Chris Lowe: Cultivating a Strong Engineering Culture - Strategies and Stories

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Matt

My name is Matt and I will be talking with Chris Lowe about effective strategies for building a strong engineering culture and insights on leveraging consulting experience in corporate leadership. I think before we start our short conversation today and the interview, it would be great if you could give, give like a brief introduction to yourself.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I'm Chris Lowe.

I'm the vice president of application engineering currently at a commercial insurance company called Amerisure Insurance. We're headquartered in Metro Detroit here in the United States and in this function I lead all of our software development and maintenance activities, our automation and cloud adoption, and most recently starting some of our AI. What does it mean for us as a company? Pretty much just like every other company in the world nowadays. Prior to Amerisure, I did spend 14 years at USA, which is a Fortune 100 financial services company focused on the military. So banking, insurance, auto, home and life and annuities. So a lot of different products.

And then outside of the both of these corporate roles, I've also started and exited two consulting companies along the way. A lot of different experiences that I plan on touching on today that I think will be really interesting for your audience.

Matt

Amazing, thank you for that. And the first question that I want to ask you, it's related to your experience of course, but you implemented the solutions on quite a big scale because on a USA before you influence the insurance and banking services, banking products for the military, which is a huge kind of market to serve.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, it's big group.

Matt

Yeah, yeah.

Matt

So and, and you implemented a few innovation, innovative experiences and even you had some patents for example you mentioned to me like medical records on a blockchain, which is kind of like an innovative, innovative thing. So I'm just wondering in your case if you have a problem to solve and you handle it with reading innovative solutions, how do you approach it? How do you choose, you know, the tech stack to serve those, those clients that you had?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I think this is where some of my consulting experience and background came in.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Which is really thinking about how do you find the right answer to the problem that the business has or your customers have and matching that back with the technology stack either depending on your constraints, maybe it's make it work on something we have now, or if it's a little more blue sky or greenfield as they say, then you can think about what is the best technology for this, the best of breed technology. I do think there's a difference when we start talking about innovation versus invention. So everyone in the world can innovate on something, I have a new idea or instead of clicking this button, maybe I can do this instead and I don't have to click that button at all anymore.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

This incremental change I think is really what drives a lot of that value. And including our work on the blockchain, just give you a little bit more of an example right Back in the, in the 2000s and 2010, blockchain got, got very popular and there's a lot of hype around it. And you know, we saw a lot of companies kind of move to say what are we going to do with blockchain? And you know, USA was no exception in terms of thinking about how could this apply to us in a financial services industry. And you know, I think we saw that there was a lot of hype, but not a whole lot of fruit that, that beared out of that. And once the hype died down, you got into some very valuable, meaningful applications. There were a lot fewer.

Many companies ruled it out because it wasn't valuable to them, but what was left was some really valuable things. One example that might be familiar, familiar to many, many people is, is there's actually a belief that Apple uses blockchain as part of their encryption process for end to end imessage encryption. So how they, how they encrypt their text messages, you know, potentially is with this very powerful blockchain technology underneath. And if I just take it a step further, I think AI is going through something very similar right now, right? This whole gen AI movement and AI in general been around for a while with AI, but we see a lot of hype right now, a lot of noise. I saw you had just recently posted a new study that just came out on massive investments but without a whole lot of results coming back yet. And I think the thing that I worry about the most is in the hype you tend to lose some of the foundational things that make good technology decisions, right?

The engineering practices, the product market, fit ideas around. Is this the right thing to do? And those still matters, right? And I think effective leaders and engineers, whether you're in the consulting world or even in the corporate world, they have to be able to talk about both and good ones do that, right? To balance, here's all the things that have to be true before we have this right technology, while also, you know, getting us to this point of keeping up with the market, the industry, the hype, the innovation, right? It's finding, finding that balance is the most critical.

Matt

Thank you for that. I really like your approach that you always start from the problem. And you, you emphasize this so because the blockchain, it could be seen, or back then it could be seen as something like really on. On a hype. Right. But you always start with the, with the problem. And, and the second question I wanted to ask you is around your experience exactly.

