Meri Williams: Leadership Insights - Nurturing Talent and Driving Innovation

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Matt

My name is Matt and I will be talking with Meri Williams about importance of values, inclusion and diversity in the workplace. Hey, Meri, how are you?

Meri Williams

I'm good, thanks. How you doing?

Matt

I'm doing just great. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I don't like to do the introductions. I think everybody could check your LinkedIn. There is a lot of things to check because you have a lot of different experiences in the, in your portfolio, so to say. But what caught my attention, the first thing that I wanted to start, and I think this might be really beneficial for the listeners, especially for those who are thinking about the scaling teams on like a pretty high speed because you did it multiple times. You scale like, scale a few teams from 30 to 300 or, and similar, you know, similar setups.

And I'm just wondering, based on your lessons learned and how you do it today, like what lessons are, could you share with other engineering leaders about that?

Meri Williams

Yeah. So I think one of the things is that people always expect the recruiting to be the most difficult part. And of course, attracting and recruiting the right people is absolutely one of the challenges of scaling. But probably the bigger challenge is what you do with people once they've arrived. And so onboarding and getting folks to be independently productive as quickly as possible is really, really valuable because in any scaling journey you hit a point where half of your team are newer than the team that existed before. And at that point, if they haven't been able to integrate really well, it can cause you lots of problems that there's this sort of lagging effect of the productivity. And so if people don't get independently productive quite quickly, it can end up being a drag on the team rather than being the reinforcements that everybody was excited would arrive.

Matt

Do you have any like, processes or your own frameworks? Like, what do you do to keep those teams productive? How do you measure it? How do you approach it?

Meri Williams

So I think in terms of measuring it, the DORA metrics are really helpful. And I think they're the only sort of scientifically backed and engineering productivity metrics, whatever McKinsey might think. And so I find those really helpful. The other side of it is to make that onboarding really amazing. And what I found when I was at Monzo, there was one particular tech lead who was amazing at onboarding people. You could almost predict that anybody that he would have onboarded everybody that he onboarded did really, really well in the company. And it became this sort of obvious pattern.

And then we asked him what he was doing differently and what he was doing. Was really thinking through what the experience of that new person was. And so for the month before they arrived, he would hold back certain tickets and tasks in the team because they were good for onboarding. And so he would try to, in the first month, give somebody quite a broad exposure to the code base that the team owned, but giving them bigger and bigger tickets so that they could get up to speed but also feel really productive in that first month. And so that was something that we tried to replicate across teams because it made so much sense and it was so helpful. I think also just having a written down onboarding plan makes people feel much less lost when they arrive. And whether that's that you've got engineering onboarding plan for everybody in notion or you have actually write one specifically for each engineer, whichever you end up doing, having some templates and having some defaults is a really helpful thing for folks as they join. And I think setting that expectation that you don't need people to be independently productive on day one, but you want them to be contributing, you want them to be shipping to production within the first couple of days, you want them to be independently productive by at least halfway through their probation period.

I think it's a really good expectation to set.

Matt

I faced the so. So on my company we do it similar. So we have the process, we do it in Asana. So I think down below the onboarding process is really smooth. But I personally, sometimes I face the problem with people are not being so open as I wanted them to be. So they have everything written down. They have the values, they have the meetings right around to get the feeling of the company.

And I encourage them to put like some time slots in my calendar, but they don't do it. They feel kind of, you know, as a last thing to do. And I don't know, like in your case, do you do something like to encourage those guys, you know, to get in the conversation? Because I think in the early months it's really important to do it right. Like to open those people inside the organization.

Meri Williams

Yeah. And so I think that that's where the line manager plays a really, a really big part part. Because I think if you can make somebody feel really comfortable, like they belong, like they're included, then they're more likely to ask difficult questions or admit that they don't know something and those kind of things. But I think it also can help because the line manager can help them explain what that session with you as the CTO is for. Right. Because a lot of times people are a little worried to set it up because they're just like, oh, I don't know what we're going to be talking about. I don't know how to prepare for this big scary meeting. Right. And so I think that the line manager can both prepare them for that and reassure them that you're not that big and not that scary, but also give them some stuff to talk to you about.

