In the latest episode of the ‘groCTO: Originals’ podcast (Formerly: Beyond the Code), host Kovid Batra engages in an insightful discussion with two dynamic engineering leaders: Francis Lacoste and Miroslaw Stanek.
Francis has formerly worked with Heroku and Salesforce & is now a VPE and CTO Coach specializing in scaling up startups. Miroslaw is the Director of Engineering & the PL Engineering Site Lead for the Poland R&D division at Papaya Global. He’s also the author of the newsletter ‘Practical Engineering Management’. Explore the theme of ‘Leading Dev teams through acquisitions’ by delving into their real-life experiences.
The episode kicks off with Francis and Miroslaw talking about their personal lives and hobbies. Moving on to the main section, they dive into the acquisition experiences and the pivotal hurdles faced by the engineering leaders in their respective organizations. They stress the importance of swiftly merging company cultures post-acquisition while addressing challenges in navigating the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic. The conversation also explores strategies for maintaining engineering team efficiency without sacrificing value delivery.
Lastly, Francis and Miroslaw share parting advice with engineering leaders who are navigating similar challenges.
Kovid Batra: Hi everyone! This is Kovid, back with another episode of Beyond the Code by Typo. Today, it’s a unique episode for us and we have some special guests. In fact, we have two amazing guests with us, Mirek and Francis. Both of them are accomplished engineering leaders. But they have one thing in common, their passion for contributing back to the engineering community. And that’s why we connected. So, Mirek has been on our show previously, but let me introduce him again. He’s the newsletter writer for Practical Engineering Management. He’s the Director of Engineering at Papaya Global. Francis is coming to our show for the first time. He’s an Engineering Leadership Coach. He’s a seasoned engineering leader and has worked with companies like Heroku, Salesforce and more. I’m glad to have both of you on the show. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining in.
Francis Lacoste: Hi, Kovid.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah, thank you, Kovid. Hey, Francis. Thanks for having us.
Kovid Batra: Great. Francis, Mirek, it’s a basic format, like before we jump on to our today’s topic of leading dev teams through acquisition, I think it’s great if you could share some of your hobbies, some personal things about yourselves with the audience so that they know you a little more. So, we can start with you, Mirek, would you like to go first?
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, like Kovid said, it’s my second time in this podcast. but, for new people listening to us, my name is Mirek Miroslaw, depending on which pronunciation you prefer. Like Kovid said, recently I’m the Director of Engineering for the company Papaya Global. I’m also the site leader, leading the Polish R&D side of this company. And I also write a newsletter ‘Practical Engineering Management’. Basically, I try to help engineering leaders to maximize impact of their work and make their teams successful.
Personally, I’m the father of a three-year-old daughter. So, showing her the way, exploring the world, answering all of the questions. And, recently I’m also becoming a professional athlete. Yes, even after being 35 years old, you can still apply for the license. So, I’m an obstacle race runner. I have some aspirations, maybe, you know, not the box on the Olympics, but still, you know, I’m enjoying the ride and then hopefully, we’ll be able to share some successes over time. Yeah, so, thanks for having me.
Kovid Batra: All the best. All the best. All the best. Thanks, Mirek. Thank you so much for this lovely intro. Francis, your turn, man.
Francis Lacoste: So I’m Francis Lacoste. I’m based in Montreal in Canada. I’m an executive coach working mainly with CTOs and VPs of Engineering at startups. I help them specifically when they need to scale their team. And this is where we, they need to get really deliberate with culture. This is my passion, really making sure that teams have a great engineering environment like I’ve experienced. Before that, I was an Engineering Leader at Salesforce and Heroku and started my leadership career at Canonical, which was an open-source company, the one that made Ubuntu. And this is where I started learning remote management back in 2000.
Outside of work, I play in an electronic ambient band. I play a hands-free instrument, the Theremin, which is the space sound music type of sound that this instrument makes. Also, I have a long practice of meditation and I now also teach meditation with the Buddhist geeks, which is an online organization.
And it’s a pleasure to be here, Kovid. Thank you for inviting me.
Kovid Batra: Great, Francis. Thank you. Thank you so much for that lovely intro. I would love to hear you sing and play the music sometime.
Francis Lacoste: Well, we have a Bandcamp and we’re on Spotify, so I can give you the link in the show notes.
