and all that sort of stuff. So I think I’m what I’m going to describe as the teams that I like, but I don’t for a second presume this to be the one true way to build great teams. For me, what are some of the things that really that really value? So it all starts from trust, you sort of read any sort of team management or any sort of philosophy around that there has to be strong bonds of trust throughout the team. Some of the ways that we do that and cultivate that is I’m very big on the feedback. I’m very, very big on feedback, quite in a way that, that I’ll give you my like, idealized outcome, but I don’t mean it to sound that if you can’t adapt to that, obviously, as a manager, or as a peer, or as anything, you have to be adaptable to the folks around you, and flex your style, and all that sort of stuff. But in terms of my sort of idealized outcome, I, obviously, with my software engineering background, software engineers have a really healthy, at least in good software teams, a really healthy attitude towards code reviews, around the idea of peer review being just an absolute fundamental part of your part of your process. And so when an engineer’s finished doing a piece of work, and they ready to put that through for review, the way I like to think about reviews is we put the code, the artifact that I’ve produced sort of sits at the other side of the table. And it’s not me and a colleague on this side of the table, and we’re critiquing it, and we’re going to see together if we can tear it apart, put it back together, you know, we’re together, we’re going to build something better than either of us could have done separately. And so that feedback culture, I think, can be applied to almost anything, you’re not when you give me feedback, you’re not critiquing me, you’re, you’re critiquing the work, you’re trying to make this thing better. And so I love that feedback style that really works for me. And so we’ve got this really nice culture of feedback, where we do that everything. So everybody gearset has opinions on what our marketing team is doing, what our sales team is doing, what our engineering team is doing, what product we’re building, how we present ourselves at dreamforce, we do anything, folks can be a part of that conversation, and give feedback on it. And that’s part of who we are. You’re not critiquing. Like, we have this awesome graphic designer, Joe, if you give him some feedback on some, you know, you know, LinkedIn ads or something we’ve put out, you’re not critiquing Joe, you’re critiquing the LinkedIn ads. And Joe welcomes that feedback, he wants it to be the best that it can be. So we have that really healthy culture. So the trust, the feedback, and then the thing that I think we do, maybe more so than other places I’ve worked is we have a real culture of transparency. So everybody in the company, we default to transparent. So we default to, if it doesn’t need to be confidential, internally to the company, then it doesn’t need to be confidential. So things that do need to be confidential. Any people related issues, anything around folks what they want to do with their career progression, also stuff we keep confidential. So you know, the Wonder ones and stuff all that’s confidential, a company strategy, sales, performance, marketing, performance, product, roadmap, all of that stuff is 100%, transparent to our staff. And then we try and be as transparent as possible externally as well. So on product roadmap and things, there’s just no benefit to keeping this stuff secret. So we have a real nice culture of trust, feedback, and transparency. And those are the types of teams that I like to work in. And then also, just then I think on top of that, you can build just teams that are fun. So I like the people I work with, we go out for dinner, we can go to the, you know, Pullman spent time with the weekends, you know, different beat 130 I don’t like absolutely everybody that I work with, but I’m sure they don’t absolutely like me and like the same movies and things. But a lot of them, a lot of them. We do have a lot of shared shared stuff, and we can go out and go out and have fun together.
Pei Mun Lim
What happens if you make a hire that doesn’t quite fit? So let’s say somebody who’s, who takes things personally do It doesn’t like your feedback culture?
