Making a change here test test. Ever wonder what it takes to truly balance the scales of gender diversity within a tech company? Mike Davidson, former VP of Design at Twitter, will take you through his remarkable journey of successfully transforming the male-dominated Twitter's gender ratio from a stark 80-20 to a balanced 50-50 within a year. Together, we'll explore the ins and outs of product management, the good, the bad, and the challenges it presents.
Our conversation delves into the intriguing facets of improving diversity and revamping hiring practices at Twitter. We shed light on the strategies employed to foster a culture of diversity that avoided the negative "us versus them" vibes. With a critical eye, we examine how the traditional word-of-mouth hiring can cultivate privilege and propose a thought-provoking idea of making it mandatory for teenagers to clock hours in minimum wage service industry jobs. In that context, we also delve into the unique Twitter rule that promotes maintaining employees in roles best suited to their abilities, reflecting on how it sidesteps the issue of employees feeling forced to abandon their expertise for advancement.
Rounding off, Mike shares invaluable insights into team well-being, decision-making, and the intersection of these aspects with product iteration in the Bay Area. We discuss the importance of judging the quality of decision-making over outcomes and the pitfalls of data-based conclusions. Hear from Mike, how maintaining a motivated and cheerful team is the secret sauce to successful iteration and product launching. Join us for an insightful journey into the world of gender diversity, product management, and team well-being. It's a conversation you won't want to miss!
Our conversation delves into the intriguing facets of improving diversity and revamping hiring practices at Twitter. We shed light on the strategies employed to foster a culture of diversity that avoided the negative "us versus them" vibes. With a critical eye, we examine how the traditional word-of-mouth hiring can cultivate privilege and propose a thought-provoking idea of making it mandatory for teenagers to clock hours in minimum wage service industry jobs. In that context, we also delve into the unique Twitter rule that promotes maintaining employees in roles best suited to their abilities, reflecting on how it sidesteps the issue of employees feeling forced to abandon their expertise for advancement.
Rounding off, Mike shares invaluable insights into team well-being, decision-making, and the intersection of these aspects with product iteration in the Bay Area. We discuss the importance of judging the quality of decision-making over outcomes and the pitfalls of data-based conclusions. Hear from Mike, how maintaining a motivated and cheerful team is the secret sauce to successful iteration and product launching. Join us for an insightful journey into the world of gender diversity, product management, and team well-being. It's a conversation you won't want to miss!
—
Hired is a podcast hosted by Cameron Moll that ran for several seasons in 2013-2016. Although the original files for many of the episodes were lost, we've published full episodes or excerpts for the surviving episodes.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone.
This is Hyerd.
I'm your host, cameron Maul.
Mike Davidson is today's guest.
Mike and I have known eachother since about 2004, when he
linked up a redesign of my sitefrom his and sent a truckload of
traffic to it.
Of course, that was back whenhe and I both were riding a lot
more than we have recently.
But speaking of riding, thatsets the stage for today's
(00:21):
discussion, because Mike is backin the blogging game.
He recently redesigned his sitemikeindustriescom is where you
can find him and he recentlywrote about his three years in
San Francisco as the VP ofdesign at Twitter.
On today's show, we'll divedeeper into some of the things
that he touched on in thatarticle, which you can find
linked up in the show notes.
(00:41):
Mike, welcome to the show.
Thanks, cameron, it's great tobe here.
What prompted you to write thatarticle?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It was a lot of stuff that had been bottled up inside
of me for the last three years.
I was actually a little worriedbecause I couldn't figure out
how I wanted to structure it.
There was just so much to say.
At the end of the day, it justended up being a stream of
consciousness.
My hope was that I could justput enough good stuff in there
that people wouldn't even reallyremember how disorganized it
(01:14):
was.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What's been the response so far?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's been really good .
Whenever you pour your heartinto something, you have a fear
that people will just look at itand go oh well, yeah, there's
another person leaving SanFrancisco.
Or oh, there's another personin design who's got something to
say.
Or oh, that's too long, I don'twant to read it.
I published the article firston my own blog.
As part of the redesign Iturned comments back on, which
(01:41):
has been great.
There's all positive commentsso far, no trolling at all.
It's just been echoingthroughout Twitter and
throughout Facebook andthroughout a bunch of other
places.
Now, so far, I'm pretty happywith the reaction.
It seems to be getting a lot ofpeople talking, hopefully
talking to their bosses, talkingto their colleagues and really
(02:03):
even reconsidering whetherthey're happy or not at their
current job.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah Well, a lot of that might have to do with the
honesty of not just this piecebut other pieces that you've
written as well, but maybespecific to a topic like the one
that you well, the topic'splural, I should say it's a
retrospective of working in theBay Area for three years.
Is the difficulty of beinghonest when you're writing?
Is that a result of theatmosphere within the Bay Area
(02:29):
for a piece like this, or is itsimply just a result of being
tactful and empathetic as awriter?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I think it's mainly the former.
I think there's this unspokenrule and it's really throughout
the business world in general,but you just see it a lot at Bay
Area companies, where you'rereally just not supposed to talk
about anything negative.
You're not supposed to talkabout things that may be
happening that don't seem rightto you or don't feel right to
(02:56):
you.
You're supposed to just smileand try to make things better,
which in general, is a goodattitude.
I mean, you want to always bepositive.
