Crafting Success in Tech: Stories from the Frontlines of Innovation

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My name is Matt, and I will be talking to Pat Kua about tech leadership journey and scaling teams.

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Hey, Pat. I'm really happy to have you here today, with me.

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And I just wanted to start straight, forward with with my first question.

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So I really wanted to ask you because you are from Australia, and I used to live in Munich.

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And only guys living in Germany, from Australia were the usually, the visitors from the Oktobersons.

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So I'll just you have to tell me the story.

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How come how how come you landed in in Germany?

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Thank you. Thank you for having me, firstly.

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And, you're right is that I think probably most Australians are tourists.

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It's a long, long way from other places.

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But I started my tech journey in Australia.

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And for anyone who has worked in Australia or is currently working in Australia, even though

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it's a very large country, the tech industry is relatively small.

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Now I've been working in tech for more than 20 years, so it was even smaller than what it was

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back then or what it what it is today.

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And, I ended up working for a company, called Thoughtworks.

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They're a consulting company, and, I had an opportunity to do an exchange to the UK.

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One of the reasons why they had this exchange program was to promote more cultural, exchange across different offices.

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Obviously, more networking across different offices.

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And I was personally really excited.

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If you spoke to a lot of Australians, especially back then, it was a rite of passage where everyone

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did at least a year or 2 years in the UK.

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There used to also be this visa called the work equality, visa.

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So you used to have a lot of Australians, often in the UK called anti padians, other side of

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the world, working in pubs and various things like that.

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But I was lucky enough to work as a person in tech.

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The exchange program was supposed to be a year and then it just turned into many, many years.

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And then, yeah, I worked in the UK for a long time.

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I think I was there for almost 12 years or so.

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And the reason I ended up in Germany was because I had a job offer from, n 26 to join as their CTO.

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And so part of that time, remote working was maybe not as accepted, or as open as it is post.

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And so I did move to Berlin, which is where I'm currently based, and that's how I ended up in Germany.

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Great that you mentioned the tough tough works.

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So to be honest, I'm really excited about your experience in this company because I'm following

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the tough works for quite a while.

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And as you know, I run the consultancy, so I like to have a glimpse in their tech rather and

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their approach, like, what they are releasing the reports.

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I think they are making amazing job.

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And I'm wondering how this was impactful for you because you first worked on a consulting side. Right?

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Like, outside of, product companies, like, helping a lot of, probably, the the product companies.

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But I mean, like, those consulting experience, How this shaped you and how this influenced,

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maybe your next assignments, like, with n 26 or near mobility?

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Yeah. It's a great question.

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And, I did work for a a couple of product companies beforehand, before joining Thoughtworks.

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One of them was Oracle, and then another one was Flight Centre, which is a large travel agency in, Australia.

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But, you know, I spent a lot of my time doing consulting.

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So I think I was at Thoughtworks for I think it was almost 14, 15 years.

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And over that time frame, I'm sure everyone will have recognized how much our industry has changed.

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I'm sure you've seen a lot of change as well over that time.

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And I was very excited actually to join Thoughtworks.

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And the reason I ended up there was when I was at Oracle, I found myself working in a part of

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Oracle that was a bit more like an r and d lab, where we were actually experimenting with the

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very first early day x XP or agile type of concepts.

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So we were using the first version j unit automated test framework, first, version cruise control,

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1st continuous integration server out there.

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We weren't doing pair programming or anything as, crazy as that.

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But, yeah, I I really enjoyed working in those sorts of fashions because I could see a lot of

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the problems that we were facing that we were trying to fix using these tools. Right?

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We were doing long releases.

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We had very painful, build processes and very painful regressions.

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And so I understood where a lot of these things are coming from, and I wanted to work in an

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environment where I could do more of that.

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Now, back then, agile and XP, especially extreme programming, was, a little bit like dirty words,

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like, you do never talk about. Right?

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Because you talk about extreme programming in particular, and business people would think you're,

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like, anarchists and, you know, these are agile, this this terrible thing.

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And it was just, you know, a more effective way of working.

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I think today, most people would want to be agile.

