Richard & Coté’s SpringOne Platform Pre-Romp

Episode 150 · 47:09 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

hey you've got kids right i do what do you uh what do you do when you sit down at your desk and you see a uh let's say a third eaten apple and you know that's from this morning are you just is it is it just like time to get rid of that apple or are you going to make yourself you know something out of that apple a snack or something oof i'm really bad about eating food after other people for some reason it kind of grosses me out so like even my kid will like take a bite of you can finish it so i'm probably not doing anything with that apple besides staring at it for a while and throwing it out yeah not gonna eat it i see no i i it's uh it's a mental block i can't get over it's it's you know maybe my dog will eat this apple i was gonna say it's too bad dogs don't eat things but i think uh well i mean they eat things eat fruits but maybe it'll uh it's kind of crunchy the dog might be confused although my my dog has a an odd habit like if you give the dog let's say a piece of bread that's maybe like two bites for a dog you know like a sandwich instead of eating it she'll go and bury it somewhere including the couch so i don't i don't really know what she thinks is going to happen in the future that she's going to want to go like things are going to get so bad she's going to want to go into the backyard and dig up a sandwich that's probably weeks old to eat uh but you know she's preparing i guess she's a survival that's good you know there's for the worst exactly well next is there any other weird food that the dog eats like my dog's like bananas i don't know about you any other no she's just i think pretty pretty normal i'm mostly just shocked that you know one time we were out of dog food and uh we made her a peanut butter sandwich because dogs like peanut butter right and uh that's when we discovered that she just won't eat a sandwich she'll go bury it which is also a strange calculus i wonder if there's a equivalent in humans where you're like you know i have i'm hungry right now and i have this food in front of me but i'm gonna go bury it for later in case i'm hungry and there's not food so i'm not

really sure what what that's about that's kind of like the way my grandparents would save money on things instead of spending now on something nice they were uh saving it for a rainy day that seems really responsible yeah that's good good depression era thinking back when you had to walk up hills both way they would they would rearrange the hills midday yeah just flip around regular rube goldberg thing between between schools mcs your painting exactly well we're about a week away from uh spring one platform our annual conference in austin texas i think it's going to be great what what uh what do you do in this last week when you're preparing for a conference like this now never mind the the work for what do you do personally you know you uh making a list of things to pack checking it twice what's on your agenda i don't know how far how far do you pre-pack now you've got me curious i'm usually a same day packer but um no i mean we're you know buttoning up talks i have a talk i'm doing i actually should probably finish it that would be good to get ready for that you and i are both presenting some things next week i think on monday so i gotta actually get that uh kind of buttoned up so yeah kind of prep week you know i'm debating whether i write a little recap or not of the talks i'm looking forward to and publishing out of my blog things like that oh yeah tighten it up now animals are ready to go there's there's a question for you you know uh in in in this content producing business that that we get our hand we're doing it right now as a matter of fact uh but do you do you like do preparation work for like recap posts like you know you're like all right i'm gonna write some uh some text that i know i'm gonna need so that i can publish this quickly i don't do i don't i don't prepare like that i'm thinking if i want to highlight the talks i'm interested in attending versus the uh writing the obituary for the person who hasn't died yet sort of scenario that's right that's how that works i was always creeping out yeah yeah i guess it takes some imagination yeah you know i i don't i don't pack that far ahead of time you know the only thing

i've packed ahead of time is is i i of course live in amsterdam but we have storage in austin so i was packing some things this weekend to take with me because my flight leaves like saturday morning so i think i'll i think i'll bring some stuff that we don't use around here to put in storage uh you know a bunch of you know i've got those i've gotten rid of most t-shirts i don't want but i have a few t-shirts that i don't want to get rid of that i don't wear that are just sentimental and then uh i got a bunch of uh i got all my my boots my cowboy boots which sadly they have holes in them because they're so old and that doesn't work around here because it's wet all the time so you know you can't have holes in your shoes it's kind of charming if you're in a dry place where you got you know like oh look at those you've got tango and cash boots and you know or is tango and cash the one with don johnson no that's that's i think you're right not turner and hooch make sure you got your your combos yeah there's some i mean to give a spoiler there's some you know there's some where i think don some movie where don johnson has some boots with duct tape on it and they're a joke and then it ends up playing a pivotal part in a literal cliffhanger at the end of the uh the movie as i recall you just you just wear wooden shoes now right you're exactly yeah because they float how long do you uh do you think your kids like long after you're 90 and then are going to go through and just find a bunch of t-shirts you could never get rid of because i feel feel that like i just moved i just moved probably a dozen t-shirts i'll never wear again but i just have a sentimental attachment to yeah i think i think they'll they'll find some old t-shirts of mine but and and a bunch of like usb devices of just like you know this seemed like a really cool usb device you you you you plug it in and it lights up isn't that awesome yeah why does dad have so many hard drives like it's just like i couldn't get rid of them there was a there was a good let's say five to ten year period where i collected usb thumb drives it's just fun because when those first came out in the mid-2000s i was like you know what a time to be alive look at this it's a little hard drive on this thing here and uh

