AA114 - Working at a Sustainable Pace

Are you on a team and you feel the pace is not sustainable? Are you on a team and you're burning out? that's what we're gonna talk about today. Working at a sustainable pace. I don't hear this covered in the agile space. And also, there's some bullet points in the Agile manifesto that I don't see thought leaders I'm getting real sassy with already I don't, I don't see them posting about this is one of them. There are some things that I see people online posting about some common things, and then there's some things I never see go up, like the line about contracts, for example, that we did a whole podcast about. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Do you remember the number please? Uh, nope. No idea. And nobody else does either cuz nobody listened to it because it contracts. Yeah. This is, this is gonna be a good one. we have, Lisa here on our first time on the podcast. Hi Lisa Hey, Lisa. Hey, how's it going? And uh, stormy is back. Uh, Stormy is back along with Ed up. Oh, no, don't, don't do that. Oh my gosh. We can't, we're gonna have to bleep out everything! I don't know today's world. Any, any signs. Questionable, my gosh. Everything is taking the wrong way. Geez. I can give you some questionable signs, but I'm sure you can One of 'em. Yeah, please don't. So, Lisa and Stormy your background is in healthcare and Ed and I, our backgrounds are both in tech. I'd like to kick it off by, giving the textbook example of, of what we're talking about. Let's start with the Agile Manifesto. Let's start with that, right? The principles for the Agile manifesto. So tha tha thanks 75% of the audience. It was good to have you here. Please subscribe. Principle number eight. But for everyone else, like principle number eight in the Agile manifesto, here we go. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. let's cut over to the scrum guide For those of you, using Scrum, or for those of you Scrum trainers that have wandered into the wrong bar, talking about the Scrum team. Working in sprints at a sustainable pace improves the Scrum team's focus and consistency. I feel you could cut the scrum team out of that and it generally, it would be applicable to pretty much any team, like working at a sustainable pace improves, focusing consistency. Stormy, when we started this podcast, you had an interesting question. You're like, what does sustainable mean? and what did you call all, all of our original definitions. Ambiguous. Ambiguous. I don't think sustainable pace means the same thing to each organization, to each person within that organization, or each e even to each individual, individual project so sustainable pace is going to mean something very different to different people at different times, given the context. Every team has its own pace. And that definition changes, like Yep. You know, depend depending on what they're, they're being expected to deliver, and the maturity of that team and the culture within the organization all of those things also have a theory that everybody has a story about a time in their career where they were working at a unsustainable pace. They might not be able to agree on what sustainable is, but I think everybody can point out what unsustainable definitely is. I remember in an organization that I was in where I was a manager in the organization and as a manager in the organization, you, you just get to that point where you're like invited to leadership meetings, leadership meetings, and uh, your HR has regular conversations about what they expect from you and you're hiring people and that kind of stuff, and dealing with discipline. Anyway the point is like, I, I, I, I distinctly remember that period of my life because you would wake up in the morning, Immediately check your phone to see what fires were going on and what fights you were about to get into. And you'd get roped into all the fights that your employees were in. You would see stuff coming, and you'd try to head it off before it impacted either your team or your manager and the leadership above you because you're gonna, you, you, you can't hide from either one. And I just remember I remember going into the office every day, that was, I was, I was I was exercising a lot at that point in my life actually. I was, I, I got to work at about 7:00 AM and I'd go on a 45 minute run and then I'd shower, I'd go up to work, when most employees were just like rolling into the office. And I needed to be there before most of the managers and most of the employee. Most of the managers, definitely most of the employees got there. I needed to be there cuz if I wasn't, I would get flack for not being, what was it visible. Mm-hmm. Not having a visible leadership process. Yeah. You're not present. That's right. Mm-hmm. You're never here. That's what I would hear. Exactly. And that was the, management culture at that organization. You know, you were not allowed one slip up. I drove in. I didn't see your car. Exactly. I wake up at 5 45 in the morning and I'm already prepping for my first fight and I remember when I, when I left that place, I remember the last conversation I had was with somebody that that, I really didn't get along with in the end. We had worked together for 10 plus years, and I remember telling him, I I, I, I told him you need to start taking better care of yourself because these people will kill you. They will work you to death and when you are dead. Yeah. They will get your replacement in the door in two weeks. And no one will ever talk. No. Talk about you again. Well, I guess at what point did you know it was unsustainable and you needed to get out? I mean, you told us the story, but not at what point was it unsustainable? You had healthy coping habits. I think it was, I think it was no, I always knew it was unsustainable. It was the coping habits that that. That made you survive longer? That made me survive a little bit longer. Yeah. But it, but it's some resiliency. It, it wasn't sustainable cause it was always headed to I'm gonna quit or they're gonna fire me. I always knew it was headed to that. That's where I actually missed the commute because the gym was on my way to the office. Right. Right. And so it was, since it was on the way I was hitting the gym, now I'm not commuting. I'm rolling out of bed, grabbing my phone, and going right to work. Yep and so when you talk about sustainable pace, for me, I used to use the commute Right, as downtime to transition mm-hmm. From work to home. It does. I was