AI-Native Engineering: From Coding to Orchestration with Robert Gonzalez

00:00:08 - 00:00:33 Stephen Koza
Most engineering leaders I talked to think about AI adoption as a tooling decision to give engineers copilot. They watch the velocity numbers creep up and say, hey, that's victory. Well, my guest today saw that trap himself. He runs a 115 person engineering org, and he's taken them through their own AI native transformation. And it didn't stop at the IDE.

00:00:33 - 00:01:00 Stephen Koza
It goes all the way through how the team structured, how the C works, which roles exist, and I can't wait to learn about what he found. Welcome to Tech Pod Talks candid conversations with leaders who are building what's next? I'm Stephen Koza, I'm the CEO at EverOps. Every episode we bring up in a practitioner, somebody who's actually in the arena to share what's happening behind the scenes.

00:01:00 - 00:01:38 Stephen Koza
We talk platform engineering, DevOps, cloud leadership. And my guest today is just that kind of person. I'm joined by Robert Gonzalez. He is the VP of engineering at SugarAI. There are backed SaaS company serving thousands of small midsize businesses all over the world. Robert's path to the executive ranks is kind of unusual. He's self-taught, started as a developer, spent the last 14 years working his way up through every layer of the engineering stack, started as a software engineer, and now he's at SugarAI.

00:01:38 - 00:02:04 Stephen Koza
They ship CRM products behind north of 100 million in revenue. He helped drive apps down by 70%, quadrupled automation coverage, brought in a new customer self-service product. But he's got a lot to say about AI, native engineering, how to lead to agenda development. He also writes publicly, so we'll include some of that in the show notes. Robert, welcome.

00:02:04 - 00:02:05 Stephen Koza
Thanks for coming on.

00:02:05 - 00:02:06 Robert Gonzalez
Thank you for having me, Stephen.

00:02:06 - 00:02:30 Stephen Koza
It is my pleasure, man. So maybe to start, I kind of teased it a little bit. You don't have the traditional career path, whatever that is, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you have a CS degree. You didn't do a ton of job hopping to build the resume. You started as a developer at a.

00:02:30 - 00:02:45 Stephen Koza
You know what you might say is not a traditional tech company, but you've been at Sugar quite a while and grown your career a lot. So tell us about that. Tell us about your background, what made you stay and what are you up to these days?

00:02:45 - 00:03:06 Robert Gonzalez
Sure. So my my background is far from traditional. You called it out. It is unusual. I actually stepped in into technology kind of by accident. I was working a job years and years and years ago, in which I was the only person in my department that kind of knew how to use a computer. So everybody in the group decided, hey, you know what?

00:03:06 - 00:03:30 Robert Gonzalez
Since Robert knows how to use a computer, Robert's going to do things for all of us. And so I started doing a lot of manual technical tasks. They weren't heavily technical, they were document processing, network storage, filing and things like that. But part of the job that I was doing at the time, I thought, would it have been better served by having something network able, something that I didn't have to keep on my computer, that I can have where I was at or any other place?

00:03:30 - 00:03:37 Robert Gonzalez
And so I started looking into at the time how to build web pages. I'd say that a little tongue in cheek, but that's literally what I was doing.

00:03:37 - 00:03:40 Stephen Koza
You were you were a webmaster. That was what they used to call it.

00:03:40 - 00:03:57 Robert Gonzalez
To some degree. Yes. And what ended up happening is I started learning HTML, I learned a little bit of CSS, learned a little bit of JavaScript, and then I started getting really curious as to what I can, can do to make data persist. I didn't know that that was the term at the time, but I learned later on what data persistence was.

00:03:57 - 00:04:15 Robert Gonzalez
I learned what databases were, and then I learned what server side scripts were. And the next thing you know, I'm writing PHP, talking to MySQL and, you know, running tutorials from a book. And and then the next thing you know, I'm writing applications at the job I was at, and I turned my very manual job into a very automated job using tech.

00:04:15 - 00:04:40 Robert Gonzalez
And that was my springboard into technology. So my first job within the technical space, if you look at my LinkedIn, you'll see it was as a web developer for a local Bay area alarm company. And that is where I got really into like commercial software for the very first time, I learned about, you know, data security. I learned about performance and operations.

00:04:40 - 00:05:06 Robert Gonzalez
And from there I moved through a couple of jobs and landed at Sugar in 2012. And I've been at Sugar for for 14.5 years now, and it's been quite a ride. There's been some amazing learning lessons that I've gotten out of working at this company, working at scale, working around the globe, working on distributed systems, just a lot of really cool technical challenges that I've been able to solve.

00:05:06 - 00:05:25 Robert Gonzalez
And where I am now, I'm on the cusp of another one. We're in an evolving technical time. AI is taking over the world, and I get to be squarely in the in the driver's seat of what my company is, is choosing to do in that space right now. So that's that's what has gotten me here and what keeps me here.

00:05:25 - 00:05:41 Stephen Koza
I smiled when you said evolving. That's like the understatement of the year, I think when it comes to AI. So. So at the alarm company, were you developing there? Was that a traditional developer job? How many developers did they have? Does an alarm company have?

00:05:41 - 00:06:06 Robert Gonzalez
So this was actually kind of funny. They we in our technical staff, I'm going to not call them developers because we weren't all developing or we were developing in different areas. Our technical staff was eight people, but I was the only guy at the time writing for the web. And what I was brought in to do was to harden their intranet, which had been developed by 3 or 4 people in their spare time, that had learned a couple of things here and there.