With the agency and consulting. So you mentioned you, you work on an agency on a consulting side, you make some exit there. And I'm just wondering how this experience shaped you and how this helped you with the current or the previous role.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And I've been driven by this quote from Steve Jobs as the founder and CEO of Apple. And he said, I want to say it was in the mid 2000s, he had a quote that was, you know, Apple sits at the intersection of technology and fine arts, or liberal arts, I believe. And so, you know, it's about being in this crossroads, right, Where I have this experience. Right. We could be a technology company, but if the technology company doesn't consider anything else, right. Any other industries or how it kind of mashes together, then. Then it's.

It's not as valuable.

Matt

Right?

Chris Lowe

And that's what's really driven me as part of that consulting experience and then bringing it back into the corporate world is I've gained experiences for things that I never would have, would have thought about or talked about before. One example I'll give you when I was in the consulting space is we built an app for the state of Colorado. The Department of Natural Resources, which runs all the park systems in the state, wanted to build a system and a platform for hikers and skiers and people that are out in the mountains and in the fields to report back. Kind of a distributed way to say, what are the conditions like today?

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

The state doesn't have enough employees to go into every mountain range or every hill or walking trail and say, is it good? And so they wanted to leverage the power of the crowd to do that. And so we built an application and a platform to help them do that. And one of the things that I love the most about it is I got to go and interview, you know, hikers and skiers. And as somebody that's not really an outdoorsy person, you know, I got to learn this whole new world that existed way outside of my purview. And I think that's the power of. Of consulting, right?

As you get to experience a lot of different slices of life and then bringing back that. Bring that back into the corporate world. I really think about three, three Things, you know, there's a, there's a phrase out there that says the luckiest one, the luckiest people are the ones that work the hardest. Right. So the ones that, that try the most, try new things, try different things. Maybe we're innovating or inventing or we just want to put out really high quality work tend to be luckier at, at getting things started or getting new opportunities or being on that bigger project. And in the consulting world, especially having started the consulting company, you know, if, if you don't put in the work, you don't grow, right?

It doesn't happen. It just, it just doesn't, doesn't happen that way. And so bringing that back into the consult, into the corporate world, you really get to focus on, I'm going to drive, right. That entrepreneurial or entrepreneurial spirit, I think is one thing. The second thing is that you never have perfect information. You make the best choice you can at the time. And coming from consulting, there's a couple different frameworks that are out there.

You can easily look them up on YouTube. McKinsey has quite a few videos out there on how they structure strategic research. So being able to problem solve and not rush in, especially in an engineering context, not rush in to start coding right away, right. If I don't understand the problem or how we're going to bring the solution to market, it doesn't really matter. And so that really was meaningful to me in a consulting space. Now, as an executive for over a software group, it's not about the software that my team builds, it's about the value and solutions we provide back to the business. And then the last piece I would say is the curiosity about outcomes.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

So if you care deeply about the problem you're trying to solve, we had one vendor that we work with that sends us a survey every year, right. Say, how are we doing as a partner for you? And they ask, are we considered a vendor, an implementer or a partner? And they really strive to be the partner level of things because it goes beyond contracts and dollars and people and more about, we're going to solve this shared problem together because we really care about your work. And so I think again, bringing all those back in from a consulting context makes for a really successful, you know, individual contributor, but also leaders right. In the engineering space. And it's been great for me.

Matt

I'm very sure you run the team of around 200 people together with contractors, more or less, am I correct?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, we're running right now. I've got about 60 FTEs and about 120 or so third party contractors.

Matt

Okay. And regarding the culture, this is interesting to me, like based on what you said, probably you have some kind of set of things or rules that are important for you regarding the culture and like, what is it? And like, you know, how do you implement it with the engineering? What is your approach here?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, I'm a huge advocate for culture. And it's actually one of the first assignments that I picked up when I joined the company was kind of leading the banner charge for this engineering culture that we needed to establish because that's really in the modern world for a technology company or a company that wants to leverage technology the best. They have to have really robust engineering cultures. We have to care about the problems that we have today, but also how are we going to, how is that going to scale and be solved for 2, 3, 4, 5 years, maybe 10 years from now? And how do we keep it current?

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

We keep all of our technology up to date. And so I think the culture comes in a couple different ways. First is you have to have a mix of what I would call a groundswell and a top down approach. So I can't show up to my teams and say, you know, guys, today we're going to be collaborative culture. This is our new culture. We're collaborative.

Matt

Right, Right.