I try to always be positive,but I just didn't feel like it
would be an honest piece if Ididn't mention a lot of positive
and a lot of negative thingsthat I noticed over the last few
(03:17):
years.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I've known you, as I mentioned, for more than a
decade and have read a lot ofyour stuff over the years, and I
guess I should have guessedthis, given the caliber of
companies that you've worked at.
But I had no idea that you hadthat much to say about product
management.
I mean, where did that comefrom?
Why would you dive into that asthe very first thing in this
particular piece where it's aretrospective about design at
(03:39):
Twitter?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah Well, I mean, as you could probably guess, I saw
quite a range of it over thereand I worked with some of the
best product managers I've evermet in my entire life and I ever
will have the good fortune towork with.
But then I also worked withsome people who I just honestly
didn't feel like should even beproduct managers in the first
(04:01):
place, let alone at a five star,public, extremely important
company like Twitter, and I justwas not really used to kind of
seeing that.
Like, I guess with a designerit's sort of a lot easier to
tell right away how good of adesigner somebody is, Because as
(04:21):
a hiring manager you look attheir portfolio, you talk to
them for an hour or two andfigure out if you think they'll
be easy to work with.
You get a feel for how theysolve problems.
You know, with an engineer youdo coding tests and a bunch of
other things, and I just thinkwith design and engineering it's
so much easier to tell beforeyou work with somebody how
(04:41):
effective they're going to be orhow qualified they are, and
with PMs it's just way more of acrapshoot.
You may get lucky and hiresomebody amazing, and you may
get really unlucky and hiresomebody who shouldn't be
managing products and shouldn'tbe managing people.
And so you know, I guess thereason I wrote about it is I saw
(05:03):
the sort of both immenselypositive effects it can have
when you get somebody in thereworking with designers and
researchers and engineers who'sjust a fantastic PM and a real
force multiplier on their team,as well as the opposite effect,
where you've got great designers, great engineers, great
researchers stuck with somebodywho really has no business, you
(05:24):
know, making product decisions.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I'm going to ask you about diversity in the workplace
.
I know you have some thoughtsabout this, so maybe share your
thoughts about diversity ingeneral and, if you're willing
to share, tell us how you tookTwitter from an 80-20 male to
female ratio to 50-50 in lessthan a year.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, you know, diversity isn't something that
I've thought a lot about myentire career and I would say
before I moved to the Bay Area Iwasn't really acutely aware of
how big of a problem it is intech.
You know, when you aren'tpaying attention and you kind of
look around you and you see amix of men and women and some
(06:04):
white people and some blackpeople and some Asian people and
some Latinos, you sort of maysay falsely in your head like
hey, I work in a diverseatmosphere because look at all
these people that I see.
But you're not really doing themath, you are just making a
snap judgment based on the factthat you aren't surrounded by
(06:26):
all white males.
And there's a quote from KathySierra.
She did some research many,many years ago that said, in
order to feel like a techconference is 50-50, what is the
percentage of women that needto be there?
And I think it was like 25.
(06:48):
So, as long as a techconference is 75 25 also,
double-check on the number.
It's been a while since I citedthat, that stat, but you know,
the tech conference is 75 25, ormaybe it was 70 30.
It feels to male participantslike a 5050 atmosphere.
And so when you start to reallydig into to what things are
(07:09):
like in tech, like the situationis pretty grim.
And you know, when it really hithome for me was we had a series
of kind of fireside chats thatwe did within the design studio
at Twitter, where we had womenon the team talk about their
experience of working in technot just at Twitter, but just
intact throughout their careersand one woman on the team Said
(07:31):
something that really just kindof made me set up and and and
listen, which was she saidSometimes I go weeks without
being in a meeting with anotherwoman.
And I thought about that and Iwas thinking to myself wow,
there's like thousands of womenthat work at Twitter.
There are many, many women thatwork in our department.
How is it that you can go weeksbeing the only woman in In the
(07:55):
meetings that you're in?
And then, as she furtherexplained it, it made a lot of
sense.
Most of the meetings she was inare dominated by engineers.
There may be a meeting whereit's, you know, one designer and
nine engineers, and as soon asyou start thinking about those
sorts of Dynamics, it becomesclear like, hey, it's not just
about the overall number ofpeople at Twitter, or it's not
just about the overall number ofwomen in our department, but
(08:17):
it's about what this designer isday to day Workload look like,
and for her and for many otherwomen in our department, this is
a really common thing.
Another thing she said that wasthat was really interesting to
me.
As she said, all it takes is tohave one other woman in a
meeting and she feels way morecomfortable talking and she
feels like she can speak hermind so much more easily when
(08:38):
she's the only woman in the room.
And you know, this sort of youknow makes sense when you hear
somebody say it, but it's notsomething that you think about
without hearing it directly fromthe voice of a woman.
So, anyway, that's kind of howwe started out.
The process of really making ourdepartment a lot more diverse
is really so.
We started with the stories.
We started with what peoplefelt like being a woman in tech
(09:00):
and you know and I say woman intech and not woman woman at
Twitter Because I think that's areally important distinction.
One of the reasons our effortwas so successful is we didn't
create like an us versus thematmosphere, and I think the
women on our team were very,very smart to recognize the
problems or the potentialproblems of creating that sort
(09:21):
of atmosphere where you know youdon't want a situation where,
like, the women on the team feellike the men on the team are
the, are the are the source ofthe problem and the men on the
team don't think that they'rethe problem.
