Stop Telling Devs What To Do w/ Dana Lawson of GitHub

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Running a highly productive engineering organization does not include telling a bunch of people what to do. That don't work. You have to strike the balance between data and trust, positivity and productivity. As the VP of engineering at GitHub, Dana Lawson's team makes decisions that change the development workflows for millions of people at a time.
On this episode of Dev Interrupted, we chat about the role of technical leadership, how to implement continuous improvement, and how positivity relates to Dev Team culture.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
This episode is sponsored by Linear B. Give your Dev Team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
Sign up free at linearb.io.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:52)
Dana, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Dana Lawson** (0:56)
Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
This is one of my annoyingly favorite topics to talk about. So, excited.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:05)
Yeah, awesome. This is an amazing topic to talk about. And if we're gonna just jump right into it, I've been really excited to discuss positivity and productivity in Dev Team culture with you. I think anyone who has either heard you speak or maybe read one of your interviews or something that you've written, what jumps out is kind of a combination of your positive personality and humbleness.
And so, I think it'd be good to just kind of hear your views on how productivity and positivity relate to each other and maybe how they affect Dev Team culture.

**Dana Lawson** (1:50)
Well, I don't know. I think that it relates to more than just our work. The work-life balance is just a complete blur for a lot of us, especially now, where the majority of people in technology are working at home, right?
And so, I just try to wake up and really approach life that way. I know it sounds cheesy, and that's why I said annoyingly, talk about it, because I truly believe all this. You think about the fundamentals of life, right? What gives people the reason for getting out of bed in the morning?
Well, at least for me, and I'm only gonna speak for me. It's like the opportunity to influence a positive change in our environment, you know? And having that blend into work, and doing it in a way where there's low stress, low distress, you produce more.
And as a developer or a maker, a creator, I think when we get into that flow, and our mind is on the prize because we're feeling good, we're feeling positive, we have all of these things to help enable that vision. Like, you suddenly get some fulfillment in your life. You remember why you're getting out of bed in the morning, and why you're living. And I think it just translates to almost every part that you do. And it doesn't mean that, you know, you're always like, I don't know, super pumped and jazzed and happy. No, it just means that you know that everything will pass. Like, you know, stuff is momentary. And that if you really think about the things you've overcome, I think most people just don't give themselves credit for what they're capable of doing. You know?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
If we were gonna get maybe like more specific to what would it mean to be in flow for a developer, some of the things that I've seen, it's like, how fast could I get feedback maybe on the thing that I created? Even better if it's not just, you know, it's always cool to get team feedback. I like team feedback, but I always kind of liked it when the person I was creating the thing for is telling me something about it. Usually that's a customer for a lot of us. So kind of having that fast feedback loop was always a thing that made me feel really good. And I guess on the other side of that, long feedback loops, long cycle times, even in my first job out of school, I think I worked at this company and my code never made it out to production. By the whole time I was working there, like six months, so that's a negative feeling, right?
Is that kind of the way that you look at it from a developer standpoint?

**Dana Lawson** (4:29)
Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of carries on through the whole life cycle, right?
It's like, it is almost like gamification, right? That customer experience feedback is so good, especially when you're in the zone, you're feeling really awesome about stuff, you're cranking it out and you're like, okay, am I hitting the mark? Because it doesn't matter until somebody interacts with it. It just doesn't. It really doesn't. It's tough. And like you said, I've been guilty of sitting on a pull request for a very long time, and then you finally get it out there to review and they're like, what is this, 800 lines of code? You suck. And you're like, I don't wanna do that.