Eric Müller

Bringing on a DevOps team is challenging, particularly with what I do. No one's going to hire me and my team to have a full-time DevOps person for the length of the project. They need that DevOps person, but they don't need them 40 hours a week for 20 weeks. It's hard to keep someone busy, particularly when maybe two or three projects have to start at once. How do I scale that?

And because the nature of DevOps goes up and down, how do I ensure that I can get hired guns back? Because I don't want to constantly meet new people and get them used to the way that we work and teach them how we're using Terraform. But if I don't have them on my staff, I have no guarantee I'll ever see them again, no matter how much they like working with me.

DevOps is just the hardest area to manage, to scale, to keep those people engaged, to keep them busy, to justify that expense. And I think you have to get to a certain size before that becomes an easier lift.

There are a number of folks that I have worked with, not just at Presence, but at other companies who I brought on board, I mentored them, and they've gone on to do great things. I know folks who are running their own engineering teams now. I know folks who started their own consultancies.

I know folks who just went to other companies that are doing the same thing, but they wanted to be on the product side. That just makes me so proud. There's just something about helping someone grow and that they get to a point where they feel like they can't learn anything more from me. It's sad on one hand, right?

But on the other hand, it makes me feel good because it's like they've gone as far as they could and they want to go somewhere else. They want to run their own team now. And I'm very proud of that.

I remember one time where we had a deadline, we had overcommitted. This is when I was actually working a mechanism and we had overcommitted. There was an expectation that the work was going to be, that we were going to get a release out that day. And everyone was willing to work till midnight. But the expectation was we're going to get the release out. And it's about two o'clock in the afternoon.

And I'm sitting at my desk. The product manager has his desk next to me. And everyone's freaking out. We're all mostly working in the office at the time. And I called everyone over to my desk with the product manager. And I looked at everyone. I remember the look on this guy's face. I looked at everyone and I said, all right, we're clearly not going to launch.

And the product manager raised his eyebrow at me. And I said, we're not doing this. We're not going to get this done. And I said, so let's just take a deep breath. Let's figure out what the problem is. How do we solve this? And we'll launch when we launch. And I was quite serious, actually. I was going to go to our boss and say, I'm sorry. We did our best then. It's on me. And it is what it is.

That moment, my willingness to say, look, I screwed up. It's on me. It's all good. It took the pressure off of them. And suddenly people are relaxed, identify the source of the problem. And we actually launched. Not every mistake or error has that kind of a happy ending. But I think the key for me in any mistake as a leader is to own it. You have to own it. You put the team together.

You made the commitments for your team. If you are in a bad situation, you let it get that far. So you got to own it. When you own it, that takes the pressure off of the team. And now you have a chance to fix it.

There was this guy by the name of Brian Gilpin years and years and years ago when I was working at Wells Fargo Bank. I was very early in my career. There was an HR situation with one of his staff members. I believe he basically put his career on the line to take care of this person. I don't remember the names of everyone I worked with from all those years ago, but Brian's name is still there.

That he was willing to go that extra mile to take care of this person is mind-blowing to me. To this day, it still is. And that level of commitment to his people has just stuck with me, obviously. The next person is someone by the name of Ron Lichty. We actually worked together at Charles Schwab and then he went over to Razorfish and he hired me over at Razorfish. And he has this amazing empathy.

He's an agile coach, and he helps build teams and solve problems. But the thing that really struck with me around him is his empathy for his team, his empathy for clients, for his partners. He was always calm. He always had a smile. He was a technologist. He could think through problems. And I've just always tried to bring that empathy that Ron had and that passion for the people that Brian had.

Those two people together, I think, really helped inform the way that I manage people today.

One, this is so cliche, but don't forget to stop and smell the roses. It's so easy to get caught up in your next big thing. And I think when you have that passion, work on it for a while. However, take a step back. Make sure every once in a while you're catching your breath. Your kids are young for only so long. You don't want to turn around.

You missed when they learned how to walk or you weren't there. You skipped a bunch of Halloweens, take them trick-or-treating and stuff like that. Your product can afford to miss a couple of those days so that you can have those special moments that never come back.

The second thing I would say is get a skeptical eye to come in and take a look at whatever you have that you're ready to launch to the world. Get someone that you know is going to be honest with you and is not worried about hurting your feelings.

You don't want them to be a jerk, but you also don't want them to be like, oh gosh, I don't want to tell my buddy that this isn't really hitting for me, right? No, no. You want someone who's going to be willing to look at the product and say, you know what? You need to rethink this portion. You know what? You need maybe a couple more months to make this. You want that person.

You want someone who's going to be willing to give you those truths. And you don't want to surround yourself with yes people.