TT: The Key to Continuous Growth with Mark Porter, then CTO at MongoDB

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're bringing you an episode of Tech Titans. Mark Porter, former CTO at MongoDB, joins us in this episode to share his best advice on creating space for open and honest dialogue in your team. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Tech Titans.

(Mark Porter at 00:00:21) So I'm going to speak generally because MongoDB, we're still working it out like everyone else, and I don't want anyone to think that we're perfect. What we've done recently is we'd added some questions to our quarterly planning, which a lot of people participate in. We do quarterly planning of the next quarter for our products. And some of those questions are, hey, does anyone want to say we're moving too fast or too slow?

(Mark Porter at 00:00:45) We've actually added that to the list of questions we will answer in every quarterly planning. And we've noticed that if we don't ask those questions, no one will volunteer. But when we ask those questions, people start saying, yeah, I think we're actually producing a product which maybe doesn't have the right level of quality this quarter. Maybe we should delay it till next quarter.

(Mark Porter at 00:01:07) And so where I think leadership plays a role is in creating open conversations where everyone gets to say their piece in a productive and psychologically safe way. And that requires vulnerability on the part of leaders. Because sometimes you're going to ask, is this the right thing for us to do? And in the next ten minutes, you're all going to find out that you're doing literally the wrong thing this quarter, and you should probably replan. We actually had that happen about three months ago with one of my teams where quarterly planning just went wildly off track, and we replanned the entire quarter.

(Mark Porter at 00:01:49) And that requires leaders to be able to go, wow, we were just wrong. And that's really hard for leaders because we're held up on some kind of pedestal where the reason we're your leader or your manager is because we're smarter than you are. And I just want to say to anyone listening out there, we're not smarter than you are. We just have a different job.

(Mark Porter at 00:02:10) And our job is to help steer the ship, and our job is to help you feel psychologically safe. We're not smarter than you are. And so help us do our job just like we're helping you do your job. Hierarchy should not represent power. Hierarchy should represent assistance.

(Mark Porter at 00:02:29) So my boss, Dave, assists me. He starts our one-on-one with, how can I help you this week? And hierarchy should represent assistance. So I think of an org chart as a tree that grows up out of the ground with branches, which is the reverse. It's vertically flipped.

(Mark Porter at 00:02:46) And I think of myself as being one of the branches or maybe even near the root, I guess, since I'm a C-level. And I think of myself as supporting the rest of the tree. And it's those actual branches and the actual leaves which type the code customers care about, which answer customer questions. They're the ones which should get the nutrients. They're the ones which should see the sunlight, and we're just here to support them.

(Mark Porter at 00:03:12) And companies which have it the reverse, it's a very uncomfortable environment for everybody because the employees are like, hey, I'm doing the work customers care about and not getting recognized for it. And the managers are actually being put in this unnatural position of being held accountable for doing something other than helping employees. One of the things you'll hear me talk about a lot in talks is the Dunbar number and Conway's law. And so Conway's law is that you kind of ship your organization.

(Mark Porter at 00:03:41) If two leaders don't like each other and they're far apart in the org, then I guarantee you their products aren't going to work well together. Right? And even Satya has talked about this law and how it affects Microsoft, which I was very amused by. And then the second rule I try to keep into consideration is the Dunbar number, which is typically for most humans around 70 to 75 people, which is the number of people you can trust or keep in your social circle comfortably. And what you really want to do in today's world is you want to have teams and interactions which are within the Dunbar number.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:17) You want to work with teams you trust, teams you're like, hey, let's go out for dinner or let's have a Zoom chat, I guess, this year or whatever. And so you don't want to build monolithic thousand-person teams where people don't trust each other. And so when I talk to customers, I talk to more than one CTO a day, by the way. My EA keeps track of it for me.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:38) My average since I've been here is I've talked to 500 CTOs in 400 days. I talk to them about how they structure their teams and how they structure their software, and I try to detect if those two things are in sync or not. And that, I think, is one of the goals of leadership that is often overlooked. I would say one-fifth of my CTO conversations are product conversations. I would say that CTOs and executives in general, CTOs aren't a special branch. We live at the top of that pyramid I talked about.

(Mark Porter at 00:05:21) Right? Which means the buck stops with us. In most other jobs you'll have in your life, there's someone above you, someone who can give you advice, someone who's been there before. As a C-level executive at a public company, there's no one. So we all reach out to each other, and we all learn from each other regularly.

(Mark Porter at 00:05:41) And we counsel each other, and we berate each other, and we learn from each other constantly. And that's actually one of the most rewarding parts of my job right now is learning from these other executives who've all been through so much. And that's another thing I'll say. Learning never stops. If you ever think you're the master of the game, you have failed.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:03) You are always the student of the game. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't care what role you're in. I don't care how high you are.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:09) I don't care if you're a CEO. You are always the student of the game. If you think about a graph that had mastery on one axis and time on the other axis, or effort, maybe effort on the other axis, visible mastery of instruments could go up really high like drums. I can hit a rhythm within five minutes. But piano might take longer, or god forbid the wind instruments like saxophone, which my son is learning, the learning curve.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:40) But then there's the real mastery curve, which is are you really good, which is probably different. And I think the thing that's interesting is in an orchestra, everyone has a part to play. We've already talked about that at work. You know, the marketing person and the CEO and the developer and the person who runs the front desk are all just as important to the company in terms of them playing their role, and an orchestra is the same way. And mastering job skills is the same way.

(Mark Porter at 00:07:05) And so when you think about the world of tech today, I think it's really interesting because there's all these frameworks out there, and you can master some of them. Like, literally, you can write an app against MongoDB in VS Code in ten minutes and be putting data in and taking data out. And as much as I would love it to be the case that that makes you a master of databases, it doesn't. And so it's kind of like the drums. We've made it easier to acquire these skills.

(Mark Porter at 00:07:35) But the one thing that I feel so passionate about is that becoming the best person you know at something should be something we all strive for, whether that is in facilities or marketing or code or running podcasts like you do. What I try—I have five children, and what I try to train my children or what I try to nurture in my children is learn that feeling of being, oh my god, I was good at that. And I don't want my children to become addicted to all the different things people can become addicted to today, but I do want my children to become addicted to that feeling of I was good at that combined with the feeling of I helped somebody. And if we could all keep that as our North Star, even as companies, my company helps people.

(Mark Porter at 00:08:28) And even as individuals, which is I'm really good at something, I think a lot of questions get a lot easier to answer. And I really am not going off the rails. You asked me ten minutes ago about culture. The companies which I have found have the best culture are the companies who really focus on doing things well and doing good in the world to some definition of good.