If 10% of the World Were Developers: GitHub’s Mario Rodriguez

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
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**Mario Rodriguez** (1:13)
I'm Mario Rodriguez from GitHub, and you're listening to Me, Myself and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:20)
Welcome to Me, Myself and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT Smr and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.
Hello, everyone. Today, Sam and I are excited to be speaking with Mario Rodriguez, senior vice president of product at GitHub. Mario, welcome to the show.

**Mario Rodriguez** (2:15)
Hello, how are we doing?

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:17)
We're doing great.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:19)
I think most of our listeners know what GitHub is, but can you describe it briefly for us? Absolutely.

**Mario Rodriguez** (2:24)
So we usually describe GitHub as the home of all developers. It is the place where you store your code and other assets that are necessary to develop and ship software. It's also a place where you come to collaborate and remix ideas with the open source community.
I have two daughters. One of them is six years old. And sometimes the way that I describe what that it does is my daughter has a book bag and she puts a bunch of things necessary in there. You know, her lunch, her snack and her folder. She has a purple folder where all the homework goes and things like that. And that is the space for her to accomplish the stuff that she needs to do at school. And think about GitHub being that for developers. It's the place where you come and put everything in order to develop and ship software.
We're lucky to have an amazing community on top of it.
In my role is I am the SVP of product at GitHub and I oversee both our product and design teams, including GitHub Copilot. I joined GitHub as part of the Microsoft acquisition in 2018 In fact, I've been working in DevTools for 20 plus years.
I consider myself super lucky in the sense that I love what I do for a living. I sometimes have to pinch myself on that. I think about it, humanity already created the will, created fire. Everything that we're going to be doing going forward to advance it is going to be through software.
And giving these software developers amazing tools to continue to push humanity forward is a lucky place to be at. And I just love that mission and that drive. So consider myself lucky in that. Right now I'm overseeing our product and design teams and making sure that we continue to innovate and we continue to meet the needs of our customers.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:27)
I couldn't agree more with what you said about the importance of enabling developers to collaborate more, particularly as everything is moving more and more towards that. Tell us more about what the product group does.

**Mario Rodriguez** (4:42)
Product management, maybe this is a little bit controversial out there, but it's a very new discipline, in my opinion.
It's not something super big. We know how to do agriculture, as an example. Developers have been doing stuff for a very long time, too, in one way or another. But product management as a discipline, I think, is probably new.
I think of product's role overall is to take something like an outcome that you want to achieve and then figure out how to get the product to be able to accomplish that outcome. And it's magical to do that. People think it's a set of features, and you then get into this thing called feature factories, if you have heard that term. And I think that's not right. The product discipline itself is more art than science many times. You're not there just to run stand-ups or you're not there just to talk to customers either. There's this beauty of the product discipline that is all about taking what does the customer want to accomplish or what does the business want to accomplish but for them are super valid, right? And then figuring out how to get there, at least from my end, I love to do it incrementally. It's very hard to be right all the time.