And that I think is usually super helpful. So I think when my engineering managers will talk to somebody new and get them ready for that first interaction, they'll have some conversation about what matters to me and reassure them that I'm not going to be bored by whatever they choose to talk about. I'm probably going to be pretty interested because I don't get to be in a team shipping code every day anymore. And so it's super interesting to me, especially when somebody comes in with new eyes and they can, you know, spot things that are inefficient in the process or tooling that's missing or tell you things from their past organizations that they miss. And that kind of stuff I think is super helpful. And so there's this sort of sweet spot. You want to talk to people probably after their first four weeks, but before their first six weeks are finished, because then they've had enough time to see what it's really like and enough time to reflect and compare to where they were before that they might have some really interesting insight for you.

But they're not so fresh that they feel like they don't know enough yet and they're not there so long that they don't have those fresh eyes still.

Matt

So four to six weeks rule. I will keep in mind that. And let's talk a bit more about this bleed scaling because you mentioned already important topic that the recruitment. Maybe it's not the most important part here. You mentioned an onboarding. It's super important. Measuring dora metrics are really helpful.

But maybe do you see something that is really hard or not so obvious from the outside when you think about the bleach scaling? Any other parts?

Meri Williams

Yeah. I think a lot of people will sacrifice culture and values in order to meet the scaling targets. And I think that's the biggest mistake to make. But it's a really easy mistake to make. It's really easy to feel like there's pressure and your culture's going to change anyway with all these new people arriving. And so it's easy to become haphazard about it and not to be intentional. And I think that figuring out how to do A really good interview that's based on your values and to figure out how somebody is going to add to the culture, not fit in with it, but add to it is super valuable.

And so at the interview and the recruitment stage, I think building in some kind of assessment of cultural ad and values fit is really useful. But then following that up by making sure that you use your values in your assessment of people during their probation as well. Because on the one hand, there's the impact somebody has and the things that they're delivering, but on the other hand, the way that they deliver it really matters as well. That's what culture is made up of. All the little behaviors over time that we allow or don't allow. And so there's something about making sure that they get good values guidance or cultural guidance as well during both the interview and the onboarding process. And in an ideal world, it's actually that you're using your values to assess people all the time in your company.

It should be something that you're. That you're using in annual reviews and promotion and similar as well. You want to see those positive cultural behaviors echoed all the way through somebody's career with you as a company.

Matt

I think this is super important what you are saying. So I experienced this on my own. On my own, to be honest. I'm running the business for nine years and for once, one, we did it once. So we said like we put the bar a bit lower and we haven't focused so much on the culture as it was before. And it was like the worst thing that we could do because on the long term, you feel it for a long, long time. So when you lose the belt and you lose your criteria and the culture.

So I think this is what you said. This is number one thing to keep in mind. And I think it could be really difficult right, when the management is pushing you because you need to hit the numbers, you need to hire the FD's, right?

Meri Williams

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a little easier in the current environment because there's so much, it's so much that is on the side of the employer at the moment because of all the layoffs that we've seen in tech and similar. So there's a lot of people who want to join your company. You, you don't have to be as great at employer branding or those kind of things as you used to.

Used to be. But I think it's actually a miss to not still invest in those things because it's part of telling people who you are. And part of telling people who you are is important because then they can go, ah, that fits with my values. It's something that I can add to culturally or oh, no, something is important here that doesn't matter to me or that I actively don't care about. And I think that's really useful and important for people. And so I suppose it's a thing that even in times where you have a lot of applicants and a lot of interest, it's still worth doing that employer branding work to be really clear about who you are and what matters to you as an organization. Because otherwise people can't opt in and opt out the way that they should be able to if they don't know who you are.

Matt

And let's talk about the controversial stuff. Or maybe something contrarian. It's the more fancy word for that. So you made a lot of decision in your career as an engineering leader. But I'm looking for an example when one of those decision was controversial, contrary, and not so obvious and not so comfortable to make and comfortable for people. Could you tell me and go through the experience.

Meri Williams

So something that we've done at PLEO since I joined is we standardized engineering salaries. So we have bands, and within the bands, there's basically finding your feet, mastering and expanding. And so that's kind of not bottom of the band, but it's sort of like you're doing okay, you're doing well, and then you're doing, you know, you're on the verge of the next level, you're doing. You're doing better than average. And we have standardized that to basically say, like, at landing, you get paid. Sorry, at finding your feet, you get paid certain amounts. At mastering, you get paid a certain amount.

