Season 3, Ep. 27 – Improving software delivery with AI and Open Source, with Scott Sanchez, CMO, Harness

Transcript

(THE FRONTIER THEME PLAYS AND FADES OUT)

Faith (00:05):

Hey, Scott. How’s it going?

Scott (00:06):

Hey, how are you? Can you hear me okay?

Faith (00:07):

You’ve got a great setup there. The sound quality’s immaculate <laugh>.

Scott (00:13):

Thank you. You know, I actually have a nice, like, Shure SM7B microphone and the whole thing, and I don’t know. I hate it being like…I have a standing desk, (Faith: Yeah.) and I don’t know, I just hate being sort of tethered, so I was like, you know, I’m just gonna go old school, sportscaster style here and really just go for it. So…

Faith (00:32):

Yeah, I love the headset. I think that’s the next step in my remote work journey, is probably doing a headset. I’m still working with these like, I don’t know, 2004 special headphones, but there’s just something about the wired connection that just gives me peace of mind, you know?

Scott (00:50):

It is, and you know, part of it is don’t fix what’s not broken <laugh>. (Faith: Right.) If it works for you, you know, and these are, these are good for like, an hour, (Faith: Yeah.) and then it’s like, okay, I feel like my ears need a breather.

Faith (01:04):

Yeah <laugh>. I need to get that tattooed someplace visible. “Don’t fix what’s not broken,” because I feel like that is the theme of my life. (Scott: Yeah, right.) We just finished a huge renovation on our house yesterday. Like, they wrapped up, they cleaned everything up.

Scott (01:20):

Congratulations. That’s a milestone.

Faith (01:22):

Thank you so much. And we are about to submit an offer on a new renovation. Completely unexpected, just found this house. And it’s the same thing. It’s like, “Don’t fix what’s not broken, Faith. Come on, live in your house for a little bit.”

Scott (01:35):

I have done the like, full gut renovation. I’ve done the small like, we’ll improve some things, do a bathroom here and there, (Faith: Yeah.) and then I’ve done the, when I lived in Austin, there was a lot of new construction happening, and so I just bought a brand new house from the builder, and (Faith: Wow.) I’ll tell you, that’s pretty great. Where you can say like, “Oh, customize this <emphasis>. Like, I want it like this <emphasis>,” (Faith: Yeah.) and you just move in, and it’s still got that like, new house smell. It’s pretty great. So…

Faith (02:00):

Man, okay. That’ll be, that’s next on my list. (Scott: <Laugh>.) I’ll see if I can make that happen. Well, Scott, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast. I feel like you and I can probably talk for hours and hours about developer marketing. So just to give folks context, Scott, you are the CMO at Harness, which is an end-to-end software delivery system, and you use AI to automate the parts of software development that are kind of most tedious and painful for developers. So I’m excited to dive into that today. We’re gonna talk a little bit about Harness’s growth. I know you’ve leveraged open source and open source communities to do that. And, you know, kind of what’s on, what’s on the docket for Harness.

Voice actor, via Harness promotional video (02:48):

(UPBEAT TECHNO MUSIC PLAYS) Before the cloud, the developer experience was relatively simple. Developers could focus on writing code, drinking coffee, and eating pizza. Today, developers have to not only write code, they have to deploy it on demand and manage everything from cloud infrastructure to container orchestration, to pipeline scripts, to plugin dependencies and even security. What if a single pipeline could do it all? Simple, smart, scalable. Harness: it’s the only pipeline you’ll need. (VIDEO AUDIO FADES OUT)

Faith (03:20):

The last couple years seem like they’ve been big. You’ve been awarded all kinds of things, Top Startups of the Year list in 2021 from LinkedIn, oh, sorry, in 2020, and then in 2021 you were on Tech Crunch’s Best Startups to Work For, Forbes’s 50 Best Cloud Computing Companies to Work For, and Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work. So it sounds like I should go work for Harness <laugh>.

Scott (03:46):

We’re hiring, so, you know.

Faith (03:48):

Well, we’ll talk about that, too, yeah. Obviously, Scott, I really am interested to hear about you. I think, you know, everybody’s career story is so fascinating, and I know you’ve had some, some peaks in there that’ll be interesting to talk about, so this is gonna be fun.

Scott (04:02):

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate you having me. I would say I’m an accidental marketer, (Faith: <Laugh>.) certainly not someone that’s set off on my career path to be a marketer, and in fact, there were quite a few years where I avoided the marketing title altogether. (Faith: Yeah.) Even when marketing reported up to me, I was like, “No, no,” you know, “Call me ‘Chief Strategy Officer’. Call me ‘Head of’, you know, ‘Growth’.”

