Transcript
Mark Allen: I’m Mark. I’m Head of Engineering at Isometric. I’m going to talk to you all about how to get involved in big strategic conversations to maximize your organizational impact and your global impact. I’m going to share some practical tips for how to do this. I’m going to end by telling you a story of how I applied these tips to get asked to lead a project which saved my organization a billion euros, in three months.
Our revenue was about €2 billion at the time. What are these big conversations then? I’m simply thinking about conversations where strategic topics are discussed, decisions are made, and projects are assigned. These things could be financial. They could be operational. They could be technical. They could be personnel-based conversations. They happen all the time, every day, at every single level of the business that you’re in. They could be the CEO and the CXOs talking about fundraising, and the plan for the next two years, and the five-year roadmap. It could be a team talking about who in the team is going to work on a particular project. This is not something just for the people at the highest levels of the business, it’s something for individual contributors, for managers, and for everybody. Big conversations are where impactful decisions are made and they’re where work gets assigned.
If you’re part of the conversation, the project is much more likely to be assigned to you or your team, if you want it to be. If you’re not in the conversation, somebody else is probably going to end up doing it. Big conversations aren’t just these meetings that somebody creates and summon in lots of people, big conversations can be one-to-ones. Big conversations don’t have to involve everyone coming to a scheduled Zoom room or a physical meeting room. They can be a desk-side chat in an office. They can be a Slack huddle. They can be a private Slack channel or DM thread. They can be a pull request. They can be a draft RFC where you’re the person that’s approached to comment first. There are loads of things this can be.
The good news is that all of us are already involved in some of these, and all we’re talking about is how to be involved in more and better conversations. What happens when you aren’t in big conversations? This has probably happened to all of us. You think you’re doing a good job. You’re hitting the basics. Everything you’re expected to do happens. You get to your performance review, you think it’s gone well. Your manager sits you down and says, “You’re a fantastic engineer. You’re a great manager, but you’re just not having enough strategic impact to go to the next level. We’re just not seeing what we want from you at a business impact level to make us think you’ll be a success at the level above”. This has probably happened to all of us. It’s happened to me in my career. I’m going to talk a bit about how it happened to me only a year ago and what I did to turn it round since then.
Career History, and General Context
First, why am I the right person to talk about this? Why do I have expertise on this topic? I’m going to have to tell you a little bit about my career, give you a brief career history to let you know about some of the chMark Allenges I’ve gone through and some of the things I’ve done. I grew up modding and building games. I’m from a town called Warrington in the northwest of England. Not much going on in Warrington, so I grew up modding and building games. Civilization III was a favorite. This took me into a career building software. I actually started out more as a data engineer, data scientist in my first role, and I went through a few different individual contributor roles. In my teens and 20s, I took a few steps outside of engineering.
These are three of the wacky jobs I did as I’d made a nomadic trip around the world living in eight different countries. I was a tour guide. I actually worked for the world’s largest tour company in terms of volume. I wasn’t just a guide, I was also the COO. I was responsible for hiring and leading 500 different tour guides. I co-founded a pasta company called Pasta Masta. This is an AI-genned logo. I couldn’t find our logo, this was a long time ago. We used to go to music festivals and sell gourmet pasta to people. The proudest invention we had was this thing called breakfast pasta. It was pasta with egg and bacon and sausages, because nobody normally buys pasta in the morning. If you have breakfast pasta, nobody normally buys pasta in the morning anyway, did not work. You won’t see that in pasta restaurants now.
The final thing I did was worked in conservation. I co-led a conservation project in South America trying to save this little guy, the Andean bear. Paddington is one of these bears. It sounds super glamorous, just spent a lot of time walking around a forest looking for bear poo. All good fun. I learned a lot of new skills doing this, and I took them back to the engineering world and started working in engineering management. Started out at Skyscanner where I worked in the car hire space. If someone comes to you to try and hire you for a flights business and says you’re going to work in car hire, don’t say yes, not a good career move, but I did it. I moved to Glovo. Glovo is on-demand delivery for Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa, kind of Deliveroo, DoorDash in those places. Worked there for a few years.
By the time I left, I was leading two tribes, almost 100 engineers in total across the business. I left to co-found a company called Ourspace. We raised a few million dollars, hired a team, and built a piece of software that we thought was going to replace Miro and FigJam. Miro and FigJam is still here, Ourspace isn’t, two reflections. Those are hard products to replace. We had a terrible logo. Nonetheless, onwards and upwards. When Ourspace didn’t work out, I moved to a business called Isometric. Isometric is one of the UK’s fastest growing climate tech startups. We’re a platform layer for people buying carbon credits. We get paid by Microsoft, Google, Stripe, Shopify, and others to verify the quality of the carbon credits that they produce. I lead a fantastic team of engineering managers and staff engineers. A really great place to work, and making a lot of impact. I’ll talk more about some of the things I’m doing there as we go.
