People Driven Development

PDD: Episode 1 - Who needs managers anyway?
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Eddie Flaisler: [00:00:00] All right, let's see what we have here. Dear PDD, I lead engineering at a mid sized company. We have about 50 people on the engineering team. Lately, my CEO has been pushing me to flatten the organization, saying we need more working hands and less people talking about the work. I have two directors, each with two managers reporting into them, and that doesn't sound extreme to me. The span of control is one manager for every ten people. But my CEO says he sees no need for more than one or two people managing the entire team. How do I convince him that he's wrong? Best regards, George.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Geez. Dispute between a CEO and a VPE.

Morgan VanDerLeest: What a way to start .

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love it.

Eddie Flaisler: Well, let's see if we can be helpful. Play the intro and let's go.

Morgan VanDerLeest: We are Morgan VanDerLeest and Eddie Flaisler. Morgan kicked off his tech journey 13 years back, diving into a half decade of sales, marketing, and supply chain. The realms where it's all about business value and efficiency. He made a formal switch to software engineering a decade ago. Shipping stuff for [00:01:00] startups of various sizes from a few dozen to several hundred people. He's led teams across a range of engineering disciplines, ultimately realizing that the skills that really fueled his most significant successes in software weren't about the code at all, but about understanding people.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Eddie always wanted to be one of the cool kids at school. A classic nerd. He spent half his time getting all the way to his Master of Science in Computer Science, from Georgia Tech.

Eddie Flaisler: 4. 0.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I was getting to the 4.0. And the other half was observing the popular kids at school and trying to discern what worked and what didn't, when trying to get people on your team. Eddie has been in engineering for over 22 years. And out of that 13 in leadership positions.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I am Morgan.

Eddie Flaisler: And I am Eddie.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Eddie was my boss.

Eddie Flaisler: Yes.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And this is PDD: People Driven Development.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So I'm curious if we're even answering the right question here. Is this really a clear cut the CEO is wrong situation?

Eddie Flaisler: You know, I'm looking at the question again, and one thing that stands out to me is the language used by the CEO. We need more working hands [00:02:00] and less people talking about the work, which makes me wonder if this is about span of control at all, right? Because is there an issue where managers don't seem effective? Is there an issue where there are concerns about engineering velocity? And that is why there's a decision that we need more working hands. So I guess one thing to answer George's question or to start answering George's question, one thing that we can dive into is really the underlying motive to a CEO saying such a thing.

Eddie Flaisler: I mean, granted, you know, as people, we often think when, when we come up with a question, Or with a problem. We have the answer that we want to hear that we think is right baked in. So the CEO just came and said, here's the answer instead of just saying, this is what I'm dealing with, but I would be really interested in such a situation to learn what is the underlying sentiment or like, what is the underlying [00:03:00] situation that the CEO is observing when asking that?

Eddie Flaisler: So maybe today what we can focus on is, What reasons can lead to a CEO having such a conversation with a VPE? Because that might help George respond. Because you're not responding with No, the span of control is exactly where it needs to be. You're responding when trying to understand what problem we're actually solving and proposing solutions for that.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Yeah, I think a lot of the most successful executives that I've seen are those that can take what the CEO comes to them with and then realize like, no, there's, there's something underlying or something that led to that. So I, definitely agree there. How do you uncover that, that other piece and have enough understanding of your own kind of domain and org to go back with a well reasoned discussion there.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So let's swing it the other way. Do you think it's even possible to run an engineering org or otherwise entirely without managers, what would that look like?

Eddie Flaisler: Wow, I feel that's a [00:04:00] very, emotionally charged question, right? To ask a manager if there can be a situation where their job is completely redundant. I hate to say that, but theoretically, yes. I just think that a lot of conditions need to be in place for that to happen, which normally companies or people don't spend the right time in setting up that infrastructure or that process, that structure in general, to minimize the number of managers they need.

Eddie Flaisler: So I'll start with a probably non tech example, Morningstar. Morningstar is a tomato packing company in San Jose, and it's a private company, so results are not exactly, you know, known, but they seem to be doing very well for themselves. They've been around for many years, tomato packing, tomato shipping, and their whole thing is holacracy.

Eddie Flaisler: They don't actually have managers. They just have the president and supposedly everyone under the president is equally [00:05:00] empowered to do whatever they want to move the company forward to lead projects at any scale. They of course need to get buy-in from each other. The fact this is working or seemingly it's working supposedly, is proof that it is possible. But if you think about it, it requires a lot of things to be true. Number one, personality types, self management.

