I'm at Callan and this is scaling up.
I like to see about 60% of the energy of the team going into
building things for customers users in the business.
I like to see about 30 percent of the energy going on platforms
and technologies that are scalable and that leaves 10%.
And I like to see that ten percent spent on innovation.
This podcast aims to educate and Inspire by telling the stories
of great growth companies As Told by their CEOs.
And Founders TDM is an Australian based investment firm
that invests globally in fast-growing public, and private
companies for more insights visit our website TDM growth
partners.com. Welcome to a special episode of
scaling up and episode where we trying to uncover.
What does great look like? When it comes to technology
leadership and building Great Tech teams my guests to help
decode. All of this is Hugh Williams,
and I'm probably not all that familiar to many listeners, but
someone who has had a significant impact on many of
our Lives. Regardless, he truly is one of
Australia's greatest technology, exports a leader, who's been at
the Forefront of some of the biggest Innovations of the Two
decades amongst inventing the infinite scroll, something that
we all use every day for getting that was not always the case.
The content could be loaded continuously as we scroll away,
relentlessly on our web browsing.
He was also one of the leading experts globally on internet
search his career and journey spans.
The Global Tech Giants at Microsoft, eBay and Google where
Hugh led the Google Maps team as VP of engineering and product
and we dig into the traits Hugh look.
When he was hiring great technical Talent as well as how
great teams in the tech functions are built, I really
felt it was necessary to dive into a bit of a lane of
Discovery here to better understand the impact, great
engineers and leaders can have on a wider organization, both
structurally and culturally. I hope you enjoy this special.
What does great look like episode that hopefully
complements, our previous mini series on both the CFO and CP 0
function? And of course, for other great
content, the TDM medium page Is a great place to start.
And as always, the link is in the show notes.
Q. Welcome to a special episode of
scaling up. It's a series interlude of sorts
I guess regular, listeners know, both the founder stories that we
try and tell. But also sporadically, we also
try to illuminate what great looks like when it comes to
other key areas of company building and there's no one
better in my mind to really explore, what makes a great
technology leader and what great technology teams look like.
But what I am deeply fascinated with is how the best business Is
a built. And so, I think it's really
important to illuminate this technical side of businesses and
their role in building companies.
My friend Fraser, who I sit next to it work, here has this great
poster above his desk and it says mediocre Engineers.
Don't build great technology companies and aside from
alluding to the technical skills.
Directly, it also talks to the fact that these wonderful
generational technology companies are built by people.
And so I do want to dig into To not just what a great engineer
looks like. But also what great engineering
cultures can look like that allow for people to do their
best work now. I think that's already too much
from me, so let's get into you and a quick thumbnail sketch of
your career because I think it's nice for listeners to get a feel
for you. Your upbringing, what brought
you to technology and of course maybe some keys of tombstones in
your career as you see them. I was a phenomenally lucky kid.
Ed I was maybe six going on, seven years old, my parents
decided around the dining table to make a career move and the
career move was my Dad. Decided he wanted to be a
computer programmer as they were as they were called back then
and he had no knowledge of computing.
So this is 1976. So what they did was they bought
a Fortran book man. I wish I'd kept it and they
basically went from chapter one through to the end pencil piece
of paper and taught themselves around the dining.
Abel how to write Fortran and then my dad bluffed his way
through a job interview with Esso in sale in gippsland here
in Victoria and became a computer programmer with no
prior background, which there's something about, you know, the
entrepreneurial Spirit, perhaps of my parents and the good thing
for me was I guess two things really and the first thing was,
there's a Fortran book in the house.
And so I kind of went the seems kind of interesting.
And so started at chapter 1, in tried to sort of figure out how
to program in Fortran. And then the second Was amazing
for me, was my dad now had access to mainframe computers.
And so I could, you know, write down simple programs that I
wanted to try, you know, print out the numbers from 1 to 100.
And then I could give that to Dad, he could take it to work on
the weekends book some time on this Mainframe computer.
Run it for me and bring home the printouts.
So, I was madly writing for training when I was like, six,
seven years old in the same way that you know, maybe kids learn
maths at school, you know, very Elementary, sort of simple.
Stuff putting together simple Concepts but started doing that
when I was six or seven. When I was about ten my dad
built us a computer at home out in the garage and and then all
of a sudden had a computer at home which was a massive
Revolution. So I kind of fell in love with
Computing. When I was when I was a really
small kid and back then it was very much a solo thing, you
know, like, it was nobody, I knew who was interested in
computers or probably even knew what a computer was little own
and Regional Victoria, what are unique upbringing and this
passion and curiosity LED you to rmit.
In Melbourne, the early 90s, the internet just was in its infancy
and started to get going. How does the narrative Arc
continue from here University to working at some huge
generational companies, Microsoft, eBay, Google let you
take it from here. So I am, I took a year off after
school. Actually, I went to Indonesia
and live there for a year and then came back and sort of fell
back in love with computer science, and went to went to
rmit University, started there in 1988.
