Justin Turner & Owen Samuels at H-E-B

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Justin and Owen from H-E-B, and we discuss how they used chaos engineering to build resilient systems that were able to scale, how to take risk in an organization by building credibility, and how they are applying the concept of extreme ownership throughout their engineering organization. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) So we've got Owen and Justin. Owen, you want to introduce yourself, and then Justin can introduce himself?

(Owen Samuels at 00:00:44) Sure. My name is Owen Samuels, VP of Engineering at H-E-B and CTO of Favor. So sort of a dual role is my title.

(Justin Turner at 00:00:59) Justin Turner. I am the Senior Engineering Manager responsible for digital fulfillment systems and teams at H-E-B, which is really our curbside, last mile delivery, make ready. And I have a couple of warehouse systems in my portfolio as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:19) That was one of our first questions. When we were researching, we were like, why does a grocery store need an engineering team, engineering management team?

(Justin Turner at 00:01:28) Well, if you look at the amount of problems we have to solve, it's pretty complex. From the farm to various vendors that we get our food from and how they interact with us, all the way to warehouse and transportation to being within the store with point of sale systems, inventory, and then you look at our fulfillment systems now, which are very complex. And that's the stuff I work with. You know, we get an e-commerce order from heb.com. How do we most efficiently shop that order?

(Justin Turner at 00:02:06) And that factors in things like e-commerce fulfillment systems as well. So end to end, H-E-B is a really interesting set of problems that are highly complex, and there's not a whole lot off the shelf to solve those problems end to end. So we have to build a lot ourselves.

(Owen Samuels at 00:02:28) Yeah, you forgot manufacturing. We have pharmacies in our stores. There's just a lot of different things going on that have a lot of integration points as well. You know, I actually felt the same way as you did when we were acquired by H-E-B. I was like, what? And then I got involved on the engineering side at H-E-B, and there's a lot. It's super complex, and I gravitated over towards that because I was like, whoa, that's some interesting, complex systems that it would be great to work on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) Yeah, we don't have any of them in my town that I'm aware of. Can you give me an idea about how big H-E-B is?

(Justin Turner at 00:03:13) Sure. So we have around 400 locations between Texas and Mexico.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) Wow. How many employees is that?

(Justin Turner at 00:03:24) It's over 100,000. I don't know the specific number, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) And so you provide services to the—you cover the technology for the full spectrum of the brand?

(Justin Turner at 00:03:36) That's right. We're kind of organized in business areas or business portfolios. Some teams are off the shelf systems, so we have our systems org that services a variety of different business use cases. And then we have engineering, which Owen leads, which—warehouse, specifically, I work in enterprise engineering. So digital fulfillment rolls up to that, and that includes a lot of warehouse systems.

(Justin Turner at 00:04:07) We have order management, pricing, coupons, just a variety of stuff, and then the digital fulfillment systems as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) Nice, nice. And then I know you guys have a connection to Gremlin. Matt Fournier over there, I talked to him, and he said that you guys actually ended up using Gremlin. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Justin Turner at 00:04:30) Yeah. So it was early 2019. We were in a place where our fulfillment systems—the expectations around it had changed. We, curbside, grew from a nice to have convenience for customers to this mission critical revenue stream for H-E-B. And we needed to get much better in our resiliency.

(Justin Turner at 00:04:56) We needed to modernize and move to the cloud and all the things that make up our modernization journey to get to that higher level of resilience and be able to move faster. And so we put together a strategy of breaking into different domains, into services. And the way that we approached it was we wanted to move as fast as possible and make sure we weren't going to create a distributed monolith or a really bad situation for ourselves, because microservices, they're very hard to get right. And the way that we wanted to approach it was introducing failure early rather than waiting for the failures to happen or finding out all of our assumptions were wrong at the end. Let's validate those assumptions with a tool like Gremlin so that we can move that much faster and know that the thing that we deliver along this journey is going to be resilient to the complexities and realities of running a production system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:55) Nice. How did you find them?

(Justin Turner at 00:05:57) It actually started as a cold email. Some proof to vendors that sometimes cold contact does work. I was—my wife was in the hospital doing five weeks of bed rest, and I was reading email probably when I shouldn't have been, trying to keep sane. And I saw an email from Gremlin. I'm like, oh, that sounds cool.