00:06:06 - 00:06:29 Robert Gonzalez
And then I was also working on a middleware application that took in the enterprise database that drove the business and connected it to the intranet, and then also connected it to the account management application that I also had to build for the business. And then I built what ultimately became the internal framework on which all applications were built there.

00:06:29 - 00:07:00 Stephen Koza
I can tell the era because, you know, from some of the words intranet, I don't think we use that term anymore. That's why that's why I joked about the webmaster term earlier. Yeah, that was pretty cool, man. I stalked your LinkedIn a little bit before we hooked up, and I saw a post where you talk about saying saying yes to risky projects and stuff that you know isn't well defined and problems nobody else else wanted to solve.

00:07:00 - 00:07:04 Stephen Koza
Hopefully that wonderings a bell putting you on the spot, but like, tell me a little bit more about that.

00:07:04 - 00:07:30 Robert Gonzalez
So I've told people before that some of my career progression has been defined by those moments where I've chosen to do something that other people might not have wanted to do, whether that's taking on additional teams or taking on different responsibilities, or being willing to stand in to own something that somebody else might not have believed in or or found a way to find the value in something.

00:07:31 - 00:07:56 Robert Gonzalez
There's an example of something that we did a few years back at Sugar, where we have a sort of a customer self-service portal that that ships as part of our CRM package. And we wanted to actually enhance that. And as we started talking through it, realized that it might be better to build a new one altogether, like just building it within the CRM didn't make a ton of sense because it trapped it in an area that we didn't want it trapped in.

00:07:56 - 00:08:23 Robert Gonzalez
And so I actually was allowed to lead a team that built a new portal from scratch, and it was built in a way that it was microservice driven, was connected to any of our services, not just the CRM service. It had a lot of customizability and self-service architecture within it. And there were actually two risks in that when one was at the beginning, which was, why are we building something we already have?

00:08:23 - 00:08:41 Robert Gonzalez
Turned out it was actually for what we wanted to do. It was the right thing to do. But the other was I had to stand in front of another risky decision at the end of it, which was to spin it down. When we built it, we hadn't built it with the right marketing impetus. We didn't build it with the right business impetus.

00:08:41 - 00:09:03 Robert Gonzalez
And so we ended up spending a couple of years building a product that arguably did not generate any revenue because it didn't have a path forward to go to market. So it was a great idea. It was great tech. We had a really cool product that had been put out. We just couldn't sell it. We didn't have a way to sell it, and at some point it became a a losing proposition.

00:09:03 - 00:09:19 Robert Gonzalez
The risk obviously, in that one is you have people that are working on it. They don't want to watch their work that they just put in it spin down. They don't want to worry about. Am I going to have a job? But it was the right thing to do for the business. I, I was the one that kind of drove for that a little bit.

00:09:19 - 00:09:35 Robert Gonzalez
And at the end of the day, everything ended up being okay. Like the people that were on that project found other projects to go work on, and we actually learned some pretty good lessons from that one that helped us frame where we're going later. So that's how the risk reward process has worked out for me. And as an example.

00:09:35 - 00:10:00 Stephen Koza
Yeah, I like that one. I learned along the way that like failures or, you know, usually okay, like because you learn something, right? If you don't take the risk, if you don't try something that might not work out, you know, you're playing a little too safe. And I remember a speech that this exit gave our our team wants about something similar.

00:10:00 - 00:10:18 Stephen Koza
We had a product and decided, you know what, we're just going to kill this thing. And here are all the reasons why. And, you know, he took responsibility for the decision and laid it out. And that really stuck with me, which is you're reminding me of that moment right now. Hey, I, I heard you still code today. Is that true?

00:10:18 - 00:10:30 Stephen Koza
Yeah. And if it is, I was curious. Did you start coding again because of AI, or was that true even before the coding assistance?

00:10:30 - 00:10:51 Robert Gonzalez
So I have a particular problem in that I love coding. I've loved programing from the moment I started doing it, I've never stopped at Sugar. I was I was contributing to our core application up until the time I became a senior director, and in fact, as a manager and a senior manager, I was still one of the highest contributing performers of my teams.

00:10:51 - 00:11:14 Robert Gonzalez
I really do just love being in the technical weeds and knowing how my product works, understanding my architecture, knowing what my customers want out of out of the products that I build. I'm not as involved in the day to day enterprise coding that happens today for the product and the business, but I stay very close to the tech and I do build still, I use I use code to build my own applications, my own tools.

00:11:14 - 00:11:33 Robert Gonzalez
And in the last six months or so, I've been using AI as a coding agent for me. So I don't actually put my hands on the keyboard to make code as much anymore as I instruct my robots how to go and make the code that I want and what I what I do now. I wouldn't even really call it coding as much as I call it orchestration.

00:11:33 - 00:11:53 Robert Gonzalez
I have pieces in play that I have something I want I so I start with the outcome. I feed the outcome into my agents that I built. I let them put together my specifications and all of the plan and the process, and then I tell it to go. I verify I actually have robots that verify that what I wanted done was done, and at the other end of it, I get the outcome that I'm looking for.

00:11:53 - 00:11:57 Robert Gonzalez
So I'm not as deep in the code as much, but I'm still definitely in the build phase.

00:11:57 - 00:12:12 Stephen Koza
I've heard from some others, which is why I asked the question that, you know, they haven't coded in a long time, but AI's kind of brought the joy back to them. Sounds like the joy never left. You said you've got a special problem, I like that. That's funny.