Kevin
That’s a great question. And something we actually, the thing that I’ve been really conscious of as a skill gearset is you run the risk of not having enough diversity, you run the risk of not having enough folks that are different from you, in terms of how they think and in terms of how they approach things. So I’ve been really conscious that I didn’t want to create total replicas of the original group of people. And that’s still something I think, I don’t know if we have or not. I know it’s working really well. And we’re finding folks and everyone’s fitting in. So I don’t know for sure if we’re if we are running that risk. But in to answer your question directly, we try and avoid that situation, ourselves there. Our recruitment process is I think, for candidates, potentially a bit of a pain in the ass. There’s, you know, a pretty deep technical stage, depending on if you’re engineering or marketing, whatever it is, it’s really, really practical. So we don’t have you do like any hypothetical stuff. It’s, you know, we, if you were interviewing to be an engineer, on one of our teams, we would ask you to jump on a session with us, we’d put some code up together with a real problem. And we’d work on it together. And we’ll give you Google and we give you Stack Overflow, and, you know, whatever, whatever you want. We don’t care just, you know, show us how you would tackle this job for real. And then if you get through that stage, our sort of cultural team fit type interview is again, about two hours. And we don’t we try to avoid almost any hypothetical stuff. So how would you respond to a situation where instead we dig into, you know, one of the best teams, you’ve been a part of what made it the best team? You know, what, actually, is the sort of types of questions you’re asking me now would be an excellent deem fit, interview. So those those are the types of things we do, and we do it to understand. Hi, folks. Hi, folks like to work. Because, as I say, I don’t presume to say that our way is the correct way. It’s just this just our way. So if you prefer a different style of environment, then that’s great, too. You know, you’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you. So we want to show you through that process, who we are. So you can make the right decision for your career. And it’s like, I don’t want these guys are reviewing my code. Yeah, I don’t know what my marketing, I’m like, you know, if you’re interviewing a marketer, or something like my copy is sacrosanct, you know, you can’t copy at me, well, then you probably will fit in here. That’s okay. You go somewhere where you can, you know, you can have that style of culture. And then, if you do, if you do join the company for recruitment process hasn’t hasn’t told each of us what we needed to know, then yeah, it’s it’s just understanding, when you have that friction, do lots of lots of one to ones lots of coaching, and lots of really open, honest dialogue about it. Something that you’re currently uncomfortable with, but you aspire to, to getting there, and you want to work on that together? Or is it just fundamentally you don’t like this way of working on? You don’t just don’t aspire to changing, right? You’re really happy with that view, and it works for you. And then then we can have just a grown up conversation about where that takes us.
Pei Mun Lim
Have you had the situation where you have a candidate, absolutely blow the interview? Amazing, amazing, amazing. But once they come through the not quite up to par?
Kevin
Not so much. Actually, we would pick we’re a little bit conservative, maybe we take the approach, we’d rather say no to great candidates, then say yes to the wrong one. The team that we’ve built I’m immensely proud of and I love working with every day. And I think that’s true for all my colleagues. So we we don’t we don’t take a lot of risk and not department we take risks elsewhere in the business but not on hiring. Hiring, we get the right folks. So the number of people have left gear set, either because I’ve unfortunately had to ask them to leave or because then you don’t want to leave themselves is really small, really, really, really small. We’ve we’ve very small amount of turnover. So I don’t know I think I think what we’re doing is working for us anyway.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, so you mentioned about risk. They say you don’t take risks. When it comes to hiring people. Where do you take risks
Kevin
and maybe progressing people so you know, if you take me As an example, I’m an I’m a pretty pretty okay software engineer. But when we left red gear to start gear set, there was so many other things that I wasn’t good at. And I sort of look back on and hindsight is like, you know, if I had no one the things that I didn’t know, would I have done that sort of thing. So we take risks on people internally like folks where we give them opportunity to do things that are outside their comfort zone. I like doing that. We’ll take risks on trying new things, and not being afraid to make ourselves uncomfortable, either. I don’t know I did. And marketing seals new ways of working, opening offices globally, you know, where we’re ambitious about what we’re doing. It’s just that hiring one, I don’t, I don’t want to, because the consequences of that mistake are bad for you. Because you disrupt your team, that’s really bad for that person, because that’s a knock on their career journey, or that’s a knock to their competence, if, especially if you have to be willing to ask them to leave. That’s a really unpleasant conversation. And it’s a it’s, there can be a can, it can have an impact on them. So, around hiring, we don’t want to have to bring someone in if we think there’s a risk that we may be asking them to leave.
Pei Mun Lim
You mentioned about opening offices globally. How many do you have at the moment,
Kevin
just the two. So we have our headquarters in Cambridge, actually, I guess two and a half, we were headquarters in Cambridge, we hired a bunch of folks over the last 18 months that are based in London. So we will probably do a London office if they want to work that way. And then the second one that we opened that we’re going to create, like a center out and really scale is our office in Chicago, which will be his sales marketing support office,
Pei Mun Lim
would you be overseeing the recruitment there,
Kevin
or how we’ve hired a super leader in that office, a guy called Simon bishop. And he’s, you know, one of the reasons we hired him was he’s all aligned on values. So he thinks about building teams in the same way that he wanted to be part of the team that we have built in the culture that we’ve built that resonated with him. So I’m really confident that he’s going to create not the cookie cutter, same culture, but the same values and the same principles. And in that office, I have been a part of the recruitment into that office, just because I like meeting folks, I quite I quite liked the recruitment side of things. And the first four or five people that we’ve hired are, they’re super. So I’ve loved going through recruitment with them. I’ve loved the first few months of working with them. And I’m really excited. I’m hopeful we get out to visit them now in q4 and get myself across to Chicago, I get to meet them in person and great for, for some dinner.
