Developing Leaders: Building and Managing Dev Teams. A Roundtable Discussion

Ah, every time I see that intro, I feel like I am in the movie Tron Helper Advocate at ye old HubSpot. And today we are talking about developing leaders, building and managing dev teams. Very exciting. Got a lot going on and we have a very, very concise agenda. You got to hear me talk for a few minutes and then we're going to move right into the roundtable discussion. It is going to be a doozy. So hope you all are ready. But before we get there, actually, aj, you might bring in Anton and Tune back on the screen right now because I think this is important that they're here as well. The developer hug is turning one, folks. This is our one year anniversary. We have over 500 members, almost 600 at this point. We have a month. We've had great attendance, we've had great feedback and I really want to just give a shout out to Anton and Tune, who have led this hug and have made it a success that it is. So thank you all so much. If you want to say something, go for it.

I would say we have planned something big for next year, but this will be a surprise.

Your children's birthday. So that's how I will remember it going forward.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, what's better thing to celebrate your kid's birthday than having a webinar? No kidding. Of course. Now I think it was amazing year as well. We did a lot of great webinars

are seeing this QR code on the screen right now. AJ is going to put into the chat the link as well, just in case you didn't see it there or you can't get to that QR code for some reason. That is going to lead you to a form where we are going to give out 5 to 10 shirts. Special one year celebration anniversary de hug shirts. This will be our third swag item, actually a little trivia sun a while back. So yay, it's all that. So go ahead and fill out that form. We'll be picking the winners and hopefully delivering those shirts by the end of the year. Hopefully that's my goal. So, yeah, look out for that. All right, next session is going to be let's have a conversation. We're going to be talking about and I'm pretty excited to do that. That one's going to be our last session for the year and we are starting to discuss what our agenda is going to be for the next year. We'll have that up hopefully the next month or so. But I just want to put a special shout out to our New podcast that's been going out that we're on. Episode number four. I think we're about ready to record number five. Developers After Dark. Subscribe to it, listen to us. I get to talk to the. Love to subscribe. Next up, developer feedback. We've added this to our site, so if you go, say it nicely but, you know, throw your feedback in there because we actually do take that seriously and we do want to hear it from you all. With all that being said, I am going to introduce this fine group of folks. Initially I was going to do the introductions for them because they're all very long winded, but I think I'm going to let them talk this time. So we're going to start with Anton Bonowski, founder of Graphy Spot. Do me a favor and do a quick intro of yourself, sir.

Okay.

Anton Bernofsky, founder of Graphis Sports designer developer community champion, DHUG co founder indeed.

So, yeah, moving on. Justin Givens is next in line here. Go and throw this fella up onto the stage. Co founder of Imagine in a Box. Justin, tell me everything and please do give a special shout out to the boot camp that you just lead in an amazing way.

Yeah, we just wrapped it up. Justin Givens here, co founder at Image in a Box. Also the head founder over at Simple Events. Been in the tech industry for over 25 years. Been developing and managing people for over 15 years. So it's a. It's a fun panel. I'm super ecstatic today. And Carter Makai and I, Jim packed. It was a lot of fun. It's sad that we wrapped it up yesterday, but we'll do it again in the.

Without you, my friend.

Yeah. I was told you were supposed to read the bio, so I'm a bit taken aback, but I'll manage. So, I'm Ludwig, not founder, but I'm partner at Mi4. We're a Solutions partner. Yeah. Basically been managing teams for about seven years now. Not technically a developer, but managing them. And yeah, I'm pretty stoked to be part of the.

Love it, love it. Moving right along and a very special guest, my boss, Karen Eng. Would you mind coming on upstage and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure.

Hey. Dennis tries to keep us to 11 words. I'm going to be a little longer. I'm Karen. I love being here with everyone. I run our developer ecosystem at HubSpot, our smart CRM and our operations hub. But I have been in developer communities for a long time. I helped create the C Sharp programming language with Kotlin and Java.

So beautiful. It was not 11 words, but it'll do. It'll do. Tune, tune, or 10. It's already up on stage presently, so go ahead and say your thing, my friend.

Yeah, I'm the head of development and design at Bright Digital. Been working there for almost nine years now. I think approximately five years with HubSpot. And I'm leading a beautiful team of

developers and designers, indeed, growing every day as well. And last, but certainly not least, let's bring up Mark. Mark Riba, a guy I've known for a long time, I've always respected. Please go ahead and tell us a little about yourself.

Hey, what's going on, guys? As Dennis said, my name is Mark Riba. 2024 actually marks my 10th year working in the HubSpot ecosystem. So I've been in here for a while. I like to describe myself as a partner agency veteran. Worked at a number of agencies. Currently director of web development at, excuse me, instrumentl Group, formerly Revenue river and yeah, been managing teams for two, three years now. On the development side, was actually a marketer. Trained myself as a developer and then now dev leader. So that's my career path.