Kovid Batra: Oh yeah, that’s cool! Great. Francis, Mirek, we are here today to discuss around the challenges that engineering leaders face post-acquisition. And both of you come with immense experience. You have spent time in different-sized organizations. You have had startups, worked with companies as big as Salesforce, Francis, as you just mentioned. I’m sure you have had experiences of acquisition, right? And various types.
So, to start off, tell us about what kind of acquisition experiences you have had. And what were the biggest challenges as an engineering leader or as an engineering team you saw for the company getting acquired?
Francis Lacoste: Well, at Salesforce, we had many, there were many acquisitions. I came in with Heroku just after they had been acquired. And the Heroku acquisition was kind of a weird one because it took like that very long time. It operated somewhat independently. That was part of the main challenge. You know, the challenge is how do you integrate the culture? You know, it’s an integration problem. The big challenge was the ‘identity’ one. We’re identified as Heroku, but Heroku is now part of Salesforce. How can we be seen? How can we embrace the bigger identity of Salesforce? So, that’s how I would characterize its essence, the challenge we faced. And, it was not inside of it, but concise on, there were many other acquisitions, some more rapid where kind of you’re acquired and then there’s.. It’s a technology acquisition, so the product kind of shuts down very rapidly, things like that.
Those are other challenges, but there’s still this identity issue that’s very present there because usually people are not happy when losing identity.
Kovid Batra: Sure. I think we’ll come back to you for more details on that and discuss more things in depth. Mirek, what about you?
Miroslaw Stanek: From my side, basically the company I’m working for recently, Papaya Global acquired the previous company, Azimo, where I worked for almost eight years. What was the challenge of the acquisition? I think that the merging process in general, yeah. So, my role in the company was like, I would say, middle-level manager as a Director of Engineering who leads leaders who lead individual contributors. Basically, our main challenge was to make sure that the entire know-how which was acquired by, you know, by the bigger company is utilized because we came with know-how, we came with, you know, experience, and then the long stories, ways of working, but this is still in the sphere of, you know, of the potential which you can give to the company. And as a leader, as a manager, you need to be sure that this potential is somehow utilized. So, I think this is the biggest challenge. So, finding good places for the skills which we are bringing with you and you know, it opens all of the challenges around that. Yeah so, the ones about the organization, the culture, the team structure, and everything. So yeah, this is how it looks like in the general view.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense. Diving deep a little more into this challenge, how on a day-to-day basis are you navigating this situation? And Francis, please feel free to share your opinion or Mirek, please feel free to discuss anything that you feel should be known to the community also which you are facing as a challenge today. And, Francis comes with a lot of experience. I am sure he would have certain advice on how to navigate this situation.
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, I’ve coached people who went through acquisition as well, so that’s another source. I think one of the things that is very important to get going is to know what the context of the acquisition is. You know, there are multiple reasons for an acquisition. I’d say there are three main ones. So, the first one is usually a strategic product acquisition. Your business is acquired because, it’s seen as complimentary. I mean, there’s two, actually, there’s two there, you know, it can be because they want the revenue. So you’re in the same space as your competitor. And they just want, I mean, the one who’s acquiring is kind of a competitor and they’re kind of getting your customers and they want to add their customers there. That’s one strategic acquisition.
The other one, which was more like Heroku and I think in Mirek’s case here, is there’s a complementary product. You know, so it’s kind of Salesforce wanted to expand its reach in the developer space and Heroku was very at good traction in the developer space. So, it was okay work. And, and you’ve seen that in Salesforce. You know, we have a portfolio of companies they acquired, exact targets to add, like marketing capabilities to the CRM, Tableau to add analytics. So these are kind of products complimentary. And the idea is that when you go to sell to customers, you have, like a more comprehensive solution to sell them. So, that will drive more revenue.
Kovid Batra: Right.
Francis Lacoste: So, this is like the strategic acquisition and that will be very different, how it goes and how it will go away than these other two, which is ‘higher acquisition’, you know. So, you’re acquiring a company because of talent. You, you want to usually this will be as you acquire a small startup where you’re not really interested in their product or that technology.
Kovid Batra: It’s just the team that you need.
Francis Lacoste: It’s, “I want the team.” You know, there’s this, and usually it might be one person in the team. You know, there’s like a, somebody has like a very deep expertise. They’re not willing, they have a stake in the company, they’re not willing to jump ship. So they’re going to buy the company so that they can work for the bigger corporation. That’s a very different context than the first two.
