Author: Alexis

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I’m joined by Gojko Adzic. Gojko is an AWS Serverless Hero, a long-time product builder, and the author of Impact Mapping (a book I still use constantly, especially when working on OKRs) and Specification by Example.

We talked about building products, avoiding waste, and creating a shared understanding of value across business and technology.

“If you are not keeping score, you are practicing, not playing.”
— Gojko Adzic

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”
— Fred Brooks

The story behind Impact Mapping: great code, zero value

Gojko wrote Impact Mapping after a brutal experience: a team that was technically excellent, ahead of its time in automation and delivery, and still delivered no value.

They built with high quality, high speed, and high confidence. They also burned through the budget.

That moment forced a shift: technical excellence matters, but it is not enough. Product decisions, assumptions, and value validation have to be part of the work, and engineers need to engage with product thinking, not as gatekeepers, but as collaborators who can help challenge ideas and shape better decisions.

What Impact Mapping is

Impact Mapping is a simple visual method to connect:

• a business goal
• to actors (who can influence that goal)
• to impacts (behavior change)
• to deliverables (what we build)

The key idea is the middle layer: impacts as observable behavior changes. Impacts give teams a shorter feedback loop than business outcomes like revenue or market share.

If we change the product and people:

• stay longer
• complete tasks faster
• make fewer mistakes
• adopt a feature
• return more often

…then we have evidence we are moving in the right direction.

Impact Mapping creates a bridge between the “problem world” and the “solution world” through measurable behavior change.

Simple is not always easy

Impact Mapping is simple to explain quickly. It is not always easy to do well.

But the point is not perfection on day one. The point is to create a shared map that reduces uncertainty, helps prioritization, and supports learning as the team iterates.

Scoreboards, leading indicators, and accountability

Gojko connects Impact Mapping to execution discipline: focusing on what matters, measuring leading indicators, and revisiting decisions frequently.

The message is practical:

• do not measure only outcomes you’ll see in 6–12 months
• measure what helps you decide what to do next week
• make the “score” visible to the team
• build a cadence to inspect value and adapt

This is how you avoid the trap of delivering what someone asked for and calling it “valuable” just because it was requested.

Pair programming, quality, and sustainability

Gojko also shares how he works today across two products:

• one built with continuous pair programming for shared context and quality
• one built solo to maximize flow and creative immersion

Pair programming can be demanding. It can also be a powerful way to produce a better product, avoid corner-cutting, and design more thoughtfully, especially in very small teams.

“If you are not keeping score, you are practicing not playing”

Gojko Adzic

Conflict, alignment, and the power of examples

When collaboration becomes tense, Gojko relies on two patterns:

• provoke clarity by offering an option people will react to
• bring the conversation back to concrete examples

Examples cut through ambiguity across roles. They create shared reference points that business, design, engineering, and testing can all discuss.

This connects directly with the spirit of Specification by Example: examples are not only about tests. They are first a tool for understanding.

The industry evolves in an upward spiral

Gojko ends with a broader reflection: the software world moves in cycles, but progress is not purely repetitive. It’s an upward spiral.

When one bottleneck is solved, the next becomes visible. Teams improve development, then testing becomes the bottleneck. Teams improve delivery, then product discovery becomes the bottleneck.

We keep returning to Brooks’ point: deciding what to build remains the hardest part.

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”

Fred Brooks

Listen to the episode here:

Here is the transcript of the episode

Alexis:

Hey, Gojko, glad to have you here. How are you and can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Gojko:

Hey, wonderful to be on the show. I’m a developer, currently working on two products. I’ve worked as a consultant, I wrote some books, effectively, I really like coding. And since I started on a developer job 20 something years ago, I realized that in order to do good coding, I have to learn how to do good testing, how to do good product management and a bunch of other things. And my interests seem to be going around in a spiral, I tend to learn a lot about doing some coding thing. And then that leads me to making more complex product so I need to learn more about how to test it well. That leads me to figuring out well, how do I reduce the amount of things I need to do in order to do all of this well, so I need to learn more about product management, and then it gives me more capacity to do more development and start new products. It’s kind of going on in a spiral and every time I touch one of these subjects, I end up writing a book about it, I guess, is a way of doing a memory dump so I can free more random access memory for myself.

Alexis:

I love that. I love the way you are describing that. And I love the fact that it’s a virtuous spiral that is leading to more books, because I already enjoyed reading your books. So that’s a really good news. Of course, one of those books that I’m using radio a lot is Impact Mapping. Can you tell us a little bit more about what led you to that book? And probably what is impact mapping? You will need to explain that once again.

Gojko:

What led me to the book is I was CTO of a company that basically ran into a wall and spent all the money that it could spend. And it did that in the worst possible time where kind of 2008, 2009 it was almost impossible to get any good investment, and we ran out of money. And I was a minority investor in that company as well so I didn’t take any salary. And I was left almost without the money to pay the rent next month, that’s how stupid I was. And we were incredibly, incredibly efficient in terms of software production. It was by far the best team I’ve ever worked with, even till today, in terms of technical competence. And we were doing things that became buzzwords later before they had a name. So we were doing stuff like continuous delivery before people knew the continuous delivery buzzword, we were doing cloud based deployments back then, we were doing almost 100% automated testing. And it was wonderful. The code quality was wonderful, but we delivered no value.

Gojko:

And because we were really, really efficient, we efficiently burn through our core budgets. And as a CTO of that company, I was really embarrassed when it came to the point that I had to admit to myself what we’re doing is wrong. Because I thought we were doing so well. Up until then I really focused on on the technical quality of what the product is. And I’ve realized that there’s a lot more and as a technical person, I need to engage a lot more with product people. Not in a sense of not trusting them, but in a sense of being able to more efficiently challenge their ideas and help them make better decisions, and help facilitate a discussion between technology and product. And that led me to a lot of research and trying to figure out what we did wrong. And I started studying the emerging discipline of product management in software and how to kind of people do product management and deal with assumptions. That’s, I think, roughly around the time when the Lean Startup came out, and the software world really started awaking to how much we waste on stupid work and stupid products.

Gojko:

And one of the really wonderful things about software for me is it’s almost like magic. You literally turn ideas into products. You sit and drink coffee and turn something you have in the back of your head with some magic words. We don’t use Abracadabra, we use const value, and for each and things like that, but that’s magic, create products out of nothing. But at the same time, if what we build is missing the point, then you can spend a ton of cash and it just vaporizes, it disappears in thin air. There’s nothing to show for it. And the research I was doing back then to figure out what we did wrong and how would I never repeat that mistake in my life led me to learn about this technique called effect courting that the E news agency in Sweden was developing. And I just saw how incredibly wonderful that is for facilitation.

Gojko:

And the reference book for what they were talking about then was in Swedish day, there was an English version of that book, but wasn’t that popular. And I have very high respect for E News people and I don’t want this to sound like I’m kind of disparaging them, but I don’t think the book was accessible to the average software developer or the average software stakeholder. And I decided that I’m going to just try this out, and trying it out I saw how good it can be. And then decided to kind of write a book that will make this technique more approachable to people, especially doing interactive software delivery. And that’s basically the story of the book.

Alexis:

Excellent. I love the story. And I love it. It’s anchored in something that is really important to you. People always love to talk about their successes and how great they were, nut it’s always interesting to learn about something that didn’t really work well in the end, and what you can learn from that is really important. So I love the story behind the book.

Gojko:

Yeah. I think there’s so much wasted potential today in what we do as an industry. I mean, if you look at how much software gets produced and how much energy and how much effort people spend building these things, and then you look at the results of some of these efforts, most of it is just going to mediocre, most of it doesn’t go anywhere, a lot of it is kind of pointless. And it’s very difficult to even know in the short term if what we’re delivering makes sense or not. One of the best examples of this, a few years ago there was a project that the British Broadcasting Corporation where it was shut down, it was a personalization project for the video player, and it was shut down after a few years when they spent something like, I think 75 million pounds, can find the link and send it to you so that you can attach it in the podcast. I don’t remember exactly now. I think it was about 75 million pounds, something like that. It was shut down because it delivered no value.

Gojko:

And because this is a publicly funded cooperation, it’s a public broadcast that the government Office of National Audit got involved to figure out how can you possibly spend so much money on software and deliver no value. And the conclusion at the end, I’ll send you the link to that you can put it in the podcast links for your audience, was they could do it because it was urgent. And what that meant is that every month what they delivered, somebody was evaluating to say, well, is this good? Is it bad? Is it valuable? And the stakeholders were deluding themselves where they were making the decision if something was valuable or not. And it was basically somebody in the company told some developers, “Well, I want this feature.” They deliver the future and say, “Well, is it valuable?” They say, “Well, yeah, that’s what I asked you to do.” And it’s completely pointless. It’s just running around in circles and having no way to actually understand if we’re going in the right direction or not.

Gojko:

And I think impact mapping is the easiest solution I found to that problem. It’s not the best solution, there are probably better solutions out there but they’re very, very academic, very difficult to apply. The most popular process for goal driven requirements engineering in the academia is something called the iSTAR. And the basic book on iSTAR is about six or 700 pages. You must provide some wonderfully precise way of measuring value, but I don’t think any of the people I ever worked with would understand that and have time for it, where impact mapping is something that you can explain in 10, 15 minutes to business stakeholders and one afternoon later they will already have an impact map. And that’s why I love about the practice. It’s it’s kind of fast, it’s collaborative, and it really helps people solve an actual problem.

Alexis:

Can you explain impact mapping in a few minutes for us?

Gojko:

Absolutely. So impact mapping is a visualization technique that helps developers, business stakeholders, product representatives, analyst, UX people, people from different backgrounds, have a really good conversation on how the plan or a proposed deliverables connect to the value and how do we know that we’re going in the right direction, what is the value of what we’re going to deliver. And they help people visualize the big picture for what needs to be achieved and create a good way of measuring if we’re going in the right direction or not. Impact mapping does that by connecting the business goals through impacts, through changes to the users behavior or changes to the customer’s behavior, and to the deliverable. So it presents this middle layer that helps us measure change in a short term. What’s really wonderful about that is that behavior changes are observable on a shorter timescale. So if we change some software over there, and people start staying longer on the website, or they start interacting better with their friends, or they can administer Linux systems easier, or they can create larger server farms faster, then we’re delivering value. And behavior change is something that can be measured in the short term, it can be measured with a trial population of users, it can provide a leading indicator of value. And that’s why it’s so important.

Gojko:

And I remember reading Michael Jackson’s book, of course the consultant architect not the singer, I don’t think the singer wrote any books, about problem frames probably 20 years ago, or even more. And he said that one of the biggest problems in software delivery is creating a connection between the problem machine and the solution machine. And impact mapping creates a connection between the problem world and the solution world through these impacts and behavior changes and allows us to see where we’re going, allows us to measure that what we’re doing makes sense and allows us to focus on solving problems instead of just delivering solutions.

Alexis:

That sounds really easy said this way. And I think it’s exactly why the approach is so useful. It’s because it’s really easy. And once you started asking yourself the questions, it really helps you to do exactly that; connect the impact you want to achieve with the solution you want to break. And that’s really, really helpful. I love that.