And so there's not as much negotiation as there used to be, which some people might think is a bad thing for employees. But what it let me do was it let me spot that there were a bunch of people who were underpaid versus their peers for doing the same work. And so I needed to go to the CFO and to the CEO and basically say, I've got a bunch of people who are underpaid. And some of them were underpaid by like 30, 40%. It wasn't many, but it was some. And they were mostly women, as tends to be the case, and basically went and said, like, we have to fix this. We need to make it fair.

And then in order for it not to happen again, I want to make salaries not. Not individual salaries public, but salary bands and salary points Public. And that was a fairly major change and quite uncomfortable for the, for the company. It wasn't something that we had done before, but that was probably one of the big decisions I've made that was quite contrarian, quite controversial. I think the, you know, the, the theory in business is that you should get, you know, people for the cheapest you can get them for. But I think that just builds so much resentment and so much unfairness over time that it's really, really problematic. And so that was, that's probably one of the big ones in the last couple of years that made a big difference.

Matt

And you talk a really interesting area of the. I would say diversity and inclusion. Right. And I'm just wondering how do you approach this kind of topic? How do you lead this in a bigger organization and what do you do currently? So this example was a great example, I think, of, you know, one of the initiatives, but maybe do you have any other examples or advices to the leaders who might, who want to tackle this topic?

Meri Williams

Sure. So I actually lead ESG for all of pleo, so environment, social and governance across the company. And that's really interesting because it means I'm not just looking at engineering or data or product or design. I'm looking across the whole company. And that's been a really interesting experience in terms of the sort of framework I use to assess inclusion and to make it better. I developed a framework over time that I use quite successfully, which is basically that I think that people are asking themselves three questions. Whether they are doing it consciously or subconsciously.

They're asking, am I expected here? Am I respected here and can I be myself and be successful here? And I think that first one is about appearances. Am I expected here? Is, is there any evidence that someone like me is meant to work at this company? And so if you're a person of color and there's just white people on the website, maybe you look at it and go, oh, I'm not even sure I'm expected to apply here. If you're, you know, in your 40s with kids and you've got, you care about, you know, healthcare and pension and things like that, and you look at a startup's website and the most benefits they've got is like beer Wednesday and football, foosball Fridays.

Maybe they're not expecting somebody a bit older with kids. Right. And a lot of that am I expected. You can tell from just looking at, from the outside in am I respected? I think you experience as part of the interview process and, and every day in the company. Right. But am I.

Am I respected? Is about whether your differences are seen as a feature or a bug. And so if somebody is trying to make you be like everybody else, there's a lot of energy to pretend to be something that you're not. And so it's not very wise investments of time for those of us who are different to go somewhere where we're going to have to spend all of our energy pretending to be something different than we really are. And then I think that last one, can I be myself and succeed here? Is really about whether you see people in leadership above you who are the same as you. And I'm different in a lot of ways.

Like we've probably chatted about. I'm the one the Daily Mail warns you about. I'm an immigrant with a job. I'm perceived as a woman working in tech. I've got a physical disability, I've neurodiverse and all of these things. My wife is British, so I'm over here stealing their women and their jobs. But I grew up white in apartheid South Africa, so I grew up very privileged.

I grew up with a lot of advantages that I didn't earn. And I've never found somebody who was exactly all of those different things above me in leadership. But I look for whether the leadership team is very similar to each other. And when the leadership team look like they share a matching haircut and matching ties and probably matching underwear, it's very difficult to imagine that anybody who doesn't look like them and talk like them, them and went to the same school as them will be successful. Right. And so I think that that's what people are looking for. They're looking for some evidence that difference is celebrated and difference can lead to success.

And one of the most ironic things is that the data tells us that difference leads to success. Diverse teams are more innovative, they're more profitable, diverse boards are more likely to reign over more successful companies and. And all of this kind of stuff. And so there's a lot of data to say that it is the case, but it's amazing how many places still have very, very, very similar leadership teams. And so it makes it very difficult for somebody to look at them and say, oh, yeah, someone like me can succeed here.

Matt

Thank you. Thank you for that, Mari. And I think that another question is maybe a bit related to tough matters that we already tackled, because I really wanted to ask you about the hardest thing that you have done in your career. And, like, what. What was it? And, you know, how have you went through like what were your lesson learned?

