Pivoting During a Pandemic

A conversation with Rob Smith, Head of Content, LeadDev

Damian Górny

This week I talked with Rob Smith, Head of Content at LeadDev, a community of software engineering leaders that come together to learn and get inspired on all things team, tech, process, and personal development. We talk about the challenges of pivoting a business during a pandemic and how to scale yourself as a new leader. Full disclosure: I run LeadDev's Bookmarked.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you tell us a bit more about you?

I am the head of content over at LeadDev, a software engineering company. We cut our teeth around 2015. We started with events in London and have since expanded to New York, Austin, Berlin and soon to be San Francisco. We've run conferences for about six years now. I joined almost three years ago. At the beginning of the pandemic as events stopped, we shifted to become an online publisher. We do tons of online content, online events, as well as other community engagement stuff. My current role is head of content and I oversee the content team on both the publishing side and the event side.

What was your path to your leadership role?

I joined LeadDev about three years ago. Before that I was at another events company. It was, as we call them a conference factory. They do tons of different things in different industries. I did aviation conferences, Nordic banking conferences and then other technical conferences. At the time, I was a bit disillusioned by the industry. I found it a bit heartless, a bit soulless, and was vowing to leave. But then LeadDev reached out.

We ended up chatting and I just fell in love with the LeadDev brand. It is such a caring, nurturing environment. Jo, who is our managing director and is my manager, is one of the most wonderful leaders I've ever met. It gave me a bit of hope to try and stick around at events. So that was my journey in.

What role did you start in at LeadDev?

I started as a content producer. The role was to work alongside our conference chair, Meri Williams, our CEO Ruth, and a few of the other members of the team, to do the content production of the LeadDev events. I conferences all around the world. We host CFPs, so people write pitches for talks that they'd like to deliver, and then we select which ones will be delivered on stage with our review committee, and with the internal team. I was the person in charge of running that for a while and as well, working with our review committees who help us identify which talks are good and which talks are really excellent. So that was my role at the time.

I want to fast forward us. I guess you'd been at the company maybe a year-ish when the pandemic hit in March 2020. Is my timeline about right?

About eight months.

Not even a year. Wow. Can you talk about what that was like and how you and the company moved through that time? Events went to zero. A lot of us were like, "Oh, now we're working from home." But for an events company, this really changed your landscape.

100%. It was a complete disruption, a total, world stopping, shattering event as it is for the world. I guess an important piece of context for here as well is while we are now LeadDev, we operate as LeadDev and it’s our main brand, prior to the pandemic, we also had another couple of brands that we were running. We were honing in on LeadDev. We knew it was the one we loved. We knew it was the one that we were getting the most traction with, but we still had a few things up and running at that time.

When the pandemic was just starting to hit, we were running five events. LeadDev New York, Berlin, Austin and London. Then we had another conference with a different brand. So as the pandemic started to raise its head in February, I was actually in San Francisco doing some research for an upcoming San Francisco event with some of the team. I remember us reading the news and being like, "Ah, what's going on here?" There's always a certain amount of trepidation, but also a, "We've seen it before and it hasn't affected the mission too badly."

But then as we’ve moved into March, we see it start to take effect. So immediately the first thing that we think of is security and safety in these events. How do we make sure that we can run an event? As we reached the middle to end of March, we realized that wasn't possible. Our next event that was about to happen was LeadDev New York, which was happening on April 7th and 8th, 2020.

So at the point that we had to postpone that event. We were three weeks out, and it's a scary thing to do for a ton of reasons. Obviously we have 800 people attending that event. We have sponsors, I think it was 25 sponsors at the time. All of our catering staff, all of our venues, everything like that has to be shifted. They were all super wonderful during that time. Actually, I think that's one of the things that LeadDev has really learned throughout the two years is that our community really has been our heart and soul. And they've managed to keep us through these testing times.

But it was still a huge thing. So three weeks out from LeadDev New York we postponed. We were a team of 10 or 11 at that point. We've just postponed an event, but we want to give something back. We knew it would have to do would be quick. So we ended up creating a virtual event at that point called LeadDev Live, which took place three weeks later on the days that the conference was due to take place.

