Team Building in the Brave New World: Transforming Software Engineering Culture and Leadership

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day, folks. This is Shane Hastie, at the Info Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I’m sitting down with Duncan Grazier.

Duncan, welcome. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.

Duncan Grazier: Thanks, Shane. I appreciate it. Very excited to be here.

Shane Hastie: My normal starting question for these conversations is, who’s Duncan?

Introductions [00:51]

Duncan Grazier: That’s a great question. I ask myself that all the time. Professionally, Duncan Grazier, the CTO here at BuildOps, we’re the largest commercial trade software in the industry. Before that, I was the CTO of a publicly traded company operating in the cannabis industry, high scale, so on and so forth. Before that, I was a contractor with a whole bunch of different technical companies that you’ve definitely heard of. Software engineer by trade, became a manager, went on a very similar journey to a lot of people in my position, where you just grow and learn and develop on the job.

Shane Hastie: So we were chatting earlier and one of the phrases that you came up with interested me, intrigued me, team building in the brave new world.

What are the characteristics of the brave new world and what do the new teams need?

Defining the “brave new world” of AI-augmented teams [01:34]

Duncan Grazier: That is a fantastic question, I think a lot of leaders in my position are asking every day, both to themselves, their teams, their peers, their advisors, pundits on the internet. It’s particularly interesting due to how fast things are moving between age Agentic, these modern tools, the Claudes, the Gemini’s of the world. We have access to so much more technical capability that can really empower our developers and our product people, and our quality people, and our performance engineers, and our DBAs and everybody involved. And I think it’s interesting to really think about what’s a team culture in the context of having an LLM as a part of the team, not just as a piece of a tool that helps an engineer be more successful, or a product manager or a business analyst, so on and so forth?

So when I say Brave New world in this context I’m referring to, we now have people operating on our software that are not really people in and of themselves. It’s a set of statistical outputs, contributing pull requests to a system that might be automatically getting reviewed and deployed by another automated system. So it’s a very interesting new context to operate in. You do have people as well, and those people have to engage and be a part of this new system. So culture that becomes polymorphic in a way, multimodal, and just solving that problem and figuring out how to keep people retained, excited, involved. A very interesting problem in the space and very, very new to the industry as a whole.

Shane Hastie: New, interesting, challenging, big problems are tackled by breaking them down into small chunks. What’s the first small chunk?

Take an incremental approach to AI adoption [03:10]

Duncan Grazier: I think providing access to tools in a safe space in which your employees, your team members, can start using them to make incremental improvements. We saw test writing as a good example to start with, engineers, software engineers themselves don’t love writing tests, but we all know tests are very important. So give them a simple problem space to operate in.

Then from there, measure the impact and the efficacy. “Hey, you all are now outputting 50% more software and doing it safely. How do we feel about this?” Measure that, really think about the impact on the team. “Does it make you feel good? Does it make you feel bad? Are you scared? What does this mean for junior engineers? The hiring pipeline?” So on and so forth. And so you just expand the scope of the problem space from somewhere simple like recording, replaying tests, something along those lines, that narrows the scope down to say, “Hey, this isn’t going to change everything. It’s just going to change this one thing dramatically”.

Shane Hastie: So I’m going to guess you’ve been doing this. What are you seeing in your teams and with your folks?

Duncan Grazier: I think it’s a mix of excitement and a mix of trepidation, in a way of, “What does this mean for me, the person, the employee, in the wider context of my career?” I see it as one of the many things in technology. Things move really fast, whether it’s a tool set or a tool chain or a way to work or a methodology or bit blockchain, and then AI, VR, AI, these things move very quickly.

And I think as an engineer, it can be a lot to take in and intellectualize the problem in a way that you can then apply it to your day job and say, “I, as an engineer have to do output at a certain velocity and a certain pace and certain level of quality and performance and scale. Is this rule going to help me or hurt me?” So you need to have champions inside your organization that are exciting about this and then can help people feel on the team that, “Hey, this is positive impact to you. You’re going to get more output done, you’re going to focus less on the minutiae. You can solve the really hard problems, the ones that LLM is not going to pick up, but the ones that solving a business need”, Or, “Chipping faster”, Or, “Scalability”. Or so on and so forth.