Chris Lowe

I think as you address engineering culture and just culture in general from a top down perspective, you really have this concept of the shadow of the leader.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

So does the leader model good behaviors? Do they talk about the things that matter to them? When I talk to my engineering leaders that report to me, we often talk about, if you're not asking your team how well they're doing in code reviews or design reviews or how well are they working with architecture. I don't expect my leaders to be doing code reviews.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

I don't need them to be doing that. We have a solid engineering team that can do that and the leads should do that. But if the managers never ask about it or they never talk about it, then we don't actually have the insight to know are we doing the right things, are we healthy in what we're doing? And so I think asking those questions, being passionate, like I just mentioned in the last example, being curious about how we solve these problems, whether it's a business problem or you know, hey, how do we, how are we solving this API design so that we know there's a new system coming next year, how is it, how are we going to replace the old system with the new system for this, right? These, these maybe somewhat simple or basic questions get people to think about these problems, but also sets the tone that, oh, this is something we should all be mindful of. And so when, when I, for example, I've. I've been working on taking my AWS solution Architecture certification, and whenever I'm talking with my teams, like, you know, could be a college hire, for example, I talk about my continuing education, right?

The way that I continue to invest because again, as a shadow of the leader concept, if they see me investing in myself and learning new things and talking about how excited I am about this Gen AI course I just took, then it reinforces that, A, not only is it okay and they should do that too, but. But B, that's the kind of culture we want because the leaders are doing it too. You know, the other thing that I think leaders can control is the incentive model. So, you know, are our objectives aligned to a better engineering culture in this example? Are your goals to do that? Are the people we're promoting championing the right culture for us? Because people watch and they know, like, if that person over there gets promoted, but they're really kind of a jerk to work with, then we're telling everybody else, like, if you're really good at coding, it's okay if you're a jerk, because that's what we value is more productive output, right?

And so the incentive model is really important to get right from the Bottoms up perspective. Where I think the culture really changes is you find the people that care, right? You find the people that want to do better. So we have a lead engineer that we hired last year that had a ton of Net experience.

We're a Net shop. And so, you know, he came in and he. We asked him to do an assessment. What's our code base look like for a bunch of our different systems? And he had a whole host of recommendations of things.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

That we should do. And so we spent six months empowering him with. We brought in new tools, new processes, we changed one of our approval processes to align to the feedback that somebody who was passionate enough to care about this process and gave us feedback, we enabled them, right? So now we're showing that other people who have ideas we want them to speak up to, you know, so removing their obstacles, we're getting them power in their voice helps with that groundswell, right? Because now not only are we setting the right measurements to say you're successful if you're working this way, but now we're giving them the tools to do that.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And now they're feeling empowered. And then I think the last piece of this is giving them an outlet to leadership, right? If you're on the floor, do I, do I feel like I can go to my, you know, my boss's boss or can I go all the way up to the CIO and express some opinion about how I think things should be done? So the open borders, the open doors, the transparency into leadership and getting your voice heard and that we actually take, take the feedback and do something with it. I can't fix everything, of course, but you know, especially if there's multiple people feeling a certain way, we should, we should listen and adjust to that. I think that's how you drive and enable that engineering culture.

Matt

The examples that you gave during the top down approach about like knitting, but by example. It's really funny because yesterday I talked with my wife and you are thinking like how to convince like kids to do something like to have like healthy habits, for instance, right? We noticed that our daughter, she's ordering the water instead of like the can of Coke, right? During when we go for lunch in compared to other kids. And even like, you know, she, she has the ability to do it. But like this is lead by example because each time me or my wife, when we go for lunch, we order our water and she's doing the same despite of this that the other kids are doing. This is like really simple, like a human behavior, I think.

And the same with the top down approach, right? You lead the example. We show like the culture by doing the things so. And you cultivate it. So it makes a lot of sense.

Chris Lowe

I think, I think two things just real quick on that. One is, you know, naturally there is a psychological element where people want to fit in, right? They don't want to, they don't want to stand out from the crowd. Generally just kind of our human innate, right? If you stand out, then sometimes bad things happen, right? You get picked on or you get called out, right? Like in.

And you see it in, you know, herds of animals and you know, in the, in Africa and things where the ones that. The slowest gazelle kind of thing, right. They want to be in the crowd. And so, so you're looking for those groups around you, right? Where are other people doing? And then I think to your point, as you model that behavior, it's also reinforcing, right? It's very easy for us to say, I don't like that thing, right?

