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Today, we're talking to Dylan Etkin, founder and CEO at Sleuth, about how CTOs can master metrics and move beyond dashboard graveyards. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

It's been three or four hundred episodes since we last got to spend some time together. What's changed since 2021? It's been about three, four years now.

Yeah, I mean, so many things have changed, right? I mean, our economy has changed. I think last time we spoke, we were probably cowering in fear of COVID-19. You know, so lots more in-person presence. I don't even know when we last spoke. There might have been a nascent space around what it is that we do with Sleuth. There's a thriving space around us now with lots of new competitors and old competitors and those sorts of things. And, you know, I think like everybody in the software world, obviously the last year and a half, two years has just been a real shift in the amount of value that you need to provide in order to actually sell and be impactful for organizations, just with all the layoffs and the reduction in funding and those sorts of things.

Help me understand something. So I talked to a lot of tech leaders. Everyone approaches, writes content, has conversations as if this engineering management metric thing isn't solved, as if it is an open problem. So I'm curious, will that get solved before AI replaces team members? Like, will we end up never actually solving this, like, just unsolvable problem? Or have you guys solved it, and now it's just waiting for people to learn about the solution and adopt it and understand it?

That's a great question. I think that it's somewhere in between, right? I think all of these things are gray. I think it is far more solved today than it has ever been. I would say that it is far more solved today than it was when we last spoke. I don't know if it will ever be fully solved until perhaps the AI takes over and sort of says, "Yeah, I'm fine," right? I don't know. I hope that doesn't happen.

I got that question from your... I read your engineering blog, and you're talking about anti-patterns when implementing AI. And number one was replacing team members with AI. Have you been seeing people... You mentioned in the article a little bit about people jumping the gun. Have you seen that firsthand? Or have you heard it through networks? I haven't personally met anyone who's mistakenly fired teams of people thinking AI is going to replace them. Have you?

Oh, interesting. I mean, I have a friend who works in the video game industry, and they let go of their entire concept artist team. You know, so yeah. And they're just using the AI tooling for that, which, I mean, if you think about it, kind of makes sense. They're not using the assets that come out of that in game. They're just saying, "Hey, what if it was a purple polka-dotted hippopotamus?" Right? And, you know, AI is good enough to get you into the realm of, "Alright, conceptually we like that and we want to move forward," or we don't. So, you know, I mean, I don't know if in software dev, like, in what we're doing, I've seen a lot of that. But I think there's a lot of shifting going on.

Now, I want to see a purple polka-dotted hippopotamus.

And today we could. We could just...

We could. We could just type that in. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You can visualize... You know, I've been doing that with my kids. Yeah. What was it? He wanted to see a... My son, my five-year-old, wanted to see a monster truck made out of hamburgers.

There you go.

Flipped open GPT, and I said, "Show me this," and boom. It was beautiful. It was a magnificent monster truck made out of hamburgers.

I mean, we have a really fun marketing campaign that we're running right now where we got a bunch of, you know, influencers or folks that have exciting jobs as CTOs in the industry. And we have this idea of this "just" campaign where, you know, somebody comes to you and asks, "Could you just do this thing?" And it's kind of the tip of the iceberg. It's the ice cube that is hiding the iceberg below. And so we've collected stories from these folks, and then we kind of created an emoji of these individuals and then put that together on these billboards. But for the emojis, yeah, I'd say 85 to 90% of the heavy lifting was AI, giving us... You know, describing the individual and getting the emoji and getting the right positioning. And then the rest of the way was our designer, you know, cleaning it up.

Are they on your website?

No. We just... We're running them in SF right now, and then there'll be a run on the Nasdaq later in November. And then there'll be some in bus shelters around AWS re:Invent in Vegas. But it's amazing how we all have the same stories, right? Like, you know, one of them was like, "Just add more... Just get more GPUs," right? Or "Just add autocomplete," or "Just add dark mode." You know? And there's a dark mode. That one's a good one. Yeah. And, you know, I think our punchline for that one is "80% in two days," you know, three months later we shipped the feature or something along those lines, right? Where it's just... It seems simple. You just do it, right?