This was three of the most fun weeks of my life working on this event at a very hectic time, because we were reaching out to people. We were saying, "Hey, we're putting something together. We really don't know how it's going to go.” We hoped that we'd get 800 people who are there at the conference to come along. Really banking on goodwill saying, "Please, can you give us an hour of your time on this day? Can you do a panel? Can you do a talk, can you do this?" We ended up getting 45 with the most amazing engineering leaders, who I still thank to this day for turning around at such quick notice. Then 13,500 people ended up turning up to that event.

So 13,500 people showed up for your first online event?

Yes, yes. It was beyond all of our wildest dreams. That is solely thanks to the community that we built. It went wild on social, through word of mouth. We were able to engage a bigger audience we'd ever done before. That really taught us something, which was that we were running four events a year and maybe we were engaging with 2000 people. Then we realized our eyes were open to the fact that the world is so much bigger than the people that we were touching at the moment. Also we were providing LeadDev content on maybe eight days in the year, two days each for four conferences. But actually, people face challenges 365 days a year. So they were our two real big learnings at the beginning of the pandemic. And from there, we began to think about the other things that we could do.

Was the LeadDev Live event a paid event or was it free?

It was free. LeadDev has always believed in having our content for free for the community. So all of our talks for all of our events were put online and made available afterwards because we believe this is an accessibility issue. We shouldn't be only allowing people whose companies can pay for ticket prices or for individuals who have their own personal expense to be able to come to these events and to get learning opportunities. We believe that we should also be giving to the community for free to help nurture a new generation of leaders. That's one of our standing principles that we really love and the abide by.

That’s incredible. What was the thought process and what were you all doing around what was next for the business?

It was definitely challenging. Even more so for me in content. The people who I say it was the most challenging for are our operations teams, because at that point, they were planning for events that were due to take place in August, the possible postponements for possible cancellations. Really our ops teams, our finance teams were modeling every possibility that could exist. On the flip side, what I was doing in my role alongside our head of business development, who's called Daisy who's incredible. We spent four months researching, speaking to the audience, thinking, "What are the things that you want to learn? What are the things that you need? And what are the things that you are able to get and are currently unable to get from other sources?"

One of the things we did was think directly about our events. We know people come to LeadDev events for high quality content but we were finding out what else they came for. People come to the experience, people come to be in the room with people, people come to expand the networks, to build that community. Community's always been at the heart of what we do. So that was one of our big learnings.

The other big learning on our content side was that people have problems all year around that they want content all year round to solve these problems. So what we were doing is thinking continuing around these three angles. So we knew that we had some brand values for LeadDev — we needed all of our content to be accurate, correct, led by the really clever minds in the industry who believe in the same vision we share around inclusivity and about the positive image of the tech world. We wanted all of our content to be social. We believe in creating community. We believe that we can do better by sharing and we also want to bring delight everything we do. This has really come from our founder Ruth, who believes in the special moments that you can give to people. I think people who attend in person events really know this. But providing that online is maybe a bit hard, or a bit more hard. So we are thinking about how we deliver that.

Research was the first thing we did. We went back to our community. We spoke to them for months. Well at that point, I was the only member of the content team, but usually the research takes place from us, maybe marketing and a few other different departments. This was something that the whole company got involved in. So it was from our financial director to our bookkeeper, to our events assistant. Everyone was involved. It gave everyone a perspective of what our audience cared about. It really endeared them to the mission of the company even further. People were able to for the first time really see the actions of what we were doing on a personal level.

This could be a very demoralizing event, the work that you do can basically no longer happen. Instead it seems it brought your company even more together.

Yeah. I think we've always been such a tight knit group. I think that really helped us get through. In a time like this, when everyone's job has been disrupted so entirely, you have to have a really high empathy environment because people are going to be stressed. Also fundamentally, as well as you can know your colleagues, you never know the ins and outs of their jobs. So you never know when they're in that peak periods of disruption, when they're in peak periods of uncertainty, when they're in peak periods of doing what they've never done before.
Having that really grounding company trust allowed us to really operate in a space where everyone was working really autonomously in a really fast paced, very high velocity manner, but also with complete support from everyone else.

