Realistic Product Roadmaps and Other Lies | Best Egg’s Johnny Ray Austin

**Johnny Ray Austin** (0:00)
We talk a lot about velocity and just moving quickly, and I think a lot of teams get caught up in moving quickly, that they forget that they need to have a direction as well. They're on the treadmill of doom, essentially.
Moving real fast, looking real busy, but ultimately not getting to the outcomes they want. So you can easily burn out a team for a year and accomplish absolutely nothing. And then the idea is like, oh, you work really hard, but we didn't actually achieve what we wanted to because I, as a leader, did not give you the right context, and I give you the right prioritization. I just kept you busy for 12 months. And so, you know, we see that all the time, actually.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:36)
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Everyone, we are back at Dev Interrupted, here live at Leading Engineering West Coast. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm joined by Johnny Ray Austin. Johnny is Senior Director of Product, Connected Digital Experience at Best Egg, and former Head of Technology there. Johnny, great to have you with us.

**Johnny Ray Austin** (1:27)
Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:29)
I mean, it's a distinct pleasure to have you on because honestly, you have the best talk title that I have heard in a long time. Space aliens are among us. Your product roadmap is realistic, and other lies, you believe.
And you're an experienced engineering leader who's built and led high-performing teams, globally distributed engineering teams. You understand the pressures engineering leaders face. Pressures we're all feeling.
Growth, product innovation, efficiency, what competitors are doing. I'd just love to know, how did you come up with that talk title?

**Johnny Ray Austin** (2:02)
Yeah, I mean, I knew the concept, what I wanted to talk about pretty early on, but given what's going on in the actual real world. So the concept probably started back when, you know, the New York Times released images of like UFOs, like real UFOs. And so I was just like, that's not a UFO, that's a dot on the screen, that's not real. And so I was just like, all right, whatever.
So that's where it kind of, you know, originated from. I am not lost on the fact that we just had a congressional hearing, and this might actually be a thing, but you know, I figure if I'm wrong about aliens, then we have a lot more to figure out than go-to-market strategies.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:37)
Yeah, at least it'll be funny about it, right? Like, are we wrong? I mean, honestly, we're here on a convention floor in a spaceship-looking dome.

**Johnny Ray Austin** (2:45)
Yeah. It all fits.
And the rest of it is just all about pulling from my day-to-day experience. You talked about pressures of delivering, and sometimes those pressures are fine and reasonable. Sometimes they're completely unreasonable. And if you can get a few engineering leaders into a bar with a few drinks or whatever, and they'll talk to you about the ridiculous things they've been asked to do in the past. And so it's a big tongue-in-cheek. There's a little bit of comedy in there, so I'm hoping to kind of lighten the mood a little bit.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:14)
So what's one of the ridiculous things you've been asked to do?

**Johnny Ray Austin** (3:17)
So I guess I was asked to launch a 3D world for a conference with like a month's head of time.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:27)
What was the value driver behind that, let me ask? Was it just this will be cool?

**Johnny Ray Austin** (3:31)
Yeah, that's it.
It would be really cool. It'll look great. We'll show it really nice.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:35)
We'll get five people to look at it.

**Johnny Ray Austin** (3:36)
Yeah, people will look at it. They'll be like, who built this?
And yeah, that's it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:43)
How did you handle that?

**Johnny Ray Austin** (3:44)
I mean, I had to do it. I mean, I'm saying me, but I had a fantastic team who was really behind it, really great engineers who really came together under a tremendous amount of pressure to kind of pull that together. To this day, I don't know how we did it, honestly.