advice to hiring managers w/ stephen white

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auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email, social media at T D S N T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. David, nothing to be running my mouth. Give the people what they want, who are you, what do you do, and we'll go from there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, hey everybody, I'm Steven White.

I am the AVP of software engineering for health trust performance group. We're part of the HCA family, but we're kind of our own thing as well. So we're getting to build and deploy software in kind of a more competitive market. So we get that nice hybrid, right? I am part of a large enterprise connected to HCA, getting the stability and some resources is there, but also we're our own company. We get to operate a little bit more like a startup. We get to move at pace. We get to build and control a lot and that's a lot of fun. So I've been here for about a year before that.

So I'm originally from Nashville. I've always been here. But before that, I made my career for about 11 years at Ashurian. Amazing place. Did lots of great things. Met lots of really cool people there. So yeah, I'm just excited to be here. It's crazy. You're this. Are you so you're from Nashville. Yeah, I did your second person in a row My guess yesterday Matthew Rucker is from Nashville like I've struck gold put y'all in that museum and there we go I'm a few more people tuned in Christina. It's great. See you Shane. I love it. I got some ATL people in here I love that so much than Casey Casey.

I think it's in South Africa right now So good morning afternoon evening wherever you are actually makes sense. Um, all right, Steven And so we are going to dive into obviously kind of something I'm very passionate about, especially over the last two years, because we've lived in a remote setting. I mean, we still do in a certain way, but it's building brand, building culture, and then also retaining talent. And I mean, technically, I think we could probably talk for 30 minutes on all those three topics alone. So I want to talk about your journey with content, right? Because I know you and I've been in touch and you're starting to get into it.

So I want to hear from you on why you're getting into it and maybe some advice to hiring managers on why they should do it as well. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So yeah, so I started posting content. I mean, it's probably only been like a month, month and a half into my journey. So relatively recently, one of the things that we're fighting, I mean, this is the same thing that everybody's fighting, right? Like, yeah, things have turned down turned maybe a little bit in the last week or two, but in general, market is still insane for hiring engineers. we are all fighting for a much too small pool of resources.

So we have to find some way to stand out and look, say this is a place where people want to be. And there's a lot of different ways that you can compete. We work for some companies like Amazon or some of the other big unicorns out there have enough money that they can go and they can compete with just straight dollars. And that works, but there is so much more to a fulfilling job than just a salary. Like a salary is super important. and I think we should all pay everybody competitively for what they do. But I think it's also important that you are at a place where you can feel like you're contributing to something that matters, where you have the ability to control your own future, you're able to make decisions, be a part of the change in your organization, build cool software, meet with your customers directly, all those kind of really cool things about why we wanna be software engineers.

And I started creating content because I think we're doing a pretty good job of that here at Health Trust. I just wanted to tell people about it and say that this is, this is, I think, this is a really cool place to work. I've been here for a year. I am super excited for the people that I get to work with, the problems that we get to solve, watching our engineers grow, getting to build cool things. And I just want more people to come along with us. Yeah, and I think, I think that's awesome because I think people are like, you know, why should I post?

What should I post? So give, can you give maybe like one or two like very like granular things about some things that you've actually posted to maybe spur on some managers to do the same thing. Yeah, absolutely, right? So I think one of the things is I've been talking a little bit about culture and I think that that is such an important topic because I think culture, a mentor of mine once said, you know, we, a lot of times we spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our friends and family. Right? It is a significant portion of our lives. So this should be an environment that we want to be a part of, that we want to grow, that we want to shape in the future, and that, you know, this is something that we can feel fulfilled in being a part of, right?

So like some people hear company culture and you go back, you know, a couple years ago, and that was, I think you said this yesterday, right? It's ping pong tables, it's free beer in the office, it's a casual dress code or whatever, right? And it's like, yeah, that's fine. But really, A, we're in a remote world, so that looks differently now. But even even going back then, I would say that's really not what culture is, right? Culture is how do you work every day? How do you feel fulfilled in doing what you do? That when you log off at the end of the day, you're able to say that, you know what, I did something that made an impact on my organization.

Maybe my organization does something that makes the world a little bit better so I can feel fulfilled about that. Maybe I helped my team to grow and I can feel fulfilled in that. And so just giving people a way that they can feel like that they're doing something beyond just, you know what? I had a ticket today and I did the thing that I was supposed to do and now I got a check. So I've talked about this too and I asked, I've actually had a few people, they're like, man, you asked like the same questions all the time and I'm like, yeah, yeah, because it's incredibly important because most of the country isn't doing it.

