YouSaid · the spoken record

Baris Cetinok

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-11-04
most recent: 2024-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Have already when you get into, let's say, a 2024, 2025 lyric, your experience at different electric architecture than you would have maybe if you bought a Colorado ZR2 pickup truck. And that's okay. And by the way, Customers actually done need to know. Our job is to hike that complexly and the choices, all you want is a reliable car that you can easily and comfortably get directions from. Routes you in such a way that you know when you need to charge, how much, where the charging stations are, that you can stream your music, answer your phone calls, etc., and new experiences. But let us do our job. We'll hide the complexity and we'll continue to innovate and make things even better without always having to know it.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tomorrow, and they need to power ecosystem of thousands of permutations or millions of permutations. What we do is we do support multiple electric architectures because that's what we do. We do build the software for them and we always are also looking into the future of where else can we take it. And the thing is, just like any company who's working on their next electrical or electrical or electronic architecture, you are going to have a rollout that's going to be progressive. You cannot day one flip an entire portfolio of three brands and tens of different offerings on day one. And also you don't have to. That's the thing that I think our customers have different needs, different expectations, and we are working through that responsibly. My team is already actively working on the next and even next next generations of architectures because this takes five to a decade or longer. So we are on this continuum.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the beauty and the hot but fun part of having such a vast and rich portfolio like we offer through GM brands? We built a Hummer as well as sedans and the Blazor and Silverado and Bolt. We have a very large portfolio that meets the needs of very different jobs that people want to get done. And so what that means is also this is a popular portfolio. It's been around for a while, right? This is not a startup proof of concepting with just two vehicles. That's a little bit easier to get started and it's easy to start from a blank sheet and say this is the new norm because there is no preceding norm. So our job is just like any successful company and we're not the only ones, right? I mean think about Windows. Windows runs probably on PCs that's been around for four decades as well as a PC you just buy.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, ABS. It's been around for decades. That's magic of software, right? Emissions and how that's controlled. That's magic of software, how you take corners safely. That's magic. There's a lot of embedded software. I think what's coming is just to the forefront and create that interactions. And I believe we gathered the right group of people, the right talent, collaborating with the existing talent at GM and creating those kind of experiences. I believe in short, it's possible.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your blood sugar and decides how many MGs of insulin we should give you instead of in the old days, right? You had to prick your finger, do your own shots. Think about those kind of systems. These things are life-critical, safety critical things. So one thing you come to appreciate when you start building cars is that you need to get that right. That's non-negotiable. That is job number one. Then you start expanding it and say, how can I create richer experiences because now you're in that vehicle. And I believe with the right talent and with the right players and you can marry them up in a company, we can at GM create this kind of experiences. And we have a good track record, right? Our cars have had software for decades now. And it just wants, I think, changing is the software is now coming a little bit more to the forefront in how you interact with the vehicle rather than”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. One thing I came to really appreciate in my one year, tenure here is Building cars, it's a complex system. And also, one thing that's important to appreciate, yeah, you might get frustrated if you don't get to post your favorite, really witty TikTok for an hour if there is a outage. You don't have that permission when you're being a safety critical device that gets you from home to work, gets you to the hospital for your child's first birthday, or you need to go rush and pick up your kids from school. This needs to work every time, every day under snowy days, hot days, reliably and safely, non-stop. I mean, that's amazingly high bar. There's very few little industries you appreciate. Healthcare is one of them, right? Imagine if you're type one diabetic, those insulin pumps that monitor.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apple is an interesting comparison. Obviously, there was a car project there, it appears to have not gone well. Is there a reason why GM is able to turn into a software company faster than Apple is able to turn into a car company?”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tap into all the capabilities of this thing and create a deeply integrated experience. And yes, I'll have to say, I learned it from the best, right? I mean, you look at a company like Apple who espoused deep vertical integration is one of the ways to create the most seamless experience. Case in point, we believe in the same thing for vehicles, and that's why we believe we are a hardware software and services company rather than just a hardware company.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The navigation system, the accelerator HVAC, and something like super cruise, they should all be talking to each other. That's actually, if you and I were just imagining a car, we did not know nothing about technology, we will just describe that, that it just works, right? You will just be like, hey, I get into a car, I express to the car, forget full autonomy, just generally. Hey, today I'm going to drive from here to Chase Center for Warriors game. Help me get there. That's all you want. Now, today, we ask people to divide this into little subtasks, and you have to do all of the parts. That's the magic of software, right? We take that complexity away and we make it simpler. We automate certain tasks, we hide certain tasks. And the thing that I'm excited about working at GM is I get to imagine how I can.