in a better mood at home. Yep. Because I had that time coming home from my day at work, not just walking down the stairs. It's a transition rest period to where you can kind of restart. Set or take that time to process the day, not take work home with you, listen to a podcast. Mm-hmm. Do some growth. Listen to an audiobook. That's, and, and so some, that to me was a healthy aspect mm-hmm. Of the commute. Yeah. That when we talk about now, oh, I'm more productive now. Well, yeah. But you don't get to leave your desk for lunch. You don't get to drive to the gym so non-sustainable pace for me on the healthcare perspective would be on I guess nursing during Covid 19, where nobody knew what was going on. Everybody's politically charged and you know, none of that matters when you're in our field, doctors, nurses we just go in, we help people, we leave, and all of a sudden you have people coming in at high casualties, high acuity. You don't know how to treat them, you don't know how it's spreading. Families can't come in, it gets very stressful and then you just get to this point where there's upper leadership and management's telling, okay, well, we're short, people are quitting, people are sick, or they're out for two weeks on quarantine and all right, we're gonna need people to pick up, pick up extra hours, and. And got to the point where nobody wanted to pick up extra hours. Not even for overtime, not even for the bonuses. They were increasing the bonuses. Everybody was burned out and too tired like nobody wanted anymore. And then it became mandatory. And how long was that before the time between It was volunteered and mandatory. What was about, what time was that? Because that's when it became unsustainable at that point. Yeah. Within unsustainable it came, it's mandatory. It wasn't bad with the first round, but delta wave here hit much harder and killed a lot faster. And our specific population was much more affected we were seeing patients die a lot more . It was, it was really rough. But you know, people don't think about like the, they were talking about doing the mandatory if this becomes to a high level, we're gonna have two days on, two days off and that's it. There's further foresee feature and I was like, all right, that is where I'm gonna quit like that, that's where I'm done. What is a normal schedule? I don't know what a normal schedule, A normal schedule is three days a week and a call shift every two to three weeks, so 12 hours, which ends up being like 12 and a half, 13 after you give report. Cause if you go in early for a huddle for my floor and then after and give reports so that would be thir round then? 39 hours roughly? Yeah. A week. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay. So then we're doing three thirteens would be 39 hours. Yeah. So then we do probably like an extra 12, but you know, it's 12 hours straight. We usually don't get a break. I do like high risk critical care, high acuity you know, insulin drips, magnesium drips, really sick, really sick patients. And of course, with Covid, everybody had to be tested. Everybody had to be checked it added so much more to the triaging process. There was no room for people. It was, and then everybody came sick. And it just got to a point where I was like, all right, if they institute that, like I'm, I'm not gonna be able to do this anymore. Like, I'm gonna have to look for something else. We would have like maybe one unit open and then the wave would come and we would have eight floors full. It would go like that. Even here in Tampa, this pace kind of went on and off for like a year and a half. so, yeah, I, I talked to Lisa earlier about this. I was like, I, I, I'm trying not to turn this into a podcast where we're bashing on like the American medical system. Cause I, I realized that's not on any of our points to talk about. It's like the system can't support stress. Mm-hmm. It's like when there's a hurricane and the phones go out. Yeah. Because it like mm-hmm. Well, we too many people are using that. We, we, we, oh, yeah. Yeah. We never expected so many people to use the phone at the same time. Like, we're like, we're not expecting hurricanes. Mm-hmm. Like, yeah. Yeah. We are like the, the areas that get major natural disasters, you probably should anticipate and be ready. June to November is usually a pretty, pretty reliable time to see a hurricane. In Florida it's, it's especially August when it gets really hot. Yeah. Supercharged. And I'm not a meteorologist, but. I just feel it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like the hospitals in Florida are pretty, are pretty prepared for unfortunately. Yeah. We've got like backups to backups, to backups. So that's something we do really well, actually. Yeah, but we're just talking about, we're talking about the stress on the system. Sustain, so the system back ultimately breaks down sustainable paces is putting stress on a system, right. No matter what organization you're in, whether it's a hospital, whether it's a technology organization. Sure. Yeah. Whether it's a manufacturing, it's relatable or, or a car shop, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Probably because I've been delaying the Deming podcast for so long, have we not talked about how systems take on a life their own. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I understand that like people's pushback to this will be, well, system is just a group of people. Psychologically, yes, it is just a group of people. However, there's this like diffusion of responsibility of the system taking over. But if it's, but if it's just a group of people, that group of people have emotions and limited energy, just like I was gonna say, like each individual has a certain pace where they break down like a system. Yes. They go to a certain point, they break down, and in person is the same way. And each person's level to where they break down is different. Certain people can tolerate more than others. And that was the part of Covid that was difficult. Some people couldn't emotionally handle mm-hmm. All the death that they saw. Other ones saw it all the time to where they, the weekend I went to the icu I left with like ptsd, where the other ICU nurses did not, bat an eyelash didn't cry. I was seeing things that still traumatized me and they were not even fazed. Like, yeah, we see this all the time. I'm like, okay. Hmm, that's great. Like, I could not see that every day I would be gone. So I don't know how they do it. I actually walked