Love it. All right, I want to bring this slide down real quickly and let's get into some questions. I need to pull up my questions right now. Some ground rules, folks. I know you all are a rowdy bunch, so do me a favor and don't get into any fistfights virtually. But I do like to have a good discussion as I go through these questions in the audience. If you have any additional questions, go ahead and throw them into the chat. AJ is going to sort them and he's going to force me to deal with those questions and ask these fine speakers for answers. I've grouped these things into four, four categories I have. Transitioning to leadership, adapting to the evolving working space, workspace. Wow. It's harder to say team building and management, as well as technical leadership and project management. My goal is to not stump, but to learn a lot from all these people. So I myself, this is all very. This is all for me. This whole thing's for me. So I am a better person. So let's get going. All right, first off, let's talk about your beginnings. And I actually want to go around the room on this one. I want to know everyone's beginnings here. What made you decide to stop the pursuit of the independent contributor and become a leader? I will start with Mark. Mark, you can go.

Cool.

Yeah.

So kind of directly branched off of what I What I talked about before. Right. So I did not start as a technical person. And at the first agency I was at, we were pretty smaller, like a scrappier team. And we had an intern who came in and knew absolutely no programming. And so I ended up. I taught him how to. How to develop on HubSpot. And I just got so much satisfaction out of it. Was more of a mentorship role than necessarily like a direct supervisor. But I loved kind of unlocking that potential and someone else and helping them kind of realize what. What they could do with just a little bit of work and learning. So, yeah, that's just something I've carried with me throughout various roles in different agencies. And I kind of always go back to when I was. When I was in college, I was also a snowboard instructor. It was one of the best jobs I ever had because, well, for many reasons, but one of my first days there, someone said, like, hey, we can teach you how to be a good snowboarder. We can't teach you how to be a good person. Right. So basically, like, I've kind of carried that through the different roles that I've had. Just like, if you are willing to put in the effort and learn, learn and put in the hard work, then I want to work with you. I want to help you get to the next level and achieve your goals. So that's been my motivation.

Oh, good.

Karen, going on to you, what's your. What's your origin story?

Ooh, origin story. I was like, it's hard. I will say that I'm definitely one of those probably leader managers that, like, really value the IC work. And so I actually usually keep a part of ICE work. I don't, you know, develop day to day now, but I certainly, um, from our company perspective, I am an IC on how we think about unstructured data, and it's something that I keep there. But I think for me, I love the building, I love the craft. Sometimes when you think big picture, it's actually easier as a team. So I think my team knows this. If we want to open up, like, HubSpot's ecosystem, opportunity, it's a bigger thing. There are many things that we're doing at the same time, and that's probably what took me into the leadership or the management path. I was thinking about that big vision, and the team is driving towards that.

Love it. Tune what you got?

Yeah. So when I started at Bright, I was actually an intern and I always wanted to found my own company, so I was a bit hesitant to stay at Bright after I finished my internship. But in the end I did because it's a great company. However, I really had the ambition to start building something myself. So I. I agreed with the director that if they had enough opportunities to start building something at their company and build with them, that would be enough to keep me engaged and keep me enthusiastic about working there. And that's exactly what happened. So we started with a really small development team of two people and we slowly started growing up the team.

So that's your end goal, which is. And you can't lean on skills that you had. Yeah, go with Justin.

No, I'm going to piggyback off. That is because you can bring the architecture and sort of like the path for them to succeed, that you have that knowledge. Right. And that's where when we typically. And this is where a lot of people start. Like, I don't want to be a leader because I'm getting bad code from this person or that person. That's a communication breakdown. And I learned that the hard way. I was like, hey, go write this function or go write this website. And you give them this giant project. Instead of saying, hey, why don't you build three widgets first and then we'll scale to the bigger project. So when you want to start managing teams, you can think in that sort of widgeting. How can I give Karen this? How could I give two in this? Then we. And that's where the managerial. Because you could still write a widget that maybe is the complex widget that you know, because you've seen what they're pushing out, they couldn't handle it. But you could all work together to actually, like Karen said, open up a larger project faster than you could even do by yourself.

Yeah, I love that. That's exactly what it is. Like, I spend a lot of my time now figuring out the pieces. I like the breakdown of the pieces. And I might take one and just like run with it, but I break it down the pieces so we can go in parallel.

And then keep the fun pieces to yourself.

Yeah, I usually take the worst depending on Mark.

You said you came from the. The marketing side of things. So you didn't. You didn't come as a developer and you learned a lot along the ways. So when you jumped into the more leadership aspect of it, did you have any type of like, imposter syndrome? Like, what. How am I? How am I? The person's teaching this person how to do something when I, you know, didn't go to school for this, for example, for sure.