00:12:12 - 00:12:30 Robert Gonzalez
I have a number of colleagues, though, who are in that boat, who they've they've been in management or they've been in leadership. And just within the last 6 to 12 months have gotten back into coding because it's a renewed passion for them. They see the things that they can do by building and using the tools that are available to build it.

00:12:30 - 00:12:53 Stephen Koza
Yeah, I, I don't know if I could totally say that about myself. I, I have an engineering background, but career wise went down the business path, so I don't know if there was ever joy in coding. In fact, there's like a little PTSD, you know, the college classes and my first job. But man, it is so much fun now with AI and, you know, leveraging the tools and the kind of stuff you're talking about.

00:12:53 - 00:13:00 Stephen Koza
We'll come back to AI for sure. But before we do, I want to talk a little bit about leadership. So you've got a pretty big org these days, right?

00:13:00 - 00:13:05 Robert Gonzalez
It's actually it's gotten just a little bit bigger recently too. So but yes big Org.

00:13:05 - 00:13:10 Stephen Koza
And it, it is everybody in the same spot or they distributed.

00:13:10 - 00:13:26 Robert Gonzalez
We're distributed all over the world. I have have, have staff or have had staff on four continents in 16 different countries right now. My my sphere of influence starts in the US, goes through the UK and then continues eastward all the way to India.

00:13:26 - 00:13:48 Stephen Koza
Okay. Wow. Yeah. That that's spread out for sure. Tell me, how do you how do you manage that specifically? Because you're across many time zones. Can't just get everybody on a meeting or, you know, have real time comes back and forth. So I imagine you're you're doing a lot of stuff async. How does that work and what have you done to make it work?

00:13:48 - 00:13:49 Stephen Koza
Well.

00:13:49 - 00:14:13 Robert Gonzalez
So there's a fair amount of async that happens. But one thing that I've, I've done personally, and I think that is shown as an example to my staff, anything that they can do is just be moderately flexible on the bookends of your day. I start my day, I'm in California, I start my day at about six in the morning and six in the morning for me is 2:00, 2:00 in the afternoon for the UK.

00:14:13 - 00:14:35 Robert Gonzalez
It's about 4:00 in the afternoon for parts of eastern, central and Eastern Europe. So if I start my day an hour or two early and my teams in the Far East end their day an hour or two later, we actually have a pretty good amount of crossover in our workdays. So there's a lot of I say in-person, but I mean like face to face communication and group communications that we can have.

00:14:35 - 00:14:56 Robert Gonzalez
I operate on something we call the golden window. That golden window for me is six in the morning to ten in the morning, because that's when all of my people are generally available at some point in that window. And then around ten in the morning, my time is where people start tapering off. And my business within the US, Canada, places like that, that's when that picks up, because we're we're generally in the same time zone.

00:14:56 - 00:15:20 Robert Gonzalez
They're on the async side though. We, we have to use our tools, right? We use our, our our slack channels. We communicate through JIRA tickets when we're working. We communicate through our Microsoft series of products. The things that you would work in with presentations and comments on decks or using word docs or confluence pages. So the easy way of working is an effective way of working when it needs to be.

00:15:20 - 00:15:25 Robert Gonzalez
But nothing beats, you know, actually being on a call with somebody or having face to face time with them, which we still get to do.

00:15:25 - 00:15:32 Stephen Koza
Do you do you ever get people together in person like the whole team? Has that ever happened or is that just impossible?

00:15:32 - 00:15:51 Robert Gonzalez
So it is a little bit challenging to get the whole organization together. And what we do right now is we actually bring leadership together. In fact, we just had an off site in Denver a couple of weeks ago where I had my leaders from Romania, my leaders from the UK were able to come in, and then I went out there from from California.

00:15:51 - 00:16:17 Robert Gonzalez
We have one of my leaders from North Carolina was able to join us, and then several others from around the US and other parts of the world. So we're starting at the leadership level, being able to bring people in person. It's an absolute godsend to have all of your colleagues in the room together. You have 8 to 10 hours of very intense strategy sessions, but you get so much accomplished in such a short period of time, so it would be nice to be able to see the whole team together.

00:16:17 - 00:16:24 Robert Gonzalez
I don't know if I can make that happen, but if I can, I'd love to push on that. But right now we're we're starting with the leadership of the organization and bringing them together.

00:16:24 - 00:16:33 Stephen Koza
Tell me a little bit about how your teams organized. I think you made some changes. I don't know if they were recent or not, but I want to hear more about that.

00:16:33 - 00:17:01 Robert Gonzalez
So we did make some changes. Our business has undergone some some pretty significant change in the last couple of years. We have a new not new anymore, but a CEO who started about two years ago, and he brought in some some leaders within his organization to help transform the business. And that led to transformation internally because it had to new leadership, new product leadership ultimately led to new technology leadership.

00:17:01 - 00:17:24 Robert Gonzalez
And as part of the response to that, with a new product leader in place, we got a new roadmap, a new series of product initiatives and objectives that we were trying to hit. And so we had to align the technology group to the needs of the business. At the same time, our leader brought forward some very aggressive goals for customer retention and making sure that we tend to customer friction points.

00:17:24 - 00:17:47 Robert Gonzalez
So I had to actually organize our technology group or the engineering group around three key vertical pillars. One was our product roadmap, one was our support roadmap, and the other was our technical roadmap. So I organized around the things that were the strongest initiatives in the technology or the product roadmap. That was our seller experience and our revenue intelligence pieces.

