High Trust, Low Blame Cultures

Carlos Ponce (00:09):

Good morning everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. And today we are getting unplugged with Dustin Diaz, the head of engineering at Duro. So first of all thank you Dustin for joining us today. And of course, thanks Wade. My fellow teammate and co-host. Thank you for joining us both here. Dustin, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about you what your background is, anything you want to say about yourself, now's your moment, and then of course, tell us a little bit about Duro, and then we'll go from there. Thank you, and welcome to Tech Leaders Unplugged.

Dustin Diaz (01:00):

Yeah, I appreciate it, Carlos. Happy to be here. Well, I'm out here in Los Angeles, another sunny day, although I can't think of many other places in the country that are not sunny these days. Yeah, well, I've been in software for just about 20 years now. I came out of college with a Spanish degree and a minor in cultural anthropology. And so really back in the nineties it was not so much about getting a computer science degree and whatnot, it was just more of a hobby. And so yeah, that led into a foray, of companies and products and projects that I've worked on since then. I've been at Yahoo as a normal business team. I was at Google on Gmail, an early employee at Twitter, and a founding engineer at Medium. And then that kind of first describes the primary 10 years of my career and the latter 10, I, you know, I kind of took that fork in the road into leadership and management. I was at mix.com with the co-founder of Uber. I ran my own business for a while that went under from Covid in 2020. It was a platform for booking talent, like actors, models, musicians, and what have you. And certainly, yeah, when lockdown happened, really our bookings took a dive. We pulled out a series A and ultimately a year after that shut down the company. So since then, I did some contract work, fractional CTO more recently at route.com as an engineering leader. But currently, I'm head of engineering at Duro Labs. As we like to say, Duro is for disruptors. It's, it's PLM for hardware manufacturers. We get a lot of companies in the space and robotics industry. And so we're doing a little lot of cool stuff there. That's a bit about me on the other side. I do a lot of running. I'm a master's marathoner. I think one day I have a goal of winning a major marathon, whether that's Boston or New York or whatnot, not as the primary rating, but, but as the winner of like an age group. So, whether that's 40, 45, 45, 50-year-olds that, that would be a pretty cool thing to happen.

Carlos Ponce (03:35):

Right. That's awesome. Dustin, thank you. Thank you for sharing, for sharing a little bit about your background. And now Dustin I understand that today we're going to be talking about the topic as chosen by you High Trust, Low Blame cultures, and the North start objective for engineering teams. This is an interesting topic, Dustin. So tell us why you chose this topic and why you thought it was relevant for today's day and age. Let's start there, please.

Dustin Diaz (04:10):

Yeah, I think it's massively relevant now. I think, you know, within tech, we often think the largest challenges ahead of us are actually tech-related at that. It's about optimizing this framework or using that library, or how we're going to scale this platform. And that, you know, we often think about these challenges as something to be overcome. And in reality, I think so many of them are just solvable. And, really the hardest, the largest barrier ahead of us is ourselves as people and how we communicate and collaborate and whatnot. And so one thing in particular that has been top of mind for me in the last few years has been engineering productivity and just really how to create more efficient teams. So more recently there's been a framework that was released as a white paper, if you want to call it that, out of GitHub, which, which I guess you could say out of, out of Microsoft called the Space Framework. I don't know if you guys have heard about space if you talked about that in the past, but effectively that's an acronym for so really in short satisfaction like developer wellbeing, so to speak, like developer happiness is for performance, like how well the things they produce are performing. I think is something that a lot of younger engineering, engineering leaders, or less experienced engineering leaders tend to focus on as something that is successful for activity. And that's things just like raw commits you know, pushes to production, things like that. It's a really naive Elon Musk way of thinking, just like, how many lines of code are you writing and that is how successful you are. But that's only one variable in this whole setup here. What is it, then, what am I on? SPA is for, I, I think officially in the framework it's for communication, but I like to tie a bunch of CSS to it, which is communication, collaboration coordination, clarity, and then that last one in there is for efficiency itself. So the whole like work smarter, not harder, and what have you. And this framework is a guide to understanding engineering productivity, not in particular, measuring it itself. There are other tools and systems out there too, to like to measure it with, with like numbers itself. One is like door metrics. I think at this point, in this day and age, every engineering leader has heard of Duro. Sounds a little sad.

