Meg Adams:

I deeply believe that work can be a joyful and contributing part of people’s lives. And so, I have always just been attuned to that vision and looking out for ways that I could lean into that, whether that was hands-on line, managing a team and creating joyful environments where we could do really hard things together, but in a really joyful way are now working with managers and teaching them about some of the concepts of neuroleadership and joy and play and how people’s brains work better and how we can actually improve a company’s bottom line by creating these really gorgeous teams where people feel satisfied with the work that they’re doing. The decisions I’ve made have always been rooted in that focus on the vision.

David Joy:

Well, welcome to the podcast, Meg. And how are you doing today?

Meg Adams:

I’m amazing. This is my first podcast, so I am nervous and excited, which I think is how I want to feel most of the time about most of life, a little nervous and a little excited.

David Joy:

I think you always want that first-time experience for every experience that you have?

Meg Adams:

Yeah.

David Joy:

It’s also my first time recording a podcast live with somebody, so I am also… we kind of experiencing this together, so it’s all good. But I just wanted say to thank you so much for taking the time to say yes because you have so many different roles that you have been through, and now you are the executive director at Estée Lauder for the platform engineering team, and you have so many different things going on, but you still said yes to come to the podcast. So, I really appreciate you doing that.

Meg Adams:

Absolutely. Anything for Cockroach.

David Joy:

Yes. So, before we begin, tell me about what is it that you’re doing right now at Estée Lauder? What that role is all about and what that function is?

Meg Adams:

Yeah. So, at Estée Lauder, I am, like you said, the executive director of platform engineering. Platform engineering in our context is a bit sprawling, so we have everything needed to support the application. So, that is things like cloud infrastructure, all the way to global analytics, automated QA, the tools developers use. How I think about it is we serve the developer as our customer, and that’s who we think about, and we try to make their lives easier as much as we can.

David Joy:

Yeah. So, it’s like a broad function that you have to be responsible for. And here’s the funny thing, when I was traveling, I was telling my wife, “Hey, so I have to go for Roach Fest, which is a company event, and then I’m talking to Meg Adams from Estée Lauder.” And my wife lost her mind because she’s a big Estée Lauder fan because she gets her eyeliner from there. She has a bunch of other things that she gets from there. So, she’s like, “Can we get free stuff from you?”

Meg Adams:

Okay. I should have brought samples. And I’m embarrassed now that I didn’t.

David Joy:

I was selling, and I tried this trick with somebody. I spoke from Chick-fil-A, his name was Brian Chambers, and we had a podcast and I got some free Chick-fil-A sandwiches. So, if you can hook me up that I believe the best thing. But again, Estée Lauder is one of the largest cosmetic brands in the world. And previously you were working in Etsy, which is also a huge place for online retail.

So, how was that experience for you going from a world where you have eCommerce in that sense, moved to Estée Lauder? How was the whole space for you?

Meg Adams:

I think the big difference between Etsy and Estée Lauder was that Etsy is a two-sided marketplace. And so, the focus of the work we’re doing within engineering, what I was doing within data engineering there is really thinking up through the whole flow from ideating a product, all the way through to it arriving to someone who bought it. And for Estée Lauder, it’s engineering and what we’re focused on is purely on the buying consumer. So, thinking less about the whole marketplace and more specifically about how do we get this amazing product that so many people are so loyal to into their hands as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible in a way that is delightful and that they find pleasing.

David Joy:

Before we got to go on this, I would rather open it up and tell me a little bit about your own story as to how you got into tech. And I was reading stuff that you’ve written and the story is amazing and beautiful. So, I would rather have you tell that story to everyone listening as to how you got into this whole practice of tech and engineering and being a woman in code actually?

Meg Adams:

My story started out so many as an elementary special education teacher, I went to school for teaching and ultimately decided that that’s not what I wanted to do. But I wasn’t sure at that point. I just graduated college and was like, “Oh God, what have I done? I have this degree and have no idea how to apply it.” But what I did have going for me is that I’d been working part-time for one of the limited brand stores for several years.

