In this episode, we cover:

• Introduction (00:00)
• “Embracing Change Fearlessly” (01:45)
• Fearless change enabling good work (04:00)
• The culture change that needs to happen (06:10)
• How to talk to your leaders (10:45)
• “The Adolescent Version” of engineering (14:40)
• How Natalie prioritizes time, speed, and efficiency (18:42)
• Natalie’s keynote (26:48)

Links Referenced:

• Gremlin: https://www.gremlin.com/
• gremlin.com/podcast: https://gremlin.com/podcast
• loyaltyfreakmusic.com: https://loyaltyfreakmusic.com

Transcript

Natalie: I like this—I call it the adolescent version of engineering. It’s where, you know, we’re through the baby part, we need to start to grow up a little bit, we need to go from getting stuff done in some way or another, to something that’s repeatable and scalable. And so, it’s like, that adolescent years, that’s my fun. That’s what I enjoy doing. I call it creating something out of chaos.

Basically, taming the chaos is what it really looks like because it’s very chaotic initially, and that’s true of every, like, small organization; they always start like that. And as they start to grow, you know, you’ve got ten different engineers who have ten different opinions on how something should be done, and so they do it ten different ways. And that’s fine when you’re only ten, but then when you need to go from 10 to 20 to 30 to 100, it no longer works.

Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, culture change, and learning from failure. In this episode, we talk with Natalie Conklin, head of engineering at Gremlin, about the importance of embracing change, and how we can all work through our fears and work together to build more reliable systems. Natalie, I’m so excited to have you here with us today. And today is actually a really big day because it is the fifth year of DevOpsDays Boise, which you are doing the closing keynote for. So, really excited to have you both on the podcast and at the conference today. And your talk is titled “Embrace Change Fearlessly.” So, do you want to kick off by telling our listeners a little bit about you and what you’re going to be talking about?

Natalie: Sure. Thanks for having me. I am excited about both, sort of, [laugh] which is exactly what the talk is about. [laugh]. The talk is really about being able to embrace change fearlessly, and that it’s rarely ever fearlessly truly, but mostly around being able to do what makes you afraid anyway.

I’m not a big public speaker, so that’s something I’ve had to work hard at trying to be able to be more comfortable doing. And so, this is an exciting time for me. But background-wise, I am the head of engineering currently for Gremlin and had been leading engineering teams for growth companies for just over a decade. And a lot of what I end up doing centers around this: It’s helping those engineering teams be willing to move forward in risky—because in growth companies, a lot of times you’re building things that are brand new, this is not something that, you know, has been out there and done, so they typically have to do something new for the first time. And so, being able to take calculated risks is tough. It’s hard stuff. And so, getting into the right mindset to be able to push through that, that’s a lot of what I ended up doing.

Julie: I love that. And that’s actually a really good point that you’re bringing up, you know, growth companies and being in the right mindset. So, one of the things you and I talked about when I was starting here at Gremlin and getting to know you a little bit about your background, which is really cool. You lived in India for a few years, correct?

Natalie: I did. I lived there for two years. I was working for a company, we were doing big data analytics for telcos, building big, large platform that we would then do some custom development work off the top of for these various telco companies. And the team over there had experienced some turnover, and so there was a lot of quality issues and things of that nature starting to show up for the first time. This had been a very rock-solid team, honestly, and so the company asked if I would be willing to go to India to figure out what was going on. And so, that was what I did. It was a great opportunity; loved doing it.

Julie: So now, as you work with teams to embrace change fearlessly, and we talk about you mentioned the ROI and doing things in new ways and building new things, do you have an example of maybe when you built something new or your team built something new, and it changed the way we work?

Natalie: Well yes, an easy answer would just be to fall back on the India example for a second, right? So, a lot of what I did when I went there was they were a very waterfall shop, converted them over to Agile practices and DevOps. They had really none of that practice existing. So, when you ask the company—or the, I’ll just say the team to go through that sort of transition, you’re pretty much asking them to change everything about the way they work. And we focused a lot more —there was a lot of manual processes that they had been doing previously and we were automating all of those had to do the automations, but then also, you know, make sure that work fit into this new automated way of doing things.

They also had, just, also the trepidation over am I going to still be needed, right? Those are all those things that come into your mind when you’re basically changing from a manual process to an automated process, “Am I still going to be needed? Is my work going to still be important? What am I going to do in this new world, in this new environment?” There’s a lot of that that pops up into people’s heads.

So, a lot of making the change successful, there’s certainly the technical aspects of getting it automated and all those things, but to really make a change successful on that kind of scale, it requires getting people to think about it differently and to be okay, and to realize that they can learn new stuff and they’ll come out of this better than how they went in. And a lot of that takes a lot of, just, communication and talking, being very personal with people, making sure that they personally understand how to do this, but then just also, things like training and coaching and making sure that there are people there to counter the negative energy that comes along with change. There’s always negative energy that comes along with it, people are nervous, they’re scared, and you have to be able to counter that in some way.

Julie: You know, there was a talk I gave a while ago, and I’m trying to remember the name of it, but one of the things that I talked about was the Pareto Principle, which is, what, 20% of people are going to be amazing in an organization, 60% are going to be, you know, middle of the road, then you have that bottom 20% that are going to kind of fight that change. And you shouldn’t really necessarily focus on that top 20%, but you should put a lot of the focus on bringing that bottom 20% along with you. And we talk a lot about just the cultural change that needs to happen when we talk about Chaos Engineering, for example. I mean, there’s a huge cultural change that organizations need to switch that mindset into embracing failure. Which we talk a lot about, but it’s hard for folks to embrace change fea...