The Dangers of Shipping at All Costs w/ CEO & Cofounder of 33 Teams, Drew McManus

**Drew McManus** (0:00)
Everybody has probably worked at a company at some point where you had a leader or a founder or somebody who was one of those people who showed up every Monday and said, you know, I was thinking about it over the weekend, and I think what we need to do is, you know, insert giant left turn here for that factor. Like, you have to be able to have a set of goals that have been prioritized and agreed on and maintain that focus.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
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 of close to 1 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.

**Dan Lines** (1:04)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Drew McManus, CEO and co-founder of 33 Teams.
Drew, welcome to the show.

**Drew McManus** (1:18)
Thanks, Dan. It's great to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:20)
Awesome to have you. Now, for everyone listening, there's a good chance Drew has worked on some of the apps on the device you're using to listen to the podcast today. He's had a really successful career, you know, over 30 years. In that time, he's worked at places like Apple, Adobe, Pivotal Labs. At Pivotal, you were the vice president of product, right?

**Drew McManus** (1:48)
Yeah, I was part of the team that actually ran Pivotal Labs.

**Dan Lines** (1:51)
Okay, very, very cool. I think most people know about that company and the software there.
And then with, you know, your decades of experience, I want to open the show up with a discussion on what makes companies successful. You've pinpointed curiosity as an invaluable component of great teams, which we're going to get to in one second. But before we go there, you're one of the co-founders at 33 Teams. What is 33 Teams all about?

**Drew McManus** (2:23)
Well, so we are a consultancy. We help customers, everything from startups to big companies build software.
But almost as importantly, while we're doing that, we help you get better at building software. So we help you learn about Agile, but we also help you figure out what's going to work best for you and your team and your culture.

**Dan Lines** (2:44)
Very, very cool.
I love anyone that's helping software teams improve. Always a very, very difficult thing to do, especially when you're under the gun to deliver. It's like getting better while you're actually have like deadlines and stuff. Super difficult. Do you see it the same way?

**Drew McManus** (3:03)
And it's actually really important that you do it while you're delivering, in my opinion.
There's never the luxury to stop and like send everybody off for training or go to a course or something. Like the way we do it is by dropping in and there's no better way to have empathy with your team than to work on what you're trying to work on and work on what you're trying to deliver and face the challenges that you're facing. But with like a wealth of experience of having worked with so many teams in the past, we often can see ways forward that might be harder for people to see who are inside of it.

**Dan Lines** (3:39)
Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, when I was a developer or even a team leader, I always felt a pressure from the organization to hit my deadline. Usually it was like a sprint, but sometimes there's a huge release or you have sales coming to you, like, hey, we have like a 500K deal. They'll sign if by Friday we can prove that we have X, Y and Z feature. I always feels like, okay, I'm in the weeds. I'm not always thinking about improvement.
Do you have any tips on while you're under that pressure as a team leader, how to also say, wait, there's an opportunity to improve?

**Drew McManus** (4:23)
Well, so all teams go through periods like that, right? Like there's deadline pressure or there is a big fix or there's a big patch or there's all kinds of different pressure that come along. And even healthy teams run into tough times.