So I'm trying to drive home, obviously some topics. But my question to you is, yeah, because like my thought is, is like pre-COVID culture was very group general focused, right? So open bar, ping pong table, pizza party, like very just like very group century. I feel like the shift to remote culture and this is what makes it so freaking hard is it's focused more on the individual's needs and not the group's needs. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that that's absolutely right. Yeah, because culture is still about having an organizational identity, but how do you do that when you're not in connected to everybody physically, right?

And so, so yeah, so it has to be a little bit more individual centric because that's who you're around all day, right? Like, we might be having a conversation on a video call and connecting with everybody there, but in the physical presence for a lot of people who are still remote, yeah, it's difficult to have that interpersonal connection. So it becomes a little bit more about What are the things that you value? How do you fit life and how do you fit work into your life and have a reasonable balance there? Like I'm just a minute ago, right? Like how do you do something that makes you feel like you're fulfilling something that is bigger than yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's why you know what? I think that's why a lot of companies aren't scaling. Or no, no, I'm sorry. Why come you're having issues because it's tough to scale that? Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, like, I mean, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's in the weeds. It's, it's like one on ones. Yes. Hey, listen, I want to meet with you for 15 minutes because you talked about this problem because you can't, because if you're in person, you hear them, you like grab in the room like, Hey, let's talk about it now blah, blah, blah, and we move on.

Mm hmm. But I feel like now with the remote culture, it's like, Hey, listen, like you talked about this problem yesterday and it's also caused managers to listen. Right? Because you're in meetings now, virtually, and you may hear somebody say something like, I need to follow up with that person. Yes. Yeah. Instead, I feel like in person cultures, like somebody said something and like they weren't happy, you're like, I don't eventually get figured out. Sure. Yeah. No, you have to be super intentional with making connections with people. Like if you're a leader in any capacity and you're not spending the majority of your time talking to people and just connecting with them.

And I don't just think about an update on what's going on with this project or where we're at with this particular item, but just how are you doing? How are things going? How can I help you? Then I don't think you'll be able to scale effectively. Yep, 100%. So I want to talk about other ways to retain talent right now. I know obviously, you know, we talked about this on fair, kind of where you work, right? You can't, you can't can't compete with the Amazon's. And like most people can't, right? Let's just say that. Talk about maybe some things that you're really trying to push or maybe if you're willing to share some of your secret sauce on kind of how you're trying to retain and kind of what me and Matthew Rucker talked about yesterday, recession harden your organization.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it starts with kind of creating a shared value system and and then living that out and how we interact every day. So we have a document that we have internally. We call it the things we believe, right? And so there's six ideals and there are these things that we try and make sure that we're doing throughout the course of our day, right? So in all of our interactions and then just giving everybody that shared value system that we can all speak that same language, just have that same basic vocabulary, but then build on that and show that this is why what we're doing matters.

So when it starts with like, so the first one, I won't go through them all right here, My favorite one is the first one is called missionaries over mercenaries. Love that. So you have a mercenary, they're going to take a task. Right. So hey, you know what, I am on this team. I've got my board. This is the top ticket on the board. I read the ticket and I can go do this at a work. Whereas a missionary is okay, what are we trying to do? Help me understand the problem that we're trying to solve. Oh, this is my customer. This is the problem that they have.

Here's how I want to make this experience better for them. and I want to be a part of challenging and defining what that looks like. And so giving, I think that that's a huge way that we try and retain talent and, you know, attract talent here is to say that, you know, you have a meaningful impact on what the future of our business is even going to look like, right? The people closest to the problem should be the ones who are driving us forward, right? It's not some top-down mentality of I come down with the team and say, Hey, I've got this brilliant idea. Here's what we're going to go build.

It's what, what, what really ideas do you have and how can I help you be successful? I love that. I love that. What else? This is good. What you got anything else, any other bullet points that you kind of really like. Um, and so I, I think, um, I think another one is, um, just kind of meeting teams where they are. So we talked about remote work. So we're in this like interesting hybrid world where we let our teams decide what makes sense for them and this kind of goes into again, going back to the shared value system of giving our teams the tools that they need to be successful, but only the tools that they need to be successful, and then otherwise getting out of their way.