I can think of one role and I think that it's kind of a unique scenario where like kind of the opposite of what we were just talking about where you are the best IC and you know, it's really humbling and like honestly really exciting when that isn't the case. Right. Especially when you've like been doing it for a couple years and you have a developer who's just like, you know, one of those like just geniuses who just wants to, you know, be at his keyboard the whole time. And so I don't know, it was a really cool transition for me to kind of go, all right, here's the client need, here's how I would approach it. How, how would you? Right. But at the same time understanding like for me what I felt like I was really good at was being more T shaped and like relating with other teams, especially on HubSpot where we're building CMS experiences but also need to work with the CRM, make sure that you know the solution scalable. So being able to communicate is probably the biggest thing there and also ideate. But yeah, a lot of fun to have like, especially if you've been with the group for a little bit. You know, everyone's kind of talent and stuff and perspectives being able to take a problem and work more collaboratively rather than just kind of this like master architect, all right, go do your stuff kind of role.

I'm going off script a little bit here, but now I'm curious to know about Yalls manager. Like was when you decided to become a leader, was it like a very independent, you know, confident decision on your own or. We kind of nurtured into it and to extend that a little bit further. Do you see? Do you do the same for you people you're managing? Open question to anyone who wants to answer that one.

I'm going to jump in, please.

You know, I do not like pauses more than one second. So if I hear that in the future I'm just going to randomly call on someone.

So I was forced into it. So I started the business with my wife and she's like, you've got to get out of the code. And I'm like, I don't want to get out of the code. Yeah. But then were you're, you're hurting the company. I was like, no, I'm not. I'm helping the company. And it wasn't. And it was that force. So I would slowly, I would build this honestly trust with my other developers saying okay, they can do that and Then when they failed, it wasn't their fault for failing, it was my fault. I gave them a. A project that was way out of scope, it was way too big for them or it wasn't communicated enough and that it was ripping off a band aid that needed to happen. And it. It never was fun because then I would come home later and then stay up late and just program.

Right.

I sort of like, I had an addiction, right.

I need to work.

I need to program.

Yeah. Tune, tune. I know you were like, develop. You got a young team, right? You've got a lot of new faces on it. Are you seeing. Are you seeing as you're growing with the folks that you can tell are going to be, you know, they're going to stay down that IC route and the other people who are going to start veering off to the more the, you know, managerial responsibilities?

Yeah, I think so. I have quite a diverse team of people. And what we normally do is at the beginning of each year, we try to create a individual development plan. So not for development in a technical wave sense, but their. Their learning path for that year. And that also includes the ambitions of each particular employee. Right. And where they want to grow to. And some more want to grow more to a leadership role. Some just want to have more challenging technical projects. So it's really diverse there. But, yeah, we definitely have a few people who I can envision growing to a leadership role in the future.

Ludwig, do you have any advice, like, for people who are on the fence trying to get, you know, they have that feelings like, okay, I'm. I need to make a decision. Am I. Which, which path am I taking? And they decide to go on that managerial path, that people manager path. Any advice on how to get started there?

It's pretty hard to give an advice because, like, it's. It's different for everybody. But I can. I can relate to what Carter said. Like, how do you get past the point of just building it? Your. The thing is, for me, I was never a developer to begin with. I just learned it the hard way because I had to do stuff. And at some point, the projects just became bigger than myself. And I made it like a goal to work with people more talented than me. And at some point I just realized that my strength wasn't my ability to be an expert at something, but being good at many, many things, which helps

me,

as I said, again, like, bridge the gap between someone who's very technical and someone who's more on the marketing side. And this ability, like, became my strength. When I realized that I was better at giving instructions rather than executing them. And of course, I had, like, this feeling of being the imposter, because, like, obviously you're managing people and you're not able to do their job. Yeah, like, entirely. But in the end, it's not a matter of being able to do everything that your team can do because, like, the bigger the projects, the more impossible it becomes. But it's more about, like, you know, being able to listen to people and give instructions and help them face their obstacles. In the end, what matters the most is that everybody is thriving and at the same time, that the projects are, you know, being delivered on time and that everybody's happy about it. So, yeah, not really an advice, but, like, if you feel like, I don't know, like, if you feel like you don't want to be the expert and being the person that has to have the answers to everybody, to everything, then maybe go more the managing route. And if you feel like you can handle many topics at the same time, then maybe it's something that you're built for this.

I mean, I really like what you said earlier about listening to experts, you know, like, understanding that you are appreciating. You are not, you know, the best at what you do. So you want to hang out with the experts, which is something I kind of struggle with myself, honestly, because I have, like, that feeling like I need to be the best. And I feel like this confidence issue, I don't know, it may be some male thing that I have to deal with. I need to go to a therapist and talk about, but that's a hard one. I think it's a very good piece of advice. Thank you for that. I want to move on to my next set of topics.

Can I jump in one thing for that?

Oh, yeah. No.