i forget it might have been when we were moving or a year before that i had this shoe box and i was like all right i just gotta i gotta get rid of these so i i laboriously went through and copied all the files off of them into a little dropbox thing and then got rid of them and then and then sure enough i'm holding one in my hand right now so i still have them that follow me around everywhere although listen i should take a picture this one's super cool it's this little dell one that i saw at a dell world once so of course i grabbed like five of them and it's like super thin and it's got this metal sleeve that folds over and then it says dell on it so i mean of course you want that right isn't that nice and of course this year's SpringOne is swagless because we we care about not just uh filling bags with goodies but filling heads with knowledge so don't get any uh you don't get any tchotchkes my uh my 60 year old children who are emptying my collection they'll appreciate they'll look back on this year 2019 is the year that dad didn't have a usb drive that was branded no it's gonna be like you know archaeologists or uh with the people going through like the strata in the rock and why is something missing in this era that's gonna bring one platform 2019 such a garbage on both sides but this one i don't know it was a fire something you can tell this is when when uh conferences stopped having swag i was at devops days london last week and that was a theme they encouraged us to be that way so so we we the pivotal people rolled up with minimal swag meanwhile other people seem to have not gotten the memo which is which is a bummer but yeah what are you gonna do first first mover moral advantage or something right well i was thinking we should go over a few like just little uh spring one platform things and then also we haven't talked in a while so we can kind of catch up on things we've been doing but as always we got a few news items going going uh going on here what what's what's been happening that catches your eye yeah it was a few things i thought highlight that uh our audience might care about so we think about initializers the spring initializer obviously uh one of the more popular places on the internet for developers is there's a million and a half or so projects created

there per month for spring boot developers they go there they pick all their options they click generate gives them a download now their project's ready to go there's been some nice updates to that now it's really easy to not have to download a project if you just want to browse what it would look like because you want to steal it for a project you already have and you can even share now so you can get a link that you could share with another developer put it on a wiki somewhere that says hey click this link to bootstrap this whole web project now so that's pretty cool and then our team spun up a steel toe initializer for.net dev so if you go to start.steeltoe.io you can actually bootstrap a .net project which is pretty neat as well next time i was thinking about it was .net core 3.0 ship last week so this is the next big version of .net so you get new language stuff if you're doing json support which if you're doing web apps you're probably doing that that's great some more containerization support for docker containers more friendly there and if you like building windows forms and windows presentation foundation you are a happy camper because now you can do that with .net core now is that is that the is that the like gooey way of doing things it is i think that's the first way i was really building stuff when .net came out was like hey here's visual basic and i can drag and drop a button i can do all this stuff so that was left out of .net core for these last few years and it was like hey if you want to build windows forms you use .net framework on windows but now you can use .net core so that you don't have to rely on framework anymore for that all right now now would you say are you do you reminisce about the gooey days are you glad those are uh sort of over i guess you have mobile things but like i don't know what's what's your i never really did gooey programming so i don't know what the feels are around it there was something gratifying about seeing the work i mean i don't know building a restful web services and i don't think give you that same kick as like here's a button i just like that loads of you know loads data or puts an image up there so there was something about instant gratification of front-end design obviously we now satisfy with web design so it's not like we're all building back-end components all the time yeah but no i mean look i don't know what's on your desktop i do have a the dedicated slack app i do have you know dedicated trello app or i have dedicated