Eddie Flaisler: So coming to work in the morning and being so invested in doing the right thing for the business without thinking of your personal considerations: what does it mean for you in terms of your career that requires a lot of self discipline?

Eddie Flaisler: The second thing is. You also need to be the type of person who knows how to influence others because you cannot achieve all of that by yourself, right? Like major initiatives require more people. So when you are in a position where as an [00:06:00] employee in the company you are expected to achieve great results, it kinds of means you're a leader anyway, even if there are no formal managers. They did hire people with those characteristics. So you also need to make sure that you hire in a very, very, specific way. And the third thing is probably around compensation or how is ownership in the company expressed? You know, the whole capitalistic model is about, I'm paying you for your time. I'm giving you money. You're going to do what I need you to do. So ownership kind of goes away. I know that like many companies have in their values, be an owner or like some form of that. I always found it to be weird. Like I am a person with, I would like to think I have very high work ethic and I expect the people in my team, I treat them well.

Eddie Flaisler: I expect them to do what is needed for the business to be successful and you know, what is expected of them. But I don't expect [00:07:00] anyone to wake up in the morning. And say, I'm just here to make it all work. I don't need anyone to tell me that. I think that's just unreasonable. So I'm not sure if that directly answered your question, but what I will say is, there are examples of a company working without managers.

Eddie Flaisler: I think it requires a lot in terms of how you create ownership within the company, who are the personas you're hiring, and also what processes you have in place.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That makes sense. I like the fact that you called out It's theoretically possible. It's almost like just to kind of tie this back into engineering. It's like a proof of concept. Like, yes, it works. There is a thing in a certain set of circumstances under which this particular set of things works well enough.

Morgan VanDerLeest: But that doesn't mean you can just go apply this everywhere. You have to have some other way to somewhat replicate the exact same standards that made that possible. And, that's more difficult than it sounds. So are there any key attributes of a team and a system that will succeed with limited [00:08:00] involvement of managers?

Eddie Flaisler: Yeah. So I think that the answer that we should probably start from where a manager typically adds value. Coordination, right?

Eddie Flaisler: Planning, right? That's what you see in most that you see in most companies, direction and clarifying, you know, what happens, what is getting decided at a higher levels and how it propagates down. So the first thing I would say is systems to solve all the above in a way that requires minimal human intervention.

Eddie Flaisler: If you think about it, when people join as an individual contributor to a company, oftentimes it's not just about what they want to do, but it's also about what they don't want to do. I joined because I want to be an engineer.

Eddie Flaisler: I don't want to do this insane project management puzzles. I don't want to have all these conversations because these people are disagreeing and I want to make them agree. Sometimes I don't even want to do hiring. I need to be forced into that. So these [00:09:00] machines need to be really well oiled. And it's funny because someone needs to spend time on that. And that person needs to have domain knowledge in engineering and engineering management. So maybe at least temporarily, you do need to have someone from that discipline doing the work or maybe like partially maintaining that, but clear structure that focuses on being seamless and having minimal human intervention is important here because otherwise you're leaving room for a lot of frustration and a lot of friction and a lot of inefficiency. And even if you don't have managers, those things that need to happen for the organization to run smoothly will either not happen at all, or they'll be very, very clunky and just take time away from the actual individual contribution, which defeated the purpose of not having managers.

Eddie Flaisler: The second thing I can think of is hiring. Who is it that you're hiring? Are you [00:10:00] looking for discipline? Are you looking for leadership? Characteristics have to be very, very specific and you need to know how to vet for them. I think one of the questions I hate the most is tell me how you dealt with conflict. Because different people bring different things to the table. And you, like, you know, you always ask how Probably every single interview I've ever heard about for a software engineer included the question, if it wasn't technical, included the question, how did you deal with a conflict? It's so ridiculous to me because you hire different personas who can bring different value and not always their value proposition is to be the bigger person or the adult in the room. So I would argue that if you're hiring only adults in the room, then sure, maybe a manager is [00:11:00] not as much needed to solve these disputes or to help there, but also this comes at a cost.

Eddie Flaisler: People who come with a huge sense of ownership and leadership. And like working with people and like making an impact. Do you really have the scope to have all these people around?

