Anthony Mayer: Automating Success - The Transition from Manual to AI-Driven Testing

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Matt

My name's Matt and I will be talking with Anthony Mayer about the differences between working in tech in the US And Germany, leadership challenges in engineering, and.

Anthony Mayer

Transitioning from manual to automated testing.

Matt

Hey Anthony, good morning. I'm really happy to have you here. You are my first guest in 2025 and as we discussed before, I want to try something differently because I haven't done in 2024 any introduction at all. So maybe this time you could tell a few words about yourself before we start.

Anthony Mayer

Hi, Matt. Sure, of course, happy to be here. So, yeah, I'm Anthony Mayer.

I'm the VP of Engineering at Charles. We help businesses communicate with their customers through WhatsApp, sending marketing, messages service messages viewing products, those kinds of things. And yeah, I've been an engineering leader for VP for over five years now and before that director role and been an engineer now for I think about 15 years. So. But yeah, I'm super excited to be here and be part of the podcast and to be your first guest in 2025 is quite the honor.

Matt

Awesome. Happy to hear hear that. The first question for a warm up because you are clearly from the US hearing your accent and based on your LinkedIn, you work for Yelp, you work in San Francisco, you work for the organization there, and usually, you know, there is not a lot of people moving to Germany from the US to work in tech. It's opposite. Right. So I'm wondering from your case why you moved and like, maybe you could tell a bit about how working in tech in Germany is a bit different than in the U.S. sure.

Anthony Mayer

So yeah, my accent doesn't give it away, but I'm actually half German, half American, so I grew up a bit in Germany, but then in the US for a long time. And as you, as you said, I worked in the Bay Area in San Francisco for a few years and about seven years ago I decided to move to Germany mainly for personal reasons, but it really wouldn't have been possible if the tech scene here hadn't evolved to what it is. And it's continued to evolve even while I've been here. And I knew I had a lot of opportunities and originally I was still working remotely for Silicon Valley companies. But then I had an opportunity to jump in properly into the European tech scene, join GetSafe, an insurance startup based in Germany. And it was great. And I really saw how much the German and overall European tech scene had evolved and in many ways become similar to what it's like in the us There are of course differences, like lots of them, but I think, you know, it's really been incredible to see where the tech scene here is at.

Yeah, I guess, I guess in terms of differences. Right. I think one of the biggest challenges I've faced as a hiring manager is, you know, the way notice periods, probation periods and just hiring cycles in general are, you know, in working for US Companies. When you're hiring mainland the US if you decide, hey, this quarter, here's what we want to do and we need additional people. You can start the hiring process and often have somebody working right. Within three, four weeks. That's completely possible here.

With longer notice periods, with more hesitancy to leave companies because of probation periods, I think it slows that all down. It definitely takes much longer to hire somebody. I think the quality of people you can get is really great, but it drags things backwards a little bit. So that's definitely one of the biggest challenges I've seen overall. I think company sizes and things are a bit smaller here. You definitely see fewer IPOs, but I think we've seen that speed up a little bit more now. Of course, you're not seeing too many IPOs in the US either right now.

So I think in really many ways the markets are on par with each other at this point.

Matt

During our last conversation we were discussing and you mentioned that you're not wanting to have the tech leads and instead you have the separate roles. I mean the engineering managers and staff engineers. Maybe you could share a bit to the, to the listeners, like why are you doing so?

Anthony Mayer

Sure. You know, it's funny because I actually was a tech lead for, for a little while and it's a role that naturally emerges in many, many teams. Right. You know, and it's, overall, it's a great sign. Right. You have a more senior engineer, there's a team, it, you know, needs leadership, somebody steps into the role and you know, they're still continuing to develop a little bit. They don't maybe have formal people management responsibilities, but they're leading all of the projects, making planning decisions along with the product managers and things.

The problem that emerges is at some point things stall out a little bit for that tech lead. They're trying to balance too many things, trying to wear too many hats. At the same time, they don't know how much time they should be spending hands on programming versus in planning meetings versus mentoring people. And all of those things are important. But then it also becomes tricky when you're trying to grow and learn. Right. Do you spend time in management kind of trainings or you spend time Going deeper into the tech stack.

And that's why I found it's been better to really have more clear differentiation between staff engineers who are really focused on the technical. They still may lead projects. That's not a problem, and that's great. It's important. But they don't have that responsibility over the whole team. And engineering managers, who do have that responsibility for the whole team, making sure, you know, the people are happy that they're working successfully, but also that the team is delivering overall on everything. It's been an interesting thing because, you know, oftentimes when you talk to an engineer who's, who's at this point where they say, well, I want to just do a little bit of both, and I would that way myself.