So I think what we see is a mix of excitement and fear, and the people range from left to right. We’re doing brown bag lunches, we’re doing sessions that are recorded, showing people the value of this and it’s starting to pick up steam. But until that one person gets that excited feel of how this is going to impact them positively on a day-to-day, it’s like, “Eh, I’m not so sure about this today”.

Shane Hastie: This is the Engineering Culture Podcast. What are the culture implications of this shift?

The cultural implications of the shift in team formation [05:43]

Duncan Grazier: I think on the short term, it’ll be less impactful than people feel that it will be. But I think in the longer term, the whole concept of vibe coding and some of these novel ways of interacting and building software, are really going to change people’s engagement with custom developed software. And that was all professional consultant speak, it doesn’t even matter, but I think on the day-to-day, what it’s going to look like is, it will have micro improvements on an engineer’s day-to-day, their output, their performance, the quality, the code, less bugs, so on and so forth. I think over the long term, a single engineer will be able to solve bigger problems in less time with a higher level of quality and performance than ever before. So the gap between a IC2 software engineer and a senior engineer is going to get closed very quickly, from a capability perspective,

Shane Hastie: If that gap is closing, what does this do to things like career paths?

The impact on career paths [06:39]

Duncan Grazier: The age-old question. To me, I think it makes people move more quickly up the currently designed ladders, in the short term. I think in the long term we’re going to have to really think about what is the software engineer? What is a computer scientist? What do you draw the lines between level two, level three, level four? It used to be the ability to communicate, the ability to break down a problem, the ability to think systemically or look at the design of software versus microservices and API contents and things like that.

A lot of that’s going to go the way of, “Hey, I just need an API for this. It needs to do this. These are the data points. Here are the attributes, this is what the schema needs to be”. And so those baseline characteristics go away. So to me, it’s going to really, really force us to rethink what good is in this context, and to me, it’ll be all about our ability to communicate and be effective at explaining and describing and breaking down high level problems. And now that the tools that exist today to me have a big gap on hearing what a customer has to say, listening to what they have to say, taking that problem, being able to generalize it and describe it in a solution forward manner, than an LLM or a software engineer or somebody like that can then go complete. So I think that’s a very interesting dynamic shift in what we describe as software engineering today.

Shane Hastie: So the software engineer who wants to move into a leadership or management role, what do they need to focus on in this brave new world?

Redefining leadership and team structures [08:06]

Duncan Grazier: I just described some very high level around performance and measuring performance and how do you know somebody’s ready for a promotion? Thinking now more in, what are the problems we’re solving? How effective are we at solving those problems? Is it actually contributing value to the technical team? To the product team, to the business? So on and so forth. So I think we’re going to have to look a little differently at what is a manager. An engineering manager used to be the senior most technical person, the best person to communicate with product, they could potentially be on customer calls. All of those things now become very important in a model where everybody can have the same basic understanding of how to solve the problem, which is a very interesting concept.

So as you’re developing in your skills and thinking about what’s next for yourself, how do you leverage these tools? How do you get more leverage out of the tools as well as the people at the same time, from a performance perspective? So it’s a great, great question to think about. I don’t think anybody knows, too, which is maybe the more exciting point of all of this, of what that actually means, the implications are. But to me it’s going to be a lot about communication, how we do documentation, how we describe what the problem is, what the solution is, so on and so forth. So the experts there will really feel I think an acceleration in their career.

Shane Hastie: You’re making the point, we don’t really know this yet, but how do we prepare our people for it?

Duncan Grazier: I think the things that make you good in this so-called brave new world will also make you good today. The ability to communicate, talk to and understand the problem, break problems down, as you mentioned, quality whiteboarding, describing the solution in a way that the whole engineering team could understand. Being able to document the decisions you’re making, being able to write schemas clearly and effectively, build for scale.

