#384 Mastering Remote Tech Leadership: Glyn Roberts on Managing Global Teams

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Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased joining me, Glyn Roberts. Glyn, thank you very much for being with me on the show today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, tell us a little bit more about you and what you are currently up [00:01:00] to and then we can take it from there.

Glyn: Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. Um, yeah, I'm Glyn Roberts. I'm CTO of digital solutions at Vention. Uh, Vention is a software development company. We have about 3, 000 engineers in about 20 countries. Um, so quite dispersed, large team, and I've been working as a professional for about 20 years, moving up into different leadership positions from a developer all the way up into like head of roles and CT role, CTO roles over that time.

Mehmet: Great. And again, thank you, Glyn, for being with me here.

Mehmet: Yeah, it ignited the question in my mind. So you're managing a very large team and I can imagine they are distributed. And yeah, nowadays, actually, this is the trend I would say. So what are like some of the key challenges you think, um, leaders like yourself, technical leaders, like you said, they face managing global tech teams and [00:02:00] how have you overcome them?

Glyn: Sure. I mean, interestingly, we have one extra stage of challenge as well with ours. So yes, we are a large team. We are based in multiple different countries with obviously different cultures and challenges there, but also because we're agency Our engineers work alongside multiple other businesses. I think we've got about 250 active clients.

Glyn: So not only do we have to obviously support and embed our own culture on the way that we work, we also have to adapt ourselves to the way that our clients work as well. So there's, um, yeah, multiple different challenges when trying to deal in a much more heavily remote world, especially inside different countries.

Glyn: So, essentially, let's start off with, um, the concept of the way that we like to work. Essentially, any clients that work with us, we want them to treat our engineers like their own. So, therefore, that's the best success that we always see. If the engineers are treated like their own staff that may be sitting next to them on site, um, that, that mindset [00:03:00] of they are yours.

Glyn: is an important piece and this ties very heavily into the ways they work, the company culture. And this is obviously one of the biggest challenges TwoFace to adapt because each, obviously every company has their own different direction and ways of doing work compared to everyone else. Um, but obviously as we then start looking at, um, the challenges of, yeah, some engineer, engineers might be based in Europe.

Glyn: Maybe based out in Asia. So maybe based on the U S obviously very different culturally. Um, I mean, myself, I used to, I've brought up in the UK. I then moved over to Portugal, worked over there for about a year and a half before coming back to the UK. And you'd see a massive shift in just the cultural aspects of the way they live their lives, the way they consider problems, the way they do work compared to just the UK and their.

Glyn: very closely aligned to the UK. So obviously in other areas, you can have much larger differences to, uh, what you may expect if you've only ever worked with locally based engineers. Um, [00:04:00] so yeah, I'll be, I'll stop there, but I'll let you ask more questions because obviously I've got multiple different routes from here.

Mehmet: No, no, absolutely. Absolutely. That's fine then. So no one thing, you know, Regarding, you know, having this, uh, the team, you know, sitting in multiple countries and I'm sure like, you know, sometimes you have different time zones. So, um, from, from your experience, what is the best way to have the communication as much as possible, you know, smooth and, you know, you make sure that, The collaboration is happening as you want it to happen from a leadership perspective.

Mehmet: So what have you seen, you know, effective, uh, when it comes to communication that I know, you know, you know, especially when it comes to, to, to technical teams, communication is, is key. So what have you seen and you, you experienced from, from communication perspective?

Glyn: Certainly. Um, [00:05:00] I mean, it's since we've moved into this remote world since COVID where remote has become a much more common occurrence or at least hybrid, uh, with people no longer sitting next to you in the office, the communication methods that we used to utilize in the past have sort of had to go out the window and had to move more towards a remote mindset.

Glyn: So be it, if they are still in the same country as you or others, obviously the way that we communicate with our teams, the way we work together has obviously changed. When it comes to the communication piece. You hear a lot of people say, you know, you want to over communicate. So the two biggest challenges working with a remote team is expectation management and communication.

Glyn: If you can deal with those two, everything else sort of falls in line, as long as obviously, you know, you've got people with the right technical skills, um, you know, the right tools that they need to do their job, it's expectation, understanding, and then the communication of day to day work and the communication piece.