Faith (04:25):

Sounds like a real developer.

Scott (04:27):

Go to market, anything but marketing, right? And yeah, I think it comes from that natural reluctance to things that aren’t factual, things that aren’t, you know, proven, and marketing sometimes can have a reputation for, you know, stretching the reality of truth. So, (Faith: Yeah.) for me, I was at Amazon Web Services, prior to Harness, and, you know, in more of a product marketing role, but at AWS, product marketing wears a whole bunch of hats. Everything from figuring out the campaign strategies with those teams, to what does sales enablement and go to market look like, and then obviously, messaging and positioning. So it was sort of like, your CMO or GM of all these little services, some of which were very large services at AWS. And you know, when I joined Harness, it was because they built this incredible product and company at a Series C stage, already, without a tremendous amount of marketing. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.)

Scott (05:24):

The product was speaking for itself, the community was growing, sales was doing a tremendous job and still is, in terms of growing the company, but there was an opportunity to take what was sort of an early growth stage marketing function, which stood up a website, ran a few ads, showed up at events, supported sales with the basic blocking tackling. And how do we get that to evolve to the kind of marketing organization and the kind of contribution for marketing that would bring us to, you know, a billion dollar run rate? (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) And so that was sort of the thinking, since I joined, as you pointed out, we’ve continued to grow. We’ve raised to a Series D last year and (Faith: Wow. Congrats.) more than doubled by every single metric, and so the company’s done really well. And certainly, you know, there’s a lot of work to continue to do from a marketing perspective to get to that billion dollar ARR kind of mark, (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) but, you know, building the foundations on which that type of scale is achievable, instead of, you know, sort of, on the path that they were on, which was, “Let’s just make sure that sales has what they need.” Now. It’s, you know, “Let’s make sure we have a mature marketing organization.”

Faith (06:33):

Let’s start at the foundations there. I’m sure you’ve read the book, Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, and (Scott: <Laugh>.) that’s always my joke when people ask what I do, I’m like, well, I kind of like, my job actually doesn’t exist, you know? And I think the foundation of being able to market something to developers, which is both of our audiences, is having a product that they actually want, which seems obvious, but I think often we can lose sight of that as ICs and as companies. So I’d love to hear about your experience working with Harness, that’s, you know, you mentioned the mission is so critical and so almost emotional for developers, because it relates to how satisfied they are in their job, right? And so what has that been like, working to market something that really does solve a pain point for devs?

Scott (07:26):

Yeah. I mean, you know, back to sort of my origin story as a developer way back when, and you know, I do still enjoy hacking on code and building things, I think, at my heart, I’m a builder. I just learned really early that I didn’t like getting paid for writing code. I liked getting paid for turning that software into a business opportunity and turning it into a way to solve problems for companies. I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of developers who care about things they like, (Faith: <Laugh>) and how do you, you know, how do you articulate that in a way that doesn’t sound like marketing? (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) That sounds, back to the truthiness meter of like, “Okay, is what I’m telling you real? Can someone identify this product, download it, sign up for it, use it, and in minutes realize the value of that,” (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) “in a way that’s tangible?”

Scott (08:27):

And I think developer marketing is a very real thing. Anyone that, you know, I know the book has a kitchy title, but it is a very real thing. The nuance for me, for Harness, for anyone that I think is gonna be successful here is, how do you turn what could be a fluffy marketing pitch into something more tangible, into “you have a problem right now, I have a solution right now”, and in five minutes you can quickly see that I’m not full of it? Right? (Faith: Right.) And I think it’s that level of just authenticity that has to come through, as opposed to talking at a level where you’ve lost all of their trust, before they’ve even tried your product, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) which is really easy to do. “We’re the best transformational digital, you know, X, Y, Z,” like, they’re just gonna go to the next thing on Google and try that one instead, because you’ve already lost credibility, right? (Faith: Right.) And so I think making sure you’re always talking at the right level, making sure you’re delivering value as quickly as possible, is sort of the quick route to a developer’s heart. (Faith: Right.) And then, if they have a great experience in the product, then they can become your champion and they can go tell everybody else how great this thing is.

Faith (09:46):

Yeah, and I know, you know, one of the key levers for growth at Harness has been your open source community. And so I’d love to hear your perspective on the foundations of that, the impetus, and, you know, how you’ve seen it boost community engagement, and then ultimately growth, on the product side.

