Sam Babic - VP & Chief Software Architect at Hyland

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(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) Leaderbits is a leadership development program made specifically for technologists. It's the only action-based leadership training for your direct reports. Get better leaders faster at leaderbits.io, or you can email Billy Mays directly. You can email Joe directly, [email protected]. Now get excited because today we are talking to Sam Babic, the chief software architect at Hyland, and we discuss how to break introverted habits, learning through osmosis, and the formula for earning respect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. What's up, man?

(Sam Babic at 00:02:02) Good morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:03) You having a good day?

(Sam Babic at 00:02:03) Yeah. Where are you out of? What you got? Why do you guys say electricity?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) I don't know. I don't know. Usually I don't. It's probably because I'm wearing this shirt. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) I gave a talk this morning in Tampa, and we're like an hour away from Tampa. So gave a talk and then ran straight down here, right into the podcast right on time.

(Sam Babic at 00:02:23) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) What's that poster you got behind you?

(Sam Babic at 00:02:26) The Core. Have you ever seen that movie?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:28) No. Is it good?

(Sam Babic at 00:02:30) It's awesome. It's horrible. It's one of those sci-fi movies that everything's wrong in it, where every single piece of science is bad. There's actually a story behind that one if you want to ask it later or something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) Please. No, I think now is the moment.

(Sam Babic at 00:02:46) Now is the moment? So yeah, basically when I was at Hyland, I first started at Hyland maybe a year into it. I'm sitting there, and we were pretty small back then. We're about like 3,500 people now or something like that. I was employee 33 back in '97, and it was probably not even a year into it. The CTO at the time and our CEO called me in their office, and they said, "Hey, how would you like to write a, you know, rewrite our product for the web?" And I was like, "Hey, why not? Sure." And so I'm like, you know, "Why? Is there a reason?" And they're basically like, "Well, because we sold it." So I'm like, "Oh, all right. That's great."

(Sam Babic at 00:03:25) So you sold it. And so I'm like, so basically I was kind of the father of this rewrite, if you will. So taking us from this C++, application client application in an MFC to, you know, kind of to the web, I guess. And so we had to give it a name. And right around that time, I named it The Core. Right? So The Core was like the foundation, the platform for what the stuff was going to be built on. And maybe a month or two later, the movie came out, and it had Hillary Swank and, I forget the guy's name. But, you know, it's just a horrible sci-fi movie, but it came out like after I named it The Core. So I was like, "Man, they totally stole my name."

(Sam Babic at 00:04:07) Right? And so I was talking to the CFO, Chris Hoinlein at the time, and I said, "Man, I really got to have that poster," because it was up at the theater. It was one of those posters that was kind of like wallpapered to the wall. Like, I really want that poster because they stole my name. I want to frame it. And so he comes in the next day. He literally went to the theater and paid the guy at the theater to tear down the poster. He had it rolled up sitting on my desk with the stickies on, you know, the sticky tackiness on the back and all. So he basically paid the guy at the theater, you know, our CFO paid the guy at the theater to rip it down off the wall and give it to me so I could frame it. And incidentally, it's actually my birthday too. March 28. What? My birthday.

(Sam Babic at 00:04:48) So there's a lot of meaning behind this movie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) And that's the one I'm looking at right now. That's the actual one, right?

(Sam Babic at 00:04:56) That's the actual movie poster. Yeah. They basically drill down. The core of the earth stops spinning, and so all the effects that you get when you lose the earth's magnetic field, all the bad things been like, you know, the solar flares start coming in and birds can't navigate and all the crazy things that'll happen if you don't have a spinning core. And so they build a vehicle and Hillary Swank and I forget the guy's name, and they get into this vehicle and they drill down to the core to kind of reset the spin. And all the science is horrible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) Yes. And you've got to love it, because then you do an internship at NASA?

(Sam Babic at 00:05:32) I did. Yes. Exactly. So, I was at NASA for four years, right out of high school. The guidance counselor in high school was basically—I was there a valedictorian and salutatorian. Since I got second place, he gave me a consolation prize, and he said, "Do you want to go work at NASA?" And I was like, "All right." So he kind of recommended me to work at NASA. So I was at NASA for four years while I was going through college. So I kind of worked in, I worked in the satellite communications division at NASA.

(Sam Babic at 00:06:00) And actually, in fact, I worked on the ACTS satellite, which is the prototype for the low Earth orbit satellites that now run our phones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) Really?

(Sam Babic at 00:06:11) Yeah. The ACTS satellite was basically one of the first satellites that has some of the technology that the modern day satellites have to kind of support, you know, modern telecom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) I love it. You know, we had last week on the show, the CTO of NASA.

(Sam Babic at 00:06:25) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:26) Yeah. Douglas Terrier. He's so bright, man. He's just coolest guy.