Why am I a relevant person to talk about this? Because I’ve done a lot of things in my career. The reason I’ve done a lot of things is because I get continuously approached with crazy projects, and bold opportunities, and invited to meetings, and invited to take on things that nobody else seems to get invited to, not my peers, sometimes not even my manager. I’m going to talk a bit about how I do this. I’m also going to talk about some of the people that I’ve managed. I have managed some fantastic engineering managers, software engineers, staff engineers. I’ve met most people who’ve come up against this exact problem, “I’m not having enough strategic impact”, and I’ve coached them through it. I think of a person I manage right now who 12 months ago was seen as this data genius. He was always given these individual contributor, really complex staff engineer projects, go off on your own, come back with a solution. He wanted to be a team leader, didn’t know how, now he is.
I think of some of the things that I’ve done to help people through these chMark Allenges as well. Just in summary, over the past 15 years I’ve done these things. I’ve written thousands of PRs, managed people, reviewed many technical docs, been on-call over 50 times, on-call a couple of weeks ago. I’ve also done hundreds of sales calls. I’ve VC fundraised. I’ve managed a marketing company. I’ve presented loads of webinars. I’ve made a contribution to climate science.
Today we’re going to think about your left and right side. There’ll be a lot of people sitting here thinking, “That’s great Mark, but I’ve never saved Paddington. I’ve never worked in sales. Are you going to tell me today I need to get a job in something I don’t love doing to get ahead in my career?” No, because even if you’ve only ever had one job, only ever been an individual contributor at one company for your entire career, you’ve also been a parent. You’ve been a mentor. You’ve been a friend. You’ve set up a meetup. You volunteer in your community. You are continually influencing others. You’re continually building relationships. You’re continually making an impact in the world, and so you have all the skills already to have more strategic impact in your workplace. Yes, but how? What are the tips you’re going to give me for how to do this? I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year or so, and I’m going to talk through five different things that you can apply to be able to have more strategic impact.
Cautionary Notes
There are a few cautionary notes. I’m going to talk about things which are going to be different, maybe tricky. This is a few things I want to say beforehand. Firstly, everything I say today forms a virtuous circle. There’s no order to what I’m going to say. There’s no, do this in week one, then in week three do this, then in week five do this, because this stuff is pretty hard and you have to start small. One of the big chMark Allenges are, you don’t get invited to big conversations unless you’re an expert or you’re already really senior. You can’t become an expert unless you get invited to the big conversation to observe the context. You can’t become really senior unless you get invited to the conversation and get given the project to lead. How do you overcome that? You start small. You put things in place. You grow, and gradually the conversations get bigger. The messages today, all underpinned by this idea of starting small.
Second one is, don’t forget your day job. Nothing in this talk is for you if you can’t meet expectations in the role that you’re asked to do. We all get paid by our companies to do something: we get paid to write code, we get paid to manage. Do not take what I say today and think, I’m deleting VS Code from my computer and I’m going to focus on strategic stuff. Don’t cancel all your one-to-ones and say to people, sorry, I’ll meet with you in a month, I have strategic work to do right now. That is not the message of this talk. Your day job is still very important, but your day job is probably also something that you can do with a lot of comfort. You do have to make hard choices in times at work. There’s always more tickets. There’s always another refactor. There’s always direct reports coming to you with requests, you might need more help.
Those things we’re probably really good at. We do them well. We do them quickly. We get praise. Praise usually from the people that we manage or from our peers. Maybe a bit less praise from the people more senior but we do get praise for them. It’s hard to say no to work you know you’ll be praised for to take on something abstract and ambiguous, but that’s what helps us grow, doing things that we’re not comfortable with. One of the things I want you to take away from today is you might have to do things that are hard.
Finally, all organizations are different and you might need to contextualize. I’ve done what I’m going to talk about in organizations with max 1000 engineers, also in organizations with a couple of hundred engineers, also in organizations with 10 engineers, and organizations with 3 engineers. I’ve never worked at Microsoft. I’ve never done this with tens of thousands of engineers. I’ve never worked in government. I’ve never worked in a consultancy. I have worked in B2B and B2C and B2B2C. There’s plenty of things I haven’t done. Does that mean this is relevant? I can’t say, but I think it is. I do think that you might have to take what I’m saying and not think, this isn’t relevant because in my company, a, b, and c would happen. Try and think, how would I apply this in my context even if my context is different?
