YouSaid · the spoken record

Gene Kim

lines on the record: 72
first: 2020-03-06
most recent: 2020-03-06
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

“Right, and that's such a great question. And so we actually dug into that in our research, and we find that there are five characteristics that end up being predictive of driving change and really amplifying all of the other capabilities that we found. And these five characteristics are vision, intellectual stimulation, inspirational communication, supportive leadership, and personal recognition. And so what we end up recommending to organizations is absolutely invest in the technology, also invest in leadership in your people, because that can really help drive your transformation home.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see a lot of CEOs and CTOs and CIOs in our business. We have like a whole briefing center. We hear what's top of mind for them all the time. Everyone thinks they're transformational. So like what actually makes a visionary type of leader who has that not just the purse strings and the decision making power, but the actual characteristics that are ripe for this.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can achieve So, I think we're in a world where technology matters. Anyone can do this stuff, but you have to get the technology part of it right. That means investing in your engineering capabilities, in your process, in your culture, in your architecture. We dealt with a lot of things here that people think are intangible and we're here to tell you they're not intangible. You can measure them. They will impact the performance of your organization. So take a scientific approach to improving your organization and you will read the dividends.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teams are organic entities. And I love that you said that the unit of analysis is a team because it means you can actually do something, you can start there, and then you can see if it actually spreads or doesn't spread. Bridges doesn't bridge, et cetera. And what I also love about this framework is it also moves away from this cult of failure mindset that I think people tend to have, where it's like failing for the sake of failing. And you actually want to avoid failure. And the whole point of failing is to actually learn something and then be better and take risks so you can implement this new very smart risk. So what's your final? I mean, there's a lot of really great things here, but like what's your final sort of parting takeaway for listeners or people who might want to get started or think about how they are doing?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have several companies around the world now that are measuring their culture on a quarterly cadence and basis because we show in the book how to measure it. Westrom's typology was the table itself, and so we turned that into a scientific, psychometric way to measure it.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, what was surprising to me was that yes, there's lots of rules. The rules aren't necessarily bad. That's how we can operate at scalers by having rules. But what I found was there was a lot of people who are mission-oriented. And I think that's a nice alternative way to think about generative organizations is to think about mission orientation. The rules are there, but if it's important to the mission, we'll break the rules.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, just to kind of summarize that, you have pathological. This is a power oriented thing where the people are scared, the messenger is going to be shot. Then you have this bureaucratic, kind of rule-oriented world where the messengers aren't heard. And then you have the sort of generative, and again, I really wish I could apply this at people, but we're talking about organizations here for culture, which is more performance-oriented.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what they found was the number one ingredient was psychological safety. Does the team feel safe to take risks? And this ties together failure and novelty. If people don't feel that when things go wrong, they're going to be supported, they're not going to take risks. And then you're not going to get any novelty because novelty by definition involves taking risks. So we see that one of the biggest things you can do is create teams where it's safe to go wrong and make mistakes and where people will treat that as a learning experience. This is a principle that applies, again, not just in product development, you know, the lean startup, fail early, fail often, but also in the way we deal with problems at an operational level as well.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. And then also, how do we deal with novelty? Is novelty crushed or is it implemented or does it lead to problems? One of the pieces of research that kind of confirms what we were talking about was some research that was done by Google. They were trying to find what makes the greatest Google team. Is it for Stanford graduates, a node developer and fireall the managers?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. How do we deal with bridging between different departments? And crucially, how do we deal with failure as we discussed earlier in any complex system, including organizational systems, failure is inevitable. So failure should be treated as a learning opportunity, not whose fault was it, but why did that person not have the information they needed, the tools they needed? How can we make sure that when someone does something, it doesn't lead to catastrophic outcomes, but instead it leads to contain small blast radiuses? No.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead of the five love languages, you can have the three relationship types. So pathological organizations are characterized by low cooperation between different departments and up and down the organizational hierarchy. How do we deal with people who bring us bad news? Do we ignore them or do we shoot people who bring us bad news? How do we deal with responsibilities? Are they defined tightly so that when something goes wrong, we know whose fault it is so we can punish them? Or do we share risks because we know we're all in this together and it's the team. You're all playing in the game. You're”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, we measure it in our work and we can show that culture has a predictive effect on organizational outcomes and on technology capabilities. We use a model from a guy called Ron Westrom, who was a social scientist studying safety outcomes, in fact, in safety-critical industries like healthcare and aviation. He created a typology where he organizes organizations based on their pathological, bureaucratic, or generative”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what you need to do is take a look at your capabilities, understand what's holding you back. Right? Try to figure out what your constraints are. But the thing that I love about much of this is you can start somewhere and culture is such a core important piece we've seen across so many industries culture is truly transformative.