apps for things that are also web versions because sometimes it's nice to have a desktop version so like not like desktop development's dead although clearly most of our work's in the browser now man that's true there's plenty of desktop and then and then really the uh the stuff you do on your phone that that usually is a gooey it seems like or at least it might as well be huh yeah so meanwhile what's what's the uh the lambda networking change what's going on there yeah i mean it's self-promotional since i wrote it up for info queue but it was also good news uh which was uh so i mean up until now if you were building lambda functions in amazon you know these serverless functions and you were using a virtual private cloud which is how most enterprises are adopting public cloud they use like perimeter security they wrap up in a private network their all their stuff and it's not internet accessible you get a vpn and whatever but lambda always sits outside of that so that vpn or that vpc kind of had to bridge over to your vpc it would create a new network connection for each function and if it's a cold function it hasn't been warmed up it would have to instantiate a network connection meaning when you have lambda functions talking to let's say your database your line of business app in your vpc you can have this really longer cold start and so it's kind of prohibitive like all right i'm not going to use lambda functions with my own systems it's just it's kind of painful i'll just use it with other stuff that's on the internet and that's fine but what they made a change of is they kind of create a persistent connection now when you instantiate your function in the first place and so you don't pay that tax anymore so if i'm trying to do serverless stuff on line of business systems in my private network i'm really only incurring the cold start time of actually booting up the function not doing all that network bridging stuff which is pretty cool yeah has serverless stuff gotten uh sophisticated enough yet where they charge a different tier for fast versus slow no although i mean the other thing i linked to in the same kind of sentence that i put in our show notes was uh you know another analysis that blew up last week of like hey it cost me a lot more to do serverless which is counterintuitive because the you know the message now is like hey this is the cheaper way to do stuff get with it but that for certain workloads and certain kind of usage profiles

you still have to stitch together a lot of pieces with their own micro billing components gateways and storage and functions and this and that so sometimes it's cheaper just to run a vm sometimes it's cheaper to use a pad sometimes it's that reminder that there's probably not one abstraction to rule them all like it probably doesn't make sense to say it's all going to be serverless it's all going to be this all going to be that you know there's still we're still not a place where i think any normal company normal person is going to try to fit everything in that model yeah wasn't there and i suppose isn't there there was some kind of like cloud compute thing that like you like you never really knew when it would execute and therefore it was like cheaper or you were like bidding on things or you kind of like use leftover compute space or something right yeah there was that that kind of model for spot instances there you go yeah most clouds do that where you can yeah you'd almost bid on it and hey once it goes above this price they'll just shut it down yeah and so if i'm doing like crazy map reduce stuff or i'm doing just kind of bulk computing and i can lose nodes it's fine but again i think if you walk into most enterprises going hey your compute may or may not be online at any given time like that's not going to run a majority of your stuff it's going to be certain types of jobs yeah that that's that's that's a uh that's a cloud service in need of some marketing if that's uh the the way they pitch it this this this is an unreliable service that's affordable but that might describe most enterprise it uh in in many cases anyways that's right yeah so you know we're gonna and we'll cover some more serverless stuff at SpringOne next week as well so again i'm still bullish on the model frankly i prefer it to a lot of other ones but you know i try and also be a realist especially when you and i talk to a lot of large companies and a lot of people who listen to this podcast who look at their line of business systems look at what they already have running look at the fact they're spending maybe 10 to 20 a year of their budget on innovation type work and the idea of saying like hey everything's going to be serverless is like maybe in 20 years because by the time i would actually change all my apps or the the time that sap or siebel would work nicely with functions like we got a ways to go yeah

i was talking with someone who works in government it last week and they were uh i i don't follow serverless stuff as close as i don't know if it's i should i don't follow it that closely but uh i was asking him like what would you use this stuff for and he was he was saying well we use a lot of uh just like microsoft office and just a lot of excel and word docs and there might be a point where like it makes sense to like call out to serverless stuff to do things and right and with the point of allowing people to keep using excel as a ui instead of shifting them to some other things and then you could uh link in some i don't know more programmed services on the back end rather than just like macros and weird calls to things which i don't know that seems interesting maybe someone will do that kind of back to gooey's as we were talking about earlier that's right so then also also in uh cloud world it looks like microsoft uh launched a i always forget what siem stands for but i wanted you to say it first i think it's even pronounced sim but i sometimes say it wrong myself but it's a uh what does it stand for it stands for security information and event management so kind of suck in a bunch of information do things you know gather all this data you analyze it you look for anomalies you try to figure out if there's a security problem and that's been a mature space for a while i just thought this was interesting because now microsoft entering this with their new ga service azure sentinel which sounds uh i guess scary that it hooks into all the usual azurey stuff so office 365 and cloud stuff so it's gonna be pretty compelling it's the usual cloud kind of pay-per-use sort of thing might disrupt kind of the more slow-moving on-prem sort of systems or ones that don't have sophisticated machine learning that microsoft has advantages in so anyway it's an interesting entry into the market but public cloud providers keep doing this right where they offer really useful stuff that messes around with the rest of the market this feels like the next one yeah it'll be uh you know i remember talking with uh uh