Did the classic undergraduate computer science degree and made
a ton of good friends who had similar upbringings?
It was real interesting. Sort of come finally come
together with a set of people who had, you know, a common
interest in a common passion. But as you say it, I mean, it
was before the internet. So back, then, it was still
somewhat mainframes IBM. Sort of PCS, but largely was
about building, desktop software, and, you know, and it
is it sort of really was back. Then was a support function in
most companies, you know, they weren't really terribly many
technology companies except The likes of Microsoft and those
kinds of folks, but the internet sort of existed.
At that point. I think it had a there was a
single modem at Melbourne, uni that connected Australia to the
rest of the internet. So it wasn't common to be able
to access the internet but then in the early 90s, the World Wide
Web was born. And I remember that light bulb
going off. I remember going to a talk,
actually, I think it was in 1994, it's guy got up and he
said, one day, I believe there could be over a million pages on
the world wide web. Member like you could hear it,
you hear a pin drop it, but it wouldn't have taken along didn't
take long for there. But everybody's like, wow, that
is a lot of pages because, you know, that that point in time,
you kind of went at nasa.gov and there wasn't a lot else to do,
and then obviously it exploded. And then, you know, the internet
companies were born and search became a thing and so on and so
forth. It's about accelerate, the story
of little bit, you know, I finished the undergraduate
degree in 1990. I started my own company, and
then I went back to University in 94, to do the honours year,
and then I went on and did. PhD in computer science and this
sort of research area. I got interested in was search
technology which back then, was sort of called information
retrieval and was largely about searching information in
libraries, but that technology it turned out was incredibly
valuable technology because it became the basis of the first
generation of search engines. So if you think back about you
know look smart excite infoseek Altavista, you know that crowd
of search engines, became the technology that underpins those
and then later became the technology that underpins Google
in the late 1990s. 90s. So so my area of expertise
turned out to be a valuable area of expertise.
And I think it was 1999, Google pinged me and said, would you
like to come and work for us? And at that point, they were
vacuuming up, people like me from all over the world.
You know, people who had this research, interest in search
technology, they wanted all of them Flew Over the California
went through the interview process, got the offer letter,
which was almost like hand typed, you know, I still got it
somewhere, I should find it and then I came back and my wife and
I went through a lot of angst. Should we move to the United
States? Is this the right time?
The pay was terrible, by the way.
Like it wasn't even enough to pay for the rent, in the Bay
area. So I was actually gonna go
backwards by taking the job and there's these things called
options, heavy Equity, component of the equity component, crazy
options, didn't understand what they were.
Of course, at that point in time search was a terrible business
to so Google. At that point had an invented,
their ads model and a whole bunch of other search companies
have gone broke. So you know it seemed like going
and taking a research job with some awesome people.
People that I would lose money doing.
My wife is actually very, very keen on the job but I kind of
went, I don't know, I'm not really sure.
And so we passed and obviously, you know, hindsight suggest that
wasn't the best best financial move and then later on I got a
similar offer from Yahoo. We're now sort of getting into
the early 2000s to come and do the same thing.
Similar crowd of people, you know, similar kind of job and
then eventually in 2003, Microsoft ping me and said would
you like to come work and I'll sort of foundational?
Team we're gonna go and take on Google, we're going to build a
better, search engine change the world, and so I flew over and
met them. A few of my friends worked
there. There's a couple of Australians
who worked there and I thought this is the time, let's do it.
And so I took this job working at Microsoft and we moved to the
us and that was, you know, the beginning of a career.
In the US, the 10th engineer is you just called out helping to
build being from there, move to eBay, which, you know, the Tori
is pretty well-known. I think, by now is a VP of
engineering and product and we can dig into what you learnt in
really playing a pivotal role in building that business.
And then, of course, this little thing called Google Maps, you
did end up at Google many years later, essentially running the
team and the project around Google Maps, which is now part
of everyone's life day to day. So we can now imagine you as one
of the leading technologists globally and we're lucky to have
you in a Raelia now giving back and we can touch on that later
but maybe just zoom out a little bit before we Zoom back in as a
stray lien from Regional Victoria going to the valley.
It's almost this Disneyland for technologists and really a
beehive of counterculture. It was attracting people that
maybe had felt that they weren't needed or wanted elsewhere in
the corporate world. Can you give a sense of what it
was like to be part of Silicon Valley?
But also Oh, maybe some of the big lessons that you took from
your time, the best and the brightest in my area of
expertise absolutely work on the west coast of the US.