So, I called up Victoria’s Secret and was like, “Will you please give me a job?” So, I was assistant managing a store for some time, and I found really quickly that I was able to bring a lot of the philosophy and the theory, the things I’d learned about human development and engaging the minds and spirits of people into the context of building and growing the team at Victoria’s Secret. And working in sales, you tie real dollar results to that. I had some of the most engaged teams, people who came back, we had very high retention, which is uncommon in retail, and we were selling a ton of stuff. And I was really excited by that.

I was like, “This is the thing I want to do. This is fun, but didn’t want to work in sales forever.” So, I knew I wanted to be a leader and a manager, which is fairly uncommon I think for engineering leaders because people become engineers and then eventually they either accidentally or on purpose become a leader. But I started out knowing that I wanted to lead teams and work in a leadership space. It took some time to teach myself to code and spent some years as an engineer largely working in the front-end space.

And then, finally achieve the goal that I’d set out, which was to manage teams. So, started out, my first team was at Condé Nast, working largely in the frontend space. And when I moved on from that job to Etsy, I’d interviewed for a role that was also in the frontend D product space. But through the course of the interview, they were like, “You have a really strong management practice. We have this job over here in data engineering.

We’ve been trying to hire for a year and it’s just not working. We can’t find anyone with the skillset we need. Will you come try data engineering?” And at the time I was like, “What? Absolutely not.” But I was really excited by the people I’d met and finally was like, “Okay, let’s give this a try.”

David Joy:

Got it.

Meg Adams:

So, spent my time managing teams in the data engineering space at Etsy. It was an absolute blast. Data is so interesting.

David Joy:

It is.

Meg Adams:

It’s my favorite of all the engineering spaces. And I did that for almost a full four years. Towards the end of my tenure, I was invited to try a strategy and operations role. So, rather than leading some of the data engineering teams, I was working on top of the engineering org, which had about a thousand engineers.

David Joy:

Got it.

Meg Adams:

Thinking about engineering enablement, things like engineering, onboarding, team acceleration, manager training. And I really liked doing that. I liked thinking about the problems, but I pretty quickly realized I missed working hands-on with leaders and with teams. So, I made the move to Estée Lauder where I now work with an amazing team of managers and senior staff engineers.

David Joy:

How big is a team now at Estée that you’re managing?

Meg Adams:

Oh, that’s a good question. Right now I want to say 50.

David Joy:

Fifty it’s not less. It’s a lot of people.

Meg Adams:

Yes. It’s a lot of people.

David Joy:

To manage. Yeah. So, do you think that having that experience of trying these… having this versatile experience of being a developer, working on data, working on of such a holistic profile now, and now you’re a leader too?

Do you think that gives you perspective to look at a 50 people team who’s working on different areas and you can have a perspective, a real perspective? I’ve met managers who are managers, but they don’t have real experience on working on those problems. Do you think that helps you as you lead the team at Estée Lauder now?

Meg Adams:

Yeah. I think it helps me in a lot of ways to pretty consistently be the person in the room that needs to seek clarity, needs to rely on my people to have expertise in the areas that they own, to push them to learn even more about what they’re working on and to learn it to a degree that they can teach it.

David Joy:

Got it.

Meg Adams:

So, for me, it’s been a superpower to consistently be entering into new spaces

David Joy:

Got it.

Meg Adams:

And it’s also a certain flavor of leader. I don’t think all engineering leaders can be purely broad.

David Joy:

Yeah. That makes sense.

Meg Adams:

But it’s really useful in some use cases.

David Joy:

You have a very holistic profile and that’s what it feels like you’re bringing to Estée Lauder as a leader. And talking about Estée Lauder, I wanted to ask you is what… for somebody who’s listening to this for the first time. Estée Lauder to a regular person is a cosmetic brand and we know lots of people use these cosmetics. It’s the second largest cosmetic brand behind L’Oréal, I believe. So, what is technology at Estée Lauder like for people?