All of those skill sets that are maybe four different people have partially each one of those skills, I think everybody’s going to have to have all of those skills. So you can start building your people up now to be effective in this new context because it’ll be beneficial to your team today anyways. We want everybody to say, “I understand this problem. I can describe this problem. I understand this ticket. I understand this algorithm. I understand what we’re building”. So on and so forth. So I think it’s really… All of the tools that we develop today will impact and benefit ourselves maybe in this effective, brave new world.

Shane Hastie: And what’s a team in the new world?

Duncan Grazier: I’m hopeful that it’s the same scale of people, the same structure of people, the same context and clarity and architecture of technical leadership, people leadership, a handful of individual contributors who are well aligned to a charter and understand the customer persona we’re going to solve the problem for so on and so forth, augmented with unbelievably powerful tools that enable them to do and solve those problems 50% faster, 100% faster, 150% faster in certain contexts. So a team remains the same. I think the toolkit and the tool belt and the capabilities that that team has are going to really dramatically improve over the next two, three, four quarters. They’ve already happened over the last two quarters, the tools we have to had at this quarter versus two quarters ago are amazing.

Shane Hastie: One of the things that we have explored on the podcast, and on InfoQ a number of times is the impact of cognitive load on engineers. Are we increasing the cognitive load now or are we managing it?

Managing cognitive load and learning curves [11:32]

Duncan Grazier: We are definitely increasing the cognitive load. We are teaching engineers, from my perspective, a new way of operating, which dramatically increases the overhead required to be successful. However, the return on that investment in learning those new technologies and those capabilities, I think will pay efficiency and productivity gains pretty dramatically from my perspective. And we’re bullish on that at BuildOps, and I think a lot of people in our position are, unicorn valuation, growing like crazy. Got a lot going on, got a lot to do, got to move forward. A lot of capabilities needed.

So I would say 100% yes. However, much like any leadership and development or training or capability or cultural shift in an organization, I think it does pay dividends. And actually I’m reminded of just really quickly of Agile. I remember when Agile came on the scene, everybody’s like, “This is so much overhead. Why do we do all these meetings? Why do we need a daily standup? Let’s just plan it all and then just go”. And it was like, “Oh no, but these are the gains you get on the back end of all that”. And now generally speaking, most people follow that pattern. So 100% we are increasing overhead, but I think in the longterm it’s going to pay pretty significant dividends. A lot of that cognitive load goes away because the tools can do a lot of the administrative work, a lot of the clerical work, so on and so forth.

Shane Hastie: So it’s getting through that and learning how to let the tools do it?

Duncan Grazier: Yeah, trusting the tools too as they develop and mature as well.

Shane Hastie: So if I’m aspiring to become a leader, I can ask ChatGPT, “How should I talk to my boss about this problem?”

How does my boss respond when they realize that all I’m doing is asking the machine to tell me how to talk to them?

Duncan Grazier: To me as a leader, the practical experience of having those hard conversations, very different than actually… Someone telling you what it’s like to have a hard conversation, very different than having to have a hard conversation, a good conversation, a bad conversation, a hard conversation, a complex conversation. So to me, practice makes perfect.

In the leadership context specifically, some things never get easier, a demotion, termination, those never get easier. You can have a million of those conversations, but a computer can tell you, “This is the way to do it. These are the effective things to say”. But until you actually do that enough times, until you can empathize with the person that you’re talking, until you can feel the emotion going into that conversation, it’s pretty hard to really know what good and bad is. And so yes, a computer can right now tell you what the best way is to have a hard conversation. But until you do it or talk to someone and someone coaches you through, it’s very challenging to actually be successful in that situation.

Shane Hastie: Let’s dig into coaching as a leadership competency, that’s not something that most technology folks have even thought about. Where do they go to even learn this? How do I become the coach for others and how do I get coached?