Pei Mun Lim
Sounds good. How has the pandemic affected the people in your company and your business?
Kevin
It’s been it’s been really variable across the team. So from a business sort of continuity point of view, it’s been there’s been no real impact. And we were pretty flexible organization before we folks could work from home as I’m really pleased, we have a nice office in Cambridge, that people will go to clubs, a nice place to hang out with people you like hanging out with in a nice environment to work in. But you didn’t need to be there. We never enforced it, and we monitored or anything. So we were able to switch to full time working from home really effectively. We tried our best to do as much there. So team cohesion stuff. So we did, we did what everyone else did. And we moved to like virtual events and like, escape room stuff where you’re like, on zoom, shouting instructions, the person that’s having to run around and do burpees, cuz you’re telling us to do burpees, or whatever it is. So we do a lot of stuff. We trade as much as possible to create social things. Because that was one of the things that was gonna be most hard to recreate. folks have a lot of choice and where they can work, right, they can work wherever. So one of the things that I think a lot of people work at gearset because of is because of the people they work with. So if you we want to keep that attachment as much as possible because that’s what makes it all fun. And then on the personal level for like different people that so the human level. folks were impacted the way everyone sort of globally was impacted. You know, people lost family members, people suffered with isolation or how Kids running her own whether in homeschooling they, you know, they had gears that said, at this stage now over 100 people, so in a group of 100 people, you’re gonna have people who enjoyed it more, enjoyed it less, were reasonably unaffected. I was thankfully, really unaffected by it all. And some folks that were affected by it you have you have a spectrum, and then just try and support them as best we can.
Pei Mun Lim
Please hit, as you say, different people differently. We’re going to pivot slightly to software development, because methodologies in particular, because that’s something that I interests me a lot. How what, how do you develop software within your company
Kevin
goes back to a lot of the buck stuff. So if we sort of separate our product and engineering, not that they’re separate, but if we tackle them separately for a second, on the product side, I’m a big believer in getting stuff out to users as quickly as possible. So validate your assumptions that you’re baking in. So when you have the idea, before you have the idea, or the very conception of the idea, start talking to users about it. And then if you think, oh, we should do something new in this area, okay. We’ll talk to them at the very, very start before you’ve written any code. Once you’ve, once you have validated the idea, and you think, yes, we should go and invest in this area, then slice it up into the smallest possible useful deliverable, which if you’re doing like Lean Startup II style stuff, you know, people refer to minimum viable product and all that kind of thing. And you can get lost in all the terminology and all that sort of like the one true way as I’m stuff. But I think I think the principle is great, which is, how, what’s the what’s the most? What’s the most useful thing that I can do that I can get in front of users as quickly as possible? Because then they can tell me for real if it’s useful. There’s this book I love called the mom test. If you join gearset, we tend to everybody, get everybody to read this book, because it was such an impact on me. But it’s this idea that, how do you pitch an idea that even your mom would be able to say to you the truth of it? So, you know, in theory, again, not everyone’s so lucky, but in theory, your parents are very, very supportive of what you do. So if you say, Hey, Mom, I’m thinking of doing this idea. Do you think it’s a good idea? They’ll say, yes, you should go and do that thing. And this is less true for Irish parents, by the way. But again, the principle I think, is a pretty solid one. So we want to get it out in front of users as quickly as possible. Because we that that that then is the truth of it, right? is do they actually use it? Does it actually fix their problem, and then iterate, iterate, iterate. So we do that for product. And we do that, then our engineering philosophy is all around that. So we do very quick iterations, we deploy gearset itself to all of our users, globally, across all of our data centers, three or four times a day each and every day. We try and go from first line of code written until it’s in production, and sort of 36 hours, obviously varies depending what’s happening. But that’s we’re trying to do we want to what is the smallest safest iteration that you can do to get us from where we are to just another step along the path of where we want to be. So take the RJ stuff and, and really, really like, again, none of the dogma, but all of the philosophy, I guess. So we don’t have any, we don’t follow Scrum strictly or combined strictly or any of these things strictly we adopt what works for us, which is around identify the smallest next possible iteration that we can get to and deliver that and get feedback and get feedback and get feedback.