Wade Erickson (07:17):

There wants to be part of the show.

Dustin Diaz (07:19):

Yeah. He's like, Dad, come on. So Duro there, I mean, by now there's, there's a ton of platforms out there that can consume your GitHub data or GitLab or, or whatever, Bitbucket, just your repository data alongside your tracking system, whether that's linear, Asana, JIRA, whatever, and they kind of mash it up together, and that'll tell you how well you're doing on cycle times or your recovery rates things like that. And that's easier to say, like, oh, here's how we're doing in, in those areas. But with space, it's certainly on the softer side of things putting this all into perspective. I, I know this, this is a lot of like, the context for it all of all this research that's came out of Dora, which, which I think now it's been like 10 years. They do this annual report called the DevOps research assessment report in the 2020 version. Obviously, we haven't done 2023. This is, aside from all these metrics, all these variables, or whatever, the biggest factor in efficient teams is having a high trust, low blame culture. And to me, that kind of ties back even to the space framework that s is like that most important variable, which is satisfaction, developer happiness, just people enjoying their jobs, people, you know, engineers enjoying what they're doing, feeling challenged, and like they're, they're making a difference. I'll pause there if, if there's any kind of direction you want to go in that.

Wade Erickson (09:02):

No, I think that's a great summary. And yeah, this is an area that obviously we, we don't talk a lot about, whether it is in hardware or software development is these softer sides of things that are, you know, often not presented. It's always, you know, getting the product out the door, you know, like you said you know, release times, all those efficiencies are measured in much more tactical kinds of things. And, you know, as humans it interests me that your, your degree was in anthropology and then a lot of your, you know, previous you know, endeavors were around, you know, kind of social networks, social interaction, you know and then, you know, which is software development, right? And then to be at a PLM company that's largely tied to hardware, which is traditional engineering, and thought of that. You know, tell me a little bit about how some of that background that you had in social networks and all of that and the kind of the more social interaction kind of software fed into this PLM space that has really traditionally drove them from hardcore electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, that kind of thing, and the collaboration, a tool like that.

Dustin Diaz (10:24):

I mean, if I could be transparent and completely honest, I don't have a background in hardware. I, I don't have a background in PLM, you know, I, I came into Duro as someone knowledgeable in software systems and managing teams. And so, I think a lot of startups in this day and age, you know, their biggest struggles are execution and efficiency. And so certainly many of the engineers on the team are aware of you know, what that process is. Look is like some have been in electrical or mechanical engineering. I've worked within other PLM systems and you know, so I didn't come in with my PLM expertise by any means. You know, there, there are still days where I'm just like, I don't understand this whole part, but I trust that our team will figure that out. And so I, I'm not that guiding beacon of light ticket, you know to basically say, oh, here's how this should work and whatnot. When it comes to software architecture, sure. I sit it in, in our architecture review meetings on occasion, I, I'll still do a code review here and there, not so much as to say, here's how it should work, but just more like, here's some guidance and, and some feedback. Take it as you will, but otherwise looks good to me. You can either use that and, you know, address that there, or open up a separate follow-up pull request for whatever. And so I, I do try and stay out of that. And so, my background and other social networks really just stem from my passion for culture and, and people really, I, I feel like that's why I got into web development to begin with because this is where all the people were. This is where I feel like my kind lived. And I, I don't know. It wasn't really until Twitter that I feel like I found my footing and interest in these types of systems. But e even before that, I was really big into joining online forums and whatnot, chat rooms, and as I'm sure many others, you know have been part of, but it's something I really enjoyed. And so, it was cool to make an impact on a platform, at least back then these days, I don't know what's going on with Twitter. And so keep that out of the conversation. But it was cool to make a difference there. Like Twitter was seen as this like cultural phenomenon that really made a huge impact on the world.