(Sam Babic at 00:06:33) Yeah. No. And at NASA, it was a fun time. As I was graduating college, I didn't really want to work for the government. So it's definitely a cool place to be, but I kind of wanted to get into some private industries. So that's kind of why I left. Right? Pretty much on my, literally the, the last—I was at, I'm trying to think that my last week there, I came and I left lunch on Wednesday, and then I went interviewed at Hyland during lunch. And they offered me a job on the spot, and I drove back to NASA, and I said, "I'm quitting. My last day is Friday," and I started the next Monday. So my cycle time was like a couple days on that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:11) And you've been there since. It's like twenty years.

(Sam Babic at 00:07:14) Yep. Yeah. Twenty-one. Yeah. Twenty-one-plus years now. Yeah. I left NASA. I was at '93 to '97. I was at NASA, and I got my electrical engineering degree from Cleveland State. And then on '97, July '97, I left NASA, and I came to work at Hyland.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:27) So tell me a little bit about the progress. I mean, most people have, you know, a career where they're just jumping around. Right? But you've managed to stay there. Now I saw also that it's like Fortune 100 Best Places to Work and things like that. Like, I want some insight into your process and how things evolved.

(Sam Babic at 00:07:48) All right. Well, that's fair. So, I mean, yeah, being here twenty-one years, I got a lot of interesting stories, and I've seen a lot of evolution. I mean, honestly, one of the reasons I came, you know, in the first place was, so while I was working at NASA, you know, I was at college at Cleveland State. My degree is actually electrical engineering, and I really haven't used the electrical part of my degree ever. I guess back in the day, everybody told me, you know, engineers make all the money, computer scientists don't make anything. So I kind of broke the mold. I spent my four years, and I wanted to kind of get my four years and I actually graduated number one in my class in electrical engineering. But I had one of my computer courses with a dude named Cal, and his brother actually made at Case Western Reserve with our CTO, and he's like, "Hey, I'm getting this job at Hyland Software, you've got to go interview at this place." So I'm like, you know, it was right towards the tail end where we're about to graduate. And so Cal, you know, Cal's brother, Syed, roomed with Miguel, so that's kind of how I got the interview.

(Sam Babic at 00:08:49) And so I go into the interview, and, you know, see the, Packy Hyland Jr., the CEO interviewed me, and then Miguel Subizarreta, the CTO, he came to interview me. He was wearing sweatpants and he had an Indians T-shirt that was like down to his knees. And I'm like, "This is the place I want to work," because I was like, I could wear this kind of stuff every day. And, you know, I was just at NASA for four years too and I was like, you know, I just want to write some software there. You know, I was probably employee 33 at the time.

(Sam Babic at 00:09:17) Obviously, it was a Cleveland startup. Probably right around that, I guess, that the first dot-com era kind of bubble, if you will. But, you know, being a part of a startup in the Cleveland area, I think was cool. You know, just kind of seeing the culture and what he was doing there. So that's kind of what led me to basically say yes and hop on over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:43) That's excellent, man. Yeah. You look super comfortable. I like the shirt.

(Sam Babic at 00:09:47) Yeah. And like I said, over the last twenty-one years, it's pretty much, you know, I pretty much dressed like this. I looked younger, but, you know, I probably wore the same clothes twenty-one years ago. So the culture really hasn't changed really all that much. I mean, we've grown a lot. You know, we've had a lot of acquisitions. We've, you know, we do sales. Right? Everything's grown, but, honestly, like, the kind of culture and the type of people that we hire for are pretty much the same since when I was hired. So that's what I kind of like about it, and it's been pretty much the same for the last twenty-one years in that respect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:22) And do you currently have a CTO or CIO, or do you sort of operate as that?

(Sam Babic at 00:10:27) So yeah. So kind of how we're structured. So up until recently, our CTO actually retired a few years ago. So the guy that hired me, Miguel Subizarreta, our CTO at the time, he retired a couple years ago, and we kind of reorganized. And so, you know, over those twenty-one years, I started out in development, obviously, and I was a programmer.

(Sam Babic at 00:10:48) And then I was actually one of the first managers, I guess, because we had a vice president, but I was kind of one of the first managers. And then a couple years later, we created some associate vice president position. So I was actually associate vice president for quite some time. And then recently, we kind of reorganized. So when our CTO left, we kind of retired the title with him, I suppose. And his replacement, if you will, was our chief product and strategy officer, Brenda Kirk. And she actually, you know, grew up at Hyland for a while too. She's been here like eighteen years. And she came from a sales and strategy background. So the creation of the chief software architect role underneath strategy essentially was kind of like the functional arm of technology.

(Sam Babic at 00:11:30) So I'm kind of functionally the CTO, but, you know, I think that the chief software architect title, it's a VP-level position, but it kind of suits me better because I'm not really like a good front person. I'm a front man, I guess, if you will. So that CTO kind of front-man style, you know, I kind of consider myself the shadow government in kind of structure and all. So I kind of like living in the shadows and making sure that everything that is required to kind of support the technology is there. But, yeah, I pretty much operate as that kind of functional CTO role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:04) Excellent. How large is the organization?