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They see that as a good thing, but back then it was not.

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And so I ended up at Thoughtworks because, they were known for doing more of the projects, with

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Agile and XP, and actually, was really lucky to work with, you know, different types of industries,

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lots of different, clients across different, sizes and scopes as well.

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And, also see lots of different aspects of, project life cycles.

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So everything from, you know, starting fresh, sometimes then, changing this old legacy system

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that has been around for 10, 15 years, you know, helping clients with different initiatives, over that time frame.

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A lot of them would have been going from, you know, waterfall to agile ways of working, maybe

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introducing practices like automated testing, continuous integration.

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Thoughtworks, is known or at least some of the authors, Dave Filley and Jess Humble for continuous delivery.

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And, you know, one of the projects where they invented a lot of those, ways of working or a

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group of people rather, They published the book on it, but a group of people invented ways of

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working, which is now known as continuous delivery, helping people go down that path.

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And so, yeah, it really shaped a lot of my experiences because I was able to a, help a lot of

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clients, you know, move in the right sort of fashion.

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B, I got to work in tech, which I really, really love.

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And, C, I got to build a lot of different skills and experiences as well.

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I think, to maybe answer, another part of your question, which is how has it influenced me as

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I sort of moved into my career.

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I think all those varieties of work, really meant that I really had to build up a muscle of influence.

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Now I do a lot of CTO coaching.

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I train a lot of tech leaders.

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And I think in particular, learning how to influence other people, is one of those key skills.

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And as a consultant, you have to do that all the time if you're going to have any impact, because

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typically you don't get to make decisions.

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Typically, you're working through other managers or other your sponsor to make a decision, and

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you have to work to influence a lot of people to get stuff done.

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And so for me, I think there was a lot of times or relationship building of knowing who to talk

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to and and finding ways to build those relationships, helped me build influence, and also gave

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me motive to actually help other people as well in a positive fashion.

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And I think that's definitely shaped a lot of my career and sort of what I'm doing these days.

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You mentioned Oracle, and I when I think about the product from the product perspective about

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the Oracle and n 26 or tier mobility, Those are completely different organizations.

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So, I'm just and the top works top works is another story from the consultancy perspective.

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But, I mean, switching from Australia, from those organizations to more of a startup world of

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a tier mobility or 10 26, I'm just wondering, was there anything surprising for you, like, cultural

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wise or approach how they, build the products or how they do engineering, how they build teams?

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Like, was there any surprising?

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To be honest, not so much because, even within Thoughtworks, even though many of our clients

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would have been maybe enterprises, I had had over the host time, 14 years, long time, working with sometimes startup environments. Right?

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So I know how scrappy, client, that sort of phase has to be.

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You don't have all the time.

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You don't have all the budget to get stuff done.

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You need to build a good product, and, you need to iterate quite a lot.

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And so I kind of had a good exposure to company life cycles at different stages.

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And if anything, what it did was it helped me prepare for understanding what problems we were

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gonna have at different sizes and scales.

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So for instance, one of the reasons I joined 1026 is they had a really solid engineering team,

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but it wasn't growing very, fast.

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And, we needed to grow it very quickly because the rest of the company had already outgrown

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it ratio wise, and also the rest of the company was gonna grow a lot more.

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And so we had a lot of catching up to do.

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As you can imagine, and so you probably also know, it's hard to hire good people in tech, whereas

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there are a lot of other people who can label themselves very quickly as product people or business

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people, you know, telling people what to do with more projects. That's easy.

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Shipping quality product or shipping a product at all that works is already a challenge.

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And so I kind of knew all of the different challenges that we're gonna have.

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And although I didn't necessarily know if it was gonna always work out, at least I had a portfolio

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of different approaches that we could experiment with, that gave me better chances of going, okay.

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Well, I think here's what we're facing.

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Here are some things that we need to be able to do around that because I've seen this work in

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different, different types of companies.

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And so that gave me a lot more preparation for the circumstances I'd find myself in.

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Let's talk now about n 26.

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This is really hot, startup, hot fintech, and then in Germany.