the line between healthcare and, and healthcare IT and product and, and so I see it from both angles, but as far as my examples, in regards to un unsustainable pace, so I worked as a nur, a charge, a charged nurse in the ICU for quite a few years before I actually got into healthcare it and related to multiple factors you know, they always talk about a nursing shortage. There's always a nursing shortage, right? Always. But this seemed to be a, a, an exceptionally rampant nursing shortage. And how much of that depends on what the company I was working for was willing to pay and how much they were, will how much they, they, they were able to kind of get nurses to actually do. So I worked on a 20 bed nursing ICU floor. So a little bit of context here. Typically in an icu, a nurse should be assigned no more than two critically ill patients. Sometimes one, if they are exceptionally ill, right? Mm-hmm. But generally no more than two. Yeah it was consistent that, and number one, we didn't have a manager at the time, so this was, oh wow. This was the reason, this was part of the reason for that. So we would come in and we would find out we were fully staffed because it was our responsibility to balance our schedule as long as we balanced our schedule. Cool. Good job. Yay. Well done. We are covered, but we would come in and we would find out that we have 10 nurses. They're floating three of them to another floor. Oh boy. So now we're down to seven. We need to have a charge nurse. That charge nurse was me. I was responsible for ultimately everything. Everything that every one of those nurses did signed off on and mm-hmm. And every one of the patients wellbeing. Right. So what ended up, no, numerically what you end up with is six nurses who are tripled and a charge nurse taking two patients. And the charge nurse shouldn't even be taking any patients. Any patients. Right, right. So can you, so from an, and, and, and you have to think about this too, it's a little bit different when we're talking about healthcare it is our responsibility to do no harm. So it's kind of a big deal so I was the charge nurse, six other nurses all tripled increasing the, the, the probability of, of errors, right? Yeah. Right. Again, increasing the probability of potential patient harm. And I'm now responsible all this, any incident. Yeah. Correct. These were 12 hour shifts and night shifts, which meant we were very, we also had minimal support. Yeah over the night, the night shift, which made us much better nurses cuz we could do every thing. Yeah. So you know mm-hmm. Like hats off to all you night nurses out there. I know you. So in this situation there was no end in sight. Yeah. There wasn't a finish line. Additionally I didn't have a manager that was staying overnight Sure. To take on a patient load. They were perfectly capable of doing it. But did they? Mm-hmm. No. So leadership management were not stepping up. Yeah. And setting an example, number two. Yeah so I felt like, so I was basically a lone wolf like, I need to take care of me, but at the same time, I'm responsible of all these other nurses. I'm responsible for patient care. So I have all of this on me. Yeah. And the one last thing is this was hourly pay. So nurses work for hourly pay. They don't work for salary. So I don't know how much that kind of fits in, but that's one of some of the huge differences that I find when I got into my PO position, where I was working at an unsustainable pace. So I'll move over into that genre right now. Sure. So like can I pause for a moment? Please? Move it. Question. Yeah, definitely. So for, for the example you gave, you gave a a perfect example where it's not the hours worked, it's the environment, it's all the other things that go into what you have to do in the amount of time you have to do it. So it's more of that qualitative not quantitative correct scenario. And quality, if you even wanna bring this back to development and all that. So quality absolutely is impacted by this as well. Yep. Right? And this quality is now th this quality pertains once again to people. Yep. So, yeah. So many, so many people think that when you talk about sustainable pace, you're only talking about hours. Right? You're only talking about a 40 hour work week. You're only talking about how long you're in the office sure. And so we all, we tend to miss that, all those other factors, all the context switching that happens all day long in a 40 hour work week mm-hmm. Could be just as stressful and challenging as a 60 hour work week doing one thing. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, the negative potential ripple effect that that can have regardless of your job role. Now I'm talking about this from many years ago, working at the bedside in the ICU. But here's another example of unsustainable pace from a product perspective. So we were building greenfield application, had a beta that we needed to go live and we needed this to go live. This was our team's reputation, our vp uh, of product reputation, and the possibility that we could potentially get shut down. Right. So it was, it was a big deal for us to make sure this happened on time, right? We needed to get this beta release out. Here's the difference. Number one we were all engaged as a team. There wasn't this dog eat dog, which was often experienced in that previous scenario where this dog eat dog world. Kind of like, I want the easier patients. No. Our team, this is what we owned. We were engaged and we wanted it. Yeah. And we were determined and convinced that we could deliver it. And we also had an end in sight. There was a finish line. Additionally, I had leadership that was also engaged and involved. And when we had to do testing and we were doing testing over the weekends so that we couldn't, we weren't in, in interrupting traffic. Sure. I had. My VP of product was in there with us helping, doing everything they could to set that example. They were really, that, servant leader. So we were highly invested. We had leadership engagement. There was the finish line. Our team was highly engaged. Mm-hmm. And we all felt accountable to making sure this happened. So parallels, but from a, from an opposite perspective, oppos opposing opposing parallels. Yes. Opposing parallels. So interesting that this was a very unsustainable pace in the timeframe that we had to get it done, the four or six months or whatever it was. But we were happy to do it. It was ours, it was our baby, and we knew and we were so freaking determined to