(Sam Babic at 00:12:07) So, yeah, Hyland itself is, I don't know the number, 3,000-plus maybe 3,500. R&D, so we pretty much doubled our size in the last, I want to say, two to three years. We had, we had two rather large acquisitions in the last couple years, and we've acquired a number of companies in the past, I think going on ten years now. But in the last two to three years, the acquisitions almost doubled our size. So our R&D organization almost doubled as well. So I think we're somewhere around a thousand people in R&D, and that includes QA and developers and whatnot. All the other different roles that you have in R&D at scrum masters. Actually, the product owners report up through product management, but the scrum masters are considered R&D. So they're pretty much a thousand people in that organization. And so the way that they were organized to, you know, get a little bit more detail there, I guess.

(Sam Babic at 00:12:57) So as part of that, when we reorganized, the chief, there's really three, actually four vice president roles. There's a product management vice president, there's VP of engineering, and that's in charge of the actual day-to-day execution and creation of the product. The operations vice president actually is in charge of, you know, providing all the supporting infrastructure that's required for the engineering and architecture to kind of operate, and then there's myself. So a lot of the R&D organization reports up through engineering, and all the architects are actually a dotted line to me. So we purposely embedded, as part of this reorg, we actually created a number of new architecture positions.

(Sam Babic at 00:13:35) So there's team-level architects that operate at the scrum team level. There's principal architects that operate at the program level. We actually implemented as part of this reorg, you know, agile across the entire organization as well as scaled agile framework. So SAFe, I don't know if you're familiar with the scaled agile framework and the term SAFe. We've implemented that so that the principal architects operate at the program level. And then I actually have four enterprise architects that report directly through me. So that whole architecture organization is kind of a dotted line. So it's kind of when I say shadow government, it's kind of that glue. They report into their respective teams and programs, but they kind of all align up through architecture. So the architecture is kind of the core of everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) And it's, yeah. That sounds smart.

(Sam Babic at 00:14:16) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) And so, and then you're the lead of those, you're the leader of the shadow government.

(Sam Babic at 00:14:22) Yeah. I mean, yes. Yeah. That way. I'm going to be getting in trouble for that. But yeah. Yeah. It's kind of how I look at it. I mean, it's really, it's really making sure that, you know, because, you know, I've been here twenty-one years, so I've seen a lot of the evolution of the software. Right?

(Sam Babic at 00:14:34) Earlier, I said, you know, I'm the father of the Core, which is the first, you know, the first modern, I guess, platform, if you will, for the web. But over time, you know, we still have somewhat of a monolithic back-end architecture. So we're currently in a modernization phase right now. And that was in part, you know, kind of some of the motivation for some of this reorganization as well is to basically take our software to the next level using, you know, some more modern-day technologies. Essentially, accomplishing a lot of the things that we've been doing great for the last 21 years, but moving them more into, you know, modern-day kind of paradigms.

(Sam Babic at 00:15:08) And so I think, you know, the architecture is kind of key to that, especially because we're in this formative phase. We're now kind of rearchitecting a lot of this stuff. One of the tenets of our software, though, honestly, is, you know, over the last 21 years, our software is either hosted or on-prem. But one of our key tenets was, you know, the software was upgradable, you know, point-and-click configurable and point-and-click upgradable version over version over version. So you could take a version of on-prem software that was maybe running that's, you know, 12, 13, 14 years ago and apply the current version and it will upgrade, you know, all the database tables and the whole monolith magically up until the current state.

(Sam Babic at 00:15:45) Right? So that's kind of like the evolution and up until, you know, the last 18, 24 months, that's kind of where we're at. And now we're moving more towards, you know, microservices and modern-day applications, et cetera. The whole content services API economy kind of buzzwords.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) I love the buzzwords. But, uh, so give me a little context about the service, the value that Hyland brings to the world.

(Sam Babic at 00:16:09) Well, so traditionally, we're, um, you know, we were considered—if you look at the analyst speak, you know, Gartner and Forrester and the other analysts—you know, we're kind of in that enterprise content management space. So there's, you know, there's a lot of consolidation over the years. But essentially, you know, document storage, archive, search, business process management, workflow, customer correspondence management—all those things that basically you do with content, whether it's ingesting content, whether it comes electronically or via paper, and then, you know, doing something with that content. So whether you're routing the content or providing some kind of analysis on the content, and then perhaps outputting that content to some kind of format. So, um, you know, picture an—it's called a list of information.

(Sam Babic at 00:16:53) So patient wants to request their medical information. Um, you know, our software goes ahead and communicates to all the different various systems and takes the content that is augmented by Hyland's products itself and then creates that whole patient record, then delivers that as, you know, a printout or as content to somebody else. So, essentially, that whole end-to-end content management. People, if the viewers are familiar with other people like Documentum, OpenText, those are people that were in our space. IBM FileNet. So when IBM bought FileNet, these are all the things that over the last 21 years kind of consolidated out.

(Sam Babic at 00:17:25) Um, you know, we're kind of in that leader quadrant now with Gartner. So we're up there with, um, you know, Microsoft, OpenText, and Hyland are really the three leaders right now. But you have people too, like, you know, Box is in there as an emerging technology. So they would be considered in that same space. They're in that same kind of category as we are.