That kind of gets into a Warthat doesn't really need to
happen.
So we really made sure Well, Isay we, but I mean the women on
our team specifically made sureto keep the conversation at a
(09:43):
very like, high, broad,professional level so that
nobody on the team feltthreatened, nobody.
Nobody on the team felt likethere were two sides and at the
end of the day, everybody feltlike we wanted to help improve
the situation.
And so, you know, over thecourse of the next year we
started looking at our, ourApplicant screening process, our
(10:04):
interview process, we looked atthe numbers behind how our team
was comprised and you know wenever set a goal of being 50-50.
We just ended up that way,mainly by paying attention.
You.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I think that's the best approach I mean, if you
could define an approach fromthe people I've talked to is to
have that be a natural extensionor incorporated into your
company, where, yes, you focuson it, but that isn't
necessarily the goal by itself.
The goal is to have more womenor more underrepresented parties
(10:37):
participate and find ways tomake that a natural part of the
company, the culture, the teamsand so forth.
What's your take?
Is San Francisco not as diverseas it could be otherwise?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
It's not as diverse as it could be otherwise.
I mean, it's not.
That's probably worse places,right?
It's not.
I don't think it's the leastdiverse place in the world.
I think there's a lot ofdiversity there.
That's really really good.
But I think most of the problem,or a lot of the problem at
least, comes from the fact thatthe way we hire is the way we've
always hired in every industry,which is word of mouth.
When you look at the cascadingeffects that a system like that
(11:16):
has, what ends up happening is,if you start with a base of
mainly white males white malesmainly know other white males,
for better or for worse Actually, definitely for worse, never
mind what happens is, let's say,you've got a team of 10 people
and eight of them are whitemales, and those white males
(11:37):
very innocently refer arepresentative group of their
friends for any open positions,and so if you just run the
averages, the number of peoplewho are going to get hired are
predominantly white male.
And so if you just let thingsgo innocently in that direction,
that's how you end up in asituation where we have a lot of
(11:58):
white males hiring a lot ofwhite males who are generally
educated in the same colleges,who are all given plenty of
privilege to be successful whenthey were young, and that's
another thing.
As we talk about privilege,privilege is not something that
most people ask for.
If you are privileged, it'sprobably because your parents
(12:20):
did well for themselves and sawto it that you went to a good
school and saw to it that youalways had books and a laptop
these days and you didn'tnecessarily ask for that, but
you have it and it gives you anadvantage, and so I am really
interested in the cases thatcome through our door of people
who have really taken a longjourney to get to where they're
(12:42):
at.
So, yes, you're sitting infront of here applying for a job
at Twitter and, yes, yourportfolio looks great and, yes,
you've got all these references.
But where did you come from?
Are you coming from a family ofdesigners who are all very well
off and who set you up for lifeLike, okay, that's fine, but
that doesn't show me the sort offighter you are.
That doesn't show me thatyou're able to fight through
(13:05):
adversity, the sorts of thingsthat you're going to have to
deal with in the workplace.
Did you, however, come fromanother country?
Did you teach yourself design?
Did you put yourself throughcollege?
Did you work minimum wage jobslike I did and like you probably
did, cameron?
At one point in your life Didyou show that you can become who
you are through hard work anddetermination.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, paper boy, that was my first job.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Great.
Everybody should be a paper boyor a busser or bad groceries in
a supermarket.
It should almost be the law InIsrael.
Everybody has to do a militaryservice.
It's like the law, right, youhave to do, I think, a year or
two of military service.
It should be the law that every14, 15, 16-year-old kid should
(13:53):
have to work a minimum wage jobin the service industry to get a
proper respect for work and forpeople in those sorts of
industries.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Twitter has this rule and you mentioned it in the
article where engineering,product design, those teams
there's no promotion intomanagement.
If you're happy as anindividual contributor, then
there's a career path for that,but if you're happy as a people
manager, there's a career pathfor that, but there's no pay
raise.
It doesn't level you up withinthe system.
First of all, by the way, Ilove this concept.
(14:23):
As you mentioned, it letspeople do the kind of work
that's most rewarding to them,most valuable to the company.
I'm curious is this the firsttime that you've encountered a
rule like this at a company?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, it is.
You know, and it's funny, I betyou there, there are people at
Twitter who don't know that rulewe made.
We made sure to talk about itquite often in our department,
just because it's important notjust to have the rule but for
people to know the rule.
In fact, that's the mostimportant part that people
actually know that this systemexists.
Because if they don't know,then they just assume hey, the
(14:55):
managers get paid more and themanagers have more prestige and
the managers are on a bettertrack, and that's just not the
case.
Like look, I mean I, I Gettingback into actual Pixel pushing,
redesigning my site and coding,and, you know, getting back to
the non managerial aspects ofwork over the last few months
Really reminded me that, hey,you know, management is not
(15:19):
always as fulfilling as doingthe actual work itself, and so
that's kind of the point of therule is is you have people who
who gravitate towards solvingpeople problems and are, in fact
, better at that and that'svaluable, but then you have
other people who are, who areactually just much better in the
product itself, and so youdon't want to create the system
where people feel like they aresort of dead-ended unless they
(15:41):
decide they want to give up whattheir best at, which is, you
know, working on products, justso they can, you know, start
having one-on-ones with theiremployees and start managing
salaries and all the stuff thatyou know None of us really
wanted to do when we got intodesign.