as we used to call it systems management vendor that structurally deals with the same thing as a uh sim right like just a whole bunch of information that's always coming at you that you have to analyze and make some conclusion about so someone can take an action uh right or go to lunch uh and uh you know the thing that they always bump up against and when i used to work on this was just like the sheer amount of data that you have to deal with and analyze and uh with sort of on-premise traditional things you just kind of run out of compute that's affordable and so it's it's always interesting to see if you centralize it in a cloud somewhere what you do with that especially when it comes to applying machine learning things because i get the i get the feeling that a lot of like uh machine learning or ai ops or whatever like it just seems like it's going to hit some wall if it's all done on premise that you wouldn't have uh hosted somewhere which you're i mean i think you're right on the compute side definitely because you start just starving for compute and then the storage right is when do i choose to throw out stuff do i just have to start summarizing data because i can't store all the raw data that now the tricky thing is every public cloud makes it so easy to keep data forever and copy it everywhere but that's not free so at the same time like it's amazing but i don't know if most most folks are budgeting for never-ending infinite storage yeah it's like that shoebox full of usb drives it seems free but it takes up space and time at least at least in your head yeah yeah there's always some delightful things to discover on those though from you know years ago oh yeah goodness gracious i'm finding resumes from like 2001 or here's like this this project i thought was super important i forgot about or all those great things all the usb drives well as mentioned we've got a we've got SpringOne platform coming up next week october 7th and 10th probably if you're listening to this you've already registered or you're not going to or it's already happening but that's fine there's a if you haven't registered there's there's a code you can use for 200 off but you know if there's time you should definitely come to it it's going to be it's going to be in austin i think uh i was supposed

to write up a guide for my european friends about going to austin but i didn't however there were several emails sent about recommendations of places to go and i think we've we've answered those and uh let's see we got i i i know you you you've helped on things i've helped curate talks for the uh the devops track and the leadership track and a little not really on the kubernetes track but i looked at it i think i was just a secondary concern there and we got uh some analysts come in workshops there's a little executive event that we're doing there's even if you're if you're from uh amia we've got a happy hour you can come to wow and and be happy i mean you glossed over just there but this is the first year we've done a leadership track right i think so i don't yeah yeah i mean i think i we we've had similar things but like specifically calling out like this is uh not necessarily about technology stuff or case studies but here's some uh here's some thought technologies uh to apply to leadership things so when i when i was looking through things i was trying to get you know a lot of them are from uh from uh customers if you will or people have done things but i've tried to make sure we have some talks that go over uh not only how to do the the usual change management but for example there's a couple of product management and uh design based ones where more so sad well not more so but like partly satisfying my curiosity of like what does it mean to do leadership with product management in an enterprise con context and i think um for you know actually if you're listening to these podcasts in order it's uh the one maybe right before this i was talking uh with uh alexandra about this topic the talk she's going to be giving and uh you know i think there's a lot of product management talk when it comes to a software vendors doing it but i don't hear that much about uh doing it in the enterprise as it were and then there's a panel on design that has someone from usaa on it and a couple of other

design people that will be interesting to see how you sort of uh lead design uh if you will but i was i was looking through uh all of the talks uh earlier and and i have to say uh i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna pick one that just for for totally sentimental reasons i'm very interested in on thursday at 12 30 there's one called drive-in meets digital modernizing a classic customer experience from our friends at sonic where they uh you know i love i love a sonic burger that reminds me of one of my favorite david sedaris things where he's he's in paris and on a subway and he's making fun of of some some young americans there and they're like boy i sure could use a sonic burger right now and i think i think that expresses a sentiment many of us have at least once a week you could just use a sonic burger and a uh and a slushy that would be great i think i'm gonna go get one of those now when yeah you really i know you've messed me up now for the morning i'm hungry yeah uh but no that that that was a good looking one it's funny how many of these you almost want to attend because you're actually familiar with the company like oh i want to hear how this company that i depend on does stuff yeah it's interesting we actually have so many customers and it just enterprises presenting stuff like wow i actually need them to be good at this because if comcast stinks at technology my kids yell at me when i can't get an on-demand movie like i need them to be good at this or the health care companies or dicks down the corner from me right your insurance provider it's all interesting stuff that even to your point like there's a sentimental attachment to sonic like i'll go hear their talk i don't even care what they're talking about like i just want to hear what they talk about yeah yeah it would be like you know every now and then uh air france klm has a talk and i fly on i fly on klm all the time so i'm very very interested to see how they're improving things around there it's uh the power of a familiar brand is is is really nice how about you what are you what are you looking forward to yeah i mean always you know again i think that leadership stuff's interesting because you don't i don't know i've we've i've done what this is my third or fourth SpringOne and again my first