It sounds like you were all thinking about how to continue forward, even if it looked different. So it sounds like really adding a lot more online content was the next move. Was that something you all had planned to do already?

We'd always talked about it as a rumbling, like, "Oh, how could we provide content all year round?" but I think if we're being honest that would've been four or five years away. All of our big goals at the time were to bring more content to people and to increase the scale of our events, to able to engage more people. So it was on the horizon, but there had been no direct planning up until the point of the pandemic struck.

So you were looking at scaling, but all scaling through your existing vehicles. When the pandemic hit, the future became now. That moved the timeline up dramatically.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Definitely dramatically. We started the end of April and launched our content platform on September the 14th. And that's everything — we built our website, hired an editor, wrote all of our documentation and our style guides, our editorial guides. We created our contributed payment schemes. All of that was put together in four months. So it was a really quick time.

Wow. Again, you had not had plans before. You did not have a specific plan to build out that platform before April of 2020.

Not at all.

It's incredible how much you pulled together. Then you have added other things. Bookmarked came into being around that time. I think we held our first event in May 2020.

Yeah, that was with Karen Catlin who wrote Better Allies. Karen is an incredible author and an amazing person. That was at the beginning of that journey to us, understanding that we wanted to engage our community. So one of the things we did when in person was sit around. We held meetups in London, New York, Austin, Berlin, San Francisco, Tokyo and Edinburgh. Then we really farm ways to get our community together. But we weren't able to do that during the pandemic. So things like Bookmarked, things like our webinar series, we ran a series of asynchronous meetups with speakers who previously spoken at events. All ways of getting our community talking and bringing people together.

How was that period of time for you given that ... were you the only person in content at that time?

At the time I was the only person in content. Content is a really interesting role. So I guess content role is quite interesting because some companies, content roles will be as a function of marketing. As we've talked about before, the content role at LeadDev is a cross between traditional product and content.

In some ways the content stuff was the easy bit, if that makes sense. I developed forup to a year and a half by the time that we launched a content product with the audience. So I was quite immersed in the content at that point. What was really hard was the product side. We were thinking about how we switched all of our products online or creating new products online. Each has a very unique set of challenges when converting to the online audience.

As the sole member of the content team, it was a really interesting tension between defaulting to the areas of my job where I felt really safe. So I was like, "Oh, I know I can create programs from content." That would've been really easy and focusing on the really hard bits of the role, which were super necessary at that time and stuff that were definitely more unknown territory for me. Events have a shape in a way that exist. You can add bits, you can change them, but inherently they are people getting together in a room and how you innovate is within that. What we were finding when we moved online is that we were innovating in completely different ways and ways that ... I still am very proud of the team for creating, we've created very unique online propositions that require a lot of thinking. They require a lot of deep thinking times. I found that quite hard. That role, that was probably the toughest shift at that time is to dedicate my role to a facet I'd never really done before in that way.

What do you mean by the product bits? Can you just give us a little bit more specifics?

I guess a way to think about this is, so with events, what we did with LeadDev Live was we created basically what was the shape of event and brought it online. It's a free event. The success criteria is slightly different to the criteria of an event in person. So we knew people would view for less time. We know people pick what they want to view and when they view it. But there were also events where we said, "Oh no, we want to get people together for longer periods of time. We want them to stay in a virtual space for three, four hours at a time. How do we do that?" I think that was a problem that every events company was struggling with at the time.

The other thing that all events companies were struggling with at the time, we know events are half about content and half about community. So how do you get people to engage and interact in environments when we all hate interacting on Zoom? That's an unspoken thing that's never said in the events industry, but it is definitely true. Socializing on Zoom is not that fun. So that was one of the things that we were thinking. So as soon as then we bring an event like that online, we think, "Okay, these are the bits that we want to keep. We know that it needs to be content. We know that it needs to be super high quality. We know that we want learning opportunities. But then what are the bits that we can tweak and break and what are the bits that we can add on that we've never done before that would be possible to do in a virtual event?"