Eddie Flaisler: So that's something that I always, I always think about. Everyone wants to hire a leader. But does the work warrant a leader? Does the work merit a leader? I cannot tell you the number of times I've been told at EM pitches when a manager was pitching the job to me "We need someone to come and lead the team." And then you join... as an IC, and then you join and there's a Tech Lead and there are seniors and you do Jira tickets and that's all you do. And you're frustrated. So the thing is, these people are not necessarily [00:12:00] lying. You know, they're trying to do their best to sell the job to you, but they cannot control the fact that there aren't many opportunities. Non managerial to shine as a people leader. So then you ask yourself I need to get someone who has all the qualities to be a good leader so that I don't need an actual manager working with them but then I need to put them in a small box and say you do this Jira ticket but behave because you know how. So it's about hiring. It's about finding those unicorns And if somehow you're able to find all these like magical beings that are have all the emotional capabilities and maturity to not require supervision, but are also okay with doing their own small boxes. Then sure, maybe you don't need managers.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Definitely a unique set of circumstances that leads to that. What if we dive into specifically how frontline managers add value [00:13:00] versus middle management and some more senior leadership. Can you talk about that?

Eddie Flaisler: It's really interesting when you talk about frontline managers vs senior leadership because I feel these are completely different jobs. One of the, speaking of reality check, most companies operate well in a top down decision model. So the decisions are made at the leadership team because, and by the way, it's not because it's a dictatorship, it's not because anybody's trying to be dismissive of what people are thinking at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Eddie Flaisler: It's the nature of the system. I think being able to listen to the opinion of every single person in the team and take that in at scale is an art and science that I'm not sure most organizations have figured out. I myself don't necessarily know how to do that. And probably the easiest thing is to put a bunch of smart people at the [00:14:00] top who make those decisions.

Eddie Flaisler: Granted, they do need to be good listeners because input coming from the field is so valuable. But ultimately, the decisions are made there. But then, you need someone to do two things. Number one, collect that input from people, and pass it on to leadership. And two, pass to the team, the decisions that are being made by the leadership team, and why they're being made.

Eddie Flaisler: Now, both these things sound like, Eddie, you've just described a web portal, with a text box, Where I can give my thoughts and also I can get messages from the leadership team. So what is that an email? No, because we cannot dismiss the value of the human factor here. You talk to someone about your ideas when you build trust with them, when you listen for an update coming from the leadership team, you want to know why [00:15:00] you have questions that you don't feel necessarily comfortable asking directly to those people. And you want to talk to someone you trust. Maybe you want to share frustrations in a certain way, in a safe space. All these things of like maintaining, keeping that two directional communication going is the job of the frontline manager. And that's definitely not something that I expect my senior leadership to spend time on. It just doesn't scale. Then there's, of course, the, day to day organizational design and the management of the work, the orchestration, but that's details.

Eddie Flaisler: Ultimately, it really is about that bi directional channel and making sure that execution is happening. When you talk about senior leadership, it's always a very delicate subject because these are the people that most people on the ground like to demonize. They're being overpaid. What is it they're even doing? They're making decisions [00:16:00] in a vacuum. They live in their ivory tower. They have no idea what this is going on. Like, it's so funny because I remember, in companies that I worked for, where I was a director or a VP, and the hierarchy wasn't that huge. It was just like me, the managers, and the people. And people would have all hands with me and they would tell me, Eddie, we don't feel leadership is listening. And I would look at them and say, but I'm leadership. I'm here. I'm listening. There is no, I don't know who's that boogeyman you're talking about, but like there is no other person. It's only me and your manager. So people have this inherent sense that there is someone sitting at the top, not paying attention to them. So I do feel that a huge part of a leadership team is not just strategy, but communication strategy and culture.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That was the kind of ringing some bells for me is [00:17:00] like, yes, you're in the room with folks. Like, you're, you're there. You're somebody to talk to. From an individual's perspective, talking to senior leadership it's like, I'm telling you these things. Why aren't you seeing, why aren't you fixing stuff? Why aren't you handling this thing? And I think there's a missing picture of how all these pieces play in. Like, I do hear you. That's is either not anything we can prioritize right now, or here's how this fits into the big picture that I think a lot of people, a lot of companies are not good at doing is managing that bi directional flow, like you mentioned. They can take the information, they can take the text box, but they're not good at then adding the context to that so that we can see like, ah, okay, I hear the concern here. Right now the priorities are X, Y, Z. Here's why those are the things we do want to focus on this, but it's probably not something that we can get to until some later point.