What are you guys working on? Where does technology get applied and what is it needed for?

Meg Adams:

They are a holding company that owns many brands. So, it’s not just Estée Lauder, they also own beauty brands like La Mer, Bobbi Brown, MAC Cosmetics, some things in the fragrance space like Tom Ford Beauty is a big player in fragrance, Jo Malone. And so, how Estée grew up in the tech space is that they were a marketing powerhouse. And so, they started acquiring these brands or creating these brands and helping market them to a place of really great success.

David Joy:

Interesting.

Meg Adams:

And this was happening as the web was growing up and every company needed a website. And so, what happened is that there were these different brands, these different marketing teams that were like, “We need a website and we need it now.” And so, they started hiring engineers to build them websites. And how that worked over the years, Estée has been wildly successful for quite some time. And it was okay to be investing in engineering in all these different spaces, but it obviously created pretty-

David Joy:

Like an open culture where it’s not critical?

Meg Adams:

Yeah. Not critical and nothing really needed to be unified. Everyone was doing what they wanted to. But at a certain point, for a lot of reasons, having a tech stack that’s just sprawling doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when you’re solving a lot of the same problems for different brands.

David Joy:

A 100%.

Meg Adams:

And in eCommerce, there’s only so many things we can do. You click the thing, you buy the thing, you’d select the size or the-

David Joy:

And then, checkout is the bread and butter.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. Exactly. And so, as I started talking to Estée with the journey that they have been on is consolidating all of that into a single tenant-based application where they build the components and then are able to share them with all of the brands that can modify to the look and feel, the things that they want. And then, we have more engineering resources to build cooler stuff to think more about AI and things like that.

David Joy:

Interesting. So, basically what your team right now is working on is creating this unified platform experience that then sub-teams within Estée can say, “Okay, we need this. Can you pull this out for us? Can you pull that out for us?” You can do that.

So, how has it changed coming in from some outside bringing this perspective? I know your favorite word in engineering is change management

Meg Adams:

It is.

David Joy:

For your article.

Meg Adams:

Crazy article.

David Joy:

Yeah. So, I read the article. So, how was change management like when you were coming in and talking to Estée Lauder about it, “Hey, this is what we need to do, this is where everybody’s going.” How did the transition start?

Meg Adams:

Okay, beautiful question. I’ll clarify that I have come in at the middle of the street-

David Joy:

Oh, the middle of it. Okay.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. And that’s actually what made the job really interesting to me is I care a lot about change management, about managing culture and managing humans through change. And so, the digital transformation the company was in the middle of, I was like, “This looks like something I want to sink my fingers into.” So, what I have been working on there is really espousing engineering best practices. Again, because we were coming from a space where there was more distributed engineering resources and not a centralized engineering organization, there’s not necessarily that rich history of people who are advocating for or implementing really strong tooling around things, like observability or testing.

And that’s not to say that there haven’t been people who’ve been doing a lot of good thinking there over the years, but there’s just not quite, hasn’t been as much investment in it. And now we’re very, very focused on ensuring with this new singular platform that the uptime is everything that we want it to be, that the performance is what we want it to be. So, we’re really focused on advocating for and implementing some of those engineering best practices.

David Joy:

Got it. So, when you were coming in, talk about in terms of where they were, what were they doing? Were they adopting the cloud? Were they already on the cloud? Like AWS, if I ask you what cloud they prefer, is it a multi-cloud strategy or is it let’s say on one cloud or on-prem? How is that?

Meg Adams:

We have a multi-cloud strategy as an organization, but for the eCommerce website specifically, we are more consolidated in AWS and that’s where our strategy is today.

David Joy:

Got it. How is it that you have engineers with you who are doing latest R&D, generative AI coming and all these different things that they want to work on? So, how do you handle that when they say, “Hey, I want to try something, say which is on Google,” and how do you tell the person to again move everything to AWS? Do you have to have those conversations where you have to get involved and say, “We should look at this, but maybe on AWS?”