Gojko:

So one of the one of the books I really love, I read this book a few years ago and I’m really sorry I’ve not discovered it a longer time ago, is Four Disciplines of Execution. For people that have been doing a good product management or can do delivery in a good way, there’s nothing revolutionary new in the book, but they’ve explained things so well it’s amazing. So I think even if you are the total expert in your field, it’s worth reading that book because the book is so well written and the ideas are so well explained that it’s totally amazing. And they boil down the difference between organizations that are excellent in executing their plans, compared to organizations that are not who they execute in their plans to kind of four big differences. The first big difference of the first kind of discipline of execution is focused on the wildly important, which is really keep your eyes on the ball and focus on the ball and work towards that. Impact mapping helps with that, because you have this one goal at the center of the map, and you’re really focusing on delivering that.

Gojko:

I’ve worked with organizations where once we start creating an impact map and have 50, 60 ideas in a backlog connected to a single impact, and the first two epics deliver the impact, then we can just say, “Look, we don’t have to do the other 48, we focused on the goal. We’re not focused on delivering the solution, we’re focused on delivering the results. And we’ve delivered the results so let’s move on.” The second thing they talk about is focus on leading metrics of value, on leading indicators of value. They say that every organization can very easily measure at the end if an initiative succeeded or failed. If you start something to increase your market share, or increase revenue, or increase profit, six months after you finish or a year after you finish, you will be able to know if you did it or not. Very easy. The measurements are there. But those measurements are irrelevant, really, for knowing what should you do next week. Like if you have 50 user stories that address the same impact, which of these user stories should you do and which you shouldn’t do? You can’t know that if you only measure the results six months later. If you’re like, the BBC in the eye player project, and four years later you wasted 75 million pounds, that’s game over. We need leading indicators of value.

Gojko:

And impact mapping helps incredibly with that because it provides this glue layer in between that is these impacts that we can start measuring, are we going in the right direction or not. And there’s a wonderful story from Mark Schwartz in his book, The After Business Value, where they talk about this project they’ve done at the US Immigration Services, where it was a massive, massive government project but they looked at how many cases a human case worker can process per day. And that’s a leading indicator of value that then you can focus on. And they were measuring the behavior change for these people. So every time they deliver a piece of software they were measuring if humans are processing more cases per day. If yes, we are delivering value, if not, what we deliver is incomplete, pointless, damaging whatever. And impact maps help amazingly with that. The third discipline of execution that they talk about in the book is to create a team scoreboard. Create a way for the team that delivers to know are they going in the right direction not. Not to have to wait on external feedback from some third party that three years later says well, this is valuable or not. But look at really focusing on providing value to the people that providing information to people that deliver so they can make better decisions.

Gojko:

And they have a wonderful quote in the book, I love it. They say if you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing, you’re not playing. And for a lot of organizations, we throw some software against the wall, we have no idea if it delivers any value or not. And again, impact maps help with that because they make it clear, well, this story is related to this impact. Our scoreboard, the way we measure the score, should be is this impact happening or not. And this opens up some really, really interesting discussions that can happen. There’s a wonderful piece of research, and I’ll give you the link, I think it’s interesting for your readers to understand as well, from Microsoft, where a guy called Bronco Harvey went to analyze if the stuff that was promised in PowerPoint actually came through for some initiatives. And his conclusion was that about 1/3 of initiatives that they looked at actually moved the numbers that were supposed to move in the right direction, about 1/3 actually created no statistical impact on the numbers that were supposed to improve, and about 1/3 actually damaged the numbers they were supposed to improve.

Gojko:

Microsoft is a pretty good software development company, and if you look at it from that perspective, they don’t get things always right. And of course, they don’t get things always right because the business people are not clairvoyant. They don’t have a crystal ball, they don’t control the competition, they don’t control the market. And writing the scoreboard allows us to actually see in a shorter cycle are we delivering or not. And the fourth discipline of execution they talk about is creating a good cadence of accountability. The last discipline they talk about in the book is creating a cadence of accountability. And really, that means reviewing the plans as we’re going along very frequently, and being honest about are we delivering value or not. Being honest about is what we’re doing providing what we expected it to provide. And if not, then there’s something unexpected going on. Then we need to do a bit more research, we need to inspect whether there’s something blocking our users from realizing the value we expected. Or maybe the ideas we have they’re just bad ideas. And from that perspective, impact mapping really helps connect all these things together. And it’s a wonderful visualization technique that’s really simple.

Gojko:

And you said it was easy, I think there’s a nice distinction we need to start making between simple and easy. I think impact mapping is simple as a way we can explain it in 15 minutes. I don’t think it’s incredibly easy to do, there are some challenges about doing it. It’s not too difficult to do, but it’s much, much easier to do than a lot of other very complex bureaucratic things. And that’s why I love it.

Alexis:

Yeah, that’s true. It’s simple to understand, it can be hard to get to a map that you really like. The thing is, it’s easy to start, you can have something really fast, it will not be perfect but if you accept that you will keep that map and you will continue to improve it, you have something you can work on, and you can improve it. And it’s convenient to visualize it. And it really helps with prioritization and saying, okay, we will focus on that particular impact now. And that’s good. We are good with that. So yeah, you’re right. It’s simple, it’s not necessarily easy.

Gojko:

One of the things I think helped me a lot was reading that habits book on how to measure anything. That’s kind of when I was doing this research for my benefit on how do we get good business metrics out, I came across that book, and it’s a wonderful book. And in the book, he talks about how lots of people discovered metrics that are not perfect, because they don’t totally eliminate uncertainty. And he says that good metrics don’t necessarily need to eliminate uncertainty, it’s really difficult to eliminate uncertainty. But good metrics help reduce uncertainty. So I think impact mapping is one of these things where it will reduce uncertainty and the more you do it, the more it will reduce uncertainty. And even if you start and you don’t get the perfect map, you don’t get the totally mathematically correct thing you need to do, it’s useful, as you said, because it’s better than what people were doing before. So it reduces it a bit.

Alexis:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. When we scheduled the call, you told me that you were available before a certain time in the day, because after that you were programming. And of course, I’m very interested in collaboration and in close collaboration like pair programming. Is it something that you are always doing, pair programming? Or is it something that you’re doing just for the moment for a specific product you’re working on?

Gojko:

I work on two products at the moment. One is relatively kind of successful and more stable. We’ve been developing that since 2013. And there are two people working on that product, There’s me and a colleague of mine, David, and we pretty much pair program all the time on it, because that allows us to share the knowledge of what’s going on. And that allows us to create a better product, that allows us to keep each other honest, and not cheat and not cut corners. And it genuinely leads to much better design, because we can have two pairs of eyes looking at something instead of one pair of eyes. And we develop this product that basically stands on its own, it doesn’t require almost any support. And it allows me to travel around when there’s no Corona and the planes are flying, and it allows David to do his own things in his time.

Gojko:

So it’s very important for us that the quality of the product is allowing us to work at a sustainable pace. Because there’s only two of us, we cannot spend time fielding customer support calls or fixing bugs and things like that because then we’re not producing value on the product. So what comes out has to be really, really good. And I think pair programming is absolutely critical for that. Having said that, I honestly enjoy programming more on my own. I find a lot of joy in programming. Programming is one of the best things I can do to lift my spirits up and enjoying my day. And pair programming can be brutal, it can be very difficult because you’re always having to explain everything you’re doing. And I found that I cannot get really immersed in the problem, I can’t get in the flow if I’m pair programming. As I said, it does produce a better product. And from a product development perspective, it’s the right thing to do. From a enjoyment perspective, I also like spending a long period of time just on my own, listening to music and very quietly being immersed in a problem and trying to solve it. And that’s kind of what brings me into the flow.

Gojko:

The other product I’m building is a very young one, I kind of literally launched it commercially less than six months ago, I think in October. It launched commercially in April last year, it launched as a betta. It’s a video editing tool that is saying that people who are not video editing professionals and they want to very quickly create a video from assets such as images or screenshots, and it does. For developers and techie people in particular it’s really good because it allows you to convert a markdown file into a video, which means you can have video on the version control. And it helped me a lot doing stuff for the previous product, actually. That’s how I came with the idea. Because there’s only two of us, we have to do programming, we have to do support, we have to do sales, we have to do product management. And one of the things I ended up doing is creating videos for users to learn how to use the product. And then every time we changed something small on the screen, I have to re record everything again. And because I’m not a video editing professional doing a five minute demo video takes me two or three hours or took me two or three hours.

Gojko:

So I started looking for ways to automate that. And then I figured out well, I can just automatically compose screenshots into video and even integrate with text to speech engines that have improved significantly over the last five or six years. And they can do English better than I can. I mean, I can’t get rid of my accent so if you hear me speak in a video, that’s not as nice as hearing a nice gentle voice that speaks in a perfect English accent. And I can do that with machine learning voices now. So basically you get the markdown document, you compile it, and it gives you a video. And then I realized, when I automated for this other thing, there’s a product here. So I’ve kind of extracted that into a separate product and launched it. And for that, I’m programming on my own. And I enjoy that immensely. So I can spend 10 hours immersed in a problem and not notice how much time has passed. And I realized if I work on my own, I enjoy it a lot more. But pair programming creates a better product.

Alexis:

This is excellent. So the first product is Mind Map, right?

Gojko:

Yes, the first product is Mind Map. It’s a mind mapping tool mostly used by schools and universities. We have some kind of project management cases and also some people are using it for describing the testing plans and outlining books and writing, but it’s mostly used in educational setting.

Alexis:

And the second one is Naraeet?

Gojko:

The second one is Narakeet. Yes, exactly. Thank you very much for investigating so much. That’s amazing.

Alexis:

Yeah. I have to admit that I’m really excited about Narakeet because I wanted to have a short video to explain something. And now that I know that I can even just create a slide in Google slide and start from there, I’m really excited about it. I’m working on it right now.

Gojko:

Thank you very much. Yes. So it started this a bunch of shell scripts actually to get everything editing. I don’t know, I have this flaw in my mind where if I see something that I do five times, because I’m lazy in a good way. I don’t like repeating myself. And if I see something I do five times manually, I cannot have an urge to automate it in shell scripts. And this thing actually started as a shell script, and then evolved into a nice web service for people. So I’m really glad you can use that as well.

Alexis:

This is really good. This is really good. I have a question for you. When we are in close collaboration with someone, it’s sometimes a little bit difficult to get things across in the right way. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the potential conflict? How do you deal with not being on the same page when you work so closely with people?

Gojko:

So I have two techniques I tend to apply to resolve situations like that. One is, I don’t know who I stole this idea from, so I can’t really give you the exact source of this. But I think I stole it from Michael Bolton, the tester not the singer, of course. The idea that I phrase it like now, I think he phrased it slightly differently, is that it’s much easier for people to complain than to tell you what they want. So if I’m working with people and I can’t really get them to say what they actually want, I throw something that I know that they’re going to complain about. Like I propose something idiotic, and then we get to a good conversation that actually makes sense. The other technique that really helps me clarify things is to offer realistic examples. And I think, examples of how something is supposed to work, examples of how we might want to use something, are again, concrete enough for people to really understand that there’s an additional case here, or we’ve not covered everything, or we need to discuss something in a better way.