Meri Williams

So I think my, my hardest thing was probably scale. The first big scaling gig that I did which was at the government digital service and we went from 30 to 300 people in, in about nine months which was very, very intense. Not all of them permanent. So some folks were, were from ThoughtWorks and a couple of other companies that with. Because it just physically wasn't possible to hire that many people in that period of time and we had Gov UK to deliver so we had to, had to get it done. And that was extremely challenging. And part of the reason it was so challenging was I was the only manager for a really long time. So I had 80 direct reports at 1.80 which is a lot of onetoone to do every month and a lot of people to keep clear on who is who and what's their situation and what are their aspirations and their career goal.

I got very good at taking very good one to one notes during that period of time. But that was very intense and very, very challenging. And part of the trouble was that the leadership there didn't. They were. The one thing that the leadership there had in common was that they weren't people who had benefited much from having a good manager. And so they didn't see the point of management. They didn't see that there was a reason to have good managers.

And I think we all hate bad bosses, right? The pointy head boss in Dilbert is funny because he's so recognizable to all of us. And so I don't, I'm not a fan of bad bosses at all. I don't think you should be dictatorial. I don't think you should be telling people what to do or you know, I think a Great Manager helps 8 to 12 people to achieve their potential. And so it really is a multiplier role, a maximizer role. But I think at the time, because there were all these leaders in that organization who hadn't really ever needed or benefited from a manager, if anything, they had worked around their managers for a long time.

They didn't see that it could be valuable. And so I ended up in this situation where I had these 80 direct reports for quite a long time because it was really difficult to convince people that more managers were needed and that they could be valuable. And I feel like that's coming back a little bit in the industry right now. There's a lot of places talking about flattening hierarchies, wanting managers to go back to being hands on. And I think that that's wildly underplaying the value of a good manager. I think a great manager can help so many other people be more than they would be otherwise that they can really help them be more effective and efficient and happy and productive and help them learn and grow. But it's very easy to underestimate the value of that.

Especially when people are getting back to thinking that they should have as small teams as possible or as flat a hierarchy as possible. There's a brilliant book called Slack. Well I suppose like the app that everybody uses now but it was written long before that. And in that um, it's quite a good articulation of what middle management is good at. Middle managers tend to be the folks who can spot that there's opportunities, that there's inefficiencies. They can help make things better for individuals and for teams. And actually is if you take away that layer, you take away all the slack in the system, then you take away all of the opportunity to improve things for teams because everybody is too busy just do it.

To ever stop and retrospect and think about how to make things better. And that's a real risk. I think with the current attitude in the industry towards engineering managers and that they all have to code and they should all be, you know, carrying a full coding load as well as looking after a bunch of people I think is short sighted and I think we're going to see a load of people burn out and then have to recover from it. Unfortunately because of that it is really.

Matt

Interesting that you mentioned it. So I wanted to ask you about the experience of Procter and Gamble because you worked there for almost nine and nine, almost 10 years I would say. And I have a feeling that in those companies like Procter and Double. More, less like tech, techy companies, less startup, like less startup, kind of less fintech. Let's you know, you know what I mean? More traditional companies, they have pretty good organized the managerial kind of thing. And like in the big techs there is a lot of testing the things. Right. So sometimes the we are on the left side, sometimes we are on the right side.

And now what you are saying, like everybody needs to be more full stack even the managers, right. They need to have more people, we need to cut the cost, we need to be more productive. But I think it's. It will be temporary because you cannot work this way what you said, right. The people will burn out.

Meri Williams

Yeah. And I think it's definitely going to happen. Yeah. I mean P and G was a fantastic place to grow up because it was so good at investing in leadership and in management. And there's a famous quote from the Chro at some point saying we hire the most competitive people we can find and then we only reward them for collaborating, which is a really good articulation. So hire the most sort of competitive people that you can ever know who are all natural leaders and then you only reward them for collaborating with each other. It's one way to run a company and it's, you know, been very successful for them.

They're a $81 billion company now, right in revenue and so they're pretty amazing. But yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about tech and one of the reasons that I helped start the Lead Dev conference was that we pretend that we have to go back to, you know, 1920s style factory management and iterate our way from there. When there's been a hundred years of management science, there's a hundred years of lessons learned and case studies and articulation of what does and doesn't work. And as tech we are often just willfully ignoring it and starting over from the real basics of people management and trying to, you know, reinvent Taylorism and go from there. And I find it immensely frustrating because I think it's just we're, I understand us being an industry that likes to go back to first principles and there's been some really good stuff coming out of going back to first principles. But I think a lot of the time what people are doing when they, when they say they're going back to first principles on management is they're just going back to old principles, they're going back to old ways of working and they're ignoring all the modern knowledge that we have about how to do this really well. And so I find that super frustrating in the, in the tech industry that we spend so much time, yeah.

