TECH TITANS: Business Lessons from Strange Places with Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. It features our greatest leadership advice distilled into shorter summary episodes. Rob from CircleCI joins us in this episode to share his best advice on how to lead a team to connect value to the customer. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Rob at 00:00:22) From a leadership perspective, even, I listened to a bunch of audiobooks with my son. This year, we did a lot of road trips, and so we listen to a lot of audiobooks. And he doesn't want to listen to anything about software or leadership. So we listened to, like, outdoor adventures, you know, like mountaineering expeditions gone wrong and stuff like that. And both the human factors that lead up to the problem and then the way that sort of, you know, leadership comes into play and the ways in which people deal with the problems or like search and rescue and how they apply search patterns. I'm constantly taking notes. You know? It has nothing to do with software per se, but the human elements are actually really, really consistent across so many different domains. And it tends to give me new ideas in a way that when they're packaged up with a very software flavor, I might have missed. But somehow they work for me coming with a different context, plus they're just fun books to listen to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) What are some of the things you have learned that have worked out to be true for you?

(Rob at 00:01:23) From all of those, from all the listening? Well, I mean, I'll tell you one of the most interesting. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do justice to this. But speaking of human factors coming into play, we listened to a story about the K2 disaster, basically. And all of these teams independently had practiced and trained and, you know, we're going to go take the summit, sort of thing. And then there was one day, so they decided to combine their efforts. Otherwise, it would be too congested. But basically, like, under the most grueling conditions on the planet, you have all these groups coming together trying to execute without the trust or preparation or understanding that you have of each other. And, I mean, I won't tell you what book it is, but whatever. I mean, it's like a pretty famous day on the mountain. Things go sideways, unsurprisingly, or else there wouldn't be a book. And one of the most interesting things is the language, which is not something that really happens in most of our workplaces. Like, we don't hire different teams that can't speak to each other in the same language. But there's one pivotal character who is the translator between all the different teams, and he gets sick. And now none of them can even talk to each other, and they're in this harrowing condition or whatever. What's so interesting about that and what really resonated with me was the preparation and the cohesive team. And so a place that we've applied that internally is actually, you know, speaking of learning from failure, focusing on incidents, building a close-knit response team that works together every day versus what typically happens is you have a few different people coming from different parts of the company trying to solve a problem who, at our scale, which is very different from what it was, you know, when we last spoke a couple years ago. Those people might have never even met, let alone work together. And so there's a lot of, you know, just natural communication overhead. Right? And, you know, when I look at highly effective teams, particularly under pressure situations, you see things like hand signals. Right? Like, I can just blink and you know that means go do this thing, versus now I take five minutes to explain to you, "This is the thing we have to go do. This is what I need you to do." You know, whatever. I want to have practiced and trained that. Right? And, you know, again, it was something that sort of clicked or landed from hearing what happens when a whole bunch of different people who don't really know each other are trying to operate under what ends up being, you know, extremely strenuous conditions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guy, one of the reasons why I started the podcast. He had just said be yourself and start with what you know now. Like, don't try to be somebody you're not. So the way that can translate is, you know, if you're an engineer and you're getting paid to be an engineer, you at least understand the concept of installing some sort of language on your system, using an editor, using the terminal, and, you know, doing Hello World. And to somebody who wants to get into engineering and has none of that experience, they don't know how to do any of those things. So you can start just by helping them because one thing that we haven't yet talked about is how enormously rewarding it is, like, emotionally or as a person to be able to help other people learn. That's a big driver for me.