So letting teams decide, how do they want to work? Oh, I have a team that they love coming in all the time. They're in two, three days a week, and they have their set days where they want to come and hang out in the office. I have other teams that are throughout the country, and obviously they're full-time remote. And so how do we give them the tools that they need to be able to hang out and be successful and work together and collaborate, and just really just meeting each of the teams where they are and understanding, And this is also a big thing I have as advice for, as all leaders, but understanding that, you mentioned it's more about the individual, understanding that you as a hiring manager, you are leading a group of individuals, right?

So you can't take some one size fits all strategy for different people, have different communication styles, different people have different levels of engagement that they want. I have some people that it's, hey, point me to a problem over y'all from the distance and I'll let you know if I need something. And other people who want say, hey, come along this journey with me and I need a little bit more guidance and so just understanding to meet your people where they are. Yeah, I love that. So I wanna, so the one thing you brought up that I wanna ask real quick and then we'll move to our next area of questions.

What, is there anything that Y'all's team has implemented to like any like fun things to build culture for remote teams? Cause I'm always trying to cheat off other managers papers. I didn't know if there's anything like, I talked to Kyle Welch at Eventbrite, and they have a Google Meet room where you can just hop in and just have it on and work. It's kind of just a hangout session. Obviously, some organizations use donut and slack. Do you have any other fun things that you've seen work? I mean, we do the scheduled virtual happy hours. I think some of the teams do that, and that works decently well.

I mean, that varies a little bit by the success of our team. But really, I think the biggest thing that we found that's successful is just understanding that we have a... We're heavy Slack users, right? So you have your spaces where you're having conversations that are about being productive and getting work done, but also just as active or sometimes even more active are the spaces that are not about being productive. But we have a video games channel that is constantly going back and forth about the newest releases or what's going on or people's opinions. And I think it's just important for people to be able to connect and feel like it's comfortable and okay to have those conversations We were doing it in the office.

Why wouldn't we do it when we're remote? I love that. Yeah, I've noticed and I give a shout out to Render Atlanta who obviously I was a part of their conferences past year and also react Miami that conference that went down with Michelle Engabe down in Miami And what they did is they created discord channels before the conference that had different channels so people could bond before the conference based off somewhere. And I think that's brilliant. And that's something that I've seen a lot of companies do. And I probably need to do that myself with my group. I want to give Chris good morning, Bill, Jason, Samantha, Hamad, Morgan.

Thank you for the affirmation. I appreciate Erica and then obviously LA coming in. Yes, finding a calling to it being vandalized your mission. So Steve, I want to move into the next part of this. The next part of the show, next segment, is advice to aspiring hiring managers. So I've touched on this topic with some previous guests. I think it's been a few weeks since I talked about this. And I think this is a fascinating topic because I think there comes a time in every developer's life, the life cycle where it's like, do I make the jump? Do I stay as an IC? Do I go be people?

What's, what's, what's some advice, man? I mean, if there's individuals who watch this, like I want to be like a Steven, you know, I want to go manage a team of 40 like you're doing right now, not directly but overall your department. What's just some things that people need to be aware before they make that jump? Yeah, absolutely. I can think of a few things. So the first one I'll tell people, and this is something that I wish I had learned a little better early on, is just to have a little patience. So I knew pretty much from the beginning of my career that this was the path that I wanted to go.

And so I was very impatient to get here. So I was going to, I was going to be a people leader and then I was going to lead multiple teams and then I was going to be a CIO and that was going to all happen in five years and everybody can get out of my way. And I was a little bit arrogant about that. And honestly, I got the opportunity to be a people leader relatively early on in my career, just like three or so years into it. And frankly, if it had been like a day or two earlier or any earlier in my career, I would have failed miserably.

already a really bumpy start in the beginning, right, making that transition. And so I think, you know, like starting to get yourself, you know, giving yourself tools to be prepared and be successful. But I think the number one thing I'll tell people is just to have a little patience. And then, you know, another thing is, you know, just to understand what it really means to be a people leader. I think that, you know, understanding where your motivation comes from is important and kind of what drives you in doing that and how you want to be successful. So I saw a Netflix engineering talk a long time ago and it's kind of stuck with me for a long time.

And one of the things that they said on that is that, you know, my job as a leader is to hire really smart people and get out of their way. And so I tell my teams all the time that I don't do real work for a living. They get to do interesting things and all my job is just to make your life a little bit easier. And so getting yourself into that mindset early on of, you know, I come last, right? So in the order of priority, it is the organization I worked for at the end of the the day I work to represent the organization that I'm a part of.