get it done. Yeah. And we had the leadership guiding us to do it, and I don't know that you obviously can't do all of those things same from, from a healthcare to a product perspective, but what a difference, both unsustainable. Yeah. But morale from that nursing perspective, it was like, this is miserable and I don't see it ever changing where the unsustainable pace that I experienced as a product was almost motivating. I almost wonder if the difference in that example was the visibility of leadership. Because in one of your examples, like leadership was like starkly absent command-and- control. Absolutely. Yeah, totally. The other one, they were there control, because I, I have to go back really early in my career to look, to reach for an illustration where there was a sustainably unsustainable pace at certain points. Like, because back in the day SaaS wasn't really a thing. Like you had like big software, they had to go run out and install on customer sites, and you had to burn it to a cd; that's not really a thing anymore. And, and thank goodness you know what I mean? Uh, but the point was like, if you didn't make that Friday afternoon release, it wasn't gonna make the CD cut to go out in the, A gold a gold, a gold CD was important. Yes. Right, right, right. That, that, that kind of thing. That's when you talking about shipping software. Yes. It wasn't just bits across the wire. It was mailed out. That's exactly right. Mm-hmm. Your, your bugs were visible right in in fixing 'em. Yeah. It wasn't a patch tomorrow. Yeah. Right. that environment doesn't exist anymore for, for better or worse, i, I don't really know. I'm not trying to make a statement about that, but the point was, we all knew that those events were unsustainable, but they were so uh, infrequent that it was okay. It was okay on the development team, cuz it didn't happen that often. It just didn't happen that often. We cut the cd, we all go home, it's nine o'clock at night, it's 11 o'clock at night, whatever. And Woo, success, we all succeed as a team, right? There is, there's also that leader present mm-hmm. Who's walking around with a hammer, right? Yes. Not walking around with a servant mindset that says, what can I do for you? Yes. They're walking around, standing over, are you going, are you done yet? Which, then translate to the, to similar behavior being adopted by the people that are working in that environment. we, we just hit on like one of the main points, there are things you can do to, to promote sustainability with regard to pace at a team level, and there's things you can do at a management level, I guess, that management. Yeah. And back back to the Stormy's story, what would that story sound like if there was no end in sight? Mm-hmm. Your team was not equipped to do the work they were asked to do and the solution was pushed on you and you weren't engaged in it. Right. It, it's a completely different story. It's a completely different scenario. so your story was positive. Your results were great because you had the domain knowledge, you had the support of the leadership. And everyone saw the end in sight. Mm-hmm. When you don't see the end in sight, you never know when that pace is gonna end. So for your product story you had like a very short time span if I knew, okay, I only have to like, This crazy pace for like this many months, all right. This much sleeplessness, constant, six, seven days a week. All right, I can do it for this long and I'm gonna have these great results. I can do it. And I got great support. But then in the other environment that you were describing, it's, there's no management, there's no end in sight, minimal resources, no support, no future staff coming in, unsafe. You have people's lives on the lines. It's, it's a completely different scenario, people staying alive is a whole nother thing where you take that home with you, did I do enough? What if I missed something and they died because I missed it? Mm-hmm because doctors come around for five minutes a day and look at that patient. You're with the patient the whole day. They take your suggestions because they're not there. And you've gotta wonder at the end of the day, yeah, did I do enough? And. You take that home with you. I wrote a couple of big categories down while we were talking through things. I wrote down empathy for users helping a lot with this. Like maybe you're working at an, a sustainable pace, but you're working with a lot of empathy towards your user. So, and your teammates and your, and your, yeah. Empathy. You said empathy. And I wrote it. I wrote it immediately down. Cause I was like, well, that's a big thing. Mm-hmm. That's a key thing in this topic. I wrote it is unique to teams in both speed and quality. Mm-hmm. Right. And then I wrote alignment with leadership like in line with the mission and the vision. I wrote that down too. Yeah. So I wrote those as, as big, like banner level item items for me to take away from this conversation. But because I'm a product manager in the back of my brain, I'm also listening to the conversation as it happens. And I'm thinking to myself like, are there metrics that I can use to help with this? Mm-hmm. Are there measurements I can take to know that burnout's gonna happen soon? The old red, amber, green indicator is to let me, the obtuse manager know that something is happening, I gotta take a look at are, are there things that, that, or organizational culturally, oh, here I go again. Spiritually, physically. I did that in the last few podcasts. It was really annoying. So let me, so you're, you're asking for a metrics, so not so that's going to the quantitative side of it. Mm-hmm. So I'm not sure that you can have a straight metric. Okay. But if you're not doing one-on-ones with your team mm-hmm then you're not having the appropriate conversations No. To where you can hear it by what they're describing, what's going on. Yeah. And the more frequent your one-on-ones are, the more likely you are to hear it in the 10th talk, not the first talk. Yeah. A lot of people want to go in that first one-on-ones. Like, tell me everything. I'm your friend, trust me. Right. But we haven't talked 10 times and I haven't, we don't really have that trust level yet. And I haven't seen you, what you do with the information I give you. Right, exactly. If we have a one-on-one, and then in two days I hear something from my one-on-one out in the Yeah, yeah. In the bullpen area. I'm like, Hey, wait a minute. I didn't tell anyone. Then I told you that. Yeah. Yeah. You suck. Yeah, I quit. Yeah. So you need to establish that rapport Yeah. With your team. So obviously first, how do you get, so the measure is that one-on-one. I think that's the, the first step. That is interesting. I, I joined an organization that was very, very small. I, I, I went and small 10, 20, 20 people. Okay. Yeah. 20. I think I was employed like 24, I think. And when I joined that organization it was, they were wonderful because one of the first 30 day checklist type of items was you had to have a one-on-one with every employee in the company. 