So whether it's Seattle Washington where Microsoft and
Amazon are headquartered or whether it's, you know, the
Silicon Valley, proper where, you know you find our people and
Facebook and Google of course. And so I think what's really
amazing about working in companies on the west coast of
the US is the people are just off-the-charts amazing and I
don't just mean intellectually. But I mean me a phenomenally
driven and phenomenally focused on on results and outcomes, and
Building Things fast, and making a difference.
So you get these incredibly motivated people who are really,
really smart want to be in teams and go and drive and and do
things. So that was some of the
eye-opening thing. For me, I suppose the big
difference between, you know, working in Australia as a
researcher and working as a, an engineer at Microsoft was
suddenly we Were all working together.
You know, we were we were a group of people focused on one
outcome and we were driving as hard as we could to go and get
that outcome. And you know, I remember in my
early days at Microsoft being a bit sad when it got to be the
weekend no I got to be sort of Friday at 5:00 and I'm like oh
what a bummer. I got a day off tomorrow.
Now of course I love going home and hang out with my wife and we
were young kids at the time and that was that was fantastic to.
But you're like, oh my God, we have to stop now, you know, this
is this is awesome. And so I worked phenomenally
hard and the time went incredibly quickly because it
was just such a great set of people to work with and I felt
like we were really making a difference really, really fast
and I think that's sort of the culture of the West Coast of the
US is people. Just work phenomenally hard
because they love what they do and they feel like they're
creating creating the future. You mentioned Google Maps.
A moment ago, I mean, I had to pinch myself when I had that
job. I mean, a billion people a
month. Use Google Maps.
Maps. And where do you get a job like
that? You know, where do you get a
job? Where you can do something and a
billion? People are impacted by it?
It's just amazing. And so, I think, I think that's
what attracts people to the West Coast to is jobs like that or
the opportunity to create new companies.
That might be like that he's probably a nice time to just
reflect on this. It was obviously a honey pot for
talent but covid is sort of dissing mediated that a little
bit. We're hearing the war for talent
is still there, but On his now dispersed globally, in many
respects around these great technology companies, you have a
view on the Labour market and where you think it's heading,
because we were hearing about the great resignation.
And the power was certainly with the employees, but it's felt as
on the last few months and we're sort of recording this mid year.
2022, there's been a bit of a shift in power back to the
employer and maybe just some color from your Viewpoint as to
how this might play. Way out.
It's a great question. Ed, I wish I had a crystal ball
and whatever I say is going to be wrong but I'll say a couple
of things. The first thing I'd say is that
the A+ people, the best of the best have either not moved or
can still move wherever they want to move.
If their company still alive and and successful and has
prospects, I think they are still heads down doing amazing
things. It reminds me a bit of some
2008-9 in the west coast of the US.
I think the best of the Is it still kept their head down and
sort of road that out? So I think by and large, the
best people that I know are still doing what they were doing
where they were. I think thing, number two,
though is you rightly point out is I think that the Power
Balance is somewhat shifted. It was a seller's market as a
software engineer. You could basically ask for
anything anywhere anytime. I think that has changed
particularly, if you are not in that a plus kind of bracket, I
worry a lot about the remote work piece and the flexibility
piece, I mean, I think we've all watched Scott Farquhar and Elon
Musk have a little tussle on Twitter about their opinions,
you know, musk said, right? Come back to the office.
And then Scott said, this feels like the 1950s and anyone had a
had a shot back saying something like the great thing about
recessions is a little weed, out the weaker companies or
something, something like that. So they're, they're having a
tussle about it, it's above my pay grade to have those kinds of
opinions, Ilan. Forgot that atlassian was build
in the greatest recession of the modern area and was completely
bootstrap. But you got to pick your fight
somewhere. That's I'd like to keep the
ashes of these these these tweets, you know, heaven knows
what time of the day and what sort of mood, he's in.
But I think back to the early part of my career in the US.
And I think about working at Microsoft and I think the best
work that I did was sitting around a table with the best and
the brightest, or those sort of incidental conversations that
weren't planned in a one-hour online meeting.
And so, I look back at some of the Innovative interesting
things. We did that really mattered, and
I wonder, would those happen if we set up a zoom call to
brainstorm, About Innovation and I suspect not.
And so I think he'll on to my mind has a point, you know, I
think if you want to create a generational company, whether
it's a generational battery and car company or solar technology
or SpaceX, there is an enormous benefit to having a set of
people buzzing in an area and having those those kind of
informal interactions, I think it's very hard to program a ties
that and and expect that you get that kind of innovation at least
with We have today from a set of people who are sitting in, you
know, bedrooms all over the world in different time zones,
somewhat distracted, and somewhat isolated.
So I think your point is valid now whether technology catches
up and were able to have those kind of interactions in sort of
interesting fun ways, who knows? I mean, I guess that's the
premise of matter and a, our VR technology, but I think that's
got a, it's got a long ways to go.