Glyn: You always hear say, saying, um. You want to over communicate, which is true, but I've also [00:06:00] seen some cases where it goes way too much over communication. There's just so many meetings, just communicating the same thing again and again and again. So again, communication is important, but it needs to be done thoughtfully.

Glyn: It needs to be done in a way that is actually. Constructive, clear, and is, you know, ideally documented. So it can be come back to and referenced if it's something that needs to be, you know, instilled amongst the business, be it the strategy, be it the culture, be it um, like any important activities that are currently ongoing.

Glyn: So, um, yeah, asynchronous communication is great. Yes. You've got documents, you know, get, uh, GitLab have got great documentation on the way that they do remote working. Um, there's lots of different tools and methods and methods for, you know, Dealing with the communication piece, but it's about finding that right line between what your team actually needs.

Glyn: And it's very easy to go either too short or too far with the way that you communicate with your organization. So essentially expectations is always the biggest thing, you know. How often am I supposed to be available for certain [00:07:00] meetings? Do I need my camera on? Um, essentially if you email me out of hours, are you expecting me to email you back immediately, or do you understand that, you know, these are not my core working hours and I'll respond back to you in a more appropriate time is the expectation piece, which is always normally forgotten about because it's considered, you know, part of the existing culture in a business before you started moving out towards the remote working, um, direction.

Mehmet: So, so Glyn, you mentioned something and I think we're not only technical teams like I used to work like in consultants in consultation and, you know, during COVID, you know, when everyone went, um, you know, working from home and of course, like the trend continued, of course, um, and we became, almost remote only at some stage and now hybrid more or less.

Mehmet: So the thing that majority of the people they started to complain about and to your point, so for example, let's say some organizations, they use slack for their [00:08:00] communication or maybe another tool similar to slack teams. Maybe, uh, some teams, um, you know, they have this, uh, policy of having the calendar shared, You know, among their colleagues and the topic that always used to come is first of all, the amount of messages that comes to Slack, you know, or let's say teams, it became, you know, so much noisy, um, That people get interrupted all the time.

Mehmet: The second thing is regarding the calendar. So so people assume because, for example, let's say I'm part of your team again, and my calendar is I have slots off 30 minutes, right? So so people, they tend to book back to back meeting. So from Leadership perspective, I'm sure like maybe you have seen, not necessarily in your organization, but maybe you have seen like other leaders also complaining about this, uh, [00:09:00] happening with their team.

Mehmet: So what's the best approach? You mentioned culture, but do you think culture alone is enough or there should be like something else to be taken care of?

Glyn: There needs to be expectations managed depending on, uh, What team you're working in and the type of work that you do. So in the case of, um, your calendar being booked up on your behalf, that takes away a lot of control over what you do as a leader on a daily basis.

Glyn: So just because you don't have a meeting booked does not mean you don't have activities planned for the day. And therefore we then get into the situation where you're then deliberately putting block times inside your calendar, just to avoid them being booked just so you can, uh, you know, Continue with whatever activity that you need to do in an offline sense.

Glyn: Um, I've seen some CEOs and CTOs, uh, hide their calendar. So therefore people can't do that. They always have to reach out via messaging to ask for a time for availability to do it that way. Obviously adds a lot more steps to whoever's trying to arrange a meeting with you because they're waiting for [00:10:00] you to respond.

Glyn: Um, and then you give your availability. They've got to check the other people's availability on the calendar and then Find from there. Um, so, you know, that's not an ideal solution. It's better to have more of schedule periods. So if, you know, these are people that you are line managing, you want to make sure you have your one on ones.

Glyn: So therefore these things are covered. And only in cases where there is an escalation that needs to be had, is there a need to obviously add more time. You've then got the issue of other departments that want to take up your time for meetings, which you may not consider as high priorities. That's a different challenge.