Gojko:

And examples are a wonderful technique. This goes back all the way to I think Jerry Weinberg’s work on exploiting requirements from 1989, or even longer, on giving people something that is concrete that everybody can agree on. In a complex organization that delivers a product, you have people from lots of different backgrounds, and they all use different sources of truth and different forms of explaining information. UX designers use wire frames, developers use code, testers use some kind of testing scripts, business people use PowerPoints. And it’s really difficult for all of them to agree on anything. But everybody can talk about realistic examples. And that’s something that has turned out to be an almost universal tool for good communication.

Alexis:

Excellent. Is this the route ideas that lead to write the book Specification by Examples?

Gojko:

I think so, yeah. Spec by Example, again, came out of a slightly different journey for me, where I was working for a company where they had lots of database developers who only looked at Oracle PL SQL code, and application developers who looked at Java back then I guess, or C# wasn’t out yet properly. And business analysts wrote all these kind of log documents where nobody was reading them. And I was really trying to figure out how do we avoid the long testing cycles? And how do we avoid getting stuck in something that we deliver and at the end it turns out it was the wrong thing. And that led me back then to discover, I think, fifth from what coming home and fitness that came around that time. And I started thinking about this from a perspective of this is going to help us automate testing. But I realize there’s so much more to this. And it’s actually kind of a good communication technique. And test automation really becomes secondary, once you have a good understanding. It’s easy to test, but kind of the tests almost become secondary. So the book Spec by Example came out to kind of that learning journey.

Gojko:

I told you earlier, I think, once I remove a bot with me doing code, I realize something else is a bottleneck. And in that case, testing was the butt link so I had to learn how to do testing. And that led me to this whole idea of what was back then, example driven development or acceptance test driven development. Behavior driven development as a phrase didn’t exist yet back then. I think Dan North came up with that phrase around the same time. And most people would call that stop behavior driven development now, but there was a very interesting situation where we actually… I think XP, when XP became popular or started becoming popular, early 2000s, developers were the first to jump on the train. And then we remove the bottleneck, lots of organizations removed the bottleneck from development. And then they all realized, well, the next bottleneck is testing. And as Jerry Weinberg says, once you solve your number one problem, your number two problem gets a promotion. I think the community that invested a lot in solving this kind of developer tester communication gap and that’s what led me to examples and Spec by Example.

Alexis:

Yeah, it’s excellent. I love the idea of looking at the world process and looking at the bottlenecks. You remove the first bottleneck on development, you have a bottleneck on testing. And then you can say, “Oh, yeah, we need to deliver.” You solve the bottleneck on delivery, although it’s absolutely perfect. And then you realize that you are not delivering the right product. And you are going back to the beginning saying, “Okay, what is the missing link between the users and the value they want and the definition of the product itself?” And you solve that also a problem. It’s interesting how you connected all those dots. I love it.

Gojko:

Yeah. I think it’s not cyclical, I think it’s an upward going spiral. You solve one problem and then it takes you to another problem. And I think our industries is very cyclical but the cycles are quite long. If you look at what’s happening now in the technical infrastructure space, in essence, we’re almost back to the time of mainframes, or the time of mainframes is coming back again. In the 70s and early 80s before the PC revolution, people were renting, effectively, CPU cycles from mainframes with timeshares and things like that. And now you have people renting CPU cycles from Amazon, or Google or Microsoft, either using virtual machines or using severless functions now. And in a sense, it’s a much better mainframe and much more accessible mainframe than it was before, but it’s timeshare, we’re coming back to that. And-

Alexis:

Exactly.

Gojko:

… really interesting after this timeshare, there’s going to be the new equivalent to the PC revolution or something like that, where we go back to client server software in some new way. But my best guess is it’s going to be client server software on very small devices like IoT, or things like that, that’s kind of emerging. And we’re going to end up in in really silly situations and some wonderful situations. You can really see some examples of that. I think there was an outage at Amazon in the US East one region, that’s kind of the first Amazon cloud that went up in North Virginia. There was an outage a few months ago where the message distribution system, Kinesis, that they use, brought down a bunch of other services. And there were people locked out of their homes because they had these smart lock devices that were talking to the Amazon cloud. And now you have this mainframe going down, and people can’t go into their homes. And that’s ridiculous. So after the mainframe, we’re going to go back to smarter clients. Because if the cloud goes down, you still still need to go back to your home, obviously. So cyclical, but the cycles are slow and people don’t really notice that much.

Alexis:

Yeah, I think during the PC revolution people were mocking the, I don’t remember who was the person at IBM that said we will probably need five computers in the world at the beginning of the computer story. And people were mocking those saying, now you can see how many computers we have now, but from a big mainframe perspective, we are probably on our way to have five big computers in the world.

Gojko:

There is three computers that, maybe four computers really matter. I don’t know enough about the Asian market. But really, we have Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google. And I think, unfortunately, IBM missed the game. It’s incredible how IBM kind of totally missed the mobile, and the web and the clouds. And it’s very interesting to see if they will catch up. Oracle is trying to build their own cloud, but I don’t know anybody who’s using that. And you effectively have three computers that matter. And maybe there’s Alibaba or somebody like that in China, I’m not really sure about that market. I think that’s an emerging markets. And I need to learn more about that. But yeah, we’re coming back to three or four computers effectively, and everybody else having down terminals that connect to that.

Alexis:

Yeah. And the smart computer at the edge, that’s exactly that edge revolution, because the example you mentioned about not being able to go back to your home, that’s exactly what you don’t want when you have a car and the intelligence should be in the car and some of the data should be in the car because you want the car to be able to break or find its way to some places without the need to even connect it to the network.

Gojko:

And things are so so connected that it’s ridiculous now. I remember, two or three years ago, Amazon S3 went down for a couple of hours, I think. And it took down half of the internet with it, it took down Reddit, it took down about a bunch of other services. So everything is connected to everything else now. And that’s amazing, because you have this kind of information distribution that anywhere you go in the world, you carry all the world’s knowledge in your pocket effectively. But because everything is connected to everything else, crucial service like that going down for a couple of hours might mean yeah, car stop working now, and that’s ridiculous. So yeah, we are going back to those cycles. But the reason why I mentioned this, I think is we’re having the same type of cycles, I think, in the software development world as well. Because we unlock one bottleneck as a community and that changes the context, and then we go and unlock another bottleneck. And then at some point it comes back. So I fully expect at some point that programming will become the bottleneck again, and then we’ll have to come up with much, much better techniques for programming or better languages or better ways of doing things.

Gojko:

And whether that’s because everybody settled on JavaScript, that is the worst possible language you can think of in terms of language design. But it’s incredibly productive for people, and it turns everywhere. So now we have these monstrosities like TypeScript that’s trying to kind of fix it, and WebAssembly that’s trying to allow compilation of JavaScript and other things. And maybe when it comes back to that, we’ll have better languages, finally, to work that run everywhere. Who knows? But it is a cyclical thing. And I think it’s worth reading stuff that happened in the previous cycle. When I was trying to figure out how to improve the developer testing cooperation at this large company, I was reading stuff that people were writing about in the 80s and 70s. And there’s lots of good material there. People today, chase the current fad, and always look at whatever next shiny thing gets invented. But we tend to… Software industry is not really old but it’s already gone through a couple of these cycles. And it’s really worth looking at what people were writing about in the previous cycle to figure out what ideas can we take from that and apply in the new context.

Alexis:

Yeah, I agree. You, if you look at Frederick Brooks or Melvin Conway, you can see those things that oh, yeah, they exactly describe the problem I have now and it was 40 or 50 years ago.

Gojko:

Fred Brooks said the most difficult problem in software is deciding exactly what to build. And look at where most people are now, or at least people I have worked with as a consultant. The bottleneck is not in programming, the bottleneck is not in testing, the bottleneck is in product management for a lot of people. So we came back to the most difficult thing being deciding what to build.

Alexis:

Exactly. It’s really an interesting conversation. I’m really grateful you accepted to join the podcast today, Gojko. Is there’s anything else you want to share today?

Gojko:

Well, I don’t know. Let’s leave it at this, I think. It was a really enjoyable talk. And thank you very much for inviting me.

Alexis:

With great pleasure. Thank you, Gojko.

Alexis:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com. For the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello. until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels

In this episode of Le Podcast, I had the pleasure to welcome Jeremy Brown, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Traveldoo (Expedia Group). We talked about leadership and teamwork in a conversation that quickly became emotional, because the travel industry has been hit brutally hard by the pandemic.

Jeremy describes the last year as a shock to the system: a sharp drop in activity, painful downsizing, and a heavy human cost for the people who left and for the people who stayed.

Leadership when the context is not yours to control

Jeremy shares a powerful reflection: it’s easy to be a leader when everything is going well. It’s much harder when things are not going well, and even harder when you don’t control what makes it hard.

And yet, he sees growth in himself and in his leadership team. Not the kind of growth you would choose, but the kind you can’t avoid.

What leadership means to Jeremy

Jeremy makes a clear distinction between leaders and managers.

For him, leadership has two parts:

1) Direction, and explaining why
He uses a simple image: when you navigate a forest, the leader is the person who climbs a tree, looks out, and points the direction.

2) Being human
Leadership is not about performing perfection. It is about staying connected to people, admitting the struggles, and creating space for the complexity everyone is carrying, especially when work and home blur.

He also links leadership to self-awareness: the more he gets to know himself, the better he becomes as a leader.

From office-first to remote, then to asynchronous

Traveldoo moved from an office-first culture to fully remote work. Jeremy explains that the first phase was about replicating office habits with video calls and Slack. Then, over time, the team used retrospectives to learn and adjust.

A key shift: moving status reporting and coordination toward asynchronous collaboration.

One example Jeremy shares: a release meeting that started as an in-person ritual became a video call, and later turned into a Slack workflow. The direction is clear: fewer meetings, more written collaboration, more focus time.

Inclusion and participation in remote settings

Jeremy notes something interesting: remote work can be more inclusive when you intentionally change behaviors.

They introduced simple mechanics like hand signals in video calls, explicitly inviting quieter voices, and asking the question that often brings the best insight:
“I notice you didn’t comment, is there something you want to add?”

It’s not perfect, but it’s a real move toward better collaboration.

Recognition, energy, and the long game

Jeremy shares something many leaders can relate to. As a developer, he loved moments of flow: losing track of time while creating something.

As a leader, the reward changes. It becomes more long-term:

• seeing the payoff of investing in people
• watching language and behaviors spread across the organization
• noticing progress in the metrics over time

He’s also very clear on recognition: he prefers continuous call-outs and small wins over big award ceremonies. Recognition close to the moment has more impact and is more fair.

What drains energy

Jeremy mentions two drains:

• toxic or immovable behaviors that resist change no matter the investment
• the frustration of caring deeply and feeling others don’t understand why it matters

He connects this to his CliftonStrengthsFinder profile: his top strength is Belief, which makes him go all-in when he commits to something. When the “why” doesn’t land with others, it can be draining.

Advice for leaders who want to grow

Jeremy’s guidance is straightforward and practical:

• know yourself (tools can help: CliftonStrengthsFinder, Kolbe, others)
• choose your environment (the people around you shape your growth)
• seek challenge (you grow when others challenge your behaviors)
• deliver results without burning people
• invest in relationships across the organization

And if you’re not in an environment that helps you grow, change it.