Coaching as a critical leadership competency [14:22]

Duncan Grazier: I wish there were more leaders who have gone through the pain and suffering of the growth who are willing and open to share that context with their employees. I think the people that do understand the importance of coaching are very excited to help other people learn how to be good coaches, if that makes sense. So I always empower my team and the people that I know to say, “Hey, find somebody in your organization, even if it’s not an engineering leader, that you know is doing a really good job managing their team, they have a lot of cultural impact. They’re really thought very highly of as a leader. Go find them and ask them if they can do a monthly session where you just talk through hard conversations. They can give you practical examples”.

So I would love to say, “Talk to your CTO. Talk to your VP of engineering. Talk to your director”. But you’re probably not going to get tons of traction. There are dozens of us who think this is an important thing, but I always recommend people in sales are really good at having hard conversations. I know that’s like an icky statement to say on a technology podcast, but they do, all day long they get shut down.

So they’re very good at handling challenging conversations. So find somebody in your organization that you hear is a good leader, a strong leader, you see them as an exemplar way of operating and just ask them, “Hey, can we do 30 minutes a month?” Coffee, tea, whatever it is. And I almost guarantee they’ll say yes, that’s super exciting for them. Because they generally want to share what they know, they don’t want to be the only person in the organization. So find someone in your life that is that, go and talk to them. They’ll be very excited to share that information with you.

Shane Hastie: What’s the important question I haven’t asked you today?

The long-term industry implications of the shift [15:58]

Duncan Grazier: Ooh, great question. I think the implications long-term on what the world perceived AI’s impact is going to be on the technology industry is a very interesting area to explore. Intellectually to start, what does it mean for the IC junior engineer? Do you want to enter the software industry right now knowing that vibe code is coming? What does that mean? What does that mean for our hiring pipelines and our ability to grow talent internally? If everybody knows everything and every problem is a PRD that you can just shove into an LLM, then what does expertise mean in that…

There’s a lot of unexplored areas here from a leadership perspective, from an organizational owner perspective, from a strategic level, what this all means. I’m not sure anyone really knows, and it’s changing very fast, which is cool, but it’s a very interesting area to explore, intellectually of we actually are asking the question, what does it mean to be an intern right now? What does it mean to have a technical intern? We want those people to have that experience, but also, is it important to have interns? What does that mean long term?

So there’s a lot of very long cultural implication conversations to have about this. And I think the other is we’re totally… Get it all out there. How do you attract talent in this market? What does talent acquisition look like? How do you all hire the best and brightest, when you’re maybe at a B2B SaaS company versus a company that’s building novel AI interfaces, so on and so forth? So those are two fun areas that are very hard problems that need to be solved by leaders like myself.

Shane Hastie: What advice have you got for leaders like yourself?

Advice for leaders [17:33]

Duncan Grazier: Be true to your values? I think in any situation, if you know who you are or your approach to leadership, how you’re going to react and feel when you get really bad news, really good news, something really negative happened underneath you on your team, I think being clear on your approach to leadership is probably the most critical thing to learn as a young leader who’s starting to develop their persona as a leader. Are you fair and firm? Are you laissez-faire? Are you open? There’s a lot of different ways to think about it. But you have a personality, that person only shows up and who you are as a leader.

So really have clarity around what it means, how are you going to show up, so on and so forth. So that’s one of the first bits of advice I give to someone I’m going to promote from a team lead to an actual manager. “Hey, know yourself. Know how you’re going to show up because it’s going to impact your ability to lead”.

Shane Hastie: Duncan we’ve meandered a lot, but some really useful points and interesting areas to explore there. If people want to continue the conversation, where can they find you?

Duncan Grazier: Please find me on LinkedIn, Duncan Grazier. Available, shoot me a connection, shoot me a message, happy to chat. My website’s on there as well. You can send me an email as well, super easy to find.

Shane Hastie: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Duncan Grazier: Thanks, Shane. It’s great.

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