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And the facts are that you scaled the team from 55 people to to 250 in 18 months as far as I remember.

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So that's impressive, I would say.

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You work there as a CPO, but in the end, like, you, you work there as a chief scientist, which

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is a bit different in the world when I when I'm, like, looking at the titles.

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I'm just wondering what are your biggest lessons learned from from this company for for yourself as a leader?

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Yeah. So firstly, I think, if anyone has learned about the CTO role is that there are a lot

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of varieties of that role.

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And when I was there in the early parts, it was pretty clear that my role was going to be about scaling up the organization.

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Now typically in a organization, you typically have a VP of engineering, or a, and a CTO.

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And it's the VP of engineering that's typically responsible for hiring and staffing and, keeping

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an organization running from that sort of side.

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So I knew that was gonna be part of my responsibility because I didn't have a VP of engineering at that time.

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And so part of my role of, what I saw myself, doing early days at Intuitiesix was really about

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building out the management leadership layers so that we could scale effectively. Right?

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So, you know, moving from a team of 55 people, you can kind of get a sense of what's going on everywhere.

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But when you get to several offices around the world, several 100 people in engineering, you

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literally can't do everything yourself, and that's why you have to grow a good management team effectively.

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And so that's one of the responsibilities I had.

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And so as I brought in, a sort of more senior, manager, we called it a director in our leveling

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system, but, it's kind of conceptually like VP of engineering, then I could actually step back

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to focus a little bit more on what a CTO might typically more do, which is really talk about,

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you know, the the tech side. Right?

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Making sure that we have a good tech strategy heading in the right direction, making sure that

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we're investing in the right types of quality, and that particularly the engineering team, have

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good levels of experience and have access to that experience, to make sure that you're you can

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continue to build a quality product over time.

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And so that's one of the reasons that I moved into sort of the chief scientist role is because

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the CTO role in that sort of world was going to be a little bit more focused on delivery, staffing, and org.

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And so we needed a different title around that.

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And, we can sort of think about it as moving back into a little bit more of the individual con

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contributor track where you have to use a lot more leadership, influence.

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But it's really more focused on sort of technical topics than it is about the the organizational operating side.

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So, just to just to dig deeper in so in this case, the CTO moved a bit into the the the role

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of a VP of engineering. Right?

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So you could describe it that way. Yes.

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It's the the responsibilities would be more typically what a VP engineering would do.

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Okay. And the tier mobility, this is interesting point because, I know that you're helping a lot of, tech leaders.

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I mean, c level, VP level, head level.

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And at the t Mobility, you worked as a board in a board of advisory, role.

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And this is really this is really interesting point because, like, when you look at somebody

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LinkedIn and you you see board advisory role, it's not always obvious how this work looks day, like, day to day.

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Like, what kind of responsibilities do you have?

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How does it look to have this kind of work?

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So maybe you could describe a bit your relationship with the T Mobility and your role there.

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Yeah. So I will also say the advisory role also

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tier mobility, it was the sort of advisory board for the CTO in that side.

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So, Matthias, who was the CTO and one of the cofounders of TIER, assembled effectively his own personal board of advisors.

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And so, this was his collection of people, of, you know, people he trusted, who had different

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backgrounds and experiences, but could draw upon, whenever he had specific situations, that

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he needed some extra help with.

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And so the way that that worked was a little bit more on demand advisory, which is, you know, hey.

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You know, we're starting to grow.

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We need a left link system.

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Pat, you know how these work.

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So can you help our team, you know, build out a leveling system so that there's more clarity around that?

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Sometimes it was just there to be a, external person for, sort of advice around particular topics.

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So, you know, when, one of the directors at TIER had a certain, challenge, I could create some

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time, and we could talk through what they're currently going.

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A little bit like how I'd normally do things with coaching with the CTOs that I normally run.

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But sometimes it's a little bit more, I would say, mentoring or advice than it is pure coaching from that side.

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And so that's how we operated there at TIER.

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When I look at your, profile, I I think, like, you are pretty successful in there.

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I mean, like, you work for a really big organization.

