John Doran: The Power of Perspective - A Conversation on Growth & Creativity

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Matt

My name is Matt and I will be talking with John Doran about mindset and growth and how shifting perspectives can lead to personal growth, better decision making and long term success. You are with the Phorest for over nine years. You started on a dev side as a developer, now you're a CTO and you were like through, you have been through all the roles, I mean like on the engineering side right from the manager to head and up to the cto and it's not really, you know, common. So maybe could you describe tell a bit more about the career and what do you think what helped you to make this journey up to the cto?

John Doran

Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I guess I'm not committing crimes to code anymore. I'm on the made the switch to the manager track many, many years ago. I joined forrest yeah nearly 10 years ago now at this point. And I joined for, for me, for the company and the mission was really motivational and working on a smaller company SaaS business was something that I was really passionate about. And the founder, yeah I guess this was a really important factor as well. So joined as a put the ego to one side.

I you know, worked really hard, got to tech leads and previous company and put the ego to one side and just said look, I don't really care about the roles and the titles. I just want to work at this company. They didn't have that kind of engineering ladder structure but yeah, wanted to join Forest and did as a senior engineer and we were really small, small company, small business compared to what we are today. Um, but yeah, just joined, got stuck in, focused on the kind of biggest business challenges that we had, worked through them and then at a certain point the team needed a leader. So I kind of naturally gravitated into that role and just really focused on, you know, nailing what we needed to do, identifying challenges, working through them and then more opportunities came along the line. So it was never, I've never actually asked for the next level. It was always something that's kind of happened as a result of putting in the work.

And I think for me there was a turning point was when I realized like I can never achieve the same amount. I can never achieve the same amount on my own as I can if I can just get everyone around me to work in and go in a certain direction. And that was kind of, that was a big kind of realization for me. And the other thing was always to just be a leader that I would want to work for and make the decisions that I would be happy with if that was My manager making those decisions. So that's kind of how I have always framed what I do or how I think about things. It's just what would me as a software engineer value or appreciate here or me as a manager or me as a director feel, feel valued or, or feel important about how, how I made maybe approach a problem or, or work through something.

Matt

So how big was the company when you joined and how big is it today?

John Doran

So There was about 60 people and about around 1500 salons on the platform and we're going to hit 400 people this year and over 11/2 thousand salons on the platform. So we were when I joined just really focused on Ireland and the uk whereas now we're much more international where we focus on many different countries and we've kind of broken into new markets as well as kind of maintained leadership position in some other regions as well.

Matt

In which countries are you.

John Doran

So our main markets are UK and Ireland, Doc. Australia, Finland and North America. So US and Canada.

Matt

And how do you approach the new markets? Do you have like, I don't know, the country manager opening? Do you have somebody on the engineering side or.

John Doran

Yeah, like engineering is all HQ'd out of Dublin and then we, we have a kind of a matrix structure where our regions are run by country managers and go to market teams.

Matt

You organize pretty, I would say famous conference which is called the shipconf for the five years which is focused on software delivery and I think like at least two of my guests were the speakers on a conference and then when I were in Berlin visiting clients, I heard about it and I think it's really cool regarding the topics that you have there and, and this is like really down to earth down to earth conference. So like really loose atmosphere. But I'm just wondering from your side, do you recall any of the top talks where you had this aha moment right after hearing it and some lessons learned that stick in your, you know, in your head that you could share?

John Doran

Yeah, like so ShipperCon got involved in it at the very, very early stages and then myself and Tom kind of took, took things from there in terms of organizing and directing it. But for me it was always about like getting to really good tech conferences is really, really expensive and it's quite inaccessible for many people. They can't actually get to them and many of them that are around just try to extort money out of people or like sponsorships and they become very sales focused and sales driven. It's not really what like again coming back to like what I said about management and leadership. It's similar as a, as a craftsperson. What sort of event could we build that engineers would love to go to and talk about and really add value to, to their careers or, or even just provoke their thinking a little bit differently rather than this kind of standard off the shelf stuff. So really Ship Aon like because it's community driven because it's all about like the, the tech and it's all about really bringing people together.

It's very, very different I think to, to many other conferences out there. It's kind of like it that has that indie vibe to us also the room, the way that we, we stick to the same venue every year is quite a special round room. So it's almost like a wedding event and everyone comes together. It's like a big reunion. When you go to a wedding you don't see friends for years but then you see them all at the wedding and you have loads of fun and. But this obviously you learn and you get to see great talks and great quality of people. I think the penny drop for me that, that was really working well was when like amazing world class speakers who I would always have looked up to are literally emailing me asking me, hey, can I come to Dublin and talk at this this year?

Like that was like a bit of a wow moment for me. I'm really proud of that. And then the other side of it too would be we get a lot of local speakers or people who have never really done the public speaking thing but have amazing stories to tell. And I think there's a lot of companies out there that are doing really amazing work that don't talk enough about the, the maybe advancements that they're making or how, how well they're, you know, approaching certain problems. So I love getting new speakers out there to, to share their stories. And like Ship Aon for me is not, is not my day job, it's my passion project. So I really like, I would obviously use my day job and maybe apply some of the learnings or people that I work with and get them to go to Shipacon or talk at Shippicon.