year i had didn't know java from a hole in the head for the most part and i've learned spring over the last few years and things like that but this really has turned into a conference if you have no interest in java you would actually really still enjoy this conference because there's a lot of as you say leadership stuff kubernetes stuff event-driven architecture stuff dot net stuff tons of things there so it's really an interesting all-up tech conference at this point so you know i'm looking at a couple that are or transformation-y and specifically like how you get over the hump since again that continues to come up in a lot of talks that i have with people that yep sounds good for incubation again how do i keep scaling this the reactive stuff's taking a good leap forward over the last year last year at SpringOne we announced a lot of reactive things like hey we talked about our socket and we talked about r2dbc which is not a robot on star wars and a number of other reactive things but all that stuff's matured now so we've actually had you know just today i think spring framework five two shipped with new rsocket support for reactive messaging kind of event messaging between components the the stuff we've been doing with reactive database stuff has matured all the web flux stuff so i just want to learn more there try to get a little more understanding of why i care about that and then finally some of the building platform teams helping the sdlc that stuff again intrigues me because i'm always fascinated how big companies figure out how to use tech at the right time how to speed up developers all that stuff we take for granted when i just read hacker news every day so looking forward to those kind of talks and then the main stage you know uh dormain draywitz the host of the podcast in the alternate weeks is running the main stage which means she's going to do tremendously better than i did the last two years so i'm looking forward to that uh but she's put together an awesome lineup you know i've seen some previews of what we're going to be talking about and sharing and i don't know to me i don't know about you Coté but for me clearly there's a transaction looming here with vmware and i think there's an interesting chance to maybe bookend pivotal at this conference like what has our impact been what's you know take a step back sure what have we contributed to this industry for the

last six years what have we moved forward did we transform how the world built software i don't know some of it we did and maybe taking a step back i think is kind of a cool moment here yeah well i think i think structurally like the the mixture of uh business stuff and nerd stuff it kind of shows like the uh the way things uh have been affected by by pivotal work which is nice that you have those two things together now now more importantly you know previous year like last year there was there was some costuming going on some little quick changes of the mcs is there i don't want anything revealed but do you think there might be some uh costume changes this year that could occur gosh i don't know if i'm rooting for that this year that was pretty pretty wild last year uh yeah i don't know if it's gonna be like the what it's gonna be gonna get any horse heads or anybody can be dressed up in anything fancy i haven't seen any sneak peeks though of crazy costume changes no no acting like a sheriff there that would be funny if there was a classic two-person horse that came walking up that's uh i mean again i would find it better if no one acknowledged it like just walk out as the horse and get undressed and just caught off like this all right that was a horse yeah cool well uh well also since last time we talked you did a uh you did a webinar with uh nicole from uh the devops what does dora stand for i always forget devops research a yeah yeah there's there's there's a bunch of things in there don't put me on the spot but uh but how did i i have to admit i haven't watched that webinar yet but uh how did it go what what what was the interesting sort of like uh insight or idea that came out of that webinar that you didn't have beforehand yeah i mean the state of devops report that uh nicole does and she had some other folks again helping out this year putting this together i think everyone looks forward to this every year i know i do just because it's a another state of kind of grounded information about these practices it's not just feelings it's not just well i saw this on a project once this is a you know obviously rigorous method

for figuring out what are the outcomes that come from some of these practices so you know it's always a pleasure to get to do with this with uh dr forzer and this is the second straight year we've done it together and so you know there's some good movement in sort of elite performance and this and that but the one thing that stood out for me and you should watch the webinar i think it was our fifth most popular one of the year but she did some analysis as well and figuring out what are the sort of practices that actually positively and negatively kind of improve org performance like if you start thinking about all right so continuous delivery kind of what feeds into that what is actually a predictor of success there is it again things like monitoring loosely coupled architectures trunk-based development deployment automation yes so heavyweight change process actually shows you know statistically to have a negative impact on software delivery performance or so it was actually i think starting again try to tie this stuff together not just hey this is why we should do source control management this way this is why we should pay down technical debt this is and if i'm an enterprise it and i've always felt like i'm fighting upstream because no one believes my crazy you know software suggestions to be able to start to have this sort of information that says yes look it's negatively correlated to do x and y here's the data behind it here's the sort of research behind it it would just seem like this is a relief to a lot of people who are trying to champion change and feeling like they're just fighting the inertia of just the way we've always done it yeah yeah you know like tech that's always an interesting thing it's uh it's it's it's sort of like it's a good test of if people believe the developers right in in the sense of like you know it's common sense to uh architects and developers that like the the more the more corners you cut and things you don't update and things like that uh it's going to slow you down in the future and you'll tell people that and and i don't know if it's that they don't believe it or they don't have time to think about it and then like a few years later it's like yeah we can't really change anything effectively or quickly because i told you that two years ago but you didn't believe it whereas i