Pei Mun Lim
So obviously, I come from, you know, discrete projects taking company from state h state being state a might be I have Siebel, state B, I now have Salesforce, and so you know, as a structured series of steps that get you there from requirements gathering, analyzing your current environment, blah, blah, blah, writing requirements, building it, testing it, deploying it, so it’s fairly structured. And I know it’s quite different when you’re a software company, and you’re building and continuously improving on product that you have. So, you know, with that in mind, how do you do your testing, so it’s all so my head There’s two things one is you are improving, you are iterating, you are adding to your functionality set. And the same time, Salesforce is releasing three times a year, and so on, so forth. So you got, like these two things, you’ve got to keep in sync, how do you do that and how to test to make sure that the product that you are putting out there is worth for everyone in their environment in the various flavors,
Kevin
you it’s a massive challenge. So you got to take a multi dimensional approach to tackling that it’s really to use every tool in your arsenal. So we’ve got all the classic things like decent unit test coverage, you know, that’s as an engineering philosophy is baked in, we don’t do strict TDD, we don’t force you to write the tests up front. But when your code gets submitted for peer review, we want both the code and the tests nobody care what order you’re with men, we think TDD is a perfectly sensible way to do this. If you disagree, that’s great. As long as 36 hours later, when you’re ready to do your code review, we want both those things. So that that helps us get pretty good unit test coverage. We also have integration tests, then both at sort of functional level, and then also sort of you a beast, like right prior to release, do the RAD roots still work through our, through our product, we automate all that sort of stuff, we then practice a pretty decent DevOps philosophy ourselves. So we try and put as much ownership and responsibility on to the feature for our feature on to the developers we count. So they will be responsible for writing the code. And also making sure that before it goes to production, it works. So again, you put a certain amount of onus on, you know, get better, it’ll be obviously broken, there’s always gonna be edge cases and stuff, once it like, reaches the, you know, the 10s of 1000s of hundreds of 1000s of orgs that we’re working with. But, you know, better work for most of them better work for at least the ones you have access to our own arcs and things. So we put that responsibility on the users, our onto our internal developers. And then going back to the iteration and feedback cycle thing, one of the things I really like about that is, I’m sure you’ve seen this, if you if you have to review, a massive essay, you know, 10s, or hundreds of pages, right, or if you have to review in software, like 10s, of 1000s of lines of code changed, there is only so much review you can do on that. So if you’ve been working for weeks and weeks and weeks on a feature, before it gets to peer review, there’s only so much scrutiny that can go into it. Either from yourself first and foremost, for you reviewed. First, there’s only so much you can do when it’s that massive, that daunting task. Whereas if you’ve broken it down into small, small, small, then First of all, you can do a great review. So you’re more likely to spot any issues in either the design or the implementation. And then certainly your your colleague will be able to as well, it’s easier to ask questions about a few 100 lines of code than it is a few 10s of 1000s lines of code. So you take a whole bunch of different approaches through personal responsibility on the future. Lots of automation to catch us. And then by doing small things, it’s easier to spot the issue. And once we put it into production, we’ve got a really nice deployment system that just rolls it out a little bit a little bit. We’ll test out with some users and then all users and then eventually it’ll go to code everyone. And along the way, there’s next monitoring that will say, oh, our error rate is spiking here, okay, then, let’s pull back. And that’s on the stuff that we’re changing that we control on stuff that Salesforce is changing under our feet, or GitHub or changing under our feet or whatever that just comes down to? Well, as much as possible. We work with our partners to make sure that we know what their release cycles look like and what’s happening and what’s changing and access to preview orgs and nightly patch releases and things so we can run our automated test suites against it. But ultimately, yeah, something’s still just changing unexpected ways. And then we have good monitoring telemetry and an amazing engineering team that can that can respond quickly.
Pei Mun Lim
Okay, sounds like you got quite a good framework to work with having lean leaning on your previous experience in development. Yeah, so I’m quite interested to hear a bit more about your transition between now from software developer, to a co founder. What were the things that surprised you about this change in Rome?