But tried to keep the two worlds a bit separate as well.

Matt

Let's talk a bit about the metrics that you measure and what is important for you on the forest. I think the last time when we talk you mentioned observability as a major focus for 2024 and I'm just always wondering like how do you communicate? How do you ensure the buy in from the developers and the team that this is important and why this is exactly important for you.

John Doran

Yeah. So I think, I think it all boils down to like the, so what here is with anything is like what's the impact on the customer and what does it really mean for our business? So I always, like with anything, any sort of initiative or metric, it's always tying it back to that and making sure that we can very clearly say, like, why is this important and why should we care about it? And with something like observability, I think people get brought down the wrong track sometimes and get too obsessed about the tooling and really they don't focus on the customer side of things in terms of what does this mean for our customers. So for me it was particularly around the support side of things. So I would hear about customer issues or challenges from our support teams or end users. They might email me or text me and like, as a leader our job is to make sure that like there's no surprises and that our teams are on top of, you know, the most important areas of the product and that they understand how healthy they are and are able to react before a customer tells them about them to fix those issues.

So I kind of would have framed that quite like succinctly. As we know before they call, as in we know before anyone else tells us about an issue, we will know about it. And that's kind of our North Star. There's. So we would track things. Like we just track that, you know, how many times, how many major issues was there that we didn't know about and what can we do differently to know about them the next time? So that will emphasize for teams to think about when they're building products.

How are we going to observe these things and know that they're really working or when they're owning certain areas of platform. What are these features and functionalities? How important are they to customers and how do we know about them if they become deep degradated in terms of their health? So I think to bring it back to your question, like what was important is for us knowing about customer issues before they tell us. And how do we do that is by just kind of really tracking those areas and monitoring. We use SLO service level objectives to have a budget error budget and we track that and stay on top of it. Yeah.

Matt

And when you're setting such a goal, let's say like observability, it's the thing for 2024 and probably in the past, you always talk with the clients on the different levels you gathered the feedback, you observe the things, what is happening and had some tough times, but solve it. But I'm wondering when you set the goal as a leader, as a cto, right. And let's say when do you see the first results?

On how much time do you think? If anybody wants to implement it in their company, how much time should they expect to see the first results?

John Doran

Yeah, like I think like as a CTO your job is not to actually implement it at all. It's to set up the, set the context out and set the direction for teams to do that. So in my case I have two like I have a couple of amazing people whose job it was to do this. So like principal engineer level people whose who would be embedded in teams and partner with the teams to work through this. So it would be very much a, it's not a top down thing. It's here's the direction we're going in everybody and this is what good looks like. And you have support here in these amazing people who know it inside out and can give you examples and partner with you to make this a reality.

So I think really important to with any sort of organizational change or culture shift to have those kind of, I'd say champions and really let them drive and work and, and it's never going to be perfect. So you're going to have to kind of ebb and flow into different way. You're going to learn a lot as you're working through it. You're not going to particularly with something like this. If you're, if you're trying to predict exactly how it's going to all work out, you're wasting your time because you just have to kind of lean into it. If you think, if you know it's the right direction, you're going to have to work through it and learn as you go and through those kind of working with teams and embedding those really amazing people in there, that's how you're going to get through it. Yeah. In terms of first impact I would always say like share real stories and observations.

So we just like set up little share like knowledge sharing Slack channels where we would do things like here's an example of something I learned today and here's how I found it and here's a little video or loom of how we got there and here's the impact. So before this call used to take 5 seconds, now it's 10x faster. Things like that, really practical things, showing the learnings and then letting people jump onto them. I think as well, seeing like different actors get involved, like different types of roles and people is really interesting too. So he may be a product manager, jumps on and starts looking at the tooling and giving insights, which is something we've seen, which I thought was fascinating, the different use cases around it. And then as well, seeing as we're launching new products, teams instrument those areas of their features that they might not have done before and tracking, tracking the successes and true new turnings I think has been amazing.

Matt

And as a cto, do you have your own North Star metric? I mean not your own, but the North Star metric that is really important for you and how does it influence the decision making?

John Doran

I think like most companies it would be around the nps, like it would be around customer health and happiness. So the net promoter score is really those super fans and it's quite a lagging indicator. Like it's not something you can just go and do 10 things tomorrow and expect a better NPS. It takes a lot of time. So we look at that as our kind of our North Star and something that we kind of monitor quite closely.

Matt

And what was the biggest mistake or like the fuck up in the recent years and what have you learned out of it?

John Doran

Oh, there's too many to listen. I think, you know, anything to do with failure is no one should be afraid of it and that it should be safe to fail because if you create an environment where that's not the case, nobody will drive change and they will be too afraid to make an influence a direction. So I think it's really important to, without even going into examples to make sure that it's, it's dealt with in a positive way and there's zero blame and that you look at as a learning opportunity. So we had say a P1 recently and the biggest learning for us was that our incident management process has to get better and how we communicate internally around that. So I think you always have to look for zero blame. High trust and learning from those examples is really, really important for you to just constantly get better because if you don't, you create a space where people are afraid of making mistakes, then you're never going to make progress. You might as well just stop doing what you're doing if you're afraid of making a mistake.