Meg Adams:

That’s a good question. It’s not something that’s come up yet in a way that we’re really pitting tools against each other. A lot of our data stuff is in GCP right now, so it’s fluid enough that there’s options for engineers. And I think that’s the vision of leadership is that we really want autonomous empowered teams who are able to choose the right tools for the job. And then, as a platform engineering leader, what I’m doing is looking out for what everyone’s doing, looking for opportunities to consolidate things, to implement guidance around things, to implement automation around things whatever I can do to make people’s choices work better for them.

And when we’re able to package things up and make them a little bit more self-service, so teams aren’t having to recreate wheels for themselves, we’re able to make the easiest thing the best thing for them. So, whether we’re talking about security, documentation best practices, we try to package things up in a way that application teams can very easily pick things up and run with them.

David Joy:

So, when you’re working on AWS, there is a problem that resilience is important or region is going to go down and things like that especially with the cloud, we have these scenarios where AWS regions are not available and you have to do multi-regions sometimes. Do you get into conversations with your engineering team where there is requirement for resilience? And how do you architect or how do you go into recommending that for your engineering teams?

Meg Adams:

In general, how I think about my role is putting the burden of proof on… especially engineering managers and tech leads to lay out their ideas in a way that they need to advocate for things like availability. They need to tell me why something is going to be the most scalable option, the most high performant option. I want managers and teams out experimenting and doing proof of concepts and coming back with real data that says, “This is how this works and this is how I think it’s going to work in the next two, three, four years.”

And I’ll say that the leadership for this transformation in the single platform in the application space at Estée right now is really strong. So, we have an application architect, Chris Lai, and then both of our leader Daniel Peck, who are constantly thinking about what it means to build a platform that can accommodate all the use cases at Estée today, and also make it flexible enough that we can accommodate tomorrow and the next day as well.

David Joy:

Right. That’s brilliant. So, one of the biggest advantage of cloud is the ability to just go pick something up or start something on EC2 or in Kubernetes and it can scale. I know you were talking to me… or I was also reading an article because you’re a big advocate of building things or environments that can scale. And this goes back to what you’re saying as a philosophy for you and your team is building an environment a uniform platform that is ready for taking whatever it is for the next few years.

That’s what it sounds like. So, tell me how that works for you and how you’re working on that, this whole idea of building environments that can scale? And maybe we should go to the first point. Why should we think about scale at Estée Lauder first?

Meg Adams:

This is a global company that does a lot. So, I’m working very much just in the eCommerce space for the.com, so that’s like mac.com or bobbibrown.com. And that’s where a percentage of our products are sold. They’re also sold at other spaces like Sephora, Nordstrom, like big box retailers that sell the products for us and then the physical retail stores. So, when we are thinking about building APIs and products that can sell specifically in the eCommerce space, for me personally, I think that we want to build a fantastic experience for that particular customer, the retailer customer, but we also want to build systems that can accommodate a lot of different use cases, APIs that can accommodate this sprawl of where our products are sold.

And so, I think being that it is global, sold in a million different regions, a bunch of different brands, it’s just there’s no one thing that we’re doing or selling that we could very specifically focus on. Instead, it’s the problem itself needs to be flexible and scalable and more plug-and-play in a lot of different spaces.

David Joy:

Yeah. No, it’s interesting what you were saying because this was not a thought that people used to have before. If you go like a decade ago, we would just put infrastructure on a server. And I used to work at a company where we had an AS/400. I don’t know if you know about an AS/400.

It’s like one of those IBM machines that’s really small and it can work forever. So, there was an episode when company was moving offices and they had this AS/400 machine that was running forever. It was resilient. Nobody knew what to do with that server because if they unplugged it, they didn’t know what they would bring down. So, there was this situation that we were at where we were thinking about, “Hey, what’s going to happen? What disaster is it going to cause?”