(Justin Turner at 00:06:20) Chaos engineering. I kind of sort of heard about that. And so I went and did a bunch of googling, and I shot off an email like, oh, this sounds awesome. I want to see what this is about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) And then you reach out, you find out that it's pretty useful, you give it a little demo, and then you decide to go full blown integrate it into the organization?

(Justin Turner at 00:06:38) So it started with bringing Gremlin on site. They gave us a demo of the tool, and we saw it wasn't really about the tool as much as it was the process and the mindset. The tool was incredible because it did a lot of—you hear about other tools like Chaos Monkey or something like that that can shut servers on and off. Gremlin was great because it had network attacks, which was a lot of what happens to us is the circumstances around our project, and we could simulate a lot of that. They showed that to us, which was wonderful.

(Justin Turner at 00:07:11) But going into it, we were like, oh cool, we're just going to break stuff randomly and learn stuff. And that's not what it is. It's scientifically introducing failure to your project. And it started by them showing us how to do game days, which is using the scientific method. You come up with a hypothesis of what you think is going to happen with a specific Gremlin attack, and then you validate the results.

(Justin Turner at 00:07:35) And if it's not what you expected, then you put in a fix to make yourself more resilient, or you put in a fallback or a failback or something that makes you more resilient and fail gracefully.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) And so how do you deploy that to all of your teams after you were bought in and you saw it and you tried it within one—how did you roll it out to multiple teams?

(Justin Turner at 00:07:56) So it became available to all of my teams, and some of enterprise engineering is starting to adopt it. But it really—it's just selling it internally. We run our own data centers and we do DR failovers and things like that for our systems that run on-prem, but this was a completely different mindset. So it starts with the mindset of, hey, rather than making sure we can just fail an entire data center over, let's see what happens if you inject failure at the application level. And you bring other teams in, you show them the success that—you let them ride along with game days and let them make the decision if it's the right time for them to adopt.

(Justin Turner at 00:08:39) And for a lot of my teams, it was the right time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) So if you're going to give tips to other technology leaders who are wondering how to sell something internally, what would that be?

(Justin Turner at 00:08:51) Start with the reality. Show success, but show them by doing this, this is what this prevented, or this is the financial benefit, or tie into whatever their value is, because that's what you're going to most influence them with. And with Gremlin, I think everybody wants higher resiliency and uptime. And focus on the mindset rather than the tool. The tool is nice, and it enables them to adopt it more easily, but the mindset is the hardest piece to get people to transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:33) So it sounds like you just stayed open. You constantly showed, you let them involved in the game days. They sort of sold themselves. Some people caught on, and then you can generate some more steam with the people who are liking it.

(Justin Turner at 00:09:46) That's right. And don't be forceful would be my other piece of advice. Not everybody is ready for that part of their journey. Some folks and teams need to do other foundational work before they can be ready for that kind of a thing and just be patient.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) And then, Owen, over with Favor, I was really curious to know—I have a background in engineering, and so I wanted to ask you about what's the most important piece of feature software involved in that life cycle at Favor, about how you deliver the groceries?

(Owen Samuels at 00:10:25) I mean, it's like any engineering team. I think the most critical piece to any good engineering team or good system is foundational infrastructure. That has to be really solid and repeatable and maintainable and scalable. So in my mind, that's always the first place you start. I think if you go specific into Favor and what's the critical system or the critical application or critical feature when it comes to Favor, there's so many. But I think at the end of the day, it comes down to probably however we're presenting our information to our customers.

(Owen Samuels at 00:11:15) So if that's our mobile app or our website for our customers. But when I say customers, you can also think about drivers and merchants. Right? Those are kind of our three big users that we have to make sure that we give them the right tools to be successful in our ecosystem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:35) What's the feel over there while working at Favor? Are you guys trying to become the premier delivery service of the world, of the United States, or of Texas? What's the mission over there?

(Owen Samuels at 00:11:48) I think the mission really is become the premier delivery application in Texas. You know, I could go into the whole story of Favor the last five years. We were national, and we kind of moved back into Texas and kind of decided to concentrate there because we think that's the best state or the best place to start and then move out from there. So we're still on our journey, but right now, it's really becoming the go-to delivery service of Texas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:27) Nice. That's exciting, right? Especially because the future relocation, I might end up using the service. That'd be nice.