Pretending that we have to reinvent everything when some stuff has been quite well researched and quite well looked into and we could, we could build on that and we're much more likely to accept expertise when it's technical expertise than we are in any other field. And I think that's just very short sighted of us as an industry.

Matt

Yeah. Another interesting thing that I've noticed, and I don't know if you'll notice before, but because like in tech, I think this is the first industry which is so much globalized, so much diverse, like with so many nationalities, so many different approaches to life like making the task and work, which is really insane to kind of set the same the Same rules. That works for everybody, right? So to give you an example, I will not mention the country, but to give you an example, I had a friend who was running a company of, he had like 150 people, it was like a tech company. And he, he read a few books from us authors about four days week, right. So he read the book and he said, this is brilliant. So I'll create like a better environment for the people.

They will be more focused, they have more ownership, they work only four days. So he implemented that instead of five days, they started to work four days. And he had the problem that the people said like four days and I'm not working any hour more like even if the, if it's needed, even if this is overtime. Because you said we work now for days, right. So, and, and it was like, you know, this was the clash of the cultures because in the US it kind of worked. But you know, in a country that I, that I didn't mention, it hasn't worked. So I don't know, have you seen some kind of like a rules and you know, you work a lot with people that some works for one guys and another not.

Meri Williams

I mean, I think the difference in holiday culture between the US and Europe is particularly fascinating because it should be that Europe is more productive. Sorry, that America is more productive than we are. But not. They're not, they're not as. They're about the same and they're spending so many more weeks in the office than we are in Europe. Right. And so I, so I, but I get what you're saying.

Like some of the, sometimes the background's default is important when you're, when you're figuring that out. So there's been a big, a big trial of four day working weeks in the UK recently and it has been found to be more productive and it works really well for people, but it's against a background of people working quite hard. And so I don't think many people are getting to 32 hours in the week and then just downing tools and refusing to do anything more. They've got a more adult relationship with the company that they'll put in a bit of extra effort when it's needed and then they'll take it a little bit easier when it, when it's not.

And I think that's a healthier way to be. But you're absolutely right that there are cultures where people do exactly what they're told, exactly when they're told, and then that becomes very, very challenging or hierarchical cultures, for instance, where you can end up with somebody in a very un hierarchical culture. You can just share an idea even if you're the boss and if it's a stupid idea, somebody will tell you it. And then if you, but if you come as a boss or a manager in that situation and then you have a bunch of people who are from a very hierarchical culture, then they're like they've got two problems now. Number one is their boss is an idiot and number two is they can't tell them problematic as well. Right. And so I think you have to be culture aware when you're making these kind of choices and implementations and it makes you over communicate.

But I think like in a lot of ways, you know, remote teams have been shown to be more productive. I think that's because things that are unseen and under the radar in, in person teams have to be more explicit and more structured and more organized. In remote teams I think that it's actually because communication has to be better that it then makes the team better. Same way as people think that diversity and inclusion should be easy. And it's actually the fact that it's difficult that makes it hard.

That makes it hard, that makes it good. And it being difficult to get a bunch of people from really different perspectives to come to the same decision and agreement of which way to go forward is really valuable and is so much more valuable than having a bunch of people who all had the same idea, who might feel like they work together easier because they get to the same decision fast. But it might not be a good decision because they haven't had these opposing viewpoints, they haven't considered it from every angle. And so I think that there's something to be said for learning from all of those cases that being more explicit and being better at communicating is valuable and helps to balance out those cultural differences that you might have otherwise. So being really explicit about expectations and how, you know, launching a four day week for instance and then also just having to say with that, knowing your culture and this might sometimes mean that you have to work on a Friday occasionally, but then we'll try and give you a Thursday back as well. Right. That kind of stuff.

Matt

And Mary, you mentioned the lead dev conference. A few of my guests were there and they were even like a speaker is there and I know that you are engaged in this a lot. So I, I, I check it like a few times and I feel there is a lot of good content there and there is not so many conferences around the leadership for engineering leaders. And even like I heard the opinions about it, that it was created for the engineering leaders and like, some engineering topics are added. But in fact, this is like a leadership conference, like leadership conference for engineering leaders. Like, and. And it's really.