00:17:47 - 00:18:15 Robert Gonzalez
So those are almost half of the engineering organization that are dedicated to building out our next generation of capabilities for our customers. Then I took about 30% of our organization. I dedicated it to our technical and customer support team. So burning through our bug backlog, making sure we address our sub one sub two issues in a timely manner, making sure that the three step forward prioritized high enough to be able to make regular deliveries on those and really drive down that customer.

00:18:15 - 00:18:41 Robert Gonzalez
Friction that has has grown in the past in a slow manner, but it is grown in the past. And then there's some portion of my my organization that's dedicated to what we call sheep quality, compliance and performance. And that's driven by sort of the technology, the technology roadmap, things we need to do to to keep our product advancing and keep our platforms up to date, making sure we're secure and stable and compliant and all of that good stuff.

00:18:41 - 00:19:00 Stephen Koza
Tell me a little bit more about the leadership transitions, because when that happens, sometimes it's pretty disruptive. Sometimes it's a little less disruptive. But it's it's always changed. Like what would that look like and how did it impact your word. What worked well? What broke would you do about it.

00:19:00 - 00:19:24 Robert Gonzalez
So our our leadership transformation was pretty significant. Like every I think all but one, all but one of our sea levels has, has, has a new person in the role over the last year and a half to two years. And obviously when there's a significant change like that, there's there's going to be disruption to the business in some capacity.

00:19:24 - 00:19:46 Robert Gonzalez
That disruption comes from a transition in knowledge that comes from how somebody might want something done, how they might staff for their strategy. There was a fair amount of turnover that went with it, not that, you know, whole parts of the organization were were replaced. It's just that people, people sometimes struggle to adapt to change in the way that that the business needs it.

00:19:46 - 00:20:07 Robert Gonzalez
And there was there was some folks who moved out. There were some positions that had to be moved out because the strategy called for that. There was some some change in our culture, and that was a little bit hard for some people to, to take hold of. Right. But in general, all of the changes that took place were needed by the business.

00:20:07 - 00:20:27 Robert Gonzalez
The business needed some some, some fresh air. Breathe, breathe into it, some life breathed into the business and navigating. That was a little challenging for a period of time, but we're at a point now, I believe we're on the other end of that, and things have stabilized quite a bit. I think we're all pretty well acclimated to the leaders that we have in our business.

00:20:27 - 00:20:35 Robert Gonzalez
And we're we're moving ahead now in a in a pretty strong path forward to getting to the objectives that have been laid out before us.

00:20:35 - 00:21:08 Stephen Koza
That's great man, I'd love to hear that. I'm curious when, you know, I found leadership sometimes is, you know, embracing the direction, but like protecting your team from the noise and the disruption because I imagine you still got a roadmap. You still got a ship. Nobody's letting you off your commitment. So how do you balance that? How do you carry the, you know, the vision torch down, but also make sure people don't get too distracted by the stuff that's going to get in the way of their day to day.

00:21:08 - 00:21:35 Robert Gonzalez
So actually, I had to learn that lesson in the hardest of ways. So one of the things that I didn't do very well at the beginning of that transition was manage the expectations on my team and make sure we stayed focused. And in fact, I allowed a little bit of that, that thrash to creep in. And that actually has a really wild effect on diminishing the energy of the team.

00:21:35 - 00:21:56 Robert Gonzalez
Right? When when you're focused, you maintain a pretty good pace. Good, good sense of urgency, good amount of energy and good amount of positivity. When focus gets disrupted, you start to create a level of thrash that really drains the team. And I actually went through that for about a month and a half, two months where things got very, very hard for my team.

00:21:56 - 00:22:16 Robert Gonzalez
That turned the corner late January early February. Around that time, we we got a new CTO in place who came in, and he actually was able to put a pretty quick stop to the noise that was filtering its way down. And one of the things that he did is he put kind of an umbrella around the technology organizations that I chilled for a minute.

00:22:16 - 00:22:34 Robert Gonzalez
Let's figure out what we're doing and that that little motion. And it was done over the course of maybe 2 to 3 weeks. But that little motion really set our technology team back on a level that was very stabilizing for everybody. And that's where I actually caught on to, you know what? We don't have to say yes to everything.

00:22:34 - 00:22:48 Robert Gonzalez
We don't need to try to keep, in my view, keep the business moving forward through the midst of constant change and disruption. It's okay for us to have limits that say, you know what? This is what we can do. This is what you asked us to do. This is what we're going to do. If there's a change, let's negotiate.

00:22:48 - 00:23:05 Robert Gonzalez
Let's talk it through. But while we're doing that, we're still going to stay focused on what we said we were going to do. Until we have agreement that we're going to we're going to transition and we're going to pivot that little, that little transition, I think, was critical to stabilizing the technology organization. And now we're charging on all cylinders.

00:23:05 - 00:23:06 Robert Gonzalez
In my opinion.

00:23:07 - 00:23:30 Stephen Koza
That's awesome man. Nothing like, you know, learning a hard lesson to grow, right? Yeah. There probably wasn't a good book to read to give you all those answers. Well, hey, let's talk about AI, because I know you've got a lot to say on the subject, and I'll just give you a bit of a T up on that. So I you've written a lot about it.

00:23:30 - 00:24:03 Stephen Koza
And, you know, I think your takes are detailed and specific and they're out there and you've talked about a bottlenecks and staging environment problems and context problems and, and so I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're actually doing. And you know, AI has moved so incredibly fast. You know, I'm stating the obvious there. But talk a little bit about how you think about applying AI to engineering, because, you know, if you if you live in our little bubble, that's all there is.