Tips for Getting Invited to Big Conversations
Five tips for getting invited to big conversations. You’ll need to identify what matters. You’ll need to be a beginner again. You’ll need to build stronger relationships with different people. You’ll need to craft an internal brand. You’ll need to choose the green button, sometimes. I’ll talk more about what I mean by that.
Identify What Matters
Identifying what matters. It’s really hard to make a strategic impact if you don’t know what matters in your company, and if you don’t know what matters to the people one level, two levels, and three levels more senior than you in the organization, which might not be the same if you work in a huge company. Differences between what’s happening at C-suite level and what’s happening in your part of the org. You need to know what matters and you need to know where people talk about what matters, and how these things are discussed because that’s where the conversations happen.
The first thing I think whenever I join a new company — and I’ve joined quite a few as you saw earlier — is where do people talk about strategic stuff in public? In many companies they’ll be an all-hands. This could be a company level maybe once a year, big general meeting, or once a week in a smaller org. Probably within your department or organization there’s a more regular everyone gets together and has a meeting. As a leader, we have these very regularly in my teams, and I put so much thought and intention into the messages I want to have there. I know all leaders think the same. There are things I want people to take away and they’re usually things which are strategic, they’re usually things which involve the organization changing. We’re having to do something new, we’ve got a new product coming, and so I want people to internalize changes happening.
When people come, I want them to be super attentive and intentional about understanding my messages. When someone more senior than you is doing one of these things, always assume they’ve put a huge amount of thought into what the message is, and then think, why have they done that? Why are they saying that? You might have a chance to ask questions at the end of these meetings. I think that often the questions that are asked are of varying quality. I remember working at a previous company, Skyscanner, and you get questions that were everything about like, how is this change in the law going to affect international flights?
Then you get somebody asking, why is the gym benefit higher in London than it is in Spain? You have a chance to speak to the CEO very rarely and you pick your question that you ask. Do take your time to think about strategic questions and upvote other strategic questions. Hear what people have to say, and attend to it, and listen. Leaders often share strategy docs. They share docs about their thinking. Try and find these and engage with them. See what’s in there. There are probably public Slack channels, or Teams channels, or Google groups, or places where people in your company share their findings and learnings about market dynamics, business change, technology change. Find those channels and engage with them. See what the things are in there. See where they’re coming from, what blogs, what people on LinkedIn. Who are the voices that shape the narrative in your organization? Find them, learn from them, follow them yourself.
Your manager could be your greatest ally. Obviously, all managers are great. If you’re lucky to have a great manager or a good manager, go to them and say, I want to have more strategic impact and I need you to help me. When you meet with your manager’s manager, ask exactly the same question, but ask them, what do you do to get a better understanding of the chMark Allenges facing the business? What do you read? Who do you speak to? Who do you think the best people in the business are? Start to build an understanding of the people who are good at this and the things that they do. Your manager might be able to point you in the right place. Your manager may not be able to point you in the right place, but there will be people in the business, could be somebody two levels above you, could be somebody, a product counterpart, there will be people in the business who can help you. Do use them. I think of my current manager who’s our CPTO, Ola, and I have asked her about this.
One thing that was actually more useful for me was just seeing what Slack channels she paid loads of attention to. I saw that if a post appeared in a Slack channel about one of our commercial partners, she’d be looking at it really quickly, responding to it, adding thoughts, here’s how we’re going to deal with this in the technology part of the business. I started doing the same and I found I had so much better context about what we’re doing. We’re a pretty small company, but had so much better context I was able to go back to my team, and say, “This thing you’re working on is going to be so useful for this company over here”. Or, “We’re working on this. That’s not going to work with these three people. Perhaps we should spend more time on this and make it a bit more extensible, a bit more flexible”. I was able to absorb this context and put it into use to have impact in my teams.
Be a Beginner Again
You’ll need to be a beginner again. That’s me in Barcelona on a bike delivering food. When I joined Glovo, I knew nothing about on-demand food delivery. I had no idea of how the industry worked other than the orders that I’d made on my phone. I was asked to lead these teams responsible for building software for the couriers, the people that deliver orders. I didn’t know anything about it so I spent a huge amount of time when I started just going out and doing orders. I learned how our software worked. I learned about people’s experiences. I learned that when you work in on-demand delivery and you deliver food, it’s super dehumanizing.