†

If you think about trying to navigate through a forest, they’re the person that climbs up the tree and looks out over the forest, and points you in the direction where you need to go. I think that, typically, I would expect leaders to have a clear vision of where we are going, and perhaps more importantly, explaining why we’re going in that direction.

Jeremy Brown

Here is the transcript of the episode:

Alexis:

Hey Jeremy, thank you for joining Le Podcast. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Jeremy:

Hey, Alexis. It’s great To be here. So yeah, a little bit about me. I’m Jeremy. I’m Irish. I’m actually half Irish, half Finnish. I live in Paris, where I’ve been here for about five years. Currently, I guess my background, I’m an engineer. That’s been my history, but I think I have also probably one of the most, I think, fairly diverse backgrounds for someone in my position, because while I’ve worked as an engineer on low-level things like the operating system of mobile phones, I’ve worked as a consultant doing very large scale Java implementations. I worked in pre-sales. I’ve worked in sales as an actual sales person. I, with a friend, started a startup incubator in Cameroon of all places and helped local entrepreneurs start tech businesses in Cameron 10 years ago. So it was pretty crazy. Yeah. So really lots of different things. And I would say my background and my passion is about building products and the teams and the systems that build those products. I think that’s really my passion and what everything has led me to today.

Alexis:

Today you are chief product and technology officer at Traveldoo, right?

Jeremy:

Yes. Yes.

Alexis:

So it directly connects to your passion of building products.

Jeremy:

Exactly. Yeah. And building products, and we’ve been, Traveldoo is a subsidiary of Expedia. We’ve been changing how we work as well. And I think that the majority of my work has been a little bit less on the product and actually more on how we build the product and how can we change how we do that that has a material impact on our customers and our users.

Alexis:

So of course, as soon as we said travel in the current context, I need to ask you a question about all that current situation that pandemic is affecting your business and the way you work.

Jeremy:

Alexis, this past year has been, I think, one of the hardest that I’ve personally experienced on multiple levels. Obviously, like everybody else just in a personal level of trying, the pandemic clearly had an effect on our personal lives. And we have a small child at home. He’s less than two. And we were, in March, we were all at home, and there was no crash. And we were busy juggling him and trying to get on with work.

Jeremy:

But of course, more than that our business is a travel and expense SAS business. And we went from people booking travel, where we were doing millions of transactions in a year to 80%, 90% down on the previous year. So from a business perspective, we’ve had, I would say, an extreme shock to the system.

Jeremy:

There’ve been a lot of implications to us as a company and the product team. We’ve had to let go of our contractors that we had. We’ve had to half of our team are contractors based in India, and we had to significantly downsize that team as well. And the people cost for us has been really high, not only for the people that we had to let go, and contractors, I really saw them as our own staff, but then for the people who are still here with us, they’ve had to, not only like everybody else, had to make a transition from being co-located in two different offices, one office in Paris and one office in India. But they’ve also had the personal challenges. And then, I think when you’re in one of the companies that’s heavily affected by the pandemic, it adds an extra stress and a worry for the staff compared to one of the companies where they’re benefiting from the current situation, because there are winners and losers right now. We’re definitely a loser. So it’s been hard. Yeah. That’s how I’ll summarize it. It’s been a tough year. Yeah.

Alexis:

I can hear that. It’s, of course, always difficult to imagine what people feel about it. I understand that you’re focused on, of course, the business is impacted, but that’s the big people cost. And I’m sure that if you see people around you let go,, it’s always affecting you. You cannot just be satisfied of being lucky and still having a job. That’s not the way it works. Of course, it’s very hard. So, yeah. It’s difficult to go to the next question.

Jeremy:

Well, all I would say is that that this has been, I think, a test for all of us, for myself. While it’s really tough. I would say that the growth in yourself, I guess like in hard times, you grow more like, just like you prune plants to help them grow in the next growing season. I think, I feel like the one thing that this has done for me is it’s helped me grow as a leader. It’s very easy being a leader when everything’s great. It’s much harder being a leader when things are not great, and it’s even harder when you don’t control a lot of the things that make it not great. I don’t just speak personally for myself. I speak for my leadership team and what they’ve had to handle.

Jeremy:

And I would also add that, we have dealing with customers who are also many of them struggling, because I would say that a large part of our business is with travel agencies. They’ve been even more heavily impacted than ourselves. We’ve been fairly fortunate. We’ve kept most of our staff from being furloughed so that we can continue to build a product. A lot of our partners that we do business with, they’re not in the same situation. So it’s been an interesting learning and growing experience, not one that you would choose to ever go through. But I’ll take it because, first of all, you don’t have a choice. But secondly, I do see the positive growth in myself and the others around me as well through all of this.

Alexis:

That’s really bringing me to the next question about what does being a leader mean to you?

Jeremy:

Yeah. I was actually thinking about this question when you sent me some of the questions you might ask beforehand. And I was wondering actually, what leader means change because of this experience as well. And I would say, first of all, I don’t know if it has. For me being a leader, there’s a couple of parts of this. I believe that there’s a big difference between leaders and managers. And I believe that a leader is definitely someone who’s kind of, if you think about trying to navigate through a forest, they’re the person that climbs up the tree and looks out over the forest and points you in the direction where you need to go. They have, I think they typically, I would expect leaders to have a clear vision of where we are going, and perhaps more importantly, explaining why we’re going in that direction.

Jeremy:

And really then I think the second part of leadership for me is really about being a human being. I’ve always believe this very strongly, and I think it’s become more important through the pandemic and managing things. But yeah, I really believe that not being disconnected from people, but really showing you’re not perfect and not painting a perfect picture of yourself, being human and looking into seeing how are your people doing and coming alongside them, if you can, and encouraging them to not… We’ve had people that have overworked, a lot of people, I guess. They’re out home, and there’s no, the lines blur between work and home. And you can really start to see the stress build.

Jeremy:

And I think the two parts to all of this is kind of showing that you yourself are having the same struggles as everybody else. Because I think that that’s important. Certainly I’m not the kind of person who would want to hide that.

Jeremy:

And secondly, providing space for people to manage the extra complexity that everybody’s currently managing. So I guess, yeah, for me, that leadership is about direction, and more importantly, explaining why that direction is important. And secondly, being human. The one thing I’ve learned in my journey, and I can say I’m far from perfect, but the one thing where I’ve had breakthroughs as a leader is where I’ve gotten to know myself more. The more self-aware I become and the journey I progress on that journey, the better leader I become as well. So yeah, that’s leadership for me.

Alexis:

It’s very inspiring. Being self-aware, being human. That’s not the first thing all times. And I think it’s really important. And I feel that the people around me are more and more aware of that and are more and more ready to be themselves and to be a real person in their work environment. And I see that as really a positive evolution of the world.

Jeremy:

I agree. It’s a world I want to be part of. I don’t know, Alexis, but just a quick comment on this. But I do think as work changes, creativity and collaboration are actually the things that we want to encourage in the workplace in order to really bring value to the businesses that we work in. I think that this is the kind of leadership that people respond best to to help people be inspired to bring their best and do their best. And so for me, it kind of goes together with the nature of work changing. I think the nature of leadership has to change a little bit too.

Alexis:

I think the kind of leader that was more kind of manager, that was showing the artifact of success could be a big car, a big watch, the nice clothes and inspiring respect or things like that, that’s already gone. That’s not the kind of feet our people are ready to follow now and wants to work with now. It’s interesting that shift that is happening.

Jeremy:

Yeah. And you know that because we’re not all in the office anymore, it’s harder to flex like that. It’s just you with, in your, home with a camera. You can’t flex in that same way that… I don’t know. Yeah. It’s different. When you’re in the office, there’s all sorts of power that happens that kind of, it changes clearly, but like the bad micromanagers come out still. But yeah, I think this new way of distributed work doesn’t really facilitate people to do that either.

Alexis:

Speaking of offices, I remember a passionate conversation with you about gathering, about how to assemble the team in a space and all to design the space to make the collaboration happen. We did discuss a lot of that. I assume that your way of working change, of course, from colocated you said that to fully remote. How you change those things? How you change your way of working to still be able to foster that creativity and that collaboration you were mentioning?

Jeremy:

Yeah. So I’m fortunate enough at least to have when I worked at Red hat before, Red Hat is kind of, I would say, pretty good with remote work. And a lot of, I would say, a large percentage of people who work there were kind of remote workers. And certainly, I was, though I saw my team face-to-face a lot, and we did have a lot of face time. We just definitely haven’t got that now. But here in Traveldoo, we had basically a team co-located in the office in Paris with a kind of a really office first culture. And the same thing in Cocci and in South India and Carola. And it was a pretty sharp change to not be in the office anymore.

Jeremy:

And I would say that the first phase of our transition was kind of just replicating the way that we worked in the office, but with video instead of face-to-face, and we heavily used, we were using Slack already, but I think we went a bit even more into Slack. And I think that was the first sort of transition out.

Jeremy:

And then we used the retrospective in the team, probably not as… Everyone says they use retros. We do use retros. I would say, it’d be nice if we used them more at the same time. But we tried to learn. And what we realized was, first of all, I started to hear my skip level conversations, especially with the tech leads, that they were in a lot of meetings and actually not able to code that much. And we still have that problem today, but I think we’re a little bit better than when we first left the office.

Jeremy:

We started to change the way we communicated. We started intentionally moving more and more things to asynchronous. I think I would say that if you looked at my calendar a few weeks after we had moved out of the office, and then you look at my calendar now almost a year later, it’s very different. We’ve definitely moved basically all of our status reporting to asynchronous. We’ve reduced the amount of time we spend in meetings. We’ve intentionally cut repeated lead meetings and asked why we’re doing that. And we’re moving more and more of what we do to even shorter form meetings. So that’s, I think, meetings is like one area where we’ve actually also, we had a release meeting, and we had people getting around at lunchtime and spending 15 minutes talking about the next release. And then that release meeting moved to a video call. And now today, it’s moved to a Slack workflow. So it’s fully asynchronous. And yeah, I think it’s incremental changes that we’re moving. And we’re moving in this continuum towards more and more written and asynchronous.

Jeremy:

We’re not there yet. I wouldn’t say, you look at companies like Automattic, the company that makes WordPress and so on. They’re very well known for how they work. We’re not there yet, but we’re definitely nudged towards them in how we do things, which is a very positive thing.

Jeremy:

Certainly we’ve seen while our team size has reduced, productivity overall has actually increased for all of us. I think that we’ve surveyed our staff, and we have a healthy percentage, like 20%, 30% staff who would like to stay remote and actually would like to even leave Paris. And we have another percentage of people who, the majority, the rest, would say, I’d like to go to the office, but I don’t want to be there five days a week, which is what we had before, where we had one or two people that worked two days a week remote, and they were the exception. So we’re really moving in a different way.

Alexis:

Have you noticed, of course, when we speak about companies like Automattic or Basecamp that are really working with people fully remote and putting a lot of attention to written communication and asynchronous communication, they are a thing that enables people that are usually more shy or more introverted to contribute better, and that enabled the better thinking. Have you noticed a change in the contribution of people? Have you noticed that some people were able to contribute more? Or what do you think?