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You work for the startups that are well known, and you you have, like, recognition because,

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like, people hire you to help them out, with some, like, high level, like, executive, ideas,

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I mean, on a on a technology or engineering side.

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So I'm just wondering why are you where you are today?

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To what do you attribute your success?

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So thank you, firstly. I appreciate that.

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And, I will say that I think success comes in many different forms.

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And, now I'm independent, and I do a lot of training for early tech leads or staff engineers and entering managers.

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And then I coach CTOs, and also run training through the Tech Lead Academy.

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But one of the reasons I think I'm here is, of this concept called Ikigai.

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Now some of the people who are watching or listening to this might be familiar with it.

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But if you're not, Ikigai is this Japanese concept, and I always forget all the different elements.

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But roughly, it's the, you know, what you enjoy doing, intersection with, what you're, good

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at, intersected with what the world needs, and intersected with how you can earn money.

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And so, you know, I think I'm quite lucky in that, a, I fell into the tech industry versus maybe

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some other industries that are maybe, diminishing, because of other advances or other types of fields.

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You know, I feel that I focus a lot in growing people.

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I think, that was a consistent level of strength, feedback that I had, in reviews of helping

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others grow, particularly as leaders and managers.

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And, you know, there's definitely need for that in our industry because we have so many first

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time tech leads, managers, directors, VPs, and CTOs that they need support.

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And I'm fortunate that, you know, we have companies that have budget that can actually do that.

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And so, I will say that at least how I found this sort of intersection of ikigai is a little bit of serendipity.

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It's not something like I planned this for 20 years, and this is how I ended up in.

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But I am sort of quite lucky that I think the the intersection of all of these elements did, mix.

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But I will also go back and say that there are many different definitions to success. Right?

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So for some people, you know, what is important to you might be about having a stable family

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situation and having a consistent income stream. Right?

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And that's something that, some environments will suit better than others.

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And I think success is very, yeah, dependent on how you define that and frame it, but there

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are also many variations of it.

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I I think you are very modest saying that.

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I still think that, we should celebrate a bit our successes and where we are and appreciate it.

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I'm saying it because I I'm I'm doing the same.

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I'm not saying that I'm gonna any any kind successful. Right?

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Because it's always like the the way that you can go further. Right.

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But I still think and what I see from the outside in our talks, like, when we talk about our

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coffee in Berlin and when we are talking today, I think that we are really good, in, like, orchestrating

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the the the people and building the kind of structures, around it, and help it help to make it work. Thank you.

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This is what I see from the outside.

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But let's, dig deeper in this, training consulting because I feel this is the thing that you'd

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do, and you like to do them both, currently.

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And based on your experience and what you are saying, you are doing more and more those kind of engagements.

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And when you're talking with those leaders, like the c level, VP level, I'm just wondering about

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some patterns or maybe some, about some some problems that those those guys are having that

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maybe you see something similar, like, the the the common problem that they have, and you don't

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look don't see it from the outsides because it's really hard probably for them to share. They share with you.

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And, of course, we don't have to go into details, but maybe some kind of, like, a glimpse inside

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of the conversation that you are having.

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Yeah. So one of the common problems that, yeah, I see a lot is, you know, if you are a senior

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leader or manager in a company, like a director or a CTO, you need a strong management or leadership team.

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Now, often people get promoted, into these roles or they hire.

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But, you know, in in a in a good place, you also promote people into those roles.

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Often those people are are going to be doing these management roles or director roles for the first time.

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And this is where, you know, they're gonna be making a lot of mistakes.

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And, I know this as a director or senior manager of other managers.

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It's challenging because you sort of know what you don't want, but you wanna give people that sort of freedom.

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And often you want people to maybe work in a certain way or you expect certain things from people,

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but they're not always meeting, those expectations because they're effectively in a new role.

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And so one of the reasons often a lot of people ask me to come in and train their tech leads

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or entry managers in particular is because if you're a director, you typically don't have a lot of time.

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You can't sit down and sort of teach, and sort of coach people through all the skills and expectations.

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And it's often helpful to have somebody external to do that because you're you won't be able

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to carve out all of that time in your schedule.