You know, there's a, there's a frustration or a hesitation to pick one path. But what I've seen is that when you can create that clarity, it's really a relief for people, right, because they have a much clearer sense of what they need to be focused on, how they can be successful, how they can help their team be successful. I think at the same time, it creates a lot of clarity for the team of, okay, now this person is responsible for this and not these other things. For that I go to another person. And overall, I've seen that work really, really well. But, you know, sometimes having a tech lead is the right thing for a team for a period of time. But I really believe long term it's best to have that clear separation that's most successful for teams is what I've seen.

Matt

Speaking of the transformations, team transformations, another thing that we talk about was about moving, moving from manual testing to automated testing. And I recall the same, like, transition, like far or five years ago. Like, I remember when we were starting some project, we said, like, without the automated test, it doesn't make sense to engage us as an agency. And it's like so important. So I'm wondering, in your case, I mean, like, automated tests are really important, but I was more interested in like, how you did this transformation, how you describe it to the lead team, or maybe not technical people, that this is important to do. So. So how was it for you?

Anthony Mayer

Yeah, it's actually funny because one of my first jobs actually as an intern was working as part of a QA team where I was doing automation for the first time. And it was very controversial for the team. I remember even back then I was a college student and I had all these grownups at the time, you know, who were like, whoa, whoa, what are we doing. But you know, as we started adding automation, the, the kind of, the more manual QA people realized, oh, wow, now I don't have to spend time on the really repetitive tasks. I can get much deeper. I can actually find the more fundamental problems with, you know, the product, find those, those bigger challenges and spend more time understanding the product. And not just on, hey, let me click the same thing that always breaks every time.

And you know, that's something that I brought to other teams as well. I think everybody, like you said, everybody likes the idea of automation. Everyone knows it's important, but it does take a lot of work. The most important thing is really having processes in place, bringing that into a team understanding, okay, where are we at with testing and where do we need to get to? And you can't just flip a light switch. You're not going to suddenly have everything automated from day one. And I even think when you're working on a new project, you can start with unit testing and maybe some integration testing, but you're probably not going to have end to end tests right away. And that's actually something we're dealing with right now at Charles, where the team has had more of a default manual QA mindset.

And one of the first changes I've made is to say, no, you know what, official policy we're moving towards automation. We have, you know, QA focused on adding additional automation, adding processes, adding, you know, underlying infrastructure. And it's scary for a team, definitely because they're like, wait, what do we do now? But it's something where I do think most engineers come to embrace it. And also the people who do the manual testing, because like I said, they can, they can focus on higher leverage work and less on kind of just clicking around.

Matt

Have you got a challenge with the management or business people to convince them that it makes sense to make automated tests instead of manual testing?

Anthony Mayer

It can definitely be a challenge. I think most of the time what business people care about is how quickly can I get something out the door, right?

And does it work? And if you can clearly explain to them what that new process will look like, how you can make sure that, you know, you will be able to ship as fast and eventually faster, then I think that's a pretty strong argument. And I think there's always a hesitation also for, for the more outside business people of process changes. But I think there you just have to really guide them through it, show them examples where it's worked and help them understand how it will strengthen the organization overall, but also be Transparent where there may be some setbacks. Right. You have to be honest. If you promise perfection, then you'll be setting everybody up for failure. Right. It's really important to, to make sure they understand that story. And that's why, you know, when I did make these changes also Charles, I, I made sure not just to talk about it within my team, but also did, you know, presentations in our company, all hands explaining to them, hey, here's what we're doing, here's what the effect will be, here's what we expect it to have the impact we expect to have on other teams as well.

And I think that was overall very well received.

Matt

I'm personally running different businesses for 12 years and I think like the self development is really hard if your company grows or if your role is being like VP of Engineering for instance, like in your case. And there is a lot of knowledge in the books but like I feel there is still not enough, not enough transparency and it's really hard to develop yourself and to find this off the shelf kind of knowledge. And I'm wondering in your case like, how do you keep growing? How do you keep learning for the role?

Anthony Mayer

Yeah, yeah. I mean I think it's definitely something I try to think about a lot. You know, I'm always looking to learn and grow for myself obviously. But also I expected of my team and I want to be a role model in that sense. Right. So I want them to also understand, you know, what I'm doing to get better. And I think sometimes things like conferences can be very helpful. Right. I went to for instance the Leading ENG conference from Lead Dev for the first time this past year.