You shouldn't get a Coke every time we go to lunch. But we spend Significantly less time saying, hey, great job in getting that water. I really like that you're thinking about the choices you make.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And that reinforcement behavior goes a long way.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

To say, I like this, and that's what I'm promoting for other people. That's a great example.

Matt

And I have a feeling that you have really interdisciplinary experience.

Matt

Right.

Matt

But there are a lot of domains that are so different and grow. So you cannot be expert in everything.

Chris Lowe

Right.

Matt

So I'm just wondering what is your approach to get doing the trust to achieve the outcomes that you want when you are not an expert in a certain area?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's nearly impossible to be an expert in everything. So. So you'll come across this quite a bit. And especially, you know, if I go back to my consulting time, you know, I worked in six different verticals or industries, and so coming from, you know, financial services and insurance, when I'm trying to advise, you know, a partner in oil and gas industry, for example, we had some projects there I had to do. I had to do a lot of research.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

I think that the first and most important thing is you have to look, you have to try to make sure that you're putting in the work.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

If people can see that you are becoming knowledgeable of their space, then you demonstrate that you care. And even if you're not the expert, I think you also get a pass in some regards where people see that you're trying.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Hey, I read this article or I took this class. I'm trying to understand your world. They become a lot more patient and a lot more open to those conversations and what's happening. And people love talking about their space and what they do. And so if you're curious, you know, I think those doors open really well, especially if there are areas you don't really know anything about. Or maybe you have, you know, leadership oversight, but I can't necessarily drive their outcomes. Again, doing that research first and understanding as much as you can about the domain is critical.

I think you then come with ideas, right? You come with ideas and not solutions. So I don't understand your domain. But, you know, as I used that example before of that intersection, like with Apple and technology and liberal arts, right. That I have this idea, you know, I did this thing in my other role or in another life, I did, I did this, this thing, and I wonder if it would work here.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Is you kind of offer solutions, but you're, you're soliciting the experts and the people that that report to you in, in this example for their advice and could this work? And, and you know, you could challenge them if they're saying oh that will never work here.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

As, as a leader especially you have to try to overcome those, those objections but not by saying this is the thing you have to do but more of here's my experience, how does it fit here? Right. And you learn and build that trust over time. I think the other side of it is that you want to be vulnerable and talk about I know this and I don't know this and I need you guys, guys and girls to help me with this and that's how we're going to be successful. And your job as a leader is to paint the bigger picture. Right. How does your role affect the company and our strategic objectives or how do you provide value ultimately to our customers?

That's what a leader can do regardless if they know the domain or not.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Is to say here's why you matter and try to connect the employees back to some bigger mission that's bigger than themselves. I think it's a lot of buy in and it gives you some time to then figure out what the domain is all about.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And how do you bring that value?

Matt

And let's continue this discussion about the results and the outcomes in a different, let's say combination. I mean nowadays I think the really successful company artists are those who can create the value and outcomes as a, on a cross section of different departments.

Matt

Right.

Matt

So you have the marketing and sales to make it successful you need like both puzzles. You cannot live in a silos.

Matt

Right.

Matt

The same with engineering and product and but sometimes it's really hard to influence to get the results when you work like hand in hand with different department. So I don't know, do you have your own approaches? How do you impact the department like other department with which you are working to get and drive the results that you want to get as a, as a company or as a leader.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, absolutely. Similar to the last question of we can't know everything, you also are unlikely to own everything.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And if you do own everything then you're probably going to be not very effective at getting the results from two or three levels down because there's so much. And so you know, it's critical that you have those good relationships. I think first and foremost I would say one of my, one of my management secrets and what I tell a lot of my staff that report to me, right. Is that don't let the first time you call somebody be when you have a problem. And I think that that's really powerful, right? Because if, if I become known for, you know, the problem guy, I'm. I only, I only call you when I need something or when something's broke or there's bad news, right? Then. Then there's not a whole lot of positive emotions about my role in the company.