You go into a McDonald’s and people don’t look you in the eye. You pick something up, you walk out. I learned the visceral experience that people have doing this, and feel so fortunate and humble to be doing what I’m doing. I used to go to our courier center, we called it a Glovo center. This is the place where actual real-life couriers come. They come with the phone and say, “The app isn’t working for me and I can’t get my pay because of this, that, and the other”. They come and talk about their lives. I remember a person coming in and saying, can Glovo lend me €500 because I can’t afford to feed my family this month. By doing this I think I built up a picture and an understanding of what we were doing and the people we were working with, far greater than if I’d sat in an office, looked at Slack, done those sorts of things. I remember sitting with our real-time ops team.
Our real-time ops team are a team that track dashboards. They sit looking at dashboards of 30 different countries, and they notice that we’ve suddenly had a dip in the last two minutes in Kazakhstan. They drill into why, maybe the app’s not working, there’s a thunderstorm, a big road is closed, who knows what? They have to sit staring at dashboards and reacting like human observability tools. We did build better observability tools, but this was a few years ago. I remember sitting with them and finding out what their work was and their chMark Allenges were. Whenever I did any of these things, I would come back to my teams, come back to the organization, and I would say, I did this, these are the things I learned.
Product app improvements, other things I’ve learned, thoughts for things we could do differently. What this did was it gave me a much better understanding of what Glovo do, and of the space. It also meant that I built relationships with people working in the courier center. I built relationships with the real-time ops team. I knew how our marketing worked because I’d spoken to them, and I’d sat with them. Which was very useful, and I’ll talk about why later.
Build Strong Relationships
This is the next thing, you’ll need to build strong relationships. This might not be a positive reflection on the world, but relationships matter. Conversations happen with people. People ultimately determine who’s involved and who they speak to. I mentioned Ourspace earlier, the company I co-founded to compete with Miro and FigJam. We were actually doing this in the team design space. We were looking at creating a thing that replaces all those Miro boards you may have seen where you have every engineer on a Miro ticket, and you move them around between boxes, and you don’t care about what their growth goals are, and you don’t care about the diversity of the team. You just move people around because you need to fill a reorg plan.
That’s what was supposed to replace that. Turns out Miro and FigJam are better for it. I really care about inclusivity, but the world works on relationships right now, unfortunately, for better or for worse. You’ll need to build strong relationships and move up the funnel, because engineering is at the bottom of the information funnel in any business.
Customers come first. Customers speak to sales, marketing, customer success, partner success, maybe a UX researcher, maybe a product manager. If you work in enterprise, maybe they speak to the CEO. At some point leadership come into the conversation, and then product and leadership and the stakeholders have this big conversation. What are we going to build? Then everyone decides, and it comes to engineering, and maybe it’s feasible, maybe it’s not. Maybe there are timelines, maybe it’s not. Engineering is right at the bottom of this.
Again, you might be lucky that engineering was involved a bit earlier if you work in a modern organization. By building relationships you can move up the funnel and get yourself involved a lot earlier. If you’re the logical person that people think of when they think of engineering and couriers, as I was in Glovo, people will come to you early on and say, we got this piece of feedback, do you think it will work? Here’s the thing we’re thinking of, what do you think about that from the engineering side? If you build relationships, you move yourself up the funnel.
Let’s imagine you have built a relationship, you’re now working with some new people. Relationships exist on giving value bidirectionally. People aren’t going to enjoy you coming up to them and saying, “I want to build a relationship. I want to learn more about what you do. Can you give me half an hour of your time and tell me?” You have to give back.
One thing that I’m really intentional about is whenever I work with new people, I think long and hard about what I can give back to them. As a manager, feedback is a huge thing. I was seconded to a project in my current company, Isometric, working with our team of PhD scientists in New York for a week. I’ll talk more about the project in a bit. When I left, I took the time to sit down and just write down feedback about every single scientist that I’ve worked with, and share it with our science manager and head of science.
The goal being to say, “I don’t know what I can give back. I really enjoyed this experience. This might be helpful when you’re formulating people’s performance reviews, which is useful for you. I’d like some feedback myself. It will help me improve”. I got it. I did this. I did a few other things. Because I did this, I was asked to be on another science project, a really cool thing on ocean modeling, which I’m really interested in. Another really cool, high-impact project with our science team that might change the world.