(Owen Samuels at 00:12:35) Yeah. Well, if you move to Dallas, we're in Dallas. And if you would have moved back to Lubbock, where you're from, we have H-E-B there now too, which we didn't before. But H-E-B is there now too. But we also have Central Market, which is in Dallas. So that's an H-E-B store as well. So you could try that out as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:54) Nice. I'm really curious to know, Justin, you used to be a prison guard?

(Justin Turner at 00:13:00) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:01) Okay. So when I saw that you're a prison guard, I was like, that's awesome, first of all. Secondly, I said, that's a great opportunity to talk about how you made the career transition.

(Justin Turner at 00:13:13) Sure. Well, for me, it didn't start as a career. I was an 18-year-old out of high school, and I'm like, I didn't want a bunch of student loan debt. And living in Huntsville where I grew up, that was the job. You either worked at Walmart, you worked at the college, Sam Houston State University, or you worked at the prison. And not having a college degree yet, I was like, okay, I'll go do four years, learn a little bit about the world. And it turned into a longer detour than that.

(Justin Turner at 00:13:32) Just I was there for nine years, and I'm thankful for the experience. It was—it grew me a lot, and it was a good place to spend my time while I got to a place where I was mature enough to actually focus on college. But my intent was always to get my computer science degree and go into game development. Back then, you know, I love video games. I just had that view of that was the thing that I wanted to do. And I got fortunate enough to actually interview at H-E-B before I got my degree. And I thought H-E-B was just going to be a way station for me, that I was going to be there long enough to get enough experience to get my foot in the game industry.

(Justin Turner at 00:14:29) And what I found was, you know, I built games in college and while I was working at the prison and all that kind of stuff on my own and with my friends, that same endorphin boost I would get from completing a project like that, I got from solving the problems that existed in grocery. And the environment was healthy and good at H-E-B. The culture was amazing, and I kind of accidentally found my home. And I feel like I won the lottery out of the box with coming to H-E-B first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) I want an article on the leadership lessons that you learned from being a prison guard applied to running a software development team.

(Justin Turner at 00:15:09) They do. To a certain extent, they do. You learn everything in the prison is extremes. It's humanity to whatever extreme. And when you're dealing with those level of extremes, you want to be firm, you want to be fair, you want to be consistent, and you learn how to manage people's emotions and how they handle their expectations not being met.

(Justin Turner at 00:15:33) Or and if you can scale that down to interacting with humans that are not imprisoned and that you're leading, and learn simple lessons like, hey, if I'm going to give somebody feedback, I should do it in private. I should do it where they don't have to save face in front of other people. Conflict management, because conflict is a problem in the prison, and it's a problem in a much lesser scale in a professional work environment as you work on solutions.

(Justin Turner at 00:16:01) And so if you can effectively scale those lessons and focus on good outcomes, it's been very beneficial in my move into leadership as I've grown my career at H-E-B.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) Any prison experience, Owen? We set the bar high.

(Owen Samuels at 00:16:19) No. No prison experience over here. Sorry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) I like that, though. I'm not making light of it, Justin. I think it's incredibly admirable because those situations are, first of all, it's life threatening to some extent. So it's akin to serving in the armed forces. Right? You're doing a job that's very, very difficult, that's very demanding. And I think it's, yeah, I just imagine how easy it is for you to run an engineering team or have to let someone go or these difficult moments when you've had all sorts of other types of extreme experiences. Right?

(Justin Turner at 00:16:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) And so it's like it definitely—you overtrain for the situation you're going to experience. Right? That's how you win.

(Justin Turner at 00:17:04) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Yeah. That's pretty cool. I've never talked to anybody that—I mean, I have a brother, or a cousin-in-law who's actually a prison guard. But yeah, I've never had any conversations with somebody who's done that and then become a technical leader, and so I think it's pretty cool.

(Justin Turner at 00:17:21) Yeah. Thank you. I'm very thankful for the experience. I wasn't at the time. You know, all I could think about was getting past that part of my life with me and my wife moving on and benefiting from getting through college and all of that.

(Justin Turner at 00:17:35) But now that it's far enough in the rearview mirror, I can reflect and be thankful. I don't think I would be where I am in my life if I hadn't gone through that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) Yeah. And you can still play video games, right?