Kevin
That’s a great question. Surprising. It sounds a little bit naive, but the, the, the move to every everything’s about people, everything’s about getting, you’re no longer doing them work. It’s you’re getting other folks to do the work and getting them all aligned to do the right work. Being responsible for that alignment is probably the probably one of the sort of biggest things that I’ve experienced over the last few years. That probably sounds hopelessly naive to anyone that’s done anything of this scale before that, how is that surprising to you? How can you not have realized that was coming. But you know, when you’re originally when the sab and then after was the 14, you still sort of know everybody, and then a doubles to 20, you still you still sort of know everybody? And then, you know, when you get up to over 100, you can’t know anybody, everybody anymore. And critically, they can’t know you. So they’re always trying to think, oh, what would you do in this situation are, you know, what, what do they think the company wants you to do. But if you haven’t communicated that effectively, because they don’t have the history of knowing you for you know, 10 years, then then things can go wrong. So that, that creating clarity, creating over communicating the values, all that sort of stuff has been a really interesting learning over the last the last couple of years. And then probably the sort of personal impact stuff, I don’t get to write software anymore at all, like I just, there’s no way it’s a good use of the CEOs time to re code. So if the company if I’m on the company’s time, I don’t write any code anymore at all. I I’m all around our go to market, working with our sales team work with our sales leaders, work with the marketing teams, our customer success organization, work with our whole strategic customers to understand what they’re looking for. all that sort of stuff is has been a massive shift for me over the last number of years. And then on time I get to write code knows I do it at the weekend, as as much of a loser as me sound like, because I find it very relaxing. So I’ll I’ll write some code in the weekend. Just to remind myself, this is the thing that I’m I’m okay, at.
Pei Mun Lim
How do you feel about shifting in the transition? You know, what comes to mind is a Dilbert strip around how he’s moved from engineering to managing people. Do you miss? Do you miss the things that you used to do? Or are you enjoying your unique identity as someone who runs a company,
Kevin
I really love my job. I do miss some of the engineering stuff. But I, I choose my job, right? I lucky enough to be able to choose the things I want to do in life. And I wouldn’t switch what I’m doing. I get to work with an amazing group of people across the entire company, I get an amazing, there’s very few people at a company the size of gear sets that understand it end to end, that’s very hard to recreate. So every single aspect of gearset, and how customers interact with it, how new users interact with it, how folks respond to our marketing, you know, you very rarely are in a position that in any given week, or even in a given day, where you’re going to be having conversations about all of those things. For as I get to do that, I feel very lucky getting to do it. It’s a really, it’s a really nice job to work with people that are amazing at the thing they’re responsible for. So our marketing team that work with our marketing leader a lot Alice, and she’s amazing at her job. And the team that she’s assembled around her is they’re doing fantastic work. And I get to sort of be a part of them, I get to watch these people that are infinitely better at this thing that I would ever be if I ever put my mind to it. They are world class. And I get to see how world class people do this thing. And the same within our engineering organization, our customer success seals, our internal Ops, you know, I get to work with all these incredible people and get to see Oh, that’s so if you’re working with a truly world class, Chief people officer and that’s what that person does. That’s That’s really interesting. I really like So I don’t I do mess engineering. But I’m very happy with things that I do day to day.
Pei Mun Lim
Super cool. So if you had a time machine and take it back six years, what would you tell yourself just as you were thinking about doing this, like, if you did this, it would save you lots of pain. So what are three things you would tell yourself, when you when you just started your journey, I guess that that would have saved you mountains of pain,
Kevin
be more confident, have a little bit less imposter syndrome. So nobody knows what they’re doing. Just just crack on and get it done. Probably a little, a little bit of that, you know, hire Foster, you know, the first the first hire, we need the once we once we had set it all up, we waited, we waited probably a little bit too long for that. And we thought we had this perfect thing at seven, right? If we didn’t get the person, then oh, that’d be somebody new. I don’t know them. And I want to work with them. And the person that we ended up doing and hiring was this guy, Frank short, who’s still with gear said, He’s an enterprise account executive with us. And he is the day we hired him is one of the best days he’s been an amazing, amazing colleague. I wish we had done that earlier. I wish I’d have the competence to do that earlier. And probably the other thing I would have done is stop writing code sooner, maybe switch to get your head stuck into the sales and marketing. That’s a lot of fun. And you’ll enjoy it a lot more than you expect. I’d never done any sales prior to prior to starting gear set. And it’s a lot of fun, that’s been a really fun thing to do to run, I see it to build and run a sales organization over the last few years and the way gear set those seals because there’s obviously a bunch of different approaches to this, you can kind of do lots of bums on seats, and just send them forth, and hire and fire if they don’t make quota and all the rest. Whereas gear set sales organization is again, a fantastic people who you can grab any of our code executives and have a really in depth conversation about Salesforce DevOps, what books are trying to do, how to structure great teams like, again, the stuff I was talking about earlier, but how to structure an engineering organization, you know, we have account executives that can have that conversation with you. They have no done that consultative stuff so much with different customers around the world that these guys are world class experts that can get up on stage at dreamforce. And, and other events and talk knowledgeably about this stuff, not from a script. But because they know what they know what inside out. So yeah, that’s the thing. The other thing I tell myself is get stuck into sales and marketing a little bit earlier. And you’ll surprise yourself and find it really, really enjoyable, creative, intellectual pursuit.