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've been this hallway style conversation around all these themes of DevOps measuring it, why it matters, and what it means for organizations, but practically speaking, if a company, and you guys are basically arguing it, any company, not necessarily a quote company that thinks it's a tech company and necessarily a company that has like this amazing modern infrastructure stack, it could be a company that's still working off mainframes. What should people actually do to get started? And how do they know where they are?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and the whole thing with machine learning is how can we get the shortest possible feedback from changing the input parameters to seeing the effect so that the machine can learn? And that the moment you have very long feedback loops, the ML becomes much, much harder because you don't know which of the input changes cause the change in output the machine is supposed to be learning from. So the same thing is true of organizational change and process and product development as well, by the way, which is working in small batches so that you can actually reason about cause and effects. I changed this thing, it had this effect again, that requires short feedback loops, that requires small batches. That's one of the key capabilities we talk about in the book, and that's what DevOps enables.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Branches. And the reason for that is actually because of feedback loops. Developers love going off into a corner, putting headphones on their head and just coding something for like days. And then they try and integrate it into trunk. And that's a total nightmare. And not just for them, more critically for everyone else who then has to merge their code into whatever they're working on. So that's hugely painful. Git is one of these examples of a tool that makes it very easy. People like, oh, I can use feature branches. So I think, again, it's nonlinear in the way that you describe. Gives you new ways to do things. Are they good and bad? It depends.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, me and Day Farley wrote the continuous delivery book back in 2010, and since then, you know, there's Docker and Kubernetes and large-scale Docker in the cloud and all these things that you had no idea would happen. People sometimes ask me, you know, isn't it time you wrote a new edition of the book? I mean, yeah, we could probably rewrite it. Does it change any of the fundamental principles? No. Do these new tools allow you to achieve those principles in new ways? Yes. So I think this is how I always come back to any problem is go back to first principles. And the first principles, I mean, they will change over the course of centuries. I mean, we've got modern management versus kind of scientific management, but they don't change over the course of like a couple of years. The principles are still the same. Technologies give you new ways to do them, and that's what's interesting about them. Equally, things can go backwards. A great example of this is one of the capabilities we talk about in the book is working off a shared trunk or master inversion control, not going on these long-lived feature.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then finally maturity models just sort of take this snapshot of the world and describe it. How fast has technology and business changing if we create a maturity model now, let's wait, let's say four years, that maturity model is old and dead and dusty and gone.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and maturity models just don't allow that. Now another thing that's really, really nice is that capability models allow us to think about capabilities in terms of these outcomes. Capabilities drive impact. Maturity models are just this thing where you have this level one, level two, level three, level four.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can use a capability model. You can think about the capabilities that are necessary to drive your ability to develop and deliver software with speed and stability. Another limitation is that they're often kind of a lockstep or a linear formula, right?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so many people think that they want to snapshot of their DevOps or their technology transformation and spit back a number. You will have one number to compare yourself against everything. The challenge though is that a maturity model usually is leveraged to help you think about arriving somewhere. And then here's the problem. Once you've arrived, what happens? You're done. And then the resources are gone. And by resources, I don't just mean money. I mean time, I mean attention. We see year over year over year the best, most innovative companies continue to push. So what happens when you've arrived, I'm using my finger quotes?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company, I hear that all the time. I don't know if I'd say there's any such thing as readiness, right? Like there's always an opportunity to get better. There's always an opportunity to transform. The other thing that really drives me crazy and makes my head explode was this whole maturity model thing. Are you ready to start transforming? Well. You can just not transform and then maybe fail, right? Maturity models, they're really popular in industry right now, but I really can't stress enough that they're not really an appropriate way to think about a technology transformation.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so what I love hearing about this is that it's actually not necessarily tied again to the architecture or the type of company you are, that there's opportunity for everybody. But there is this mindset of like an organization that is ready. It's like a readiness level for a company”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see no statistical correlation with performance, whether you're on a mainframe or a greenfield or a brownfield system. If you're building something brand new, or if you're working on existing build. And one thing I wanted to bring up that we didn't before. This is still a really, really smart approach for packaged software. And I know people who were working in and running package software companies that use this methodology because it allows them to still work in small fast approaches and all they do is they push to a small package pre-production database. And then when it's time to push that code onto some media, they do that”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the data shows that. One thing that I would say is a lot of people jump on the microservices, containerization, bandwagon. There's one thing that is very important to bear in mind. Implementing those technologies does not give you those outcomes we talked about. We actually looked at people doing mainframe stuff. You can achieve these results with mainframes. Equally, you can use the Kubernetes and Docker and Microservices and not achieve these outcomes.