The Tech Executive Operating System - Part I

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
Building high functioning teams is considered both an art and a science. This week's guest, tech executive consultant, Aviv Ben-Yosef, has built what he calls the tech executive operating system. It guides leaders through their first 100 days at an organization and beyond.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. 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 gift activity.

**Dan Lines** (0:33)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by tech executive consultant and author, Aviv Ben-Yosef.
Aviv, thanks so much for joining today.

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (0:48)
Hey Dan, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:50)
Yeah, absolutely. Now, I know you have a new book out and we're gonna dive into that at one point, but before we get there, I'd love to let our audience get to know you a little bit better.
And one thing that I know about you, like myself, we both started out as developers, as engineers, and now you're doing this executive consulting stuff. How did you get into tech executive consulting?

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (1:19)
Oh, wow. So I started coding when I was nine and I've been in love with code ever since then.
And after several years of working at big corporates, being first employee at startups and being a freelancer and a bunch of very successful startups for the past few years, after I think four or five, six years of doing this, I realized that I was this highly paid band-aid. A VP of engineering would bring me in to help them deliver really fast and I would make the keyboard go clickety clack really good.
But the moment I moved along to the next client, I saw the previous ones going back to their old ways and old delivery rates. And I wanted to have a bigger of a dent on my clients. And that's when I started transitioning from really doing the work for them to helping them realize how to build these, I call these world-class engineering teams, or I talk about that's triple your impact per engineer. And that's what I'm trying to make happen for my clients. And it's been a slow transition over a few years. And now that's all I do.

**Dan Lines** (2:31)
Yeah, it's always sad if you're brought into a project and then that project goes really well and then you leave and it goes back to shit. And it's just, I should have taught you how to fish. Then you could have done this yourself. So what type of companies like team size and spaces, who are you working with? What types?

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (2:51)
Oh, actually, I think that this is like the fact that when I do code, I love touching everything, like backend, frontend, mobile, whatever. If it's cool and if it has an impact, that's what turns me on. And the same applies to my clients. If they do interesting stuff, I want to help.
Really, right now, I'm working with a startup that's two weeks old and I'm working with some local Israeli unicorns, for example. So all the range.

**Dan Lines** (3:21)
Ah, that's awesome. So it's not really dependent on the size, but more so the type of person and the team and what they're looking to accomplish. When you go in and you start working with the executives, the tech executives, is there any common troubles that they're having or what are you seeing out there in the world right now?

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (3:42)
There are a few things that I would say. As a consultant, most of the times, people think of you because the shed has hit the fan and they need help. They need something to be recovered.
And that's often stuff like my team is not delivering as it used to or oh my God, we've tripled the team size, but we're barely delivering at the same rate we used to like a year ago. Or I hear CEOs coming to me and telling me stuff like, they said that this feature is six months. It should take two months in my opinion. What are we supposed to be doing about this? That sort of stuff.

**Dan Lines** (4:17)
I hate hearing that.

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (4:18)
Frankly, frankly, as a consultant, when I hear those, that's the easy stuff because like the same applies to code. You hear someone talk about a bug that they see and you've already saw that bug 20 times in the past year. You can already tell them, oh, you need to look at the third parameter of that function and you just need to change it probably.