(Sam Babic at 00:17:43) And Gartner, um, you know, recently, you know, reenvisioned that enterprise content management moniker, and they moved it over to content services. And it's essentially the same capabilities, but, you know, with enterprise content management, there was a bigger focus on the management and the repository, and where content services is focusing on the use cases. So how do you take that content instead of just managing it and letting it kind of sit there? How do you expose that content via, you know, different—via APIs and components and different persona-based applications—so you can actually leverage the content that you have in those various use cases. And you've got things like, you know, our software applies to, you know, every industry.

(Sam Babic at 00:18:21) We literally have customers in literally every industry. We were big in healthcare now, so healthcare is actually one of our largest verticals. But, um, you know, healthcare, insurance, government, commercial, construction—basically, almost every vertical you can imagine, and all the back-office functions for those as well. So things like HR, accounts receivable, accounts payable, contract legal. So any department you can imagine within any vertical, we probably have some customers somewhere.

(Sam Babic at 00:18:48) And now with a lot of our recent acquisitions too, you know, our geographies are everywhere. We have offices all over the globe and, you know, customers really all over the globe as well. So we basically touch every industry. Government is another one. City, state.

(Sam Babic at 00:19:01) And not so much federal, but we're getting more in the federal government, but city, county, and state governments. So basically every vertical you can imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) And so when you, as you grew and ended up becoming the leader of these architects, like, what—was it difficult for you to learn more of the people skills or, you know, the human component of working in groups, or was it pretty easy?

(Sam Babic at 00:19:27) Um, that's a good question. I think I mean, I'm kind of a big introvert, but I think, you know, what happens over time is, you know, you kind of learn to play that extroverted bit, and you kind of learn from, you know, all the hands-on and all the courses that they kind of put you through. Um, and as you interact more with leaders. Right? So as I kind of grew through the organization, I, you know, interacted more with some of these executives.

(Sam Babic at 00:19:52) And being as small as we were, it was kind of nice because you get to interact with some of those executives sooner. Right? So, like, you're talking to VPs when you're—you know, it's harder. You enter a, you know, 5,000-person organization. You're not just, you know, elbow-to-elbow with the CEO.

(Sam Babic at 00:20:07) But back in the day, you were really—literally, the C-levels were, like, your buds. Right? And so you kind of learned—you know, it was really great to learn from them, you know, very early on and kind of a lot of that rubbed off, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And so I think I picked up a lot of the people skills from actually working with the executives and the vice presidents really early on just because it was possible when you're in a startup like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:30) Yeah. If you do the things that great leaders do, you mimic them, you become one of them. Right? It rubs off. So do you—and that's putting you on the spot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:39) It just popped up in my head. So, like, now that you're at the top of this large organization, do you have any way that you're helping your younger, you know, architects or engineers get closer to these people so they can benefit from that?

(Sam Babic at 00:20:53) Um, so yeah. We—I think we have a—you know, when we reorganized the department, we created a number of things. So for instance, this whole concept of the team architect, the principal architect, and the enterprise architect. Um, those enterprise architects are essentially kind of vice president-class people. So they're architects kind of like, I guess, me if you want to look at it that way.

(Sam Babic at 00:21:13) Um, and there's a whole mentorship program that's set up. So even though the architects are reporting into their respective areas, so the team architects report up through R&D managers, the principal architects up through directors. But they actually have that same dotted line—there's a dotted line hierarchy through the architecture group too. So they're actually—the Dev 4s are being mentored by—sorry, the team architects are also called Dev 4s. That's why I'm calling them that. And then they're mentored by the principal architects, and then in turn, they're mentored by the enterprise architects.

(Sam Babic at 00:21:43) And we put them through a lot of—we actually call that whole group Technical Leadership. We call it leadership for a reason because we don't just consider them, you know, architects or, you know, programmers. They go through leadership training as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) That's awesome.

(Sam Babic at 00:21:57) And a lot of them, honestly, a lot of them came from—so when we actually introduced the role, a lot of them came out of their other roles. So there are some architects that, you know, originally were, you know, programmers that became R&D managers or directors, and in some cases came back out of that into these architect roles. In fact, one of my enterprise architects was one of the associate vice presidents that was along with me for the ride here. He's actually been here one year longer than I have.

(Sam Babic at 00:22:21) Dan Wilson, he was one of the associate vice presidents with me, but he's one of my enterprise architects now. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) How many—so are there a lot of the original 33 around?

(Sam Babic at 00:22:33) That's funny that you mentioned because I actually did a—I went into our systems, and I was curious what my seniority was. I'm like, well, exactly where am I in the seniority chain now? Because, you know, people did retire. There was some attrition. So I'm actually number 14 of those 33 now.

(Sam Babic at 00:22:50) So at least—at least, um, if you do the math, at least 19 of those people. So there are the original 33, but there's at least 13 people below me or 13 people ahead of me. Not all of them vice presidents that are still here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Wow. That's some—that's a sticky company, man.