00:24:03 - 00:24:24 Stephen Koza
But if you take a step back ever it, you know, it's like one of these technologies and there's been a few of them that, that every part of the business has to figure out. You know, cloud wasn't so much that but mobile was and the internet was. And now we've got AI. And so talk to me about your views on that and let's dig in a little bit.

00:24:24 - 00:24:42 Robert Gonzalez
So AI is to me it's one of the greatest unlocks that technology has ever brought forward, both for personal and for professional use. When you go talk about some of the emerging tech that we've seen in the last couple of decades, you just called them out, right? Mobile was a thing that a lot of people were like, don't know.

00:24:42 - 00:25:00 Robert Gonzalez
And don't nobody want to ever use this on a mobile phone. And now everybody does everything on a mobile phone, right? There were people who were like, I don't even know what a cloud is, let alone am I going to put my business in this thing called a cloud, where we have seen those emerging texts land is they become things that we have built our lives upon.

00:25:01 - 00:25:19 Robert Gonzalez
Right. You have a mobile phone right now that likely is storing half, if not everything that's on it in a cloud somewhere. And 20 years ago, 15 years ago, ten years ago, people are like, I don't want to touch that. We're in a time right now where another emerging technology, AI, has come to the forefront and it is faster than anything we've ever seen.

00:25:19 - 00:25:43 Robert Gonzalez
It evolves in days, not months or years like other tech. And the way that it's evolving is unlocking potential for anybody that's willing to put any kind of attention to it. When it comes to engineering, I look at I look at what we do with an engineering as a series of technical things that one of one of which happens to be coding.

00:25:43 - 00:26:03 Robert Gonzalez
And there's a lot of talk in professional circles, and you don't have to go very far, even on LinkedIn, to see this, where people talk about AI and how it writes code and how much slop there is and how terrible the code is. And all of these challenges to why we shouldn't use AI to do this one thing in an engineering space.

00:26:03 - 00:26:31 Robert Gonzalez
My view is a little bit more broad than that. Reducing an engineer to code takes away easily 50% of the work that an engineer does. The value that an engineer brings to the business is so much beyond code. We we prototype. We use meth in a lot of our our calculations. We diagram, we collaborate, we actually offer solution and and all kinds of other services outside of the code rewrite.

00:26:31 - 00:26:51 Robert Gonzalez
And I think any engineer that's been in the business more than a year knows that code is is one of the tools in our toolbox, but it's not our toolbox. So when you look at what AI can do, it can accelerate the engineer in a number of ways, not just code. Now it will accelerate with code, but it's going to accelerate everything you do.

00:26:51 - 00:27:19 Robert Gonzalez
It's going to accelerate architecture. It's going to accelerate documentation. It's going to accelerate testing. It's going to accelerate design. And when you can apply that acceleration to the role, you get a lot more output as a person. One of the struggles that I've seen, and I've talked about this a little bit, though, is that particularly in the AI space, accelerating one piece of a puzzle just moves what happens in a bottleneck situation to a different part of that puzzle.

00:27:19 - 00:27:44 Robert Gonzalez
In a AI driven workflow, if you're saying, hey, I want engineers to be driven by AI, it's awesome. What is your deployment look like? Is your deployment covered with AI? If it's not, you're going to have a bottleneck. There is your go to market covered by. If not, you're going to have a bottleneck there. So when I look at AI right now, even as an engineering leader, I look at it more as a business leader, which is how are we using AI to accelerate all facets of the business.

00:27:44 - 00:27:59 Robert Gonzalez
So that way we make that fast lane for everybody, not just for engineering. Engineering can go really fast, but if you're not ready to receive that speed in that pace, you're just going to get overwhelmed with the things that engineering builds. And then the value of that acceleration starts to drop off pretty quick.

00:27:59 - 00:28:21 Stephen Koza
Yeah. You know what? This reminds me? We we had a another engineering lead from another SaaS company on. We talked about the same thing. It was like, okay, now you can generate, you know, unlimited code. Code is not the bottleneck. And it turns out, well, you know, something else is now the bottleneck. It's pipeline or testing or and I like how you included go to market and even other parts of the business.

00:28:21 - 00:28:42 Stephen Koza
So couldn't agree with you more for sure. You know, I think maybe this is a poor analogy, but like the farmer, you know, when the Industrial Revolution came about and all of a sudden they had better, more automated ways to do their job, their job was never to plow the field. Their job was to produce food. And that's what a developers job is.

00:28:42 - 00:29:02 Stephen Koza
It's to create a product. It's not to write lines of code and to create a product, you have to be thinking about a lot of things like architecture and security and stability and user experience. And how you do it kind of doesn't matter so much. So we have a client who I like their take on it. He said, well, it was a version of that.

00:29:02 - 00:29:15 Stephen Koza
It was, you know, their job is to produce something of value. It's not to, you know, measure results based on lines of code shipped, although that is a way that people did it and still do it in a lot of cases.

00:29:15 - 00:29:17 Robert Gonzalez
That's a terrible measurement, by the way.

00:29:17 - 00:29:30 Stephen Koza
Yeah. Because doesn't AI write more lines of code? I well like for this for the same solution, you know, like manual development versus AI, doesn't AI tend to generate more lines of code to solve the same thing.

00:29:30 - 00:29:48 Robert Gonzalez
At 100%? It does. If you ever dig into the code that AI generates, one of the reasons why you hear people talk about AI slop is that when, right, sometimes it writes a lot of code, sometimes it writes sloppy code. At the end of the day, the machine is going to do what the machine thinks is best. A human that might be doing the same job is going to think, you know what?