But we went from that kind of an era to an era where we are talking about cloud infrastructure, deploying things in the cloud and be able to scale infrastructure like click on stuff, have easy to running, you’re good, somebody else manages. Now from there, we have gone to Kubernetes where we are talking about orchestration and folks running infrastructure whenever they want. You don’t even have to worry about it going down because it automatically scales up and down. Do your teams have been using these tools now as they’re applying these principles? Do you get involved in those conversations?

Meg Adams:

Yeah. And EKS and that space is very important for us because eCommerce can be very spiky. So, traditionally you’re looking at holiday, so things like cyber week and towards the winter holidays are sales increase a huge amount, huge, huge amount.

But additionally, in the TikTok era, you also have to think about things like partnerships and what if Rihanna recommends this certain eyeliner, then what happens? And can your website support all those users going and buying the eyeliner? So, we think a lot about the TikTok effect and spiky workloads.

David Joy:

Yeah. You’re talking about in the financial space, that’s the Super Bowl event, right? Like on Super Bowl day, the amount of transactions happening on Venmo is one. So, they have now scaled their platform to consider every day as a possible Super Bowl event. So, for you, that’s Black Friday or the holiday season. So, that’s what your team is working on.

So, do you have to do a rigorous testing also? Do you put any practices around testing to make sure this resiliency and scale is you can handle that? Is that something that you do regularly? Do you have practices around that?

Meg Adams:

Yeah. We have a working group devoted to performance and load testing. So, we are consistently making sure that we can accommodate that scale. And it was the same Etsy as well as before holiday typically. And a couple of times throughout the year we had scripts we’d run to test everything end to end and be like, “Okay, what happens if we just throw chaos at this system?” We as a platform engineering group are able to pave the path of what we hope engineering teams are going to do.

And we try not to prescribe. We try not to say, “Okay, here is the best tool and here’s what you’re going to use because we said so.” We instead evaluate what is probably best for the business from what we understand of the use case and having a vantage point over a variety of different teams and a different groups that we’re working on different problems. And we try to package things up and say, “Here is this tool, we think it would be great for your use case. And here’s the 10 ways we’ve made it really easy for you to do.

Here is an engineer who can sit with you and help you implement this particular tool. Here is the documentation that makes this super easy to implement.”

David Joy:

We need documentation.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. It gets into almost the enablement space I want to say we’re definitely choosing tools, but teams can absolutely walk their own paths. We’re just trying to make certain paths easy to walk and helping teams use tooling and make technology choices that we have recommended.

David Joy:

First of all, when I was walking through your profile and it’s very inspiring where you are right now, what you have become. Like as a software engine leading a team now 50 people. If you have to go back to a young Meg and give her any advice, what would that advice look like?

Meg Adams:

I don’t think I would give her any advice. I think that I have been committed to a certain vision from the beginning, which is that I deeply believe that work can be a joyful and contributing part of people’s lives. And so, I have always just been attuned to that vision and looking out for ways that I could lean into that, that I could work on that.

And whether that was hands-on line, managing a team and creating joyful environments where we could do really hard things together but in a really joyful way are now working with managers and teaching them about some of the concepts of neuroleadership and joy and play and how people’s brains work better and how we can actually improve a company’s bottom line by creating these really gorgeous teams where people feel satisfied with the work that they’re doing. And so, all of my career has happened a little bit randomly, but the decisions I’ve made have always been rooted in that focus on the vision and that vision hasn’t changed from when I was working in Victoria’s Secret until now.

David Joy:

To know how to code. Yeah. To now where you’re at. As I was saying before we were talking about where you are is the perfect place to be and it applies. Anyway, but you actually brought this up, this whole idea of neuroleadership and the whole idea that wherever a person is, you have to look at that person and there is immense potential in a human being.

And I love your leadership description there and your LinkedIn about too. So, how are you applying that? And I know you’ve just brought it up. How do you apply this whole idea to your leadership? How do you apply the philosophy to guide your team into finding the best in engineers and developers so that they can apply all those things in their everyday work?