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I think a lot of other people, there is a difference between being able to do a skill and then

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also to be able to teach a skill.

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And so even if you know what it looks like, some people don't have that skill to teach, or the

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patience to teach, of the many different varieties of how things work.

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And so I have been sort of teaching and training people for about a decade.

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And so I know, all the different variations of things that people will ask about.

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What about these situations, that situation to go when they're leading or managing a new team?

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But I think that's a very common problem that a lot of organizations have, which is they put

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a lot of people into these roles, and they want them to be successful, because they've been successful in previous roles.

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But often, there are a lot of, inexperienced people because they're doing new responsibilities,

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and they're building skill on the job.

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But at the same time, the people who are managing don't have the time to teach and coach and

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and work with them, or they need faster results as a result.

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And so that's a very common thing at all different parts of an organization, unless you're lucky

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enough to hire always in the experienced people.

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But then, you limit the amount of growth that people can have, from, other sort of parts of the organization.

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And often you sometimes bring in, you know, people who don't necessarily fit culturally because

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they're bringing in a very different culture from their old workplaces.

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Based on what you said, I would add to this.

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Like, they don't have time to coach or, like, time space to coach, I would add, like, the skills

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to coach the people because sometimes, like, this is based on my experience. Right?

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I feel like I'm I'm I'm really bad manager.

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So, so and I feel like I don't have enough skills, and somebody else is better at, like, skilling

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up my my my my people.

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So I think this is the the sometimes the the thing that we omit, or it's hard for for us as

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a leaders to agree and say, like, I don't know something. Yep.

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And it comes maybe with, with time where you put the ego and the pocket, then you could, like,

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tell to somebody, I I don't have a clue how to do it.

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Like, we need somebody to help us out.

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You're absolutely right. And that's exactly why people bring in external people who can help,

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bring in that skill or when it's needed.

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Let's talk more about your experiences, and I think we learn and and people like to listen others,

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let's say, case studies based on, on others' experience.

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I'm just wondering about, your hardest like, what are the hardest things, that you have ever done?

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Like, when you look at your career, when you look at what you have done in 26, in in tier mobility,

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in top works, like, could you tell, like, any case study, like, the hardest things that you

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have ever done, like, how you deal with the situation, how you went through it, and, like, what

24:19 - 24:21
was the the the outcome for you?

24:21 - 24:27
Sure. I will say one of the benefits of working in a consulting environment is there are a lot

24:27 - 24:34
of things that you cannot control, and you end up in places where if you chose to work, then you probably wouldn't.

24:36 - 24:38
And so part of that, I think, is learning a bit of resilience.

24:38 - 24:45
A really good example of that is, I was asked once to help a team, because there was a team

24:45 - 24:50
that was doing some estimation, and the client didn't like the results of the estimation. Right?

24:50 - 24:53
So they're like, oh, well, these timelines are too long.

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Why is it taking so long?

24:55 - 24:59
And so there were questions around the planning process and how did they end up with these timelines.

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And so they asked me to come in, help this team.

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We went through their sort of planning process.

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We went through the items of work that they had, how they came up with their sizing, the estimates and and assumptions.

25:11 - 25:15
And then, the plan seemed reasonably solid. Right?

25:15 - 25:21
It's not necessarily gonna be precise, accurate, but it's roughly about the time frame that they were talking about.

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We were talking about, I think, a time frame or 9 months at that time.

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This was, for the replacement of a sort of master service about customer information.

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Now, we the team had to present this, to, their management group.

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And in this management group, there was a ex Goldman Sachs director who was, managing this team.

25:45 - 25:49
And I remember this very vividly because we had, the development team there.

25:49 - 25:51
We had the project sponsor from the client.

25:52 - 25:58
And then, there was the first time that I'd met this director person who, was managing this entire department.

25:59 - 26:08
And the team, and I were starting to talk about, you know, how the timelines were reached, what went into that.

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And all of a sudden, this this, manager started screaming and shouting, right, about why this is unacceptable.

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I could get teams working around the clock on this 247.

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We're gonna be done in, like, 2 months.