00:29:48 - 00:30:01 Robert Gonzalez
How can I do this in with the least amount of effort applied to it? To a machine effort is a negligible factor, right? So yeah, you get a lot of code when it comes to when it comes from from AI, AI tools.

00:30:01 - 00:30:12 Stephen Koza
Yeah. So so yeah, lines of code is certainly not the measurement and maybe not even press anymore. You know, that's that's kind of a bad proxy now because it's easy to push a bunch of those. Right.

00:30:12 - 00:30:41 Robert Gonzalez
One of the measurements that I have, I've changed in the way that I'm looking at when it comes to metrics, is I'm moving away from story points. A lot of agile shops have used story points instead of just pure time based estimations to to measure time and complexity. Right. But what I'm realizing is as code becomes less and less costly, and as agents are building more and more of our product, what used to be a measure of time and complexity is now becoming a factor of one.

00:30:41 - 00:30:59 Robert Gonzalez
Like time is negligible, complexity is negligible because robots are handling both of those. So rather than having a numeric value associated to a ticket, if the ticket is just a one, then all you really need to measure is throughput, not story point velocity. So one of the things that I'm looking at now is how many tickets are we doing?

00:30:59 - 00:31:16 Robert Gonzalez
Because those are going to be the measure of our accomplishments. It's you might want to add pull requests in there, but I'm not looking at lines of code. That's actually not even a meaningful metric for me. What's a meaningful metric for me is something that you said just a second ago, which is deliver value. How are we delivering value?

00:31:16 - 00:31:35 Robert Gonzalez
That value comes from what our customers ultimately receive and what we build to get to the outcome that our customer wants. So if we're delivering work and that work is an outcome, and that outcome is what the customer is asking for, that's a good measure of success. Story points, velocity and pull requests and lines of code. That's that's fluff.

00:31:35 - 00:31:40 Robert Gonzalez
I think that a lot of people get lost in the in the numbers game for the wrong reasons, in my opinion.

00:31:40 - 00:31:58 Stephen Koza
Yeah, totally. I mean, if, if, if you get a trophy for lines of code, I'm competing for that right now, just in my nights and weekends because it's fun. And trust me, I don't deserve any trophies for building software. Hey, let's talk a little bit more about agile, because this is something I've been thinking about a bunch lately.

00:31:58 - 00:32:19 Stephen Koza
And and you, you brought it up. So yeah, traditionally the waterfall people moved to agile, and that's what we've run for a long time. And you got somebody leading the scrum and story points and epics and all the things. How how are you thinking about that in the age of AI? What lives on? What doesn't make sense anymore?

00:32:19 - 00:32:26 Stephen Koza
What do we need or what do you what have you guys started to adopt to kind of stay with the times?

00:32:26 - 00:32:57 Robert Gonzalez
So one of the things I think that is becoming clear to me, it might not be clear to others yet, but it's clear to me and my staff is that a lot of what is baked into agile was built around people and roles within that system, and a lot of those roles can actually be automated. One of the things I just got done doing this week is collaborating with one of my team members to build a Scrum Master agent, and that Scrum Master agent looks at actual true capacity for throughput, looks at actual calendars of people that are going to be at work who aren't going to be at work.

00:32:57 - 00:33:15 Robert Gonzalez
It looks at requests that might be coming in from product, or maybe it's a PRD, maybe it's an epic. Whatever. It looks at the volume of what is being asked to do and can actually measure what is on the team against what can be done within a period of time. Even if we stay with the two week sprint, we still need to be able to set out a plan for that sprint.

00:33:15 - 00:33:39 Robert Gonzalez
That's something that a Scrum master historically has done, and that's something that AI agents are actually very good at doing, taking in a lot of data, analyzing it and planning. Right. So the role of the scrum master, in my opinion, can become a very fast. And it's one of the first things that we're working on. But there's some more pieces to that, which is there's the planning bit and then there's the part that kind of keeps track of what everybody's doing on a given, on a given point within the sprint.

00:33:39 - 00:34:03 Robert Gonzalez
Then there's the part that says, hey, what is our retrospective going to look like? And plans for the retrospective, and then also looks back and says, what was our actual numbers? What was our sprint predictability? What was our sprint edition of completion? What was our throughput? Right. How many times do we have something get kicked back? We can look at rework, we can look at throughput per engineer, and all of those numbers are immediately available to an AI agent.

00:34:03 - 00:34:22 Robert Gonzalez
As soon as you hit close the sprint. Right. That's something that typically has taken a person days to be able to get to you. And then if you are in a shop as big as mine, for example, where you have 12 or 13 scrum teams, being able to aggregate that all the way up to an executive view and then be able to present it to my CTO or CEO, that's a week long process, right?

00:34:22 - 00:34:41 Robert Gonzalez
We're at a point right now where I have agents that run every day, that give me daily statistics and daily metrics on what we're doing. I have sprint based metrics and month operation metrics that are all being grabbed by my AI agents, so that my May leads don't have to worry about doing that. My Scrum Masters don't have to do that anymore.

00:34:41 - 00:34:59 Robert Gonzalez
They also have at their disposal. I'm actually putting it together for them. They have those same agents that they get to run their businesses by. So that's one way I think that agile is changing. I think the framework is still workable, having time bound segments that you work against like a sprint. I still think there's value in that.

00:34:59 - 00:35:18 Robert Gonzalez
It allows you to stay focused. It allows you to have a goal. It allows you to show attainment of that goal in a period of time. But the sum of the elements of it, like your daily stand up, for example. That's the thing I think that in a distributed set of remote teams probably is async already, and that's something that can be easily coordinated by an orchestrated agent.