Jeremy:

Yeah, I will say the extroverts still are the most chatty people on Slack. Their personality still comes through. Yeah, I think we’ve seen that nudging. I don’t think we’re at that stage of where Automattic are, but I do think that the one thing I will say is video calls or chat and email and all are more inclusive if you operate using them differently. Certainly, we’ve intentionally adopted a number of different behaviors, just to give you some examples, in video calls, we’ve introduced hand signals to say, I agree, or I disagree. We’ve introduced a hand signal to say, I’d like to talk. We do try to intentionally ask people who are not talking to say, hey, I see you didn’t really comment here. Have you got something to say? And I’ve always found that that question generates the most powerful insight in the meeting. So we’ve definitely, through the retros and stuff, introduced more behaviors like that.

Jeremy:

And I don’t think it’s as easy to do that in real life because definitely the extroverts dominate that much more. And you kind of… But you do sense the body language in a room, but it’s not… Yeah. I still think that this is still pretty inclusive, and it’s definitely, even through this, we’ve become more inclusive. Maybe if we would go back to the office, we’ll also have learned from that and still be like that. But it seems a bit weird to hold your hand up in a room and to stick your thumbs up in a room, whereas on a video call that feels now natural. So I don’t know.

Alexis:

Yeah. I remember the first time I had a workshop using sociocracy or using the core protocols. And you are asked to make hand signals in the meeting room and not talk to talk to signal your agreement to a proposal that is made. And it’s really odd. It sounds counterintuitive, but at the third round of the table, going around the table, it’s starts to become more interesting, because you are already focused on what people are saying. And you look around, you see the hand signal, you see that suddenly you catch the opinion of people that you would have probably not even noticed before. It creates something different. So I think it’s odd to put in place in a room in the physical environment. Interestingly, I’m curious about what will happen when we are coming back once we learned those things remotely.

Jeremy:

Yeah, me too. I’ll tell you the one thing that I’m looking forward to when we can like see each other is to see each other. We do have like little coffee conversations, and we realized at times that some of the middle management were getting more and more disconnected in different departments., And they have like regular coffee hours together, which has really worked out well. But yeah, I think, for me, that the hybrid approach where you charge up your face to face time, and you get that small talk and stuff, I think is super important. And I think even where teams are fully remote in the future, certainly on my side, I intend to have regular face to face time for those teams because I think it’s important.

Alexis:

Yeah, absolutely. In the company like Automattic and Basecamp, they have face time events when they gather all together. So there’s a need for that definitely.

Alexis:

We spoke about leadership and what it means. Who do you look up to as a leader? Where are you inspired from?

Jeremy:

There’s been a couple different books I’ve read from different leaders that have inspired me. And maybe even more than, like nudge is maybe too weak a word, like really kicked me in the direction. And I would say David Marquet and Turn the Ship Around! has definitely altered the course of how I try to be a leader. I would say that Simon Sinek has really transformed how I go into work, start with why and a lot of the thinking that he puts into work. And I would say that he’s certainly inspired what I feel is my personal purpose for what I want to achieve and how I turn up and work. So there’s probably a few others like that, but yeah, I think those are the two that instantly come to my mind when you asked that question.

Alexis:

Yeah, good. And what gives your energy?

Jeremy:

When I was a developer, you had these periods where you entered flow, and you could lose track of time, and you were achieving something and making something, and you just felt so happy, and you don’t think about it. But afterwards you realize that those are those moments. I think as a leader, as a manager, you don’t have that kind of creator schedule and a maker schedule. And it took me a long time to feel reward and energized by some of that. Today I think it’s long-term for me. It’s the investment that you make in people and the pay off that you see. And it kind of three months later, a year later, and this, you made this change for the person, or you coach them towards a certain way of turning up into work. And then you see that paying off, or you have a one-on-one with someone, and they say, I did that thing that you said, and it just worked so well. That’s the big energizing moment for me now.

Jeremy:

And I accept that they’re not every day, but yeah, I think that that’s very rewarding for me. And also, I think in nudging an organization over a period of time where, as a kind of a leader, you’re you feel you’re repeating yourself over and over again, saying the same things. And I think there’s two rewards. One is that the language that you insert into the situation to try and nudge things starts to be repeated by others without, the same terminology that you introduced. And the second is you see the metrics that you use to track how we’re doing actually making it significantly changing. And those are also super rewarding and energizing.

Alexis:

This is really good that made me think of things in a different way. Right now, this is really good.

Alexis:

I have a question about, of course, what drains your energy, the opposite side of that coin?

Jeremy:

The opposite side, so one is, I think toxic people, and maybe also just people that no matter how much you invest, you can’t seem to get them to see the world differently or to change. And I think it’s also frustrating for me because I feel like there’s probably a way to nudge everybody forwards and into different way of behaving. And there’s a level of maybe frustration in me. So that’s one.

Jeremy:

And I would say that we’re all different. I’m a big fan of the Clifton StrengthsFinder and the idea of each of us having unique strengths that are in different orders. And my number one strength is belief. And what that means is that it’s a kind of an actually an execution strength. And if I believe in something, I’m going to go after it with all my energy and passion and everything else. And I think one of the things that kills that and drains it and creates bad behaviors in me is where I feel like people don’t get why I’m so passionate about that thing and why they should also be passionate about it. And so that can be really, for me, at least, that really is, it drains me a lot. That’s at least the things that I think about.

Alexis:

I think if you form a club about on that, I would join happily. I think you are not alone with that kind of frustration and a belief that, yes, we could all and get to somewhere different ways to change our mindset. And sometimes you don’t find the way, and it’s frustrating. That’s true.

Jeremy:

I would just say that when you’re energized like that, you want everyone to move fast, and you can’t… The fact that it’s not moving as fast as you want is also part of that kind of frustration. But then you get these payoffs, and boom, you’re back in the game, and you’re, yeah, we did actually make progress. It wasn’t as bad.

Alexis:

Yeah. Sometimes you need the feedback from others saying, no, you don’t remember how it was six months ago. It seems you don’t realize the progress we made. You say, oh, okay. Oh, yeah. That was nice. Well, that’s good. You need to do that every six months, a small paragraph like this will really help me if you can continue, maybe add it to your calendar 🙂

Jeremy:

But I’ve tried very hard to build a culture where we speak out those things more. And it definitely energizes people, not just me. But yeah, to call out and say, thank you and to call out those little wins, repeatedly. We now introduce weekly updates. We actually have that built into it. And we have a biweekly kind of all hands just within the product and tech team. And we spend probably 15 minutes of that meeting just thanking people for the last different call outs for the last week, last two weeks. So, yeah, I think as you build that, and we’ve only been really introducing more and more of that in the last six months, you do start to see it popping up more and more, and then you get a few compliments yourself, and it’s rewarding.

Alexis:

Yeah. It’s incredible, the impact that it has. And it’s difficult at the beginning, but I like that way of celebrating. I feel that the regular celebration close to when the event happens is really more efficient than the big awards ceremony.

Jeremy:

Exactly. Yeah. Actually I just personally hate big awards ceremonies because you always have to give awards to some people, and you can’t give it to all the people who really deserved it. I’m actually really kind of an anti those. I prefer the continuous kind of call outs and encouragement than plaques and awards and things like that. Yeah. At least that’s my personal, relatively strong belief. If I was leading an organization, I definitely wouldn’t have something like that there.

Alexis:

Yeah. The question a little bit other is, is there something you’ve always dreamed of doing but never dared to?

Jeremy:

Yeah. Difficult question. I think I’m quite, I’ve taken quite a few risks in my career, but I think, and I did start a company already. But yeah, I’d like to start another company. I’d like to build a real business from scratch or acquire one or do something like that, and really built a different kind of business, one that stands for different things in society. I’m very energized to turn up to work to do that. But I think that when you run a company, you can really shape it in a different way. And ideally, more in the sense of like Basecamp or folks like that, where they’re really, they don’t have to do something specific for their VC, the funders and things like that. They can really grow the company at the pace that they believe that it should grow at. And yeah, I think that would be the thing.

Alexis:

This is nice. I love it. I hope you will.

Jeremy:

Oh, me too. Me too.

Alexis:

Apart from work, is there something that you’re passionate about that you want to share today?

Jeremy:

I’m a geek. I’m passionate about lots of things, and probably like maybe a lot of men, I’m also, my passion is like, I would say obsessions change from time to time, but I do like to get out on my bicycle and go cycling. I really enjoy cycling. And my partner and I are very fortunate also to have a son, and he’s just about to turn two in a couple months. There’s definitely my passion has shifted being a father. That’s definitely like where a lot of my energy also goes, and probably why I’m doing a little bit less cycling these days as well, apart from just the pandemic. And certainly, in the lockdown, in Paris, we had a one kilometer radius that you could leave your home. So cycling wasn’t really a thing you could do so easily.

Alexis:

Yeah, of course, of course. What would be the really your advice to people who want to develop themselves as leaders?

Jeremy:

I think a lot of people who aspire to leadership, there’s getting to being a manager of people is something that they can all achieve and be entrusted with managing a team. And I think that there’s clearly certain skills that are needed for that. And they can learn and grow that. But to really push through, to break through kind of up another couple of levels, I think that there’s a bit more that needs to be developed. And it goes back to what I said earlier, but I do think knowing yourself, going deeper in yourself, I highly recommend people to take some kind of tests, like the Clifton StrengthsFinder, and there’s others, like I think Kolbe and a few others. Often people’s work will pay for those, or even people have done a bunch of those. I think if one doesn’t really work for you, try a few, but use some of those tools.

Jeremy:

I think being in the right environment of having the right people around you is super important. And if you’re not getting that in the environment that you’re in, change it. Find people that are going in the same direction as you and passionate about that, because I think we take each other on the journey together. And you’re not going to really be tested in going deeper in yourself without other people willing to challenge you. And then, I would say that my current team, there are people in there who have challenged me on my behavior, and that’s helped me grow. So yeah, I think going deeper in yourself.

Jeremy:

And then clearly in the kind of executive world, I think there’s a couple of things here. One is that you definitely have to be able to deliver results. Ideally, the good kind of execs do that without people paying a price, like taking people with you. Second is just managing the relationships with execs of other departments that are not directly related to yours, managing the politics and the… Just it’s relationship thing. And those are critical skills, but you can test, you can, every level of your career, you can definitely develop them. But I think it gets a bit harder the more senior you go. And often people get a bit stuck at a certain level. Yeah. And for me, the breakthroughs come when you either, and I think you also, you need to be willing to move a little bit to change jobs, to get those experiences and get the right people around you, or even to fail and then move again and try again. So yeah, that would be my advice.

Alexis:

I love the advice.

Jeremy:

Thank you.

Alexis:

Very tempting advice. I hope that people will be appealed to that, knowing yourself and looking at your environment and look at if the people around you are helping you to grow. I think it’s a really, really good one. Love it.

Jeremy:

My parents taught me that, Alexis. I just hear their voice at the back of my head when I’m thinking that, because that’s from my parents. I definitely learned that from them.

Alexis:

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, we learn all the time, and sometimes you remember the things we learned are coming from a long time ago. It’s really good.

Jeremy:

Exactly.