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I can't at all understand how this thing is gonna be, the the 6 to 9 months sort of time frames

26:27 - 26:28
that the team was sort of talking about.

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Obviously, as a consultant, you can't do anything. Right?

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You have to kind of effectively eat it up.

26:34 - 26:41
And I think that sort of awkward situation that you find yourself in, you know, there's no sense in arguing back.

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There's no sense in shouting back.

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That's certainly gonna escalate the problem.

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But learning how to cope with these, what I would describe as very stressful situations, is

26:49 - 26:51
something that you definitely learned.

26:51 - 26:53
Now a funny story about this situation.

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Obviously, we didn't, continue with this client.

26:56 - 26:57
We didn't win the work.

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But our salesperson kept in touch with, this client.

27:01 - 27:07
Led commissioned a, sort of outsourcing firm, an Indian outsourcing firm who had 3 teams working around the clock.

27:08 - 27:13
And, our salesperson checked in, 18 months later, and they were still not done with this project.

27:13 - 27:17
So, you know, you could try, but, you know, work is essential work.

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And, yeah, sometimes things do take longer than expected.

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But I I think that's a great story. Amazing experience.

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So this is something that we don't hear very often, and the people think that, in tech, we everything

27:31 - 27:40
is, like, peaceful, calm, you know, like, you know, perfect energy, yin and yang, but, it it's not like that.

27:40 - 27:43
So I hear that kind of stuff in a in a past the same.

27:43 - 27:47
And my lesson learned from those kind of experiences, of course, you don't want to work with the spine.

27:47 - 27:53
But sometimes this happened because somebody had, like, a bad day or, like, a hard time, like,

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on on a private, let's say, area.

27:57 - 28:01
And what what I really like to it's you need to wait.

28:01 - 28:02
The person need to shout.

28:02 - 28:05
They need to keep away the emotion, and you talk, like, another day.

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And then you talk with more recently, and sometimes it worked out, because we are just, just humans.

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But, in the this case, like, what you described, it's, like, I think it's a perfect case case study.

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Yeah. Thank you.

28:20 - 28:25
Pat, so, the but the last two questions that I wanted you to ask.

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So I I really enjoy digging deeper into, like, your lessons learned, because you have a lot of interesting cases.

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And I'm just wondering if you remember, like, your most important lesson learned with, which

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shaped you as a as a leader in tech, which changed your way of painting, maybe?

28:47 - 28:50
There's a lot. I don't know if there's just one.

28:51 - 28:57
But I can give you another example that I think has shaped how I think about, giving things

28:57 - 29:03
away to other people, And, another consulting story here, a lot of interesting stories, lots

29:03 - 29:09
of lessons learned, was working with a client that had very, very tough deadlines.

29:09 - 29:13
There's a lot of stress to get things shipped to within a certain time frame.

29:13 - 29:16
As a result, they wanted to spin up teams very, very quickly. Right?

29:16 - 29:22
They're like, can we have 50 people tomorrow starting to work on the system? I'm like, okay.

29:22 - 29:26
You can't necessarily have 50 people working on the same code base because, like, they're not gonna do anything.

29:26 - 29:28
They're gonna be stepping on each other's toes.

29:28 - 29:31
So we talked about how we could ramp up as quick as we could, have it parallelized.

29:31 - 29:38
Now at some point, I was personally managing a team of about 20 people, and, you know, I was,

29:38 - 29:42
trying to do the best thing that I could that I felt was reasonable at the time.

29:42 - 29:48
So, you know, in those days, I was working or trying to work ahead of the team, working with

29:48 - 29:55
product, or in that case, the business analyst, trying to work out, scope out work effectively

29:55 - 29:58
to make sure that there was relatively good assumptions around it so that things were ready

29:58 - 30:00
to be picked up by development team.

30:01 - 30:06
Now as you can imagine, I was a big bottleneck in trying to do this for a team of about 20 people.

30:07 - 30:17
And, in trying to feed number of streams work, at some point, I realized it wasn't going to work very well. I physically became sick.

30:18 - 30:19
So I lost my voice.