00:35:18 - 00:35:39 Robert Gonzalez
Right? Puts out a message into your slack channel, says, let me know what you're doing, what you're working on, what your obstacles are, takes all that in and then can actually use that to plan or to coordinate with the team. So there's a lot of pieces, I think, of agile that may not fit an agent development system, but there's still some of those pieces that I believe makes sense to the overall development flow.

00:35:39 - 00:36:00 Stephen Koza
Yeah, I like the point about, you know, using it to collect and analyze the data. It's infinitely better at that, as long as you steer it in the right way and it has the right data and all that. And so, you know, I would imagine typically Scrum Masters like assigning stories and then measuring that, and you've got those metrics.

00:36:00 - 00:36:20 Stephen Koza
And how cool is it that AI can tell you like, well, not only do that, but like backtest and use pattern recognition and say, well, actually like the way we chunk those up before wasn't right. And here are the reasons why. And you know, our measurement was wrong. You know, we thought a story would take this many hours.

00:36:20 - 00:36:29 Stephen Koza
And so it took that many hours and way better than a human can do. And then conceivably like frees up that human to do the more valuable stuff.

00:36:29 - 00:36:54 Robert Gonzalez
I'm using AI right now to do some of that backward looking analysis, to go back over things we've done over the last like 13 months and ask the question, did we appropriately estimate that work? And I have across all of my teams, I actually discovered a variance that's pretty stark. Like there's this range between like one x and three x on how story point estimates matched to tickets.

00:36:54 - 00:37:14 Robert Gonzalez
I have one team where their their average story point per ticket was 1.1. And then I have a different team where their average story points per ticket was 3.2. And you look at that, you like, how did we get there? Right. Like I thought we were standard. I thought we had a I thought we had an agreement. But that that goes to show what happens when you have different, different people working in different spaces and in different ways.

00:37:14 - 00:37:27 Robert Gonzalez
And that is something that when again, when you reduce that, that time and complexity factor down to one, throughput becomes the true story. And every ticket that you do that becomes what it is that you've done.

00:37:28 - 00:37:57 Stephen Koza
Let me ask you about the context layer. I know you've done some writing on this context layer is the moat. So everybody in SaaS is trying to figure out what's the durable moat, what's the durable advantage, because the software or the ability to create software gets commoditized. You got to have something. Right. So tell me how you think about that given, you know, not just your views on the space, but you're one of those companies trying to figure it out.

00:37:57 - 00:37:58 Stephen Koza
I'm sure.

00:37:58 - 00:38:18 Robert Gonzalez
This might be considered a hot take, but my my view is your your product, the product you put forward, the UI that you put forward that lost its value. The minute that somebody with a $200 a month cloud subscription was able to write whatever software they wanted to in a handful of hours over pizza and beer, right.

00:38:18 - 00:38:35 Stephen Koza
Or I, like, I would say, like or that person with the $200 subscription can go access the data in the platform that they have. Like all of a sudden, like there's still a customer, they still love your product, but nobody's actually like clicking around anymore.

00:38:35 - 00:38:57 Robert Gonzalez
So that's the next bit, right? Is you have you have the ability to create your own interfaces, but you also have the ability to create your own view of data within your tools. Something that that I wrote about recently is there's like 11 flagship products that almost every tech person has had some dependency on in their career that I don't touch anymore.

00:38:57 - 00:39:12 Robert Gonzalez
I'm not in JIRA every day. I'm not in confluence every day. I'm not in jellyfish. I'm not checking my metrics in a tool anymore. I'm not even in word, in PowerPoint, in Excel anymore. I do all of my work, all of it in cloud. I connect it to my systems. I tell it what I want to see, it gives me back what I want.

00:39:12 - 00:39:31 Robert Gonzalez
And then if I need a document, if I need an interface, I go and I tell it to build it for me. Like I don't make PowerPoint presentations. Cloud does. I don't write word docs. Cloud does. Right? When I don't need your UI, then what good is your product if it isn't the UI? Where is the value of your product coming from?

00:39:31 - 00:39:53 Robert Gonzalez
To me, that's the context layer that we're talking about, right? Companies that have a rich layer of data that can offer behavior, context that can offer pattern, context that can offer relationship context and the knowledge that connects those pieces together. That's where the wind comes from. Because whether I'm using your UI or my own homegrown. I still get value out of what it is you offer.

00:39:53 - 00:40:12 Robert Gonzalez
So that context layer being the moat, that concept for me is you protect your business when you bring forward that thing that has really driven your business to success, and that's your data. It's what you know about your customers, what you know about industries that you serve. It's what you know about patterns, whether it's selling patterns, buying patterns, remediation patterns.

00:40:12 - 00:40:30 Robert Gonzalez
That's where the value of your business lies. And if you're focusing more on the UI than the context layer, I feel like it might be slightly misdirected because the durable good is going to be your data in your context, not the not the UI. UIs are being spun up and spun down every day.

00:40:30 - 00:40:54 Stephen Koza
Yeah. So I can relate. So, you know, I'm the business guy over here, but we do a quarterly board meeting, you know, just like any other. Most companies and you know, the board deck, you send out the pre read everybody a few days before. And you know that's always a massive lift. You know you got to get data from finance and all the other functions and log into a bunch of tools.

00:40:54 - 00:41:15 Stephen Koza
I don't do any of that anymore. Like I don't create the slides, I don't log into the tools. It just sucks it all in. And we've got, you know, workflows now that figure out the agenda and the, you know, the what we're trying to communicate what we want to spend time on. And oh my gosh, like I can't believe I used to do it any other way.