I think I just want to validate, too, that I know we're talking about management, but, you know, I can see in the chat, one way I think about it is there was this book called now discover your strengths that really shaped how I thought about my career, which is your strengths should align with where you like, kind of what brings you joy. It is very okay to decide and recognize that actually managing is not for you. And, you know, the way I trial it sometimes is sometimes if somebody is interested in the path. Like, for me, I was at Microsoft, there was an ICP app and a manager path. You might get an intern, you know, at HubSpot, we'll have APMS, I trial it, and if you find a lot of joy from helping people. And at the end of the day, you felt like you're achieving a lot of things. Great. Some people try it and they hate it. You know, they want to be in the code all day, and that's okay. The way you grow, there is bigger, harder problems. Stuff that goes across orgs. And I've been at, you know, Microsoft, Google, here, and at each place, I've actually helped try to create a principal path so that there is a way that we can grow as ICs.

So, yeah, yeah, we want to call

out, like, it's not for everyone. And, like, recognizing where you have passion and strength is a really. Is a great thing.

Can I. Can I push back on our challenge a little bit more on that? I'm curious to know, when do you give. Give up's the wrong word. Right. But, like, when. When do you make that decision? When you recognize that this is not my path. Like, because every. Every thing you do, there are things. There are challenges that you just hate. Right. Every job you ever going to have, there's. There's aspects you don't like. But when do you realize that this is not for me?

I mean, sometimes I would actually say, like, if you don't know and you want to try it full scale, do it, you know, and at some places, you might. You might be in it in a year, a couple years, and, like, not really be able to tell. One way is you're not good at it. You're not actually great at driving everyone together, or you'll end up in a year later realizing that, man, I just want to. I just want to sit and code, and I just want to solve, like, some gnarly challenge. I think you hit that spot when, you know. But I would say, like, there's no. There's no wrong thing in trying it full scale and then recognizing in a year or two, like, you don't like it that much. It.

Totally agree.

I think on a team, you need to do that. Yeah. I'm just going to piggyback on that mark, too, is that you need to give your team that opportunity to try, because they might not voice it, but then something might come out of them that's going to excel your team even faster. Yeah. So don't just assume someone likes head down.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Off Karen's point, too. Like, those decisions that you make aren't forever either. Right. Like, there are some times where you do just, you know, I don't know, get to that point where you're like, all right, I just need to like code something, be it internally or client facing or whatever for like a week. I just need to like kind of detox and stay in it. Especially in a platform like HubSpot that's changing so often. Like you do need to be somewhat close to it, even if it's not your necessarily, necessarily your day to day. But like I can remember like when I, when I got married and now I'm, now I'm a dad, like I couldn't be, you know, pulling those, those 2:00am hackathon kind of schedules anymore. And so there are other times where that's needed. So just because you pick one direction doesn't mean you're down that path all the time.

For sure.

You can always go back and change. Agreed.

I love that. That's, that's wisdom right there. I'm not sure, like, I think you have to be a certain age to have that type of wisdom, you know, Like, I don't know if I could see that when I was 20 years old versus now when I'm in my 40s. Moving right along to adapting to the evolving working workplace. I don't know why I keep on messing that word up. So things have changed last 20 years. We're all old enough to have seen some incredible changes in the landscape of what defines a workplace. I want to go from two different perspectives because Karen, you lead a very large hybrid team and I want to know how you are managing it. But I also want to know something like tune. I know from, we talked in the past how you need people to come into the office and those are two different perspectives and I want to understand both of them. So Karen, starting with you, how are you managing that and how are you keeping, I mean, what are the pros and cons? Like, how are you keeping the connection?

Yeah, I love hybrid, so I'll just say I'm coming from that. I work out of Seattle, which is not our HubSpot's base, so I miss the people. But I love the hybrid. I'm a lot more intentional thinking about like we need regular ways to connect and I will like make sure the team kind of has that. You know, HubSpot has peer week. We have team off sites now. But that's super intentional. So I'm actually a lot more intentional to understanding like what drives me, you know, where do I want to be and where my impact is. It helps me focus because otherwise, like if you're kind of all remote, you just need to be aligned the same direction and that makes me think I'm Also a lot more conscious of like, even in our team setting, I'm. I'm not that much of a small talker. I don't know if my team knows that. I'm much better at now, but I'm. I'm way more intentional about like sharing different parts of my life, like where I'm going on vacation. I have an open calendar. People know when I drop off my kids. I think that's important in hybrid and remote, which is like be human, show up.

Yeah.

And I want to do that with my team too.

So for sure, sure. Tune. Would you give me the opposing? I'm not sure opposing the wrong word. I'm sorry. But you have a more of an in office type policy like you want your team to there, right?

Yeah. So we have a 60% in the office policy so people can work from home. But it's really nice if people come into the office. And the main reason is we have a few reasons for that. One of them is bonding.

Right.