30:20 - 30:22
I was like, I had a cold.

30:22 - 30:25
I wasn't sleeping very well, just because of all the things that were going on.

30:25 - 30:32
And, I was sent home for 2 days effectively saying, Pat, you need to take a break, and, you

30:32 - 30:34
know, just get some rest.

30:35 - 30:39
Now after that time frame, that was handy because, I had some time to reflect.

30:39 - 30:44
And I think at that time, even though I was laying in bed most of the time, I could sort of

30:44 - 30:49
think about, well, if I go back into the workplace, this isn't necessarily gonna change.

30:49 - 30:50
Like, I'm gonna be healthier.

30:51 - 30:55
But if I go back to what I was doing before, I'm just gonna end up in the same place.

30:55 - 30:58
And I think this is one of the big thing I learned with systems thinking is you wanna change

31:00 - 31:00
change the system so it's more sustainable over time.

31:00 - 31:06
And so I was like, well, what led me to where I am now and what needs to change as a result?

31:06 - 31:11
And, when I, thought about it from that perspective, one of the things that I introduced when

31:11 - 31:15
I came back was I started to introduce this idea of feature leads.

31:16 - 31:21
So a scoped area of where I could delegate a certain level of responsibility, and those nominated

31:22 - 31:26
feature leads would effectively do the same work I was doing, but scoped in a smaller area.

31:26 - 31:30
So I worked out how to break up work into small, delegable pieces.

31:31 - 31:36
You know, so there was one person that was responsible for the operational stuff.

31:37 - 31:40
So the release pipeline, the, sort of release process.

31:40 - 31:46
There was another person that was more responsible for the sort of security side, so the authorization

31:46 - 31:49
and other security mechanisms that we needed to put in place.

31:50 - 31:51
Another person was responsible then for,

31:54 - 31:57
CMS with a sort of different web app front end.

31:57 - 32:00
So we had 2 different leads that were leading different sort of architectural

32:07 - 32:11
helped tremendously, and it showed me the power of better delegation.

32:11 - 32:15
I was used to delegating tasks, but delegating areas of ownership, that wasn't something that

32:15 - 32:16
I was yet ready for.

32:17 - 32:22
And so that's something that sometimes you think, well, I'm doing things to help other people,

32:22 - 32:28
but, actually, other people are ready to actually take on more scope than you think they can be.

32:28 - 32:31
And so that's something that I've I've carried with me since that experience.

32:33 - 32:41
Awesome. Thank you. So the last question that I have, it's about any books, podcasts, conferences,

32:41 - 32:49
or, any given type of resources that have been particularly helpful for you as a leader that you could recommend?

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Oh. So I think it's interesting because I started my career a long time ago, and I was reflecting

32:56 - 33:00
on this actually in a recent talk, where I reflected on 10 years of teaching with people.

33:01 - 33:06
And when I first started, there weren't that many great resources or books, certainly no podcasts back then.

33:07 - 33:12
One of the books that was very formative to my own journey, it's a little bit hard to get a

33:12 - 33:17
hold of because I'm not so sure it's in print anymore, is Jerry Weinberg's, Becoming a Technical Leader.

33:17 - 33:19
It's actually on the shelf on IB.

33:19 - 33:19
Yeah. That

33:19 - 33:23
is brilliant. So that was a very effective book that helped me.

33:24 - 33:29
And another book that helped me think sort of organizationally about systems thinking, was,

33:30 - 33:33
Peter Seng's The Learning, or the I've forgotten the name of it.

33:33 - 33:36
The but, it's the book about the, the 5th discipline.

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It's about the learning organization.

33:39 - 33:44
And, talked about, you know, why organizations don't learn and introduced the concepts of systems thinking for me.

33:45 - 33:49
So those would be 2 things I would say had a big impact to my own career.

33:50 - 33:54
Awesome. Thank you very much, Pat, for a really interesting conversation and sharing the the

33:54 - 33:56
personal stories that you that you have.

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I I really appreciate it.

33:58 - 34:01
You're welcome, and thank you very much for having me on here. Thanks.

34:02 - 34:07
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