So I don't know actually howpervasive the rule is at Twitter
.
I know it's, I know it's withinengineering, product and design
(16:03):
.
I'm pretty sure not throughoutthe entire company, but it may
be.
But it's just had a greateffect in terms of, you know,
keeping really great you know,really really great designers
and researchers and engineersWorking on what they do best
again.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
I love the concept and there are plenty of benefits
from the sound of it.
Was there any weirdness to it?
That would result and I'mguessing here, but result from
having, say, a people managermanaging individual contributors
, where both the manager and thecontributor might have the same
pay grade or might beconsidered equal.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Um, you know well, there's instances where it goes
even beyond that, where you knowan individual contributor will
be making more Than a manager.
And no, it's not something thatwe hide.
I think it's something thatthat you just have to be honest
and up front about, and we don'treally want people who are you
know who are, who are working,you know, at the company, for
the money we want to be able to,you know, pay people a fair
(16:59):
amount, certainly as much as wepossibly can, and we just don't
feel like you know, we justdon't feel like managers are
always, are always, worth morethan individual contributors.
Sometimes they are, sometimesthey are.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You know, I remember reading what you'd written, and
you mentioned that one of thethings that you struggled most
with in San Francisco wasdealing with people who had no
desire to balance happiness withVisible output, as if the two
are mutually exclusive.
What is the key, then, tomaking both of those things a
priority?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Um, I think to me what it comes down to is look,
really looking at behaviors overoutcomes.
I think there are a lot ofpeople, especially in the Bay
Area, who are very outcomefocused.
So let's just, you know, use ahypothetical project.
Let's say you are, you know,redesigning the onboarding flow
(17:52):
for your product.
If you as a team are able tosay, hey, you know, we
Objectively increase the numberof people who make it through
the funnel by five percent byvirtue of these things that we
did over the last three to sixmonths there are.
It's very tempting to look at astat like that that's easily
(18:13):
meant Measurable and say, well,everybody on the team did a
fantastic job, like the PM musthave done a great job, the
designers must have done a greatjob designing a great new flow,
the engineers must have builtit so it was fast and reliable
and works, and the researchersmust have done a fantastic job
of figuring out what was wrong.
And let's shower praise uponthe team.
(18:35):
Or the reverse could happen,and you could spend three, six,
nine months and, like you know,you might not get any sort of
raise in Amount of people whomake it through that flow, and
then you could, you could makethe reverse assumption and say
well, you know, the people onthat team are not very smart and
they don't have their theirstuff together, and and that's
why this thing failed.
(18:56):
It's easy to Make snapjudgments like that based on
data, because it's so readilyavailable, but what you really
want to do, if you can, is tojudge the quality of the
decision-making in in a givenproject, and that's a lot harder
to do because you need to knowhow the team operates.
(19:17):
You need to know why they madecertain decisions at one point
Along the road or another.
Sometimes you can make a reallyhigh quality decision that ends
up having a bad outcome.
You, you, you could be facedwith a decision that has a 90%
chance of working and beingfantastic, and then you look at
(19:38):
it and you do it and, lo andbehold, the 10% come through
like something.
Something bad happens and youknew you had a 10% chance of it
not working and it didn't work.
But you shouldn't judge theteam then and say, like well,
that hit a thing didn't work,and so you, you guys, did the
wrong thing.
You have to judge the qualityof the decision.
I somehow managed in my post toavoid any reference to Seattle
(20:00):
Seahawks.
But this is a really greatalthough painful point.
To bring that up the last playin the Super Bowl against the
Patriots two years ago, I wasthere with dick actually from
Twitter and a few other people,and you know it's an amazing
game.
Everybody knows what happenedon the last play.
We didn't hand the ball toMarch on Lynch, we threw it.
(20:21):
The ball was intercepted.
We lost the game.
You know I left that stadiumthinking that was the worst call
on the history of sports, asdid the rest of the Rest of the
world for that matter.
Months and months and monthspeople were talking about how
bad of a call it was.
How could we do?
That Cost us the Super Bowl andyou know I believed it.
But if you look at the actualdecision and you run the numbers
(20:43):
on what we had done Sorry, whatwe had, what had happened in
the past when we had called thatplay and called other plays, it
was the correct decision.
We've been at the one-yard linebefore and we didn't score a
hundred percent of the time.
If we turn the ball overactually a couple times when we
were on the one-yard line Tryingto run the, trying to run the
(21:04):
ball, that the play that wecalled was actually the highest
percentage play that we possiblycould have called in that
situation.
But it didn't work out.
There was like a you know a oneor two percent chance that what
happens you know, aninterception of the goal line by
a rookie, undrafted DB wouldhappen, and it happens.
And so we can sit and call ourcoaching staff a bunch of idiots
(21:28):
and say they did the wrongthing or we could recognize that
.
Hey, these guys know whatthey're doing.
They made a high qualitydecision.
They were wrong, and that'ssports.
Making decisions in ourindustry isn't much different.
Like rarely Are you able to todesign a product, to build a
product With a hundred percentcertainty of how it's going to
work out.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
But if you build in really good decision-making,
really high qualitydecision-making, you're going to
be right more often than not ifthe well-being of the team is
Just as important as visibleoutput, would that justify
missing a deadline Intentionallyfor the sake of you know?