would imagine in like i don't know bridge building or what's something even less important than bridge building like you know novelty usb drive creation is probably like you know if if we uh if we set up the factory to create only this type of usb drive instead of being able to vary it if we only create blue ones the next time someone wants to order an orange one we're not going to do well and they're like i don't know we got to ship these blue ones just make it do the blue ones and it just seems like as a terrible analogy but no but i mean that's that's not awful i just think i mean even where i live there's a lot of two lane roads because it was a backwater 25 years ago and now everyone seems to be moving this way and so did you kind of take on debt and the first time going look i don't need four lanes like i can just go one lane each way and now it's going to be a real pain in the neck and shut down areas for six months to widen the the road i don't know are those that are those just kind of what some people say realistically sometimes tech that's just smart to take in the first place because it's an mvp maybe i don't want to over engineer this i don't want to bring in four database types and purposely decouple all my code because it might be a garbage idea and now i've just wasted months when i just really need to prove a concept so sometimes i take on debt on purpose just like in real life you take on a mortgage you borrow you know borrow money for a car you know and our colleague domain's done a great talk on kind of the kind of positive side sometimes of taking on debt but then to your point sometimes you're actually purposely taking shortcuts or even accidentally and that still holds you back so how are you at least going to pay that down at some point so you're not completely constrained even this research again that the door and and the team have done i think just starts to shine a light on what are examples of tech that like insufficient test coverage incomplete migrations obsolete tech like these are things that are eventually really going to bite you and you either try to do it all at once so you kind of keep this continuous modernization mindset which i'm seeing maybe more people talk about a little more and more than just these big bang migration projects but treating dead is something you're always addressing not just on emergencies yeah yeah well you know that so speaking of

that's that's that's some other work uh somewhat related to some work i've been doing recently that uh that i collectively call the uh the business bottleneck although i have to say maybe i should just call it the bottleneck but i like this idea of saying like oh the business has has has some some alignment issues but there's a uh a webinar me and another pivotal guy rick clark have coming up uh later this week where that's basically part one of uh of the business bottleneck and you know the tech debt thing is a good example of that where we don't really go over this necessarily but it's uh i don't know a way of saying this that doesn't sound like you know the nerds getting upset but it's sort of like well there's there's sort of business people making decisions about what to do with technology without fully understanding not only limitations but like what's possible with it and like the i started thinking about this idea one because everyone's all like you know the culture is a problem and and uh i have to deal with finance and things like that and it seems like there's uh in its best case where you've got your your product teams or your developers deploying their software weekly and they can validate it and course correct and be a tech company like i always wonder like if you have that setup does that just fix all the problems of a business or of an organization or does the business side need to do uh need to do something like you know what we usually recommend is as we were talking about earlier like you have a product manager which is not necessarily a technical person but someone who kind of like is responsible for the product and the and the business and i don't get the sense that in aggregate that role exists so much so there's some sort of uh misalignment going on so i've been working on like a a book on that topic which which uh i should finish at some point uh especially since there's more or less a deadline now but we have uh we got a webinar it's a couple days from now and i think what we're going to do in this first part is uh just kind of lay out some three key areas of misalignment and then uh the week after next we'll uh we'll

tell you all the solutions we'll magically solve them but more seriously we'll just kind of paint a picture of what uh you know some possible ways to fix it and the three areas so far that we've settled on is how uh how the the annual cycle of finance and strategy and also just kind of a mistrust of how they they like to fund uh it projects how that's kind of an annoyance and then this is the next one is one that that rick thinks of a lot which is basically how uh the way that compensation is done not only straight up pay but other things creates all sorts of problems and he put it and i you know this is probably uh kind of touched on or at least uh uh i don't know tangentially related to some some devops report stuff that if uh if you've got this independent autonomous product team that's supposed to be acting as one and uh you know owning the team and working together and yet if everyone gets paid based on individual conversations and their bonuses are based on individuality and their career is based on what they do as an individual that doesn't seem like a recipe for uh coolness and even more broadly right like the uh the business side gets compensated when uh the business is successful when there's revenue and they can they can do things with the business and it gets compensated when they have good uptime which means you don't want to change things very often so something at the macro and micro level of compensation is a little wacky of of how things work and it gives you uh misaligned incentives uh to behave right and i don't know i remember in counting this people would literally say uh you know there's no reason for me to help this other person because because like i get my bonus based on my performance so teamwork doesn't really apply here which which is a bummer and then i think i think more broadly there's two more points and one is kind of what i was indicating is like these uh these two entities they don't really seem to work on the same team so often there's usually like proxies and project