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I'm going to hire you as my internal evangelist. We can go on a whole tour across the company, pitch what you just pitched. But I wholeheartedly agree with you, which is, I think what happened is the propulsion change induced people to reimagine what cars and vehicles could do. I don't think it was the root cause of it. It just was a spark and made people pause and start questioning what else can we reimagine in the car? However, I don't think it's this kind of like correlation was just causation. I agree with you. Propulsion change should not be the causation of we should have more integrated, deeply aware experiences of our vehicles. Because one thing that I always try to say to people is like, this is one of the most vertically integrated products. And why wouldn't we imagine a world where”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That may be Super Cruise is easier to deploy on an EV because you have finer grain control over the motors or the braking system or all the other stuff you might have mechanically in the car. Do you think that that's true that you need the EV transition to enable the user experience transition in the car? Or are they just sort of coming along for the ride together?”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I'm very jealous. I was going to say, if he didn't have one Corvette in there, I was going to be mad, but a black wing is a reasonable substitute for a Corvette, I think. Actually, let's talk about that. That's a good framework for a bunch of questions I have here. I talk to a lot of people in the car industry, as you know. You're a listener of the show, and there's a general sense that we're undergoing what amounts to a platform change in the car industry from ice vehicles to EV vehicles. And that creates the opportunity to rethink a bunch of experiences inside the car. And I would say this is more or less conventional wisdom. People buy an EV, they think the whole car is going to be different. This is an opportunity to actually make things different. Whereas if you go from one gas car to another gas car, suddenly whole things different, that might be unexpected or strange. I'm not actually sure I buy that, right? I think if you buy a gas card and it has a much better infotainment system, you're not going to be mad. If you buy a gas card and has super cruise, I think people will be generally happy. But there's a bunch of stuff under.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazingly different software stacks and capability stacks and how it comes together. But it's the same group of software people who are actually thinking about what it takes to create a performance car, also what it takes to create an amazing hardcore off-road EV vehicle-like Hummer EV pickup track. So there is a way to create this type of expertise and collaborate. And that's why we're trying to achieve here and doing it, I think pretty well. I think in the last year we have good moments of demonstrative examples how it came together.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company like General Motors, we are actually very similar to some of these other companies we are talking about. We are a hardware, software, and services company. We built beautifully industrially designed vehicles, amazing engines, be it electrical propulsion or internal combustion, amazing interior styling, plus software and plus a service-like on start. It's been around now 25 plus years bringing to one product. So therefore, when you have this type of different domains and product knowledge, it is important to come together because, for example, I have two cars right now. I get to drive fun cars every six months. I get to drive something different. One of my cars is a hammer EV pickup truck. And the other one is could not be on the other end of the spectrum. It's not yet released 2025 CT5V Blackwing. And it's a six-peat manual transmission. These two cars have amazing different capabilities.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you have a good observation. I call it Apple tries to find its unicorns who are good at product management and also has always an eye in how to do great storytelling. So I worked for a gentleman named Jazz and afterwards Jennifer Bailey. They're the consummate product leaders who starts with the customer value proposition and turn it into a product and eventually ship it. So in that sense titles aside, good product managers always start with a customer backward story. Like you need to have an end story in mind. You know, some companies like Amazon ask their product managers to write fake press releases. Literally says, what would you like the press release to read like if your product was being announced today? So product managers actually do end up collaborating very closely with marketers in companies because they are the stewards of the product. They know the facts and the spirit of the product.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to ask one more question on this? I'm trying not to get myself sidetracked into how curious I am about this across the industry. You were at Apple. Apple is sort of famous for not having traditional PMs, right? They have product marketing managers who are outbound to the customer. That's very different than a bunch of other companies, Google, Meta, what have you. How do you think about that at GM? Because you're not really marketing the software, right? You're marketing a car. And then GM has multiple brands with multiple expressions of the software and the car platforms. That seems like a very challenging kind of job description.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All these thousands of parts come together by the thousands and build such a complex and beautiful machine called a car. That's why you need also strong program management culture to bring it all together and package it and ship it. So without these two actually four or five players playing together, it's almost impossible to build amazing products and ship them on time.