Glyn: A different topic, different topic conversation all together. Um, the other thing that you mentioned there though, was, you know, let's say slack or teams Channels that people are in as a way of communicating And the first thing that everyone was saying that when we moved into a remote world was that we wanted To make sure that communication is open transparent, you know, you don't want any private chat rooms You want public chats therefore everyone gets to see everything that's going on sounds great But if you've got more than [00:11:00] five to ten people in your organization You It becomes incredibly noisy.

Glyn: It's impossible to keep track of everything that goes on. And it's hard for you to prioritize what you should and should not be reading. This is obviously a different challenge, again, of trying to find the right balance. If we're an organization like ours, we do have a central teams chat. So therefore we've got, uh, you know, channels and, and, uh, teams for.

Glyn: Uh, delivery and sales capabilities. We've got, uh, ones for each sales location, each delivery location. You've got legal teams, you've got specialist skills, a bit like, um, chapters and Spotify. Um, so obviously understanding what you should and should not be in is definitely daunting when you first joined an organization and you could spend your entire life just trying to read all the chats and never actually get any work done because you're just constantly reading the stream of content coming through.

Glyn: So in this case, Having everything public is not actually the right approach when you are a certain size, essentially, like I say, it needs to be thoughtful, concise communication that you're sharing with the business. [00:12:00] And yes, you know, your close teams, your members, those should be potentially private groups, which obviously everyone inside your team can see, communicate with each other.

Glyn: And then that information can be consolidated and shared for when it does. Impact a product or another team or someone else needs to be in place. So with us, like when we set up a new project, even internal projects, we create a new team, a new channel, the members are added. So therefore we try to reduce the amount of noise.

Glyn: So therefore anything that you are following is actually directed directly to what you actually need to understand rather than, um, just having everything open, which. Sounds great, but becomes very, um, very noisy and difficult for you to manage on a day to day basis as a normal user.

Mehmet: Yeah. One thing, uh, maybe it's related partially to, to, to the communication and even to the culture, uh, which is, you know, and this is, I was hearing this [00:13:00] from, from, you know, other startup CTOs and even like large organization CTOs.

Mehmet: Like, you know, when we were in the office close to each others, it was much easy to have or to work on creative projects. Um, you know, when we have all of us as engineers sitting in the same room, you know, we can brainstorm together and, you know, do much of the, um, I would say at least planning together in person.

Mehmet: Now with remote first and again Sometimes it's because the organization itself, you know, it has a lot of people working in different time zones so Is it like a myth that this can not happen in, in a digital world, Glyn, or no, it really, you need to bring sometime the team, you know, probably fly them somewhere, sit together and, you know, maybe socialize.

Mehmet: So, so how you see this aspect of, you know, really people being [00:14:00] in the same room to have the creativity, the pro not the productivity, I would say more the creativity part of, of their, uh, their jobs.

Glyn: Sure. I mean, the reason why there's still definitely a sense of needing to meet up in person, um, on a more regular basis to have these more creative conversations to do roadmap planning, sprint planning, or whatever it might be, it'd be more creative around a new product idea.

Glyn: Is that When we try to do this in remote session, Pete, the time hasn't been designed correctly. Essentially, if you have everybody in, you know, in an online sense, you've got 20, 20 faces in front of you, you know, and it's a four hour long session. People are going to drift off. They might be doing other work because they're overloaded.

Glyn: If you've got everyone in the same room, you can look at them and see that their laptops are closed. They're looking at the board. If they stop paying attention, you can, you know, click your fingers, ask them a question, get them back [00:15:00] engaged where in a remote environment, it's a bit harder. There are businesses that have actually.

Glyn: be able to achieve the very creative work that would normally be done, um, side by side in a remote fashion. But that's because it's always been very well refined. It's very, very defined the way they actually go about this process of going through this with clear goals, clear, um, checks about progress, clear, clear ways of making sure everybody that needs to have their voice heard is heard in those situations.

Glyn: Um, in. In an in person meeting, this is a lot easier to manage than it is in a remote way. So, yeah, essentially both can work. It's definitely harder to do certain things like that in a remote fashion, but definitely not impossible. There were several organizations I've seen do this incredibly successfully without the need to have to do an all hands on site meeting like this.