If the well-being of the teamis at severe risk Just for the
(22:07):
sake of producing that visibleoutput, does that justify making
decisions that might be in theinterest of the team as well as
the product?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Absolutely, because you want stable teams.
You want teams to to sticktogether.
Like you know, deadlines aregreat.
Like I love deadlines, you haveto set deadlines, but the world
, for the most part, doesn'tremember deadline.
The world remembers what youreally the world remembers if
they enjoy what you release, andso slipping a deadline when
you're when, when, when, what,when the quality bar hasn't been
(22:36):
met, is generally an okay thing, in my opinion.
In our industry we don't.
You don't launch things andthen let them sit.
You launch a 1.0, which youknow has problems, and then you
want to iterate to 1.1 asquickly as you can, and then 1.2
, 1.3 and then 2.0 and then 3.0and then 4.0, and the only way
you're going to do that is ifyou have a team who is still
(22:58):
happy to be working on whatthey're working on.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Well, listen, mike, it has been absolutely wonderful
chatting with you.
I really appreciate you makingtime to chat with us, and we're
looking forward to whatevercomes next for you.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
My pleasure, cameron.
Thanks so much for having me onthe show and I look forward to
seeing you Sometimes soon, I'llbring some nice weather with me
fantastic.
Hi everyone.
This is Hyerd.
I'm your host, cameron Maul.
Mike Davidson is today's guest.
Mike and I have known eachother since about 2004, when he
linked up a redesign of my sitefrom his and sent a truckload of
traffic to it.
Of course, that was back whenhe and I both were riding a lot
more than we have recently.
But speaking of riding, thatsets the stage for today's
(00:21):
discussion, because Mike is backin the blogging game.
He recently redesigned his sitemikeindustriescom is where you
can find him and he recentlywrote about his three years in
San Francisco as the VP ofdesign at Twitter.
On today's show, we'll divedeeper into some of the things
that he touched on in thatarticle, which you can find
linked up in the show notes.
(00:41):
Mike, welcome to the show.
Thanks, cameron, it's great tobe here.
What prompted you to write thatarticle?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It was a lot of stuff that had been bottled up inside
of me for the last three years.
I was actually a little worriedbecause I couldn't figure out
how I wanted to structure it.
There was just so much to say.
At the end of the day, it justended up being a stream of
consciousness.
My hope was that I could justput enough good stuff in there
that people wouldn't even reallyremember how disorganized it
(01:14):
was.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
What's been the response so far?
Speaker 2 (01:18):
It's been really good .
Whenever you pour your heartinto something, you have a fear
that people will just look at itand go oh well, yeah, there's
another person leaving SanFrancisco.
Or oh, there's another personin design who's got something to
say.
Or oh, that's too long, I don'twant to read it.
I published the article firston my own blog.
As part of the redesign Iturned comments back on, which
(01:41):
has been great.
There's all positive commentsso far, no trolling at all.
It's just been echoingthroughout Twitter and
throughout Facebook andthroughout a bunch of other
places.
Now, so far, I'm pretty happywith the reaction.
It seems to be getting a lot ofpeople talking, hopefully
talking to their bosses, talkingto their colleagues and really
(02:03):
even reconsidering whetherthey're happy or not at their
current job.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah Well, a lot of that might have to do with the
honesty of not just this piecebut other pieces that you've
written as well, but maybespecific to a topic like the one
that you well, the topic'splural, I should say it's a
retrospective of working in theBay Area for three years.
Is the difficulty of beinghonest when you're writing?
Is that a result of theatmosphere within the Bay Area
(02:29):
for a piece like this, or is itsimply just a result of being
tactful and empathetic as awriter?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
I think it's mainly the former.
I think there's this unspokenrule and it's really throughout
the business world in general,but you just see it a lot at Bay
Area companies, where you'rereally just not supposed to talk
about anything negative.
You're not supposed to talkabout things that may be
happening that don't seem rightto you or don't feel right to
(02:56):
you.
You're supposed to just smileand try to make things better,
which in general, is a goodattitude.
I mean, you want to always bepositive.
I try to always be positive,but I just didn't feel like it
would be an honest piece if Ididn't mention a lot of positive
and a lot of negative thingsthat I noticed over the last few
(03:17):
years.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I've known you, as I mentioned, for more than a
decade and have read a lot ofyour stuff over the years, and I
guess I should have guessedthis, given the caliber of
companies that you've worked at.
But I had no idea that you hadthat much to say about product
management.
I mean, where did that comefrom?
Why would you dive into that asthe very first thing in this
particular piece where it's aretrospective about design at
(03:39):
Twitter?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah Well, I mean, as you could probably guess, I saw
quite a range of it over thereand I worked with some of the
best product managers I've evermet in my entire life and I ever
will have the good fortune towork with.
But then I also worked withsome people who I just honestly
didn't feel like should even beproduct managers in the first
(04:01):
place, let alone at a five star,public, extremely important
company like Twitter, and I justwas not really used to kind of
seeing that.
Like, I guess with a designerit's sort of a lot easier to
tell right away how good of adesigner somebody is, Because as
(04:21):
a hiring manager you look attheir portfolio, you talk to
them for an hour or two andfigure out if you think they'll
be easy to work with.
You get a feel for how theysolve problems.