So I worry about it. I think probably the truth, of
course, is in the middle, nothing is black and white, but
I I worry about completely remote organizations.
And I worry about the kinds of decisions that some of these
larger companies are making and what effect that will have on,
not just the culture, but their ability to create generational
companies, that, that really Define the future of technology
and one step removed from you. But I'll tend to agree with you
without trying to create too much of an echo chamber.
You talked of is a one talent and it's still doing its best
work. You've done a lot of hiring and
searching for great technical Let's dig into what you are
looking for and what in your mind makes a great engineer
because I think this can help frame up other technology,
leaders internationally and domestically here in Australia,
when they are hunting for, what traditionally has been, very
hard to find the first thing I'd say, is that skills.
Come and go. So I learned the fundamentals of
how to code in the Fortran programming language.
I can pretty much nobody writes Fortran anymore, but those
fundamental competencies, you know the ability You to write a
loop, the ability to use variables, the ability to have
an if statement print things out.
I mean, these are these are fundamental things that exist in
almost every language. And so I think skills come and
go, but competencies that Roar ability to problem-solve is
timeless. And so when I'm hiring I'm
interested in just that so I would never look for somebody
who's a Ruby programmer or PHP expert or Java?
Never look for those things I would say.
Are you smart Problem? Solver who understands
fundamental computer science and maybe put a bit more succinctly.
I'd say I really look for for things when I'm hiring people.
Look at people who are super smart.
I look for people who are great problem solvers because the
essence of computer science is problem.
Solving I look for people who are incredibly action-oriented.
So they just want to get up and get on with it, right?
They don't want to talk forever about it.
They just like, let's just get on with it and I look for people
who are very driven for results. So they're very very Focused on
a user outcome. A customer outcome, a business
outcome. They want to build something
that matters to people and I think you need both of those
things. Those last two things you need
somebody who wants to get after it and wants to get after it for
a reason, you need both of those things.
You've only got one of those, it's pretty dangerous.
Actually, if you have an action oriented person who just wants
to build things and it's not especially helpful if you've got
somebody who's very driven for results but can't get started.
So get stuck all the time. Then I think.
It's not super helpful, so you definitely need both of those
things. So when I'm interviewing people
and looking for people to add two teams, I'm looking, you
know, very simply for those four things.
And, of course, because I'm a software engineer, I'm looking
for those underpinned by computer science.
So when I'm testing, if somebody can problem solve, can you solve
problems in code because that, of course, is that the essence
of computer science. But I don't care what language
they solve it in. It's a great answer, I guess to
wrap all that up. You're also looking for good
humans that you feel can make positive contributions to the
team that they're in. 100%. And I should have said that, I
mean, there's lots of other competencies of humans, right?
So you know, humor or Integrity, all these kinds of all these
kinds of things ability, to lead people, I want all of those
things to be at par or better. I would not hire somebody who I
thought would destroy the culture of a team or would not
fit in, well, with the setup people that, you know, I've been
lucky enough to work with throughout my career.
So, it's incredibly important you're listening to scaling up
with Ed Cowan, a podcast brought to you.
By TDM growth Partners visit the website TDM growth Partners.com,
or for interesting insights and commentary.
Follow us on Twitter at TDM underscore growth.
Let's dig in one step further and of course, you led a massive
teams and teams over a thousand. People in some respects that
were broken up into smaller sub teams in terms of retaining the
best talent. I imagine the great Engineers
want to be at the Forefront of what's possible and fostering
innovation. In these larger teams requires,
fostering Innovation and smaller teams and ultimately fostering
Innovation at an individual level and encouraging.
That can you just give Sense of strategically, as a technology
later. How you ensure that from the
individual right through to the larger teams that you are
leading? How you got the most out of
these teams. It's a great question it.
I have this sort of rule of thumb that I like to use when
the team gets large enough. And that is, I like to see
about, let's say, 60 percent of the energy of the team.
The person power within that organization, I like to see
about 60% of that energy going into building things that are
on. The roadmap for customers users
in the business, right? So they're the kinds of things
that I think the commercial people in the team would
appreciate the product. Managers would appreciate, the
customers will be thankful that were released.
I like to see about 30% of the energy going on, making sure
that we build platforms and technologies, that are scalable
and last into the future. And so often that work is
unappreciated immediately by the business or by the customer, but
it's the work that you need. Do to make sure that you can
keep on delivering right to keep things healthy under the under
the hood. It's kind of things that the
engineers always talked about and want to do and I'll talk
about things like technical debt and they'll talk about wanting
to adopt new technologies and they'll say that this needs to
be re-written to allow us to do something or other.
And you often find people outside of that engineering
team, say do we have to do that? Now is this busy work?
Why are we doing this? But I've found over time that,
you know, you need to have a good amount of energy going into
that so that you can continue. In you to deliver for the future
and that leaves 10% and I like to see that 10 percent spent on
Innovation. What does innovation make to me?