(Sam Babic at 00:23:05) Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Actually, it's funny that you mentioned that. Our retention rate within the company is actually pretty low. But within R&D itself is actually, you know, very low. I mean, I don't know what the current numbers are at, but I think, you know, typical numbers for the industry, I don't know, I want to say 8 to 10%, maybe closer to 10%.

(Sam Babic at 00:23:23) Our retention rates within R&D are like maybe 4%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) I'm sorry. So your retention rate's, like, 97% and your attrition rate's, like, 3%?

(Sam Babic at 00:23:32) Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Retention rate.

(Sam Babic at 00:23:34) I was sort of the inverse. Yeah. The turnover rate, like, 3, 4, where normally it should be, like, 8 to 10. You're right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:41) Okay. Cool. I was just like, yeah, it's semantics. We get like turnover, retention, whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:49) All this. Basically, it's sticky. People stay. They like what we're doing. And where are you—is your—where are you located, like, physically? Are you still in the same spot?

(Sam Babic at 00:23:59) Um, yeah. So that's another interesting question. So, um, yeah, I've been—I've been from this area my whole life. I grew up in the area called Parma, but moved over where the company was located in Westlake. So we're a suburb of Cleveland.

(Sam Babic at 00:24:11) The last couple of years though, I actually ended up buying a house in Florida. I do spend half my time down in Florida now. So I spent about five months down. The last three years I've been—and I fly back and forth during the winter, but I've became an early snowbird, unfortunately.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:26) Where—where in Florida?

(Sam Babic at 00:24:27) Uh, Melbourne Beach on the Ocean Atlantic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) You're right by NASA, dude. Come on.

(Sam Babic at 00:24:31) I know. Seriously. Right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:33) You—oh, so did you grow up over there? Is that how you got NASA?

(Sam Babic at 00:24:37) No. No. I—yeah. Well, I grew up at NASA Lewis Research Center. It's right by the airport.

(Sam Babic at 00:24:40) So that's how we have a NASA in Cleveland. So I was at—so NASA now it's NASA Glenn, I believe. Um, but, yeah, when I—years ago, it was NASA Lewis, and they're right next to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. So that's kind of where I spent four of my years. So, no, I didn't grow up there.

(Sam Babic at 00:24:53) I was—I've been a Cleveland nerd my whole life, but the winters have been getting rough. So I basically decided to kind of split my year down there. And, you know, the whole remote technology, you see me on the Owl, you can tell that I got some pretty good technology now, so it doesn't really affect it too much. And, again, I fly in and out during that time. It's a pretty easy flight from Orlando.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:17) Yeah. I mean, I'm like an hour and a half from Orlando. So, uh, do you—can you see from Melbourne? Can you see the SpaceX launches, like, at 1 a.m.?

(Sam Babic at 00:25:26) Actually, yeah. That's a funny story. So there's a bar that I go to to pick up—I, so I go—usually my routine is I work, I'll go to the gym, and then on the way home, I'll pick up, you know, food for my wife. It's basically takeout kind of people.

(Sam Babic at 00:25:41) And there's a bar on the beach called Sands Bar. It's also called Bikini Bar. And I'm there one day. I go to the gym, I go to the Bikini Bar, and I'm like, um, you know, I order my food and there's a bunch of people and they're all facing north. Right? And I'm like—and the waitress is like, uh, she's like, "Oh, it's another launch."

(Sam Babic at 00:25:58) You know, she—because they're like, they're on the beach right there. They see it constantly. Right? And I'm like, "Oh." And I turn, and here's this rocket—one of the SpaceX rockets is like, you know.

(Sam Babic at 00:26:07) And it's already like, you know, it's still very visible. You know, it's got the big smoke trail, but it's still far enough away. You know, Cape Canaveral is like—I still want to say from that bar, it's probably still a good 15, 20 miles maybe north of me. But all of a sudden, you know, the sound wave hits you. Right? It's like, that blast.

(Sam Babic at 00:26:24) And you see this rocket clear as day. You see the smoke trail and then all of a sudden—so everybody's watching this rocket launch and I'm just waiting for my shrimp, you know, and I didn't even realize there's a rocket launch and I was like, "Oh, duh." And honestly, I hadn't really looked to see if I could see it from my house because I'm a little bit south of there. Um, I'm actually 15 miles south on A1A.

(Sam Babic at 00:26:42) It's a quick drive. It's a 50-mile-an-hour—you know, A1A is 50 miles an hour, but I haven't actually seen if I can see the rockets from my house. I probably could.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:52) That'd be—yeah. Because I looked up the launch schedule because, you know, I got my wife and my daughter, and we were thinking, you know, maybe go see a launch. But they're all, like, at 1 and 2 a.m. They're really late. Like, there's not a lot of launches that happen, uh, in, you know, outside of those hours.

(Sam Babic at 00:27:07) Yeah. No. And my guess is I could—I probably would end up seeing it. I mean, Florida's so flat. Right?