That was one of the key context switch for us was not how do we bring our in-person things online, but really what can we do online that we've never been able to do in person? What was born out of that was one of our favorite products, which is event called LeadDev Together which broke the networking idea event. So what we were saying with LeadDev Together is, "We know that networking online is really hard, but we also know that teams who've been working together for years should be able to do that better."

So with LeadDev Together, we create an event which was focused on groups of engineering leaders from the same organizations to come together, learn new ideas and talk about how they could practically implement in their organizations. So what that was a slight shift away from keeping the fundamentals of what makes the event successful. We need an event to be social, but then thinking about how we could reinvent that for an online era and get teams together rather than getting individuals from really different locations together. So that was the product thinking. It was about thinking, "What are the things that we need to keep and what are the things that we can adapt and break and change?"

That must have hard because it required you to think about your work in a different way and think about the content in a different way. We might think, "Oh, an events business is going to recede during a pandemic when they can't go and do the normal work." But you all have expanded, correct? How big is the company now?

We're touching 25 now. We’ll be approaching that by the end of our financial year, which is cool. So my team scaled from one into five, which is great, which is probably the biggest expansion in the company. I think every functional team within our company has scaled in that time period. That's also all remote, all onboarded remote, a company that was never remote before. We'd always had an office space in south London that was then immediately shattered when the pandemic came. So, yeah, we've just over doubled in the two years of the pandemic while all being remote.

One to five, that's a big difference. So I'm curious about how you thought about scaling that out, how to bring on board and new people on board and all of that.

Yeah. So really early on in the process, we realized that we were working now in two functional realms, which is publishing and then events. So when we first began to spin up LeadDev.com, which is our content platform, the first thing that we could see we immediately needed was an editor to exist in that publishing space. This was because we knew that our audience was super, super good — they were super brilliant contributors. Finding a way to make the content on our site as excellent as it can be, but also find a way to give them something back was also very important to us. So that was our first role. That lasted for about six months, at which point we then, as you said, picked up speed. We were producing more and more content. And we then began to think about the other roles that were necessary in the company.

One of the really good things that I think Dave and Ruth (the founders) have been incredibly gracious with, is always thinking about not only what is the bottom line of a hire, but also what can this do for the audience? Another one of our key success metrics was also engagement mode. We didn't only want to reach more people. We wanted to keep the ones we had satisfied and keep satisfying them in new ways. So we were thinking about how we could bring those two roles together, thinking about how we could focus on those.

Then also as well as we moved into April of this year, we also knew that our in-person events were coming back — hopefully in April, COVID allowing. So we then began to think about that. In terms of how we practically looked at that in the team, one of the key things we were looking at is we are a newly remote company. How do we onboard in that environment? That was our key satisfaction element. If we believe we could do that well, we believe that we could set the team up for success. Really as well, particularly when you're working in a team of what at the time is 10, you're working in a very high context environment. You are also working in an environment where people are talking in an office.

Before COVID, we all sat in the same room — we were two desks away from each other. So every conversation that had, everyone was aware of, even if they weren't a part of. That was one of our really biggest switches. We found out immediately that our documentation, particularly for some roles, just didn't exist. Also in my team, because everything was in my head at first, all of that documentation needed to come out. Our head of operations, Megan, was incredible in her detailing all of the process of how we onboarded people. That's obviously still a very living and breathing thing. More recently, we have now started giving individual members of the team who've taken care either in a job title or for passion areas of the business to come and deliver presentations to all new starters, to think about how we can immediately integrate people in work. That was one key success factor.

The next thing then was thinking about our progression structures and plans. That was a really tough thing to do, particularly as anyone who's working on a product which is a year old knows. There's a lot of change. So what we wanted to do is try and find a way to give the people who are coming into the team, particularly on the publishing side, which was newer, that comfort to be like, "There are some uncertainty. We are uncertain about some and things. And unfortunately that means you are going to be uncertain some things. But what we want to do is get you to a place where you are happy in that uncertainty, in a sense that you know what the fundamentals of your role are, you know exactly where you'll be functioning. Then it's just the tweaks, which way we'll go, left or right that is left up to you."

