Starting Up

It has been about seven months since I started at Fender. When I started, I had a team of about nine people. Right now the team stands near forty. We have grown a lot, hired a ton, and as a team are setting the template for what it means to be “digital” at the most storied company in Rock and Roll.

Below are some of my observations from the last seven months. In no particular order.

Hire a great engineering leader early

I’ve managed engineers. I’ve been one! I wasn’t a great one. That made me not a great manager of engineers. I learned this way too many times to be healthy (for me or the engineers), so at the outset I took myself out of this job and hired an amazing engineering lead. The tendency of product leads (which I have been and still am as CPO) to want to manage engineers is mostly an excercise in autocracy and control. Those two things are not the ingredients for a great engineering culture. A great engineering lead is.

Culture is grown

A culture is not a mission/vision statement, nor is it a handbook you give an employee. Culture is seeded, cultivated and grown through means that include these items, but mostly are related to the articulation of the “why” of making through the “how.” A culture is lived and is a framework of a team’s methods rather than a thing you point to on a wall.

A department is its own product

I’ve done the whole ‘culture is a product’ riff before, and I still believe that. I also believe that a department and group of people are their own product. Before you ship something to the public, you need to ship inwardly for yourself. A department requires infrastructure, operational parameters, a go-to-market strategy, analytics, continual improvement and refining and most of all: listening to its constituents.

Don’t isolate your division

Digital is fun and cool. It requires using cool shiny tools to do interesting things. But you know what? So does making an electric guitar. Makers are makers and tools are tools. We all play our instruments and operate our machinery, but there is a dangerous tendency (that I’ve been guilty of) to adopt a “cool kids” mentality becuase of the tools afforded to us and the world we play in. At the end of the day we’re all as good as what we make, and as relevant as what we ship — digital or not.

It’s about what you make. And ship.

There is a lot that gets in the way of shipping and there is also a lot that can pollute the process of “making.” I often gut check the rabbit holing with “does this contribute to the product we’re going to ship,” “does this make the lives of our users better” and finally “is all of this testable and measurable?”

Meeting cadence matters

One thing I established immediately when I started was a cadence to meetings that kept Tuesday — Thursday mostly free (myself excluded). Monday it’s a meeting about the week behind us, and Fridays about the week ahead. That way we start the week with everyone showing what they shipped, what they did and me giving an exec brief. At the end of the week we prune the backlog in the morning and plan the week ahead at the end of the day. You often dread Monday a lot less when the first thing you do is celebrate rather than plan.

Processes adapt with the team

I set up a product development process before I started, but I also made sure that the documentation for that process was on a system that allowed collaborative editing. I also stipulated that everything is adaptable. This is key: what works when you are planning and “getting to know each other” as a new team isn’t what works when the operational cadence increases. Processes adapt to the team and adapt to the changes in team structure and size over time. Whatever process you currently rest on needs to adapt to those changes.

Leaders lead by leading

Titles don’t make leaders, neither do org charts. In fact, leaders on your team will often emerge ahead of any organizational changes. As well, leadership isn’t dependent on organizational structure. If you bottom-up your org-chart, you should be looking for leadership in every member of the team, in every maker on the team. Being maker-lead isn’t just about saying you are so, it’s really letting the makers lead and define the vision that they want to contribute to.

Fight to keep and get good people, but keep it symetrical

If you find good people you want to get, or if you have good people you don’t want to leave, fight to keep them. Team members who fit culturally and in their work are key to a great org. But, be mindful of when the battle to keep/get someone turns to a battle to just not lose the battle, vs get the desired outcome. At that point, you are fighting too hard, and the relationship is asymetrical. That isn’t going to end well for anyone.

Nothing good comes from late night/weekend emails

I had the horrible tendancy in prior positions to fire off the 1AM missive, the 5AM observation or the Saturday at noon bug report. Nothing good comes from this. For one, it just breeds anxiety among the team, and secondly, it perpetuates this behavior. When someone’s boss does this, they start doing this, and you end up with an anxiety laden department of twitchiness. I try not to do this, I hope my team doesn’t do this, and am glad my boss also doesn’t do this. If it really needs to get written, use Evernote and send on Monday.

Vision and mission matter from the start, even if they change

A boat needs a north star even from the start, even if the boat is only a dingy. Luckily when its small, it is nimble and easy to change direction. As the boat gets bigger, the north star gets more fixed, but you keep the boat from being rudderless by having a north star from the outsset. I have now exhausted nautical metaphors.

Learn from the past

In Evernote I have a document that is titled “What went wrong before”. I created the list in 2011 and continually update it as I learn new things. Continual integration and delivery applies to yourself as well as your engineering org after all. I maintain the list, I revisit the list, I make sure to not repeat things on the list. This is the fourth time I’ve spun up a digital org, I know what not to do, but I’m sure the file will still grow.

Know yourself

Part of what writing that aforementioned document did for me is it let me be confronted by my own flaws, with my own observations. I know my areas of discomfort, where I tend to stray, my bad habits and things I’ve done that irritated others. In terms of areas of discomfort, I know I’ll have to do some of these things, but I also know myself well enough to know where to delegate them. I’ve often said “you find the holes by falling into them,” but knowing yourself and your own tendencies puts big cones around those holes. It saves a lot of time and energy.

Recruiting is Marketing

Your job posts, your interview process, on boarding, off boarding, first day experience, etc are all part of how you market your team to others. In tech hiring it is competitive (though not as much now) so treat every touch point with a potential employee (or new one) as if it was a marketing oppurtunity for the product that is your team.

RAM, screens, Macs are all cheaper than people

Keep your team comfortable with technology that enhances work rather than hinders. Pretty self explanatory. RAM is cheap, screens are cheap, Macs are cheap. People are expensive.

A 70 year company that makes noisy things out of wood is pretty great to recruit into

When hiring talent, the story matters a lot. We are a growing company that makes product that you see on late night shows every day there is a musical guest. You can’t find a picture of a band on stage without one of our products present. And while we are 70 years old, that hasn’t worked against us. Who’d have thought stability, risk tolerance, growth and nimbleness are all mutually compatible and attractive for potential team mates?

And on that note, we are hiring.