And, and so I think building those relationships, investing in, you know, could be simple conversations even, Even like this, right? And we've had chats, just getting to know each other, you know, could be the traditional lunch or coffee or.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Where those touch points, I think, become really important to say, let's get familiar with each other. Then we can talk about the work and figuring out the style of people, right? Maybe some people just want to talk about work and you can jump in and be effective. But I've, I've found in my experience, the vast majority of people want some amount of human connection, right? Maybe not best friends, but some amount that, that normalizes our relationship. And then I think there's back to maybe the psychology examples that we've been talking about is really important because there's always the consideration of why do I care and what's in it for me. Right now I don't think people are going around consciously saying what's in it for me?

Like, how are you going to make my life better? But I think there is a consideration of, I've got a full backlog, I've got a ton of stuff to do, like, why is this important? Where should I put this? And so understanding why I'm asking you for something and maybe bring it back to that bigger picture.

Here's what happens. If we work together, this is great. If we don't work together, you know, this is the, the doom and gloom that awaits, right? And we really got to figure out how to make this successful. Fear is a big motivator, right? The fear of losing out on something versus, you know, the, that we accomplish some goal is a good goal, but also missing the goal is, is, is a big motivator. You have to pick your battles, right?

And so as you, as you want to work with groups together, you align your, your outcomes and your incentives. You also have to realize you're not going to win everything, right? And so finding the hill to die on, if you will, or the hill to charge, whatever the phrase is, I think becomes really important to make sure that you find the things that are valuable and meaningful. And the dance of I'm going to, you're going to win Some things, I'm going to win some things. And that's how we both, you know, stay happy.

Matt

Regarding the incentives of Warren Buffett, one said, like, show me the incentives and I will tell you what people will do.

Chris Lowe

Right?

Matt

So.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, exactly.

Matt

Point number two that you mentioned, it's, I think it's really like a human, like a simple human behavior, right?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, absolutely.

Matt

Another thing that I wanted to ask you, it's regarding the challenges. And I have two topics that I want to tackle. But the first one, let's, let's start with the first one. I'm just wondering like 2024, what are the biggest challenges for you? What are the biggest pain points related to engineering and product delivery?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, the biggest pain point. So I think from a, there's a macro and a micro perspective, right? So in the macros perspective you have things like AI that are, that are, you know, depending on how you, what you believe, it's either a lot of hype or this is going to change the world.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

So we have these outside pressures that suddenly everybody needs to talk about. You know, there's changing customer experience, needs. So in the commercial insurance space, you know, we're, we're generally not very digitally focused today. Now we want to be. And so we have, you know, especially at Ameriture, we have a digital strategy that we're working on implementing. But you know, the products we sell are very complex. And so people generally don't want to go onto a website and say, yeah, I want this policy.

You know, because you might be putting out, you know, half a million dollars a year for, for this, for this policy that you're going to buy. You almost certainly want to talk to somebody for, about it, for something. Right? And so we're working on finding that right balance of what does the customer need where they want to talk to a human and have an answer coupled with, let's make sure enough is available online or distributed in some fashion so that they get the information that they want when they want it. But if they still have questions, we're there for them too, right? So finding that balance, you know, commercial insurance is a, is a pretty reliable business. Insurance in general, I think weathered the, the COVID storm fairly well in the commercial insurance space.

For example, we, we specialize in manufacturing and construction as our, as our two big pillars of at, at Amerishare and during COVID Right. Both of those industries were generally considered essential industries and so they kept functioning. So from a, from a macro environment, I think we've been able to weather it fairly well. But now we're seeing the back end of that where, you know, inflation is, is, is very high. We're seeing long lead times for fixing vehicles, for example, which drives up the cost of everything from I have to have a rental vehicle longer now, but my, my parts to my bumper costs more. By the way, it's being shipped in from China. So now the shipping delays are causing problems which, you know, everything just kind of exacerbates through that.

So, so I think the delivery, if I bring it back full circle to your, to your question, the delivery perspective, we have to consider what's happening outside and are the things that we're working on still the right things? Right. And then that may change. We don't want to, we don't want to have, you know, what we would call the whipsaw effect, which is back and forth, back and forth. Oh, this thing happened today or this thing happened this quarter. You need some stability, but you also can't be oblivious to the world around you. I think the internal perspective or the micro, the opposite of the macro perspective is internally you never have enough resources, you never have enough people, you never have enough time to do things.

And so the focus on technical hygiene becomes that much more important. When we think about delivery, the analogy I use with my teams is we're a world class steakhouse. We want to sell the best steaks in the world. But when those steaks come out and the plates are dirty or the glass is chipped, or you know, there's a mouse that runs through the kitchen and you can see it from the, from the, from your table, nobody's going to want to eat there, right? And so, so in this maybe weird analogy, right, we can put out the best software we've ever built. It's scalable, it's maintainable, it does everything the business wants. But if we didn't invest enough in automation or you know, continuous integration and Delivery in our DevOps world, if we didn't invest enough in smart architectural patterns, then eventually it's going to break down.

It doesn't matter. The things that surround the stake aren't good enough to make the stake that valuable. Like I said, that's where I think the delivery focus comes from in today's world. And finding those technologies like AI could really help with that. I think we're seeing a lot of awesome advances in the software development space with AI, things like Copilot or you actually ChatGPT and Claude are coming out with really stellar. Take this piece of code, tell me what's wrong with it. Take this piece of code and create my documentation for it, really supercharging what developers can do.

And so I think in a product delivery space, we can go faster, but also take some of the mundane stuff away from a developer that allows them to really focus on adding that value while balancing the technical hygiene required for it.

Matt

What is the toughest thing, you know of you being in your position that maybe not, not all the people are seeing from the outside or maybe it's not obvious from the outside. Like what, what do you think are the toughest thing, Toughest, you know, aspects of your role?

Chris Lowe

Yeah, so I think there's a couple things. You know, the first, especially, you know, I'm ambitious. I'm very happy with the role that I'm in. And, you know, eventually one day there should be more.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And we figure out what's happening. And so I think from the perspective of a challenge for me personally, right. Is that every company has an ebb and a flow. And so, you know, you have to find the ability to either create change internally or you have to learn to adjust to the pace that the company can move at. You know, we, I mentioned our, our digital strategy work. We had, you know, we had started some of that, that early socialization almost two years ago at this point because we knew that, you know, the, the lag time to build the momentum to say this is something we really should be doing, we should be investing, was going to take time, right? And so for somebody that, you know, wants to go fast and say, let's go do it now, let's go, you know, spin up another $10 million project, let's go deliver, that's not going to happen.

And so you really got to figure out how to pace your change and help the company move with you. And so I think that's, I think that's a big, big challenge, especially, you know, being, being over our engineering group. You know, I'm considered middle management. And so, you know, we're, we're in this, this middle ground, you know, if you will, that we have a responsibility to deliver the things that my group does while also helping, you know, RC Suite and the people, the leaders above me to get their results.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

And so finding that, again, that ebb and flow, I think is really important, something that I actually include as part of my interview process.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

So we talk a lot about culture, responsibilities, you know, HR talks about benefits, and those are all critical things. But I think one of the most important things you can do when you're interviewing for a company or like I said, what I do in my interviews is, is trying to find how comfortable are people with that ebb and the flow, right. It does the, does the pace they want to work at match our company, and that may be very fast and, and maybe they don't want to move that fast. They don't like chaos, but it also may be slower than what they're used to.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Maybe they came from a startup and you know, commercial insurance is not a startup world generally. And so we got to find that right.

That right balance. That's, that's the first thing. The second thing that I would say about what's tough about my role, maybe that we don't talk about a lot is, you know, there's a saying that it's lonely at the top. And you know, being that like, if you're the CEO, right, you're one of one, it's hard to talk to other people. And I think, you know, in many of the roles, that's true even down the organization, right. So if you use the example of, you know, it's lonely at the top and that's 100% lonely, then, you know, maybe two levels down, it's 50% lonely.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

In my, in my role. And so not lonely in the, in the terms that like, nobody wants to talk to you.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

It's not, it's not lonely that way. But when you look around and you try to figure out your support network, right. Of a, hey, I have this problem. Who can I talk to about this? And you know, where can I go to for an outlet and for help and for, you know, for many bigger companies, the enterprise grid companies, you know, there's just generally a lot of people in roles like yours, so you can, you can get some more feedback. But you know, like in, in my company, I'm the only one that runs our, that runs the software delivery organization. So I have great peers and I do consult with them, but they don't know.

They can't always understand the problems that I'm having. Just like, you know, I can't always understand their problems. And, and so it gets, can be a little lonely that way. I would say one of the, one of the other things that are that matter the most to me is as you create that peer group that works around you and helps you, I'm very fortunate. My boss is our cio and he was in a role that was similar to mine previously. And so we can connect very well, right. In terms of the problems we have and the Challenging.