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transaction costs That's what all the technical and process stuff is about that. I mean, Don Ryninson once came to one of my talks on continuous delivery. At the end, he said, so continuous delivery. That's just about reducing transaction costs, right? And I'm like,”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he actually studied this. There's a whole section on architecture in the book where we looked at exactly this question. Architecture has been studied for a long time and people talk about architectural characteristics. There's the ATAM, the architectural trade-off model that Carnegie Mellon developed. There's some additional things we have to care about. Testability and deployability. Can my team test its stuff without having to rely on this very complex integrated environment? Can my team deploy its code to production without these very complex orchestrated deployments? Basically, can we do things without dependencies? That is one of the biggest predictors in our cohort of IT performance is the ability of teams to get stuff done on their own without dependencies on other teams, whether that's testing or whether it's deploying or whether it's planning.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. But one of my questions is when we had Adrian Cockcroft on this podcast a couple of years ago talking about microservices. And the thing that I thought was so liberating about what he was describing, the Netflix story, was that it was a way for teams to essentially become little mini product management units and essentially self-organize because the infrastructure by being broken down into these micro pieces versus say a monolithic kind of uniform architecture, I would think that being a organization that's containerized its code in that way, that has this microservices architecture would be more suited to DevOps? Or is that a wrong belief? I'm just trying to understand again that taxonomy thing of how these pieces all fit together.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow I mean, that is the heart of lean startup. It's the heart of anything you're putting out into the world is you have to kind of bring it full circle. It is a secret of success to Amazon, as you cited earlier. I would distill it to just that. I think I heard Jeff Bezo say the best line. It was at the Internet Association dinner in DC last year where he came and asked him about an innovation. He's like, to him, an innovation is something that people actually use. And that's what I love about the feedback loop thing it actually reinforces that mindset that's what innovation is.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, as we know from research, companies that don't have a mission other than making money do less well than the ones that do. But I think, again, what the data shows is that companies that do well on the performance measures we talked about outperform their low performing peers by a factor of two. A hypothesis is what we're doing when we create these high-performing organizations in terms of speed and stability is we're creating feedback loops. What it allows us to do is build a thin slice, a prototype of a feature, get feedback through some UX mechanism, whether that's showing people the prototype and getting their feedback, whether it's running A-B tests or multivariate tests in production. It's what creates these feedback loops that allow you to shift direction very fast.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did actually measure that. We looked at nonprofit organizations, and these were exactly the questions we measured. We asked people, did the software meet, I can't remember what the exact questions were.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the second half of this, which I am also hearing, is did it meet your expectations? Did it perform to the level that you wanted it to? Did it match what you asked for? Or even if it wasn't something you specified that you desired or needed, that seems like a slightly open question?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why we like two things in particular. One thing that it's a global measure, and secondly, that it's not just one thing, it mixes two things together, which might normally be intention. And so this is why we went for our measure of performance. So measuring lead time and release frequency and then time to restore and change fail rate. Lead time is really interesting because lead time is on the way to production, right? So all the teams have to collaborate. It's not something where, you know, I can go really fast in my velocity, but nothing ever gets delivered to the customer. That doesn't count in lead time. So it's a global message. Exactly.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a lot of people treat it like that, but actually, that's not really what it's about. It's a relative measure of effort, and it's for capacity planning purposes. So you basically, for the next iteration, will only commit to completing the same velocity that we finished last time. So it's relative and it's team dependent. And so what a lot of people do is say they start comparing velocities across teams. Then what happens is a lot of work you need to collaborate between teams. But hey, if I'm going to help you with your story, that means I'm not going to get my story points and you're going to get your story points. Right. People can game it as well. You should never use story points as a productivity measure.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, velocity is the other classic example. Agile, there's this concept of velocity, which is the number of story points a team manages to complete in an iteration. So before the start of an iteration in many agile, particularly scrum-based processes, you've got all this work to do. You're like, well, you need to build these five features. How long will this feature take? And the developers fight over it and they're like, oh, it's five points. And then this one's going to take three points. This one's going to take two points. And so you have a list of all these features. You don't get through all of them.