And "just change the style sheet." Yeah. Go ahead.

I think the thing that I love too is, as an engineering leader, you know, I have gone from being asked "just" questions to asking "just" questions, right? Like, as a startup founder, now I'm the one being like, "Can't we just do this thing?" You know, I'm sure I said, "Can't we just add AI?" And they're like, "We can, but, you know, come on, man."

Dylan, just add the button. Just add the button. Just a little checkbox on the page, and we're good.

Exactly, right?

And we're good. Yeah. Yeah.

Just add a link in the header. And, like, you know, twelve months later in a UI rewrite.

It's true. Yeah. I built financial planning software for several years, and I did it alongside a financial, non-technical financial planner, right? So he was business guy, knew how to run that world, and we built the software to help his business. And I learned how to deal with "just" conversations really, really, really well, right? Because it's like if you're modeling someone's financial future, there is tens of thousands of variables that are going into these calculations. And if they're like, "Oh, just add this one little change here," and that's going to... It's got to work, right. It's got to be tested, and you've got to understand it. So yeah, those... What have you learned with "just" conversations? What's the most important thing if somebody comes to you and they give you a "just dark mode," "just GPU"? How do you handle that?

I mean, you know, the thing I love about this campaign for us is one of the big things that we're trying to give companies in terms of value is aligning engineering and business. And, honestly, most of these "just" circumstances have to do with that alignment. So, you know, when there is a misalignment between expectation or reality or allocations or who's going to work on what or what the potential value of that could be, I think that's when you get into these "just" situations where, you know, there's just not enough alignment between the asker and the folks that understand it, or perhaps there's not enough of a realization that it is a large ask, but it is an iceberg, not an ice cube, that's being asked for. So really, I don't know if there's a one-size-fits-all about what we've learned, but really, at the end of the day, alignment is key for all these sorts of things when you're trying to do a better job with engineering and your business.

I learned a new term from you from the prep call. What are dashboard graveyards?

Dashboard graveyards.

I mean, it's...

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's something that we talk about. I think that we're all, in tech, a little bit addicted to dashboards. They make individuals that create them or the individual who tends to consume them feel really good about themselves. And, you know, in certain circumstances, they can be wonderful. You know, if I'm trying to debug an operational issue and I want to see real-time metrics of what's going on with my servers, a dashboard can help me get out of a whole lot of trouble. Now the trouble in my mind is that we tend to over-rely on them. And, I mean, you tell me if you've had this experience: Somebody creates a dashboard. They think it's the bee's knees. They think it's the answer to everything, and perhaps it's something that you're meant to consume. And then you go look at it, your interpretation of what's on that dashboard might be different than what that individual who sent it your way interprets it to be. It might be the case that some of that data has gotten stale at some point. So, you know, what data can you believe? What data can't you believe? You know, is there a point in time that this was accurate? Is it accurate any longer? How am I meant to interpret it? And then what the hell am I even supposed to do with it? What's the point of it to exist? And so a dashboard graveyard, right, is kind of this collection of dashboards where they're not impactful. You don't know what to do with them. They might be holding some very, very promising and exciting information, but how would you know? There's no interpretation. There's no shared understanding. And it's very often the case that you just don't know what to do next.

Another thing that I read about on your blog that really caught my attention was discussing why traditional meetings suck and drain your soul away. That's poetic.

I think that might have been my title. I was going for something a little grabby there, but it happens.

It worked. It worked. It was my favorite thing I read because not only was it written well, I completely identified with it. We've got two meetings a week at the company, and they're under thirty minutes, and fifteen of those is socialization stuff. "How'd your week go?" Things like that. I don't like meetings. Yeah. I find them... They're soul-sucking. Yeah. So when you're building a product that helps have less meetings, does that make you feel on mission, on purpose?

Yeah. Absolutely. Or, you know, I think better than have less meetings is have meetings that don't feel like your soul has been sucked away. Because, you know, when you said that, I can relate completely. There are definitely some meetings where I dread it, and I don't want to be a part of it. But I would say that sometimes the most fulfilling thing that I have done is been in some sort of meeting where you really just got through a lot of different things. There was a meeting of the minds. You came out aligned with other people, excited and enthusiastic about what you were going to do. You felt like something that would have taken you days or weeks offline was accomplished in an hour. And I think that's the thing that you want to do. You want to turn every meeting into one of those where you've gotten the drudgery and the details and the data and the interpretation of that stuff kind of out of the way before you get into the meeting. And then you get into the meeting and you just hit the ground running.

And so when you meet new CTOs, how do you describe what you do? Because in some ways, you're describing it as you turn meetings into reviews. There was a couple different ways you guys have described it. How do you describe it when you meet a CTO and they ask, "Oh, what does Sleuth do?"

I mean, for a CTO, I think the easiest way to understand is just that you're going to help them align business and engineering. So every CTO I've ever met recognizes that that is their job, right? Like, they are in charge of building a world-class engineering organization, but at the end of the day, they're the one that has the understanding that business is a driver and that business has needs and that engineering is there to facilitate these things, right? And to work in concert and to work together with the business to accomplish the things that they need to do. So I don't usually start with meetings just because I think, you know, that pigeonholes you. But the concepts of how are you going about understanding how well you are aligned with the engineering efforts that you are undertaking? How well aligned are they to business? And how do you prove that? You know, do you have data around that, or is that more of a gut feeling? Because for most CTOs, I would say nowadays, there's some form of data. But for the most part, it's like one of these chain of gut checks, right? Where it's like, I have a really good gut over years. That's why I've been hired into a CTO role. I also hire well. All the people that work under me have great guts as well. And then we sort of run that all the way down through the org so we have a gut feel of how things are going and how well we are aligned versus, you know, using quantifiable data to inform those things.

Can you give me a specific example of how you actually do this? Like, you go into a company that doesn't have this in place. How does this actually play out?

Yeah. I mean, probably the easiest example would just be surfacing effort, right? So how many full-time employees are working on the different initiatives that you have? So capturing those initiatives, maybe it's as Jira epics or however it is that an organization is capturing the things that they are working on at any given time, and then showing the amount of effort that is going into each one of those things, and then, you know, further breaking that down by how much of that effort is new feature work versus keeping the lights on or doing support work or, you know, technical debt and those sorts of things. You know, and just giving a really clear data-driven understanding of where are we spending our time? Where do we think we were spending our time? Where should we be spending our time? And do those match?

Yeah. So but when you meet these clients, right, how you see the market, because you're actually implementing the software and working with them. How many of these companies... Just broad gut feel, right? How many of these companies have that initial categorization that's actually tied to business outcomes versus feature sets or, you know, listing... It's tied to apps. Like, how many people have their epic setup or whatever system they're using, and it's already set up connected to business value versus how many people do you have to help teach and shape to better understand how to do that? I mean, I know that there's people that, um, they know they need to do it, and they might be doing it in some other organizational way, right? Like, in some plan, some 90-day roadmap or whatever. They might be doing it there. But how many people have data that's already orchestrated or collected by business outcome?

I mean, I think it's what you said last, which is that they tend to have the pieces of it laying around. You know? It's rarely the case that we meet folks that have nothing. Although, actually, we just spoke with some folks just the other day, so I'm contradicting myself. They, you know, in their words, they had their ass handed to them by the board.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:15:52) Right? And the board basically was like, "Look, we can assume that you're doing something, but from our perspective, it looks like you're not really doing anything. So you need to at least have some form of metrics that tells us what you're doing."

(Dylan Etkin at 00:16:05) And when I was doing an exec alignment call with them, they had come to us and said, "Look, we just want to start with DORA metrics." And it was because the board was like, "You need to put something in place." And they're like, "We need to go back to the board and just show that we put something in place." And that's when I kind of stopped them and went, "Well, what if we could give you a board-appropriate level of metrics that talks about the progress of the things that you're doing based off of that real work? How would that go down?" And they were like, "Oh my god, that would be incredible."