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Milestones, so you can along the way truly demonstrate progress towards a real outcome and a date. Some companies have that drumbeat in a very predictable way. Every September you must release a new phone. It sets that entire rhythm and everybody works towards that. Those are the program managers who do that. The same thing applies here, right? When we set out to build an amazing car like 2025 Blazor EV, you have vehicle program managers, software program managers coming together.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're a proc manager for a super cruise, you basically articulate, wouldn't it be amazing? It starts with simple sentences like this. It's not some dollar sign, it's not some ethnographic study says, wouldn't it be amazing what technology when you're driving Warriors fan full disclosure? I drive from south of the city to Chase Center twice a week. 90% of my mileage is on 280 and 90 plus percent of my time is on 280. Wouldn't it be amazing during that period I can be less stressed? I can do other things because it can potentially be automated. Well, that's that initial expression of that hypothesis. Then you, of course, it's easy to say this kind of things could be sci-fi or you want to make it reality. Then engineers come in. But the program managers say, I love your vision. But now we need to divide this up into bite-sized chunks, into real milestones.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get this question asked internally. And I always say to people, and I've been very fortunate, I always tell people, write down right place, hard work meets a few moments in my life. I worked at Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s. Then I was part of the AWS group and it was just getting started at Amazon. Then I spent a decade at Apple. One thing that's common in all of these companies is a”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've opened the door to an entire hour long conversation about program managers versus product managers. I want to talk to you about a lot of other things, but we do have a lot of product managers who listen to the show. We have a lot of people who build products. What in your mind is the real difference between a product manager and a program manager? Because that's not a split that every company has”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To each other, they know how to pass the ball. But the goal is actually just having a winning team and build awesome products.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The how, and that's when design and engineering comes into the mix because these are the, I like this Disney term called imagineers. These are the people who imagine and engineer things and make those watts real. You cannot ship PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets and Figma files. You need to turn this into real code, real beautiful design. Hence, that's engineering plus design. And then program managers are the people who keep us honest on time, on schedule, on budget, and reminds us we need to make some decisions in a timely manner. They're like the cockswain of a crew team. They're the ones who are keeping the rhythm going faster, slow down, pay attention, more here, here. I don't know about sports fan. It is a team sport. And these are like the top players of the starting five of a basketball team. They each have their role. They know how to differ.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hypothesis around our organizational structure is that we are a functionally oriented organization. And we are somewhat emulating how modern technology, especially software-driven technology firms, are structured, which is usually you start with a group of people who are in the product side of the house. These are the people who think about the what. What should we build and then also the why? Why should we build it? And their job is to be the voice of the customer inside the company. They listen to the customer, they listen to journalists, they listen to the zeitgeist, they do research themselves, read research and develop a thesis and eventually hypothesis around wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it be cool? Wouldn't it be amazingly interesting to do X? That's the what and why part. That's what product managers do. Then you need to think about”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, the software which you oversee We were at Apple for a while. You actually just mentioned to me that we met at the Apple Pay launch. That's what you worked on at Apple. You came to GM about a year ago, just a little over a year ago. And then as of June, you have an I'm going to read you the whole thing because I want you to explain to me what it means. Senior Vice President Software and Services Product Management Program Management and Design. What does that all mean?”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really wanted to know how Barish is rethinking GM's approach to software and the teams that build it. And I most especially wanted to know how he plans to ship and maintain all of that software across GM's many individual brands and models. Right now, Ultify is based on something called Google built-in, which, if you've used it, kind of feels like having a giant Android tablet in the car. And that means Bearish has to deal with all of the problems of shipping millions of giant Android tablets, making sure they get software and security updates, and making sure they stay relevant even as the demands of users and software developers increase. This is a big task.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, that GM software platform, which is called Altify, That people won't miss car play. That is a tall order. Every time we do a decoder episode with a car person, we talk about carplay Get an avalanche of emails from people who say they will never buy a car without it. See, we really do read all the emails. Handing over the displays of the car to Apple and Google simply won't allow GM to innovate fast enough, so the company has to build its own software.”
2024-11-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why GM ditched CarPlay, with software boss Baris Cetinok · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT