From Metrics to Impact – Making Engineering Work Count in Business (LCPS01E07)
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Episode Summary
“Can you actually explain in clear terms how your company makes money? If you can't, that's a problem.”
In today's tech landscape where efficiency and productivity metrics are increasingly scrutinized, it isn't enough to just write good code. You need to demonstrate how your engineering investments contribute to the bottom line – especially if you've suddenly found yourself in management feeling overwhelmed by new business expectations.
Communicating the business impact of engineering investments is important for decision-making and stakeholder engagement – and ensuring your company knows you’re indispensable if they decide to have another round of layoffs.
In this episode, Lena and Amani explore how engineering leaders can effectively communicate their teams’ business value.
Our guest Amani brings wisdom gained from nearly 15 years of tech industry experience to share how engineering leaders can:
Partner effectively with analysts and product managers to understand key business metrics
Develop empathy for users to create truly impactful products
Handle increased pressure to track and demonstrate progress
Communicate engineering value clearly to stakeholders
Adapt to management responsibilities when thrust into the role
Together, they explore practical strategies for engineering leaders to understand, measure, and articulate their team's business impact in an environment of constant change.
Resources
Founders Network: Startup Metrics 101: What to Track and Why It Matters
Lena published a Series on Productivity, with articles such as:
Chapters
00:00 Entering a New Era in the Tech Industry
08:09 The Importance of Understanding the Business Impact
19:15 Tying Engineering Activities to the Bottom Line
33:45 Changing the Way Managers and Engineers Think
42:40 Embracing Change and Continuous Learning
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We want to hear from you! Email us with feedback, questions, or topic ideas; I can't promise we'll always respond, but I can promise we read every email! At pod@lenareinhard.com.
Full Episode Transcript
Amani: Just the fact that in this era, we are entering a new era in the tech industry. And as an engineer, you have to constantly, like change is the only constant, and you have to embrace the change. This, this, you know, I believe there was a person who gave the talk that this too shall pass. And yes, it will pass. We will get through these challenging times.
But in the meantime, I hope this helps you to stay employed. The best way to make that case is to understand what the company you work for is working on and how they make money.
Lena: This is Leadership Confidential with Lena Reinhard.
Real talk on hard things in technology, finding community, and becoming the engineering leader you can be.
Today, we get down to business. So before we get into our episode, I have a couple of news for you. And the first one is about our show. So far, you've always just heard me doing an intro of our episode and then summarizing things after my conversation with my guest.
Now we're changing that a little bit starting today. And there's someone that some of you already know, who's joining me now. Sly, welcome to the podcast.
Sly: Hey, thanks for roping me into this. I’m really excited.
Lena: I have to say Sly is here voluntarily. So, Sly Stark, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Sly: For sure. So hi, everyone. I'm Lena's assistant, Sly. If you see me on emails and you thought that I was an AI, well, I've got great news for you. I'm a real, human person. And if I'm not, then this is going to be a really good AI voiceover.
I'm really happy to be on the podcast. It's wonderful being behind the scenes, but now I'm excited to be on it. And also it's good to know that my voice career won't live and die with children's YouTube videos. Which by the way, did get millions of views, but it's not my proudest body of work.
Lena: We can still add it to the show notes, but I'll let you decide.
Sly: That would be really funny. We'll come back to that.
I'm an ADHD virtual assistant, which means I primarily work with people who live and breathe inside business chaos. And I'm good at wrangling that. People call me a cat wrangler, but for people with ADHD. Which I love. I think it's pretty accurate.
Lena: So yes, Sly and I have been working together for one and a half years now. Gosh.
Sly: Yeah, that sounds right.
Lena: And yeah, Sly is a fantastic cat wrangler, let's say, and has been helping out a lot. And the reason that Sly just mentioned the whole, I'm not an AI thing is because legitimately, I think we've had four instances now where for quite a long time, clients of mine believed that the “Sly Stark” that was occasionally responding to their emails was just an AI that I had designed.
Or a superhero. I think that that's also come up at least twice, which I both of those things I kind of love for you. But, yes, Sly is a real person.
Sly: 100%.
Lena: So the reason I'm very excited that Sly's here is because Sly has been working on the podcast with me from the get-go. You may have also heard their name in the show notes in previous episodes. And so they've been really involved in this. And in addition, Sly also has a business degree themselves and they work with a lot of leaders, business people.
And I was curious to bring their perspective in a little bit. And honestly, also have someone for me to chat about these things with. Because to be honest, these podcast episodes are a ton of work. It's usually, I think we haven't run the numbers exactly, mostly because I've been wanting to avoid that dark truth. But I think it's about 20 hours at least in terms of production time between Sly and myself for each episode. Plus the recording with the guest and the editing.
And like many of you, I'm also quite busy, and I kind of didn't need another time consuming hobby. But here we are and the podcast has been really rewarding and fun to make and just like so good. But the reason that Sly and I are trying this now with the setup is so that I actually get the episodes done. So you'll still get the intro and outro as usual, but with two people instead of one which I think is just a win. Sly, anything else that you want to add?
Sly: I think there's just a lot of episodes that we have in the tank, basically, but that's because there's so many good topics to talk about. And it feels like you go to a conference and then you like meet three to five people who just like have some really good perspectives to add. And so that's why like we're just like, we've got a lot, we got a lot of episodes that we've recorded. But it's exciting.
Lena: Before we actually dive into our episode today, the second piece of news that I wanted to share is a bit shorter. But I wanted to let you know that in the episodes from here on out, you will hear my guests share a little bit more about themselves than in previous episodes. You'll specifically hear me ask my guests if there's anything about their identity that they find important to share. And that's always entirely optional for them. But there are a few reasons why I wanted to do this. And I also wanted to share this with you because it's something that I find really important.
Because as this show is anonymous, something I've been grappling with a lot as we've been making it is the question of how to make my guests visible without revealing who they are. And there are three specific factors, especially because this is a leadership podcast. First of all, as leaders, we lead with who we are. This also means that the way that we are socialized, or as well as the way the world functions for us impacts not just how we act and perceive things around us, including at work, but it can also impact our own experiences.
Like for example, I'm soon speaking with a neurodivergent leader and I have another episode with someone where I'm speaking with a Latina woman about her leadership experiences. And while many leadership struggles and experiences are quite universal, our identities have a lot of an impact.
Another reason for this is that, to me, the representation factor is really important. Leadership in the tech space is still predominantly white and male. Women make up less than a third of the tech workforce overall. In the numbers of women tech leaders have just stayed the same in the last 40 years. That's about 35% around the same number as in 1984, which yes, is about 40 years ago now.
And leadership also remains predominantly white. Around 63% of tech employees in the US are white. Representation matters, we all know that. And so I want to give the people I speak with here at least a chance to share something about their identity if they want to, they don't have to.
And the last bit about this that may seem small, but is still important to me is that I don't want for you to have, as a listener, to just have to assume or guess someone's gender or race or anything else based off their altered voice. And I want to try and be explicit with that as much as we can. Because I also something, Sly and I have been working on is to figure out how we can get as broad perspectives and different views on leadership and experiences on leadership into this show. And I wanted to make that a little bit visible because it's just a topic that's really important to me, and I know to Sly as well, they're nodding.
And, ultimately, I don't want to accidentally make my guests' identity and the things that shape their experiences in tech leadership just less visible or even invisible just because they're not visible by their name. And that was it with the exciting announcements.
So now let's get on to the show.
Sly: So Lena, what would you say is the overview of this episode? What are the highlights?
Lena: The reason I'm really excited about this one is that we've mentioned a couple of times in this podcast already all these changes that the technology industry has gone through and it's probably going to come up in every episode. And as companies have shifted from this high growth, often hyper growth, to this big focus on efficiency. I mean think 2022, Mark Zuckerberg called out the year of efficiency and productivity.
As that happened, and for a lot of companies quite suddenly, a lot of engineering leaders really had to scramble to change their roles.
And many even felt like the rug was kind of being pulled from underneath them. And after all, a big factor in this is that business wasn't really taught to many engineering leaders. What got a lot of engineering managers or technical leads promoted were their strong technical skills and interests in managing people.
But many were really left behind without a lot of training on other aspects of leadership and management, like financial things or business acumen, business understanding in particular.
And my guest today was really one of those people who had to adapt really quickly, like many of you, after a time when essentially money didn't matter because money was so cheap that all companies were just spending it. Some of them maybe even burning it, but that's a separate conversation.
And suddenly money really mattered and a lot of engineering leaders needed to really get on top of that. Our guest today is Amani and I know, Sly, you've been in touch with him as well. Do you want to share Amani's background with us?
Sly: Yeah. So, Amani is a software engineering manager with 15 years of experience in the engineering field, including a multi-year stint as a CTO. He grew up in Africa and then immigrated to the United States right before college.
As a black man in the tech industry, he often found himself being the only minority in the room. But Amani learned to embrace these environments and he built his confidence and then began mentoring other minorities within his organization. So, basically Amani is like one of the coolest people ever.
Lena: He is really cool, I have to say.
Sly: Because it sounds like there was a lot of adversity that he had to go through to get to that leadership level. How many black CTOs do you see?
Lena: Not enough.
Sly: Not enough, seriously. Yeah. So I was excited for him to be on the episode. And when I was reading through the transcript, when I was learning what he was talking about, I was like, my god, this is a great topic. Because you're so right when you're an engineer. And especially because, you know, we heard other guests talk about how they're being interviewed for leadership positions and then they're giving them these intense technical tests. And they're still really emphasizing the technical aspect of it.
And you still have to do these business things and they don't even interview you about the business things. They just expect you to get in there and know how to deal with that. So I'm glad he brought this topic up. I feel like, in other leadership podcasts, you don't hear people talk about this too much.
Lena: Amani, like many of us, had to learn business the hard way and do it fast.
And so in this episode, he shares his experience and his wisdom with us on not just why it's important to understand the business impact of your role, but also how you actually do that. How do you gain that knowledge? And then how do you help the engineers and the leaders that you're working with shape and then convey to other parts of the business, the impact of the work.
I'm really excited to share this episode with you. Here's for your talk on more than two hard things in technology with Armani.
Amani: As an engineering manager in these very challenging times, one thing I have had to learn very quick is always tying my team, or teams I'm working on, to the bottom line of the company. How are we contributing to the bottom line of the company?
I've been in the industry for almost 15 years now and, as an engineer manager, most of the time you are working with a private manager. They come to you with a business case, their bet they want to make. And you're initially, you know, in the good old times, your job was to push back and figure out, like, do I have the capacity to get this done?
In today's world, post-pandemic world, engineer managers are required. It's becoming a requirement that we also learn how to think for the business. We also get to learn that the investments that we are making are going to pay off for the company, for the organization we work for. And if you step back a little bit, you look, you know, the company is probably spending anywhere between $200,000 to $300,000 a year per individual contributor, you know.
If you are taking on to work on a year-long project, imagine how you're spending essentially a million to a million and a half. You have to be comfortable with answering that question. Was this worth it? Very long, but that's kind of why I want to talk about it.
Lena: Like honestly, you set the context really perfectly, especially also like, of course, the way the industry has evolved over time and where things are at right now seems to play a huge role also for you. And I'm honestly really curious to dig into kind of how you learned those things and how you're helping others with that. Before we do that, is there, I mean, this is by the way, this is a new question that I haven't really asked people like this before.
One thing I've been thinking about is basically because the podcast is anonymous and still like representation matters. Also, you know, in leadership roles. I do at least want to ask basically, are there, you know, any aspects of your identity of kind of who you are that you're comfortable sharing? We can also, you know, edit this out or whatnot, but I do want to ask because like, it matters.
Amani: Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. I grew up a black dude who grew up in Africa. I immigrated to the United States right before college. And, of course, you know, working in the tech industry here, you know, you sort of find yourself in rooms where you are the only minority quite a bit.
But I had to learn, like, okay I need to embrace these environments. And also, that sort of being comfortable, trying to learn how to be comfortable in these environments, sort of pushed me to want to seat at the table of leadership in these companies I was working for.
So yeah, it's been a journey. It's been great to see how sometimes when I am a new leader, engineering leader in companies, other minorities look up to me and they're comfortable coming to talk to me about the challenges they're assessing in the company.
Lena: It's huge.
Amani: It is huge. It's been, you know, I really have embraced that. I think I've learned a lot about mentoring. I also learned a lot about empathy. I think as a minority, you quickly learn how to empathize with people who, you know, who don't look like you and learn, if you like, to seek to want to walk into their shoes to understand where they're coming from.
If they have a problem or if it's their underperformance. Like, okay, how can we understand the context that is causing that underperformance and really happy to boost that confidence they need to have.
Lena: Where it sounds like a lot of the skills that you've had to develop because you've been the only black man or black man in leadership position or so for such a long time. There are skills that are honestly also sounding like really essential like leadership skills. Like the fact that you've had to develop them this way, it sucks.
Amani: At the same time, you know, it's the crazy life, that reality of life. You just that you have to impress what's in front of you and use it. And the thing I'm proud of is continuously seeking to mentor other minorities in every organization that I join. I think that has been sort of like, you know, when you get in the room and people are like, I want to talk to you about this, this problem. Can you help me? And you go and you figure out how to help that individual. But to be quite honest, I mean, Silicon Valley or the tech industry works on confidence.
Like confidence is the currency that is so high, in-demand, in the tech industry. So a lot of times I find myself really just kind of affirming people and helping them develop that confidence. And once he has it, you know, it opens so many doors and that's been great.
Lena: The impact that I'm sure that has, like the way that you're able to support people who are newer in the industry, or honestly people have been around longer. Like, and I'm really grateful, especially because of that, that you're, you know, open to talking to me today and that you're like sharing some of your experiences in this format.
Because honestly, this topic as you've described it is so important. I mean, I come from a business background and my role has often been to kind of bridge between like engineering organizations and quote-unquote the business.
I also feel like there's a whole thing where that often gets framed in a way that makes it sound like engineering isn't part of the business. We might dig into that. And yet I've found that it often kind of still just really foreign for people. And a lot of people have had to learn it really fast. And so I really appreciate what you shared about your experiences just now. I was really not expecting that. And it means a lot.
Amani: Thank you.
Lena: Now onto business impact.
Amani: Yes.
Lena: So, you know, you've kind of, I heard from you earlier, essentially this kind of journey that you've gone through in your leadership roles, from sort of working in an industry where money is free, growth is everything that matters, companies are hiring like bonkers. The main thing you can do is make sure that stuff gets done really fast and there's never enough people to do it.
That kind of, I think you noted 2022 as kind of the year things shifted bigger. I think post-pandemic is what you called it. So like when we're talking about business impact, business acumen, you mentioned earlier, I think that basically the impact that engineering activities have on the bottom line.
Can you talk a bit more about what are the things you think of, what are the skills, the things that kind of play into this topic from your experience?
Amani: Yeah. So I think as an engineering manager, you have to be able to, like, first of all, do you understand how the company you work for makes money? Can you explain to, you know, okay, I will have the sub-rated explained to me like come five years old.
You know, can you actually explain in clear terms how your company makes money? If you can't, that's a problem. You need to learn.
And if you can't explain how your company makes money, can you actually tie your team's contribution to the, I've even recorded revenue, if that's the top indicator on how your company makes money.
And this is where you need to get good at actually using some of the resources your company has. Most of the time these days, most companies in the tech industry have some sort of a dashboard, the data warehouse. You have Looker, you have Modes, you have all kinds of tools that help you access the data for the company.
You most likely have a product analyst who's working with your team or data analyst who's working with your team. This is where you need to be great friends with that person and spend some time learning from them and asking them questions and sort of learning not just the tools on how the company gets to track their business metrics, but also become curious, inquisitive about those metrics and the inner issue.
First of all, most you should have one-on-one with that person. Hopefully it's a, it's a recurring, it's a, you know, monthly or bi-weekly, but you get to spend time with that person to look into these metrics and then really start also asking them to help you tease out what the private area or the engineer area of what you are working on contributes to those metrics.
Lena: So like basically my first step is like, I try and really understand how the company is making money. Like I look at like, are there metrics like the ARR that you mentioned or MRR, the monthly equivalent, and then speak to the data person that works with my team. Maybe sometimes there's also product manager in between like data analysts. And to befriend them in a professional way.
Amani: Yes.
Lena: It's really weird today. Basically, build a relationship to try and understand the work that they're operating in and use that as a way to build a connection between like what your team is or what my team is doing in this kind of hypothetical scenario. And, yeah, the company revenue.
What if, I will say in my experience, I will be surprised if that was different for you in my experience. A lot of teams really struggle with making that connection. There is sort of a whatever thousands, millions of dollars in ARR and there's a target that the company has set as a corporate goal, maybe for the year. Well, that's awesome. That's what ARR is about. And then there's, hey, here's my team that has in a good case, a roadmap or some sort of defined goals. We have a set of services that we own.
Well, maybe it's also a platform team that's about like reducing costs on infrastructure. That can sometimes be a little bit more, call it straightforward, not necessarily easier. But so how, how do I make that connection? Like how's that worked for you?
Amani: Yeah, I think, first of all, I, I work in the tech industry. I think we're starting to see an alignment or it's becoming mainstream to sort of embrace the team topology model where this great book about how to set up teams.
Most product engineering teams will have a product area of ownership. And that product area of ownership, there are features that you're developing. And Great product analysts, great data analysts, I should say, even good data analysts are good at tying your product area of ownership to how it contributes to the bottom one end of the company. And if you are working with product analysts or data analysts who cannot do that, then there must be a bigger problem in your organization that.
Lena: (Laughs) We’ll cover that in a separate episode.
Amani: You would do that business a huge favor if you can drive that understanding for your company.
Lena: I should expect that there are people on the kind of work with data who can either, even if there's no one who's dedicated to my team, but someone who can tell me, here's, for example, the features that we are putting out. Here's how many people are using those and what that's, like, bringing in in terms of revenue or how it's impacting signups, et cetera.
So I should basically figure out who on the business side can tell me those things, even if there's no dedicated person for my team.
Amani: Yes. You know, I think, and then you really start digging into, you know, like if, let's say you, you work for, your product area is to increase signups for your business. Now you can tie the life cycle of customer to, but you know, how much money the company is making per user. And now you have a correlation of signups equals how much money you are contributing to the bottom line of the company. And you know, like it's actually, think that's an easier metric to track signups or churn.
But I think you have to do this homework. You have to understand essentially how your team is contributing to the bottom line of the company. And once you get that understanding, now you are armed with knowledge is power. Now you can, you really can drive that knowledge, not only to help make decisions on how, you know, shape the private roadmap that your team is working on. You can push back. You have the knowledge to push back if your product counterpart comes to you and say, hey, we need to invest in this. We need to make this bet. You can push back. You can say, hey, help me understand how this is actually tied to the revenue.
These days, most companies are doing this. Yeah. It's very hard in our post-pandemic to see, you know, just try that investments that are really not very well explained on how they are going to contribute to the, you know, to the North Star metric, which most tech companies these days, it's about money. It's about revenue.
Lena: I have a lot of follow-up questions, but I would really also be curious that I know it's shifted your role quite a lot in the way you think about your work.
Amani: Yeah, I think once you have that knowledge, a couple of things I've done, but I can talk about my sort of “Aha” moment on how I came to realize this.
One of the companies that was working for pre-pandemic was going through in that they had raised money, they were going through a hyper growth, and that it was really hard to help product make sense of the investments they wanted to make. How that growth map was all over the place. And that it dawned on me that one of the- and actually like the, I will even say that the executive leadership was having a really hard time actually setting strategy.
Like this is where we're going and this is how we’re gonna get there. And it dawned on me in one of the meetings where we were discussing how I was blind with my team. I didn't understand what my team, how the work that my team was doing was actually driving this strategy that we had as a company.
So that's when I started really digging in and sort of actually started reading books. Initially, I thought it was about communication. I thought it was, I was not having great tools of communicating to the business, to the stakeholders, how it's actually, it's crazy to try to invest in the areas they were trying to invest in.
But then I quickly realized that even as I dug into my communication plan, that I also didn't understand. And that's when I start really working on, like, I need to be better at this. I need to understand, you know, how much money we make, how to segment the money we make per customer, you know. And are we, should we invest in enterprise customers or should we continue to invest in just commercial, small teams, you know, self-service?
Once I understood that, that's when I was like, okay, now I really need to delve deep everywhere I go and also learn how to communicate to the stakeholders that, you know, this should be the data we use to make the decisions, to drive the decisions we make.
Lena: Were there any, because it really sounds like, almost a small degree on the side. Like, you know, serve a very, you new topic and you read books and kind of really, you know, try to wrap your head around it. And are there any specific resources that you can recommend?
Amani: When I was working on communication, the one book I live by is Think Slow and Fast. I think that's the thinking slow and fast. And the great thing about that book, it gives you, it gives you frameworks. It's kind of like if you are communicating to stakeholders about this specific topic, this is how to structure your communication.
But for the business acumen, I just had to learn, you know, that, hey, we have, these are the key North Star metrics. You know, I start reading a lot of blogs about, actually written by founders, thinking about their companies. You know, a lot of these things, actually First From is one of those. These things that have so many blogs that teach you to think about, to reason about like this what makes a company succeed.
I start trying to understand the stages of companies in the tech industry when they decide to raise money, they go through a series of stages of raising money, understanding how, and what are the expectations at every stage.
So I just wanted to educate myself on that. And then come back and tie those, you know, new insights, like, how is my team doing? And are we, you know, where are we on this journey? Right.
Lena: So there's a lot in like, I mean, honestly, I love how, like, you've emphasized a few points a few times, like how much this has basically become a big part of your job and of the work that you do and how there's so much in like understanding those things yourself so that you can then kind of take others along, either stakeholders, and change the way you talk to them, but also your teams, like contextualizing the stages, for example.
Also, I'll include a bunch of resources on that with the episode, because honestly, I read up on those things at some point as well, because I wasn't born knowing this either.
And so I'm curious, as you learned those things, how did you, like, you know, one, how did it change the way that you manage the managers supporting to you because you're in a senior leadership position, of course. And how did it change how you, you know, how you, how did you take engineers along? Because I know like, yeah, it's just the thing that people have to do. I'm curious about those, start wherever you like.
Amani: I find myself essentially coaching more, even reading books with the team leads that I work with and even like the staff engineers that I work with, emphasizing that, that journey from senior to staff. But when you are a staff, you have to be, you are now effectively part of the engineering leadership of the company. You have to understand essentially, these metrics. You have to understand how the work that you're doing, same thing as the projects that you're working on, how are they contributing to that bottom line?
And if you don't, then let's find those answers. But don't just jump into project. As you write your TBD or RFC, when you get a big project, typically you have to spell out, like these are the key technical decisions I'm making, you know, let's actually add the keys on like the costs. Like start adding sections in our TBD templates or RFC templates on helping the people who are writing those documents to tie the work they're about to, the technical work they're about to do, to the business.
Lena: I love that.
Amani: So that has been the way, you know. Not just influenced the company, the engineering organization is improving the templates we use for this type of work to always expect that to be there. And to coach the staff engineers and the engineering managers to always be thinking about this.
The other thing is I expect the team leads at work with to have meetings where they have a dashboard where they talk to the team. Like, this is how we're doing. Is it, if our objective is measuring customer adoption for the things we're working on, for the features we're working on, we should have a dashboard that shows, you know, like, here's the chart of how many customers who have adapted the features that we own in our product area on that chart.
So again, it's continue pushing them to think about tying those two things together.
Lena: And how's that been received in the teams you're working with?
Amani: The way I've been selling it is, we've all seen all these layoffs. No one is safe. This helps you make a case for you not to get laid off. The more we understand while we contribute to the bottom line, the more we can communicate to the rest of the organization, the amazing things we're doing for this business, the less likelihood we end up on that Google Sheet or Excel sheet of the folks who are getting kind of, I think that usually does the job.
Lena: (Laughs) It's really, it is shocking to me that you didn't pursue a career in marketing. It's such a waste of talent.
Amani: No, I probably would have been the worst marketer. I would have ended up with that sheet long time ago.
Lena: I mean, it is a realistic pitch. Like, how do you, honestly, as you were sort of relaying all of this, I was like, you know, this is beautifully said in sort of, you know, business context and all that.
And exactly the right words. And I was honestly curious, because like you have an engineering background, like if you think back to your engineering days, is there anything you wish you would either, you know, known sooner or thought about sooner in this whole context?
Amani: I think, honestly, I feel like my engineering career sort of went through stages where, you know, I am a needle-led engineer. You just trying to learn the tools that you are, you know, you sort of trying to grow you to do the job. And I don't think most, most engineers don't think about, at the time, didn't think about it.
I do however see some of the best product engineers have to empathize with their users. And that is the thing I wish I did better as an engineer. You know, I worked for a major airline, and I was working on a feature to sort of people on airplanes. That this airline was going to a merger with another airline. And that it was very embarrassing to get to, and I was supposed to fly the next week to get to the airport and see how the future I had developed was basically how the users, the people at the gate were struggling to know the future that I had developed.
So that really made it very clear to me that I need to develop this keen empathy to my users as I develop things. But today, it's a requirement. You cannot be on a product engineering team if you're not having that constant empathy. How is my user going to feel in this workflow that I'm creating for them?
Lena: Honestly, I think it's so beautiful that like, the way you just made this connection, because I think there's, in engineering often sort of a kind of call it like some reservations or some apprehension towards some of these businessy things. And there's of course, you know, you mentioned Reddit, like check out LinkedIn Lunatics at some point, like there is a lot of things that are terrible and business speak and whatnot. Of course, has a lot of problematic aspects about it.
But I think that's why I really think this point you just made is so fantastic because like that's what it's ultimately about. Like, yes, of course there is like making money and that's how businesses survive and like it's capitalism, yada yada. But at the same time, like they are real people involved. There are people who are using the technology that we're building and those people want to get stuff done. They want to have a seat on an airplane. It's probably going to be a very small seat, but it is going to be a seat.
They want to be able to, whatever, do their shopping or get their software built or whatever it is. And of course, like metrics and all that really abstract that away. It's, I think the way that you just made this bridge, think is phenomenal.
Amani: Thank you.
Lena: We’re almost at time, unfortunately already, even though I could ask you so much more. What else do you want to share? What are the things you still want to leave with people?
Amani: Just the fact that in this era, we are entering a new era in the tech industry. And as an engineer, have to constantly, like change is the only constant, and you have to embrace the change. This, you know, but I believe there was a person who gave the talk that this too shall pass.
And yes, it will pass. We will get through these challenging times. But in the meantime, I hope this helps you to stay employed. The best way to make that case is to understand what the company you work for is working on and how to make money.
Lena: I was really excited about the no BS, get straight-to-the-point approach that Amani brought to this episode today.
And I appreciate his time that he spent on this and wanted to summarize some of the key points that I took away from it.
As Amani put it so well, engineering managers need to understand how their company makes money and how their team's work ties to how the business makes or spends money. A couple of ways that he described how you can do that are, build relationships. Become friends, like work friends with data analysts and product managers in your organization or the ones working with your team. It's really, really helpful for getting insights and not just getting the data, but also the context on how the engineering activities and the things that your team is doing are impacting the company's finances. Because that's what's in the end it is about.
Know key metrics. Know what metrics your company cares about, the ones that your boss and your boss's boss care about. Learn what enables revenue in your organization. Like what customers are buying and why they're buying it. Speak with the people on your sales teams and revenue teams or your customer success folks. They usually have a ton of insight that honestly is often really underutilized by engineering teams.
And I also love that Amani called out empathy for users, because not just empathy, but also understanding them well, knowing what do they care about? What problems do they want to solve? And then how can your technology or the things that you're developing help them? It's a really, really important skill for any engineer, but especially in this context, if you're trying to understand how to also make business around that.
And all of this doesn't just apply to you as a manager or as a leader. The engineers on your team should similarly have a really deep understanding of how their work contributes to the bottom line of the company. They need to understand how the business works, what the finances look like. That also includes things like what services that the team is spinning up or the infrastructure that the team is using. What money is that costing the company? Those things are really important.
And lastly, as Amani said, the tech industry is evolving and engineering managers and leaders, again, need to continuously learn and adapt so we can stay relevant. There's still lot of shifts going on. We're still hearing from companies that are in one department, laying people off and all about productivity and heavily invest in areas like AI or growth.
And even in the places where money is a bit, say, looser or there is more money right now, growth and AI specifically are currently good examples. That money that's kind of, seems to be free and no one really cares about it, that kind of state usually doesn't last long. So even if you're in an area right now where there's not a lot of scrutiny on productivity or efficiency or spend or anything like that, you still need to get on these topics. You still need to start understanding how is your team spending and making money because at some point people are going to ask you to those questions and you should be prepared to have answers.
So, learn to talk about impact, work with your engineers to talk about impact. The case for engineering investments is not just that engineering wants to get it done and engineering needs to get it done. It needs to be clear how all of this impacts the company overall.
And engineering productivity, we only touched on a little bit, but it's still all the rage in a lot of organizations. We have several resources on that for you in the show notes, as well as on several of the topics that Amani mentioned about and including the resources, like books that he recommended.
Sly, as the designated business degree holder in this conversation, what do you have to add to this wonderful episode?
Sly: So while understanding like you're part of the business is great for your company, you can also apply that principle to, like, hey, if I start learning about my contributions to the business and the finances and all of these things that tie into it, like who knows what's going to happen in five years, 10 years.
Maybe the person sitting next to me is going to be like, hey, let's just, like, get out of here and start our own thing. And then you're already going to have a head start, because you're not going to just be able to do the technical things. You're going to have a grasp on all the other aspects of being able to like run a business. Or at least like, you know, parts of it. You'll have some understanding of like the metrics and the finances because you never know what's going to happen. And you may not want to do that right now, but who knows what can happen in the future.
And also one other thing, I think it's important that people understand what they're doing, how it's like contributing to the business is just that feeling of what you're doing is like kind of important. Or it's like making a difference.
Because if you go into work every day and you're like, I'm just typing lines of code. Life starts to feel like, Oh my God, was I just put here on this earth to just write code. You know, especially if you’re doing it 40 hours a week.
So if you at least understand, okay, well, I'm typing these lines of code, but contributing to this project that's going to help these people do all this stuff. It feels a little bit better, you know, It still may not be fun, but at least it doesn't feel like you're just wasting your time. If that makes sense.
Lena: I love that. Do it for you. And for the whatever happens in five years, 10 years or that. I did love, your sort of, you know, two people in the office being like, let's get the heck out of here and do our own thing.
Sly: Yeah.
Lena: Yeah.
Sly: Because I was thinking, you know. I don't know if you experienced that exactly, but you had something similar to where, you know, like people were like, let's just go, let's go do our own thing. And you, didn't come from like a, like a super technical background. So you already had some of that financial knowledge and that was really helpful for you.
But I'm sure for the people that you were building that company with, it was probably a bit more difficult for them to grasp that business piece.
Lena: The reason they pulled me in is because it was four engineers and me. And I will also say I wasn't born with that business knowledge either, fortunately, but also unfortunately, that also meant I had to learn at some point. And it's helpful as a way for honestly navigating capitalism.
Sly: That, too. Yeah, definitely.
Lena: And the second point you made as well, in terms of a big part of like, sort of reframing it, of course, around like, yeah, you need to talk about the business impact of work, but like, much more kind of beautiful and humane way that of saying that, that I heard from you is basically like, how does like, what is, what is the stuff that you're doing? Like, what does it mean? Like, what does it, what does it do in the sense like, where is it moving something? Where is it moving someone or making something possible for someone?
Cause I'm, think the, especially in the day to day, it's so easy to get detached from like the quote-unquote, like actual impact. I know like when you're working on a really small like, here's a bug, right? One line of whatever it doesn't do, what it's supposed to do. Or that's not exactly necessarily the moment when you feel like the universe is opening and the stars are all aligned and the heavens open and the music swells and whatnot. It's like, well, it's just another Monday at 11 AM.
Sly: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And like that reminds me of this thing that happened recently where my- I use this like financial service, like this app thing that like calculates my taxes for me for my business stuff, because I don't want to do that. And yeah, yeah. I realized in the app that like it was taking some tax numbers from last year. I was like, OK, that's not right.
I had to email the customer service and they had one of their like software engineers go in and fix that bug. And I was like, that person probably doesn't understand just how big of a deal that was to me. Because I don't want to have to hire an accountant. Like, I don't need an accountant. I just need to know how much taxes I need to give to the IRS. And this person is literally like saving me from having to do all of that.
And for them, it's just like a normal day. Someone's going to submit a ticket all right, whatever, I'll fix it. But for me, I'm like, thank you. Do you want a fruit basket? What can I do to thank you?
Lena: Nice. Did you get them a fruit basket?
Sly: I don't even know who did it. I was just dealing with the customer service rep, but I was just thinking, I know there's some poor engineer in the back that's just like, ugh I have to deal with this, whatever.
Lena: Well, thank you so much for that additional wisdom, Sly, and for being here.
Sly: Of course.
Lena: We will probably have you around again next time. Sly, and I decided to run this as a trial, so we shall debrief after.
If you have feedback for us, we'd also love to hear it. Email us at pod@leadershipconfidentialpodcast .com and join us again next time, because next time we'll get real on, the extension of this whole topic, which is our friend and enemy product.
I'll have a fantastic product manager join me for a really good conversation about how you can fix, improve, and really get good in your relationship and collaboration with your product team.
So join us next time and Leadership Confidential was created, produced, and presented by me, Lena Reinhard.
Our guest's voice was digitally modified. Thank you, Amani, for joining us.
The theme, original composition and mixing are by Esteban Del Pino.
Production assistance, guest support, social media, and bonus host by Sly Stark.
Thank you for listening and we'll catch you next time.
Lena: Oh yeah.
Sly: I had to make sure, because lord knows you don't want to hear Peaches like moving across the table and going like (cat chewing on microphone sounds) Like f***ing, like chewing on my headphone.
Lena: I do want to hear exactly that but I know this is a professional environment so sure.
Sly: That's true.
Lena: If you have to keep the cat out of the recording it's fine.
Sly: I guess worse come to worst, we can use it as like a reaction sound you know like.