And the third one is a tech acquisition. There, it’s not like you don’t really have traction. It’s not about your customers or things like that, but there’s complimentary technology. So, they want that tech. You know, you’ve solved one problem for them and instead of building it by themselves, they will buy you. And depending on that context, it will change a lot of how the acquisition will go.
But, what’s your experience with it, Mirek? Is it like, was it more technology acquisition, a talent acquisition or a strategy acquisition?
Miroslaw Stanek: Well, You know, in the, I think in the end, it’s those types of acquisitions, they have a lot in common because yeah, you can acquire the product, but in the end, you know, there are people behind the product. So even if you have this piece of technology, you still need to have those talented people who can maintain that, who can plug it into, you know, into the new structures and who can continue the growth. I think that, we are kind of mixing both things. Obviously, we expanded the new company’s portfolio, but we also brought, you know, fresh talent, new perspectives and fresh know-how to the problems which can also be the strategic problems for the company, yeah? The company wants to grow. The company wants to expand their portfolio. So bringing, you know, fresh talents who spent years building this or that can be a part of this acquisition.
Kovid Batra: Cool. Francis, do you have any questions that you wanted to ask Mirek?
Francis Lacoste: I think Mirek is right here in the sense that these three types that I said, or four, you know, if you split the first two, they will often overlap. This is what is always interesting about the Heroku acquisition, you know. Heroku was a strategic acquisition. So, what it means is that the first thing that they do is they will usually give autonomy to the product because you don’t want to kill the golden goose. And that creates a challenge because then it will mean that you will have, like kind of two independent or semi-independent organizations going by and in Heroku’s case, it took basically seven years to complete the integration. Actually, that’s not true. Like, five years after I joined, for the first five years, the technology team, I mean, Heroku had its own CEO and it was reporting to the product organization. So, the Heroku engineering organization was totally separate than the rest of the sales force and our engineering organization. And what we’ve seen is that when they did other acquisitions, that changed. You know, in some acquisitions, the technology organization is trying to be merged, you know. And this is where you kind of get these processes because you need to.. As if you’re independent, you can have these processes going on here and these processes going on over that place. And that’s fine. I mean, unless you need to align roadmaps, there will be friction, but those are the frictions you need to deal with. Whereas, if you’re acquiring the technology, then the first thing that we’ll do, or the talent, it’s kind of, we don’t care about how you’re working. Usually, the way it goes is that they will kind of say, “Here’s how we work, and you need to align with that.” Sure, we’re open.
And then, there’s a challenge of how we can influence the culture as per the acquisition, because you have good things. And there’s a size, you know, so it’s usually the smaller ones to influence the bigger one, but that’s very hard. And it will really depend on how you’re able to hook in into the process, build the relationships, all of these things.
So, even though all the problems will happen at some point, the schedule on which they will happen, these integrations will differ based on the integration type because the first thing they do when it’s a product, you know, at the acquisition, usually you can expect like they will merge the sales team rapidly. And in Heroku’s case, that took a while. But in other acquisitions, first thing, it didn’t take long. That the sales team at that exact target or the sales team, the go-to-market of Tableau were integrated in the go-to-market, the general go-to-market because you want to go to the customer with a unified product offering, even if the tech, I think the customer experience is we’re using two different products here. You know.
Kovid Batra: Right. Coming back to Mirek’s challenge after the acquisition. Having the capacity utilization done properly. Is that something that you have also experienced and is there anything specific that you have done at that point of time? Because I can also feel this that as soon as an acquisition is done, there is a lot of context to gain. There are a lot of things for people to first get on board with and then see how teams can be utilized at every level. And the operating style of every company that comes in would be different, right? So, there are multiple areas where you need to first get yourself onboarded after that position and then, ensure that everyone is utilized in the right place. So, Francis, a question for you. Have you experienced such a thing? And how did you navigate that situation?
Francis Lacoste: Yeah, I mean, Heroku’s, acquisition was kind of special in that case, you know, because these questions really took years to materialize. So, Heroku Engineering and Heroku Product were split, you know. And then, Engineering went into to report into the general Engineering org and same thing with Product. And then, these questions started to happen.
And then, there’s these things. Okay, well, is that capacity here? Can we use it for something else? You know, again, do we want, this is less prioritized and the challenge there was kind of often there’s not a lot of knowledge or you have to explain how your product and your technology fit together. And you have to understand how you need really to dive into the understanding of each part.