(Justin Turner at 00:17:47) That's right. Very rarely, but yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) I know, man. I have kids, and it's like, I want to play video games, but the opportunity doesn't present itself very often.

(Justin Turner at 00:18:01) That's right.

(Owen Samuels at 00:18:02) Hey, how old are your kids? Are they old enough to play video games?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:06) Yeah, kind of. Got a three-year-old girl and a one-and-a-half-year-old boy. The three-year-old girl, she plays games on her tablet every night before bed. But the boy isn't into the use of the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) Yeah, I think probably in another year or so when they get a little bit older.

(Owen Samuels at 00:18:23) That's when it gets good. I got an eight-year-old son, 12-year-old daughter. No, 13. But the eight-year-old is super into playing his Switch. So I get to play some video games now and then when he lets me.

(Owen Samuels at 00:18:39) That's nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) Isn't that Switch thing crazy? I was just at my parents, and I've got an adopted sister that's a lot younger. And I was watching her play this video game thing, and she was playing a Switch. I was like, oh, that's a Switch because I've heard of it. You know, I've just never really seen it or played it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) And it's amazing how the whole console is just so small. It's just fascinating about how different that is than the Ataris and the NESes and the Nintendos and stuff that we grew up with where you'd have to put all the cords in a box to take it to Thanksgiving at grandma's house.

(Owen Samuels at 00:19:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) We had the Game Boy. We had a Game Boy back then. That is true. But one cousin always hogged it, and the rest of us had to find something to do.

(Owen Samuels at 00:19:24) That's true. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) Oh, man. So we talked a little bit about chaos engineering. We talked a little bit about H-E-B and Favor. I was just curious, Owen, were you part of the M&A process, or were you a founder at Favor?

(Owen Samuels at 00:19:39) So I was not a founder. I got brought in just after their Series B. So I was at Favor for about two years before the M&A process happened, but I was the only really technical person involved in the M&A from a Favor side. So very interesting. I've been in an M&A process on the other side being the buyer, but never the buyee.

(Owen Samuels at 00:20:11) So definitely, it was a role reversal a little bit, and I felt the scrutiny that I used to put on the companies that we were buying back in the day. So, a great time now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) What was your big takeaway from being on the other side?

(Owen Samuels at 00:20:29) I think the biggest thing that I took away from it, especially at the size that Favor was, was don't think that you need to have everything. Everything that they ask for or everything that they wanted or said you don't have, that isn't that big of a deal, because they have to just go through their checks and balances, and it's just a checkbox or not a checkbox. It's not a make-or-break a deal. And I think that was kind of one of the biggest things that I learned from the process. I'd be like, oh, we don't have this. Oh, no. Okay. But I would get all worked up about it, and I would go and figure out what I could do to make it right. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) Yeah. So it gave some, you know, I went through a process like that before, and I know what you're talking about, the due diligence checklist with the 150 items. And you haven't even heard of some of the names of some of them.

(Owen Samuels at 00:21:33) Yeah. And some of them, one of the interesting parts was, you know, that Affirm did a lot of the due diligence, but there was some interaction with some maybe H-E-B folks, and it was interesting to see technology differences and technology understandings of what disaster recovery means in the cloud compared to when you just have on-prem. It's different. Right? And so you have different processes and procedures, but sometimes the people looking at that don't understand that.

(Owen Samuels at 00:22:05) Right? And so it's like a square peg hitting a round hole. Right? And they don't get it. Right? And so it definitely was an interesting process for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Did H-E-B, did this acquisition happen before COVID, or did it happen because of COVID and the need came about?

(Owen Samuels at 00:22:24) It happened before. It was about two and a half years ago, or more than that now. I think it, oh, no, about two and a half years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) Why did it happen? Did they just see this space emerging and they said we need to fill this gap, and so let's go find someone to acquire instead of build it ourselves?

(Owen Samuels at 00:22:42) I'm not really sure. You know, I think it was definitely a space they were looking at. You know, I think if you think about it, there's probably two reasons in my mind. One is the space. They were getting more and more into curbside and home delivery. And I think the other part was probably they're starting to, you know, they've been on this digital transformation for some time, and I think maybe acquiring Favor was saying, hey, we're really serious about this, and we want to learn what a tech company is like that started as a tech company. And so I think both of those were kind of at play, would be my guess. You know? But, obviously, the delivery was a big part of it because they saw it in the future, and, you know, six months ago, it paid off. You know?

