The Tech Executive Operating System - Part II

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
We're all continually learning how to be the best technical leaders we can be. And sometimes, it takes more than a half an hour to learn something.
So we've brought back tech executive consultant Aviv Ben-Yosef to finish our conversation from last week.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
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 Git activity.

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (0:34)
Hey, everyone.

**Dan Lines** (0:35)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined again by tech executive consultant and author, Aviv Ben-Yosef.
Aviv, thanks so much for joining.

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (0:47)
Hey, Dan. Thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (0:48)
Yeah, absolutely. I made a note because I really want to talk about this.
If you're in a situation, I'm an engineering leader, and you're lucky enough to be able to triple your team size, which probably means that your company is doing well in at least a few KPIs. Maybe you got some money from an investor. And you're starting that process, but you're not seeing the output. And maybe you're starting to get some of those questions from the CEO. Hey, I gave you all this money to hire, and I'm not seeing our roadmap progress faster. If you're finding yourself in that situation, what do you do?

**Aviv Ben-Yosef** (1:26)
I give you the consultant answer and the coder answer, which is it depends. But I would say that usually what I start with when I'm trying to find the root cause, I start with looking at your management skeleton within the organization. Because I believe that essentially the engineering managers are responsible for most of the progress and growth that's being done in your company.
And it changes from one company to the other. But in many companies, engineering management isn't seen as a profession for most of the managers I'm seeing. For first timers, I'm giving it a shot or I feel like this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And their managers aren't treating it as they would treat. I just brought in a junior engineer and I'm helping that engineer become better.
I don't see enough coaching happening. I don't see enough frameworks and tools being given to those managers to learn how to manage their people, to learn where they need to be focusing. If you help all of your managers, and that's usually my first step, realize what does it mean to be a manager, learn how to provide good coaching-like feedback that helps people grow and then treat their product, treat the way they measure their own success as in how good is my team, how good is my team delivering?
They need to deliver, it's their work, even if I'm doing some of the coding. What I wanna see is that the team is becoming better. Each and every person there becomes a bigger force multiplier for the rest of the team or the rest of the organization. And if that's the way I measure myself as a manager, and multiply this across all of the managers in your organization, especially in an organization, and scale up tripling the size, that compounds to a huge impact. And it takes time to get the ball rolling, but I believe that's often enough to make a big change in the way the organization is working. There's a bunch of more stuff that you need to look at, like maybe your tool set is no longer relevant. Maybe I just talked to someone who said, that our code base became so big that code completion doesn't work even if you're using a Mac Pro, it's just too slow.
That sort of stuff, it's very technical. But sometimes, most times, what the team needs is better management and better alignment. And I genuinely believe that you can do it if you get people to have the right way of thinking about managing the-

**Dan Lines** (4:08)
And the other thing about it, and this is one of the biggest differences from being a developer to a manager, to director, to a VP and so on, is you are putting in that time to your manager still, and you're putting that time on the calendar, you're doing that coaching, and you're kind of like KPI is, are they getting the outcome from their team? And that's probably one of the bigger things that you need to learn. I saw a phrase that you have. So I work with a lot of Israelis, not everyone in the world does. So you're gonna have to define this for us. But there's a phrase that I thought was pretty cool. And it's called, Hutzpah Driven Development. Can you unpack, what does that mean?