Eddie Flaisler: So we talked about the fact that like it doesn't scale to get every single person's opinion in a large setting, but you do need someone representing the health and the well being of the organization as [00:18:00] well as the context, the business context and the technical context. That is only available at the bottom with the people actually doing the work because they see the results, right? And they see how different actions have certain effects. So I think that's really important and that's a job of of an effective senior leader. The second thing is setting the organizational tone and one thing that I've noticed in my life outside work is that toxicity speaks louder than kindness. It's very easy to get to a point where people stop trusting each other. It's very easy to get to a point where people do not communicate constructively, where they make each other's lives miserable where they're not collaborative. And I feel that you should be really intentional about setting that tone, coaching the managers, being very explicit about what behaviors are [00:19:00] encouraged and what behaviors are discouraged.

Eddie Flaisler: And I have to tell you, that is not something that I feel a frontline manager, an effective one, has bandwidth to deal with. You're executing, You're dealing with people. Your free time is non existent. A senior leader should have free time to do strategy and in particular people strategy. And people's strategy means, what am I seeing in my organization? Where do I want to take the team? What problem am I trying to solve? How do they need to behave? And what do we all need to do in this context? And act on that. So the very famous example is Satya Nadella from Microsoft, and

Eddie Flaisler: it's told that one of the first corrective actions he did with his leadership team, with his staff, was he forced everyone to read Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg's Nonviolent [00:20:00] Communication. Now, if you think about it from a kind of this, like, dry, number, execution oriented point of view, you're like, oh god, really?

Eddie Flaisler: That's what you do? Like, you force people to read books about stuff? Like, come on man,

Eddie Flaisler: there's work to do. But he noticed something was not working. He noticed people were not necessarily sharing the right numbers. He noticed people didn't have the courage to express ideas. He didn't see enough innovation, so he started from first principles. Why would people smart people capable people come to work and not bring that but only work within their small box? And you know, what am I supposed to do? Let me do it. That's all.

Eddie Flaisler: That's what makes a strong senior leader. The correct use of the time they have (and by the way, a separate comment -they don't have time because they're in meetings they're being misutilized. That's completely separate. But [00:21:00] spending time, quality time, on observing organizational gaps and solving them. That's a good senior leader.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Something I liked out of that last little bit with kind of the meetings and misutilizing time is you kind of flip that I think for the frontline managers where a lot of the job is context. It's being in situations, either one on ones or team meetings or meetings with stakeholders or directly tangential folks to pull up the context to figure out how do we then align these pieces around the team's mission, but they're not actually, they're not actually the ones doing that.

Morgan VanDerLeest: More often than not. I think it's very hard to have a more of a hands on manager because you get pulled in different directions too easily. But having somebody who's invested in that context, it's seeing. How is this individual operating today? How is the team operating today?

Morgan VanDerLeest: How are the project in general going overall? Where are the things that if we, call out pieces now we can kind of readjust and align and make sure we're staying ahead of these things that on their own [00:22:00] individuals are not, keeping up with all the threads coming into them.

Morgan VanDerLeest: It's that person who's kind of keeping the threads together or shifting threads apart and repulling together the right ones for the team at the time. And, you know, that's the manager and maker schedule thing. And yeah, the manager's job, a good chunk of that, yes, is in meetings. And for that reason, it's the context and if that's the best way to get context in your organization, sometimes it's not.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Some companies are better about context outside of meetings, which is great, but often that's the way it happens.

Eddie Flaisler: Thank you for bringing up the, manager schedule versus maker schedule. Because as much as I read that article, I like it. I think it makes a lot of sense. I also feel how that's probably one of the concepts that have been the most abused in engineering management history, and it's kind of, you know, it's kind of interesting you were talking about managers spending all their time in meetings, in like gaining context, and you know, Morgan, that actually makes me, think: if you're trying to have less [00:23:00] managers, we were talking at the beginning about better structure and better support systems, What I feel a lot of companies, including those who are very much interested in reducing the number of managers and number of like middlemen and middlewomen, they don't spend time on that. They don't spend time on making processes and communication more efficient. So you don't need a person who will spend all their time in meetings. Or you don't need a person who will spend all their time reading and responding to emails and Slack, so the team can work. You know, one thing that I, what do you call them?

Eddie Flaisler: Heroic stories, war stories. when I joined Box, I had a, very interesting observation about my team. I was a front line manager then, and I noticed that my entire team spent their life on the public Slack channel for the team answering questions. [00:24:00] 24/7. Now, they were delivering, they were working, but everything was taking time. And no one could point out why was it exactly that things that should not have taken so much time to develop took more time. It turns out that context switching was killing productivity. Because everyone was on the public Slack channel at all times. So I made a groundbreaking decision. I removed everyone from the public Slack channel of the team and only allowed, and we automated that with PagerDuty, only allowed the on call to be on the channel.