(Dylan Etkin at 00:16:39) Like, that's what we need. We need to show them that this investment is paying off. We were doing work, but they struggle to surface that today. But I'd say most organizations are somewhere in between, where they have a sense of what they're working on. Maybe they have some sort of OKR system. The two are separate. Like, they don't necessarily tie them together. A lot of folks do this very manually. A lot of the CTOs I have spoken to, they have a process in place. They have a meeting, and somebody is using Google Slides, and they're tasking individuals to go off and get all sorts of data, pull that data across the organization. Sometimes that can take anywhere between hours to days and even potentially weeks, and they're doing it on a quarterly basis. And they're running through these things. But again, I think it tends to not have all the data that they need.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:17:40) It's very manual to collect it. It's a one-off thing. There's not necessarily a shared interpretation of what that data means. There's so many different ways to improve that process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) And you're the founder of the company, right?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:17:56) Yeah, that's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) Co-founder. So you like helping people? You like solving problems and helping people? I'm serious. That's a core requirement of founders. Like, they want to be useful to other people. You can find ICs—people who are just really excited about a specific problem. But in the founder world, you find that. So who are—I don't know if you can share any clients or any stories, but what's been the most—doesn't have to be a big name or whatever. But what's the most rewarding client that, when you started working with them and you brought them tremendous value, and they just became huge fans of you, and you really enjoyed them? Do you have any stories like that?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:18:37) You know, we worked with this one customer. I don't know if I'll share their name, but we connected with this individual who was an engineering manager, who was really heavily using the DORA side of what we do. And it was one of those instances where, you know, I obviously have a pretty good sense of what our product does and how to use it. If I didn't, that might be a problem. But this was one of those instances where, after watching the way that he was utilizing the product, I was kind of surprised. And I was like, "Oh man, that's very cool." And he was even able to take feature gaps that we had and bridge them himself to sort of make different connections and then use the raw data and do the manual part that should have probably been in the product anyway, to make a difference for his team. And I mean, it was just really rewarding because I think he came to us saying they've 3x'd their metrics across the board and are really enjoying—it's driving their weekly meetings where they're getting in there and actually using this information.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:19:48) And the story was so exciting that we asked them, and they allowed us to sort of sit in as a fly on the wall in one of those meetings. And just watching how they were using it was super cool. And they drove a number of features that we ended up building because we're like, "That looked painful. You shouldn't have to do that. Let's go ahead and just automate that for you and encapsulate in the product what it is that you've discovered."