Getting to know your colleagues. Learn a bit, a little bit about their personalities, about their personal life. But other thing is efficiency. So we really try to push our team to learn from each other. We have a few more senior developers, we have a few junior developers. The big difference from working fully remote, which we have done for a few years during Corona, but the big difference is the little tap on the shoulder. Hey, can you help me out? I'm stuck on a problem here and that's so much easier when you're sitting next to each other, opposed to when it's fully digital. And that's the tricky thing because currently we have multiple offices and our team is now separated between two different offices. And I also have a new co worker who's moving to Poland, so he's going to be fully remote. And we're really trying to design a system where it's still easy to give that little tap. Hey, I'm stuck. Can you help me out? You know, but, but still it's. It's kind of. People don't make that gesture that easy through slack or through a meeting or, you know. So. Yeah, I think that's the biggest challenge.

Oh, certainly a different feel altogether. And Ludwig, you said earlier about like, you know, sitting next to the expert in your field. How have you done that in the past? Was it virtually or was it actually physically there?

Well, it was physically at first and then we went the full remote route because it was easier for us to hire people across like the country rather than in the small office where we live, which is in the southeast of France, not necessarily the best place to hire, like, talents. And it's actually really hard because I heard from different people in my team, they had, like, very opposed ways of, you know, treating their work. So one person actually wanted to work just for the money. And, you know, I come in at 8, I finish at 5. And I do my job and I'm invested. Okay, I'm invested, but I do my job and I earn my money and I'm not there to socialize, I'm not there to make friends. I just want to do my job properly and get paid for it. And then the other type that is very invested, wants to socialize is like, work is actually one of the best way to socialize when you're past 20 and you're like done learning and done going to the university. So it's like really hard to cater to those two types. We actually went the full remote, full remote way and we're meeting once a month. So there are actually times where we can actually meet and sit next to each other. But it's true, like, with time we understand that, like, we're missing something. Like there's the, you know, the team spirit and like, we do two team buildings a year. But even that is not enough compared to like meeting people every day and just drinking coffee and having lunch and together. But we try to make do, basically. We, like virtually meet several times a week and try to, you know, work in pairs. So, like, people just spend time together. But like, virtually, as you all know, is very different from in person. And so far it works. But like, it's only been a year and a half and like, I don't really know, like the, the impacts on the long run and how it's going to impact the business when it grows larger. Because we've like, been growing a lot recently and. And the bigger the team, the harder it gets to have everyone aligned and the more resources you add to a team that is full remote for remote. The, the harder it gets basically to handle all these, like, you know, different ways of considering your workday.

Well, and one of the things you said, Ludwig, that really jumped out is when you shift to a fully remote team, you've got to provide more water cooler talks, right? And a lot of companies are like, hey, let's just go virtual. We can save money because we don't need this office space. Well, that's great, but if you're not doing Friday happy hours digitally, like, you have to serve alcohol. But just like, hey, let's, let's chat. Let's just hang out. Because we have Slack. We've got teams, whatever you're using to enter communicate with but that still doesn't show any emotion, right?

Yeah.

So. And also don't hesitate to send audio files, show your emotion that you can't through text. Right. To keep that team connected but then also force them to join. Hey, we've got to do this water cooler talk. And we. So what we did is we actually did games every two weeks. We did a water cooler with a game, like a trivia game, something fun. And then one of the things we other did we did as well was a fitness challenge. Because every business knows that if the employees are fitness active focused, they're going to spend a lot less time in the doctor and at home sick. So we made it a challenge and the company rewarded those people who actually won the challenges so anybody could win it. That drove this because we had a Slack channel dedicated to who's leading the race and it would update automatically and it gave that, oh my gosh, I've got to go work out. Cool, go work out. Like you have that freedom. You're at home. Just make sure you get the work done. But I think a lot of people miss that water cooler talk for sure. So then they're like, oh, working from road is so isolated. Well, because your team's not getting together and you don't need a manager and you don't need the boss to tell you to do this. You can do it yourself no matter where you are on the team.

Yeah, we actually tried to do something like this, but as you said, like it felt forced and people just were hesitant to talk and share. But like I guess we were maybe missing the medium, which is the game in this case.

So we did the game, we did a question of the season. Like, hey, what's your favorite thing about the fall? Let's get to know one each other that we would typically like. Did you see the leaves driving in? If you think about it like that, what's something that's easy that no one's going to get personal? Like, what's the family member you don't like? You know, don't ask those questions. Right. But like what do you do for Thanksgiving? Tell me your holiday season if you're in the U.S. i know not everybody celebrates around the world, but what do you do during the Christmas time just to get to know families and that's how you can create that connection. Now, as Tune said, you're going to have random people who just want the paycheck and be done, you know.

Yeah, for sure.

And that's. You're going to have those team members, right?

So, yeah, we went on a boat trip on the French Riviera. So actually it was like a really good bonding experience. But it's actually like once a year because you said like, yeah, you got the money because you don't pay for the office. Actually, it's not like that. It's like way more expensive to run a remote business than to run an on site business because you have to pay for people's flights, you have to pay for people's nights. And when you add up, the bigger the team, the more expensive it gets and it's actually way more expensive to run a remote business than an on site one.

Yeah.

I would like to know if other people have the same experience.