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, you know, you prefer people to write short programs because they're easier to maintain and so forth. But lines of code have all these drawbacks. We can't use them as a measure of productivity.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a hard question to answer because is the inventory the code that's being written? And people actually have done that and said, well, listen, lines of code are an accounting measure and we're going to capture that as capital which we're going to have.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason the manufacturing metaphor breaks down is because in manufacturing you have inventory. We do not have inventory in the same way in software. In a factory, like the first thing your lean consultant is going to do walking into the factories point to the piles of thing everywhere. But I think if you walk into an office where there's developers, where's the inventory?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the gaps in our data is actually China. And I think China is a really interesting example because they didn't go through the whole, you know, IT doesn't matter phase. They're jumping straight from no technology to Alibaba and Tencent, right? I think US companies should be scared because the moment Tencent and Alibaba are already moving into other developing markets and they're going to be incredibly competitive because it's just built into their DNA.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I work for her. Also, at least for me personally, you know, I lived through this mass extinction of several firms, and I don't want it to happen again. And I worry about so many companies that keep insisting they're not technology companies. And I'm like, oh, honey child.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, an extension of Software Eats the World is really every company is a technology company. It's fascinating to me that that third type exists, but it is a sign of this legacy world moving into...”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a technology company. I'm like, but we just had this 20 minute conversation about how you're leveraging technology to drive value to customers or to drive this massive process that you do. And then they say, but I'm not a technology company. I could almost see why they had that in their head because they were a natural resources company. But there was another one where they were a finance company.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. My loving professor-ness, nurture Nicole also has one more profile that I love and I worry about them, like Mother Hen. And it's the companies that I talk to and they come to me and they're struggling. And I haven't decided if they want to change, but they're like, so we need to do this transformation and we're going to do the transformation. And it's either because they want to or been they've been told that they need to. And then they will insert this thing where they say,”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are going to be number one. So those are sort of the ideal. I mean, just like anthropomorphize it a little bit, it's like the 35 to 40 year old who suddenly discovers you might be prediabetic, so you better do something about it now before it's too late. But it's not too late because you're not so old where you're about to reach sort of the end of a possibility to change that runway. And then there's this person who's sort of kind of already in the game running in the race and they might be two or three, but they want to be like number one”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that answer is it tends to be companies that are like, oh shit, and they're two profiles, either one, they're like way behind and oh shit. And they have some kind of funds, or they are this lovely, wonderful bastion of these really innovative high-performing companies. But they still realize there are a handful of like two or three companies ahead of them, and they don't want to be number two. They are going to be number one.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see high performers among large companies. I see high performers in small companies. I see low performers in small companies. I see low performers in highly regulated companies. I see low performers in not regulated companies.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most fascinating thing to me about all this is honestly not the technology per se, but the organizational change part of it. And the organizations themselves. Of all the people you study, is there an ideal organizational makeup that is ideal for DevOps or is it one of these magical formulas that has this ability to turn a big company into a startup and a small company into, because that's actually the real question?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And that it can provide a competitive advantage to your business. If you're buying something that everyone else also has access to, then it's no longer a differentiator. But if you have an in-house capability and those people are finding ways to drive your business, I mean, this is the classic Amazon model. They're running hundreds of experiments in production at any one time to improve the product. And that's not something that anyone else can copy. That's why Amazon keeps winning. So what people are doing is copying the capability instead. And that's what we're talking about. How do you build that capability?”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too often, the key is that everyone else can also buy the thing and plug it in and walk away. How is that driving value or differentiation for a company? If I just buy a laptop to help me do something faster, everyone else can buy a laptop to do the same thing faster. That doesn't help me deliver value to my customers or to the market. It's a point of parody, not a point of distinction. Right.”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so this one's kind of fun. One is that this ability to develop and deliver software with speed and stability drives organizational performance. Now, here's the thing. I was about to say that's a very obvious thing to say. So it seems obvious, right? Developing and delivering software with speed and stability drives things like profitability, productivity, market share. If we go back to Harvard Business Review 2003, there's a paper titled IT Doesn't Matter. We have decades of research. I want to say at least”
2020-03-06 · a16z Podcast · Innovation Through Software Development and IT · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source