That was a really hard balancing act, particularly when there are times when even I don't know what's going on in the product, or I'm looking at something like, "Ah," we're focusing on two really divergent paths here, but keeping that open dialogue, keeping the really structured skills and competencies versions of job descriptions to make sure that people know what is expected them in a fundamental role sense was one of the big things that we worked on for a lot. It's still not perfect 100%. We're still working on that very deeply. But they were the areas that we were focusing on when we were thinking about how we were going to grow into the thing.

Given the need to pivot at speed, you didn't have a long-term strategic plan for building out your team, right? How much in advance were you planning out what roles to bring on board?

Some were easier to plan than others. So our events manager, Mariana, who's just come on board now, we knew that we would have to start producing our events six months out. We were able to plan for that role for maybe eight months before it started. Our publishing roles were a bit different. So obviously now we sell onto our publishing platform. At the time we didn't know how the sales of that would go. They've been really good, we're very happy with them. But we were thinking, "How much revenue can we generate from this?" Before we could actually think about, "Is there a role here to hire?" There is a possibility that we could have created a product that our audience wasn't interested in at all and that had to be accounted for.

So they were brought on planning about two months ahead. The way that we focus that, because we knew that that planning cycle was very short. We were thinking about how we could create really detailed cases for hiring, looking at the impact of the role, what their remit would be. And then also the, not quite KPIs. Something that's slightly more loose than a KPI. But what are the functional areas of the content arm that they would look after?

Currently now we have someone who is dealing with our branded content. So things that we co-create with other partners. Then we have someone who is specifically looking at audience reach and thinking about how we can reach new audiences. They've already created some really wonderful things. They're looking to engage our audience of senior individual contributors with our new StaffPlus track. We also are expanding into our manager planner segments, like LeadingEng for CTO-track engineering leadership, which is super cool. So we were looking at the philosophical hearts of these roles. And that was how we were planning around them.

This was very in the moment, using real time data and adjusting and really living and swimming in uncertainty and quick changes. It strikes me that there's a lot of new things that you have created in the last two years.

Yeah. I think what's super fun about what we've done at LeadDev is a different model. I know that I have friends who work in the events industry who have said that their business plan basically is to do two years online so that they can go back to life, basically. We had four events before the pandemic. We've now added this whole publishing arm, which is super fun, and another whole business area. But also when we're coming back, assuming again COVID allowing that these events have come back, we've launched an event. So we've launched StaffPlus New York and LeadingEng New York for the first time ever. We'll be running Leading Eng in London as well. Then beyond that, we'll be seeing how many more in-person events have been born from the times of the pandemic and they're now emerging as a flower out of that.

It's like a reinvention. While some are just waiting to come back, you all have decided to use the pandemic to serve your audience in other ways. It reminds me that we can build and grow through really challenging times. Not just survive, but learn how to thrive and move through something that is that altering for the business.

Yeah. It's been a lot of work. It's been fun.

I'm interested to talk to you about what it's been like for you as a leader, because you started as a content producer and now you are the head of product. This is the first time you’ve managed or been a leader, right?

Yep. It is new.

There's a lot of layers to your story, which is why I wanted to have you on. How was the process of scaling yourself and leaning into leadership as you grew your department?

Yeah. Definitely. It was super tough.

It was one of the things where you think you have everything figured out and then you realize you have nothing figured out at all.

That's the way it goes, I think. So our team, I guess scaled from ... so in August of 2020 is when we hired our first member of staff. Then we had grown to five by April of 2021. So it was within an eight month period that we had grown. Working in a team of two people really allows you to be constantly in contact, to be able to give tons of time to each other in a way that soon as then you find when you are working with five, then that becomes unscalable. So that was one of the really lessons — to think about how to possibly manage my time in a way that would allow me to be able to provide really on the ground support to new members of the team.