Kovid Batra: Yeah.
Francis Lacoste: And especially in a big organization, the decisions are made without really the details of the context. So they will say, “Oh, we can cut that.” You know? Or, we were going to ask them, but then it has a huge impact on the product because it’s..
Kovid Batra: It is not looking into deeply. Yeah.
Francis Lacoste: This is critical infrastructure. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be much, but if we don’t develop this, then we’re going to have problems or these things are going to have problems, things like that, dependency. And at the same time, there’s often, like not a lot of understanding of the other side of what it is trying to achieve. So, the advice I would give is really understand, if you’re being acquired, you need to understand very rapidly what the business of the acquirer is, you know, the company making the acquisition, how the tech fits. And now, you fit into that because you cannot really rely on them understanding what’s going on, you know.
Kovid Batra: Exactly.
Francis Lacoste: So, you need to understand them so that you can make your case to them, you know, in the terms that they understand.
Kovid Batra: Right. Right. Mirek, for you, after the acquisition, you were heading the engineering team there. When you moved here, the developers, the team members who were working with you, did they have an expectation from you, or were they looking up to you to sort their lives into this new space? And what exactly you did, like, I want to know, like your first-hand experience there, like what exactly did you do to solve these problems of them and for them and help them get on track or maybe you’re getting them on track right now, I don’t know, just share that experience with us.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yes. So, one of the biggest challenges for me as a, you know, not the senior manager, like I said, just the mid-level manager, is that I got a lot of questions with the expectations that I could answer all of them which obviously, wasn’t true. So, obviously, when the company is acquired, I assume that on the strategic level, you have a product. So, this new management thinks about how to use this product in their strategy. You have pool of talents. So, they think about how to use, utilize those talents. And they think like long-term. My role was bridging this gap between those strategic decisions which were still, you know, in discussions basically. My work was to bridge that with leaders and the engineers, to translate that into their, basically day-to-day you know, activities. It’s very similar to the things which you do as a fresh manager in a company, yeah? So, what you’d need to do in the first 100 days, for example, yeah? So, I assume that you need to learn as much as possible about business or the product. You need to understand what are the problems of the company that you need to solve. And then, looking at your team, at the individuals, you need to find the best fit for their skills in the scope of problems that the company has. Like I said at the beginning, we are joining the company with some experience, with a track record, but, you know, we need to somehow build this credibility because this is just the potential and we need to find a way to utilize this potential, how to start providing the value.
So, basically, my 100 days were full of 1-on-1s with people in all of the positions, from software engineers to their managers, to the directors, to also product people, marketing people, data people and others, to build context. For example, one of the projects which I led at the very beginning post-acquisition was building front-end infrastructure because we realized that with the monolithic system which we had back then, we couldn’t move as fast as possible. And actually, this was one of the, you know, know-how which we brought to the organization because we did some kind of that stuff in the past. So, you know, next to those big strategic things, the product and the entire talent pool, we also brought some, you know, very specific experiences. And actually, there was a problem in the company which we could solve with that.
One and a half year later, I can say that our entire front-end application is built on top of micro front-ends. We have tens of those compared to the single one, one year ago. So, this went well. But, like I said, it had to start with understanding that this is the real problem of the company and we have resources, we have experience, we have people who can address just that. So, this was one of the two experiences I had at the beginning of the acquisition.
Kovid Batra: Perfect. I think, great job there, first of all. And, one thing that I feel is that when you have traveled this journey, there is always some looking back and saying, “Okay, I could have done this better.” Right? So is there anything of that sort, Mirek, which you think you could share as an experience with the audience that this is something that you could do better? Like broadly, I feel you did the best thing. And as Francis also said, first you have to understand the business, understand the need. That’s the very fundamental. And you got to that point rightly, having 1-on-1s and aligning the teams, bridging that gap, bringing everyone on board, right? So, this is amazing. But if there was anything else that you could have done, and whatever you did, if you could do it better in some or the other way.
Miroslaw Stanek: I think that one of the super-important things which I underestimated at the beginning is the quick merger of the, I would say, companies’ culture. So, as long as you have ‘us’ and ‘them’, and we work this way and they work that way, it’s super hard to navigate, yeah? So, you know, the truth is that usually bigger organizations that are more bureaucratic, more formalized are acquiring smaller organizations that usually move faster. But also, you know, they are moving faster and breaking.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there are pros and cons.