Pei Mun Lim
So just going back to your first one, you talked about imposter syndrome. Has that? Has that feeling impacted the things and the actions that you took? Or was it just an internal angst about where you where you were heading?
Kevin
It’s hard to know for sure, because I did the things that I did. So it’s hard to know if it impacted me or if I didn’t have those doubts that everyone has, if you would take a different action. I think I don’t know, in your career if you if you’ve had this as well. But I think it’s pretty common in any group of really high performing individuals that this is, if you’re in any way, if you have a modicum of self awareness that you’re that you do occasionally doubt yourself, especially when you’re working with incredibly high performing people as am I worthy enough of Am I good enough to be next to the people I’m working with? And I’ve been really lucky that I’ve worked with exceptionally talented people. So I occasionally occasionally don’t yourself. So I think it’s more internal angsty stuff, and then it’s a little bit I don’t know, with me at least it’s a little bit par for the course. So I’ve got Okay, coping strategies to just if I find that voice a doubt in my head, it’s like, No, no, I know what this voice is. And I’m going to just quiet that down. And I’m going to keep going because we’ve got this we know what we’re doing. We’re good at this.
Pei Mun Lim
You don’t have seven people you were talking about in this team? Well, they’re all engineers, are they different skill sets or
Kevin
they were different. They were different skill sets. So even But I guess you would call them a, it was a product team. So they were they were all product. But variety of skills. So, again, our engineers are pretty versatile. So I think a lot of engineering teams have worked on in the past would be a little bit nervous, but speaking to customers are getting on stage at a conference and demoing what they’ve done. Or, you know, the first year, we went to dreamforce, where it was just the seven of us on the booth. And, you know, you got to stop people walking past and go, Hey, how’s it going? How’s your dreamforce? Today, we have a little conversation like that most, a lot of developers that I’ve worked with, would be a little uncomfortable doing that. Whereas my colleagues at that time, we were all not not ecstatic about doing that thing. But we could get ourselves there, you know, we could we could teach us how to do it. So those engineers, it sort of does a little bit of disservice to, to to only level as engineers, they’re just they’re talented folks that could do whatever they wanted. They were just very good at engineering, too. And then we mixed in, in the original seven, we had Steven chambers, who is this incredible UX designer, again, almost minimizes its scope, because it’s, He’s incredible at sales, fantastic marketing. This guy can sort of do whatever he wants, and she just happens to be his superpower, is been able to do the product management and, and understand the real job to be done, like what our customers really trying to do, and then build a product to solve it. And we had TSN, who is now our head of customer success. That time was, I can’t remember what job title we had at the very start for him, but it was like he was our, like, get stuff done. Yeah, he could do marketing, he could do sales, he could do just Whatever had to happen. He could make it happen. Never. That was Jason. So we had a we had a mix of folks within that. But I would say they were all product folks.
Pei Mun Lim
Amazing, amazing. I want to be very respectful of your time, because we’re coming up to the end. So I just wanted to thank you once again, for making time to come and talk to me. It’s been really, really fascinating to not only hear about how you’ve got to where you are today, but especially for me personally. All your insights about creating teams about hiring the right talent. And I like how you know, towards the end you You gave shout out to the folks who have made such an impact to to where you are today. So thank you very much given and we appreciate your time today. I really appreciate the conversation. So yeah, thank you very much. Thank you