That was a great opportunity to meet people, learn some new interesting things and different approaches. But I think my preference is to just try to absorb information for as many possible places at once. I, I don't tend to be somebody who goes super deep with a lot of management books or anything like that. I tend to prefer reading a lot of kind of mid length blog posts, gathering a lot of information from that.

I also love seeing what's going on on LinkedIn. Obviously LinkedIn can be very loud and there can sometimes be a lot of mess on there, but it can bring some great inspiration. For instance, actually a book I'm reading right now, it's called Loonshots by Safi Bahcall, which is about different ways of approaching innovation is something that I saw as a recommendation by a CTO on LinkedIn. And I'm diving into it and I love it. So I think you have to just be open to finding new information from wherever you can and also understanding what's important for you. Right. What are the areas you.

You want to work on and what's the best way to get there. It's not always going to be the same for, for every person.

Matt

And my next question is about the thing that I think there is no podcast nowadays without the AI, so we need to tackle this too. But I think you have really great stories around it because you have great case studies from the Get Safe and really practical, pragmatic approach to, to the AI, to run the initiatives and to measure the roi. Because everybody is talking about the AI and there is a lot of proof of concept, but this is really difficult to measure sometimes the impact of the projects. And it's still a lot of R and D, right? So it's a lot of. You try and learn, you trial and fail a lot before you implement something that is beneficial for the business. And maybe you could tell more about the case studies at the Get Safe, how you approach the AI there based on your experience.

Anthony Mayer

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I completely agree, right.

AI is everywhere. I think everyone is, to an extent, expected to do something with it. A lot of people are, of course, hesitant. There's a lot of talk, but not necessarily so much you've seen in results. And I think as a leader, if you're trying to figure out, well, how do I, as an engineering leader, how do I bring my company into this, how do I make use of this? So like you said, that it's really effective is definitely a challenge. It's something I was fairly hesitant about as well.

What we did, GetSafe actually is we had a hackathon and we had a couple teams who played with it and tried different things to see, hey, what could work, right? Just to get an understanding of how does it fit in with our systems, how can we make use of what we add? And we kind of got a sense of it. And from there we developed some initial ideas where we said, hey, this is a way we could deploy LLMs in a way that's safe. We didn't allow them, for instance, to output free text that customers could see, but we did use them for categorizing questions that were coming in from our users in our app and trying to solve the ones we could. Right? And we started very incrementally. Right. And initially it was a lot of, hey, here's an article we can have you read.

Oh, is that correct? If not, here, let's connect you to A person. And then we iterated from there to the point where we had really more complex flows the AI could run completely or take you into. But I think, you know, I think there's always this balance of, are you launching an mvp? Right. And I think there's a lot of hate of MVPs out there at the moment, which I do understand, but I think starting small and iterating is really, really important and making sure you set kind of your, your safety parameters as much as possible. Right. But that's kind of what we did at Get Safe.

But now, Charles, where, you know, like I said, we're a conversational product, you know, WhatsApp, it's all about back and forth communication with customers. Free text is of course incredibly important. And we've already kind of started launching a beta product and we're going to be going further with it where we do have the AI, you know, responding to customer inquiries on behalf of the businesses we work with. And for that we're looking at a much higher level of safety, much higher level of control we need to be able to fully launch with, otherwise our customers won't be happy. Right. So I think you really have to see, you know, what are the needs of your product, what are the needs of your customers, and figure out what your starting point should look like based on that.

Matt

I really like questions around the difficult times in your career. I have a few here that I wanted to ask you, but the first one, I'm always like, trying to look, trying to understand as a insider. Right. You are VP of Engineering. From the outside, every role, every leadership role, the grass looks, looks green. Right. But like, from, from your perspective and experiences, what are the, you know, pain points of the VP of Engineering, which are not visible from the outside for a regular, you know, person?

Anthony Mayer

Yeah. I think one of the most challenging things sometimes is just the amount of context switching I have to do. It's pretty common that at the same time I'm getting pinged about deep technical discussions or bugs and about finance, budget topics, HR decisions, and having to deal with all of those simultaneously. And I enjoy it a lot. Um, but, you know, it's pretty difficult when you need to make sure you're balancing all of that and you do want to be able to get back to people so you're not blocking others or entire teams, maybe from, from doing work. And so there's, there's really a lot of balancing that goes on there. I think it, it gets talked about a bit, but it's definitely one of those things.