00:41:15 - 00:41:37 Stephen Koza
We've done two board meetings like that now and wow, what a game changer. Let's wrap up on one more topic here that I know you're passionate about. I call it GSD because I'm trying not to cuss, but we'd say getting things done would be the more PC version. So I know, I know you've been you've been responsible for bringing some new stuff to market.

00:41:37 - 00:41:53 Stephen Koza
And one of those was a customer self-service solution, and you did it pretty quickly. So tell us a little bit about that story. Like what was it? How'd you do it? How did you deliver and what were, you know, what almost went wrong along the way?

00:41:53 - 00:42:16 Robert Gonzalez
So that that particular story, we were a very small, nimble team. I was the the engineering, we'll call it executive for the team. I had three engineers that were working for me, and then I worked with a product manager and a UX designer, and we were able to meet and develop our plan for what we wanted to put forward very quickly.

00:42:16 - 00:42:34 Robert Gonzalez
And we were because it was a new product. As is often the times when you're in a greenfield development, you get to make some choices that really unlock you. But we had the ability to move very quickly. We were on our own release cadence and development cadence. We were on our we had an ability to choose the technology stacks we wanted to use.

00:42:34 - 00:42:53 Robert Gonzalez
We weren't dependent on anything that had been in existence. So we were able to use the best, most modern tech and we were able to move very fast. So we ended up not really. We worked in an agile environment, but we were a little bit more waterfall than you'd want to be. For a typical agile environment, which is a requirement would come in.

00:42:53 - 00:43:11 Robert Gonzalez
We would as a team, we would groom it. We had an engineer who was ready to take it, the engineer would do it. And as we were wrapping that piece of work up, we'd bring something else in. So while we worked on two week sprints, we were just churning work like it was coming in. We were reviewing it and it was going out, and we were able to do that very quickly.

00:43:11 - 00:43:28 Robert Gonzalez
So that being free to to go and build what we knew we needed to build in small increments, that was another thing that we told ourselves we were going to do is we were going to keep the requirements refined, we were going to keep things small, and we were going to deliver small chunks rapidly rather than big chunks over time.

00:43:28 - 00:43:49 Robert Gonzalez
And we all agreed to it and we all stuck to that agreement. So that was another thing that helped us just just move and move quickly. So that was an exciting time. It had some of some of its moments like, you know, you get down a particular path and because you're speeding through things, you realize, yo, I made I might have made the wrong choice here about two weeks ago, but now we have two weeks of of things built on top of it.

00:43:49 - 00:44:11 Robert Gonzalez
But those were those were a few and far between. We did run into that. And that was a lesson to learn. Like, you know, sometimes we might need to be a little bit more thorough in the beginning, but that was one of those moments where we were we were allowed to just go and do, and we weren't bound by some of the other ceremonial underpinnings that can weigh a team down sometimes in an older, agile shop.

00:44:11 - 00:44:25 Stephen Koza
Nice. That that sounds like a win. That's awesome. There's a couple of things always like to ask people as we wrap, what's a piece of advice that you got early in your career that really stuck with you?

00:44:25 - 00:44:47 Robert Gonzalez
It was a version of advice that I also got later on in my career that reinforced, which was take, take the chance, because even if you fail, you still learn something. So the earlier advice was, what are you afraid of? What? Like what's the worst that can happen? Go. Go and try something. Do the thing right and before you ask for help, try.

00:44:47 - 00:45:09 Robert Gonzalez
Before you say you can't do it, try all of that stuff. Go and put some effort into it and take a chance. And if you fail, take the lesson from that chance so the chance doesn't go to waste later on in life. That that advice turned into a variant of something that you and I talked about earlier on the show, which is failure is actually okay, as long as it's a unique failure.

00:45:09 - 00:45:15 Robert Gonzalez
You always want to you always want to fail once, right? Well, if you repeat it, it's a pattern.

00:45:15 - 00:45:19 Stephen Koza
Don't make the don't don't do the same thing twice. Yeah, yeah.

00:45:19 - 00:45:37 Robert Gonzalez
But the the way that you fail is by trying. If you're not failing, you're not trying. Right. So at some point you're going to do something wrong. That's okay. Grab the lesson from it. Use that to do something right the next time. Don't be afraid to take the chance. Don't be afraid to fail because there's there's value in every part of that, whether you whether you land it or whether you fail.

00:45:37 - 00:45:39 Robert Gonzalez
It's a good thing to do anyways.

00:45:39 - 00:45:49 Stephen Koza
Yeah, I love it. That's a good one. Well, this has been fun, man. Where can people find you if they want to catch some of your writing?

00:45:49 - 00:46:05 Robert Gonzalez
My most active platform is going to be LinkedIn. I share a lot of my thoughts there. I engage with a lot of content there. I might push back on some people sometimes because I am very AI forward and I'm a huge proponent of advancing evolving tech, but that's that's the place to find me. Find me on LinkedIn.

00:46:05 - 00:46:19 Stephen Koza
Cool. All right. We'll throw that in the show notes. I appreciate it, Robert. This was fun, man. We got to do another one and go deeper on AI. And, you know, maybe two weeks from now we'll have a lot of new stuff to talk about.

00:46:19 - 00:46:21 Robert Gonzalez
I'm sure the world will be different. Thank you. Stephen.

00:46:21 - 00:46:23 Stephen Koza
Yeah, it's my pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on.