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) Did you have any engineers or anybody else with you in that meeting to watch?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:20:18) Yeah. I mean, we had the product—I think we had my CTO and a product guy as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:24) Nice. So what's the reason why people buy this from you? Why do they come and they become a customer of Sleuth? What's their pain point that they're experiencing? And they're like, "Hey Dylan, I've got this pain. I need your product." What is that?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:20:37) I mean, it can come from a number of different angles. Interestingly enough, it's that story that I just told where an organization feels like they don't have metrics. They feel like they're flying by the seat of their pants. And that tends to be a discovery process where they go off and they look and they go, "You know, what metrics could we be using?" Often they're going to fall on something like DORA metrics, but in that case, it tends to be an educational thing where they come to us saying, "I just want metrics." And then we have to push them and say, "What does that mean? There's something behind that." Again, in this case, the board handed their ass to them, and it's about communication. It's about upward communication. It's about communication at each level. It's about really knowing what is the actual work that's being done so that you can make a decision and change the outcome. But teasing that out with those folks—their initial idea is, "I just need a metrics program." But the answer is that's never the answer. There's something else that's driving that.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:21:40) Sometimes you also will get the sort of financial side of things where they're like, "I want to understand allocations. We have to do—we get tax credits from the government around the R&D work that we do. So I want to understand capitalization and, if you can, from the systems that we're already using today without very much effort, understand which parts are R&D and which parts of our development work don't fall into R&D, and we have an auditable way of showing that." The CFO can be quite interested in that sort of information too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Yeah, 100%. Right? You've got to get those R&D tax credits.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:22:23) I mean, if all my developers were in Australia, I would care a lot about that too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) Yeah, right. Okay, so did you have Pulse last time—that Pulse product? Did you have that a couple years ago, or is that brand new?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:22:37) Yeah, Pulse is brand new. Pulse is one of the things that—I mean, we've learned a lot in the last five years. And I would say the things that we learned that drove us to Pulse were that DORA metrics are not enough. DORA metrics are really great at telling you where your bottlenecks are. They're not great at telling you if things are on time. They're not great at telling you whether you're working on the right thing. They're not even great at telling you whether the people that are working for you are happy or unhappy while doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) How do you tell that?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:23:12) Oh, that gets into the whole DevEx surveys and the mixture between quantitative and qualitative information, which I think is super interesting. When we started this journey, I'm like, "I never want a Google Calendar plugin." I might have changed my mind. I think there's something to that. It's the mixture. I want hard data, but I also want a little bit of soft, fuzzy data in there too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:37) So you do dev surveys?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:23:39) Absolutely. Yeah. No, we do DevEx surveys. We'll run those out through Slack or Microsoft Teams or whatever it is that your team is relying on to do those sorts of things. And we'll let you mix that in, like I say, with the harder metrics, like some DORA metrics or allocations or an understanding of what's on track or what's not on track.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:58) Do you offer that as a self-serve standalone, like, I can just go on there and do DevEx surveys?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:24:04) Yeah. I mean—no. I mean, I think what tends to happen—we're trying to provide an operating system for engineering. Right? Because there's a lot of different personas in an engineering organization, and it all rolls up. It's all sort of tied together. But the reality of adopting something like that is that you're going to have a primary pain, and we want you to be able to solve that primary pain, understand that there's value there, and then sort of expand that out. So you could—if your primary pain is "I don't have good DevEx surveys," you can pop into Pulse and with very little integrations—obviously, just connecting up like a chat integration—you can be running DevEx surveys and get that information. You don't have to do the whole allocations piece or the DORA piece or any of those sorts of things. And, you know, similarly, you can do the others. You can adopt those.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:53) Is it self-serve or do I have to talk to sales?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:24:56) With Pulse, we're talking to sales. Because, you know, quite honestly, what we've learned is that when we do the self-serve side of things, it can go wrong. We've learned a lot about how to help organizations put in a successful metrics program and how to use them in such a way that they can change their outcomes. And that has a lot to do with top-down buy-in. Leadership needs to be bought into this sort of thing. There needs to be an understanding of how you're going to roll it out, what you're trying to accomplish, and what you're trying to achieve. And like I said, even in our market, a lot of these organizations, the impetus is not fully thought out on their part. They're like, "I need metrics," and you're like, "Which metrics and why? What's the real thing behind this?" Because that in itself is not a goal. If I get you the best metrics in the world, nothing's going to change.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) I get that every day with the podcast production company. They'll say, "We need a podcast." It's like, "Well, why?"

(Dylan Etkin at 00:26:01) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Why do you need a podcast? Like, what—is this an internal podcast? Is this—do you want to be famous? Do you want business relationships? Do you want leads? Like, why are you doing that?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:26:15) I find that they know the answer to that question. You just have to sit down with them and tease it out. Right? And that's the case for us as well—they know what's going on inside of their own organization. They know what will have the biggest impact. But if we don't have an opportunity to sit down and tease it out, then they kind of go, "I got a dashboard," and dashboards probably belong in the graveyard. And they'll be like, "Well, this didn't change my life."

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) Yeah. No, I 100% understand. Actually, it's one of the harder things about scaling that up with sales, right? That ability to really deeply understand it, to be able to sit with the client, understand their needs, and then share your product in the context of their needs.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:26:57) Yeah, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) How have you done that?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:27:00) I mean, it's probably just learning over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) Are you the number one salesperson there?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:27:06) I am involved in a lot of the sales process, for sure. I play a more useful role, which is the exec alignment role in the sales process, because I've got great people working for me. They're really good at demoing the product. They're really good at connecting and sort of taking things through a sales process, collecting those needs, and getting POCs set up. But, you know, the place where I can add value is connecting with the CTO. Right? Because I have a similar background and just can provide that sense of, "Look, here's what we're trying to accomplish as an organization. Let's make sure that we're aligned. This is what we're building towards. This is the value that we can give you today. This is where we're focusing our value tomorrow. And where are you at? What are you trying to accomplish with your organization? Why are you trying to put this in place? What would a win look like for you? Are you just trying to empower your engineering managers? We can do that. Are you trying to empower your developers? We can do that. Are you trying to talk at the exec level with data? Because we can do that too. But, like, what's important for you?"