Anton, I'm the morning. I'm sorry. Anton. Tone, I'm curious, like on the remote front, like how do you make sure that when you're talking to someone, one of your employees, that your tone is correct and it's not like ambiguous, like it doesn't, you know when you have that message and slack from your boss that has like no affect to it and you don't know if they hate you right now or if they are just like asking a simple thing.

You know every client email.

Yeah, yeah. How do you make sure that you are managing it properly and that you don't have a. Someone out there, a junior dev out there who is halftime crying under their desk because they don't know what you're feeling.

So my approach back then was we chatted through teams or slack, but when it got serious we jumped on a

call

because as almost everybody mentioned,

you

can't get emotions through text and even with, with emojis and GIFs and whatever there's out. But I mean if you see the person, at least through the camera, it's a way better communication.

Yeah, yeah.

So this was my thing back then.

Yeah.

And Karen, I want to send this to you as well because you just said you're not a fan of small talk. You're getting better at it as you, as you mature. Let's say that how are you, you know, like, how are your slack messages going out to people?

Yeah, I was laughing because I think I did that this morning where I sent a slack message with no emotion that was asking about one of our initiatives and I am sure it came, came off. I, it's funny because I, I followed it up with qualifying it and also recognizing that there Must be frustration and that, hey, we've been adapting really quickly. Things are moving super fast and I'd be happy to jump on a call if I want to. So I think that's why I'm just like a little bit more conscious of it. I try looms, you know, and I try, I try looms and I try rooms. I try different kinds of things to just kind of be human and personal, you know, I do looms a lot for our team. Um, it's just like what's top of mind for me? And then I have a couple of rhythms that I do that are literally called top of minds or you know, different versions of my extent, staff or leaders. I just recognize everyone's here because they you're like independently owning a space or like thinking about your problem. So, you know, the more context I can give, even if it's top of mind and what I think about, I try to do that in a write up or a loom that is a little bit more human.

Totally off topic, but I. Well, kind of on topic. How many times does it take you to record a loom? Just out of curiosity? Because it takes me at least seven days to do a three minute loom.

Dennis, you're not doing them enough. It's supposed to take three minutes.

No, I figured out how to do it in like one or two recordings, which is wild. If you didn't know. I used to do Descript all the time, which is amazing. I like being able to edit. Loom has that now. So if you record a loom, just start over and record and then when you switch to edit, there's actually a way to see your verbal transcript and you can delete it and it will read through the video for you.

Amazing, amazing. Hot tips, folks. Hot tips. Moving right along, we're going to the team building and management category now and we're going to just talk about the hiring process. I want to know when you are hiring, what are you? Like, let's balance the two things out like the actual technical skills and the soft skills. Where do you lead with what more important initially? And I'm gonna bring that one over to Mark.

So you're asking me this at an interesting time and I'm just a general follow up question for the whole room is how people are dealing with AI because like typically the way that we do our, our interviews or how I've done it in the past is like a soft skills screen first is kind of talking like, who are you as a person? Like kind of tell me more about, about that thing and then I'll get into a skills evaluation. And traditionally I have been like a. All right, here is your challenge. As long as you're sharing your screen and you show me how you Google or how, you know, whatever, use whatever tool set you're going to have available, I feel like that is getting harder now with, with AI because people just go to ChatGPT and put the prompt in and get an answer right. So I don't know. I am in the. I'm evaluating how I want to handle that moving forward. I would be curious other people's thoughts not to totally derail the question.

No, no, no. I love this derailment. I love it. I've been thinking about this a lot because I've been evaluating. I'm going to San Francisco in a couple weeks to go to some. A code editor. It's AI code editor thing. I'm not going to name it yet because, you know, I'm not sure if I should or not. Anyway, I'm going to this thing to do this thing with code editors where supposedly you can write an app on your phone, right? Those, those types of things are out there, those, you know, claims. And I, I'm, me personally, I'm saying it's like it's kind of the future, but not like that. You know, like it's definitely knowing how to use the AI component, not lead with it, but as an assistant is becoming more and more important. I think it's going to be, you know, crucial at some point in time, like totally necessary. I would like anyone else's opinions on this because I'm just curious generally. And room is open.

We have, we have one important rule at our company. It's. It's fine to use AI however. You need to know. You need to, you need to be able to read the output, you need to be able to make adjustments, you need to be able to add the comments, add the documentation. So as long as you're able to evaluate whatever AI is generating, then it's fine to use it. However, once you get at a point where you're no longer Understanding what ChatGPT or other AI tools are generating, yeah. Then it's a bad practice to start using it. So that's the most important rule. And to answer Mark's question, I think I just lately got advice from another manager in our company and one of the things they would do was simply send over a bunch of information like documentation. And that wasn't from a developer perspective, but just send over documentation and talk about A case during the interview. Right. So to translate it to a developer perspective, what a great thing could be to do is simply Send over the HubSpot developer docs and discuss a case how they would solve it depending on that documentation. Because if I look at myself and our company, I think the learning ability of, of someone is more important than the code they can type before the interview itself.