Alexis:

Thank you very much, Jeremy, for having joined the podcast today. I really appreciate your time and your insights. It was really beautiful. I’m really glad that we had that conversation. Thank you.

Jeremy:

Thank you, Alexis. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeremy:

Yeah. I’ve been a long time listener of your podcast. So it’s great to be here, and yeah, please keep going with the podcast. It’s great.

Alexis:

Thank you.

Alexis:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to alexis.Monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode. And to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work, drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. And until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

Photo by Annie Spratt 

Le Podcast – Season Two

• 
  Playful Leadership: Helping Others Be Their Best
• 
  Blessed, Grateful, and Human
• 
  Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic
• 
  Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar
• 
  Leadership and Teamwork in a Crisis
• 
  Chief of Staff: The Role, the Craft, the Community
• 
  Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,
• 
  What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams
• 
  Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business
• 
  Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”
• 
  Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox
• 
  The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

Le Podcast – Season One

• 
  Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact
• 
  Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams
• 
  OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls
• 
  The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills
• 
  The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are
• 
  Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up
• 
  Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones
• 
  Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership
• 
  Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration
• 
  How (Not) to Give Feedback: Responsibility, Ego, and Relationships
• 
  Rock Stars and Superstars: Supporting Growth Without Losing Stability
• 
  Do Cultural Differences Really Block Agile Adoption?
• 
  How to Create Great Goals: Using OKRs to Focus on Impact
• 
  Making Change from the Inside: Leadership Beyond Management Roles
• 
  How to Form a Cross-Functional Team That Actually Works

In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure to welcome Ally Kouao, Developer Advocate and Solution Architect at Red Hat. We talked about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), not as an abstract concept, but as something that shows up in daily conversations, hiring decisions, and the small moments that shape belonging.

Allyship is not a label

One of the strongest points Ally makes early is simple: saying you are an ally is not enough. What matters is what you do.

Ally shares a definition that captures the intent and the posture of allyship:

Allyship means acknowledging, accepting, and embracing our similarities and differences. It means being open to listening, avoiding complacency, making an effort to understand, and being proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect, and kindness.

The part that stayed with me is the humanity of it: you will not do everything perfectly, and still you can show up with sincerity and effort.

Education gives power, especially when history is incomplete

We also talk about how much recent history is missing from many school curricula, and how this shapes our understanding of today.

Ally’s suggestion is direct: educate yourself beyond what school offered, seek perspectives that are not centered on a single narrative, and do it continuously. The internet is free, but the intention to learn must be real.

Belonging can be fragile for immigrants and their children

We discuss a painful pattern: people who are second or third generation immigrants can feel they do not belong in the country where they live, while also being seen as outsiders in the country of their parents or grandparents.

The result is a kind of “nowhere to go” feeling that can last for years. Ally’s response is not to offer a quick fix, but to name what helps: surrounding yourself with people who are open to learning and listening. You cannot force someone to change, but you can choose environments where curiosity becomes respect, not interrogation.

The question “Where are you from?” and what it can signal

This episode includes a moment of discomfort that is worth sitting with.

I share how I used to love the question “Where are you from?” because it can open many doors. Ally explains why the same question can land very differently depending on context, intent, and what happens next.

If someone answers “I’m from London” and the next question is “No, where are you really from?” the question stops being small talk. It becomes a signal: you do not fully belong here.

Ally offers a line that should make all of us pause:

When you ask that question, you may be prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

The intent may be innocent. The impact may not be.

Bias in hiring is real, even when we believe we are fair

We then move into hiring, and the discomfort that comes with it.

Most people believe they are objective. And still, patterns appear: leadership teams that are overwhelmingly similar, interview processes that favor familiar backgrounds, and subtle filters that exclude people before the conversation even begins.

We discuss a concrete practice that reduces bias in resume screening: stripping out signals that invite stereotyping (name, address, school prestige, formatting differences) so that reviewers focus on relevant criteria.

Ally also addresses a common argument:

“Are we compromising on quality to increase representation?”

Her answer is clear: we do not have to compromise. Talent exists everywhere. What changes is the effort and the system used to find it, evaluate it, and give it a fair chance.

A simple test for hiring managers

One story Ally shares is both funny and brutal: a recruiter gave interviewers their own early-career resumes and asked them to evaluate them. Many rejected themselves.

It highlights a blind spot: we often forget that everyone has a starting point. We judge potential through a narrow lens, and then call it “quality.”

A good question to sit with is:

Would you hire yourself today for the first job you took in your current company?

Where to start

Ally recommends a book that offers multiple perspectives across generations:

• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

More broadly, her advice is practical:

• use the internet intentionally, not passively
• learn from diverse perspectives
• have real conversations with people you do not yet know well
• be open to noticing what you did not notice before

Because improvement starts with awareness, and awareness starts with paying attention.

Below is the transcript of the podcast:

Ally Kouao:

In that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

Alexis Monville:

That’s Ally Kouao, developer advocate and solution architect at Red Hat.

Ally Kouao:

Honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

Alexis Monville:

Ally Kouao explaining what allyship means. Diversity, equality and inclusion are what we explore in this new episode of Le Podcast. Le Podcast equips you to make a positive change in your organization. Each episode turns insight into actions that you can use straight away to build momentum and create lasting change from yourself to your team, from your team to other teams, and from other teams to the entire organization. I’m your host, Alexis Monville, and I believe in the ability of people and teams to find better ways to increase their impact and satisfaction.

Alexis Monville:

Let’s jump right into the conversation with Ally to learn more about what it means. Hey, Ally. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me on this podcast. I joined Red Hat back in 2019. Prior to that, I was actually a software engineering student in a university in Wales. In terms of my personal background, I actually grew up in London. I’ve lived in London my whole life, and I moved to Wales for university when I was 19. The rest is history. I’ve been at Red Hat for just over a year now. I’m a solution architect on the Red Hat graduate program, and yeah, it’s been a really good experience so far.

Alexis Monville:

Excellent. I think I first heard about you because you ran a 14-day program, To a More Knowledgeable You. And it was fantastic. Each day resonated with me big time. Could you tell us the motivation behind the program?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, sure. I feel like the main reason this program came about was aside from the fluctuating levels of COVID globally, it felt like there was definitely a bark to highlight the continued civil unrest that’s been magnified and brought back to the surface after the brutalities and documented injustice that has been going on in the US. What I thought was important to do alongside one of my colleagues was to make a point of the fact that not only is it possible for black people located outside of the US to be affected by what’s going on, but there are experiences shared by black people and some other minorities in their everyday lives that have been frequently glazed over, or not much attention’s been paid to it.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, so as a result, some Red Hatters and I came together and created an initiative that we now know as 14 Days To a More Knowledgeable You, that provides the safe space to offer daily insight, be it through an article or podcast episode or a personal story, into the realities of their fellow black colleagues, friends and family in the UK and Ireland.

Alexis Monville:

What would you say are the main aspects of the program?

Ally Kouao:

That’s a really good question. I feel like what really brings the program to life I would say are people’s personal stories. I think we had a total of three personal stories from three different people who contributed to the initiative. I felt like it really brought things closer to home. I think it definitely helped make people realize that there definitely is another person behind the screen, or another person at Red Hat who can relate to this sort of thing. I think it makes it even more significant that it’s personal stories in the UK.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I’ve definitely heard throughout my life really, even until now, just the fact that … not the fact, but just people’s opinions that black people here don’t have it as hard as in the US, I would say it’s definitely true to an extent in regards to the brutalities, but I feel like in the UK, that there’s so much more that happens under the surface such as microaggressions, that I feel would be really beneficial for people to keep an eye out for and be conscious of.

Alexis Monville:

It made me think a lot. It’s really comfortable for me to say that at Red Hat, we are an open, inclusive meritocracy, and I can repeat that every day, and I’m really comfortable with that, and I think it’s really good and so on. There’s no question about that. But one thing that made me realize, and I will draw a parallel with, I have three kids. I have two daughters. The youngest one is 18, so they are not really young any more. I bought from a charity organization feminism T-shirts, that were really … I thought they were really fun, and I wore one, and I offered the others to the girls and to everybody in the family in reality. The message was fun, because I thought it was fun. That will not work with everybody. And it was written, “Girls just want to have fun.” Then under that, it said, “Fundamental rights.” So it’s a good joke from my perspective.

Alexis Monville:

Once, I remember one of the girls saying, “Oh, and you are doing that and you’re saying you are a feminist.” I was puzzled because I thought there was no necessary connection between what she was observing and the fact that I thought I would want to consider a woman as equal, and there was no question about that in my mind. But I realized that the connection was not obvious.

Alexis Monville:

During the program … That was a long intro to that. During the program, I realized that in my young age, I was actively involved in anti-racism organizations, and I was demonstrating about that. And after some time, it faded away. All that introduction to ask a question. I thought I was an ally, and I wonder if I am really an ally, and I wonder even if being an ally is enough. What do you think?

Ally Kouao:

That was such a lovely intro to that question. I would honestly say that well, at least from my personal experience and from my personal opinion, that to just say that you’re an ally probably isn’t enough. It’s more so what you do. So obviously going back to your personal examples, it’s really good that you were active in terms of being feminist, so wearing the T-shirt supporting them … I think it’s quite hard, because quite a lot of people compare what their standards of being an ally is to what other people’s standards of being an ally is. I would say overall there is no real checklist of what it takes to be an ally, because everyone has their own interpretation of the term, and there’s no one way to do it.

Ally Kouao:

But something that I would say is the gist of being an ally, personally, is listening and amplifying the voice of marginalized groups, so like you said when you did it before, people who did experience racism or advocating women’s rights. I do have an extract with me of my input of what allyship means to me in one of my colleagues’ blogs on the importance of allies. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just quickly go through it.

Ally Kouao:

On the blog, I said, “Personally, allyship to me means acknowledging, accepting and embracing our similarities and differences. Where are differences are present, this branches out to being open to listening, avoiding complacency, and making an effort to understand and be proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect and kindness in areas where we may fall short. Allyship means understanding that at the end of the day, we are all human, and even if you can’t do everything perfectly, you’re wholeheartedly making an effort to do what it is you do to the best of your ability.”

Ally Kouao:

That’s just a little sneak peek of my input. For anyone who is listening to this who also works at Red Hat, I would also recommend that you check out part two of the Diversity and Inclusion: the Importance of Allies series blog post, where you’ll see a bit more about what I have to say about allyship in more detail, and hear from all the other wonderful diversity and inclusion leaders at Red Hat.

Ally Kouao:

Just to sum up everything that I’ve said in just one sentence, I would say honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen, and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, it’s beautifully written. I need to copy/paste the extract in the blog post that will be a companion to this podcast. It’s really beautiful, and it really resonates with me. It really says, “Being human,” and being your whole self and being human is something really important. I wonder if it’s suddenly that I’m getting old, and I realize more things now, but I feel I’ve learned a lot during those past years, and I continue to learn. I feel the more I learn about that, the more I have to learn and to understand.

Alexis Monville:

I will give you another example. I spent 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne, the American actor, and he told me the story of Malcolm X. Of course, I did not really spend 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne. It’s an audio book, and it’s the autobiography of Malcolm X, and the narrator is Laurence Fishburne. But I had that feeling, and that’s always the feeling with audio book, that you have someone who is telling you a story.