managers and things like that rather than you know i was thinking way back in 1999 in the extreme programming book it more or less says right there when you're working on the internal chrysler hr system you need to have someone from hr who uses the system in the room with the developers uh going over stuff and um one uh you know who remembers that and and then and then two like i'm not sure that's even practice very widely afterwards which i don't know we'll we'll see how we play around with that but i figure like if uh if people are doing things on a weekly basis they need some input from the business side at least they come up with wacky flying cars and uh and things like that but that's a little bit of overview of the webinar and and the work in general and uh also rick and i will be doing a little talk i think to open up the leadership leadership track going over these uh these concepts as well which nice which will be delightful and there's i'll put a link to it in the show notes but uh i've got just like i did for my uh monolithic transformation book i have the uh the draft that i'm working on just available for people to look at which is is actually handy because then i get a lot of reviews from people anyone who anyone who takes the time to read through it and leave a comment is probably has something useful to say and uh and interesting and uh so so that would be great if uh people are into that but i think that's uh has anything else notable been going on since last we talked seven months ago uh you know besides uh again working with our friends at dell and vmware on on some upcoming things and vm world uh europe coming up which i'll be going out to in barcelona so yes yeah just a lot of this is you know continuing to accelerate what pivotal is up to we've created some you know great new content on the blog always the webinar is coming out so keeping busy on this stuff i'm interested you mentioned kind of some of the incentives and you know hey people not working together in this and that in your kind of travails and research and

journeys do you you kind of land on what are good cross-functional metrics that actually align people is it to come down to like business success because hey we're all aligned on this product making this much money or getting this many users and i don't care if you're in it or hr this or that how do you make sure people do feel like they should work together you know i think this is one of those areas that there's not enough actual stuff being done to say anything conclusive however uh yeah i think i think in general like if you the the little anecdotes and things i hear here and there is that if if you reward people in aggregate like at the team level then not only is that possible but things go better right and the mechanics of what that looks like are kind of situational for what you have right like that's part of the the the bottleneck or the misalignment is like you have to go to hr and be like hey about the way we give people money yeah and and really work on the way you change that around and i think i think the other thing and this isn't exactly a match to that but i i do i do hear about interesting ways of using like okrs and and things like that versus like traditional performance metrics and that that being the the way that i i hear about okrs being used differently is more it gives you it gives you almost a chance to correct what am i trying to say there's almost this notion that we don't quite know if this is what we want to happen with an okr like built into it is this test of a theory to like this kind of like uh provisionalness of it so it's different to say like over the next like 30 days or 60 days which is a short period of time in the first place right like we're going to test out this is something we're going to try to see if it is actually works and also to push ourselves do it and i'm reading a little bit too much theoretic stuff and do a classic okr but you can kind of do it that way versus like you know uh more classic metrics that

you would use which is like i don't know i'm going to bring in 50 units of awesome right or or i am going to do the following things or even worse uh something that is like vague and not metricable like i am going to uh mentor my team to perform better and align with the corporate values which is like at the end of like an annual cycle of looking through those metrics like what do you do with those things you just like that it's very subjective so there's some of those things i see but that also reminds me well you'll be gallivanting with uh our vmware friends i'm going to be over at the gartner it expo slash symposium trademark uh in barcelona and there's someone from daimler that i'm doing a fireside chat with over lunch and this is exactly the kind of topic that we're planning on on discussing like she she heads up the uh mercedes-bins.io organization uh with several hundred people there and they have a i can never say it correctly how do you pronounce it heliography heliocracy there you go and uh i i was always terrible in ancient greek uh but like uh you know she her she brought up several points uh that kind of have informed a little bit of my thinking about business misalignment which is uh one how does that function and how do people manage their careers and how do you incent people to act kind of in a more of a flat organization where they're they're equals uh rather than not so hopefully we'll uh hash that out but yeah this uh i think i think this this this topic anytime i talk a lot about something it means it's an interesting unknown topic otherwise i would be brief and talk about burgers and stuff instead but uh i think this topic is like very underexplored and it was also reminding me there's speaking of nicole dr dr nicole uh you know when she worked at chef she actually gave a she had a presentation kind of on this topic like how you