It means things that are not planned chaotic stuff and is
nothing better I reckon than when you're a leader when
somebody knocks on your door or sets up 15 minutes with you and
says, I want to show you something that we built, there's
nothing better than that. You know, they come in and they
load up some URL in the web browser and they say try typing
in whatever. And then you you play with this
scene, you think. That is super interesting.
I remember when I was back at Microsoft, this guy, Michael
Cameron, who coincidentally is Australian.
He's the founder of Rome to Rio. He came into my office one day
and he said, try typing in some local things like buses, things
like that and he'd basically re-engineered search.
So if you typed in a word that had local, meaning it would
prefer results that were near you so you can type in bus and
it wouldn't just have the most popular bus in the whole of the
world. So you wouldn't get Some bus
from Central Station in New York or whatever it is you'd get the
bus that was near you and I'm like that's super interesting
and he's like yeah try all sorts of local Concepts, you know like
dog kennel and yeah just set the typing local Concepts and the
search results made sense in the context of where I was and he's
like, pretty cool, isn't it? I'm like when can we get this
out the door. So nobody was doing this at the
time and you know, Michael filed a patent on this thing of how
this piece of technology work and the idea of biasing search
results. Based on where You wear and
whether a concept was local and we just paid on as hard as we
could to get this thing out the door.
And, you know, being was the first search engine to have
local results for local Concepts.
That's the kind of thing. I mean is somebody just turns up
one day and says, had a bit of Spare Time.
Build something interesting. What do you think of this?
And it could be a physical thing.
Could be a you know, something in a web browser could be
anything but something thats related to the business and the
customers of the users. But not something that we asked
for. And I love to see about 10.
Tenth of the energy going on to that.
So I think it's a huge mistake. If you're a technology leader to
100% book your roadmap and just flog everybody, you don't get
those opportunities to do really amazing things.
If everybody's booked a hundred percent of the time, you've got
to let people like Michael have time and space to just you know,
just tinker and marinate ideas and talk to other people and
work in a more chaotic way. What I'm hearing is in amongst
this chaos, it's still thematic. It's still focused and it has
Customer Centric, it's not just chaos in its true sense of
building. Something that might be
interesting to them. Exactly, when I was at eBay, we
had this thing called the hackathon.
It was not themed at all in the first few years.
I was there. And so you'd walk around these
boobs and there was people just doing things that were just not
relevant to our customers, our users and our business.
So you know walk up to a booth and somebody's figured out
better ball bearings for a wheel or something and you're like,
okay that's cool but What do we do with that?
And I think, again, if we go back to the hiring point, if you
hire people who are smart, great problem, solvers
action-oriented, and driven for results, then those people will
innovate in the areas that matter.
They will understand the customer the user, the business,
and they will do interesting things within that context.
What we did at eBay for what it's worth.
Was we announced that the next year you had to innovate within
themes and so we kind of directed people towards things
that we were interested in. There was some pushback on that.
I think the people working on being a better ball bearings for
wheels or whatever it is, didn't necessarily want to do local
Commerce but, you know, this wasn't a research lab, you know,
we're paying people in return for their services and we wanted
them to innovate within spaces that were relevant to the
company and so I wasn't terribly apologetic about that, but I
think we had a much better hackathon the next year, but you
don't have to tell the best and the brightest to do that.
There's a great call-outs for all technology leaders while
we're in the technology teams. Let's talk to org structure and
Reporting lines. As I said, you manage larger
teams of a thousand but I'm sure that's not managing a thousand
individuals, that's managing a whole heap of smaller teams.
Can you talk to your experience and the models that you use
that? You knew work that helped frame
what an optimal structure was for technical Talent.
So Jeff Bezos said Amazon, coined this term the to Pizza
team and the idea there is that you can feed the team with two
pizzas and I love that. And what that means to me is
that team should be About six to ten people in size, you know, no
more, no less. So I love teams that are that
size and I love empowering teams to really own Something That
Matters To the End user. And another way to say that is
you want people who are within these teams to be able to go
home to see their parents and in a couple of sentences explain to
their parents, what they do, maybe show their parents what
they do on the website and for their parents to go, that's
pretty awesome. I'm going to tell my friends
about that. If I think back to sort of the
early days of my career in the US, U.s. that would mean, things
like there is an image search team.
There is a new search team, there's a team that does
autosuggest in web search. There's a team that injects, you
know, heterogeneous data modules into web search, that gives you
previews of videos and images and a bit of news when you're
running web search. So these are things that make
sense as an entity that you can describe to your parents.
So you can go home and see your parents.
You say I build image search the team's only nine people in size.
And if you click on the images tab and Utah, Query that's us.