(Owen Samuels at 00:23:34) Because everyone needed delivery, and everyone was trying to figure out how they could do it, and, you know, Favor provided that support that they needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:44) Justin, were you on the other side of that deal at H-E-B shopping and trying to find out which of these delivery services they wanted to buy?

(Justin Turner at 00:23:52) Not a part of the acquisition. Before Favor, there was a smaller delivery service that we had purchased just to dabble our toes in the water a little bit. And that kind of kicked off the first version of the business. It was HEBtoU.com before it was all located on one website. And I don't know the leadership decisions that led to Favor, but I'm glad that it did.

(Justin Turner at 00:24:19) That first, it felt like a duct tape and bailing wire proof of concept, and that got us to Favor. But, yeah, I wasn't a part of the original acquisition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:32) I saw you gave a talk at the Chaos Conference. What was the main point from that talk?

(Justin Turner at 00:24:38) So our journey with curbside fulfillment, we did start as a proof of concept as a business. We, one store doing a handful of orders a day very quickly grew to about 40 stores with hundreds of orders a day. And then, that's when they hit the gas, and we were in hundreds of stores doing many thousands of orders a day. And that growth for H-E-B was wonderful, and it was great for our customers. But that rapid scaling from a prototype to something real where the expectations had changed around the project and our uptime and how quickly we deliver, had meant that some of our early proof of concept decisions on how we structured or how the business would operate several years out were incorrect, but it was very hard to change.

(Justin Turner at 00:25:30) And the technical stack itself, all of the integrations, we hadn't really put any resiliency engineering concepts against it. We were just suddenly in this mission-critical situation. So we were dealing with incidents, outages, you know, trying to firefight while also trying to pivot with the business as they learned more about how to best fulfill customer orders. And the talk was really about the journey to get to reliability, to get to resiliency. And for us, it was kind of two real big things.

(Justin Turner at 00:26:06) It was investing in what we had and not abandoning it, so making our monolith really strong for the remainder of the time that we needed it, and then building a system that was cloud-native that was built with resiliency first, so that we could move as fast as the business needed versus building a ten-year system that's not going to change, building something that was ultimately replaceable as needed as the business learns more and pivots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) And then what inspired you to, was this your first conference talk, or have you done these before?

(Justin Turner at 00:26:39) It was, I did Google Next earlier this year, but that was more of a high level. I've always been, we actually went to ChaosConf last year, myself, Mike Angstadt, one of the other leaders, Matt Rasmussen. And we were kind of in the middle of things while we were there. And Mike Angstadt, he leads our platform team, looked at me and he said, next year, you're going to be on that stage. We're going to be talking about what we did to get out of this situation.

(Justin Turner at 00:27:08) And he called it. So I saw the CFPs for the, not for ChaosConf, but the first conference that Gremlin had earlier this year. And, didn't make the first cut, but they wanted to hear the story for the second, for the ChaosConf, which was great because it allowed a lot more stuff to play out with COVID, and it made the story more interesting to tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) Nice. Did you knock it out of the park?

(Justin Turner at 00:27:34) I hope so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) We'll say yes. For the people, sure. Oh, yes. For the record, we'll say, yeah.

(Owen Samuels at 00:27:41) Yeah. You're supposed to say yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) Crushed it. Yeah. You got off stage. There was a line about a hundred, 150 people wanting signatures, and everyone's, but it was after COVID, so it was probably digital. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:58) Oh, man. What other topics did you guys want to talk about? Did you have something on your mind?

(Justin Turner at 00:28:03) I guess probably one thing I've learned most through all of this, the differentiator here was not technology. It was not any specific person or leader. It was a mindset change that we made about two years ago, because the way that our project was structured was we integrate very closely with a lot of systems. And those systems can go down and that can turn into impact in our system. And the old mindset that we had was we were a victim of something.

(Justin Turner at 00:28:37) Right? With these different teams that own different pieces, that's the easy thing to do is pull out that finger and start pointing. For us, the big game changer was extreme ownership by going, you know what? I own not only the system that we've built. I own the problems that are inherent in it, and I own getting out of this situation, and I own the circumstances around my project as much as I own the code that's running.