So for me I have that outlet. But you know, there's other, there's other organizations where, you know, for example, it reports into the cfo and generally I've, in my experience there's been a lot of incentive misalignment.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Because it is generally considered more of a cost center when it, when it reports it to a financial function. And, and so then it becomes more lonely.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Because you have less outlet that way. So not necessarily to turn this into like a therapy session, but I think that doesn't get talked about enough.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Is how do you build that support for the role you need so that you can have ideas and that stress relief and that outlet to get help if you need it.

Matt

Yeah, I, I really feel what you are saying. It's only at the top. I really experience it because, you know, I have only one co founder and usually those are two of us that are talking like really, you know, openly about all the stuff. And like we are, you know, nobody is coming and saying like, hey, good job.

Matt

Right.

Matt

So you know, my girlfriend, are we saying that to each other? So it's, it's not an easy position. So. And I absolutely agree, not many people are talking about it, but this is how, this is how it is. This is, this is the life of this kind of stage.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, yeah. So the life you set up for a little bit.

Matt

And let's talk about the tough and hard experience because I think the biggest lessons learned are coming from, from those areas where we experience something hard in our career. And I'm just wondering in your case, do you remember those hard things, those situations that they were really tough and the lessons learned that you have got from them. And the last question that I wanted to ask you and I asked all of my guests is regarding the resources, maybe books, conferences, podcasts, something that have been particularly influential on, on yourself, on your journey as a tech leader, because you could mention some of those resources.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, absolutely. So I, I'm a big believer in being, you know, well rounded leader, well rounded engineer, back to that intersection.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Really, really influences my life. And so I'll give you three recommendations because, because I think it's important to have that balance. So from a, from a personal perspective. Yeah, I'm, I'm a huge advocate for. There's a group called Charity Water. They pioneered the 100% of your donations to them go to the field. They have a separate group that they fundraise with to fund their operations.

And you know, the water crisis and people not having clean water is quite a Weird problem to have in 2024. So I'm a, I'm a big advocate for them and their CEO actually wrote a book called Thirst, which is about how he kind of grew up and got into the charity world and starting charity Water. So that for me was a, it's kind of a passion book in terms of finding your life's purpose and finding things to help you change the world and scrapping things together.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

He started it in New York with, you know, just getting friends to donate and to coming up with all these pop up events. So really, really, I think a very interesting book for perspectives on life. Again, this book called Thirst from a professional perspective. I give every new leader that I come across a copy of the book the first 90 days and I think it's, it's a fan, fantastic book for situational awareness.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

One of the, one of the key things it talks about in the first 90 days is figuring out the situation that, that you're joining and how do you respond to it.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

So if your company is, you know, let's use the classic example of like joining Blockbusters versus joining Netflix, right? If you're joining Netflix, you're in a hyper growth stage. You're trying to figure out what to do. Maybe you're, you're dealing with a lot of broken infrastructure as you scale and you can't keep up with the demand.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

You need to respond as a leader a certain way different than if you're joining Blockbuster around that same time in the 2000s around, we're hemorrhaging sales, our infrastructure can't keep up because maybe it's older, it's not cloud based.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

You have a very different response to how you should lead in that example. And so the book the first 90 days, the middle section of the book talks all about this curve they outline and where should you be. So I think it's a phenomenal book to get started. And then from a technology perspective, there's a book called Clean Architecture by Robert Martin that talks about how to design effective systems. And I actually recommend it to all of my engineering leaders. I think, you know, in our world I'm not as interested in my leaders being able to code or to be hands on with the code, but they should absolutely be able to talk about architecture with the team.

Matt

Right.

Chris Lowe

Did we think about how these systems would interact? Did we optimize for, you know, for this, for this interaction or this connection and really thinking about architecture in a, in a seamless way, good architecture will allow us to get over a lot of bad coding if, if, if we, if we can get the systems to work correctly the first time. And, and so I think Clean Architecture is a great book for that. So that's how I stay balanced and that's how I would recommend other people balanced as well.

Matt

Awesome. Thank you very much Chris for all the meaty answers. I really appreciate it and wish you all the best in your career.

Chris Lowe

Yeah, thank you so much. Absolutely. Best of luck to you as well. Thank you. Follow Matt on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Better Tech Leadership newsletter. Sa.

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