I'm currently now in a place where only one of my team members has been here for over a year. So we're still dealing with people who are still in emerging in the environment of the company. But also as well in content roles, it's quite a bit that we are not trained software engineers by any shadow of the doubt. We're asking all my teams to talk about really complex issues here. So they're still learning about them. If I were to expect someone to come into a role and four months later understand what a migration was and understand the differences between observability and monitoring, they would find that really tough. That is really a constant process. I'm definitely still learning.

As a leader, I’m growing in being able to divide time between the higher top level work, while also being able to provide really practical on the ground support. In a company as well where as the only member of the content team has been here over two years, I was really the only person who was a source of knowledge to all four of the members of my team for a good while. That was a really tough shift.

What was hardest about that shift?

When I was working on my own, I was used to thriving by having every piece of information in my head. I could name every contributor that I've worked with, I could tell you what company they're from. I could tell you that. Now if I had to go to our website and look at our meet our contributor page, I can't tell you half the people, because they've worked with any of the amazing members of my team. That's really awesome, but for me, it was super destabilizing because I went from a position of having absolutely every piece of knowledge to then suddenly being like, "Ah, I can't actually help you because I don't know where this is coming from." That was a really wonderful thing because it allowed me to step back and really grow experts.

For my team coming in, that's a really stressful environment because it's controlled failures are really tough because what the content of producing will be going out to our audience of 60,000 people. So if they get something wrong, it's really public. So that is a really tough thing to manage through because you want to be able to give people a chance to say, "Oh yeah. Try it, see if it works." But you also do need to guard the fact that there is a right and a wrong in these areas. That was something I've really struggled with. I think it's happened a couple of times with we've asked where I've worked on a project, we've looked at it, and maybe it hasn't been 100% right and it goes out to the audience.

That's super demoralizing for myself, whoever is working on it because you've looked at something you've worked really hard to create and it isn't resonating with an audience. Not saying it's entirely wrong, but can see the gaps in it. Managing the risk and the emotion of that was someone I found really, really tough and still to this day. There are times when it happens and it's like, "Yeah, it's really demoralizing experience." So that's some of the challenges. There are few more, but yeah, those are good ones.

I think most leaders struggle with going from knowing everything, being hands on and then their role changes. Your role has dramatically changed in the last two years. What you were doing two years ago is not at all what you are doing now.

Not at all.

You're still in content, but now you're doing much more directing and strategy or prioritizing or guiding mentoring. That’s a very different role.

Yeah, exactly.

Were you interested in being in a leadership role before? Was that something you had dreamed about or thought about?

Yeah, not really. Do you know what I mean? There's a term software engineers usee — makers and managers — which is about the split between the staff and the management track. I'm a really content maker. I think most events, people will say this, but I really loved being able to see something created. Working on something, putting into the world and also having done a bit being like, "This existed and now I can move on to my next thing." So I never really thought about leadership.

I'd also, I guess, more fundamentally, and this is maybe advice for your own world, is I hadn't really thought about the craft of management as well. I had always thought managing was just an extension of being able to talk to people more in a way that it is absolutely not in any way. So I guess I had thought, "Oh, maybe I could do that," but it was never a directive thing at all.

As you were growing out the team, did you ever ask yourself, "Do I want to step into the role of leader"?

So when it was happening, no. But after it happened, yes, definitely. So as you know, as we've said, it happened so quickly that things were just springing up. I guess I hadn't really thought the implications for it on the role as well. I think as well, I naively in a way that you could imagine,

you can never really see what the role is going to look like until after you're in it.

So a part of me, one of the things that is always talked about switching into any level, but specifically going into management, going into management of management is that idea that you are creating less. And also your timelines are so long and you can never see the results of the work that you are doing. Or you can, but only looking back at a nine month period.

That was a really big moment for me, I was, as we've talked about, spinning up events quickly, getting someone to write for our website and our article being published in six weeks and doing that really at scale as well. So we're talking about events with 50 people, 40 or so articles a month. You can really see the fruits of your labor in a really brilliant way. Then moving to a position where I now do maybe one event a year, if we're at a busy time. I might do a tiny bit of content commissioning. But really it was a big shift to think like, "Oh, actually the things that I really took value from in my job, really, I'm not able to get the value from that anymore."