(Justin Turner at 00:29:07) And once we made that mindset shift, which was hard, and it took practice, we were able to change our thinking around how we architected our project and how we responded to incidents. We were no longer being blown with the wind. We were forging our own destiny. And I think that any leader that finds themself in a similar situation as where we were, they have the same power or they should have the same power to go, you know what? I'm going to change my circumstances.

(Justin Turner at 00:29:40) I'm going to own everything around my project in a way where we can be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:45) Preach. I love it. Yes. I'm a huge fan of Extreme Ownership. I love the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) I love the principles. I am curious, though, did you get together with a couple other leaders that were just like, this is enough. We have to do this extreme ownership. How did it go from, you know, you understanding the principle of extreme ownership to you applying it within your team into that catching fire within the org?

(Justin Turner at 00:30:10) It started with me reading the book, amazing book and amazing mindset, and then me buying copies of that book for my leadership team. And, you know, before I focused on anybody else in the org, I focused on myself and my teams. And let's get this ownership. Let's get rolling. Let's put a plan together.

(Justin Turner at 00:30:31) Let's own this. And since then, it's grown into my leader, Matt, adopting it for enterprise engineering, and now Owen has adopted it as one of his core principles for engineering at H-E-B. And it's really, it's an easy sell. It's harder when you're in those hard moments where you have to own your own failures and you become challenged and you want to go back to that easy strategy of like, oh, that's not my fault. But once you practice it and a leader like Owen makes it safe for you to own the things that happen even when you make a mistake, it starts to catch fire.

(Justin Turner at 00:31:13) And we're seeing more and more of it at H-E-B Engineering.

(Owen Samuels at 00:31:17) Yeah. I think the stars kind of align. You know? Justin started going on and his team's going on this journey about two years ago. It's pretty much when Favor was acquired, and then I came over.

(Owen Samuels at 00:31:30) We hired some new people, and, you know, extreme ownership and accountability is a core foundational piece of any engineering team when you're trying to bring the best value that you can to the business. So it kind of just aligned together, and, you know, Justin and his team has done a really good job in terms of the enterprise engineering, which is really back-end or back-end engineering systems. And he's right. It's little wins. You know, you're just building momentum, and now you're starting to see people come out of the woodworks and be like, hey.

(Owen Samuels at 00:32:07) What is this all about? And we're just seeing it gain momentum more and more every month, every quarter. So definitely has been a really good journey in the last two years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) What do you do when, let's say you have a team member, and we're already two years into this culture. Right? And then that team member just, maybe they're, you know, hungry, angry, lazy, or tired or something, and then they start blaming. How do you catch that early and address it?

(Justin Turner at 00:32:45) Well, so what we found is that will happen. So a couple of things. There are some people that fundamentally will not adopt that mindset, and that's fine. It's very, very hard. But for the most part, people are open to it.

(Justin Turner at 00:33:02) And when you start to see that culture change, it starts to self-correct. It starts to not be acceptable to start your conversation in the place of how do we stop other teams from impacting us or, you know, wherever the blame goes. It starts to be, okay. We're going to start from a place of blamelessness. What is the problem?

(Justin Turner at 00:33:23) How do we formulate a strategy? How do we bring others along with us? You know, you talk about the principles. Cover and move is a big one in that book of you need to cover each other and make sure you're all making the journey. And if you start from that, it mostly self-corrects.

(Justin Turner at 00:33:41) But in the cases it doesn't, it's a direct conversation, and you keep bringing up those principles and you keep reinforcing the message. And, eventually, the person you're working with either comes along or they don't.

(Owen Samuels at 00:33:55) Yeah. I mean, it basically becomes a point of herd mentality. Right? Once a lot of the herd has all come on board, you know, what happens to the rest? Either they come on board or we find something else for that team member.