30 minute one-on-one. The rules of the one-on-one were, you could talk about anything you want, but not work. Mm-hmm. And after you got through your first 30 days, there was a recurring schedule we, we had a little App that paired you with people randomly. It would pair you with different people along the, along the way. But it was a wonderful culture. They thought it was like very important to solidify relationships between people. And I've never been in a culture, that that much work time was dedicated to that type of activity. And this is the best tool for establishing, a culture that I've ever seen employed ever. there's another podcast here that I'm certain is lacking in the, in the environment. The environment uh, in the subject. I'm not digging my way out of this hole. It is the topic of pricing in product management. If you're not in the room when pricing is decided and you don't have any control over that, then in order to hit your incentives, whatever your revenue numbers or whatever, you have to either sell more product or hire more salespeople so they can sell faster, or develop more features so the salespeople can promise more things, which leads to an unsustainable pace, because now the development team has to deliver every time a sale is made, some kind of custom feature. There are plenty shops out there that are like this. Yeah. But the development team, in that scenario, will usually put their head in the sand and say, we're not doing it. And the person who feels the most pressure is the one in the middle, which is your delivery manager, your scrum master product, you know? Sure. Your product owner. And then they're, they're going out to leadership, going, the team's not doing what they're supposed to be doing. Yeah. Because you said unrealistic goals. You put them in a position where they actually do have the power to go, I'm not doing it. That's if you have a team that feels empowered enough to even push back. So culture once again, culture and leadership. It's a game of chicken. It comes in here. Yeah. I mean, but, but I will, Say that particularly in this day and age where so many of our our developers are, are outsourced and, they don't have the investment in the company and the team. I was at a company one time where the management were permanent employees, but then all of the developers were all contract outsource contract, whatever. And basically what would happen is exactly what we were talking about was like, they, they would push them somebody would sell something. They're bringing item back to the team with a deadline based on whatever the sales contract or whatever say, Hey, we need you to deliver this by this date. And, and, and you're right, Ed, like the, the team, it's, we sold 10 sprints and you have five sprints to deliver. You could push them back, but all the people leading those projects, I'll call 'em projects. They're not gonna hear that. They're gonna say, listen, you will deliver mm-hmm. Everything in five sprints, or I'll get another team. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because you're all contractors or you're all offshore, or you're all whatever. Disposable, basically. I've been in that environment and that's a same, quite honestly, that that's, that's a very scary culture. That wasn't my example. That wasn't where I was a manager. I worked in that culture as well, which was interesting because they had onshore teams and contracted offshore teams. Mm-hmm. And this is a quote, the offshore teams are just code monkeys. So when we were talking about, Sustainable pace. Sustainable pace actually meant something very different for our onshore team. Yeah. As it did for our offshore team. And also the expectation in which stories were delivered was very different for our onshore teams, and our offshore teams who needed a checklist. You tell me exactly top to bottom, I will be making no decisions that I can't refer back to, to say, this is what you told me to do and I can prove that I did it. Yes. Sign offs and phase gates and even within the same organization, you can have different, that's why it's, each team makes their own pace. Yeah. Well, they should. Right, right. And ultimately this offshore contracted teams felt, to your point, if I don't meet, whatever it is, they tell me that they need to have met, then I'm gonna lose this contract. The easy example is you have to stay and work 60 hours or work on Sunday or whatever until you get this done. The more interesting part of this to me is I've been on development teams it's, the team members themselves who are staying until seven and whatever, and like, they're not being prompted by management and as a team member, I feel pressured to be like, well, I, I can't leave these, these guys are still at their desk writing code, it's seven o'clock at night I've been here since eight in the morning, but I don't wanna leave cause of my team or like, what, what's going on with these people? So there, there's a mixed situation. There is sometimes, as the boss, right? In this case, I don't wanna call that person a leader. As the boss, you have to leave to make sure your, to let your team know it's okay to leave. Oh yeah. Right. There are times that the team is going, would they go home yet? And you still set and type in, set the example. So, so depending on the situation that the team finds themselves in, some of them are staying because the boss is still there. Right. When the boss leaves, they got a 30 minute window to go, all right, I'm checking out now, I'm done. Mm-hmm. Right. I think this is the, like if you are, if it's ingrained in the culture, I think that's what we're talking about now. Mm-hmm. It's like, like I had an office once where the corner of the office was the CEO's office, and kind of what you're talking about was, was in effect everybody from the office could see the corner. Mm-hmm. And if the, if his door was closed, he was gone. If his door was open, he