Craft Your Internal Brand
You’ve identified what matters. You’ve gone out and been a beginner. You’ve learned it. You’ve built your relationships. Now you need to craft your internal brand. What is an internal brand? I think of it as the words that people in your company think about when they have to think about what your expertise is. In my case right now, I think when people think about me, in my context, they think about hiring. I’m quite good at hiring. I think they think about feedback. I’m very intense about giving feedback, you just saw. I think about reforestation. I know a lot about trees. I’ll talk a bit more about that. I think those three things are what people think of. Take 30 seconds to think about what people think of about you at your work. What are the three things that your colleagues, the people you manage, or people more junior than you, and people more senior than you think? Think about if they’re the same words for everybody.
Think about if they’re the words that will help you move to the next level, or they’re words that reflect that you’re just very good at the level that you’re currently at. Example of me doing this recently. I mentioned at the start, I got told within the last year I wasn’t having enough strategic impact. When I joined Isometric 18 months ago, I sat down with my manager, the CPTO, and she said, “Mark, we need to focus on hiring. We have these open roles. We’re growing really fast. You need to focus on hiring. Here’s a few staff engineers. Some of them are easy. Some of them are chMark Allenging. You have to manage them as well”. I spent my first six months learning the product and what we do. It’s complex, climate science. I never worked in climate. I spent the time hiring. Did ok. Spent the time managing. Hope it went ok.
I sat down, six months review, I was like, “I think I nailed it. We’ve hired these people. I think these people are on the path to promotion. I think this is all going really well”. My manager said, “Yes, Mark, it’s going really well. You’re doing such a good job meeting expectations. Great. You need to have more strategic impact. We’re a small company. We need to grow. You’re very internally focused, just making sure your team is going well”. I said, “Ola, how can I have more strategic impact?” She gave me a few ideas. One idea was this idea about an upcoming strategic thing that I was aware of in an area called reforestation. I have to talk a bit about climate tech.
What isometric does, as I said, we get paid by people who buy carbon credits to verify that those credits are really high quality. We have a team of scientists and we have a lot of technology, machine learning, and so on to verify thousands of data points that people sent us, are truthful and valid and non-anomalous.
In May last year, this was at the time of my performance review, a group of buyers called Symbiosis, so that’s Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce committed $1 billion to buying reforestation carbon credits, effectively paying for trees to be planted before 2030. Isometric was not working in reforestation at this time. We do a lot of other stuff, but nothing to do with trees. We had nobody in the business who really knew anything about trees. I knew that while I didn’t know about this, there’s a lot of tech involved, lots of satellites, things called LiDAR, and synthetic aperture radar, detecting how big a tree is, does the tree exist? Has it been chopped down? Has it burned down? What’s going on in a forest? I knew that we wouldn’t be able to hire anybody to do this in a really tight timeline.
These people said they were going to start deploying their money in three months. We were not in the space. We had no product. We had to sit down and figure out, A, should we build something? B, if we build something, what will it be? I worked super hard on this. I spent my time reading publications, speaking to scientists, speaking to companies already in the space, and built up a good enough knowledge. I am not a scientist. I am not an expert, but a good enough knowledge to start contributing to a product.
By the end of August, we’d released what was the product then, which was just a scientific paper, about 150 pages long. I was a contributor. You can see my name at the bottom with lots of people with lots of post-nominals. The paper went out into the world, was very well received. Today, we now have a tech system to support this. We now have some of the biggest reforestation projects in the world pledged to work with us. A significant chunk of that $1 billion is going to come to our company. We are a seed stage company. A significant chunk of $1 billion is huge. Also, and more importantly, 20 million tons of carbon dioxide is going to be removed from the atmosphere. Those things that’s pledged to us, we’re going to ensure it’s the highest quality carbon dioxide removed, solving a really impactful problem. I was fortunate enough to be able to work on this, something I’m super proud of.
Choose the Green Button (Sometimes)
You have crafted your internal brand. People start to realize and opportunities come your way. Now you have to figure out, am I going to say yes to this wacky project or am I going to say no? Look at this thought experiment. This is how I think about opportunities at work versus doing the day job. You do the day job, you can get an instant $1 million. You will get a payoff. Everyone here is senior and really solid at what we do. If you take an opportunity, there’s a 50% chance it can blow up your career. You can get promoted. You can move higher. Just imagine in this case, who here would choose the green button? Who’s choosing the red button? It’s usually more like 50-50. I think maybe I primed it by saying what I would do all throughout this talk. I would choose green. The good piece of news is, this is not a one-off at work. You get asked to push the button like 10 times, 100 times.