Mehmet: Yeah, that's that's good to know, Glyn. Now, shifting a little bit gears to maybe probably another [00:16:00] area, which is the leadership role itself, right? So, um, so this question I keep asking, you know, every CTO and, you know, even sometime I ask it for any, any, anyone who developed their career from from being software engineer, and they went Maybe it became either even a cto or a vp of engineering So what do you think currently is the best approach to develop?

Mehmet: You know the leadership skill? Uh, especially we have a lot of things moving around very fast. So what have you seen? Um, uh, you know, helpful and still valid today.

Glyn: Leadership has changed an awful lot over the 20 years. I would say, especially the tech industry, I sent, um, you need to be able to adapt to new situations and leadership.

Glyn: Isn't just about, you know, telling people what to do or how to do it. It's [00:17:00] about. In bringing out the best in the people that you work with. So therefore it's not something that's as clearly defined process that you could just follow every single time. That's always going to match. It's about people management and obviously being a developer, moving into a leadership position, it's a big shock to the system.

Glyn: When you first realized that your job isn't just a purely right code and deploy. It's now to enable the rest of the people around you to, you know, work in the interest of the business. Perform better, uh, you know, your shoulder to cry on or to a person to vent to. Um, the, the way that you do leadership is, um, incredibly different to, you know, as you go get higher, larger teams.

Glyn: And also as times change, the biggest shock was obviously the move to more like remote or hybrid working massive shock to the way people used to do management and leadership compared to now where hybrid is almost like a default. And, you know, fully onsite jobs are much reduced compared to what they were [00:18:00] four or five years ago.

Glyn: Um, so therefore it's the adaptation to the way that you work. And obviously with the things like remote, there's multiple different challenges. There's psychological safety, which is a lot harder to, um, to support with, to identify when people are struggling because it's easily hidden when you're on a zoom meeting.

Glyn: Um, there's the performance could be considered poor because they don't speak up much. Well, actually they can be the best performer in the whole organization, But they don't say much in the meeting. So therefore they get overlooked, you know, considered, um, you know, just doing what they need to as a minimum where actually they're providing an enormous value to the business.

Glyn: Um, you know, you've always got to be. Open and available to your staff because being a leader you are either, you know, there's two sides to it. One is you're representing the business to make sure the business gets the best, which is how you manage your team, but you're also representing your team to make sure they're protected and able to do their best work.

Glyn: So Despite what potentially the upper management might be trying to achieve, which would be a detriment [00:19:00] to the way that you work in the longevity of the business. So yeah, essentially leadership still is constantly changing things that I'd say are the fault that always stay is make sure that you're doing your one on ones.

Glyn: And probably even do skip level one on ones as well to make sure that the people that you're managing are also managing the step below them correctly. So I'd say that's always a given. And the way that we do this is constantly changing, especially with AI coming about now. Um, I'm imagining big impact changes to the way that you manage your team, the processes, the.

Glyn: Standups might be hugely changed and shaken up because this information could be collected automatically. Uh, yeah, I think the next two, three years is going to be, um, uh, another big change in the way management and leadership needs to work, uh, for businesses to remain successful and competitive in the market.

Mehmet: Glyn, this is very interesting. Uh, you just mentioning like some high level, but I think, you know, [00:20:00] for fellow leaders and for people who, you know, thinking about the future of leadership in tech, right? So you mentioned AI. So, okay, so it's gonna do a lot of things, but do you think like we'll make some stuff?

Mehmet: I mean some some of the tasks easy because of course, you know, it's gonna work faster. It can do a lot of things Versus you know a also AI becoming kind of a challenge maybe for the leaders because I don't know, like, um, probably you, you have maybe a lot of tools to use, you know, related to AI for your leadership role.

Mehmet: Um, so, so does it, if you can explain to me, you know, because you mentioned like a couple of things, but I want you to deep dive a little bit in how AI is going [00:21:00] to go into effect. You know, being successful as a technology leader.

Glyn: So I would say there's already immediate impact that's happening right now.