Matt

I think last time when we talked you mentioned like really high retention rate of the employees. So which was not usual for the, for the market for tech companies. And I'm just wondering what are you doing like the tip and keep it like that, like what are your what is your secret sauce?

John Doran

There is none. I wish I could tell you. I think kind of coming back to the culture and the people really like, we have actually some amazing engineer managers and senior engineer managers and directors of engineering that have all grown internally. And I think one thing for us does really well is we call it grow your own timber. It's kind of a philosophy we look at to take a bet. Like our CEO Ronan took a bet on me to grow me in forest. And I would look at that similarly to make sure everyone has a growth path and they're given opportunities.

And maybe when that time is, you know, you might be thinking, let's hire in someone with more experience. I would always lean towards give someone a chance and opportunity and let them grow. And I think that creates a really good connection with the team and other people like seeing their peers kicking on. And when you, you have that culture, I think it's, it's quite special. The other thing I like to focus on, like the autonomy, mastery and purpose. It's the Dan Pink drive kind of philosophy of, you know, if you can create an environment where people have autonomy and can, can make decisions, if they can master their craft and continuously learn, and if they feel they have a purpose and they know why the work they're doing is moving the dial view, get those three things right and focus on them. You can.

I think it is part of the ingredients of high retention, but it's very nuanced and complicated. Beasts, I would say.

Matt

Are you excited about some trends in tech, I don't know, like AI or something that you are following and saying like, hey, this could be a next big thing for a product.

John Doran

I'm scared a little bit actually, about the future for graduates and new people that need to learn their craft. I'm excited and scared by it. I think there's an amazing opportunity there and I think it's only going to get more powerful. But with that, I feel like I'd be quite worried if I was a graduate right now or someone who's on their learning track. And if the mindset is go all in and learn from AI, I don't think that's the right thing for our craft. I think we have to really nurture the newbies and, and make sure that they have the support rather than just telling them to use AI to generate loads of code because you need to be able to interpret and understand what you're getting back and really interact with the prompting so that you can, you know, really craft great products. There are people out there that believe you know, there's no such thing as tech debt anymore because AI will just rewrite all the code and you don't need to worry about it.

I haven't seen that to be true yet. But I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to be proven wrong.

But we'll see.

Matt

And I bet like your work, it's pretty stressful. Like I experienced myself like a C level role. It's quite a stressful thing and I'm always looking for, you know, what is the most stressful aspect for you, how do you manage the stress? How do you stay healthy mentally?

John Doran

I think it comes back to having amazing teams team around you that you can really trust because when you can let go of a lot and trust those folks around you, it's kind of life changing to be honest. And I've let, I've held onto things for too long in the past and I've always, I've never regretted letting things go and giving them to other people. So I would say that I focus heavily on people around me and setting them up to win and by doing that then that kind of helps me free myself up. Yeah, I would say I try to keep a balance to things. Not to burn out and try to keep a balance but there are times where it's going to be hectic and I think you'd be, anyone on the C level would be lying if they said it was different. You're kind of, you have to be always on. But I think it's important to know when you need to switch off and lead by example too when you need to do that.

And yeah, so I think, yeah I would say the people around you and really investing in setting them up to win and you know, building that team around you is so, so important as you scale particularly because the challenges change every 12 months that the business changes and the context changes and you're gonna, if you're growing 20, 30, 40% year on year, the organization and needs have to change. So really focusing on the team and then leading by example in terms of just switching off when's needed and knowing that yourself.

Matt

And the last but not least, the question that I ask all of my guests, I'm wondering if you recommend any books or blogs that you're following or you had this aha moment and you enjoy reading and help help you to develop yourself.

John Doran

So like yeah, I've loads. I think it depends on who, who is the audience. So I think for like an engineering manager or someone who's on the manager track I think it always go to an elegant puzzle by Will Larson. It's one of my favorites around many different aspects from building teams, scaling teams, technical debt, all of that good stuff. There's an amazing book by Claire Hughes Johnson. She's the ex CEO of Stripe and she built an amazing book called Scaling People and it's all about building operating systems for companies and help them scale. I think it's a fantastic book and it really talks about the discipline and building a great organization.

Last one and I know you asked for one but Last one is good to great and that's by Jim Collins and I think it's. It's an amazing book because it. It studies what an average company does and an amazing company does and the differences between them and it really gives some concrete really good patterns around that. So things like the hedgehog concept and getting the right people on the boss and all of those things. So that would be kind of a famous forest book that everyone reads. So they're my tree.

Matt

Awesome. Thank you.

Good to great. It's one of my favorite too. I really like the approach of the statistics and kind of finding the way like how to recognize a good company. So I think it's a really good one. John, thank you so much for your thoughts and sharing all the experiences with the listeners. I really appreciate it and wish you good luck with upcoming years.

So all the best.

John Doran

Thanks Matt. Thanks everybody. Follow Matt and Leshek on link.

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