We do that. And so I think that's the the
eye is get the team size right? And get the team focused on a
end-user problem that matters and then Empower that team to do
its best work. Now what that means to me is
that as a leader, my job is to help that team set its goals and
I love numeric goals. So I would say things like let's
talk about image search for a second.
I would say things like let's improve the relevance of image
search. So Oh, that our results are as
good as Google's by October 23. So my job is to help teams set
those kinds of audacious goals and then let the team run.
Let's assume that they know more about image search than anybody
else in the organization that they're more customer-centric,
that they know their users better, that they get the
technology, let's assume that. Then let's ask them to build an
aggressive roadmap to go and hit that goal.
So, I think that's the art. And then when you're managing, a
thousand people or two thousand people or 5,000 people, Your job
is to create teams like that throughout your organization
that feel empowered that are super customer-focused and then
rally them all together to achieve an overall goal.
So when I was at eBay, for example, at a team of 1,000
people or so, you know, my job was to set an audacious goal
that inspired that whole organization and then that
organization run towards that goal.
And the goal I was particularly interested in at the time was
basically sell more stuff. So you know, I'll make up a goal
for Twelve. Our goal was sell 8% more stuff
in 2012 than we did in 2011. So, if you compare, you know,
eBay at the end of 2012, if you could run a test of that versus
eBay at the end of 2011, it was sell 8% more stuff.
It's okay. Let's go do that and it's just
super customer-centric do. Right.
Because if you're a seller boy, do you want to sell more stuff?
If you're a buyer, you want to find things that that you want
to buy at a great price in great condition that shipped to you.
So, you're happy and as eBay, of course, you happy.
So everybody's a winner when we I mean, if we sell more stuff
and so my goals are L was to inspire the team, but that was a
great Gulf, great customer Centric goal.
Make sure that we had the right teams in the right swim lanes
and then let him swim and you know it's a simple as that if
you can get it right? And of course within these teams
great micro cultures can be built and they come together
maybe just lifting to the next level.
How did you feel that the technologist best integrated
with the wider org? Because without great.
Product you can't sell and so it affects sales and fax marketing.
The collaboration of different silos within an organization to
ensure that that was functioning effectively.
I think a problem in a lot of technology companies and a lot
of organizations that try and harness technology is that they
assume that software Engineers can do a really good job of
talking to business people. It tends to end, really, really
badly. You've got people who just want
to put headphones on and write a lot of code and solve hard,
technical problems. The business people who are
thinking about pricing marketing, the brand, you know,
advertising all these kinds of things and you're hoping that
these people will talk to each other and come up with great
plans, and that doesn't usually end very well.
And so, in the u.s. in particular, there's a discipline
called product management, Amazon calls a technical product
management, Microsoft calls it program management, Google
Facebook and apple call it product management.
It's the same thing. But basically, these are the set
of people whose job it is to sit.
Between the technology team, the software Engineers, the
business, and the customer. So if you sort of, think of a
Venn diagram of sort of, you know, things, business things,
customer things technology and those those circles overlap.
The product manager is the person who sits smack in the
middle of that and it typically computer scientists, but they
typically don't write code. That typically people who love
hanging around with other people, they're fascinated by
the business, the user, the data, they're inspirational
people, they can come up with really interesting ideas, they
can sell something It doesn't exist.
So they can go and persuade an executive audience about a
future that hasn't been built and get them excited about a
roadmap. And so then these really
interesting, really interesting multidisciplinary people who
kind of sit in the middle that everybody likes to talk to and
then can run this kind of translation.
And so I think the trick in getting technology, team sort of
welding two faced with the rest of the organization is having
great product. Managers, you typically need one
in those two peaks of team. So you have the 10-person team.
One of those people is a Chuck manager and their job is to
figure out the why and the what that we should be doing.
So the engineers can figure out how to build it and when to
build a bar and that requires these super multidisciplinary
people. And so I think that is the
answer is you've got to have great product managers in order
to be able to build great technology, that actually
matters to the customer the user and the business that was the
inside. I was hoping you'd give but
didn't want to spoon feed you too much.
It's In terms of building generational businesses and
you've been a part of so many now and you talk to in your team
really narrowing, the focus around goal setting, in eBay's
case, down to one from many. What about wider company goals
and ensuring that they're aligned?
How do you think about those sessions when you're with the
other leaders within the organization as to how company
goals are set? So, when I was at eBay, when I
first joined, which was And 89 somewhere around there.
We had 43 goals as a company. That's a very difficult
environment to operate in because typically what you find
is, if they've anybody pushes forward on their goal, it hurts
somebody else's goal. An example from my world was
that if you improve the relevance of search so if you
made searching on eBay better, then people would click on less
banner ads and text ads and we'd make less money off the ads.
And one of the other company goals was make more off.
The sizing. And so you had this crazy
situation where you're improving the core product, you're helping
the buyers and the sellers. But you're upsetting the ads
team whose goal, you know, sits alongside your goals at the
company level and so there's all these arguments going on.