Wade Erickson (13:13):

So, we talked about high trust and low blame, obviously, that is driven by the culture, which is driven by leadership, right? I mean, a lot of, a lot of things that are the culture they bubble up from the people that are employed, and then others are really mandated through policy and you know, the actions of leadership. Tell me a little bit about how you would change a culture that to move towards a higher trust, low brand, you know, command and control site leadership to be more inclusive and open to new ideas that allow for failure. Yeah. And don't, you know, punish the failure. How, what can you do about how that might be introduced into a company?

Dustin Diaz (14:04):

It's funny because I often hear about all these things and others like leadership, blog posts, books, podcasts, and whatnot. And it's, I feel like we talk about it a lot, but it's, it's so much easier said than done. I can't even say it's been the easiest road even for me at Duro. You know, trying to you know, get each team member to trust one another. It's easy to just say, Hey guys, let's trust each other. And you can try and enforce that with policy, but even then, then it feels like that's being forced. And so the trick is to try and make it feel organic. And so I do my best to kind of empathize with the team and let my own hair down figuratively not a whole lot of hair here. And say, you know, here's where I struggle and I, here's what I'm trying to do with the team. I started by placing some values into the, you know, daily conversation. I plugged them into our interview guides so that when you're interviewing with us, you know, it actually shows what we're hoping to have been one of our core behaviors. So trust is certainly one of them. Think about the opposite or the antithesis of high trust, low blame, it's low trust, high blame. Think about cu cultures that regularly blame each other, and you can see how much deadlock they run into, and you know, how that can lead into a certain kind of burnout. Other ways of implementing is really, I know we're a distributed team and a lot of other teams out there nowadays are, you know, spread across the world. Duro invests quite a bit of its resources into gathering our teams together. So, you know, every six to eight, nine weeks or so, we actually fly out the entire dev team and we bring them into Los Angeles, and we spend a whole week together. And, you know, not a lot of like technical, you know, hard work gets done, but it is a place where, you know, we get to have conversations and just get to know each other as people, which, you know, you can try that on Zoom and whatnot, but there's, I mean, the reality is like nothing really beats just being the same room, at least to get to, to know one each other and just talk about other things so that when everyone flies back to their homes and whatnot, you know, there's a, there's a higher sense of empathy in that we feel like we want to be there for one another. We trust each other a little bit better. And so they, that ultimately leaves i, I think, to higher productivity which in the end, as, as a business goal is something you want.

Carlos Ponce (17:09):

Dustin, I think it's, let me just jump in. I have a burning question here. I think it's easier to have North start, right? When you have, for example you have, you might have a distributed team that is domestic, for example, you might be in Los Angeles, you have someone in Brooklyn, and you know, it's all distributed all over the place. I think it's easier to have that particular north the start, but what about when teams are like global? For example, you have someone in Los Angeles, like yourself and then, but you have someone in, I don't know, Singapore, Ukraine, Bueno Aires or whatever. So what factors come in play from your perspective to make sure that everyone works or, or seamlessly or harmoniously, harmonically, I'm sorry. And in, in order to produce a desirable outcomes?

Dustin Diaz (18:06):

Yeah. I mean, well, Duro certainly is spread across the world. We have engineers all over the US from Portland to LA to New York, to Pennsylvania, whatever e every US time zone we have also other members in Pakistan, India Africa. And Dro wasn't the first place for me like this as well. I, I, I feel like I've managed teams in every time zone on the planet so far, as far as I can think of. And I think it is important to have some sort of core overlap, but yeah, we, we have our touch points and we have our syncs, and those are more really to get some face-to-face time and check in how we're doing. But really, we're all communicating on Slack or, you know, some other teams, it's, it's teams or whatever. And so that again, comes into a high trust. The goal of our syncs is not to get into micromanage and get the status of the work. You know, we, we put everything in our project boards. We're, you know, we're certainly a <inaudible>. We use Geek Bot to get status updates that way. And so at no given point am I having to go to anyone directly and be like, what's the status of this? You know, you know, what's the e t on that, on that project? The team, the team enjoys it. And really when we all do get on the webcam together and we're all in one Zoom or Google Hangout or whatever it's more just of like a small time to catch up just to check in if there's any other major blockers or, or what have you. But the way we run our standups is not about the, the status of things. Like, I I say that that's a waste of time. We can get that from other project boards and, and whatnot. I don't know if that answers the question.

