So You’re In Charge Now… with Ben Greenberg

Matty talks with Ben Greenberg, who had been head of DevRel at Fuel Labs for about three weeks at the time of recording and also runs a small consultancy, Yalla DevRel. The topic is what to do when you're suddenly in charge of a team, or starting any senior role. Ben had guested before, but that episode was recorded in May and shelved because its social networking content had aged, and Matty says this one is aimed at something timeless. The cold open is Matty on the classic interview question: "What's your biggest weakness, Ben? I work too hard." Nobody Wants You to Change Everything Matty's warning for new senior hires: no matter how often people say they want a change agent, "here's the secret: they do not." Ben calls it the hero complex of hiring, the lowercase-m messiah, and describes doing something new in interviews: sharing a real, still-raw failure instead of a humblebrag, on the theory that if Fuel Labs still wanted Ben afterward, the fit would be real. Matty recalls the first manager job at Apartments.com, a role that was half manager and half sysadmin, where Matty arrived fired up about process and after about four weeks realized it was time to stop and listen. Matty's rule: "you have 2 ears and 1 mouth," and "every process, every way of doing things in a company is organizational scar tissue." The likelier explanation for something being done a certain way is that there's a reason, not that nobody has heard of Salesforce. Ben contrasts the invading colonizer who uproots things with the person who sits with people, listens to their stories and helps shape direction from within, and admits that's hard when you were hired to do things. The First Weeks Matty describes starting a role while knowing a new boss would arrive in three months. A coach suggested using the time for discovery so that the new boss could be handed what Matty had learned and a plan, without having made changes yet. Matty's onboarding technique: in every get-to-know-you meeting, mostly about the person and not the job, schedule a follow-up four to six weeks out, when there's enough context for a substantive conversation. Ben adds asking each person who else to meet, which widens the circle quickly, and meeting ecosystem partners and developers who build on the company's infrastructure. Matty recommends The First 90 Days, with the caveat that it reads like Harvard Business Review articles stapled together, and that it helps with figuring out what kind of organization you're in. Matty also uses a model from an executive coach, Bill Joy, who taught engagement and skill as two axes: a new starter is high engagement and low skill, even a principal engineer or a new CEO. "You could be the new CEO. You are low skill." Activity for its own sake looks busy but doesn't win collaboration, and Ben says DevRel suffers from filling calendars without knowing what moved the needle. Showing Value Matty's standing advice is to learn how the company makes money. In DevRel interviews Matty's philosophy is that "if you don't have a way of demonstrating value, a way of demonstrating value will be assigned to you and you won't like it." Take care of the things tied to business outcomes and nobody will question the rest. Matty jokes about wanting a Nicole Forsgren for DevRel. Ben says the same applies to SDK engineers, technical writers and DevOps: do less, more completely and at a higher standard, instead of covering everything. Ben's Plan Ben inherited a team of three, dispersed across the Americas, each there about a year, and wants a team "that knows more than you." Ben's first career was as a director at nonprofits, and Ben's earlier stint as a young manager was marked by opinions, talking more than listening and buying into the change agent paradigm, which cost Ben. This time Ben has been listening and taking notes, then drafted a quarterly plan, shared it with Ben's own boss, then the team with an invitation to tear it apart, and scheduled an offsite to build Q1 objectives and key results together. Ben's method is to be a facilitator and consensus builder, and says "ownership is how you create a sense of culture of staying." A key goal is career paths for the team, since nobody had held the role for a while, recognizing what people did in the past year and getting them to where they should be. Team Lead Is Not a Manager Matty points to Lindsay Holmwood's post "It's Not a Promotion, It's a Career Change," and tells how a new CTO suggested moving Matty from director to infrastructure architect because technology, not managing people, seemed to be what got Matty out of bed. Matty's conditions were no pay cut and a letter making clear it wasn't a demotion, which Matty says illustrates the problem. Both believe individual contributors should be able to earn more than their managers, and Ben cites Aaron Bassett's talk that promotion shouldn't require becoming a manager. Matty says team lead and people manager are very different jobs: leading an open source project is not performance management, career coaching or time-off requests, and as Ben puts it, "you're never putting an open source contributor on a PIP." Matty credits Apartments.com for heavy manager training, since many managers were first-timers from internal promotion, and Bill Joy's framing that the hardest transition is the first one, from individual contributor to manager, because you must stop doing what you're used to. Matty also says that leading a DevRel team in data, and not in a space like Kubernetes or infrastructure as code where Matty knows the material, has been easier to do humbly, since "I couldn't get a job on my own team," while still knowing how to do DevRel. Ben calls that humility a good topic on its own. The First 90 Days "It's not a promotion - it's a career change" (Lindsay Holmwood) "Not All Leaders Are Managers" - (Aaron Bassett)