(Sam Babic at 00:27:11) I should be able to see it if I stare up into the sky. So I think it'd probably be able to see it. I have to check on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:16) So I'm curious. Uh, you said that you took some, like, leadership training. That's how you improved for your leadership. Uh, and then, of course, your technical stuff, you're always having to stay sharp because everything's changing so fast. To some of the architects, maybe some younger architects, what advice would you give them about how you keep sharp in your role?

(Sam Babic at 00:27:39) Um, I think, honestly, I think one of the best things you could do, um, and I do it to this day, and I almost have to do it at this point is, you know, I don't—I haven't programmed for a while, to be honest, ever since we reorganized. But I still learn a lot through osmosis, and what that really means is you've got to basically be around smart people and have—

(Sam Babich at 00:28:01) People and ask questions and learn from them, right? I think once you get to a certain point, so I think early in your career, you take the technical things, right? But essentially, after three to five years of doing what you're doing, if you take the whole 10,000 hours, it makes you a master, right? If you think about 40-hour work weeks, 2,080 hours a year, you're pretty much a master after five years. And at that point, you can really start interfacing with other people, and you can start learning through that osmosis. Because once you're a master at something — another piece of trivia, I'm actually a third-degree black belt as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:17) Nice.

(Sam Babich at 00:28:37) And so, I mean, once you — I guess what I'm saying is once you know one martial art and you're a black belt in it and you go to another studio and you want to learn a different style, it comes really easy, right? It's the same thing here. So you've learned the basics and you're kind of now almost mastered it. So you're three to five years in, and you can actually continue learning. Obviously, you're still going to program and you're going to read books and you're going to attend conferences and stuff. But I think you can't really replace just talking to other people and learning via that osmosis because that's how you get all those other experiences. I learn every day from my principal architects and even my team-level architects, right? I can't program that stuff, and I don't see every technology that there is. But the second there's a term I don't know or some new concept, I talk with them for 15, 20 minutes. And obviously, I'm no expert on that concept, but I'm pretty good at, you know, pretty conversational with it after that point, because these things are all the same category of my knowledge, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:33) Yeah. Well, you point out a good point. You remember the experiences you have. You could read a lot of articles and textbook. You could read a lot of stuff. But when you actually engage with that human and you have that conversation about the thing you heard but you didn't know, that memory will stick with you for a long time, and it's much more usable.

(Sam Babich at 00:29:51) Oh, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Yeah. That's awesome. So the team that you have, what opportunities do you have to speak regularly? Do you do a morning meeting? Do you do a weekly meeting? How do you engage with your team regularly?

(Sam Babich at 00:30:07) So departmentally, we have a number of different teams. So again, in kind of my role, I kind of cross-cut as well. So when it comes to the architects themselves, we've just instituted some workshops. So just the other day, we had a full day-long workshop where we actually did some education upfront, and then we spent some of the afternoon kind of looking at their respective areas and their products and kind of designing technical roadmaps for those. So there's some training involved there. So we had a number of points there, and there's going to be a number of workshops going on in the future as well. We do have all-hands meetings. So we have all-hands R&D meetings, typically once a month. And then there's other leadership meetings that occur probably every quarter or every other month. So there's a number of opportunities to talk to different levels. So I work a lot with the directors — the principal architects report up to them and they kind of own the actual execution of the programs. There's actual leadership meetings where I have an opportunity to kind of work through the directors to kind of have them be that extra eyes and ears over the whole architecture group to kind of help me out with that. So there's definitely a number of their peer leadership things. There's all-hands meetings. There's these architectural workshops. We have these tech leadership forums where there's just the — that's kind of more informal where the architects kind of get together. And sometimes they'll have me talk if there's a topic they want me to talk about, but usually I kind of just stay out of their way and I just say hi. And they kind of do an information exchange amongst themselves there. So I think there's all those kind of things going on. We also have heavy participants. A lot of them are volunteers with — we do a lot of community outreach. So seventh grade through twelfth grade, we do a lot of field trips and shadowing, but we also hold tech camps, programming boot camps, tech camps, and other events actually here at Hyland for seventh through twelfth graders. And a lot of those people actually are volunteers there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:04) That's amazing. You have a very living organization. There's a lot happening, like a lot of engagement, a lot of culture, a lot of people getting together and sharing. That's really good.

(Sam Babich at 00:32:16) Yeah. Actually, that was — one of the things that one of the boards I'm on — I'm on a local board as well. A lot of this engagement that we kind of instituted here at Hyland, there's a local board called BRiTE, and they're really concerned with attracting, preparing, and placing students within Northeast Ohio. So it's kind of — it's not even really a nonprofit. It's more of a gathering of local executives. So we have CIOs and CEOs from some of the local companies, like Eaton and Sherwin-Williams and Cleveland Clinic. And then we actually have universities on our board as well. And the whole purpose of that organization is to really ensure — and this is kind of how this bled into — because I actually, the whole community outreach piece kind of grew out of my organizational structure a number of years ago, and it was kind of inspired by my participation on that board. So I get — kind of that kind of connects the dots here. So a lot of the community outreach stuff that we were doing, at least on the technical side in terms of these camps and whatnot, was somewhat inspired by participation on this local board whose sole purpose was to attract, prepare, and place students within the region. Because we found that if you can get to the students earlier — you know, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth — and they create a connection with you, it's okay if they go to university or college somewhere else, they'll want to come back, right? And we're not the West Coast, right? I mean, just be honest, we're Cleveland. And so you've got to do whatever it takes to kind of create that stickiness, if you will, with the local people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) That's really smart. I like your — you're one of the companies that I would like to come learn from.