Glyn: So with all the meetings that are happening, you've got automated transcripts and AI summaries that could be produced for you. That is an amazing tool that can reduce the need for you to have to attend every single meeting. If you have, if you manage multiple teams and can't attend every single one, You can get summarizations of every single one, which will flag up the biggest blockers, the biggest challenges without you need to sit in for half an hour, an hour meeting just to understand these.

Glyn: So, you know, these AI tools are going to improve. I can imagine there's also going to be add ons happening soon to these, to flag where people are venting unhappy and, you know, identifying the happiness of a team. Or even perceiving other challenges moving forward, you know, these things already built into like Microsoft teams, co pilots, uh, you've got on zoom, you've [00:22:00] got read AI, I think it's on zoom.

Glyn: Um, but yeah, so there's multiple different tools there. So just on purely information gathering, I've been able to summarize this in a fast, full way for you to keep up to speed with multiple teams that you manage. They've been holiday for a week. You can catch up within an hour where before it had taken you ages to, that's an awful amount of information to provide it to you very clearly.

Glyn: The challenges here are that you're now trusting the AI to have assessed the data, the conversations correctly, and provided that information to you. You're trusting that, um, they're not providing you hallucinations or false information, which is therefore going to make you take actions, which are then going to be detrimental to either the team or the business.

Glyn: So that's the very first easy example that I can see where, uh, Um, AI is already having an impact on the way that we manage. Um, information overload is another concern where if you are dealing with lots of teams previously, you would just be doing spot meetings, you'd only attend a couple of them. And essentially you'd, you'd rely [00:23:00] on the leads of each team to feed to you their reports or highlight to you when there are issues.

Glyn: Now, essentially you're taking that responsibility away from them and allowing an AI to take over that management. The next stage that I'm seeing is that, you know, middle management, um, is sort of being decreased because of all these tools where, you know, at the moment we're having to reduce costs because the economy is pretty poor.

Glyn: So therefore a way of reducing costs, you've seen lots of businesses do it, is reduce the middle management team size, reduce the number of team leaders. In the team and actually now shift the responsibilities left onto the engineers. So therefore they're now taking on more responsibilities where a project manager or an engineering manager may have been responsible for those purposes.

Glyn: For before now, with that change, you've potentially got people that are less experienced on those sites. Yes, the amount of work that they had to do has been reduced, uh, from what it would have been previously. But again, there's a big [00:24:00] shake up happening here. So the way that we're managing our teams and the way that leadership is moving forward is keeping an eye on the future, on the tools, what works for them, but also considering that there's going to be a negative impact, even though, even though you see a massive improvement immediately from one of these.

Glyn: A prime example of this, sorry I love talking, a prime example of this is, uh, Klarna, for example, you know, they announced, you know, they implemented an AI chatbot to, which removed 70 percent of their need for, uh, customer support staff. The chatbot supposedly was having a better response rate from the users that was using it rather than physical customer support people.

Glyn: So they kept 30 percent of their customer support people. But the negative thing here is. That 30 percent job has now become an awful lot worse because they only get the hard, difficult, angry clients where all the nicer, friendly, you know, just, you know, the less challenging problems have all been dealt with by the AI.

Glyn: You've now just got the bad work. So therefore that's going to be a negative impact on that [00:25:00] team. So there's definitely a to and fro as we look at these different tools that we can utilize inside the business and you need to understand with every good, there's also a strong possibility of some impacts that you didn't perceive.

Glyn: As you are starting to incorporate.

Mehmet: Absolutely. And this is normal with each technology. Glyn, now the thing about the co pilot and, you know, you mentioned removing the middle management, uh, we've seen a lot of debates and again, we're not going into the technical details, but we've seen some debates about, you know, engineers, you know, developers using AI and, you know, do you think also like From leadership perspective now, if someone is relying too much on AI, so and there's no middle management to check, like what these guys are doing, okay, how they are taking decisions, not only from coding perspective.

Mehmet: So Like even I started to hear people that saying, you know, like the default thing [00:26:00] before was to go and let's say, Google it or search it on on any other search engine. So now give it to chat GPT or a similar tool. And then let's see what it comes up with. And then you end up sometimes with 80 percent maybe even more of the decisions or maybe some of the, um, routine tasks, I would say that usually these teams do is the output of an AI tool, chat GPT or another.