Eddie Flaisler: So when you're on call, primary and secondary, you're on Slack. When you're not, you're not. We delivered more. also there was less context everyone needed to carry in their head because they could focus on the work. As opposed to the seven different conversations they started on Slack with [00:25:00] people who now expect answers for them because they responded on Slack. So you started that engagement. That's the type of focus that I feel you should have when you're trying to minimize people who spend their time in meetings. Or just digesting communication. You cannot minimize the importance of improving process. You just cannot.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love the example of that because it's not a process that you could take and just apply everywhere because I don't think it would make sense everywhere. But when the circumstances are the way that they were at the company within your team at the time, it's great.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And that's what that kind of frontline manager layer enabled. How does this group of people need to have their processes, organization, communication flow changed to do better?

Morgan VanDerLeest: I think the last story you gave, there is a perfect example of this is a way that our frontline manager added value. So we talked theoretically about how do these groups work and what should they be doing roughly? And then here's a specific example of a way that this [00:26:00] happened.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Added value in a way that without a manager, it likely would not have happened like that because folks are worrying about different things. Worrying about their own individual inputs and outputs and not, okay, how do we adjust to the system as a whole to work?

Morgan VanDerLeest: You alluded to this a little bit, but would love to dive into what tasks you think are crucial, but not necessarily suitable for an individual contributor. So they really need to have a manager for that. And do you think those tasks really warrant a full time position? .

Eddie Flaisler: That's a good question. So first of all, You know, we discussed communication and culture. Okay. And, one thing that I hear often is when you have a message that you convey with your team, probably at the point where you're too tired repeating it over and over and over is when it actually starts sinking in for people. And I think the underlying point here is that you are never done with communicating mission, communicating vision, communicating why. You are never done [00:27:00] with making the culture present with making sure things happen as your organization would like it to happen. All these things are not one off tasks, which is why someone whose responsibility is to provide those reminders to people and to make sure all decisions are made through the lenses of the values and the mission is someone that you always need in the room. That's one thing. So it's less about a specific competency. It's more about a responsibility, something that you almost measure success by as opposed to did you do your job or not?

Eddie Flaisler: It's how did you affect your team? The second thing, is about actual activities. Hiring is a perfect example. One thing I find always very interesting is that people are surprised when ICS are demotivated to conduct interviews. You always have a handful who enjoy and [00:28:00] everyone else who is, ugh, another one, but I did it last week, why do I need to do it right now?

Eddie Flaisler: I don't have time for this. I'm working on this project.

Eddie Flaisler: So hiring is normally not an activity that is rewarded for individual contributors. and as long as the organization doesn't intend to recognize that as such, it's a manager's job to orchestrate and to lead that. Because people come to work with a very specific scope and idea of what they want to do in mind.

Eddie Flaisler: And if you're going to ask them to do on top of this, selling to a candidate, talking to a candidate, running the debriefs, working with recruiting, that's a whole new level of expectation setting with people, different competencies, maybe different distribution of time. This work needs to happen. Someone needs to do it.

Eddie Flaisler: And It may or may not be something ICs are interested in, but then you, of course, take away from their capacity to actually produce.[00:29:00]

Eddie Flaisler: It's very important, but you take away from their capacity.

Eddie Flaisler: And the third thing is distinguishing between developing things in the core roadmap of the company, and developing a support system.

Eddie Flaisler: So, we were talking about Slack automation, or even about certain scripts, or just something that will make it easier for the team to run a sprint. Someone needs to have the bandwidth for that. Someone needs to have those problems in mind. And I think the whole point of having an individual contributor is that you assign a business domain, you delegate that to them, and they solve.

Eddie Flaisler: That expectation to think meta, about the work in general,

Eddie Flaisler: about the team in general, what practices do we need to have as a company, as a team, as an organization, at least the way I see positions are set up today, it's not part of the thing. So I guess what I've been trying to say, is [00:30:00] that if we start from the concrete definition of what a manager does and what an IC does today, you need a manager.

Eddie Flaisler: There are jobs that by definition are not part of what you sign up for when you become an individual contributor. Do we want to conduct an experiment where we're going to say, Hi, we are hiring a senior software engineer. Here's the job description. Running sprints. Figuring out JIRA or maybe a better tool. Hiring. Conducting one on ones and dealing with conflict resolution. I am not sure many people will be interested.