(Rob at 00:04:33) I don't know that I'm quite at the point where I would say I'm reflecting on my whole career, but I'm at the point where I look back and think, "Like, how did I get here?" Like, that's interesting to me, even. And the number of people who took time out of their day to help me figure out, you know, I was probably very demanding. Right? "Oh, what are you doing? Tell me about that. What—?" Like, I imagine that person now. I'm like, "Oh man, I wouldn't have time for that." But you have to because that's how we got here. Right? Like, that's how we continue to build. That's how we build organizations, how we build success is spending time with folks. And, you know, again, looking back, I got into software with zero background in software because someone just took a chance and said, "Hey. We need someone to do this job. Will you come try to do it? You know, you seem smart. We knew each other from college or whatever." And I was like, "Sure." That probably put some pressure on me as well. I didn't want to let them down. So I was like, "I'm going to learn this as fast as humanly possible." But that meant I turned and looked to everyone around me and said, "Can you tell me more about this? Can you tell me more why does this work this way? Why does this work this way?" Like, just, "I want to know." And I happen to be around people, sort of like the audio engineer you're describing, who had that. Right? Who were excited and comfortable and capable of breaking down the concepts and saying, "Okay. Like, step one is this. Step two is this. Step—now you understand enough to understand this." And I'm super thankful for all of that. And so, like, I'm not teaching software classes anymore, but more, you know, the thing that is valuable and rewarding to me, valuable to the company and valuable to the people that I'm working with, is typically more about "Why do we make decisions like this?" Right? "What is it about the context of our business or the needs of our customers or the overall market, whatever that might be, that's driving us to this stack of decisions that ultimately ends up with me doing this thing on a day-to-day basis?" You know what I mean? And so, like, helping people connect that is probably, for me, the rewarding part. It happens to be also valuable to me as a leader in the organization. But I think it's easily lost, right, in the, "I don't know. I'm an executive. I don't have time for this, whatever." And I think it's one of the most valuable things that you can do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:44) How does it work at CircleCI when we're talking a lot about connecting the value to the customer and making sure that people are aware of that? How does that express itself? Does the CEO put out an annual letter of "This is the direction we're headed and these are the primary goals"? Or how does that actually work?

(Rob at 00:07:01) Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, it's multifaceted for sure. We do actually—it's funny that you mentioned the CEO and an annual letter. Like, it's not an annual letter, but at least once a year, we'll do a, like, really big all—like, we do all-hands at least once a month, but a sort of state of the world recap of, "This is where we're going. This is what we said we were going to do last year. This is where we are." Like, really the connecting the big picture for folks. But that changes within the year. Right? I mean, we were talking about macroeconomic conditions. Right? So is our mission going to change because of macroeconomic conditions? No. But within that, priorities might change. Right? We might decide to do certain—maybe particular customers that we're going after not doing as well right now and other customers are doing better, so we want to focus on a different segment. I mean, it could be anything. Right? There's a million things that could change as a result of that. What you don't want is for every one of those changes to be coming from your CEO. Right? Like, what you want is an organization that knows how to adapt. And so when I say it's multifaceted, like, you want that big picture, long time horizon to be reinforced absolutely by the CEO, but also as other members of the executive. Right? We are saying that to our teams on a regular basis. I mean, we have organizations within our organization that are hundreds of people. So, you know, connecting with those leaders and then all the way down to as an individual manager. Right? I want to know, "This is the role that we play in that big picture," and be able to work with my—you know, as I'm onboarding new engineers to my team or we're making decisions with product about what we're going to focus on. You know, we need to have the sense of—not me, but, like, as a team. Right? I'll keep calling it a two-pizza team just because you brought that up earlier. So that team, right, needs to have the connection to that picture, which, yes, you could sit at that all-hands or read the annual letter or whatever and try to dissect it. But layers through the management structure are absolutely breaking that down. Right? At a director level, for example, you're saying, "Okay. In our scope, here's what's really important to us. This is how we fit in." And then the managers are saying, "Okay. Within that scope, here's how we fit in." So if you can't ladder that up, then you're going to struggle. Right? 'Cause you're trying to make decisions every day about what it is that you're going to focus on. So you kind of need that reinforced. So I guess to go back to how, you know, you've got CEO absolutely saying that directly to the company, but then you've got the CEO saying that to execs who are saying it to their, you know, directors, who are saying it to their managers, who are saying it to their people, sort of thing. Like, all of those different levels so people can see the rollup, basically.