Carlos Ponce (20:19):

Certainly did. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. I might have more, but I'm going to let Wade.

Wade Erickson (20:26):

Yeah, I think, you know, we have a few minutes left here. You know, of course you have a very, in the intro, you, you talked about some of your background at Yahoo, Google and, you know, co-founding a company with a particular, you know, billionaire, well-known person, gear at camp there that started Uber. Tell me a little bit about, you know, a lot of the folks that watch this show are, you know, software entrepreneurial, all those kinds of things. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about how you met somebody like that, that, you know, went on to, to build later Uber, and, you know, what kind of you know, what brought you together to be, to build that mix.com application.

Dustin Diaz (21:08):

Yeah, mix.com, and actually it's still live. There's an app in the app store that started as another idea, which hopefully can stay buried, but I'll un dig it for just a moment. It was this other app called Open Likes, which was this idea, I don't know if it's good or bad, but it was just a way to like, put all of your interest in this one thing and whatnot. That's a, that's a side conversation. How Garrett and I met, I really feel is just serendipitous of living in San Francisco. And so I had a colleague who was there he was Twitter's first designer. His name was Vitor Lorencia. And he was like a 19 year old designer at Twitter, still contracting for Twitter out of Brazil, I believe. And we worked together at Twitter for a couple years. Eventually, we, we parted ways, did different things. I don't know how he met Garrett, but how, I mean, how does anyone meet each other in San Francisco? I mean, I know Uber started there. They launched with three Blacktown cars. And I don't know, I, I think I was looking for one Opportunity Vitor was like, Hey, you should come talk to Garrett. He's a pretty chill guy. Very nice. As is the, the classic Canadian stereotype. And we got to talking, we worked on this concept of his, it was his idea open likes. Ultimately, we kind of combined some interest there. I, I ultimately morphed that into what became Mix. Now obviously, I didn't buy mix.com because I don't have mix.com money but we whipped that up. It would, for what I believe was a combination of both our interests. So I don't know if anyone knows this. So Garrett started Uber out of what was prior to that, which was stumble upon. So he was the guy that started stumble upon, and if I get my facts right, I think he sold that to eBay or PayPal, or one of the two made some money that, and I think he seeded Uber with that. But he's always had this interest in passion for the web and discovery and content and whatnot. If anyone here remembers stumble upon, it was literally a, like a Firefox toolbar extension to just, you know, keep clicking and find and discover new sites. And Som was really, I think, a culmination of a little bit of my background at Twitter and finding topics and interests in finding people and following those things. And his background of finding content on the web would stumble upon, and kind of putting them together. I think the internal joke for the longest time was that we called it Stumble Upon 2.0. But yeah, working with him was a lot of fun. You know, ultimately we had two devs on it in the beginning and then Garrett. And so I think today they're still finding some success. There's, I don't know how many users at this point. I mean, it, it's been such a long time. I I departed that in 2014, 2015, I think.

Wade Erickson (24:46):

Great. Thanks for that background. Yeah. I think Carlos, we got a few minutes left. Did you have anything else you wanted to share?

Carlos Ponce (24:55):

Well, absolutely, thank you, Wade. The only thing left for me is to well, we’re coming up on time, right? Unfortunately, but I, I would like to announce what's coming next. So next our next guest on Tech Leaders Unplugged is going to be Omer Slavin, the CEO and founder of Beti. The topic is going to be Construct Tech Chronicles and it's going to be about navigating efficiency, safety, and innovation with transformative cloud technology. And this is going to be happening on right here on Tech Leaders on Plug on August the 22nd at 9:30 AM Pacific. That's going to be on next Tuesday, I believe. So that's what I have Wade. And the last thing for me is simply thanking Dustin for having agreed to be here on the show. And I look forward to many more conversations. I know that there could be some potential convergences. So anyway, Thein, thank you so much for having been such a gracious guest. And we're going to be in touch.

Dustin Diaz (26:02):

Awesome. Thanks so much, Carlos, Wade, I appreciate it.

Wade Erickson (26:06):

Have a good day.

Carlos Ponce (26:07):

Dustin, stay off. Stay on as we go off the air. Okay. Thank you folks. See you next time.