Mehmet: So you talked about this as being also a challenge for the leadership because now you have to go and recheck, you know, their works. I mean, do you see this also as another challenge?

Glyn: I think because we're at such an early stage with the AI development, absolutely. I mean, with coding as an example, uh, you know, we've been running lots of different pilots of utilizing co pilots for the developer side.

Glyn: Some of them are successful, some of them are not. Uh, some of the feedback you get is, that the developers have got lazy. They're just kicking the code over the wall to the QA team. [00:27:00] And now the QA team are overworked identifying all the bugs that the engineers should have really spotted or fixed where if they were coding it more manually, rather than utilizing the co pilot, obviously we see lots of successes as well, but yes, there's lots, there's negatives happening of when people just thrown and given the tools without understanding exactly how to use them properly.

Glyn: So training is a big piece. So even Even with co pilots for development, you can't just give it them and say, go ahead. You need to train them on how to use these things and what the biggest concerns are, what to look out for. And these tools are going to improve essentially, you know, AI is never going to be worse than it is right now.

Glyn: It's only going to get better. So I think there's definite expectation that engineers output of code is going to increase. That's going to put demand on the PMs, the QAs, the DevOps side to also improve their output. So a team actually improves together. And then you've got the administrative leaderships.

Glyn: Let's say it's the engineering leader where they need to be confident that what's getting released is actually still safe. [00:28:00] Yes. I can imagine multiple different AI tools being utilized to validate throughout the stages of deployment because we're so early right now. A lot of these. Don't exist in the state that they need to.

Glyn: So therefore people are just setting them up and going, Oh, right. My life's become a lot easier without any further thought. So just like with coders, just like with leadership. Yes, it's great to use these, but you need to be incredibly cautious and wary of what the negative impacts are. And some of them may not be immediate.

Glyn: You may be checking or validating the information you've been, you've been receiving, but still there might be another impact. hidden gremlin somewhere that, uh, you didn't consider, which isn't going to pop its head up for another three months. And then suddenly you have to rush around to try and identify and solve what that problem is.

Glyn: So, yeah, essentially I think there's, um, it has to be a team thing. You can't just allow one role and there's multiple, um, challenges as we go forward, as all these tools keep on improving and, you know, provide great value, but then also provide, uh, more interesting [00:29:00] things that we never thought of before.

Mehmet: Absolutely. So just like one more thing, um, on, on the AI thing, we've seen some applications where, um, people use the AI kind of a, um, persona, and then you can go and ask it to. answer in a way that mimics, let's say, the personality of that person. So do you see it, for example, from mentorship perspective?

Mehmet: Like, let's say, uh, someone knows Glyn very well, and you know, probably you have some, some, Maybe blogs, maybe you have shared some articles. So you put that into a kind of a, um, chat GPT, you know, a GPT, let's say. And then I go and ask Glyn. So whatever I want to, um, to come back to you and take your advice.

Mehmet: So I know all, you know, the information that you shared. So this, do you see like this kind of mentorship [00:30:00] using AI, something that, which is possible to happen? Is it like really. something that can work or we always, as you know, someone seeking mentors, coaches, we still need this personal touch.

Glyn: You still need the personal touch.

Glyn: I mean, what you're describing there, I have actually built, we've got similar tools, but not for that purpose. Essentially, you know, rag engines to be able to find all the information inside the business that we have in our SharePoint and our teams files. Be able to, uh, send, respond with, you know, like more clearer messaging.

Glyn: That's more professional. That's a more aligned to the venture name and branding, which is great, but it's not, um, it's not hidden. It's like, this helps you write it like this and then you tweak it to your purposes. Essentially. It's never all message Glyn in a team's channel. And then I've got an AI bot just responding back to them on my behalf.

Glyn: Essentially that mentorship, the leadership communication still has to be human because it's too high a risk. To rely on an AI and also too [00:31:00] many nuances, essentially just because someone says, right, I'm unhappy with something. It doesn't mean that the AI says, okay, well, obviously you're a low performer and we should fire you.