was there. So while the door was open, nobody wanted to leave. So if he stayed late, the whole office they were afraid of leaving cuz he would come out of his office when he was leaving. Mm-hmm. And see oh, there's nobody here. That was a cultural thing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I do want to I wanna jump in on this one is I was an organization, first off, I think it's in Richard Sheridan's book Joy Inc. Where he talks about not celebrating people who worked nights and weekends. There you go. Okay. Mm-hmm. And so I believe, I believe that was in his book. Mm-hmm that said, I worked with an organization that had a kudos channel, and I don't know how many times kudos were sent out. Thank you for working on this thing that we. Had to get done. We had to do, we had to get across the line. And you lost time with your family. Thank you. That you didn't go to your son's baseball game and be there for your wife's birthday and you missed your son's bar mitzvah and you got this done for us. Yeah. The company I was describing before with the, with the one-on-ones, the culture of one-on-ones. Yep what we're talking about now, I feel that the systemic problems we're talking about, maybe it doesn't apply at a tiny little company like that, where like every single person's impact of going above me beyond is really, really felt through the whole culture. I feel, I feel a lot of the examples that we gave here so far like people could listen to the examples without, understanding the size of the organization. Like a, a massive hospital or a development team that's like one team in a program of 20, 30, 50 teams or whatever who's gonna know that you're working in the middle of the night or whatever, you know? But if you're in a 20 person company I mean the, the founders of the company probably are working consistently, I don't know, 60 plus out. They're definitely working all day Saturday. Yeah. But they're, they're expensing their lifestyle. They're taking disbursements and you know, they, they do have a different situation than they have more yachts than you, you're saying. Yeah. I couldn't, I, I mean, I wouldn't necessarily completely disagree with what you're saying. I could see how that can, so the size of the organization could play into it, but in my experience, even in really, really large organizations there's microcultures and so, sure. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, which the last company that I worked for was probably A total of about, I dunno, just shy of 300 people, but the people that for the product that I utilized, which was one team, and everyone that I worked with across the board was, I don't know, maybe 20, 22 people. And even even working for a huge Fortune five company, huge. I was, yeah, I mean, really huge, we were segregated and there were five teams, but we were all, this was in the pre in the before times. All five teams were in the same co-located space. Our VP of product was right there with us, so we had our own little microculture. And so even in that situation, these type of actions would be you know, would be impactful even in those large organizations. So we keep going back kind of to, it is staying on a sustainable pace, is your culture. Mm-hmm. Drives your pace, what your team does, drives its own pace. Mm-hmm. What your leadership either directly or indirectly does, it can negatively or beneficially impact your team depending on if they're present and how they present themselves. I think a lot of, a lot of the conversations we've had has been around. The team culture. We've been doing a lot of cultural conversations more than we have been talking about pace conversations. I think that may be the main driver. So the culture which is developed by the leadership and that is ultimately, I think what's going to determine what, which we talked about in the very, very beginning of the podcast, what is a sustainable pace? So I just do wanna cover what do you need? I, I made some notes on what do you need to sustain your pace, right? Yes. That's, so now I'm not talking about team pace, I'm talking about the individual pace. So the, the notes I had when, and then we can debate those were the quality of work. Right? So first off, in order for me to, to maintain my pace, the quality of work has to be valued. It, it, there just, it just has to be good. There's gotta be a standard of excellence. Great quote is uh, avoid the lollipop of mediocrity. One look lick, you'll suck forever. Yeah. Right. So I don't, I don't accept mo mediocrity. I try not to. Sometimes I get in a situation where I'm multitasking and doing 15 things at once and my quality of work has gone down. Sure. That makes me dissatisfied with my sustainable pace. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, valuable work, making sure that there's value in the things I do. Right? I could never be a lug nut guy or a ditch digger because I don't see the long-term value of me doing that every single day. That's just not, it's not what, it's not the work that energizes me. Yeah. So the work has to be interesting, right? So now is it interesting work? Is it challenging work? Does it, does it, does it tickle my mind to say, that's cool stuff. Let me, let me keep learning from this. So it's interesting. Domain knowledge. I have to have some experience in that domain. Otherwise, I'm trying to play catch up every day. Imagine being on behind on all the newest. Policies, right. Or new information. In your nurses example, right? I'm a nurse, but I'm in the wrong floor and they sent me to your floor. And you're like, so I don't know orthopedics do that. I don't know how to work these machines. Yeah. And then I feel semi useless. Exactly. So domain knowledge has to be there. Mm-hmm. Capacity to do the work, right? Mm-hmm. Is, am I being given too much? Uh, do I have the mental capacity to do it? and then lastly is strategic alignment is the work I'm doing aligned with the organization so that I'm not doing something that's never going to be used. Right? There's nothing worse than being a software developer. We got arbitrary deadline. We have to have this done by January. We have to have this done by January. Alright, we got it done by January. Yeah. We're gonna deploy it in June. Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah. Why? Yeah. Why did I have to have it done by January if you're not gonna deploy it until June? I, I, I shuffled everything. You, you said I shuffled into our four categories. I, I I created fourth category. Surprise, I created a category of one-on-ones. Mm-hmm. Which helps you align with the people. I mean, I was gonna say individual wise. Yeah. Individuals. And, and also like the, if you have a culture of one-on-ones, it helps you be in tune with, um mm-hmm. How people are thinking. I, I started with alignment with leadership. And I started realizing that alignment with leadership, Didn't just have to do with the mission. I wrote down mission slash vision. Mm-hmm. I wrote that down. Mm-hmm. Because I'm thinking product, right? I'm thinking product and I'm thinking executives. But I started realizing that alignment with leadership might also mean alignment with your engineering leadership. Who will be the people to say, Hey look, we don't, like we don't need TDD, we don't need to test everything. Just throw some stuff out there. Mm-hmm. We'll come back to it later and figure it out. Well, I don't feel good about that. Right. I don't feel good. Like it's gonna break in the middle of the night. I'm back up. I'm doing pajama party deployments. Cause we haven't, we decided not to roll our stuff out with Kubernetes. Oh. Our stuff can't scale. So I gotta go run out on Sunday and spin up some servers in emergency when this volume goes up. Whatever. Mm-hmm. Like that's alignment with leadership in both quality. Mm-hmm. And, align for where the business is going with what you talked about, there's two categories you're taken care of with alignment, with leadership. Again, we can argue about if alignment's a real thing. Cuz I, that's the interesting part for me here is like, I don't need to generate alignment. Right. I need to make alignment happen. Right. By the way the organization works. Yeah. and I don't walk into a, sorry, I don't walk into a room and say, align with me. Right? Yeah. Right. What I what we're doing is naturally aligned. There are some people who just don't know how to generate alignment. They don't understand that it's an effect of other things. So they, they do walk in the room and say, you need to alignment with me. The empathy for users. Aligning the value comes with empathy. If I'm talking to my users, if they're in front of the development team, if the development team knows who those users are. They understand their pain points, they're aligned with them. Boy, I'm using alignment a lot more than I do on normally on a podcast. And then the domain knowledge we said there's a lot of, this is unique to teams. If your teams have still to learn the domain knowledge, that speed's gonna be slower. And that goes back to. Uh, it may increase over time through team-driven efficiencies. Yes. So as they got more knowledgeable on the domain, they started getting faster and the technology. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. And so as they learned that confidential Yeah, yeah.. So this word keeps coming up on all the points that I was making. I was kind of making some points. You actually mentioned this, I think in re regards to, I guess you said capacity changes, which you kind of alluded to, but I'll get that in a second. But you started off with quality, so, and you said you have to basically create quality, well, number one. What defined, what good is, what is good, right? So understanding that definition. What is good to you? This is an individual, this is an individual wealth here. Right? What is good to you? Right? What's good? And that's going to be different from team member to team member. Exactly. Experience and as the team. As an entire, as an entire organism. Right? So, or as an entire system, I should say. That'd be a better way. Can I pause you there for a moment? Yeah. I spent a lot of time on our organizational values and sharing, repeating and engaging the team on our organizational values. A, so they they know them. Yeah. And B, to try to get them to align to them. If they don't, and if they don't align to 'em, they're gonna realize they're probably in the wrong place. Yeah. So if you don't know what your org, if your organization's value is integrity, that's entry stakes. Yeah. If your organizational value is ethical, that's entry stakes. But if it's something like Driven and learning, right? If you're not driven and you don't like learning, you're gonna know by our values, you probably don't fit at some point. Yeah. Because I'm gonna continue to drive you. The rest team members are gonna continue to drive you and you go, this space isn't unsustainable. Mm-hmm. Okay. Then it's probably not the right place. So we spend a lot of time talking about it. On the way in, we talk about it in our interview process and we talk about it when you're with us to make sure. That our values and your values for work align. Interesting. So the actual sustainability is the, is is is very much connected to the core values. Correct. That's an interesting point to make, but my point here is that's Gino Wickman, right? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It's go EOS Traction. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a great, I I was trying to fit that into the podcast, but there was just no way it was I did, I figured it out. Well, you, you, that's perfect. You got it done for you. But, but, but I like that goes back to the category of alignment with leadership. Your leadership has to be taking active role, in figuring out if people are fitting into the roles they're in and into the culture of the company. Right. You know, that's what I was just gonna go back to was culture. The fact that you're. Interviewing them and bringing them on boarding with describing the culture and the way that it's going to be, and them deciding even after the interview, okay, maybe, maybe this is not the right place for me. Mm-hmm. It's perfect because they're gonna get that going in. Okay, you know what, nope, this isn't right. Sure. Instead of wasting everybody's time, but we're getting in too deep. But that requires, leadership can't abdicate this responsibility. They, they have to constantly keep their hand on the wheel of culture. And part of culture is, again, to go back to the Gino Wickman book are are, do I have the right people and all those people in the right seats mm-hmm. Who have the right people in the right seats and you can shuffle if you are sure they're the right people. Cause they align with your culture. Maybe they're just not in the right seat. You can shuffle them. But if you're the wrong people, you, you gotta actively deal with this. Yep. I harp on Scrum about this like, you wanna