Alexis Monville:

All that to say that at some point, Malcolm X described the fact that he is considering the people from New York, fighting for social rights, going into Alabama, and he’s saying they are totally wrong. They should not do that, and when I read that, I said, “No, no, no, no. That’s … What is wrong with that?” He said, “They should fight for civil rights in New York, because there’s a lot to do there.” I realized that yeah, I did in a way the same thing. I was demonstrating against apartheid in Strasbourg while apartheid was in South Africa, and I hope it had an impact, but I’m not really sure about that. But what was I doing in Strasbourg?

Alexis Monville:

I remember one of my friends at that time coming from Algeria. He was French, but he was born in Algeria. That’s the kind of thing that you will wear all your life on your face. And he was telling me, “I’m considered a stranger, a foreigner, by everybody in there.” And I have to admit that at that time, I hope it changed, foreigners were not necessarily welcome in small cities in the country. And he told me, “I tried to back to Algeria, to say, ‘Okay, I will end my study there, and I will continue my study in Algeria.’” And he told me, “It’s not possible, because over there, they are calling me the French guy, and so I have nowhere to go.”

Alexis Monville:

I was horrified by that, and I didn’t know what I could do for that person. How would you say we can deal with our past as a country, and we can have people that … I don’t really know how to formulate the question, but how to deal with that kind of situation for people?

Ally Kouao:

Yeah. Honestly, I would say that that’s probably not the first time I’ve heard a story where someone’s recounted their experiences of going to one place and feeling like they don’t belong, and then going to place that people say they belong, and then not belonging there either. I think that’s something that is experienced by quite a lot of people, but also I can’t put a number to it. But in terms of addressing that … Sorry, could you remind me of your question?

Alexis Monville:

In a way, it’s addressing our colonial past, or addressing the fact that we have people that are coming from probably the … They are the second- or third-generation immigrants from another country.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah. Okay, brilliant. That’s put me back on track. I was just going off on a tangent forgetting what the question was. So yeah, in terms of second- and third-generation immigrants or people who’ve moved to a country because their parents did or family did, I would say in order to educate people who are already in that country, or probably not even educate people, because everyone is accountable for their own learning, I think it’s definitely worth keeping in mind that it’s important to surround yourself with people who you know are open to learning. You can’t really force it down anyone’s throat. You have to be open to the fact that people probably don’t want to change the way they want to think, or be open to the fact that people are really interested in learning more, like learning about ways that they can become closer to you or learn more about an ethnicity or a culture in more detail.

Ally Kouao:

I think if I had to give advice to younger generations out there, I would honestly say it’s important to educate yourselves as well, even if some people say that they belong to generations of immigrants or anything. We don’t know everything, right? There’s always something more to learn, and especially in terms of the educational curriculum, it can’t cover completely everything. And that was definitely another topic that was touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative. Something that we noted was that in the British education curriculum, they don’t really cover all aspects of slavery or all aspects of the things that happened in the past or things that happened that wasn’t quite so English or quite so European-centric.

Ally Kouao:

Obviously, it’s something … In terms of the world’s history, it’s quite hard to encapsulate that all into one history lesson and one history curriculum. So I would advise younger generations of immigrants and other people who would like to learn more, to just go out and educate yourselves. The internet is very much free. There’s probably a lot of sources, a lot of stories, a lot of recounts of things that have happened in the past, and there’s no such thing as knowing it all or knowing too much, because there’s always some sort of learning that you can do.

Ally Kouao:

My main point here is education, that where there is knowledge there is power, and as long as more people are … I feel like the younger generation’s definitely becoming … From what I’ve seen from the Black Lives Matter protests and not even protests, but the Black Lives Matter movement, people are taking a stance on what’s going on, and people are realizing that it’s wrong, people are taking this opportunity to educate themselves a lot more, or in greater depth. I think that’s definitely a step in the right direction, but there’s definitely a lot more education or self-education that needs to be taught and given to oneself, for there to be that good amount of change and to avoid more recounts of experiences, as you’ve previously mentioned with your Algerian friend.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, I love the advice of learning more about history, and especially the recent history. That’s definitely something I did not learn in school, and I had to learn that by myself, and there was a really good series in France about … It was Behind the Maps, and that was fascinating, about our recent history and all the things that we don’t know, but in a way we think we know, and in reality, we absolutely don’t know. We don’t know why it happens and when it happens, really, and all the reasons behind. And when we know something, we know only one perspective of it, and that perspective is of course biased. It’s only one perspective. So that’s a very, very good advice.

Alexis Monville:

I think connected to that question, there’s that question that I love to ask to people, and I realize that it’s not a good question. I love to ask a question that is, “Where are you from?” I love to ask that question, because in some contexts, people answer, “Oh, I’m from the finance department,” or, “I’m from Alabama.” And I love that, because it was a question that could open so many doors, and so many different doors, because based on what the people are thinking at the moment, they answer something different. So I love that question.

Alexis Monville:

I realized that that question was not so good when we moved to the US with my family a few years back, and of course, my accent, people are able to catch that I’m not from Boston, even if I just say hello or thank you. The next question from people, “Where are you from?”, and I realized it was not a good question because my wife was a little bit offended by that question, and she was systematically answering, “We are from …”, and the town where we lived at that time. So I had that discussion with her, and she was saying, “Yeah, why are people asking me where I’m from like if I don’t belong? I live here. That’s where I live. That’s my home.” She was really sensitive with that. What do you think is happening in that situation?

Ally Kouao:

I don’t know. I think that sort of question is a matter of people not really saying what they want to say, but not wanting to be impolite. But either way, they come out … I guess the interpretation of the receiver of that question can vary so widely, so yes, there’d be some people who wouldn’t take offense, and there would be some people who … like you mentioned with your wife, would take offense because it’s just like, “What do you really want to know from that question?” It’s not … If I give you an answer would you be like, “Where am I really from?”, or would you keep pushing until you get the answer, like you want that validation, that confirmation, that you had in your mind?

Ally Kouao:

This is definitely something that we touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative, where that’s a question that’s commonly asked, and it’s not just asked of people of color, but it’s also asked of people in places where people … I don’t know. I guess it’s sometimes seen as a conversation starter, and I can see why it is, but I think it’s the way in which the question’s asked. It also depends on what answer the person who’s asking the question is willing to settle for in front of the person they’re asking it to.

Ally Kouao:

In terms of the initiative, we really tackled the “Where are you really from?” question, because an experience that many other black associates have been able to relate to, and I’m sure many other people would be able to relate to, being at a party or something or just meeting someone in a formal professional context, and people asking where you’re from. So if I had to give a personal example, so for example if I went to someone and they asked me, “Where are you from?”, I would naturally say, “Oh, I’m from London.” A response that I do often get is, “Oh, okay,” and then there’d be that really awkward pause, and then they’d be like, “But where are you really from? I know you’re from London, but where are your parents from?” And it’s like, well, I could do … I think it’s quite important that people are very specific in their questions.

Ally Kouao:

I’ve had friends who have been even more vague about their answer to make a point out of it. So someone would be like, “Oh, where you from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from a very specific area about where they’re living at the moment,” and they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you really from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Britain.” And they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you from?” They’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Europe.” Like, just making a point to show that it’s just a really silly question to ask if you just keep digging it at.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, I just feel like in regards to the “Where are you really from?” question, it’s often the case that people want confirmation that the person isn’t British or isn’t from wherever the location is they are, or if their location sounds completely … their country of origin sounds completely different to where’d they’d typically think they’re from … I’m not quite sure if I formulated that correctly.

Ally Kouao:

But one of my colleagues, he was born in Zimbabwe, I believe. He was just saying that when he asked people where they’re from who have a Zimbabwean accent, it’s because he recognizes that accent, and that’s why he asks them where they’re from, just for confirmation of where they’re from. So like I said, it’s definitely the intent behind the question. I think it’s definitely worth clarifying with the person before asking, but I think when people do ask that question, something that they do do and should keep in mind is that it’s really important to approach the question towards the person you want to ask it to with sensitivity and clarity.

Ally Kouao:

If you approach the question “Where are you from?” or “Where are you really from?”, in that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings. You’re prioritizing your curiosity over how comfortable they feel or how much they belong in that moment in time, so you may receive a really guarded response. So someone giving a really vague answer like, “Oh, I’m from this really specific area,” because it’s a really silly question, honestly, I don’t really think you need to ask where people are from. Then again, I can also understand the conversation. It’s like, for example, we go to one of the Red Hat events. Well, from last year, we went to a Red Hat event called RHTE (Red Hat Tech Exchange), I met so many different people, and people are asking where you’re from because they’re curious to know which office you’re located in or where your accent is from. I can see how that can take a turn for the worst, depending on the motives of the person who is asking the question or the way in which they ask it.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, I think it’s a very precious … I like the point about prioritizing curiosity over feelings. It’s a really important point. Whatever is your intent or the motivation behind the question, we need to realize that it’s not a good question, that adding “really” to it will not really help. That’s an horrible question in reality. If people want to share about where they are coming from and if they are from Scotland and their grandfather were coming from Ireland or whatever, that’s their problem. If they want to share that with you at some point, maybe they will, and that’s good. But why are you asking that? Yeah.

Ally Kouao:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It’s such an odd question. There’s always that awkward pause after someone’s asked it, because when people ask me, in my mind I’m just like, “Are they trying to ask what I think they’re trying to ask, or are they genuinely curious on where I grew up and my accent?” Because I often get the question about where my accent’s from, because I’ve just moved from London to Wales, and somehow that’s just messed up my accent and people are just like, “Oh, where are you from?” So I think definitely it depends on the intent behind the question, but I would just say try and avoid it, like you said. You don’t have to know. If you did happen to know the person, and if you became a lot more close to the person or seemed to be chatting with them on a more regular basis, then you’d probably have that space or that comfort to be able to ask that question, or them be able to tell you themselves.

Ally Kouao:

I think it’s definitely an interesting question to ask upon first meeting someone. Some people just can’t really think on their feet off the bat, or it’s probably just to fill in the awkward silence when you first meet people.

Alexis Monville:

I did a training about hiring, improving your hiring practices. It reminds me something, because I was pushing some managers to say that maybe they have some biases in their hiring practices, and this is dangerous territory, and usually people are convinced they have absolutely no biases, and they are doing the right thing. What I was saying is that it’s not easy to do the right thing.

Alexis Monville:

There is a lot of biases that we have, and you need to admit that you are able to judge someone in the first 15 seconds you are seeing them. The problem is if you are not conscious of that, you will just use your intellect to confirm your first impression. This is exactly how the biases are working, so you need to be conscious of that. That’s why you need to write down all the questions you will ask in an interview beforehand. Then you are forced to go through those questions. You cannot escape that path and ask other questions that will confirm your first impression. So it’s really challenging.

Alexis Monville:

I told them I worked with a small system integrators in Paris a long time ago. It’s probably more than 10 years ago, and in the first gathering of the whole company in Paris, there was probably 150 people or something. There was something that was visibly different from other system integrators I worked with at that time. There was a lot more women, and a lot more people coming from various diversities that we have in France. France is at the crossroads of a lot of different countries, so of course there’s a lot of diversity present in the population, not necessarily in all the companies. But in that company, that was obvious that it was different from the others.