(Owen Samuels at 00:34:12) And so going back to what Justin says, as you see more and more little wins and you show the measurement of the outcome, people understand the value of extreme ownership and how it sets you up to be successful and really do bring the value that the business expects out of engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) One of the most interesting things that I've learned doing all of these interviews and going out and meeting people and everything like that, and all these leaders and seeing their teams, is that the team's almost always an exact projection of the leader and how they think and the decisions they make. And so it just started out as, you know, I kind of picked up on a little bit. I was like, oh, this is a really high-performing person. And then I meet their team, and they've got a bunch of high-performing people. And then I just kept meeting more and more and more, and like a machine learning algorithm just getting better and better data, and then it essentially just became like a rule for me. It's like, it's the abnormality when the team is different, vastly different than the leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:19) And so I loved that when, Justin, you're answering a question earlier and you said you started with yourself, because that's like step one. Right? And I'm curious to know as you learned this, because for me, I started learning this and understanding it, and then it bothered me every time I had blame somewhere else. I was just like, no, ugh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:44) Because when you let, you know, someone else or something else have the blame, you remove your ability to control the outcome. Right? It's like, I can't—if I make it my fault, I gain the ability to, you know, make better decisions in the future. And so I started applying this in my life, and then I started noticing like my spouse, my wife, being like, what? It's not your fault?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:09) What are you—she's like, that's not your fault. Like, what are you doing? And I'm like, no, it is my fault. And then it started to get like contagious with her. But, I mean, it definitely wasn't overnight, but it's just interesting how the moment you start to change yourself, like, all the connections to you will start changing as well.

(Justin Turner at 00:36:26) That's right. It's psychological safety, at least within the team. If this leader is making themselves vulnerable and they're not seeing immediate public disciplinary action because they, you know, stood up and said, yeah, we messed up, then that makes it a little bit safer to fail and try new things, and it makes it a little bit safer to make yourself vulnerable. And it just cascades throughout the organization.

(Justin Turner at 00:36:55) Anybody that's capable of adopting the mindset will potentially pick it up and start adopting it, their version of it at least.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) I love it. And then I'm curious to know, Owen, what prompted the need for the CTO role at Favor? Because you're the first CTO, correct? In some bio, I saw that.

(Owen Samuels at 00:37:19) I think I was, yeah. I mean, we always had the founders, and then when I started there, there was a VP of engineering, which then I took that position over and then took over the CTO position.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:35) Well, so when the transition happened to the M&A, they were like, where are we going to place, you know, Owen? What role is Owen going to play? And then that's when they decided to take the CTO role?

(Owen Samuels at 00:37:47) Yes, I think so. I mean, there was, uh, I'm sure there's some grand plan for me when it comes to Favor and H-E-B. So, you know, after—I think it was right—yeah, it was right after the acquisition, you know, we moved myself into the CTO position, and that's when I started to get more involved in H-E-B on their engineering side.

(Owen Samuels at 00:38:11) And so we wanted to have someone come in on the Favor side that was high enough and could be on the executive team and really run the day-to-day. And so right now, there's a VP of engineering which basically runs a lot of the day-to-day stuff. And my role at Favor is, you know, not as great as what my role is at H-E-B right now, and I think that's by design right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) And what's the best leadership advice you've ever received?

(Owen Samuels at 00:38:42) You know, I think that the best thing that I probably heard is probably just be yourself. I think that's really the biggest thing. Like, people can see through you not being yourself, and I try to really just be myself. And to Justin's point, I wouldn't say vulnerable, but, you know, show all your colors. Right? Show the people who you really are, and I think that goes a long way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:06) Yeah. Authenticity is something that we can—it's like an intelligence capability of us humans. Like, we can tell when people are being authentic or inauthentic.

(Owen Samuels at 00:39:17) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's totally true. You know? I think when I joined Favor, um, you know, I was an engineer. Like, I was, you know, the guy sitting in the corner coding as much as I could, you know. And I think that—and when I was in the trenches with all the other engineers, and I think that went a long way, you know, as I became VP and CTO. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) What was the hardest thing for you personally as you made that transition?

(Owen Samuels at 00:39:46) You know, I've—I tell everyone, you know, anyone going through the going from an IC to, uh, you know, more of a management position. You know, I think in my career, I think I've done it like four or five times. So personally, and I tell everyone this is the hardest thing to do, is let go. You know, as an individual contributor or engineer, like, you want to control everything. Right? Like, you want to—as a manager, you have to let go and trust and, you know, let the engineer do what he needs to do or she needs to do, as well as let them fail. You know, you letting them fail allows them to learn and be a better engineer. And it's hard looking from, you know, the outside and saying, like, oh, if you do that, this is what's going to happen. But sometimes you have to be like, let them do it and let them learn. I think that's a really important thing.