So I, I'm going to jump right into that. So we did a three round interview process and the first two interact. The first two rounds were 100% company fit in the personality, what does that person actually care about? Is it the one who just wants the paycheck? And they don't care. Right. They're just looking for the next job to move from or go to. And again, those people are fine, but they weren't the right fit for our organization. We had a certain culture that could work remote and in, in the shop too at the same time. But we, we focus heavily on like do they from a developer standpoint or even from a marketing standpoint or a customer service standpoint is what keeps them up at night. It's the same thing we ask when we're selling to customers. You've got to know your icp, right? Your ideal customer profile. But if you don't know your ideal customer developer, say in this case, if they're not looking at code and building at home and just constantly engulfing themselves in newest and latest things and do you really want them? Because you don't want somebody who's like, well, yeah, I can prompt AI. Well, you can only prompt AI with what you sort of have expanded your mind to from a developer. A developer can take a prompt to an AI a lot faster and a lot better than someone who's just coming in off the street, say, cool, build me an app. They're going to write, build me an app. A developer would actually enhance that prompt by a million times better. Right. So I always focus on who are they? Yeah, do they fit with the organization? And then let's talk about your technical skills if you make it that far. Because the technical skills can be taught, they can be learned, they can grow if they're just an amateur developer, but if they're a mid level or senior developer, where you're going to get them, but you need to make sure they fit the organization and they don't just come in and say we're blowing all this up, we're going to change everything, you know.

Yeah.

It can also be a massive risk bringing the wrong personality into A team. Right. Because that can mess up the whole dynamic.

So yeah, I mean it's almost like AJ sometimes.

Oh dear. This was guys not even on stage and you're making fun of like that's just terrible. Justin. So Karen, like how would you say like with, with using AI senior, like let's say a junior developer versus a, I don't know, mid range developer, like middle of their career type of developer. Not senior yet, but getting there. Right. Does it level the playing field in terms of hiring? Do you, do you reevaluate what the needs are or would you still go with the higher level developer?

Is that for me?

That is for you.

Okay, well I'll answer with like, it really depends on the role and shape of the team that I'm creating and I'm really thoughtful of the shape of team. Are you adding junior or senior members and then junior. I definitely want like a good set of technical. But you can learn it and to what Justin. And actually the whole theme of people are saying with AI, it's how people think. That's what I. It's how you think, how you break down a problem, how you might use and then make sense of it and make sure you understand it. Like a huge flag for me is when people use tools and like they don't understand it and then pretend they do. Those are like the biggest flags. Because I, I could work with anyone who's humble enough to like understand when you don't know something and then we can teach people.

Right? Right. For sure.

With AI, I think it's actually nowadays I don't expect everyone to be AI native, but I like people who are starting to be like start thinking in their day to day work with that. I think about that all the time in our hires and actually even on our team. I happen to have a machine learning degree in machine learning, but I don't need that role in every single role. But I need people who are like, if I ask the question of how do you use AI day to day, what's your answer back? Right. Like I just wrote a GPT for Hubspotters because I don't write my interview feedback anymore. If you write your interview in a certain way or ask questions and annotate it in the way that I have my GPT trained, it'll spit out your interview for you. So it seems to. I just published that for, for HubSpot. I'm looking for that which is, is there curiosity? You're in the middle of a disruption wave. And I get it, you know like are you, how are you learning that in your day to day? So is there, is there hunger? Is the passion, is there grit? And then how do you think? Yeah, and then, you know, base level skills. But you can teach a lot for sure.

I love it. We have seven minutes left, so if anyone here has questions, go ahead and throw in the chat. I didn't realize how quickly this is going to go. You all are amazing people. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions. I want to keep an eye on the chat. AJ if you see something, just throw it up there and I'll force you find folks to deal with it. Let's move on to how important is diversity in building an effective engineering team and how do you work towards achieving it? That's a very broad diversity. I'm not going to define it. I'm just curious to know how you all, as you answer the question, how you define different diversity. It could be loaded, but I promise it's not. I want to start with Justin. You know, give, give him hack, man. Get out there.

Yeah. So you don't want the same person 16 times. Right. They're not going to give you variety. You're going to get the same thought pattern. So you want somebody who can a. When you're doing code reviews, you're seeing advances and you can share that with the team. So everyone is elevated. Right. You don't want somebody writing the exact same function that might be a bad function. Right. You want people to have that sort of different thinking. Yes, we still want that developer mindset, but we still still need a variety of developer mindsets because not every problem won't be get a hammer and a nail. It might be we need to drill with a saw and do some other cuts. So when you think about it like that, your team needs to be unique and dynamic and diverse to solve because you don't right now. You know what problems you're dealing with.

Yeah.

In a week you don't know what client's going to be knocking on your door and saying, I want to solve this. And you're like, well, our team can only do this because that's all I've hired. Right. So you want that diversity.