I think that not everybody sees because oftentimes my counterparts or my team members, right. They just see one side of the me. Right. Because they're just talking to me about that one specific issue. And it's a lot of fun and I learn a lot from it, but it can definitely be be a lot. And I think the days where I've done just non stop context switching are definitely the ones where I'm most tired. Tired at the end of the day.

Matt

Do you recall during your career any controversial decisions? I mean something that like you have to do that as a leader. You do a lot of like I think unpopular decision and you just simply need to do it and see how it goes. And sometimes you're right, sometimes not, but maybe do you recall the decision that you made and it was controversial, but it turned up. Right. And what you learned from it, maybe something that you could, that we could discuss.

Anthony Mayer

Yeah. So one that immediately comes to mind is at GetSafe a few years ago we made the decision to remove all contractors from the team. And we'd been relying heavily on them, especially also in the engineering team. I'd built up relationship with the nearshoring partner and we'd had quite a few engineers embedded in the team and was working well overall. But we really could tell that there was a limit to where that could take us because we weren't able to integrate the team members in the same way. We didn't have control over, you know, could we give them raises or promotions. Right. We weren't able to reward our best people and that was always a challenge.

And so we made the decision. It was actually something that also our chro pushed across the whole company, but that I was a fan of is, you know, removing all the contractors and the team. Definitely the rest of the team definitely was very, very concerned. Right. Hey, we're losing a lot of capacity immediately, but we very quickly got to hiring more in house talent, working on raising the bar of the team overall. And fairly quickly, I would say within four to six months we really saw that the team was, was rebounding, was much stronger and that everybody really recognized and said, yeah, okay, that was difficult that we did that. It was, you know, unfortunate for those people.

But overall it was the right decision for, for the team and the company and that we're much stronger than where we were before and that was really great to see and also get that positive and reflective feedback from people.

Matt

I bet your work is pretty stressful as a leader. There's a lot of stress behind, to be honest. I'll learn a new thing like how to use my Apple watch. I have the mrv. It's like, oh, oh, heart response or heart rate variable or something like this. So I don't know if you know it, but it's clearly say like when you are stressed. So it's really cool that if it's down, it's like you can look at the day so you can, instead of journaling, you can have a look at your day, weeks and months and you see like how and what situation impact yourself.

But you know, I'm just wondering in your case, how do you deal with the stress? Do you have like some habits, some rituals that help you to manage it, like how do you overcome? Because I think this is super important and it's really difficult.

Anthony Mayer

Yeah, absolutely. I think it is important to find that time to shut off. Where I've been in kind of the worst phase of stress is when I don't manage to ever get off the computer. And I think, you know, you have to make that room for yourself. So even if I know I've got a lot of work to do, I really try to, you know, shut down at some point. You know, 6:37pm and get offline and go for a walk with my dogs or watch some tv, just have dinner. Right. Something to separate myself a little bit from kind of the normal workday.

And then even if I have to, you know, do a little more work later in the evening, I'm still kind of a little bit more removed from it. It's a little bit easier and I find that does wonders for me. It's also important to have your downtime right, you know, weekends, vacations, all of that.

But just for kind of that, that everyday thing that really helps a lot. And you know, I'm a big fan of going on hikes, being, you know, in the woods or, you know, I live in the country a little bit, so I have vineyards I get to go on, on walks through.

And that's really, really nice. And that helps me a lot to just come down and de stress and be ready for the next day.

Matt

Simple stuff. I think that's very simple routines. And the last question that I'm asking all of my guests is about the books, resources, maybe conferences that have significantly influenced your approach, your career that you could share.

Anthony Mayer

Yeah, I, you know, I already touched on like lead dev a little bit. I think they have a lot of really great material that I keep up with and I think for varying levels. So it was great. As I was more junior in my leadership journey, but also now as a vp, that's been really, really helpful. One book that always sticks with me that I read a few years ago is called Smart Cuts. I don't remember the author at the moment, but it's a great little read that kind of talks about how you can apply knowledge from one domain to another domain. And that's something that I've tried to really do, especially with, you know, the context switching and what I touched on.

And those are. Those are kind of the top things that come to mind. Like I said, I try to just be a sponge for as much information that's out there as I can, but, you know, and also try to be influenced by the people around me. I've been. I've been fortunate to have good mentors and good, good colleagues who push me and support me, and I think that helps me the most.

Matt

Anthony, thank you very much for today. Thank you for a lot of your tips and the stuff that you cannot find in the books, I think. So thank you for a great talk.

Anthony Mayer

Thank you very much, Matt. It's been great being on the podcast. Follow Matt and Leshek on link.

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