Miroslaw Stanek: Yeah. So, I think that those are the, you know, non-technical challenges that you should address from day one to bridge this gap, to stop talking ‘us’ versus ‘them’, to see how quickly we can become one organization focused on a single goal because rather than, you know, expecting the company to adjust to us, we need to find a way to influence, to bring our experience, to help change the culture which works for all of us, rather than saying, “Okay, we work this way. And then, now the new way is not that effective. So I cannot, you know, push anymore once a day because of this or that or that.” So, I think that my role as a leader would be to answer all of those questions. Why we cannot push as fast as we did in the past? Why we have more compliance rules? Why this or that? I think that this is the thing that I should do more at the beginning of that position. Just provide all of the needed context to the former team or the organization to help them become, you know, good, empowered employees of the new organization. This is it.
Francis Lacoste: I agree completely with what Mirek said, you know. I mean, and this is similar to what we would have done differently. I think for us, it took really, too long. We stayed like ‘us’ with ‘them’ for way too long. And I mean, it was still going on, you know, when I left Heroku. In my last year, it was kind of, this was what I was trying to get to the team. It was, we were looking, we don’t know what is Heroku’s mission. And I was kind of, look, we get briefed every year at the company kickoff, which is this big event that sells for us where we have the strategy of the year, you know, and we want to know what our business is. We need to listen to that and tell how we fit into that, where, what is our contribution. Salesforce is in the business of digital transformation. How do we help customers with their digital transformation? And they were cool as a big part to play with, like at development there, but the ‘us’ and ‘them’ is strong. And this is where I said at the beginning, you know, it’s an identity problem. And there’s kind of a, the acquisition, the fact that you’re successful because you’re, you know, you’re at an exit. Especially the funders are having a dip there. Usually you’re bought, you know, I mean, even if it’s not for the valuation you were expecting, you’re still, “Oh! We’re a big deal. We got acquired.” You know? And at that time, like I said, I wasn’t there at the acquisition, but when Salesforce had acquired Heroku, it was a big deal. I mean, in Acre News and all sorts of that, people were saying, “Oh, Heroku is acquired by Salesforce because it required a lot of creds.” And I’ve seen other acquisitions where there’s some sense of pride and arrogance as being the smaller being and, “We are a startup”. “We’re nimble”. We’re really, I mean, “We have traction.” “This is why we got acquired, so they should listen to us.” “We know a lot. They don’t.” You know? So, there’s some arrogance and pride there. But the truth is, you know, especially, the bigger the differential, we need to get some humility and really start to get interested around, okay, why is there this? Because bureaucracy, it’s, I mean, it’s funny. When I was thinking, well, Mirek, you know, usually what is appreciated by the startups is the HR policies of the bigger corporations because they have more formal, you know, they have better insurance, health insurance, all that. That’s usually, “Oh, this is great!” But then it says, “Okay, this is how you should deploy to production.” Because there’s compliance issues and usually the bigger one will have to deal with this. Oh no! So, we need, as startups entering this world to kind of really get the humility of, “Okay, we probably have something to learn from them and it’s on us to tell, to understand what are the pain points and how we can solve it, probably.”
I loved Mirek’s story around the front-end development. It’s a great example. There was a thing and this is how we can solve it. I mean, Heroku was not successful in that way. You know, I mean, we kind of knew how to do deployments and all of that, but we were not really able to solve the deployment problem for Salesforce as a whole, you know. And so, Salesforce created its own Heroku, you know. And because Heroku, we were not interested. So, the arrogance is at the leadership level. So, you need to be able to jump shit and.. That was ‘ship’, I’m a little sorry. You need to jump shit in a way and embrace the new culture because otherwise you become like very protective of what you have and that’s, I mean, down the line, it’s not good. I mean, you see it, usually people will stick for their golden end, their leaders stick for their golden handcuffs and then they leave, you know, because they were not able really to integrate and find the value in that. And the people who stayed are kind of miserable. So it’s, yeah.