(Owen Samuels at 00:40:41) So personally, it was just like being able to let go and trust others when solving a problem was really hard. And, you know, that's why I think I went back and forth from management to IC to management to IC, and eventually, it just kind of worked out. And now, I don't know if I could write a line of code. Actually, I wrote a line of code with my son two weeks ago. It was a print statement. I was pretty happy with myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:06) There you go. You can instantiate, like, dot new. You can do it. You can create a new object. Come on now.

(Owen Samuels at 00:41:14) I don't know. It's been a while. It's been a couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:17) But ipconfig? Come on.

(Owen Samuels at 00:41:20) It's like riding a bike, though, so I think we can get back at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) I agree. I mean, when I started this podcast, all the—like, the first year or two of it, I was writing—well, I've been writing code for like seventeen years with like no breaks, really, just writing code constantly. And then when the show got big enough where we had like teams and employees and stuff, I just went to managing our engineering team. And normally when I was managing, I was writing some code or at least doing code reviews like frequently and things like that, so I was in there. But it's amazing, you know, how quickly the tools and everything changes or the syntax and, you know, all the suites and the interfaces and then the styles. It's like, I do feel like it would be riding a bike. Like, I could get back into it and catch up real fast because those seventeen years of principles, right? And that's one thing I also learned too after learning multiple languages is the principles can transcend the language. Right?

(Owen Samuels at 00:42:20) Yeah. It's, you know, it's all like a lot of the classes are really about, like, here's the syntax on how to do this. And I'm sitting, you know, there talking to my son. I'm like, don't care about the syntax at all. Like, care about what's underlying. What's the foundational piece that you're learning? Because you're right. It transcends across any language, and syntax really doesn't matter. So when I was talking to my son, that reminded me, like, forget about syntax. It's all principles and foundational pieces.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) So, Justin, for your career progression, like, how do you look at your career and the progression? Because you're a very bright person. You're at a big company. You're doing good work, and I have a lot of respect for you. So I'm just curious how you see your career and the progression of it.

(Justin Turner at 00:43:13) It's very nontraditional, obviously. I'm very lucky to be where I am. I would say 90% of anybody's career is timing and luck. Right? Right place at the right time.

(Justin Turner at 00:43:26) That said, making sure that you have the right mindset, that you really are looking at all of the options available to you in any given situation, being willing to take risks is the biggest boost to my career. Like, most of my projects that led to me leading this org were moonshots. You know, built a little bit of credibility, built connections and networks, and then the next risky project would come along. And I'd evaluate it. I'm not going to do anything that's not going to succeed, but I can also look at something and go, you know what? We can make that succeed if we change some expectations around it or, you know, put these resources at it. And don't be afraid to take those kind of risks. And that's ultimately led to more responsibility, more opportunities. And anybody that finds themselves in a similar situation, I would give that advice. Have an ownership-based mindset where you look at yourself first for anything that needs to be resolved. Be open to feedback, and be willing to take risks, and you can succeed too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) Boom. You nailed it. That's like a mic drop moment, my friend.

(Justin Turner at 00:44:48) Oh, thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) So as we start to wrap up here, is there anything else that we want to get out there into the world?

(Justin Turner at 00:44:56) So anybody that's interested in learning more about H-E-B, I would recommend hitting up our blog, digital.heb.com. We post a lot of technical blogs there, context about what we're doing within the company. And then, similar, if you're interested in joining us in helping us solve these complex problems we talked about, check out heb.com/careers and check out and see if there's anything available. I know our internships just opened up, and we also have a variety of opportunities around digital.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) Nice. And they can apply for the internship on the careers page?

(Justin Turner at 00:45:36) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:38) Excellent. You got anything, Owen?

(Owen Samuels at 00:45:40) No. I'm a man of few words. I'm good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:44) He's like, I already did the best leadership advice, man. Come on. Oh, this is great. I had a lot of fun with you guys. Thank you so much for coming on and hanging out. I really appreciate it. And then I'll let you know if I end up moving to Texas, and then, you know, COVID finishes, vaccines come out or whatever it is, and in-person meetups and tech meetups start happening again. I'll go around to all the different towns in Texas and visit everyone and say hello. So I look forward to it.

(Owen Samuels at 00:46:12) That'd be great.

(Justin Turner at 00:46:13) Yeah. Thank you for having us on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:15) Thank you, guys. You have a fantastic day. Awesome.

(Justin Turner at 00:46:17) Alright. Thank you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:18) See you, guys. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.