If you can't do that right now, can you wait a month because
we'll miss our quarter goal? And you know everybody will be
unhappy with us and of course looking back.
I mean it's very obvious that adds goal shouldn't have sat at
the same level as improving the core It's right, and it took
some courage of the CEO and the leadership team to say, let's
let's put a line through that. Let's say that's less important.
Let's say to the ads team that their work is less important.
Let's not have them on the company goal sheet and let's
manage that team through that and help them realize that what
they do is important, but it can't be in conflict with
improving the overall core product and making Commerce
better online. So, very difficult thing to do,
but the leadership team, literally went from 43 goals to
one goal. So they go, I see.
About earlier of sell more stuff was the only company all by
about two years. After I got there, there was no
other company goal. Now, of course there are people
on the periphery the ads team. You know, people working on deep
dark platform, things in the engineering team people, working
on future ideas, who couldn't look at that one goal and say I
work on that. And so you had to sell to those
folks that what they were doing was important and it was sort of
second order effects of what they were doing that enabled
others to work on that goal. So definitely, it's hard to Sell
one goal across an organization but I don't know maybe 60 70
percent of the people We're working directly on that goal
and not in competition, you know?
Everybody was celebrating everybody else's success.
Everybody sunk or swam depending on how the company did on that
one goal. So it's incredibly unifying if
you can get down to one goal but it's it's not easy takes a lot
of courage and it takes a lot of sales as a leader.
What I'm hearing is also a focus on the metrics that matter.
And in eBay's case, there's no big Metric that matters.
Then jmv and also just the importance of that goal being
customer-centric. And so in regards to the story
around the advertising Banner that diminishes, in many
respects the customer experience of going to eBay to buy stuff
that they want to look for and so having that centricity when
it comes to goal-setting seem so important it's incredibly
important and you know it's hard to come up with goals.
Sounds simple right? Look back at eBay and you say
well sell more staff as Measured the following way by the
following date. It sounds easy, but Having the
courage to pare it down to be one goal.
Having the deep understanding of what that goal is and how to
drive that goal. The ability to sort of divide
that goal up amongst the team, the understanding that that goal
encompasses most of the work that's going on in the company.
I mean I think it's a I think it's an incredible art, business
goal setting, when I was at Microsoft working on search, we
only had one goal there as well. I guess a lot of what I learned
was from Microsoft. And our goal was around the
relevance of the search engine. We wanted to build a search
engine that gave people great answers.
And that was it there's nothing else to it.
If we're honest enough to hold ourselves up against the best in
the business, which was Google is Google.
A task, how relevant of a and how relevant are we, and what do
we need to do to close that Gap? Because that's why people choose
a search engine because it gives them great answers and being
honest enough to admit that being careful enough to measure
that and being diligent enough to measure your competitors and
understand where they're at is also super important.
Portent part of the role is a great technology leader is to be
a culture carrier and contribute to the wider culture of the
organization to build generational businesses, it's
the greatest competitive advantage that they can build.
Is this sustainable strong culture and I'm sure there are
no silver bullets but maybe just quickly.
Some of the key things that you learned as a leader in regards
to Building Company cultures the the kind of culture that I went
about setting throughout my career.
Is one where I wanted people to shoot for the moon.
But be realistic about what they're shooting for and there
was this phrase be hag Microsoft which stood for big hairy
audacious goal. And so we used to set B hags and
what they are is is things that are just attainable if
everything goes right so they're not impossible, nobody's
laughing going, will never be able to do this.
They're not things that, you know, you can kind of just sort
of phone. And get their things where
everything has to go, right? And everybody has to be at their
best. I love that about Microsoft.
And so, in all of the jobs that I've had and an advisory work
that I do, I kind of push for that.
I try and create a culture where everything has to go, right?
We all have to be our best and work together as a unit to just
make it to this goal. And that's sort of the essence
of the cultures that I love. And of course, we've got to play
as a team. We've got to be respectful with.
Show up. I'm gonna be the best people we
can be that that's got to happen to reach the be hag and so I
think it brings out the best in people.
If you kind of you kind of get that dial right?
And I think it's an art, especially when you're new to
setting a goal in the new organization because you're not
quite sure where to put the dial, right?
So you kind of want the dial at sort of nine and a half.
You don't know what mine and a half is so you might miss, you
might. Whoops, I accidentally set up
two, three. That was a bit too easy or
whoops. I set it to 12.
We're never going to get there. So I think it's an absolute Art
to get this white, but if you can do that and push an
organization to go and Achieve something again, that's
user-centric customer-centric, that really matters and it's
really stretchy and uncomfortable.
Then I think you can create these cultures that are amazing.