Alexis Monville:

I inquired about their hiring practices. That’s something our HR person is doing. She’s changing all the resumes, and stripping out all the information about the location where the people live, their first names, where they did their studies, and to keep only the things that we are supposed to make assumptions on. She’s rewriting all the resumes so they are all in the same format, so there’s no way to know things about that. And I said, “But you don’t judge people from where they live,” and they say, “Yeah, we also think that.” But the result is in our resume selection, we are selecting different people for the interview, and the result is when we see people, that we interview them and we hire them, people we would have probably never selected because they are coming from whatever, Saint Denis or whatever. Do you think that example is just an example, just a point in time? Do you think we have a problem in our hiring practices, and do you think there’s ways to fix that?

Ally Kouao:

That’s a really good question. I would just like to say off the bat that that hiring process or that process of hiring in regards to hiding people’s information, I think that sounds brilliant. It definitely strips back the identity that’s behind it, because there’s so much that people who’d probably be unconsciously biased on, such as the person’s name or where they studied or even their home address, like you said. So I think it’s really good that that recruiter definitely took time out of her day to put their main information into the resume, but present it in a similar format so there was no space for deviation. I think that’s definitely a good way to go about it.

Ally Kouao:

But in terms of general hiring processes, that’s definitely quite a tricky question, because different organizations can tackle hiring differently. It’s a double-edged sword. It depends on how you want to recruit different individuals. Overall, I think that’s important that there’s representation in a company, and a frequent argument that I tend to hear in response to that is, “Are you compromising on the quality of the candidates in favor of representation?” The answer to that can be, “We don’t have to compromise on anything.” I think there are very much skilled people of different ethnicities from different locations everywhere, and I think it’s just putting that extra effort into scouting them out and finding them.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I do tend to frequently see on LinkedIn is … I think I signed up to this girls’ page. I’m not quite sure where it is, but I think it’s a women’s empowerment page, and they tend to give empowering quotes or showing people who’ve started to rise into more senior positions, like women rising into more senior positions in companies, because you’re definitely seeing more of it today. You’re definitely seeing people in companies or industries where it used to be traditionally male-dominated. You’re seeing more women come through and excel in their fields and prove themselves.

Ally Kouao:

Something that I have seen quite a lot of, those pages highlighting women of color who are pushing those boundaries, reaching really cool careers or reaching a new level of success, and they thought it’s a really good idea to praise them, and I completely agree. Something that I did frequently see in the comments is people going, “Ah, we shouldn’t be pointing out their race at all. It should just be about their motivation. It should just be about their successes.”

Ally Kouao:

Something that I think is really important to note from these posts or posts that do celebrate women and women of color, is that sometimes this attention does need to be paid to them. For now, we do need to pay this attention so that it becomes something we do naturally. The reason why we are highlighting it is because it’s not something you see often, and when we do see it, we want to celebrate it because it’s something we should see more of, and I think we all want that shared goal of not having to think about race any more or think about the location that someone comes from or think about what their history was, in favor of getting that perfect candidate.

Ally Kouao:

But I feel like where we are at the moment, where people are still growing and learning and learning to overcome their unconscious bias, I think it’s really important we do make a point of celebrating those people who are reaching new levels that it’s not so common to see, and wasn’t so common to see before. Yeah, I think there are different ways to go about it.

Ally Kouao:

Going back to your question regarding the hiring process, I would honestly say … Just to link it to that little … I can’t even describe it. Just to link it back to what I said regarding highlighting women of color who are doing really well or people of color who are doing really well, I think it’s really important that we … Or I think it would be really beneficial if we did take that stance in hiring as well, so yeah, even though we are paying more attention to the fact that we are trying to have a more diverse or representative workforce, the end goal is that hopefully we won’t need think about this when we’re hiring. Hopefully it’s something that comes naturally to people and it’s something that … We hire them for what their talents are, and we don’t hire them because they don’t look like us or they don’t have qualifications that we’re also familiar with.

Ally Kouao:

So yeah, I think that’s my overall answer in terms of hiring. I think it’s important to pay extra attention, especially now, so that … If we pay attention now and don’t continuously stall, I feel like that will just help us to get to that end goal so much faster, and we won’t need to strip back the information like the woman you were talking about did. You could just present that person’s information, and they’d be treated just as equally as all the other candidates.

Ally Kouao:

I think that would definitely be the ultimate goal, definitely an approach that I think more organizations should take. I think Red Hat is definitely going in the right direction from even offering that sort of training to begin with in terms of right for Red Hat, and having unconscious biases, because it’s something that’s very real, and it’s something … Like the title says, it’s unconscious. People aren’t aware that they do have their biases until they realize that their whole team is not really representative, but there’s so much diversity and representation in the UK and Ireland, at least from my personal experience. Yeah, sorry for the long-winded answer, but that’s what I was getting at.

Alexis Monville:

Yeah, and I really appreciate all the details you shared. This is exactly the problem I think we have. I think it’s not easy to handle that problem, because we would like to do the right thing. We would like to think that we are doing the right thing, and it’s uncomfortable to realize sometimes that we are not. I had that conversation with the team, and at some point I stopped them and said, “Okay, so we are doing the right thing. That’s absolutely perfect, and we are all white, all male, in that leadership team. So that’s totally representative of the population of the world. You’re absolutely right, all of you. All of us are absolutely right.” And so even if we are not consciously doing something wrong, we are not helping. So there was a lot of things around that, the fact that the job description could push away categories of people directly because there was too many requirements or too many …

Alexis Monville:

That was fascinating to me, learning about those studies that are real studies. That’s not one idea of someone. It’s real studies that have been proven. It’s fascinating to me. I have a friend who is … His first name is Samir. He told me that when he was sending his resume, if he was stripping the “ir” at the end of his first name, he was called back for an appointment immediately.

Ally Kouao:

Oh. Interesting.

Alexis Monville:

But if he was leaving his first name like this, he had no appointment. He told me he tried that several times. Of course, he told me, “The problem is, when I’m going to the appointment, usually people who would have struck me from the selection in first place are not necessarily taking me there seriously.” But it’s fascinating.

Ally Kouao:

Yeah, I think it’s definitely more common than we think, that people are feeling the need to change their traditional names, because it doesn’t sound quite like what they think the recruiters would want. So for example, in Britain, some people would change their cultural or their traditional names to make it sound more European or more British, and I think that’s definitely a shame. I feel like unless someone really wants to do it because they really liked a name, I feel like the people who do do it because they feel like they’d have better chances of getting recruited, I think that’s definitely part of the problem. It’s just a shame that people would have their names changed, and it just makes it really awkward, because they get hired, they get recruited, and it’s like they don’t feel like they were able to put their original best self forward to begin with.

Ally Kouao:

Like I said before, it is very common where people do tend to alter their name or completely change it and strip back what they are originally just to appeal to recruiters. Yeah, like I said, that’s definitely a shame. I also saw a post … Just browsing the internet, I did see there was a post on … I think it was a recruiter talking about how there were some people in her company … Not her company, the company that she worked in, interviewing candidates, and she realized that they were being really tough on the candidates.

Ally Kouao:

She thought she’d play a little trick on them and give them their own resumes from when they first applied to their jobs, because obviously they’d been in their jobs for a long time. And they all rejected themselves, and it was so crazy, because I was just like … The fact that they said the people weren’t qualified enough, I thought this was just quite interesting, because I was like, “The fact that you’d … I understand that you were in a better position than where you were when you first began with, but everyone has that beginning of their journey. Everyone has a starting point.” And it was just so interesting to see that they wouldn’t even give themselves a chance if they were in that hiring seat.

Ally Kouao:

I feel that was definitely a good takeaway lesson, in regards to the fact that you might not see something that you see in yourself where you are now, but I think it’s definitely important to give everyone that chance, that starting point, where they’d be able to grow and excel, because that’s where they are now, and it definitely made me chuckle seeing that, because I was just like … It’s crazy, because if you can’t accept yourself from your starting point, how much harder it would be if you don’t see yourself in the person who you’re interviewing, or you don’t feel that they’re the right fit because they’re so different to what you have in mind? So I think that’s definitely something that hiring managers or people involved in the interview process should definitely keep in mind.

Alexis Monville:

It’s a very, very good one. I love that experiment. It’s really important to work on our biases and the way we handle our emotional system and our intellectual system, and we use it to confirm the other and so on. Ally, it was really great to have you on the show today.

Ally Kouao:

Thank you for having me.

Alexis Monville:

What would be the first thing you would recommend to people who want to improve?

Ally Kouao:

Ooh. Ooh. Ooh, that’s quite a good question. I’ve really enjoyed reading the book Girl, Woman, Other. That focuses on perspectives of different women of color, different ages, from different generations. I think it’s quite an interesting insight into how they grew up, how they lived life differently in Britain, in Europe. That definitely could not be the starting point for everyone, but if someone did want a source to have a little read of and become a little bit more of a knowledgeable version of themselves, then yeah, I think that’s definitely a good book to read.

Ally Kouao:

But at the end of the day, I can’t really tell you where to start. Everyone’s on their own journey, and everyone can consume material differently. But I’d say definitely just make use of the internet. It’s very much free, like I said before, and you can find so many good resources. Have conversations with your loved ones, have conversations with people who you might not speak to too often, and get to know them, because we’re all living different timelines, and it’s important to be aware of that, and be open to others. But yeah, that’s all from me.

Alexis Monville:

Excellent. Thank you very much, Ally. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Ally Kouao:

Thank you.

Alexis Monville:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello, and until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

Le Podcast – Season Two

• 
  Playful Leadership: Helping Others Be Their Best
• 
  Blessed, Grateful, and Human
• 
  Build the Right Product, with Gojko Adzic
• 
  Hiring and Diversity Without Dropping the Bar
• 
  Leadership and Teamwork in a Crisis
• 
  Chief of Staff: The Role, the Craft, the Community
• 
  Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,
• 
  What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams
• 
  Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business
• 
  Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”
• 
  Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox
• 
  The Job of an Open Leader: Context, Trust, and Growing Others

Le Podcast – Season One

• 
  Growing as a Software Engineer: Learning, Sharing, and Impact
• 
  Thirteen Rules for Building Strong Teams
• 
  OKRs in Practice: Learning, Focus, and Common Pitfalls
• 
  The Myth of 10x Engineers: Growing Beyond Technical Skills
• 
  The Anatomy of Peace: Leadership Starts With Who You Are
• 
  Psychological Safety: Creating Teams Where People Can Speak Up
• 
  Leading Distributed Teams: Collaboration Across Time Zones
• 
  Changing Your Team from the Inside: A Practitioner’s View on Leadership
• 
  Why Shared Language Matters: How Terms Shape Collaboration
• 
  How (Not) to Give Feedback: Responsibility, Ego, and Relationships
• 
  Rock Stars and Superstars: Supporting Growth Without Losing Stability
• 
  Do Cultural Differences Really Block Agile Adoption?
• 
  How to Create Great Goals: Using OKRs to Focus on Impact
• 
  Making Change from the Inside: Leadership Beyond Management Roles
• 
  How to Form a Cross-Functional Team That Actually Works