Ady Levy: Tech Leadership Chronicles: Challenges and Strategies

Matt

My name is Matt, and I will be talking to Ady Levy about management during uncertain times in cultural evolution in tech workplaces. Hey, Ady, happy to have you here today.

Ady Levy

Happy to be here, Matt.

Matt

I don't like the introduction, so I just start right away with the questions. So I was in Tel Aviv just before the war started a while ago, and I talked with many leaders there and it always fascinated me, like the impact of the army that it has on technical leaders there. So you learn a lot from army.

You learn a lot. It has a huge influence on your careers. And the people are saying a lot about the upside of the army. And I'm wondering in your case or your experiences or the experiences that you have seen from maybe other leaders or engineers, what are the downsides of being in an army?

Ady Levy

Wow, that's a good question, actually. Like in my career, I've interviewed quite a few army people, like people that went and did some significant service in the army. And what I've learned, and it's from my experience, is that at the end of the day, people say army and technical units, the army has a lot of units and a lot of different approaches to code, but at the end of the day, like the top notch ones, which are handful and not all of them are there, they use like a closed garden kind of frameworks, such as.net, such as Java, and kind of things that the day to day startups are using. Myrn are using like open source frameworks with Mongo react, those kind of things. And people in the army, and I'm not saying all of them, but like some very sophisticated unit would use like other frameworks. So they're coming up and they're building their startups as a civilian after they leave the army. And then the grounds of the startup are things that they got used to in the army.

That's, I think, is the downside of not using the open source community that is blossoming these days. And, you know, where you can boilerplate an entire startup with just few clicks. Right. But for the good engineers, it's easy because writing code and reading code is like a book at the end of the day. So.

Matt

Yeah, and that's interesting, like, let's say legacy approach. So I haven't heard that before. And let's talk more about your experience. And I really like to ask you a difficult question. So I'm just wondering, could you tell me about your recent disagreement that you had with your, your engineering team?

Ady Levy

So my managing approach usually is data driven, and any disagreements that I would have with my team with my managers is mainly about philosophies, about way to do things in the architectural level. And then we go to research to learn, to understand, to provide a technical justification for why that approach versus that approach. We kind of try to bring up, you know, from the Internet data about people that use that approach or that approach and what is best for our situation. So I had quite a few as a manager in this industry for more than a decade. But usually if someone comes with not, that's my feeling and I want to go this way because this is my gut feeling, or justify it with, but I've seen a, B and C, then, you know, it's a valid agreement and then we would be good.

Matt

You joined your current company just before world standard, so I'm just wondering how this impacted your work. How have you adjusted the team to the new reality?

Ady Levy

Yeah, so I joined the coin company mid September. So I had like two, three weeks just before the world started. And we are a young company in terms of the people that we have in the company. So when the war started, we had 15 people that were called to reserve duty. And so we had to do reshuffling throughout the teams and move people to accommodate the situation that we had. We didn't know how long it's going to last and people need to learn new stuff of their new team. And, you know, we moved QA persons from side to side and we adjusted.

People's feelings during those situations are super delicate and we kind of like really gave emphasis talking with the managers to talk and be there for the teams and be strong together as a group. So we needed some time to adjust. And once we started to adjust and we saw that the situation is not going to end anytime soon, I've reached out to a few of my former offshore companies that I've worked with, and I added a few offshore developers to the teams to kind of strengthen the technical capabilities of those team. At the end, we didn't want our velocity to be affected by it and we had to kind of think out of the box to get out of the situation. We're seven months in and I still have one person in reserve duty.

Just imagine that. Right? And he's going to get back in three weeks and the team is super excited and waiting for him. So. Yeah.

Matt

And you mentioned you used the help from the offshore team that you have now. And I'm wondering because you worked for many years and we, during our last discussion, you told me about the different combination, different variations of the team setups that you have in house offshore. And I'm just wondering about your approach to building the culture and working with offshore teams. So what are your best practices after so many years?

Ady Levy

Yeah, so as you said, it's more than twelve years that I'm working with offshore developers throughout the world. I led teams in Ireland, in Ukraine, Russia, even in Siberia, so all over the world. And my approach for offshore teams are to include them, to make them feel like they're part of the team and have them in all the team sessions in the R and D, weekly sessions in the company, all hand connect them to the company, make them feel like, you know, they're a remote employee that is working for us, rather than just, you know, set a project and say, hey, Matt, can you deliver that and talk to me in one month? No, have them be in the dailies. Have them go over, pull requests with their colleagues, you know, make them be part of the team. And by doing that, it's a win win situation, because, you know, we're people. And at the end, you need a goal.