be self organizing, but you don't have a way to fire people off the team. On your scrum team, you got somebody that everyone knows they can't cut it. Mm-hmm. So how long are we gonna sit around waiting mm-hmm. To deal with this person? Well un until management has documented enough cases. Mm-hmm. Right in order that HR will, can appropriately agree, oh no, that we won't be sued for wrongful termination if we let them go, and then we'll make sure that when we let them go, they feel good about it. So 2005, I got to a lot of things happened in my life in 2005, but bill Hybels is a Christian author, so I'm not saying you have to read him, but on 2005 was the first time I heard him say vision leaks. And every year that I heard him speak after that, vision leaks. And so when you talk about alignment, you talk about value statements, and you talk about missions and value, if you're not sharing that all the time Right. It leaks, it falls out of the bucket. Sure. Is. And it's filled with something else. In order to gain alignment, maintain alignment, and making sure that everyone understands what you think we're doing, you gotta talk about it. Mm-hmm. Otherwise it's gonna, the bucket's gonna be filled with all the negativity. Your culture is the stories that your last employees tell you about you. I was actually gonna get to potentially an opportunity to actually measure, but I'll just leave that one outta here because ultimately when you talked about quality, you talked about value, you talked about domain knowledge, capacity over time which equates to maybe collaboration with the team. All of those things are fluid, which means what is unsustainable today very well may become sustainable tomorrow. Right? Maybe we need to make some shuffles, maybe we don't have the right people sitting in the seats. I mean, there's a lot of babies, a lot of variables here. But my point is, what is good now is probably not gonna be good a year from now. Well, sure. Fluid, fluid, fluid. I read it on the internet that Abe Lincoln said, you never know, know how close you are to success until you quit. Right? And so, yes, what may be unsustainable now you may have been close to figuring it out. You may have been close to making it through that gate. And so you never know. That's where I kept trying to push time, how long should you suffer? Right. Right. So now let's get into stoicism, right. Suffering. Mm-hmm how long should you suffer with this unsustainable pace? Yeah. Before you finally go, enough is enough. I have to quit, or it's going to kill me. Uh, I'm gonna lose my family, I'm gonna lose all these other things are going to happen. I'll lose my reputation and won't be hireable. Right. Right. And I think to, to that point, one of the big things to determine is, is there a clear end in sight? Right. And if there isn't, if it's just this never ending mm-hmm. I'm not sure when this will ever end. And this would be very much, I think, driven by the culture and potentially leadership to recognize that and and, and to drive that and understand that, hey, if we are running at an unsustainable pace because we are understaffed, give some hope, some light. Try to figure out how to incent your teams. Maybe figure out how to change things up. Mm-hmm. I mean, whatever it may take so that you can see some light at the end of that tunnel then all I need to be able to do is say that I am engaged and motivated to do that within my actual company, which again goes back to leadership and culture. And so sustainable pace is a wave you go above it and you go below that constant and you have to be able to go up and down. Sure. So when we talk about unsustainable is when you're always going up, right? So if you use the airplane analogy, you take off, at some point you have to reach cruising altitude. Mm-hmm. Right? And at some point you have to land. You can't keep going up and up and up and up because a, the vehicle you're in can't go that high. It's gonna fall outta this sky. You just don't have the capability to keep doing that. So you have to find a way as a team and a leader to find a, a way of working together that keeps everyone safe and push back on those challenges that keep the pace at a level that won't work. Right. You have to find a way to get back down. You have to find the land. During Desert Storm one of the most amazing feats of technology was, was the KC 1 35 tankers creating the air bridge where they were refueling planes in the air. Mm-hmm. So they could fly farther. How far, how long should a pilot stay in the air? When should that bridge allow the pilot to land? Yeah. Or should they just keep circling the earth Right. At some point. There's a human capacity that you can't swap the seat enough before someone actually has to. So you actually have to come down. Mm-hmm. So we can talk about fueling people and you know, pick up a hobby that fuels you and you'll do great. You know, go get to the gym and you'll feel great at some point. It's where the burnout comes in. Yeah. At some point. That's just adding to something else you have to do. I'm gonna clear you all the land, and by land I mean the end of this podcast. What you guys were talking about judging capacity. Judging when people are burned out one-on-ones help a lot with that. Management should be checking with everyone that should be on they should be incented and also measured on this. And if they're not, what does their day job entail if they're not quote, managing the people We talked about aligning engineering, quality, alignment, quality across engineering teams, quality up and down to across teams inside of a team. Right? We talked about Being aligned with the mission and the vision of the organization, we talked about actually having and building empathy because with empathy comes, empathy comes your ability. It's relational value. Relational value. Value. Yes. Relational value comes from empathy. Yeah. And then everything we're talking about is unique to a team. Your domain expertise, your understanding of the, the, the problems up close the, the speed and quality at which you deliver also kind of bleed over into this one as a team. It's interesting that we found these four categories through this discussion I'd be interested if there are other categories that we missed out on. I'm like, again, I'm sure we could record for two more hours and talk about a whole bunch of more stuff. But there's likes all good things. There must be an end. Mm-hmm. And otherwise this podcast would not be sustainable.