Scott (10:08):

Yeah, I think it’s important with open source that companies support and nurture the mission of that project, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) while keeping two things in mind. One is, it’s okay to attach your brand to that. Like, you don’t have to keep it so far away that no one knows it’s yours. (Faith: Right.) Like, I think there’s actually comfort in knowing that there is a bigger company behind this thing, so that if I spend my time integrating this into my workflow or bringing this into my organization, it’s not gonna disappear, ‘cause someone gave up on it next week, right? (Faith: Yeah.) And so I think, you know, don’t be afraid to attach your company to something in terms of an open source project, but at the same time, don’t smother it with your brand either. Like, it should be a standalone entity that can operate, and have governance, and have transparency and visibility.

Scott (11:02):

And I think, you know, I’ve had to do this a number of times in my career, and there’s a balance. You don’t always get it right. You know, I think at Harness, we’ve done a good job of navigating choppy waters (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) with the open source world and making sure that some of our key projects, like Drone for CI or Litmus for Chaos Engineering and resiliency testing, like those are both thriving communities as a result of Harness’s involvement, not despite it, right? And I think that’s sort of the balance of it, right? (Faith: Right.) It’s also important that marketing leaders and product leaders understand that not everyone is going to find a path from an open source product to your commercial offering. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) At every company I’ve ever been at, there’s always a conversation that happens at some point with an open source project of like, well, how do we get these people to pay? (Faith: <Laugh>. Right.)

Scott (11:59):

And it’s like, well, not everyone that signs up ever has an intention to pay. Not everyone has a use case where paying is important and not everyone wants to abandon being a builder for being a user, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) and  it’s that last one that I think a lot of people, it’s easy to to forget that. Right? And so thinking about it in terms of, there are companies and teams where finding the best open source project and then building a team around it who is going to turn that into a project or product within your organization, there are people who, like, that’s what they want to do. And it doesn’t matter how much push you give them to try and move over to our paid SaaS version or our commercial offering, that’s not why they signed up for it in the first place, right? (Faith: Right.)

Scott (12:50):

They signed up for it to have the ingredients, not the finished product, and I think it’s important to recognize that, respect that, and support that, because those people can also be the biggest champions of your open source project down the road, the biggest contributors to it, and so on. So I think, again, back to balance like, recognize that, for some people, it’s a path to your commercial. For some people, it’s just where they want to be, and I think making sure you support both sides of that.

Faith (13:18):

Yeah, and I think understanding that they’re each valuable in their own way. You know, brand marketing is often overlooked, because it’s just kind of, it’s inherently really hard to measure ROI for, and it requires a lot of resources. So something like an open source community, you’re right, you’re always gonna have a percentage of folks who are not gonna convert to paid users, but what they will do is trust your brand and probably talk about your brand. And when they’re sitting in team meetings, listening to other folks vet solutions for something that you offer, they’re going to recommend your product, because there’s that awareness and that trust. So it’s easy for folks like you and I to see that path, but I think, when we’re advocating for something like an open source project internally, it can be challenging, right?

Scott (14:11):

It can, and especially if you try and frame it as a, “this will be good for our brand” (Faith: <Laugh>.) type of thing, right? Because there is a significant engineering investment that you have to make on an ugly basis. (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) There’s developer relations, there’s community engagement, there’s, you know, like, there’s all of these sort of like, seemingly disconnected, but really integral parts of what makes an open source investment successful, and if they’re not all there, if, you know, marketing’s doing a great job with awareness, but engineering’s not responding to poll requests or to issues with the code, or, you know, if the DevRel side of things isn’t showing up at the right places in the right communities to show relevancy and active project, like, none of those can stand alone. And I think you sort of really do need a mission statement as a company for why you’re doing this. (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.)

Scott (15:05):

Not just like, “Oh, well we have this code, let’s open source it. It’ll be great.” (Faith: <Laugh>.) “We’ll have a giant community next year of all these people in our community Slack.” It’s like, no, you won’t. Right? You won’t. The reason people gravitate towards open source is, sometimes first for novelty, if you truly have a novel thing out there, but then it’s because there’s a thriving community around it, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) so you have to bootstrap that until the point where that’s actually true. And there’s a great quote from Jeff Bezos, which I’ll butcher, but I’ll paraphrase, which is like, he’s willing to be misunderstood for a long period of time. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) Like, willing to invest in something that other people are like, “I don’t get this,” for a long period of time, ‘cause he has high conviction. And I think open source is very similar, where if you’re a company trying to succeed with an open source project, you should decide to make a multi-year investment in all the ingredients that are gonna make that successful. Not just think you’re gonna flip from close to open and, in your GitHub repo, put out a tweet, and now, all of a sudden, you’ve got something. (Faith: Right.) It’s like, very rarely is that actually the case, right?