You know, with an engineer youdo coding tests and a bunch of
other things, and I just thinkwith design and engineering it's
so much easier to tell beforeyou work with somebody how
(04:41):
effective they're going to be orhow qualified they are, and
with PMs it's just way more of acrapshoot.
You may get lucky and hiresomebody amazing, and you may
get really unlucky and hiresomebody who shouldn't be
managing products and shouldn'tbe managing people.
And so you know, I guess thereason I wrote about it is I saw
(05:03):
the sort of both immenselypositive effects it can have
when you get somebody in thereworking with designers and
researchers and engineers who'sjust a fantastic PM and a real
force multiplier on their team,as well as the opposite effect,
where you've got great designers, great engineers, great
researchers stuck with somebodywho really has no business, you
(05:24):
know, making product decisions.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I'm going to ask you about diversity in the workplace
.
I know you have some thoughtsabout this, so maybe share your
thoughts about diversity ingeneral and, if you're willing
to share, tell us how you tookTwitter from an 80-20 male to
female ratio to 50-50 in lessthan a year.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Yeah, you know, diversity isn't something that
I've thought a lot about myentire career and I would say
before I moved to the Bay Area Iwasn't really acutely aware of
how big of a problem it is intech.
You know, when you aren'tpaying attention and you kind of
look around you and you see amix of men and women and some
(06:04):
white people and some blackpeople and some Asian people and
some Latinos, you sort of maysay falsely in your head like
hey, I work in a diverseatmosphere because look at all
these people that I see.
But you're not really doing themath, you are just making a
snap judgment based on the factthat you aren't surrounded by
(06:26):
all white males.
And there's a quote from KathySierra.
She did some research many,many years ago that said, in
order to feel like a techconference is 50-50, what is the
percentage of women that needto be there?
And I think it was like 25.
(06:48):
So, as long as a techconference is 75 25 also,
double-check on the number.
It's been a while since I citedthat, that stat, but you know,
the tech conference is 75 25, ormaybe it was 70 30.
It feels to male participantslike a 5050 atmosphere.
And so when you start to reallydig into to what things are
(07:09):
like in tech, like the situationis pretty grim.
And you know, when it really hithome for me was we had a series
of kind of fireside chats thatwe did within the design studio
at Twitter, where we had womenon the team talk about their
experience of working in technot just at Twitter, but just
intact throughout their careersand one woman on the team Said
(07:31):
something that really just kindof made me set up and and and
listen, which was she saidSometimes I go weeks without
being in a meeting with anotherwoman.
And I thought about that and Iwas thinking to myself wow,
there's like thousands of womenthat work at Twitter.
There are many, many women thatwork in our department.
How is it that you can go weeksbeing the only woman in In the
(07:55):
meetings that you're in?
And then, as she furtherexplained it, it made a lot of
sense.
Most of the meetings she was inare dominated by engineers.
There may be a meeting whereit's, you know, one designer and
nine engineers, and as soon asyou start thinking about those
sorts of Dynamics, it becomesclear like, hey, it's not just
about the overall number ofpeople at Twitter, or it's not
just about the overall number ofwomen in our department, but
(08:17):
it's about what this designer isday to day Workload look like,
and for her and for many otherwomen in our department, this is
a really common thing.
Another thing she said that wasthat was really interesting to
me.
As she said, all it takes is tohave one other woman in a
meeting and she feels way morecomfortable talking and she
feels like she can speak hermind so much more easily when
(08:38):
she's the only woman in the room.
And you know, this sort of youknow makes sense when you hear
somebody say it, but it's notsomething that you think about
without hearing it directly fromthe voice of a woman.
So, anyway, that's kind of howwe started out.
The process of really making ourdepartment a lot more diverse
is really so.
We started with the stories.
We started with what peoplefelt like being a woman in tech
(09:00):
and you know and I say woman intech and not woman woman at
Twitter Because I think that's areally important distinction.
One of the reasons our effortwas so successful is we didn't
create like an us versus thematmosphere, and I think the
women on our team were very,very smart to recognize the
problems or the potentialproblems of creating that sort
(09:21):
of atmosphere where you know youdon't want a situation where,
like, the women on the team feellike the men on the team are
the, are the are the source ofthe problem and the men on the
team don't think that they'rethe problem.
That kind of gets into a Warthat doesn't really need to
happen.
So we really made sure Well, Isay we, but I mean the women on
our team specifically made sureto keep the conversation at a
(09:43):
very like, high, broad,professional level so that
nobody on the team feltthreatened, nobody.
Nobody on the team felt likethere were two sides and at the
end of the day, everybody feltlike we wanted to help improve
the situation.
And so, you know, over thecourse of the next year we
started looking at our, ourApplicant screening process, our
(10:04):
interview process, we looked atthe numbers behind how our team
was comprised and you know wenever set a goal of being 50-50.
We just ended up that way,mainly by paying attention.
You.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I think that's the best approach I mean, if you
could define an approach fromthe people I've talked to is to
have that be a natural extensionor incorporated into your
company, where, yes, you focuson it, but that isn't
necessarily the goal by itself.
The goal is to have more womenor more underrepresented parties
(10:37):
participate and find ways tomake that a natural part of the
company, the culture, the teamsand so forth.
What's your take?
Is San Francisco not as diverseas it could be otherwise?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
It's not as diverse as it could be otherwise.
I mean, it's not.
That's probably worse places,right?
It's not.
I don't think it's the leastdiverse place in the world.