And then it's my team and then it's me. And by the time it gets to me, there's usually not enough time for that. And so understanding that that you're putting, you know, you're doing this to be, it's a, you're a leader, but it's not about you being in front, right? It's about you pushing your team forward. That makes sense. That makes sense. What, what, what, so that was great. Uh, I mean, I'll tell you this. I dealt with the same thing, right? I think, you know, and I think, I think, I think a little bit of that is healthy. I think that means you want and you have a drive and you have a goal which I will never ever try.

I will never squash that with anybody but I also think you're spot on. I think relax, take a breath. It'll work out the way it's supposed to work out. And to be honest with you, I'm telling myself that for me too, right? That's what it is. So what else, man? Any other advice for hiring managers or responding to that? Yeah, absolutely. So I think I mentioned this really briefly earlier, but just understanding that people are different and unique, right? Like, so like always be true to yourself and, you know, who you are as a person, but understand how to adapt and flex your style to meet your different people on your team, right?

It's like different people will take, I can be super blunt and direct with certain people because that's how they want and prefer to be communicated with. And then other people I need to be, you know, I need to approach it a little bit more more delicately and understanding where those people are, understanding how to communicate appropriately in a way that lands well and resonates with that individual. And just understanding that, yeah, all of us are super different and unique and a little bit weird and that's great. And so how do you embrace that as a team? 100%. What do you think, what's been the biggest failure that you have had As a manager that you would like for other people not to repeat and I just came up with that question by the way I'm not I'm not asked that it to anybody so Awesome.

No, I love it. I love that question I've had a lot of failures and I think that that We could talk about how failure isn't a bad thing as long as you learn from it and learn But I mean I think the world needs to embrace failure more. Yeah So, go ahead. Yeah, I celebrate failure with my teams. But one of the things for me, I think, was early on, I don't think I had that mindset correct and that I was a people leader for me, right? And it was about, like, how do I get that next promotion? How do I continue to grow my own career?

And it was kind of self-serving. And so, by any chance, any of my early employees or we're here, I apologize for that. And for probably not being as connected as I should have been, it was about like, hey, how do I build something that's going to create some legacy so that I can then get the next thing where it's like, I found that I was, became so much more successful when I focused on how do I make my team more successful? Like when I stopped caring about how I was doing and what my success and growth was going to be and focused on what my team success and growth going to be.

I think that completely changed the game for me and completely changed the director in my career. Yeah, absolutely. I want to go this and Christina says Christina quoted you the world needs to embrace failure more and I totally agree. I want to kind of dive into this a little bit. How do you approach failure for your teams? So I'm really big. So I've never played football. I was in the marching band for the record. I was in the online. And I was always I'm always fascinated. But I play ice hockey, right? So, okay. I play ice hockey at Centennial. I, you know, I play on two teams.

We actually just won a tournament this weekend. And the one thing so so like our team, for example, we came out the first game and we just were not in sync. Like we were playing tight and we got beat seven to three, right? Like it was it was a close game was a close game, but then we just lost it, right? Then after that, we were like, you know what? Like, let's figure out some stuff, let's adjust. And literally we went on a tear and we went five and no after that. And we want to. And so the thing is, is I'm fascinated with playing loose and letting your teams play loose.

And as a manager, I'm always very cautious on how I've phrased things to my team, because I've said things to my team and then they tense up, they're like, Oh, my gosh, Taylor really means this. And it's like, no, no, I didn't mean it for you to tense up. I just meant if you'd be aware of it. What are your thoughts on like playing loose and how do you get your teams to play loose? Yeah, so I think it's about encouraging your team to experiment and try. Like, hey, I have, you know, like you have to create an environment where people can feel safe, first of all.

Yes, that is. If you don't have that, you know, core, what is the modern agile principle of core, one of the psychological safety, right? Like everybody should be able to feel comfortable to say that we're all humans. We all make mistakes. We're going to succeed and fail as a group here. This isn't about, you know, separate how you're doing from your job from the success or failure of an individual item that you're pushing forward. Those are two different things and that's important. And so if you can kind of get that mental separation, then you can feel comfortable to say, you know what, I'm going to try something.

I have no idea if this is going to work. And that's great. And so what I encourage people to do is to do that frequently, but to do that as small as possible. And I feel like that that also takes a little bit the pressure off, right? Like, don't tell me you have this brilliant, like this great idea, and I want to go experiment with something. And in four months, we're going to figure out whether or not that was a good idea. Okay, let's break that thing down. And what can you do in two weeks to come back and say, Hey, does this seem like we're on the right path?

