How a Trained Therapist Diagnoses Healthy Dev Teams w/ Engineer & Entrepreneur, Kelly Vaughn

**Kelly Vaughn** (0:00)
I tend to be able to pick up on whether somebody is approaching burnout before they're approaching it themselves, or before they notice it. So that has been a really useful thing because it also has helped me figure out when I'm approaching burnout as well.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:14)
Have you ever wondered how your Dev team ranks in terms of productivity, speed, and business impact? With LinearB's new engineering benchmarks report, you can find out.
The product of comprehensively analyzing the work of almost 2,000 Dev teams at close to one million branches, the 2022 Engineering Benchmarks Report is the first ever look at what performance metrics make engineering orgs elite, average, or underperforming. Best of all, if you want your Dev team's number to go from average to elite on any of the benchmarks, the report also provides concrete guidance on the behaviors, tools, and processes you need to get there. To explore the report in full, visit linearb.io/benchmarks or click the link in the show notes of this episode. Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm joined by Kelly Vaughn.
She is an incredible engineering leader, a mentor, an entrepreneur, and a manager at Spot AI. Kelly, welcome so much to the show.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:07)
Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for taking me out of my podcasting retirement, actually.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:12)
Honestly, that, I was going to mention that next.
I didn't say it in the intro, but you are an incredible podcaster. I listened to the Ladybug podcast for, I guess, two years now almost. Huge fan of the show, and I miss it. Are we going to get a new season?

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:27)
I'll have to talk to the other Ladybugs to see how we feel about that. We all have a lot going on in our lives, as probably everyone does, but I do miss it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:37)
I mean, I'll say, as an avid listener myself, I'd accept a one-off episode.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:45)
The reunion episode?

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:46)
Yeah, see, I think people will listen.
Well, I guess I was going to say, I'd be resummissive. I didn't give you a shout out for the podcast, but I'm clearly doing that here since I'm a personal fan. It's how we got you on here. I've been following you for a while. There aren't enough great podcasts out there for engineers. If you haven't listened to it, they've got a great back catalog.
And we're obviously a growing podcast here at Dev Interrupted, focused more on the engineering leadership angle particularly. Do you have any advice for us on how to keep our audience engaged or to think about storytelling?

**Kelly Vaughn** (2:16)
I think one of the biggest mistakes I see podcast hosts do is they ask a question, they get an answer, and then they immediately talk about their own lives and how it relates to their own lives. The podcast episode, if you have a guest on the episode, the focus needs to be on the guest. And that's not just because I want to talk about myself because we're going to do plenty of that today.
But that's just generally something I see. And then just authenticity. It's very clear when you're recording a podcast just for the sake of getting some certain buzzwords out there or something like that. You know, pull in real events, like real...
we all screw up. I'm going to... I don't know how... what kind of language I can use on this. So we all make mistakes throughout our careers. And it's really important to normalize that. And I find the more that we pull in, like those times that we've messed up somewhere, the episode's much more appealing because the host and the guest are much more relatable.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:11)
So I'm curious. This is interesting because host relation to guest is obviously important, but taking over the episode to tell their own stories is a negative. I totally agree.
So would you say that relating to a guest, when a guest talks about, for example, engineering screw ups, and just by saying, oh, I totally agree with that, we have a segment we do around engineering screw ups at our conference. Is that too much of like the guest's angle or is that a...

**Kelly Vaughn** (3:36)
Oh, no.
It'd be like, I tell you by this time I screwed up. And you're like, oh, that reminds me of this time I'm going to spend 10 minutes not talking about the same exact thing that I did, but I'm going to one-up you in some way.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:48)
Oh, God, one-upers?
I'll say just like personal opinion, which I sound like you agree with. Anyone who one-ups your stories regularly needs to like reconsider how they are communicating with the world.