Faith (16:08):

<Laugh>. Yeah, only for the lucky ones among us. Obviously, the growth of your open source project has been, it’s in no small part due to your efforts, right? And I think you touched on one learning, which is, it’s a commitment, and you have to decide that this is a long-term strategic initiative for the company and get everybody’s buy-in around that. I’d love to hear, you know, maybe one or two other golden nuggets of learnings for other folks who are maybe trying to do the same thing. What have you found most useful as you’ve grown the open source community at Harness?

Scott (16:49):

So back to the, you know, communities form around communities, if that chicken and egg problem, I think having a really strong face of the project, like, pick someone in the organization. Maybe it’s the person who came up with the idea, maybe it’s the product manager, maybe it’s someone in marketing, doesn’t matter. A developer relations person, but like, someone or multiple someones need to be a human face to this project. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) Whether or not you have your corporate brand attached to it is irrelevant, if there’s not authenticity with it. If there’s not a human who, I can go on Twitter, or I can go on GitHub, or I can go on a Discord, or wherever it is, and talk to that human, and see them on stage at a conference and, you know, hear them on podcasts and you know, I wanna know that there’s actually someone behind this, and that someone is smarter about this topic than I am. (Faith: Yeah, yeah.)

Scott (17:49):

Like, that’s the thing is, you need sort of a vibrant thought leader that drives the community for you, because if it’s no one, you know, if it’s sort of everyone’s job, then it’s no one’s job (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) type of problem where it’s like, “Oh, we’ll just have product work on this. We’ll have marketing work on this,” And like, no, no, no, no. You need someone who is genuinely passionate about this problem that is the face of this project for you, and this goes, whether you’re an indie developer working on an open source project, or you’re a giant company, like, the problem remains. You need a face, and I think that person, making them the mini CEO of this project, and they’re out there constantly evangelizing for it, that is like, numero uno, in terms of how you’re gonna make this project the success, long term.

Faith (18:41):

That’s interesting. I think that’s probably applicable. You know, we talk about trust a lot when we talk about developer marketing, and I think that’s applicable for just about everything you do as a business. Like, doing it behind the business’s logo and saying, “Well, this is the company saying this or doing this,” doesn’t always work. You know, having a face in a human and a person that people feel like they can know is critical. I think whether it’s an open source community, or growing, or just any sort of developer marketing.

Scott (19:12):

More than just a press release. (Faith: <Laugh>.) Like, we have this brilliant person who’s quoted in the press release or, you know, whatever, and we’re gonna get her on stage, and she’s gonna talk to you about, you know, how this is the best thing to solve your problem, right? And you can just feel that passion oozing from that person, who is not just a spokesperson, but actually a user and a contributor to the project and, you know, leads hard technical discussions, and, you know, that that type of person, which then becomes two, and three, and five, and ten people down the road from all different companies. Like, that’s how you get from zero to one in an open source project.

Faith (19:52):

Right, right. Well, you and I have chosen an interesting career path, right? Developer marketing, if we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a hundred times, it’s uniquely difficult when compared to other forms of marketing. And so I’m curious to hear from you, what do you enjoy about that challenge?

Scott (20:13):

I like that developers are just like, the ultimate sniffers of B.S. (Faith: Yes.) Like, there is, and you know, like, coming up sort of through that path, I can sniff most of it, myself, and any anyone that’s worked with me or for me can attest to the fact that like, I push back on a lot of things. I’m like, “This sounds fluffy, this sounds like nonsense. How do we quantify this?” And there’s a fine line between like, are we just putting out feeds and speeds in our marketing materials? Is it just features and specifications which no one really wants? (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) Or is it actually describing the value of our product and the solution that we bring? And to do that in a way that passes the developer’s sniff test is very hard, (Faith: Yeah.) but it’s part of why, it’s part of what makes this job fun. You know, at Harness and a lot of companies, you’re not just selling to developers though. Your developers are your, are the people who often discover your solution, but they’re not the ones that necessarily buy it. (Faith: Right.)