(Sam Babich at 00:33:57) Open invite whenever you like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Yeah. The way you've been able to structure your leadership with engineers, because, look, I started out in engineering and then moved into team lead, and it wasn't an easy transition for me to go from being so quiet and detailed and analytical to working with people. And so it wasn't super easy, and so, you know, my thing in life now is helping people through the podcast content and the books and everything, just by them being able to hear, like, exactly what you're talking about earlier. When they can, on their drive in, listen to you talk about it, that helps them. They'll take something from that, right? And so you have successfully done this at scale for engineers, and it would totally be cool to talk to whoever is putting together, you know, you and whoever is putting together that stuff to see what you've learned from the trial and failure of mentoring up these engineers.

(Sam Babich at 00:34:52) Well, and that — another cool thing I think about this is that, you know, I said we did a lot of acquisitions. When we do the acquisitions, we actually do look for cultural fit. And so even these last two acquisitions that I described, you know, they were very well-aligned from a people perspective. You know, similar attitudes, similar culture. And I think, you know, we actually leverage a lot of what we learned from them in some of these areas. So for example, one of the acquisitions that we had done, they had a much more formal architecture group than we did. And so one of my enterprise architects is actually one of the people from that acquisition, and she actually helped kind of grow some of this stuff because they actually had a more formal architect. So we've leveraged — you know, we don't just say, "Hey, we're going to gobble up these companies or whatever." We leverage kind of their expertise in these areas. They definitely had a much more mature architectural organization. And I already spun off the whole architecture group, and I'm like, "Hey, this is interesting. Tell me what you know. Let me learn from you." And so I learned — we learned a lot from that acquisition on the architecture side. And, you know, one of the other organizations that we had had a very strong product management function, for example. So there's a lot of things we learned from them on the product management side as well. But I think that can only happen when you acquire people that have a cultural fit, right? When they're more like you, that's kind of how you can learn those things more readily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) So in the acquisitions, learning and bringing these people together, you've of course identified different strengths within different organizations, but the act of pulling them together at different times, is that all a pretty smooth process?

(Sam Babich at 00:36:41) I think, yeah, I think we've gotten better at it over time. I don't know the exact number. We've done, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 over the last number of years, which made the last — you know, they get smoother as they go. The one acquisition of one of our former — way back in the day, they were kind of our nemeses, which was interesting. This is like 15, you know, 20 years ago. But now that, you know, they're — we're best friends now, obviously. But, you know, that was the largest one. I think that one might have been — we were, I want to say, I don't know what time, we might have been 1,500 employees, and then we brought in about 800. And that one actually went fairly smoothly. We had a number under our belt. That would happen to be the largest one, though. But that one actually did go smoothly. We brought on a number of geographies, a number of products, but I think because we've done it enough times and because, like I said, there is that kind of cultural fit, it was kind of eerie in some ways when we were, you know, once — because during an acquisition, there's some things that you can't see, right? You're kind of like buying a house and not being able to see inside the house, right? But then afterwards, you learn a lot more about it and you're kind of amazed that a lot of the trajectory that some of these guys are on are the same trajectory that we were on as well, which actually speaks a lot to kind of their thought processes and, you know, somewhat validating, I guess, too. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:06) So when you mentioned a lot about culture, engineers — we have a lot of engineers, both team members and leaders that listen. So could you describe the profile of an ideal cultural fit of an engineer or product manager or just in general?

(Sam Babich at 00:38:24) Well, I think, I mean, I think the ideal profile is, I guess, first and foremost, you know, the attitude and the ability to kind of work with others. So, you know, there's certain things you can train, but you can't train attitude. I'm sure a lot of people on your show at some point or another said that. But I think that the attitude and the ability to collaborate are two of the most important things. You know, just general skills can be trained or retrained. But I think definitely the ability for people to work through problems, I guess, right? Because there's going to be friction. If you think about an agile team or an organization, right? You have, you know, at the agile level, you've got scrum masters and you've got product owners and you've got your developers, you have architects. There's all these different roles, right? And, you know, when you're a startup and when you're smaller, you know, you might not have all those roles necessarily because you're wearing many hats. But as you start growing, you break out into these roles. So you have individual product owners, scrum masters, developers, and they're wearing their own hats. And you're at some point going to have some kind of friction, and it comes down to the employee's ability to kind of work through that friction with each other because it's going to happen, right? And even if you go one level up, if you think about it in terms of the Scaled Agile Framework and SAFe, how we do it here at Hyland, you know, we have directors and their counterparts would be like product managers, right? And so you all these different roles that have to interact to actually kind of create this product. And there's going to be, you know — and it, yeah. And actually, the architects too at that program level, I guess. And there's going to be times when they don't agree, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Oh, yeah.