Kovid Batra: Totally, totally. One thing you just mentioned around, like how that cultural difference plays a role at different aspects of how you are operating. So, it could be something related to the hierarchy. People moving from a team which is small to a large organization would be happy about the HR policies, as you just mentioned. So, I have had an experience of working with an MNC and I have had an experience of working with a startup, right? The problem is that everyone, even the MNCs want or a large-scale organization wants that the team should move faster, right? Of course, without breaking things. And startups usually move faster, even though they break things, but they move faster. So, when this cultural shift happens, a startup gets acquired by a large-scale organization, keeping the team motivated that has been, like working with such a good pace and releasing features, having that clarity on what they are doing, seeing that impact, how does that transition work? Like I need to understand some detail around that part, maybe. Francis, Mirek, any one of you can answer that, like how do you keep your teams motivated with the fact that, okay, now we were running at 100, it’s going to be 50 now, right? That things could slow down for us, and still you need to keep them motivated on that journey. How would you do that?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my experience during the acquisition, as an individual contributor, you either join the existing team. So, this is basically like you would be hired to this company. Or the other way is you stay as the entire team, as the entire entity, and you build your stuff and your job is only to expose an interface or any ways of integrating your stuff with the rest of the product, with the rest of the business. I think that the second scenario is easier because you can still build things in your way. You can still have your, you know, ceremonies, ways of working. Sometimes you even keep the entire, you know, SDLC process or the tech stack. This is nice, you are just taking care of exposing the API or the contract or whatever.
When you join the team as an individual, I think it’s a good exercise for the company which acquires to see how their onboarding processes worked for this particular person. So, I personally look at the things of.. How quickly you can commit to production? For example. How much you need to learn? Do you have those materials which you can learn from? And then, how can you utilize them to push even a one line change to production? If you touch the production, it’s a success because you went the entire way and then you can start generating the real value and expand.
Yeah. So, I personally assume that the best motivation to people is to give them the possibility to generate value. And like I said, those are two ways of, I would say, maximizing that, yeah? And this is basically my experience from the last one and a half years.
Kovid Batra: Totally. Totally makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. What’s your take on this, Francis?
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, I agree here again, you know. The choice between the two will depend. It’s not necessarily in your hands, unfortunately. You know, I mean, if you’re able to maintain autonomy, it will depend more on the context of the acquisition or if it’s like, “We want to keep this product.” And so, they won’t refactor the teams or they will try to maintain the team’s autonomy, at least for a while so that the product can continue to grow and develop, you know. If it’s, like more technical or a hiring acquisition, then you cannot really expect autonomy. And then leveraging the onboarding process and that. And it’s hard because I mean, you’re really changing things for folks. And the trick is that even with the autonomy, there’s a clock ticking. You might not be aware of it because there’s autonomy, but autonomy is, as always, an expiration date, you know? At Heroku, it was like a lot of years. For most of other acquisitions, usually it’s more like a year, 18 months, 6 months, you know, and then, there will be, you’re on a timeline. And what is tough there as a leader is that you’re expecting to continue building the product as you are and you’re expecting implicitly or explicitly to integrate with the rest of the engineering org. You want to get ahead of it. Even if it’s, like just in six months or a year, you want to start building the relationships to.. How is it that you’re doing planning? How is it that you’re pushing to production? What is the integration aspect? And while at the same time, keeping your team autonomous. But you want to initiate these relationships. Get ahead. I mean, this is what I would have liked to do.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah. I understand. And I think it’s good actually. See, setting the expectations brings a lot of more certainty to the situation and people get prepared for it. So, it definitely makes sense. First is that you give them that positive side of being there, keep them motivated and set the expectations right for the future so that they are prepared for it. So, I think that’s one good way of moving around like that.
Francis Lacoste: There’s something I want to add, you know, because I think I didn’t feel I really answered your question, initial question, which was about how we maintain the speed and agility, you know, of the original context. And this is the truth there, unfortunately, is that to maintain speed, you need autonomy. If you’re trying to centralize everything, this is when you centralize decision making, that things get slow and you get bogged down in, like, all of the coordination processes to make a decision. And this is what’s plaguing larger organizations. And so, there is an organizational philosophy at management. So, there is an uphill battle there because larger organizations that can move fast will add a lot of autonomy to the decentralized decision making. And that’s not really what is, like the common thinking in larger organization management. So, this is why it’s often unsuccessful. If you add up like the centralized decision making and the centralized process, you end up with these slow things. And that’s just the nature of it, you know, kind of. So, that’s the challenge.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, looking at the bright side would be the only option, like looking at the HR policies.