I think there's a lot ofdiversity there.
That's really really good.
But I think most of the problem,or a lot of the problem at
least, comes from the fact thatthe way we hire is the way we've
always hired in every industry,which is word of mouth.
When you look at the cascadingeffects that a system like that
(11:16):
has, what ends up happening is,if you start with a base of
mainly white males white malesmainly know other white males,
for better or for worse Actually, definitely for worse, never
mind what happens is, let's say,you've got a team of 10 people
and eight of them are whitemales, and those white males
(11:37):
very innocently refer arepresentative group of their
friends for any open positions,and so if you just run the
averages, the number of peoplewho are going to get hired are
predominantly white male.
And so if you just let thingsgo innocently in that direction,
that's how you end up in asituation where we have a lot of
(11:58):
white males hiring a lot ofwhite males who are generally
educated in the same colleges,who are all given plenty of
privilege to be successful whenthey were young, and that's
another thing.
As we talk about privilege,privilege is not something that
most people ask for.
If you are privileged, it'sprobably because your parents
(12:20):
did well for themselves and sawto it that you went to a good
school and saw to it that youalways had books and a laptop
these days and you didn'tnecessarily ask for that, but
you have it and it gives you anadvantage, and so I am really
interested in the cases thatcome through our door of people
who have really taken a longjourney to get to where they're
(12:42):
at.
So, yes, you're sitting infront of here applying for a job
at Twitter and, yes, yourportfolio looks great and, yes,
you've got all these references.
But where did you come from?
Are you coming from a family ofdesigners who are all very well
off and who set you up for lifeLike, okay, that's fine, but
that doesn't show me the sort offighter you are.
That doesn't show me thatyou're able to fight through
(13:05):
adversity, the sorts of thingsthat you're going to have to
deal with in the workplace.
Did you, however, come fromanother country?
Did you teach yourself design?
Did you put yourself throughcollege?
Did you work minimum wage jobslike I did and like you probably
did, cameron?
At one point in your life Didyou show that you can become who
you are through hard work anddetermination.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Yeah, paper boy, that was my first job.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Great.
Everybody should be a paper boyor a busser or bad groceries in
a supermarket.
It should almost be the law InIsrael.
Everybody has to do a militaryservice.
It's like the law, right, youhave to do, I think, a year or
two of military service.
It should be the law that every14, 15, 16-year-old kid should
(13:53):
have to work a minimum wage jobin the service industry to get a
proper respect for work and forpeople in those sorts of
industries.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Twitter has this rule and you mentioned it in the
article where engineering,product design, those teams
there's no promotion intomanagement.
If you're happy as anindividual contributor, then
there's a career path for that,but if you're happy as a people
manager, there's a career pathfor that, but there's no pay
raise.
It doesn't level you up withinthe system.
First of all, by the way, Ilove this concept.
(14:23):
As you mentioned, it letspeople do the kind of work
that's most rewarding to them,most valuable to the company.
I'm curious is this the firsttime that you've encountered a
rule like this at a company?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, it is.
You know, and it's funny, I betyou there, there are people at
Twitter who don't know that rulewe made.
We made sure to talk about itquite often in our department,
just because it's important notjust to have the rule but for
people to know the rule.
In fact, that's the mostimportant part that people
actually know that this systemexists.
Because if they don't know,then they just assume hey, the
(14:55):
managers get paid more and themanagers have more prestige and
the managers are on a bettertrack, and that's just not the
case.
Like look, I mean I, I Gettingback into actual Pixel pushing,
redesigning my site and coding,and, you know, getting back to
the non managerial aspects ofwork over the last few months
Really reminded me that, hey,you know, management is not
(15:19):
always as fulfilling as doingthe actual work itself, and so
that's kind of the point of therule is is you have people who
who gravitate towards solvingpeople problems and are, in fact
, better at that and that'svaluable, but then you have
other people who are, who areactually just much better in the
product itself, and so youdon't want to create the system
where people feel like they aresort of dead-ended unless they
(15:41):
decide they want to give up whattheir best at, which is, you
know, working on products, justso they can, you know, start
having one-on-ones with theiremployees and start managing
salaries and all the stuff thatyou know None of us really
wanted to do when we got intodesign.
So I don't know actually howpervasive the rule is at Twitter
.
I know it's, I know it's withinengineering, product and design
(16:03):
.
I'm pretty sure not throughoutthe entire company, but it may
be.
But it's just had a greateffect in terms of, you know,
keeping really great you know,really really great designers
and researchers and engineersWorking on what they do best
again.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
I love the concept and there are plenty of benefits
from the sound of it.
Was there any weirdness to it?
That would result and I'mguessing here, but result from
having, say, a people managermanaging individual contributors
, where both the manager and thecontributor might have the same
pay grade or might beconsidered equal.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Um, you know well, there's instances where it goes
even beyond that, where you knowan individual contributor will
be making more Than a manager.
And no, it's not something thatwe hide.
I think it's something thatthat you just have to be honest
and up front about, and we don'treally want people who are you
know who are, who are working,you know, at the company, for
the money we want to be able to,you know, pay people a fair
(16:59):
amount, certainly as much as wepossibly can, and we just don't
feel like you know, we justdon't feel like managers are
always, are always, worth morethan individual contributors.
