Iteration Velocity is the Key to Engineering Success | Vercel’s Malte Ubl

**Malte Ubl** (0:00)
I think iteration velocity solves all known software problems. Eric Schmidt of Google always said, revenue solves all known problems. And I think that's actually bullshit. Revenue doesn't solve Google's antitrust problems. But like, if you're a professional software engineer, you have to realize at some point that you don't know the future. You can make a wrong turn here and there. But if you are able to react quickly, then it's not as bad and you can adjust, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
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**Dan Lines** (1:01)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, co-founder and COO of Linear B. Today, I'm joined by Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel and former engineering director for Google Search. Now, Malte has extensive experience leading engineering teams at scale. And of course, today we'll dive into the changes happening with the rise of platform engineering, Vercel's approach to AI and how engineering leadership is evolving. Malte, welcome to the show.

**Malte Ubl** (1:38)
Thanks for having me. This is super cool.

**Dan Lines** (1:40)
Awesome having you on the show today. And to our listeners, if you enjoy this episode, just take a moment to rate and review DI on your podcast app. It helps us continue bringing you great conversations with leaders like Malte. All right, let's kick this off into our first segment. Let's talk about platform engineering and some AI workflows. Malte, platform engineering has emerged as a centralized movement for supportive functions, for software developers, and I know it's a topic your passionate about. How do you see platform engineering changing the way modern software engineering functions?

**Malte Ubl** (2:22)
That's a great question. It actually reminds me... So I went to college. It's kind of embarrassing how long ago that was, for like over 20 years. And I technically have a software engineering and a business degree. And I hated every minute of the business part, but it probably was actually more useful to me in the long run than the software engineering part.

**Dan Lines** (2:40)
Where did you go to school?

**Malte Ubl** (2:41)
And I had this like...

**Dan Lines** (2:42)
Where did you go to school?

**Malte Ubl** (2:43)
It was in Germany, Northern Germany, school called Nord Academy. We literally had a class on IT organization. And the one thing I took away was that you have this oscillation between a centralized and a decentralized form of doing broadly IT. And this holds true for almost every kind of non-core function of engineering that I've seen across these years. So there is also this word of shadow IT. And every time you find we're way too inefficient. We have all these people here that do, let's say, platform stuff.
Let's put them into a team so that they can professionalize what they do.

**Dan Lines** (3:23)
I'm highly familiar.

**Malte Ubl** (3:26)
And then they have like, oh my God, their roadmap is like two years planned out. They're not going to do what I want, so I'm going to secretly hire this one person on my team, and I'm going to have them do platform work, right? And so you have this oscillation, and eventually you're back to like, okay, there's so many of them I need to centralize. And so clearly, like, platform engineering as a discipline itself is like a centralization movement. Like, because you're now saying, hey, we're going to professionalize this work that's been doing for a while, but just didn't have a name, probably didn't have a character. And like, I actually have been like, I've been part of this myself in my career at Google. When I started there, I was in a team that was part, actually, funnily enough, in the Google Plus organization. And we were well-funded, we could build infrastructure. And so we built Google's microservices orchestration system. I built the framework that now every single consumer front-end is using on the client side. But we were just this small team. And then nowadays, and this happened maybe five, six, seven years ago, Google created the core product area, which is basically Google's platform team. And it's not like a thousand engineers, right? But it was made from that and kind of this team emerged in it. And so that's kind of my career path.