It was a moment for me where I was like, "Oh, do I actually want to do this? Do I want to go back to a role where I'm doing more prescriptive? I'm creating things, where I'm, putting it out?" It was a big thing. It was an emotional thing, obviously for a while.

As everyone knows, when you step into a new role, I thought I'd mastered my role when I was in it. Then I suddenly was like, "Ah, I can't do my job anymore. I'm a bad person at doing this job."

But you do take a lot of value from the work you're doing today. And if you spend eight hours doing something and you leave and you think, "Oh, I'm not doing a good job. I don't feel like I'm proud of the work that I'm doing." it is super destabilizing. So I guess, to answer your question, I didn't think about it if I wanted to do it before, but afterwards I had huge doubts about if it was something that I would find valuable and if it was something that I wanted to do.

I think lots of leaders to ask themselves “What is the value in my work”? That's part of that transition. So I love that you're speaking to that. What are the things that you are enjoying about leadership?

I have a very clear answer, which is I have the most amazing team in the world. They are super awesome and being able to watch them create really great things. One of the really big shifts in my role is thinking about the things that my team are creating now. I've got three people who sit on the production side and they're creating things that I never would've been able to produce because everyone produces everything different. Do you know what I mean? There are things that I would never have had the imagination to do. There are things that I would never have the skill to do. Watching that is really incredible. And then seeing how that impacts every part of part of content production at LeadDev is really important.

I feel really lucky to work at LeadDev, because I really believe in the mission of LeadDev I believe that in our own small way, we are starting to affect the engineering leadership industry for good.

Being able to see your team really put super clever work into the world, to be really intelligent with the way they think about content, with the way they think about people, always keeping empathy at the top of the list is a really beautiful thing to see and a really beautiful thing to be a part of. So I think that's the clear way I get satisfaction in my role. There's still definitely this part of me like, "Oh, hell, this is tough." But that always what is what brings me back.

Let's say we could go back and talk to Rob of two years ago. What advice would you have given that person who is about to scale the department, pivot the business and become a leader?

It definitely depends on when you spoke to me. If it was before pandemic, I would have said, "Get a lot of sleep now, because it's going to be a bumpy few months." But I would say, I guess some of the things I think are really important to do is always remember what you're pointing towards, has been the thing that my team have really needed the most. I think my team approach in such a high uncertainty environment, that being able to show the mission, show the vision, show where we're headed and give the fundamental, "This is the north start that we should be looking towards," is such an important skill.

Something that I didn't realize as well, I also think that the piece of advice that I really have internalized, which I believe it's from Lara Hogan, but it could be, maybe it's not? Is if you ever want to get a message out, say it seven times in seven different ways. I think particularly for roles like this on the product content side, we're so used to being so in the detail. Even now as in the role of head of the department, I'm still much more in the detail than I guess other members of the team are. Because of that, it's really hard to understand outside of my own context.

So I remember one of the things that I really struggled with in my first few months as a manager was I was going to meetings and I was explaining my work once. Then a week later people would come and they would not understand it. I could never understand that fact. I'd be like, "Oh, but I've told you. I've said the things that I was saying." I never realized that was because I couldn't see outside of my own context. I couldn't see that I was probably giving parts of the right information, but I wasn't giving it frequently enough. I wasn't giving it in a way that people who weren't understanding what my role would be able to easily grasp and be like, "Oh, okay, I get this." So yeah, that my big three things. Sleep, say things a lot and say things frequently and remember the vision.

That whole idea of mission and vision and staying really focused, which is funny because people think, "Oh, mission and vision, it's so fluffy." But those things have real purpose for the business and leaders think about those things.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think as well, when you're operating in such a high change environment, your vision is the only thing that will keep people motivated in many ways. You know what I mean? Obviously it has been a really wonderful two years, but there’s been really months and weeks that have felt completely lost in the company. They're always the weeks when I have no idea what I'm headed. And they're for me by far most demoralizing. So that trickles down. It trickles up, it trickles left, trickles right. Those weeks when you have nowhere you are pointing, they're always the toughest for me.

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