(Sam Babich at 00:40:02) Especially technical people, right? Everybody's got opinions. And even amongst the architects themselves, right? I think one of the biggest challenges that they a lot of times can work through. So once you get past those kind of people leadership things, there's still, you know, still highly opinionated role, right? And you're not no longer individual contributor, you're actually designing architectures that are used by the masses, right? But then if you're collaborating with other architects, they're going to have varied opinions. So it comes down to their ability to actually accept feedback and input from others and then synthesize that into something. And at times that requires compromise, right? Because there's no right answer. It's just programming, right? There's 10 million — there's an infinite number of ways to program something and architect something. There's never a true right answer. And that's why I think a lot of people have to recognize too is that, you know, people that are trying to dig in their heels for, you know, philosophically or for a certain thing they believe in, you know, there's never a right answer. It comes down to compromise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:04) I like it. And that ultimately traces back to at, like, core there's a core attitude, and then there's, you know, you could train a little bit as far as, like, people have good core attitude, but they tend to dig in their heels. You know, you work a little bit on that. But yeah. I know what you mean. It's hard to describe, but when you're sitting there engaging with the human, with the person, attitude and style. So, yeah, that's a real good one. Actually, I think you're the first person who's ever said the words "you can't train attitude." I'm going to make a little quote thing from that.

(Sam Babich at 00:41:37) Oh, sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:38) I love it. You win that award, Sam. Thank you. Excellent. So alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:45) You create a core. You've got massive amounts of respect there as a leader. Do you personally mentor any of the other leaders there?

(Sam Babich at 00:41:58) Well, yeah. So in addition to the enterprise architects that report directly to me, I have one-on-ones with some of the—not all of them. There's about 30 principal architects, but there are a number of principal architects that I mentor directly. And then I actually have one-on-ones with some of the directors and even a few of the R&D managers. In some of those cases, it's by request. But right now, I guess I still have the bandwidth where I am not saying no to some people. I guess eventually, if 200 people wanted one-on-ones with me, there's not enough time. But I've been asked for one-on-ones with people that want me to be their mentor, and I haven't said no yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) That's awesome. Dude, you're changing the world. You're changing their lives.

(Sam Babich at 00:42:39) Yeah. Good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:41) It feels good, doesn't it?

(Sam Babich at 00:42:43) Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of what I learned—and I said this earlier—I learned a ton from starting early on and being able to interact with some of the leaders that made Hyland what it is. And a lot of osmosis, right? I learned a lot from osmosis. I actually got a funny story. Like, these things stick with you, right? So Packy Junior, I have a lot of—I have other funny stories that probably can't tell about Packy Junior. He's retired. He was the founder and CEO, but he's retired since. But I remember—so me and Dan, Dan Wilson, one of my enterprise architects, the guy that actually predates me—we're in an elevator in our old building, and Packy goes—this is, mind you, this is like, what, 1998 at this point, because it's still in our first building. And Packy goes, "Is there anything you guys need?" And Dan Wilson says, "We want 21-inch monitors." Now, by the way, flat screen. Sorry. We want 21-inch flat screens. Now nowadays, nobody thinks, "Oh, that's interesting." Right? This is 1998. A 21-inch flat screen was $6,000.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:51) Yeah.

(Sam Babich at 00:43:51) In the elevator, Packy just like that, Packy's like, "You got it." Right? He didn't know how much it cost, honestly. So Dan's like, "We want 21-inch flat screens." Packy's like, "Yes." We get off the elevator. He literally, within a couple days, we've got 21-inch flat screens, and he's like, "Man, I wish I would have known how much these cost." Anyways, they were $6,000 a pop. And we each got—we had the first 21-inch flat screen monitors, and they were like I said, they were like $6,000, and Packy did it. Like, he kept his word. He asked us what we needed, and we told him, and he—you know, and then that sticks with you. Like, I mean, you can't not take that with you, you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31) No. You make a very valid point. The way you create trust and respect is by saying you're going to do something and then you follow through when you do it. And yeah, that's a great example of that. Yep. Awesome. Man, we did it. You and I together, we made a podcast.

(Sam Babich at 00:44:50) Awesome. How do you feel? This is great. This is actually my first—I wasn't sure what to expect. This is actually my first podcast, if you can imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) No. In honor of you, we were listening to some metal music prior to the podcast starting. It was a lot of fun.

(Sam Babich at 00:45:05) Oh, wonderful. That's great. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:07) Excellent. So I'll reach out to you next time I'm in the area up there, maybe you happen to be there that part of the year, or maybe if I'm going to see a rocket launch, I'll text you just to see if you happen—sometimes the universe lines up like that, man. It's really weird. And if we have the chance to meet, that'd be awesome.

(Sam Babich at 00:45:25) Yeah. No. Hey, no problem. I mean, actually, honestly, I'm heading there soon. I'll be there for December through May. So if somehow you end up in that area, seriously, just text me. I'm working from home, so I got nothing better to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:37) Awesome, man. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]—you CC me on the email—I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.