You don't want to feel like, you know, you're a code monkey writing code, just, you know, to live your life. People want, you know, satisfaction and to feel the fulfillment that they're doing something for the company they work with. And that's my goal there is really to change the attitude of the entire company. Because we're an Israeli company that we're being acquired by a US company and we have like, US offices and so on, but like, the Israeli office used to speak Hebrew in the dailies, in the weeklies and so on. So we made a shift. We'll talk in English in all of those meetings because we included those offshore developers and whatever teams that awoken with us. And it works.

Matt

Let's get a bit more about the culture building and integration. So during our last call, when we are preparing for this interview today, we discussed and agreed that we are getting old, like, both of us. So, like, there is like the generation.

Ady Levy

For pointing it out. Thank you.

Matt

We both. So, I mean, like, there is a lot of generational change on the people with whom we work.

Ady Levy

Right?

Matt

So the one funny story that I think we discussed was, I remember, like, eight years ago when I was or I was built, like, doing the integration party, we had beers and we have pizza. So today, like, we have pizza, but nobody is drinking.

Like, almost nobody's drinking alcoholic beers. They are. The people are switched to, like, non alcoholic beers. So, I mean, this is like a small thing, but, like, there's a lot of changes with the generation. And I'm wondering, how do you approach the culture building and integration, especially when you have such a generational shift? Right.

Ady Levy

Yeah, it's actually like we had a very long discussion about it, and I remember myself, you know, as a junior developer coming to a happy hour, drinking, you know, a few beers, getting back home, you know, wasted and really enjoying the cultural part of it. And as, as we both mentioned today, people are not drinkers at work. You know, it's, it's not common and at some countries it's not allowed even, you know, but I think, like, the parting shift is, is going towards more of other cultural building activities, such as, you know, yoga classes and activities in the office to start the day, sometimes bringing people together for, you know, hackathons every once in a while and you can set the cadence to every quarter or whatever. That's a really fun activity with, you know, prize at the end, which joins people from different edges of the office together from CS support and RMd. So it's not your team that is working. It's kind of like opening up and going out and doing some fun stuff. Like we, we went to pick fruits altogether and then enjoy the sun and, you know, it's, it's also like team builder activity.

So, yeah, it's a shift, but don't take me wrong. There's pizzas and people are eating pizzas in the office, but no boo is next to it. Right? Usually we offer beers, but, like, there's just a few that are drinking them.

Matt

And you mentioned before that you currently work in a company that is post acquisition. It's like a post acquisition period. So I'm just wondering because those are not easy times and you have a lot of, like, integration work and a lot of has a lot of changes and you need to adapt yourself and the team. So I'm wondering if you could tell. Tell us more about your experience post acquisition. I mean, how do you do the things differently after the acquisition? The impact on your work and on your.

You already mentioned you have the meetings, for instance, in English. Be more, including other people, maybe some.

Ady Levy

Other meeting English were there, like before. I always worked, like, in companies that are spread and so on, but there's cultural differences that, you know, you need to kind of be aware of when speaking to an american team, with speaking to people, people in other places in Europe and so on. Like, what can you say? What you cannot and. But I think the main thing, if we put aside culture, is the company's vision and focus. A company pre acquisition is focused on growth is focused on, you know, other metrics than post acquisition. Post acquisition is more about efficiency, is more about, you know, taking the fat out of, you know, processes and defined processes and things to be as efficient as possible that at the end will drive growth rather than growth at all cost, just to.

So to show that the graphs are climbing and show it to investors or potential buyers. Right. I think it's a parting shift for the people working in a company to understand that the goals have changed, that the KPI's that we measure are changing and what are the main focus that we want right now is, I don't know whether it's to make our customer super happy and reduce churn and make sure that retention is like a higher priority than we used to or those kind of things. Right. And so, yeah, there's work to be done and there's also team changes after an acquisition. We had a restructure just, you know, a few months back to accommodate the company goals that have changed.

Matt

As you probably noticed. I really like difficult questions, so I just really wanted Ali ask you about what was the hardest thing in your career that you have ever done. Could you tell me about this experience?