Scott (21:18):

And so we do have a self-service motion at Harness. People can sign up for, you know, any of our software delivery products, but, you know, ultimately, a lot of our revenue comes from them discovering it and, you know, through an enterprise sales motion or, you know, other people. We have a CIO who comes in and says, you know, “I’m transforming how we build software here at this bank, or this airline, or whatever it is, and, you know, our thousands of developers, we’re gonna have them use Harness.” Right? And so there’s that meet in the middle that happens. And so, you know, our team has to be good at both describing the individual products in a way that is compelling to a developer and describing the outcomes in a business-centric type of framing. And, you know, then teaching our salespeople, and our SEs, and our partners how to find that story and meet in the middle when, when you are in a sales process.

Faith (22:14):

I always tell folks the same when they, for early…folks who are early in their career, and I’m sure you remember the, well, your career trajectory was a little bit different, but you’re kind of faced with this big, huge world of not just marketing roles, but you, I mean, you could do product, you could do, you know, a a general strategy role. And the question is always like, well, what should I care about? Right? What should I be looking for? What’s most important to learn early? And my sense for folks who think that they wanna do marketing long term is like, start with the hardest group to market to, and if you can market to that group, and if you can speak well to that group, then you could, you can do anything. You can write copy for any kind of product or service, so I’m with you there. I’ve found it to be incredibly educational <laugh>, because they will tell you if you don’t do it right <laugh>.

Scott (23:12):

I think one of the most important skills a marketer could have, is to learn how to sell, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) right? And I was very, I’ll put air quotes around “lucky”, if you wanna call it that, (Faith: <Laugh>.) early in my career. I was doing, I was like 14 years old, probably illegal child labor at the time doing telemarketing, selling, of all things, like chimney repair and chimney sweeps, (Faith: Oh my god <laugh>.) and you know, you learn real fast how to get a compelling message through very quickly. (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) And then over the years, I’ve spent probably years of my life on trade show floors and, you know, other environments, where you’re having those conversations in real time, and you’re seeing like, hey, if I change one word here, how does their reaction change? How does their engagement change? And like, that skill of being able to actually sell something to a person live, versus like, I’m gonna put it in a document, and then it’s gonna end up on a webpage and a gated asset.

Scott (24:15):

Like, those are all good skills. Those are important, but I think your ability to get better at your craft only happens when you’re out in the real world trying it. (Faith: Right.) And that, so I would encourage marketers to seek out any opportunity, you know, go be a sales development rep for a day, make some cold calls, right? (Faith: Yeah.) Go work a trade show booth. Go actually talk to people. Go sit in on a EBC or some customer calls, if you can. Like, now we have Gong and some other products that record everything, and you can sort of shadow it, and that’s fine. Like, consuming is good, but practicing it with actual humans in the real world is such an accelerator, and I think, (Faith: Yeah.) given an opportunity, I think everyone should try to take that.

Faith (25:04):

I totally agree. That was when I landed here at Gun.io, I was charged with taking all of our inbound calls <laugh>. You’re right. It’s kind of like learning through pressure, which was necessary.

Scott (25:20):

I know marketing, sales, you know, there’s sometimes friction between those teams. I’ve heard, I’ve never experienced this myself, (Faith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.) wink, wink, (Faith: <Laugh>.) but, you know, I do think that sales is hard. (Faith: Yes.) You know, like, you know, marketing has its challenges, but sales is hard, and I think anyone that has spent time walking those shoes, and has carried a quota, or built and led a sales team, or gone out and had to pitch a hundred times in a day, only to get one person maybe that says like, “Yeah, I’ll take that conversation.” It changes how you think about your job as a marketer, (Faith: Yeah.) and you know, I have a lot of respect for my friends in sales and my peers here at Harness that do that day in and day out, ‘cause it’s hard. And the better we can equip them to succeed in those conversations, you know, the better off everyone is, as an outcome. And I think, you know, don’t lose sight as a marketer that like, sales is your sort of key stakeholder.

Faith (26:25):

Right, they’re your primary customer. For sure.

Scott (26:26):

And the more you can get aligned on what’s necessary, I know we talk about developer marketing, but like, ultimately at some point, generally a salesperson gets involved, right? (Faith: Yeah.) And so, you know, even if it’s just helping your friends in sales understand how to have those tough, you know, data-driven developer conversations or, you know, understanding where they’re seeing friction and adjusting your enablement to help them overcome it, it’s like, it’s really important work (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) that is often brushed aside, ‘cause there’s a launch coming up, or there’s this happening, or there’s something else, right? Like, don’t forget about the importance of that follow-through all the way through to revenue.