Eddie Flaisler: I might be wrong. But it's an experiment we can conduct It may or may not be successful. But if we start with the definition of what we have today of IC versus manager, that job is required.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I think it's a great point. Broad strokes or otherwise, I think we hopefully have given George some things to think through here, although I think the one area that we're [00:31:00] still missing a bit or the CEO question behind the question. How do we avoid conflating "the manager for this group isn't effective" with "we don't need a manager here"?

Eddie Flaisler: When I first read George's question, I must admit that the first thing that came to mind to me was, is it a case where things are working, so you're assuming as a CEO that you need less managers? There's a very famous quote by Justice Ginsburg, she said throwing out this XYZ process when it has worked and it is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet. And that quote really resonates with me in many aspects of life when you have something that's working and

Eddie Flaisler: you're like, cool, so we don't need to invest in it, it's working. But it is working because you're investing in it. So I want to call out before we start with this analysis of conflating underperformance with not meeting.

Eddie Flaisler: I want to start with the [00:32:00] other aspect. Let's acknowledge there is a world in which George's CEO. is taking for granted the fact things are working well. And if that's the case, George can try again and again and again to explain, and that would be my recommendation to George. Communicate the fact that it's not obvious, try to explain the complexities, but ultimately, I cannot promise anyone that the CEO will take that. On the other hand, there is an option of an organization that is not actually performing. So the manager says, Everyone's scrambling. Anyhow, might as well have this manager coding. I want to make it clear that if the CEO isn't getting good answers about engineering velocity, about engineering quality If there are known gaps and they're not being improved or like we mentioned propagating existing patterns. Whether or not the CEO and the business can actually articulate what's wrong or [00:33:00] just say it's wrong.

Eddie Flaisler: If they're not seeing any traction in that area, I would start from that.

Eddie Flaisler: So my recommendation to George would be first, you need to verify with yourself that you are clear on what expectations are from the engineering organization. You are able to measure those. You're able to agree on what constitutes success, and then you're able to communicate clearly both the results and what it is that's being done to improve them. If that's happening, you've done your due diligence. But normally, what I just said encapsulates so much work that there is always more to do before we get to a point where we say, Yeah, he's just not listening. We're doing everything fine, I just can't talk to him. It's an option. That's why I called it up. Sometimes you just can't talk to him. But there's a lot more to do before we get to that point. And while doing that, while doing that analysis of how effective your organization is, [00:34:00] you might find that some part of the house is not managed the way it should be.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That kind of brought to mind something interesting to me. A couple years ago. Maybe it's still around. Who keeps up with it these days? The idea of the 10x engineer. It's funny that the person most capable of getting some multiplier from an overall team's output is not an individual on the team because the likelihood of them being able to multiply that is unlikely, but if you can get an extra 20, 30, 50 percent even out of a handful of people on the team, you're looking at actual multiples and that's, that's the frontline manager.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That's the person that's helping cut through the cruft, figure out what's not working. And help enable people to actually do the job and get to the value faster than where they currently are.

Eddie Flaisler: Yeah, I think the notion of managers as multipliers is something that cannot be overlooked because when you have someone with authority, it cannot be a stable state. It can either go up or it can go [00:35:00] down. So assuming the person is doing their job, assuming oversight over the managers is done the way it should be. I am completely with you. There is just so much inherent value.

Eddie Flaisler: You talk about the 10x engineer, but even the 10x engineer needs to have context. They need to have a sense of direction. They need someone to provide them with the business priorities and the rationale behind making certain decisions.

Eddie Flaisler: They need someone, just a second pair of eyes. You can be the most brilliant person, but you need an external point of view. They need someone to tell them, you know, I think right now, maybe this architecture is something we want to break down into two components. So we only revamp this part, because that's getting the most issues. And we don't really have time to spend on this entire thing, because the cost of delay for not doing that other thing, because you're spending your time on this, is more than this [00:36:00] department can afford. So this context is really, really important, this second pair of eyes, and I'm completely with you. I think the value of a second person outside the one doing the work, no matter how good they are, no matter if they are a 10x engineer, cannot be minimized.

Morgan VanDerLeest: All right, seems that this is about all the time we have for today. If you enjoyed this, don't forget to share and subscribe on your podcast player of choice. And then consider, are you facing a tough challenge as an engineering leader that's left you unsure of what to do? Hit us up at peopledrivendevelopment@gmail.Com. Chances are, we also have no idea, but we can try. Cheers y'all.

Eddie Flaisler: Bye.