(Dylan Etkin at 00:28:12) And that can be an easier conversation, like, with myself and that kind of individual.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) So just run me through your products real quick. There's Pulse. And what else?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:28:25) I don't like to think of them as separate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:29) They're not separate? Okay.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:28:29) Well, I mean, so if you're buying Sleuth, you're buying an enterprise solution that is basically the whole thing. But there are areas of concentration. So we have basically a deep-dive DORA where it's very configurable. It handles every crazy workflow you've ever thought you might want to do. It's very flexible in terms of failure rate and the different systems that you might use for that as well. Then we also have an automations marketplace. So for a lot of the bottlenecks that we discover at that smaller level, where we say, "Hey, you know, your review lag time is taking too long," or "You have too many incidents," or whatever it is—um, there's a lot of things that you can solve through automation.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:29:16) So for instance, review lag time is a great one where you can set a goal and say, "I want to have a review done within twelve hours." And if you agree as a team to do that, well, heck, robots can jump into action and see who's on a review. They're connected up to Slack. They can say, "Oh, you know, at the 75% mark, I'm going to go ahead and ping you and remind you that you had this agreement to get this thing done. I'm going to let you know when it's over the time." And in that way, you're getting in the face of people, you can kind of automate your way to better with those sorts of things. So there's a whole automation piece that adds a lot of those things, and then there's the operationalization, which is kind of the way that we think of Pulse.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:30:19) I mean, that's the other thing that we've learned in the last five years—we've had companies that are very successful. They have their metrics in place, and then the question becomes, "How do we use these? What do we do next? Like, what are we supposed to do with this?" And so Pulse is really meant to have those more expanded metrics and then also answer the question of, "How am I actually supposed to use this? How would I operationalize putting this program in place?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) And as far as we were talking earlier about engineering and review meetings, do you have any good examples or stories of specifically how you make those meetings better?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:30:44) Yeah. So I mean, the Pulse product is all around that. I mean, that's the secret sauce. It's not that secret, really, right?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:30:50) Which is we asked ourselves, what is a commonality amongst most organizations? And it's meetings, for good or for bad. Right? And I always refer to them as rituals. Organizations have certain rituals.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:31:06) There are some pretty common ones, right? Like a sprint review. Most organizations are gonna have something like that. Or an operations review, or, you know, I would get together when I ran Statuspage at Atlassian with my engineering leads, and every two weeks we would just talk about engineering as a whole.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:31:27) Right? How is it going? Like an engineering review. Or like I was describing earlier, you know, an exec level review where you're talking about, hey, we hired 30 people. Where are we gonna allocate those people?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:31:37) Where are our allocations today? Are they the right things? You know, like, this is the OKR of the company that's number one. Is there anything standing in the way of that? You know, whether that's called a CTO review or an exec review or whatever.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:31:51) Organizations have these things in place. Now whether they are doing them effectively or not, whether they are bringing data to the table or not, whether they are bringing a shared understanding to these meetings before the meeting, or they're trying to come to that shared understanding within the meeting, it varies quite wildly. But, you know, each one of those are an example where in Pulse, we say, we understand what best practices are in terms of the data that you would want to bring to this meeting. We can glean that data automatically for you, and then we can provide the platform that's gonna allow you that collaboration to capture the shared understanding so that you can then drive changed outcomes, you know, and attach those outcomes to the data and all of that sort of stuff as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:35) Oh, man. This is good. Wait. Hey. What are your—you have kids, correct?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:38) Correct?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:32:39) I do. But they're old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:40) They're old? What do you mean they're old? You're like 40.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:32:43) Right? No, man. I'm like 50.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:46) Get out of here.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:32:47) Yeah. I mean, my daughter's—you look good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50) Thanks. You look good. We appreciate that.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:32:50) Yeah. Daughter's 22. My son's 20.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:32:54) She's graduated college. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) What was she interested in?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:00) Video games. Video game design.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) Oh, Tyler, there's a—you don't wanna go to that one area of gaming. They just all got laid off. Your buddies. Yeah.