I love further. And of course, that relies on
monitoring and celebrating and iterating and fixing and leading
in many respects to make sure that that's being upheld.
I do want to just finish on the next phase of your career,
Having talks so much and so deeply around the earliest
stages. What you're doing now is just as
important as the co founder and chairperson of Cs in schools,
you're really giving back to the Australian technology Community.
Also lecturing through rmit, but what CS in schools is ultimately
trying to achieve is bring Digi Tech skills to the next
generation of Australians, particularly and
underrepresented groups, like females and those growing up in
disadvantaged areas. Has love you to give some color
to this Mission and also maybe to understand the key unlocks in
your mind for Australia as a country, to be a driving force
of Technology progression. You know, it?
I look back on my life we talked about it at the start and I
realized just how fortunate I am, right?
So I was born in one of the greatest countries on the earth.
I mean, you basically won't know what I ticket by just being born
in Australia, right? Like let's let's be clear about
that. And then I was lucky enough to
have two parents that I had and the opportunities that I had
Getting to Computing and write a really interesting wave and that
wave is still going. We're in the middle of one of
the most profound Revolutions in humankind.
Right, is technological Revolution and I think Australia
has the opportunity to Surf this wave, but you've got to create
for everybody in Australia, the opportunity to have the kinds of
experiences that I had when I was a kid and not, everybody
will get that opportunity at home by having you know,
entrepreneurial parents and a set of Come stances that but I
had. And so the best place to create
opportunity for the next generation is of course it's
cool. We're lucky in Australia that
there is a mandatory Australian digital Technologies.
Curriculum. So there's a federal curriculum
most of the states and territories have adopted it and
said it's you know it's critical to teach in our public and
Catholic schools but if you go to the schools they're not
typically teaching that in its entirety.
Why not well you know crowded curriculum busy school teachers
who are not computer, scientists a curriculum, that's somewhat
impenetrable. So if you sit down and read it
as a non technology, like what exactly is this that I'm
supposed to be teaching that my school is supposed to be doing.
And so it's very, very hard for principals leaders in schools
and teachers to grab this curriculum and run with it and
make sure that students get these kinds of experiences in
the classroom. Now if we can give students that
experience then we can move on from being just users of
technology to being creators of Technology.
We can create amazing Technologies and amazing
companies. So how do we think that that
should be solved? Well, we think the fastest way
to solve that and the best way to solve that is to
professionally develop the teachers who are in the
classroom today. So we've built a program where
we work with in-service teachers, teachers of any
background, they're most commonly maths and science
teachers, but we work with PE teachers, language, teachers,
all kinds of teachers. So we work with those teachers
to upskill them in digital technology, and that means
understand the curriculum, and appreciate it.
Understand why it's relevant. And then actually develop the
core skills themselves to be computer scientists.
So learn how to code and then they can pass those skills on to
their students, you know, term after term year after year.
And so that's the core of the system schools program that
we've built is a professional development program for
teachers, that comes with free materials, the teachers can use
in the classroom With industry connections.
So that the students and the teachers can see the relevance
of what they do. And then, you know, we're
rolling that out across Australia.
In our first year, we worked with eight schools in our second
year, we worked with 21 schools. In our third year, we work with
42 schools. And this year, we're working
with 64 schools. And I can promise you next year
will work with 128 schools so we're doubling the size of the
program every year. That more than doubles the
number of teachers who are involved there's 250 teachers
involved this year and that more than Bulls the number of
students who get the opportunity to do, fundamental Computing at
school and in great, DigiTech classes this year.
If you believe our website statistics, I mean, I do the
back of the envelope calculation and came up with 18,000 students
learning to code this year through our programs.
If you believe our website statistic is going to be much
closer to forty thousand students this year.
So there's lots of people grabbing our materials and using
them all over Australia that we're not even helping which is
fabulous to see. I'd love to know what the the be
hag for CS in schools is I double the Schools every year by
a mess is about 2,700. Secondary schools in Australia,
we work with secondary schools exclusively right now, and so,
we're only in 64. But next year, 128, 256, 512,
1024, 2048, and then bang, we've, we've done all 2700 and I
should say not all 2,700, need our help.
Of course, there are schools out there with Incredible, DigiTech
teachers, who are super highly skilled in this space and doing
a fantastic job. So when we bump into a school,
that's Really doing a great job. We say look, here's some free
materials if you'd like them, if there's anything we can do to
help call us anytime and then we move on to the next school.
So we're here to help the schools that want to create this
opportunity for their teachers and for their students.
And we think that's certainly the majority of secondary
schools in Australia, but we should we should get there
pretty quick. If we keep on doubling every
year, which is a super scary, gold keeps me awake every night.
It's a gift that you should be incredibly proud of and you are
a National Treasure here. It's an absolute privilege to
have you on scale. Up.
Thank you so much for your time. Thanks.
It's been a privilege.