Okay.

Indeed. Mark, talk to me.

Yeah, so for me the first thing that comes to mind honestly is like diversity of skill set, especially with where HubSpot is as a platform right now. So like obviously with a lot of the betas being focused towards like react, bringing in people who are, you know, full stack developers or have experience with next or Other technologies honestly brings more perspectives into kind of that solutioning process when we're looking at how to build out something for a client. And so I love having hiring people from outside the HubSpot ecosystem. But then at the same time you also have those, at least on our side as an agency, we also have some legacy clients who have stuff built back on cause like from when it first came out. And so you need people who kind of understand like where HubSpot came from and some of those like kind of, what's the word? I don't know, intricacies or strange things about it. And some people honestly too just want to do HTML emails or like quote templates and they enjoy that kind of stuff. And so having those kind of roles and those like specialists on the team even, you know they're not going to do that work 100% of the time. But this year we've instituted some pair programming code reviews on our team and it's been really cool to pair developers who had different specialties, have them comment on each other's work and give feedback. And it's been really cool to see how they interact and the different things that you talk about. Love it.

It's amazing. I want to hear everyone else's thoughts on this. Unfortunately, we're almost out of time and there are a couple questions in there, so I want to go to those. We have one from Jonathan Brake. How do you deal with dude, how do you deal? How do you deal manage a dev that continually ignores directions standards because they think they know better, they just don't like it takes months to figure out for themselves what you were one there's showing them or the standard is the best way forward. Really don't want to be in a micromanaging. Okay, so basically summing this question up, do I need to sum it up or you all have like the gist of that question? Karen, go for it.

I think it depends. So somebody who doesn't listen to standards or directions, sometimes it's a style thing. So if it's someone where they're not humble, that ends up becoming a flag for me because it's a humility and it's a learnable culture trait. And I don't have a lot of those for a very long time. If somebody doesn't recognize that they can't be coached, that's hard. The other part of your question though was what if they don't like it? That one. I actually think people work in different styles and so sometimes when I have people who like they're really good at zero to ones and ambiguity. They're terrible for scaled stuff. And like process. I do, I do try to put them. That doesn't have to do as much. Like, I don't think everyone has to work in the exact same style and thrive. So kind of hate process. You know, I always tell people on my team like, don't, don't make me be the jira, you know, like advocate. Like, that's not me. I'm like just enough process to make sure teams are aligned. I really care that people are aligned, have communication, have good vis. But I just really don't care what the process is. Like what you run for your team. That's the second part of my question, which is if it's about like they don't like it, you have to do a base level of stuff because you're a team player. And that's the, that's the mindset I have which is like, we are a we. So that becomes a problem. I. That go on for very long. But if it's. They just don't like it. I definitely try to find roles or teams or projects that are starting up that fit their, fit their. Where their passions are better.

I think it's a teaching moment too, is for you to ask them, well, tell me why. Let's get into your brain.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of managers are like, no, my way is the best way. Well, then you just start having a, a really uncomfortable situation. Right. Instead of saying, well, why do you think that code's better than what we're telling you to do, Justin, you can

say let, let's, let's, let's follow up with. I think you segued nicely into this question then. So how should you deal with disciplinary actions for remote teams if things aren't getting done or I guess even working out? I'll extend that question a little bit. Anyone jump? Ice tune, you almost ran towards the screen. So I want to have you lead with this question and tell me, tell me the answer. So I never get fired from you? Yeah.

I mean, it always starts with an evaluation. So the first question I ask is why? What's making you struggle meeting deadlines. And I always try to see if there's an underlying problem that's causing someone to not function or not meeting deadlines. And I think once you're at that point and you do not have an underlying problem that that's causing it. Yeah. Then, then they're gotta, you gotta set more strict rules for them. And, and the sad thing is. And that's always something I want to avoid, is that then you get at a point where you're kind of micromanaging, and so you have to set a. What is it called? Completely forgot the English word. That's crazy. Someone has to decide when it's enough. Right. So first, yeah, check what's going on with the person. Is there an underlying problem? How can you help them get better at their work and maybe make it a bit easier for them? But if that's not the case. Yeah. That there. There is going to be a point where enough is enough, right?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

SJ gave a great answer as well.

I didn't see it. I apologize. Sj, what was this? She just said a spatula special is definitely the answer. I'm sure it's always the answer. We're at time, so if you all have, like, closing thoughts that you want to put out there, you don't have to. It's not a big deal. But if you want to say something, throw it out there now and go. That. That deafening silence tells me that we are all ready to end this. I thank each and every one of you for being a part of this. This is a lot of fun. I wish we had more time to do it, and I learned a ton from it. Anyone who filled out that form, I will be working on getting some swag out your ways as soon as I possibly can, I promise. Hold me to it. I'll see you all Next. Next month, December 5th, where we talk about new custom channels, APIs. Have a great, great day, and I'll talk to you later.

Thanks, all.

Thanks.