Sometimes they are, sometimesthey are.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
You know, I remember reading what you'd written, and
you mentioned that one of thethings that you struggled most
with in San Francisco wasdealing with people who had no
desire to balance happiness withVisible output, as if the two
are mutually exclusive.
What is the key, then, tomaking both of those things a
priority?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Um, I think to me what it comes down to is look,
really looking at behaviors overoutcomes.
I think there are a lot ofpeople, especially in the Bay
Area, who are very outcomefocused.
So let's just, you know, use ahypothetical project.
Let's say you are, you know,redesigning the onboarding flow
(17:52):
for your product.
If you as a team are able tosay, hey, you know, we
Objectively increase the numberof people who make it through
the funnel by five percent byvirtue of these things that we
did over the last three to sixmonths there are.
It's very tempting to look at astat like that that's easily
(18:13):
meant Measurable and say, well,everybody on the team did a
fantastic job, like the PM musthave done a great job, the
designers must have done a greatjob designing a great new flow,
the engineers must have builtit so it was fast and reliable
and works, and the researchersmust have done a fantastic job
of figuring out what was wrong.
And let's shower praise uponthe team.
(18:35):
Or the reverse could happen,and you could spend three, six,
nine months and, like you know,you might not get any sort of
raise in Amount of people whomake it through that flow, and
then you could, you could makethe reverse assumption and say
well, you know, the people onthat team are not very smart and
they don't have their theirstuff together, and and that's
why this thing failed.
(18:56):
It's easy to Make snapjudgments like that based on
data, because it's so readilyavailable, but what you really
want to do, if you can, is tojudge the quality of the
decision-making in in a givenproject, and that's a lot harder
to do because you need to knowhow the team operates.
(19:17):
You need to know why they madecertain decisions at one point
Along the road or another.
Sometimes you can make a reallyhigh quality decision that ends
up having a bad outcome.
You, you, you could be facedwith a decision that has a 90%
chance of working and beingfantastic, and then you look at
(19:38):
it and you do it and, lo andbehold, the 10% come through
like something.
Something bad happens and youknew you had a 10% chance of it
not working and it didn't work.
But you shouldn't judge theteam then and say, like well,
that hit a thing didn't work,and so you, you guys, did the
wrong thing.
You have to judge the qualityof the decision.
I somehow managed in my post toavoid any reference to Seattle
(20:00):
Seahawks.
But this is a really greatalthough painful point.
To bring that up the last playin the Super Bowl against the
Patriots two years ago, I wasthere with dick actually from
Twitter and a few other people,and you know it's an amazing
game.
Everybody knows what happenedon the last play.
We didn't hand the ball toMarch on Lynch, we threw it.
(20:21):
The ball was intercepted.
We lost the game.
You know I left that stadiumthinking that was the worst call
on the history of sports, asdid the rest of the Rest of the
world for that matter.
Months and months and monthspeople were talking about how
bad of a call it was.
How could we do?
That Cost us the Super Bowl andyou know I believed it.
But if you look at the actualdecision and you run the numbers
(20:43):
on what we had done Sorry, whatwe had, what had happened in
the past when we had called thatplay and called other plays, it
was the correct decision.
We've been at the one-yard linebefore and we didn't score a
hundred percent of the time.
If we turn the ball overactually a couple times when we
were on the one-yard line Tryingto run the, trying to run the
(21:04):
ball, that the play that wecalled was actually the highest
percentage play that we possiblycould have called in that
situation.
But it didn't work out.
There was like a you know a oneor two percent chance that what
happens you know, aninterception of the goal line by
a rookie, undrafted DB wouldhappen, and it happens.
And so we can sit and call ourcoaching staff a bunch of idiots
(21:28):
and say they did the wrongthing or we could recognize that
.
Hey, these guys know whatthey're doing.
They made a high qualitydecision.
They were wrong, and that'ssports.
Making decisions in ourindustry isn't much different.
Like rarely Are you able to todesign a product, to build a
product With a hundred percentcertainty of how it's going to
work out.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
But if you build in really good decision-making,
really high qualitydecision-making, you're going to
be right more often than not ifthe well-being of the team is
Just as important as visibleoutput, would that justify
missing a deadline Intentionallyfor the sake of you know?
If the well-being of the teamis at severe risk Just for the
(22:07):
sake of producing that visibleoutput, does that justify making
decisions that might be in theinterest of the team as well as
the product?
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Absolutely, because you want stable teams.
You want teams to to sticktogether.
Like you know, deadlines aregreat.
Like I love deadlines, you haveto set deadlines, but the world
, for the most part, doesn'tremember deadline.
The world remembers what youreally the world remembers if
they enjoy what you release, andso slipping a deadline when
you're when, when, when, what,when the quality bar hasn't been
(22:36):
met, is generally an okay thing, in my opinion.
In our industry we don't.
You don't launch things andthen let them sit.
You launch a 1.0, which youknow has problems, and then you
want to iterate to 1.1 asquickly as you can, and then 1.2
, 1.3 and then 2.0 and then 3.0and then 4.0, and the only way
you're going to do that is ifyou have a team who is still
(22:58):
happy to be working on whatthey're working on.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Well, listen, mike, it has been absolutely wonderful
chatting with you.
I really appreciate you makingtime to chat with us, and we're
looking forward to whatevercomes next for you.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
My pleasure, cameron.
Thanks so much for having me onthe show and I look forward to
seeing you Sometimes soon, I'llbring some nice weather with me
fantastic.
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