Or nope, this is a really bad idea. We learned a lot of these two weeks, and now we're going to go do something completely different. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And I think again, when you said celebrate failure, what does that look like in your organization. So it's just getting, so we have, you know, each of the teams have retrospectives all the time on catch, you know, how are things gone? What went well? What didn't go well? What are we going to do going forward? I think, you know, people hear failure and they think that, you know, you have this negative connotation in your head, but really as long as it is something that is investment, we make it, we're making small bets, whether we win or we lose.

We're making really small bets. That knowledge we gain is worth so much more than the outcome. If we won, great. We'll keep going in that direction. If we fail, we learned so much about what we know a better way to approach this market. We know that this is a better fit for this product. We know that this technology just isn't going to work for us and we don't need to invest any more time in that. I love the idea of the learning. I mentioned this before. We were chatting earlier, but I am the kind of person that I never sit still for very long and any one thing, and I love to bounce around and be roles and ideas, and I'm always constantly trying something new or learning something new.

And if you get all of these different experiences and opportunities, even the ones that you failed, you'll come to something a year from now, two years from now, where you'll be able to pull back on that knowledge. Even if you don't think that it's going to be relevant, right, even if it's something that you think is completely unrelated, it's amazing how often I can pull back and draw on those previous experiences. And so the more of those that you can have, just the more wealth of knowledge that you have to draw from to build better things going forward. I love that. All right, last few minutes we have, I wanna dive into which I think is incredibly important topic and one of the reasons why I have this show to begin with, right?

It's, I have a hiring manager on the show. And if you're on the job search, you can ask questions. So if you all have questions, now it's time to drop them. What should job seekers be mindful of right now in the interview. And the one thing you wrote is obviously questions JobSeeker should be asking. So do you have specific questions or specific ideas on what JobSeeker should be asking right now? Yeah, absolutely, right? So you've said this, I think a good bit on your show in the past, but like interviews are bidirectional and the candidates hold most of the power right now in today's market.

So if you're a candidate, you should be interviewing the company as much as I am interviewing you to try and figure out if you're a good fit. This is also a place where you're going to spend a bunch of times to make sure this is somewhere that you want to be. And so I love turning the table back, right? So we ask those behavioral questions a lot on tell me about a time when you've done something like this. So do the same thing back, right? So tell me about a time when you've empowered your team to be autonomous and make decisions. And you've given them the tools that they need to be successful.

Tell me about a time when you've celebrated failure. No. starting to dig into those like, getting an understanding of those value systems, right? So I mentioned, we have the things we believe in the shared value systems, right? So ask about those. What are the value systems? What are your core values? And not just what are they, but how do you live them out throughout the course of your day? Right? Like how do those things find their way into your daily conversations and into how you work? Asking questions like that. I think a big one I like, I ask people, and so I put a lot of people would ask back and you keep things as well as, How do you focus on outcomes and not outputs?

That's if we want to, our internal shared values, but you know what? Like doing work, so what? If you do a bunch of work, what did you change? What did you impact? And so how do you as an organization promote not caring so much about number of commits or lines of code or any of these other vanity metrics that while maybe directionally tell you something don't actually make an impact on whether or not, hey, did I bring a positive return to the business I'm working for. Yeah. And so just challenge that. And if you don't get good answers to those questions that I think, you know, that should be a bit of a red flag for, is this somewhere that really is embracing kind of a modern way of working and I can feel like I have a real impact on what it is that I'm building.

Definitely. I love that. I want to, we had some questions come in. So Karen times in, I just got laid off, I found your page linked in. So I'm tweaking my resume. We have no prior experience in tech and I'm trying to transition anything you would recommend to your profile resume portfolio as a hiring manager If you are looking to hire a junior individual in tech, what are some key things that you look for? Yeah, absolutely. When you're just getting started out I think one of the big things I love to do is to go look at your projects and see what is the work that you're doing because you know when you have that really when we're interviewing even a seasoned person, right, and we're just trying to look at like previous experience and And technologies I care a little bit less about, but I care about what kind of problems you've solved and how you think and how you approach that.