Glyn: That would be a terrible response. That's obviously not the way that leadership should work. And even if it consumed all the different leadership books that gave you some form of generic feedback, or maybe even really good feedback. It still has to be the actual manager, the actual lead, the actual leaders in the business that respond.

Glyn: So I definitely wouldn't recommend a mentoring, uh, tool like that, that would be utilized inside an organization. Maybe it would be a helpful training tool for people inside the business to learn how to speak, to learn how to communicate in certain ways, but not as a reliable tool that you should be utilizing instead of you doing your actual job as a leader inside an organization.

Mehmet: So we talk too much about AI, Glyn, like aside from AI, which is by itself, of course, like we can talk hours about it. So aside from AI as something which [00:32:00] is now trendy, everyone, you know, want to utilize it. Still, some people are examining it. What other technologies you think are shaping it? You know, the way we manage technology or, you know, so for someone like yourself, Glyn, as a CTO, um, what is on the horizon, something you see that is shaping the future, uh, of leading teams, maybe something which even from technology perspective, gonna change a lot of things, or is it just now the AI, what do you think?

Glyn: So there's a few things in the pie at the moment that could come to fruition. You know, you've got virtual reality, which has sort of had its peak and died down. That could come back with a vengeance and start to become a way of communicating. You've had blockchain, which also has had its peak and come back down again.

Glyn: It's useful in certain circumstances. It's not a bad thing. Default solution [00:33:00] for everything on the market, which is what it was perceived to be a while ago. Um, I would say that the AI impacts not talking about the actual technology, but the impact it's going to have is the expectation that the cost to market.

Glyn: To build, manage online products is going to be reduced and the impact that's going to have on both the way that businesses work, the market that exists is going to be changing hugely. So in my mind, you don't, you know, if this AI dream comes true, you're not going to need any more. Incredibly large engineering teams because a lot more code is going to be built and managed within AI.

Glyn: Obviously there'd still be engineering people in there. So therefore smaller organizations, all the other organizations can compete. So therefore they got to be more niche. Essentially, it's going to be more specific on exactly their target market. And then businesses that have never been tech enabled are now going to become tech enabled.

Glyn: And I think this is going to be the biggest shift that we're going to see over the next five years. because of, [00:34:00] you know, the way the economy is, people are trying to do things in a more cost effective manner. It's not about growth at all costs. It's now about profitability. So therefore organizations that can enter the market and they don't have to 10 X every three months, they just need to now to earn more money coming in than what they're spending going out.

Glyn: That is a profitable, successful business and a more mature business. And I can imagine a lot more smaller organizations coming through. So I think the impact on management on leadership is going to change heavily due to, um, that expectation with the way that the industry is going right now. So therefore smaller organizations, but a much more of them.

Glyn: So engineers that are concerned that AI is going to take our jobs. It's like, I don't believe that's going to be the case. I think the market's going to extend further into new areas that were not tech enabled and obviously build new businesses and opportunities that are still going to need engineering resources to be able to fulfill.

Glyn: Their goals, but AI is going to be heavily part integrated [00:35:00] into that. So I'd say that's the biggest thing that's going to happen from a management leadership perspective on the way that we do work. And, uh, yeah, like the large, big development teams are going to be smaller than what has, uh, been predicted.

Glyn: been perceived as a successful business or we have 10, 000 engineers running our product that isn't going to be perceived as a successful business anymore, because there's less of a need for that number of engineers. Maybe unless if you actually building in the AI space, which obviously has an awful lot of investment right now working in there.

Mehmet: Absolutely. I agree with you, Glyn. And I think this is the, I'm seeing, you know, signs of what you're saying, you know, Uh, the trend of having like smaller teams, you know, but, uh, leveraging the technology and as they say, especially in these tough times of the economy, doing more with less. So I think even, even if people, they don't want to do it, they would be forced to, to go that route also as well to, to save costs.

Mehmet: But to your point, and I'm [00:36:00] optimistic that this will open, um, you know, other, uh, spaces to, to explore, I would say, and, you know, build new businesses. So absolutely, uh, I agree with you, Glyn, on this. So, uh, final thing before, you know, I ask you, you know, where people can find more about you. So if you want to, based on all what Glyn has said, to be discussed today.