In fact, the point of this talk is to get you more chances to press the button and choose which one you want to do. Nonetheless, it is probabilistic. You can’t choose the green button all the time. We have our day jobs. We all have capacity. We all have things we need to be getting on with. We have lives. We have families. We have friends. We have new video game releases, in my case. We can’t spend all of our time on this. How do you figure out when to say yes and when to say no? I’m going to talk through a few things that I think about. The first thing is, if someone comes to me with a thing to do, I think, is this part of a structured initiative, or is someone just trying to offload an unpleasant BAU task on me? Again, these things aren’t, I say yes to the top and no to the bottom. This is part of a rubric. There are five of them. I’ll talk through it.
Initiatives I think of are pre-planned, already prioritized, or going to be prioritized pieces of work. Maybe they’re still being scoped. They’re things which somebody in the business somewhere thinks is really strategically important. BAU is more like a task that somebody’s coming to you to ask you to take on, “We have this working group. It’s got a rotating chair. There’s no chair for this month. Can you do it?” It’s going to be a valuable thing, I’m not disputing that, but it’s not strategic.
If someone comes and says, “We’ve got this project that’s halfway through. It’s under-resourced. Can you contribute to it?” Maybe sounds a bit more like BAU. Could be an initiative. Have to think about it. Obviously, if the CEO comes to you with a bit of their BAU and asks you to do it, say yes. It depends a bit on who’s asking and what the impact will be. Equally, if it’s an area that you want to learn about, say yes. If it’s going to help you build relationships, say yes. Not a yes or no. Just something to think about.
This is probably the most important for me. Is this an area I want to grow in or an area where I’m already strong? It’s hugely tempting to say yes to things where you’re already strong. It’s that thing I mentioned earlier. You can crank out the work. You know what to do. It’s going to go ok. As a leader, I tend to say no to all these sorts of things mainly because I usually manage someone who can do it better and is going to learn from it than me. I might say something more like, “That sounds really interesting. Let me find someone in my team who can do it”. Something like that. Whereas if it’s a growth opportunity, something new, I’m much more like, “I’m interested in this. I’ve never done anything in AI before. This might be a great way to get my foot in the door and build my skills and build that into my profile”.
I think, will this build a relationship with someone new or am I just nurturing existing relationships? I think that this is quite a hard one. I’m always interested in building relationships with new people. You understand things better. You’re more likely to be offered projects and things to do. Equally, you have to keep your garden watered and strong and keep the people you regularly work with happy. When someone comes to me with an opportunity, I think a lot about whether this is a relationship that I think I can move forward, that I’m going to learn from, I can help them, I can give them value. Finally, I think quite a lot about precedence. I think precedence, as a leader, are really important. The things you do, people copy.
The first time you do something, 10 other people will then go and do it. It’s like if a manager comes and says, “This person’s doing really well. Can we do an out-of-cycle promotion for them because they’re doing such a good job?” I think, as a leader, I would love to recognize good work, but if I say yes to this, the precedent is going to be that next quarter, three more people are going to come and say, will we do out-of-cycle promotions? Can I be promoted? Then we’ll say no, and then they’ll be really annoyed. They wouldn’t have been annoyed if we hadn’t done the first one. It doesn’t mean the thing is worth doing or not doing. It’s just about the precedent you set. I think the same with this. If someone comes to you with an opportunity and says, do you want to work on this? Or you notice an opportunity and think that could be interesting. If you get involved, you set a precedent of being involved in different things. You set a precedent of saying yes when that person comes to you, which could be good, could be bad.
If you say no, you also set a precedent of saying no to opportunities. People might think you’re not interested in growth. They might not come to you again. Probably the worst thing you can say, though, rather than yes or no in this case, is, “I’m pretty busy, struggling, a lot going on”. Because if you say no, they might think, it’s not the project for them. If you say you’re busy, you’re struggling, you’ve got lots on your roadmap, nobody is going to come to you again. That’s like, no, leave me alone. Never come back to me with absolutely anything. Those are things I think about, along with the size of the effort, because, ultimately, this is what matters a lot. If it’s a small thing and you can just get it done, you’re much more likely to do it. It’s not always a yes or no answer.
If someone comes to you and he says, do you want to work on this? You don’t have to say yes or no in the moment. You can say something like, do you have a pre-read? Is there a Slack channel I can join? Is there a meeting I could attend and just listen to learn more about this? Who else is working on this? How long have you been working on this? You can do discovery yourself asynchronously via Slack, via email, in a conversation. Have a quick five minutes and find out more, and decide, after getting more info, whether it’s for you. Even then, you can say something like, potentially, or, sure, I’ll put my name down and I will get back to you when I’ve found the right person from my team to do it.