Meg Adams:

If I had to boil down how I think about it or how I’ve taken what I’ve learned into one core thing I think about is about the importance of the job of a leader in setting containers. So, when I think about container, it’s like the space that a person inhabits. And if you go all the way back to primal days, we were out in the wilderness and we were looking for ways to set the perimeter so that we had a small space that we needed to pay attention to and look out for danger to protect ourselves and the people that we loved.

People were going into caves, they were at a high vantage point where there was less that could attack. That is a baked-in brain thing that we do. And that hasn’t changed today. And when we’re working with a team that is also a container about the potential for a threat and reward, essentially. And so, I think a lot about how can we set the container to be really specific, intentional, and how can I tell people what to expect so that their brains can quiet down and they can think more effectively.

David Joy:

Right. Engineers are different interesting people. If I work for a manager, I convey to them, “Hey, this is how I work.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I work with your kind.” That’s not a feedback side I get. And I generally used to be an engineer who used to have the tendency to like work on a problem, and as soon as that program starts working, I’m like, “Yes, my work is done.

All right. Show me the next problem.” And we have this natural tendency to work and we always need great leaders. So, I’ve been inspired by leaders who come in and tell me, “Hey, that problem is not done yet. Of course, for you, you have checked that code in, but we still have to make sure that it works.

It aligns to the objectives.” There have been many times where I’ve done stuff, I feel like I have achieved the objective and my general manager comes and says, “Hey, you know what? You are missing something.” So, do you get involved in conversations? And these can be hard conversations, but you have to tell them, “Hey, we need to consider this angle.” So, how do you take and consider those and guide someone else to do that?

Meg Adams:

So, one of my leadership principles that I do my best to live, I’m by no means perfect at it, is to leave nothing unsaid. So, again, when we’re thinking about this container, what’s possible, what’s in this container? If I have something that I want to say to you, something I’m trying to say to you, something I’m thinking and I don’t quite say it. Or if I couch it in this really nice way, “Oh, I noticed that you did a lot of that project and now you’re doing this other thing.” And like, “That’s cool, but maybe what if we did that?”

Your brain goes into this place of like, I’m not quite sure what to do with that information. Your amygdala starts to hijack your brain and you go into this threat space.

David Joy:

Space sometimes. Yeah.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. Of like, “Oh, God, I have to… there’s things that need to be fixed and I’m not quite sure what they all are.” And so, direct feedback and candid conversations I think there’s so much literature out there about structure them in this way and we need to practice. And it’s so important. And it is important, but it’s also so simple, which is just that I need to say the thing to your face.

And that’s not always easy. That doesn’t always feel good, but to say, on both sides of the spectrum maybe it’s like, “Hey, I think this podcast that you’re doing is really great and the way that you are committed to showing up for it and asking such interesting questions, that’s really important. That’s really important and what you’re doing, I really appreciate it and it’s great for the team. Thank you.” That needs to be said just as much as, “Hey, I noticed you walked away from this project and it wasn’t done.”

And I don’t think that’s how our team is going to work. We need to keep our commitments in building really reliable things and if you don’t do the testing part, we can’t keep that commitment to each other.

David Joy:

Got it.

Meg Adams:

So, can you finish that?

David Joy:

And I took it seriously I will go and do the testing. I will go back to the project. That one I really felt.

Meg Adams:

Good.

David Joy:

So, that’s awesome. I’m glad that you’re bringing this up. So, I want to be cognizant of our time. But I also felt like because we are doing a first time in-person podcast, I wanted to change it up a little bit and I wanted to ask you, would you rather question. Or I would say, I’ll ask a couple of them and you have to answer them really quickly.

And the idea is for you to apply your platform engineering skills and your leadership skills. All right? Are you ready for that?

Meg Adams:

Let’s go.

David Joy:

All right. And if this doesn’t work, we’ll just ask the production team to cut all of this out. All right. So, here’s the first question. Would you rather manage a remote data center with unlimited resources or run a highly efficient cloud with occasional outages?

Meg Adams:

Occasional outages? I love managing through crisis and I love learning from incidents. It’s one of the most fun parts of being an engineer. So, no question. I’ll take an outage here or there.