Mehmet: If you want to give kind of an advice for people who just started their career in technology and they want to, um, You know, seek a leadership role. So what do you tell them?

Glyn: So starting off in this industry right now, I consider a lot harder than when I came through, uh, 20 years ago when I came through, uh, there, you know, we had Java, Python, PHP.

Glyn: net, essentially. That was pretty much it. You didn't have these fancy front end frameworks. AI is something I covered in uni, but wasn't a real thing. thing, uh, database selections are small. You're understanding technology was relatively simple [00:37:00] over the last 20 years. Obviously I've been very lucky to be able to stay up to date with it because it's a constantly expanding field coming into this field now is an awful lot for you to be able to understand the full stack of the way everything works.

Glyn: So that's the first challenge. Um, it's even harder to get a job because if the perception of certain people, the industry is that, uh, um, a copilot AI is like a junior engineer. Yeah. Which you hear from some people. I don't think that's the case, but then they go, why do I need you? I can spend 20 a month on that instead.

Glyn: So it's harder to get into the industry, but you know, essentially I think that's going to come about, people are still going to need, um, you know, new engineers that are coming through because it's an important market to keep on expanding into, then as we go towards the leadership piece, you know, Essentially, if you haven't had a leadership role before, trying to prepare yourself for that is very important.

Glyn: Understanding what the leaders in the business that you work in right now do on a daily basis is probably the biggest eye opener to help direct you where your weaknesses lie in this space. [00:38:00] Essentially, you know, if you've never had to manage people before outside of a, you know, business, A small project that you've had to run.

Glyn: It's a very different world. You know, essentially the idea of people venting at you sounds horrific, but it's actually part of leadership. People need to vent sometimes, again, complain about people, how to manage it. If someone's unhappy with something, you don't dismiss it. Essentially you accept it. You understand that you work together on calming them down, understanding what changes need to be had.

Glyn: These are all things that, you know, books are still great. I know, you know, we live in the internet world. Everything's online. Why would I buy a book? Certain management books are evergreen. Essentially, the way you manage people, there's certain things that don't change, like managing humans is a prime example of giving you different different views of how to manage people from that perspective.

Glyn: So essentially, yeah, trying to keep up the speed and trying to find a mentor or someone that you can watch on how they manage learning from bad leaders. is also very important compared to learning from good leaders. So in your career, if you've come across [00:39:00] both, definitely keep an eye out on both of them, because there's, there's skills that you'd learn what to do and what not to do among, among that journey as well.

Mehmet: I'm happy you mentioned this Glyn, because I always say, you know, of course, I know like it's tough. tough at the moment that happens if you get like a bad leader. But actually I always tell people this is a great experience for you to manage the situation. So thank you for mentioning this. And of course, you know, exciting times in my opinion, and you, you, you shed a lot of light on, on multiple things, Glyn, which is very, very important, especially when.

Mehmet: Topic of AI that we could have gone like hours maybe discussing it. So 100 percent on this So as we come close to the end Glyn where people can get connected and find more about you

Glyn: Sure, I have a video blog at Glynrob. com That's got the link to all my socials my linkedin my twitter and on there You can see a lot of the podcasts that I do and some of the conferences that I speak at So all my information is available there [00:40:00]

Mehmet: Great.

Mehmet: I will make sure that the link is in the show notes. Uh, Glyn, really, I enjoyed the discussion and the conversation with you today. Uh, thank you for your time. I know how busy it can get, especially, you know, when you have multiple projects and many things going on. So thank you very much for giving us your time today and sharing your knowledge with the audience.

Mehmet: Um, and this is usually how I end my episodes. So please. This is for the folk who just discovered this podcast if you did so thank you for passing by I hope you enjoyed if you did so, please Subscribe and you know recommend us to your friends and colleagues and if you are one of the people who keeps listening and watching us Um, thank you for doing so we are available on all podcasting platforms and we are available also on youtube So keep tuned for more episodes in the near future.

Mehmet: Thank you for tuning in and see you again. Bye. Bye

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