Francis Lacoste: And I mean, there are various.. The trick, and this is why I insist on relationship building because I mean, especially the larger organizations, the more they are, you can build some autonomy. Even though officially, there’s only a single way to do it, in practice, there will be multiple ways because of the history of acquisition and all of that. So, you can, if you know this, if you have the relationships when you did your training, your inventory of the lay of the land, then you know, okay, well, I can gain more time here and help steer that part of the organization into something that is more sane, you know. So, you can influence the culture, but you’re not going to transform it, you know, six months here. It’s like you’re starting a journey to nudge a little bit, the larger organization to work as a saner practice. We saw that at Heroku, especially around remote work. When I joined, it was to build a remote culture there. And when the pandemic hit, at Salesforce, the larger Salesforce organization, there was a lot of interest. Oh, what can we learn from Heroku? They’ve done that. So, our experience was welcomed and we were able to shift things, you know, in that area around remote work a little bit like Mirek was able to do around, like the front-end development. So, this is why understanding what the pain points are where we can contribute can help these micro-shifts.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. All right, moving on to one last piece of our discussion today around the acquisitions. This is a time of transition, turmoil, leaders themselves are figuring out that space, that foot into the new organization and trying to set up things with the existing team and the upcoming team. At this time, how do you think you can look at the efficiency of an engineering team? How can you go about measuring it? Or maybe, you should not measure it because there could be other aspects to look at at that point of time. How do you ensure that the people who are getting paid are delivering the value in that moment of transition? And how do you ensure that people are efficient?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my perspective, I take into consideration those four stages of team development, yeah? So, we have forming, storming, norming, and performing. And I assume that if the company is acquired, it’s major enough, fast-moving enough. So, I assume they are close to the ‘performing’ stage, yeah, where you measure the efficiency, speed, you can implement DORA metrics, you know, measure the number of deployments, whatever. But when you are acquired, I assume that you are coming back to the forming phase. So yeah, obviously, if you stay as a single team, single entity, you still can move really, really fast. You can keep deploying your stuff, you know, every single day to production. We are moving fast, but the question is if we are moving in the right direction, yeah? So, that’s why you can still keep measuring those things.
But I think that at the beginning, you know, of ‘forming’, you need to get to know people, company, business and everything. So, you understand how you can contribute to the company’s success rather than just moving fast in a totally random direction. So, I would come back to my answers from a few minutes ago. I would measure the onboarding time, basic stuff, how quickly you can, you know, come into production because, you know, you need to get access to your repositories, you need to go through all of the documentations and stuff like that. In the meantime, you know, just learning the company, learning the teams, your, you know, colleagues and everything. Then obviously, you will go to the ‘storming’ phase where everyone is debating on the ways of working and why we don’t work this way, but that way and so on. But, you know, after this turbulent time, then you can come back to the performing phase where you are optimizing, but only when you know that you are going in the right direction.
Kovid Batra: Makes sense. Perfect. Perfect. What’s your take on this, Francis?
Francis Lacoste: Well, what I’d add, again, it depends, you know. It’s really understanding how the acquiring organization answers that question because they probably already have a framework of how they’re thinking about performance, how they’re doing performance management, for instance. That’s also one of the usual sources of friction. We like the HR process, but not necessarily the performance, the way they do performance management, you know, because they have a very formalized one. Our smaller organization was always smaller. So in a way it’s kind of understanding how these questions are framed and processed at the bigger level. And then seeing, okay, how is that compatible with us? How are we going to need to adjust? And if you’re already doing that, you know, so that, because that will be an impedance mismatch that will need to be negotiated. And if you want to negotiate it, you’ll have to get ahead of it because otherwise the expectation will, you’ll just use ours.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, yeah.
Francis Lacoste: That’s very tough. The other around that question often it will be removing duplication. You know, it’s not so much, it’s everybody is busy because I mean, everybody’s busy in our company. Now, the question, like Mirek said, is kind of, “Are they busy on the right stuff?” And this is where I always recommend looking more for output, you know, what the outcomes are. I mean, not output, actually outcomes more than, like the busyness, you know, or our people’s time sheets or, you know, that, you know, oh, the number of pull requests or number of lines of code or all of these metrics which are kind of irrelevant in many ways.