There are really interesting topics. So maybe could you tell me, have you heard some. Some of the panels that were influential on you, some lessons learned that you took out of this conference? Maybe. Do you recall something?

Meri Williams

Yeah, I mean, I've been really honored to. I've. I've chaired it for the last nine years. And I was Ruthian it is who started it. And I. I was very lucky to get involved very early on. And I'd describe it as a leadership conference disguised as a technology conference.

And I think that's what it is because I think it's absolutely, as you say, it's leadership for engineering leaders very specifically. And we have some unique challenges as a result. And in terms of talks that have really stuck with me. The very first year, we had an amazing talk from Camille Fournier about how you can't clone yourself and so you need to become a multiplier of others. And I think I. I took that to heart. It taught me a lot about delegating and about how to maximize the potential of other people.

There was also a fantastic talk by Anwan Simmons one year about lending your privilege. And he talked a lot about how it's not enough to just recognize that you have some advantages because of who you are or how you were born or what school you went to, you know, all these different things that can give us an advantage, but to realize that you can do something with that. And the example, the first example he talks about is that the character who played Spock in the original Star Trek realized that women on the. And in particular a woman of color on the team wasn't being paid as much as he was, and he refused to do the next series until she was paid equal. And that's a really brilliant example of lending privilege. And I think it's a fantastic talk and I highly recommend watching it. It taught me a lot.

And then there's a guy called Nick Niens who does brilliant storytelling talks every year at Lead Dev London. And he's done how to Crash an Airplane and Lessons from Nuclear Meltdowns and all sorts of things like that. And they're absolutely just masterpieces of talks and very, very entertaining to watch as well.

Matt

Sounds really exciting, I have to say. And I have two more questions, the next one that I wanted to talk about with you. So all of us, we learn something new Each year and all of us we have new challenges that I think it's like a never ending story. Like each year you have new challenges on your plate. Right. So in your case, like what are your challenges, what are your objectives, you know, what do you type in Google or ChatGPT right now, you know, when you're trying to solve them.

Meri Williams

So I've done a big transformation of the. So this role at PLEO has been unusual in that it wasn't a scaling gig. So the team has stayed roughly the same size the whole time I've been there and which is partly about the new environment that we're in and partly about PLU having realized that they were scaling a little too fast and then slowing down a little bit to be, to be more prudent. And so at the moment what I'm concerned with is getting more out of the team that I've got, so helping them to maximize their potential, to really be the best that they can be. And so we've done a lot of training and development investments and helping people to learn better and to, to level up more. So that's been learning theory and how do different people learn? And that kind of stuff has been a lot of what I'm googling.

And then the other thing is that we've kind of done a transformation from a team that was struggling a little bit to one that's performing quite well. But now we need to go to the next frontier which will be how do we get to being a world class product organization? And so that's the big focus at the moment is what does it look like for us in the next two, three years? How do we get from where we are to being that kind of world class team that anybody would want to join and be a part of.

Matt

And the last question that I wanted to ask you is around the books and resources and one of the conference we already discussed, but something that have been particularly influential and helpful to you as a tech leader that you would recommend to other tech leaders.

Meri Williams

I mean I can't not say lead Dev. I think it's a great conference. I think it's also a fantastic set of written resources now as well. So leaddev.com has articles and panels as well as all the talks that we have at the conferences. And so I think that's brilliant. I also really like Turing Fest, which is a sort of broader conference that runs in Edinburgh every year that is very multidisciplinary. So it's quite cool to have a conference where you've got not just tech and design and product coming together, but also marketing and sales and like the full customer service.

Everybody from everybody who's anybody in a company tends to go to Turingfest. And so that's pretty great. In terms of books, I love that book Slack that I mentioned. My favorite management book is First Break all the Rules, which is this very data based leadership and management book. That's that was written after a study that looked at hundreds of companies and interviewed hundreds of thousands of people to figure out what made teams high performing. And it's also a list of things that is very likely to make teams happy, which I think is really positive that those things come together. And then let me just think if there's any other.

Oh, I mean the other book I recommend to all engineering leaders is accelerate from Dr. Nicole Frosgren. Really amazing about which measures and you know, engineering productivity and what actually matters to measure. I think is really good.

Matt

Awesome. Thank you Marie for a really interesting talk and all those insights. I really appreciate it and I think our listeners will like it too. Thank you.

Meri Williams

Thank you. Follow Matt on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Better Tech Leadership newsletter.

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