Ady Levy

There's a lot of bugs that were hard to fix. That took me, you know, night and days. But I think, like, as a manager, which I think that's where you're referring to, I think the hardest thing is layoffs. And I've unfortunately encountered few events in my career that I had to kind of say goodbye to people that I liked and I loved working with. One event that I can't forget is that after four and a half years of building a startup, we got to a conclusion that we need to shut down. And no matter how we looked at the graphs, we couldn't see a way to kind of get out of the mess we were at. We still had money at the bank, but we wanted to say goodbye nicely to all of the people we worked with, friends, people that, you know, holded hands together for a few years and to kind of come and look at their eyes and say, listen, we're shutting down.

That was a really hard thing that I've done, like, and I can't forget. And, yeah, unfortunately, that's our industry. You know, those events make you stronger and you learn a lot from those. But, yeah, that's definitely the hardest thing that I've learned.

Matt

Let's talk a bit about the AI, because this is definitely, like, a hot topic.

Ady Levy

Really? What is AI?

Matt

What is AI? Yeah, exactly. No, I'm just, I'm just trying to think about the approach that the companies are having to AI because everybody, especially the investors, they are pushing something around.

Ady Levy

AI and like there's like a huge.

Matt

Cost of it, right? There's like a huge cost of it. And you know, you can use the simple algorithm algorithms sometimes versus AI, but nobody is aware of it. So I'm just wondering, what is your approach here?

Ady Levy

Yeah, so first I'm super enthused around AI. When, you know, chat GPT started, I kind of identified the disruption that is going to do for our industry and I kind of pushed it with all of my power in the previous that I worked with and in the current because I think that AI at the end of the day gives superpowers for very talented people and you need to learn how to use it. And that's my philosophy. And people are afraid of it. Even talented people, they're afraid of it. They look at this beast and they say, what is it?

How can I use it? So, and that's, by the way, side note, and I've mentioned the hackathons. We just had a great, very significant hackathon in my current company that kind of brought AI closer to people and have kind of experimented with it and saw the magnificent things that you can do with Aih. But like going back to your question, I think like at the end of the day, a manager and whoever is using AI for software development need to ask himself, do I really need to use AI here? Because like can I solve the problem with just, you know, a like query of the, on the database or a simple if else, or I should go out and ask Chachi Pt, you know, something? And because there's cost for those things and people are sometimes putting AI at all costs, putting AI just to kind of Mark AI on their flags and say to their investors to, I don't know, people that are interested in the company. I'm an AI company.

But at the end of the day, you could have just created a switch case and solved the issue. You're not really using AI, you just hacked yourself to use AI. So I'm trying to be pragmatic and I'm trying to ask the question, can we solve it differently? Do we really need to use AI? Like what's an algorithm versus going to chat GPT or whatever LlMdez and use it for the purpose that, you know, the product asked? So it's, it's a real question that we ask ourselves on a daily basis, you know, and sometimes, and I can tell you, I've got like a tech lead that got a task that to begin with, it taught. That's an AI task.

And then he came to me, very sad, actually, and said, listen, I managed to solve it without AI. I really wanted to use AI, but I just found a library that I can use that does the same. What should I do? I told them, great, you find a way to solve the issue with no AI. Let's do it without AI. He was disappointed because he wanted to touch and put his hands in the mud. But at the end of the day, you know, you need to and think of whether that's the place to put AI at.

Matt

Yeah. Be pragmatic. It's a good approach.

Ady Levy

Yeah.

Matt

And the last question that I'm asking all of my guests, can you recommend any books, resources, conferences that have been particularly helpful to you as a tech leader?

Ady Levy

Yeah. So let's go to books, because there's two books that really I can recommend. One is probably, I'm not the first to recommend the lean startup by Eric Reece. It's a great book that I recommend anyone walking in the startup industry to read. It really gives, you know, the ideas behind how to build an MVP or something lean and not go full Shebang. But recently I've read Dye with Zero by Bill Perkins.

And you read this book?

Matt

Yeah, I absolutely love it.

Ady Levy

It's a great book. I think, like, really, it's, it's a provoking approach to how to manage your personal finance and life planning because, like, you know, it's, it's, at the end of the day, it's a weight between how I'm going to live my life and, and what do I want to put for my future, for my kids future, rather than what I want to do today, where I'm young, where I have the power, where my kids are young. So I think it's about setting an equation equation that the experiences that you have in life are like equities. You need to treat it as such. And I recommend people go read this book. It's kind of like mind shifting approach to life and how you can enjoy life without running after your money and living this rat race that we all are at. Right?

Matt

Awesome. Thank you very much for the recommendation and all your necessary thoughts on the question that we have today. I really appreciate today's.

Ady Levy

Thank you for having me.

Matt

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