Just circling back, green button opportunities, red button opportunities, they are probabilistic. That means that if you do the green button thing and you say yes, it will not work a significant amount of the time and you have to be resilient and carry on. The red button things, they are deterministic. They always work. If you do tickets, if you do a refactor, if you devote all your time to managing your team, it will pay off. The green button thing won’t always. I have an example in mind of this. When I joined Isometric, I was super into the fact that we didn’t have any business intelligence tool, and I was like, we need a business intelligence tool.
Let me go out and introduce Metabase. I got Metabase. I set up a BigQuery instance, connected everything up, and I was like, “Everyone, we’ve got Metabase. Let’s look at our data”. Nobody did. No accounts were created. It was just me creating dashboards before I abandoned it. Nine months later, a new engineer joins and they’re like, “It’s crazy, we don’t have any business intelligence tools. Let’s have Metabase”. I was like, “Cool, off you go. See how it goes. Great way to learn about how our company works”. They absolutely smashed it, and now everyone uses Metabase in our company. I reflect that maybe I did well, maybe I didn’t, maybe it just wasn’t the right time. Taking on these opportunities and projects, it will fail sometimes, and you just have to be ok with that.
Real-Life Experience at Glovo
I want to talk about my experience with this all at Glovo. I mentioned earlier that when I joined Glovo, I spent a lot of time being a beginner, doing the deliveries, meeting the couriers, going to different places in Spain to see what was different between towns and cities, and just really trying to understand how the business worked. Because I did this and I built some relationships in the courier operations team, I got asked to lead this really small, weird project in Italy. They were like, Mark, there’s nobody to do this, it’s not on the roadmap, and we have some big problems in Italy with courier striking in Milan, and it can be solved by adding this really small feature to our app. Could you go and do it or find someone to do it? I was like, I think my application engineering is just about good enough to add a couple of lines to an app. I think I’m going to go and do it. I went and I did it, and it solved the courier strike problem in Italy, which was great. People were amazed by it, and like, “You’ve done such a good job on this. Thanks, Mark. Well done”. Nothing happened.
Three months later, I got another approach and this time it was completely different. At this time, Glovo had just been approached by the Spanish government. Spain is the home market of Glovo. They’d said, “Glovo, your app does not properly distinguish between freelancers and employees. All your couriers are freelancers, we think they are employees. If you want to get around this particular law, you need to change your app in these 10 ways and remove these 10 things, and you have to do it within 3 months from today or we’re going to fine you €1 billion”. It was a little bit more than that. I got approached, says, “Mark, you’re the courier app expert who can work on all these cross-team things, and we need you to find people from across the organization, pull together multiple teams, and within three months you basically need to rebuild our courier app from scratch in Spain, so that we save a billion euros”.
At the same time, Deliveroo got exactly the same communique from the Spanish government. Deliveroo shut down in Spain. We could not shut down. Spain was our home market. It wouldn’t have worked at all for the business. We had to do this. It was an incredible chMark Allenge. I was very humbled by the fantastic efforts of all the people in my teams, engineering, product, the operations team, everybody pulled together. Because it was an app, like I said, we had three months, we also had to release it several weeks in advance because, yes, that’s how it works in application development so we didn’t have three months either. We did almost everything and the fine went from just over a billion euros to €79 million just in three months’ work. This was a big success. This fine was a lot more manageable.
Glovo made a couple of billion euros a year at the time. This was a much more manageable fine. Everyone was super happy. I reflect that I would not have been given the chance to do that which was something well above my pay grade and role had I not done all the things I said earlier and been recognized as that person. I got promoted right after this to be a lot more senior than I was. It definitely worked out well. I reflect on that as being very positive.
Summary
If you want to get invited to big conversations, here’s what I do. Identify what matters, be a beginner again, build strong relationships, craft your internal brand, choose the green button, sometimes. Remember, this all takes time. It’s a virtuous circle. Just think of one or two small things you can change each week to start building this muscle, growing those relationships and building yourself out as a more strategic, rounded person.
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: The one question I have is about the build strong relationships. I think you talk about almost walking back from the customer and trying to find. Is there any other thing that you found helpful on building strong relationships throughout the company that is not necessarily, let’s go back to the customer and find where the pain is. Is there anything else that engineers or architects usually miss when trying to build relationships across the company?
Mark Allen: Something that I focus on and think about a lot when somebody engages me, is I categorize people reaching out to me as unsurprising or surprising. Reach out, it’s like my direct reports. I expect them to contact me. I don’t respond that quickly. If someone unsurprising contacts me, I respond much quicker. If I’m doing a project with someone I’ve never done it before, I really think, how can I do this thing really well, a little better than expected, to really build this trust that I’m an organizational executor? People don’t come to work wanting to be my best mate. They come to work because we’re all trying to make some impact together.