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:08) I'll tell you what. Like, that's in general. The gaming market is in a rough place right now. It's not a great time to, I think, to be trying to get a job in there. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:17) But it might be a good time to start, like, be creator in there, right? Because I've been seeing all the improvements to the tools. Now what used to take a team of, you know, 200 people can be done by a couple people.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:28) Yeah. It is incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) Yeah. Ain't that crazy?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:31) Yeah. And the distribution platforms, you know, like, I heard a couple of friends are building this game, and they're just like, it's up on Steam. You're like, yeah, cool.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:38) Alright. So people can just pay you for that. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) Yeah. I can't believe you're 50. That's ridiculous.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:47) But neither can I.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:48) Yeah. You got a good—do you feel much—so I'm 36 for context. Do you feel much different at 50 than 36?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:54) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:55) How so?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:33:58) I don't know. There's just a big distance. Well, I mean, probably the kids, right? Like, when I was your age, I mean, my kids were tiny and, like, you know, that was everything was Saturday soccer and all that sort of stuff. But yeah. I don't know. You know, I just—in theory, you're trying to learn all the time, and you're trying to grow as an individual. You know?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:34:20) And certainly, in the last fourteen years, I feel like I've done a lot of growth. You know? Like, I think fourteen years ago, I was likely, I don't know, like a team lead or maybe like an EM on a small product somewhere. You know? And just probably much more of that—the whole thing that you were saying earlier, right? As a founder, I'm looking to help people. Probably fourteen years ago, I was a little more of that IC where I was just looking to build cool stuff. You know? So I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:50) And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just different stages, different personality types.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:34:54) Yeah. I think you're—you know, as you grow older, your interests grow a little wider and, you know, you see a thing and you go, I can do that. That sounds interesting. You know? Like, let me get good at that. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:06) When did the—yeah. You start to understand the—well, that's in the past ten years, so from 26 to 36, my IQ on understanding the passage of time has increased. And it sounds ambiguous. I don't know how to be more specific. But I just understand how time passes better.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:35:23) Yeah. No. For sure. And what you can and can't accomplish and what you'd like to accomplish and, you know, setting those goals for yourself. I mean, similar to the product that we're building, right? Like, you know, if you don't have some sort of measures, like, how do you get better? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:37) Oh, my—the one of the quotes that stuck with me quite a bit in this past ten years has been, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, you can—you really can. You can choose something and set your stake in the ground and say this, it's immovable. I'm gonna make this happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) But you can—of all the millions of billions of things you could do, you can only really do that with maybe two or three things in life. Right?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:36:04) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) Well, thanks for talking about the family stuff with me. I always like to include the human side of things, and it helps me better understand people. And it's crazy because last time we talked, your kids were like in high school, and now they're in college.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:36:17) And I know. Time goes by.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:19) Yeah. Maybe next time we talk, we'll do another one in three years, and then they'll be married. One of them will be married.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:36:24) Oh my god. Yeah. I don't even think about that. But, yes, that's a possibility.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) So as we start to wrap up, let's say we've got some CTOs listening who are interested in exploring whether it's the DORA or the Pulse, and they want to get some metrics around what's going on in engineering. How do they start their journey? Where do they go to learn more? What's the next step?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:36:44) I mean, sleuth.io. There's a little talk to us button. Jump on a call with us. We'll spend, you know, thirty minutes, find out a little bit about what's going on with you, talk to you about what we can and can't do. Honestly, like we said here, I mean, yes, we want to sell things, but our goal is to help organizations. Like, there's nothing more rewarding than taking a problem that somebody has and making it a non-problem and giving them a solution.

(Dylan Etkin at 00:37:10) So, you know, come talk to us, and let's see if we can help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) There it is. Sleuth.io. There will be a link in the notes. Dylan, thank you. We made a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) Thank you for doing this. How do you feel?

(Dylan Etkin at 00:37:21) There you go. Yeah. No. It's great. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) 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.