how you create metrics for performance for staff performance of people in devops teams and i remember i remember watching that and thinking like this is not relevant to my interest like about devops or whatever this is just how you this is hr stuff and when i was kind of writing up this part of the misalignment stuff i was like aha now that's interesting and i need to go back and and watch those because it was keyed around exactly this point how do you put together metrics and career development which uh seems highly relevant no it's a great topic i i finished the book over the summer project product and again mick kirsten is over in your neck of the woods or your continent uh was talking about again how do you align around product teams and what are those measurements that kind of cross the teams in the streams and whether you're looking at quality and business outcomes and there's a number of things that's actually a whole flow framework that he calls out there it's a great book that again if you're trying to think about how to orient around products and how to measure success of products and actually you know split up your work and things like that actually have communication across the different functions where everyone speaks the same language that was that was good content so hopefully we're seeing more people talk about this now that people are actually trying this at scale yeah i should go reread that book that's probably for me one of those i need to read it in one settings book because i you know it was a good book but i didn't i never got as much out of it as everyone else seems to so i must have been uh in a bad mood or something it's probably that red eye flight back to that's right i just i just remember some lengthy descriptions of the of the the factories to make cool cars and uh yes but there were other things in there going on there were yeah i was thinking like this is just a very elaborate way to expense buying a car yeah this is how you get to spend a week in the bmw factory i guess i have to i have to be here for my work that's that's why i'm here just got to go check some emails and then go check out the car manufacturing but i did yeah but i don't but even then you do this well too i mean i like when people try to bring in maybe not our technical debt tortured metaphors but when people are actually

trying to connect some of these real life things like an actual auto factory and how they extend and how they can you know elevate the bottleneck and they look at constraints like that's i think for most people a lot simpler than trying to describe how the it you know quality team slows down software delivery like it's just different so i like when people try to pull it in from different disciplines that helps me personally so it's uh yeah go visit the bmw factory well i think maybe the last thing speaking of books i'm not done reading it but i always like uh i always like the professor reeda mcgrath she uh i forget the name of her last book that i really like but you just go look it up but she has a new book that i've been reading called uh i think it's it's seeing around corners and uh it's it's it's perhaps a tad too business bookie uh versus academic but uh well whatever and and i think i think so far i'm about halfway through and i think i think she has a good framing you know we're basically ever since uh let me see ever since like the those two engineers formed uh you know bcg and then you went over to michael porter like there's been this this kind of like refining of what strategy is but then more importantly like the the toolkit that strategists use that's that's always the difficult part is like well strategy has two difficult parts one is the toolkit that you use reliably and two is getting anyone to listen to you and uh like um so she her she she has a further refinement of of the idea of of how to respond or protect yourself from disruption whether you want to make it uppercase or lowercase d and and i think the the the crux of what she goes over so far is that instead of thinking about like the industry you operate in as a well-defined market that has you know you and your competitors this you know a michael porter view of it where you've got your suppliers and your competitors and your customers and it all fits together on that like nice chevron way of doing things that instead what

you do is to use her words you think of an arena and any sort of thing can enter the arena and not necessarily even compete with you directory directly but they can also redefine what the market is and the basis of competition and you know so forth and so on and and instead the thing you center around is like the notion of like a job to be done which is like the thing you're the problem you're solving for your customer and it gets a little like this is one of those areas where like things get a little abstract experience wise where like at some point you don't want to necessarily think that like i'm netflix and the arena i operate in is how people spend their leisure time because next thing you know you're buying bike companies and like you know things like that that they spend their leisure time in but whatever it's just sort of like the way people spend their attention and uh the job they're hiring you for and if someone else can do it and even more like uh concretely i always think of it as like share a wallet right like people have a limited amount of money to spend and uh you would prefer they spend more of it with you than with other other people and so you've got to somehow battle that out but she has some interesting uh sort of frameworks and tactics a toolkit to uh to use to kind of try to see around corners to find the inflection points as she says so uh so there's a couple of books for you all listeners to find your time with and uh you know as always this has been Pivotal Conversations if you want to uh see the past episodes we have a whole slew of interviews with uh people who are speaking at SpringOne platform across several topics there's one that i i mentioned about uh about product management and our friend mark heckler has interviews that are very uh spring and uh sort of technical oriented if you you want to uh take a gander at those and remember next week october 7th to 10th in austin texas SpringOne platform where we will be and i'm sure we'll talk about it afterwards but if you want to see all those past episodes you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations and they'll all be there for you and the show notes which we which we keep

referring to will be posted at pivotal.io slash podcast and with that we'll see everyone next time bye bye

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