I think about how I can demonstrate behaviors early on when someone comes to me to achieve that. I also think a bit about the relationships I already have with people and how I can leverage them to build stronger relationships, be in different environments, different circles. I organize our Neurodiversity Club at work, participate in our book club, that sort of thing. Also, ways that are non-traditional that I can meet people and just build relationships.
Participant 2: I don’t know if you already have in mind a sequel talk, a follow-up, in, ok, now I am involved in this conversation, what do I do? Any advice on how to behave, how to tackle those?
Mark Allen: I think that is an equally chMark Allenging thing. I thought about that a lot. A few things I think about is, when I am involved, I don’t try and be loud and blaring, and, “I’m here, everybody”. I try and think about one contribution that I can make before I go to the meeting. Like, what is the thing that I’m going to add value here on? Is there a thing I can bring? Is there a contribution? Maybe yes or maybe no. If I can’t do anything else, I might make notes, like offer to do that. Also think about at the end of the meeting, usually the higher up you get, the more reluctant people might be to do actions. If you can take an action, even a simple one, and then report back, do it better than expected, I think that’s something that really adds a lot of value and helps you get brought back into the conversation. Helps you get more context, learn more, and gradually over time your contributions become a higher quality and more strategic.
Participant 3: I’m just curious about the €79 million fine. Can you talk a bit more about how you reduced a billion euro fine to €79 million. You said there were a list of 10 things. Was it the case of just saying, we can only manage to remove eight things in three months?
Mark Allen: That was exactly it. In fact, the way we thought about it was we categorized things into different levels of complexity and different levels of business interest. There was one thing that we just decided not to do. We got told, I think that we weren’t able to use GPS to geolocate couriers, and we were just like, that makes the whole business fail. We need to know where people are to assign them orders and to show the customer that they’re on the way, so we’ll eat the fine for that. We don’t think it’ll be much.
Then there were things that obviously were just like, ok, this is really simple, or we have a simple idea in mind. This is more complex. We just used that matrix to implement things, and then did as many as we could in priority order. Worked really hard to incrementally ship them as we went along, and behind a feature flag, so we could also start showing them to people, getting feedback, getting usage patterns, rather than doing this big bang everything in the app store, just before we go live approach.
Participant 4: I don’t know if others face this, but whenever you get a promotion or you move on to the next level, I have noticed that there’s always other people who have a lot more experience, a lot more seniority in these bigger conversations, so they are always the ones to be invited first or asked first. I wonder, is there a specific way to get yourself further than people who have already established themselves, especially in bigger companies or older companies?
Mark Allen: It’s really hard. There are a few different ways you can approach this. I would try and use other people as allies. That could be your manager. It could be those people themselves. When I think about the principal engineers I work with, they often come to me and say, “I’m doing too much. I need someone else to do stuff”. Those people might even have that mindset. It’s just not their natural mindset to come to you who’s new, who they don’t know, who maybe won’t do it as well as them because we don’t do it as well the first time. That’s life. They might even be interested in you being the person instead and helping share that responsibility. Like maybe not. I don’t know the specific example. I would think about how you could leverage those other people to get involved, and your manager too, as that would be my first step.
Participant 5: Just maybe from a manager perspective, how would you apply all of these tips when trying to help your teammates to achieve this? What actions would you specifically take?
Mark Allen: I would get them a QCon ticket and get them to come and sit here. I think it depends on what they’re blocked on. I think you have to try and understand what part of it there is that makes them not apply this. It could be interest. There’s plenty of people that are like, I’m happy with what I do. I want to write code all day. Don’t want a promotion. Just good at this. I’m going to carry on doing it. Great. Fantastic.
Then you have to figure out if it’s worth your time and their time and effort trying to go through this process. Assuming they are interested, I think you have to diagnose, do they know what matters? Are they aware of strategic priorities? If not, that’s the place I’d start. Is it that they are aware but they don’t know how to get involved? Maybe they’re not being invited, as the previous question hinted at, whereas other people are.
Then can I, as a manager, jump in and be like, I really want to get this person involved. Then go to that person and say, “This is an opportunity I’ve created for you. Here are some ways that you can execute it well. Here’s how I would do it. Let’s debrief afterwards. See how it goes. Don’t worry. If it doesn’t go wrong, we’ll learn from it. We’ll find you another one”. I would think it’s very contextual about what the person is, but I would be intentional in both telling them what to do but then also being there to guide them through the process.
See more presentations with transcripts