David Joy:

I’m just going to ask a question and would that affect business or would you-

Meg Adams:

That wasn’t part of the question.

David Joy:

All right. I’ll come back to that. Okay, that’s fine. All right. Next question. Would you rather instantly scale a server capacity or possess a crystal ball for infrastructure trends?

Meg Adams:

No. Scale.

David Joy:

Scale? Scale server capacity.

Meg Adams:

Yeah.

David Joy:

Okay. Talking like a true platform engineering data. All right. Let’s go to the next one. Would you rather migrate to a new cloud provider overnight with zero downtime or spend millions of dollars to maintain legacy systems?

Meg Adams:

Okay. You’ve put me in a really hard place.

David Joy:

Yeah. That’s a hard one. Yeah. I know.

Meg Adams:

Obviously, I had to choose the first one. No question. Someone will fire me if I don’t. But also my favorite project is a migration. I love a big, messy, difficult, the company thinks it’s not possible migration.

If anyone has one of those, please call me. This doesn’t translate via audio, but I just looked right into the camera. Call me. I’m available for your legacy migrations.

David Joy:

Free consultant to help you with your toughest migration.

Meg Adams:

The first one because no one will trust me if I say the second one.

David Joy:

Yeah. Yeah. No, we’ll come back to that, but that’s great. I mean, great responses. Three on three by the way.

Okay. Fourth one, would you rather debug a network issue with no documentation or lead a team through a major system upgrade during a company event?

Meg Adams:

System upgrade.

David Joy:

System upgrade? Yeah. I hate network issues. Would you rather instantly resolve technical issues with a snap or explained complex infrastructure concepts effortlessly to a non-tech stakeholder?

Meg Adams:

Oh, I want to explain things effortlessly. That sounds so cool.

David Joy:

Would you rather want to do that? Yeah. I mean I’ve been in situations where I have to explain non-tech stuff to people like stakeholders and general people. And sometimes it’s banging your head on the wall. But I think you are an engineering leader and you have to do that. So, you will say yes to that?

Meg Adams:

100%.

David Joy:

All right. So, I think I would give you a 5 on 5 on the would you rather question. So, they were great responses. But I do want to go back to the one that you were talking about, especially that migration piece. Tell me, walk me through that for somebody who’s never done a tough migration, how to handle that scenario. If you’re in a complex migration story, tell me, walk us through that. Yeah.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. So, my biggest migration that I’ve worked on was at Etsy. I was part of the team who were migrating our data warehouse from on-prem and a particular vendor to a cloud vendor. So, different vendors from on-prem to cloud. There was a lot going on and it was the data warehouse itself, all the data that it held as well as everything built around that. So, the jobs that ran, the pipelines, all of this.

David Joy:

All the EPS, pipeline, everything. Yes.

Meg Adams:

Yeah. Fundamentally what I believe about doing hard things is that any problem can be broken down enough to make it achievable. So, I’m actually working on a book right now, it’s called How to Do Anything. So, it’s very much in this space about taking a big thing that feels really hard or impossible and breaking it down in a way that anyone can achieve basically anything given the right amount of resources, time and give a damn. And so, this project in particular went on for I think 15 months.

It took a pretty large team. It took some of the smartest people I have ever worked with to come together and to figure it all out, to break it down, to pick up these pieces and glue them back together to say, “Okay, we have to do this thing in this order. We have to move these things and then those things.” And then, to think about the communication strategy. And I think the whole thing just fosters such a teeny environment.

The goal is so clear and so specific. We’re here and we need to be over there.

David Joy:

Yeah. Did you go completely to the cloud after that? Removed the entire data warehouse from on-prem too? I hope it’s an Oracle data warehouse that you moved away from.

Meg Adams:

It was Vertica actually.

David Joy:

Oh, okay. That’s equally banned. But yeah, I mean I love technology that runs on the cloud just by the ability to scale SaaS products, especially. I think my opinion is that off late there have been lots of companies who are working on building SaaS products. And the advantage that these companies have is that they can single-mindedly focus on building a product that works on any cloud, can scale, is resilient.