But really, how is the business? Are we meeting our business outcomes? Giving transparency on how we’re making progress on those so that they can have conversations. But often, what happens is more kind of, you have a Platform Engineering team in your startup and we have a Platform Engineering, so we’re just going to merge those, you know, because obviously you should not have two Platform Engineering teams. I mean, that’s kind of naive, but it’s also a source of multiple confusion. But this is also a conversation you need to have, they’re going to come. So, you want to say, “Okay, what is this Platform Engineering team doing?” “What is their charter?” “How is it compatible with ours (or not)?” “Is merging really the right thing?” So, getting these collaborations going between peers at the startup and the bigger. If the teams have talked and have kind of an idea, when the Execs come in and say that you need to merge, you can actually say, “Well, actually, this is how we think we should be doing it.” And then, it’s much easier because the people with the maximum understanding of the context of the deals are able to weigh in on the decision.
Kovid Batra: Yeah. So here, let’s take your example here, Francis, when Heroku merged into Salesforce, there must be certain performance practices you would have already taken up, right? And then, there must be something that Salesforce enforces on the team, right? There must be some clashes over there. Can you give us an example of that? And how did you, as a leader, navigate your team and align them with that? So, it completely changes the way you are thinking, how you’re incentivized to do something in a team, right? And if that happens, it’s a big shift, according to me. How you handle that would be something that I would like to know.
Francis Lacoste: Yeah. I mean, two examples of that were, like the performance management, which I mean, Salesforce didn’t have a very formal one at the beginning. It came in later. But it required this one. The way they do promotions and things like that. So it’s kind of, okay, we need to align more with that. And it was about understanding this process & understanding how we do things. And then, there’s a phase where it’s about how we can continue to keep the spirit and the principles we have in that different process and hybridize the two. Another one was the career ladders. So, we had our own career ladders. And then, there’s kind of the, okay, well, these are the different roles. Harmonizing that. Often, I mean, the biggest job was managing expectations on both sides. Basically what we had was like an interpretation. This is that level. Here’s what that level means here. And you were seeing that even though officially, that’s kind of, you should not be doing that. I mean, the HR folks really hate that. But in practice, contexts are different and you need to have that adaptation. So, even though it was not recognized, it was happening all over the organization. It’s not like just a group who were doing that, but other teams also when they’re, kind of doing commentary on the official career ladder.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, of course. That’s there. Great, guys. I am out of my questions for now. It was lovely discussing all these challenges with you and having a discussion on all those practical tips that you shared. Any parting advice from both of you for the engineering leaders who are in a similar situation, what they should be doing, what they should be taking as next steps?
Miroslaw Stanek: So, from my perspective, I would say that your role as a leader is to find a good match between the skills you are bringing to the new company. You know, your team, the know-how the solutions, the product, to the problems which the new company has. And start, you know, start by doing that. Start by showing what’s the value of your stuff in the context of a new reality. And the quicker you sort it out, the quicker you become, you know, successful in a new organization.
Francis Lacoste: That’s a very good tip. So, two things for me. The first, most practical one is get the conversation going, you know, look at the org chart and find people who are in similar roles or where you can see that oh, if I were to look at this and it looks similar and I want to merge these things, start talking with those teams to get your team to actually start talking to these teams, just to get to know each other, to learn from each other, that sort of thing. Very informal kind of thing. It is just to encourage cross-organization conversations because that makes everything easier afterwards. You get to know people, you get to relate to them as humans. They’re not like a dam who wants to eat you or things like that. So, just encourage, multilateral conversation between similar roles and similar teams, between engineers, well, across the org. So, conversations. Then, same thing with the leader.
The other aspect that I say is kind of, keep in mind that there’s an identity shift that needs to happen, you know, from “we are this company” to “we are this bigger company”. The mission is changing, that sort of thing. And when there is an identity shift, there will be a grieving process, you know, because you’re losing an identity and you’re embracing a new one. So, be prepared to accompany the people in that journey, you know, of kind of losing the, “Oh, this is how we were.” And, “This is our startup times.” And things like that. The loss of that, because it’s a real loss, it will be an emotional impact. And then, so kind of acknowledging it and normalizing it, supporting people through it and embracing, helping them to embrace the bigger identity, “Hey, this is the new mission. This is bigger. We can do more things together.”
Kovid Batra: Totally. I think both of you, thanks a lot for such great piece of advice. Can’t thank you enough. Let’s keep this passion of contributing to the community going and let’s build great dev teams together, man.
Francis Lacoste: Thank you so much, Kovid, for providing this space.
Kovid Batra: Thanks.
Miroslaw Stanek: Thank you.
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