And if you don't have the professional experience to draw from, you can still emulate that with your personal projects, right? I can still see that in your GitHub commits. And going through your commits, I can kind of like get through in my head what your thought pattern was to arrive at that point and what problem you were trying to solve. And I think this is a thing I tell people is, you know, I am a big believer in being, you know, multifaceted and not focusing on one particular tenet or one particular language. So what I love to see in the people who set themselves apart, especially around their career, when they have a GitHub project or something they're doing, it's not just here's the code and it works, but hey, here's the code and here's my automated test suite.

I'm not maybe trying to get into QA, but I have an understanding of how that space works or and here's how here's my infrastructure as code for how I deployed that to a cloud infrastructure or here's some understanding of you know the product piece and UX and here's how I've thought about that part of it and just showing that you have some understanding not just of the specific domain that you're trying to get into but an understanding of how what you do fits into the bigger picture. Well I think the thing is I want to highlight what Stephen said it's all about explaining. Yeah. Everything Stephen just said is how do you communicate how do you explain and I think that's the biggest thing that I've seen talking with managers on the show is like they kind of viewed they kind of you all junior people about the same like technically but it's it's the communication style the energy you bring to the table that really separates you.

Two more questions and we'll wrap up Christina comes in what approach should job seekers take if they have been a consultant forever? I don't know that it changes a whole lot I know consultants it sometimes it feels like it's hard to be maybe you feel like you're you're a bit of an outsider and not a part of a company's mission, but you still make an impact on the organizations that you're a part of, right? So I think that that process is still the same. So just really showcasing how what you've done is made the organizations that you've consulted with better. Just still showing like, here's how I dove in, here's how I became a part of the team, or here's how I once become more of a part of a team, here's maybe where this is not something that I wanna do anymore.

And I do wanna dive deeper with one company for a longer period of time. just kind of showcasing that. Yeah, I think too. I think in my experience as a recruiter dealing with consultants and a lot of companies reject consulting resumes, I think you really need a really good story. Tell the recruiter on why you want to get into a full time job. Yeah. A lot of times when we submit a resume, like if Stephen and I were to work together, and I would submit Stephen like a pure consultant, I'd say, hey, Stephen, here's why Christina wants to go full time because of bang, bang, bang, bang.

And as long as it drops you, it can list specific key things on why they want to go perm slash full time, I think that generally eases the hiring manager's mind, which helps. Last question here. How do you encourage your developers to ship without fear of failure? So going back kind of the failure thing, I think people really like that. Yeah, yeah, I think I'm glad that resonates with people. I think it's an important topic. I mean, I think we have to, I think you have to create an environment where you can push out, again, make it as small as possible. I think that's the biggest thing, is understand what is the smallest unit of work that I can create that delivers some value.

If it doesn't deliver value, you've broken it down too far. But what is the smallest unit of work that I can create that delivers some small unit of value? And then how can I test that as small as possible? So when you say, ship it, great. But maybe not to all million of your customers all at once. Like, hey, I have this idea, I have this new feature we want to test. I'm going to deploy it, give me a week, and then I'm going to test it with five customers. And then I'm going to see what their feedback is. And I'm going to make sure that that worked.

And then I'll test it with five more customers, right? And so creating systems and environments where you can do that, you know, A.B. testing or canary deployments where you can just deploy to a percentage and slowly roll out that feature to a bigger group over time. Just reduces the blast radius in case it is some catastrophic failure. And then it's fine, right? I can, I'm happy to go and call three people and say, Hey, I'm sorry. This didn't work. Uh, we're, we're working on it. There's something we're experimenting with. I love it. I love it. Also, Steven, thank you again. Y'all, thank you for tuning in this morning.

That was awesome. The time flew on that one. I knew it would. Yeah, it's great. Um, Steven, stay on real quick. Uh, as, as I end it, um, I want to say bye to you. Um, but again, y'all, thank you for tuning in this morning. We appreciate it. Hopefully you learned something from Steven. Go connect with Steven on LinkedIn. Like I said, he's starting to put out content, engage with him. Um, and I know he will appreciate it. On tomorrow morning, unicorn finders is just me, Jake and Dan, because a guy can't have too many podcasts on my other podcast. It's more product focused. So, but it's just us three.

We're gonna talk about market trends. It's been a minute since we haven't had a guest. So tune in tomorrow morning, 930 AM Central Unicorn Finders. And I'm off on Friday. I'm going on a Father's Day trip with my dad and my brother to Chicago. So looking forward to that. But Steven, thank you again, friend. I appreciate you. And I will see you all tomorrow morning. Unicorn Finders. Peace. Thanks. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode.

So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again if you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S. and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.