And sometimes when you’re on the cloud, say you are on AWS, you have just that one product, but you have multiple solutions now that can work on the cloud. So, for anybody who’s on this journey, this is amazing. I recently spoke to somebody who was telling me 20 years ago when he needed to solve a problem, he had Oracle or he would have to write his own database. And now the last 20 years we have so many open-source technologies, lots of companies building these amazing products. And now we have database like CockroachDB, which is one of the solutions that engineers and developers can choose from.

So, I think that’s really exciting that for engineering managers and engineers and developers, there is a plethora of technology available to be taken and to be applied. The one question I was really curious to ask was if you are creating a leadership culture, you have to create… you want every individual engineer in your team to be or have some leadership in it. How do you take somebody who’s like, “Hey, I just want to be a developer and check my code,” and turn that person into a leader? What do you tell that person?

Meg Adams:

Experience has been… that I’ve never found someone who isn’t excited to share what they know. And I think there are lots of different ways to again set the container for someone that’s like, “Hey, you just felt this awesome thing, let’s go talk about it to other people. Hey, I see the way that you’re thinking about this problem and next time I want you to write that out loud in Slack.

I want you to write what you’re thinking and walk through your thinking so that you can demonstrate that thinking to other people and level them up too. And so, I’ve never found someone who I can’t pretty easily invite into building their leadership and growing their influence within the individual team or within a greater organization. So, for a lot of reasons, I think the Mountain Dew stereotypes of engineers are before and we are in a bright new future.

David Joy:

Yeah. I think it’s good. I mean if you are in an environment where you have 50 people to manage and all of them are like, “Hey, I would love to talk about wanting to just explore,” I think you’re with a good team and I think they have a great leader too. So, one last advice because our podcast is being heard in Africa and Australia, which is because people started reaching out to us.

I want to ask you, what is your advice to folks in these places? These places who are working on solving… they’re say developers or platform engineers, what is your one advice to them or maybe few advices on how to navigate this tech world and what the go to and look to?

Meg Adams:

I think what’s important right now in the current state of the world, which is we’re talking post-COVID, the engineering market is changing a lot. We’re in economic downturn. There’s a lot going on. And I think what has been important and what is still important is that engineers need to be able to share their ideas and share their ideas, especially in writing. So, I think using the tool of writing to clarify your own ideas, to help you understand what’s rattling around in there and really make it make sense.

It’s been an invaluable part of my own engineering, my own leadership experience. And it’s something I recommend to everyone I talk to write, even if you don’t show it to anyone, but please show it to someone. But think about things and put it into writing, clarify your ideas, put them out into the world. I think it’s important, especially in this distributed world that we’re living in. So, that’s my top advice for people. It’s just right.

David Joy:

Yeah. It’s awesome because I read that advice that you’ve written out. In 2018 I think you wrote an article, the Overwhelming Need for Learning List. I can see how you’ve written something 10, 7 years ago. You’re still applying in conversation today. What you had suggested and what Meg had actually suggested in that particular article that you can go check out on our medium blog also on HackerOne, is that you need to have a list of things that you look at, you see, and you can just put it in a list of things to learn and have some clarity, write it down, things like that.

And I feel like now we don’t need a wonder list anymore. There’s a tool, I don’t know if you know about it’s called mymind.com. It’s a website where you see anything, you can hyperlink it and AI puts all these things. It’s an extension of your mind.

So, if you’re an engineer or a developer or a platform engineer, and if you’re in that journey and you come across certain things, just put them like Mike said, into a list and just follow them.

Meg Adams:

You’ve just up-leveled me that I’m upset.

David Joy:

I’m getting up-leveled for the last 15 minutes. So, no, I mean it’s been an absolute pleasure. And I’m really excited to follow your career and see how you keep making changes with other companies. It’s been a blast talking to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed your first ever podcast regarding.