Faith (27:06):

That’s good advice. Very sound advice. Well, you’ve seen both, through like, your work as a developer, but also at Harness, Harness serves teams of all sizes, and so I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of development teams, and it’s something that we think a lot about here at Gun. Like, what makes a great team, and of all the great teams we’ve ever seen, what’s common among them? What makes them tick? So I’d love to get your sense, as somebody who’s been embedded for so long with development teams, what tends to be true at super high performing teams of developers?

Scott (27:45):

So there’s a sign on my wall, it’s a quote by a gentleman named Graham Weston, who I worked with at RackSpace, what feels like a hundred years ago. And, you know, essentially it’s, you know, “What people really want is to be part of a winning team on an inspiring mission,” (Faith: Mm-hmm <affirmative>.) and I don’t think it matters whether you’re a developer, or you’re a marketer, you’re a salesperson, you’re finance, doesn’t matter. Like, I wanna be part of a winning team on an inspiring mission. And how that translates for me with developers and to the mission of Harness, is that too many developers feel like they can’t get their work over the line. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) Like, eight hours in a day, I spent 40 minutes writing some code and debugging it, and then I spend the other seven hours trying to get it through all the gates in my company of approvals, and checkpoints, and security, and this, and cost, and all these things to like, get it out and get it launched.

Scott (28:45):

And it can take weeks, it can take months (Faith: Yeah.) for this thing I spent 45 minutes on to actually see its way to a customer. Sometimes never. And so I think that as leaders build out dev functions in their organizations, you know, it’s one thing to have a high performance SDLC, powered by, you know, a modern software delivery platform like Harness, you know, plug that right there, (Faith: <Laugh>.) But I think it’s another thing to build a culture in which all the teams are aligned on the outcome. (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) Like, in a lot of organizations, it’s almost like, security’s job is to stop development teams from being successful (Faith: Interesting, yeah.) on their mission, right?

Scott (29:30):

You could build a winning team, but my inspiring mission is, what to like, write something and then have to convince 10 other teams to let it go to production. Like, that sucks. Who wants that job? No one wants that job, right? And so there’s a lot of talk about developer experience, and I think developer experience is an important topic and a lot of companies are just sort of coming around to the fact that we’ve created a pretty terrible experience for our developers to work at a lot of these companies. Tooling is bad, processes are bad, et cetera, et cetera. The thing that we’re helping our customers think about that are like, really progressive is like, how effective are your developers, right? ‘Cause if they’re effective, then their experience and their job is gonna be better, ‘cause they’re on this mission that they feel like they can win at, as opposed to just like, “Oh, I have a cushy chair, and I have great laptop,” (Faith: <Laugh>.) “and I have, you know, coffee delivered to me on a silver platter.” Like, I can have a good experience as a developer, but I still might not feel like I’m part of a winning team, (Faith: Right.) because I’m not actually being effective.

Scott (30:32):

And so I think getting to that point in development organizations where, you know, you’ve solved the process problems, you’ve solved the tooling problems, and you’ve gotten to a culture where all the teams are aligned around the outcomes. I think that is where you see developer effectiveness shoot up, (Faith: Mmm <affirmative>.) and then all these promises of innovate faster, and deliver features faster, and more velocity in your business, like, all that comes true if you have effective developers, but if you only have happy developers, those aren’t the same thing, and so let’s not lose sight of the actual goal as a business is to like, have effective developers. And that’s really what, that’s what we’re trying to help customers with at Harness.

Faith (31:15):

Well, I will be writing down that quote from your former colleague, and also putting it in my office, because I find that inspiring. Scott, this has been incredibly helpful, very insightful. If folks are listening, and they wanna get in touch with you or learn more about Harness, where should we send them? (THE FRONTIER THEME FADES IN)

Scott (31:34):

For me, the best thing is probably Twitter. I’m just, I’ve been there a long time, so I’m just Scott Sanchez at Twitter. (Faith: Nice.) From there, you can find links to my LinkedIn and other places. In terms of Harness, Harness.io, and we are happy to field any questions you may have about the software delivery platform.

Faith (31:54):

Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you so much. This has been really fun.

Scott (31:58):

Yeah, thanks, Faith. It’s been fun.

Faith (32:00):

Thanks for listening to The Frontier podcast, powered by Gun.io. We drop two episodes per week, so if you like this episode, be sure to subscribe on your platform of choice, and come hang out with us again next week, and bring all your internet friends. If you have questions or recommendations, just shoot us a Twitter DM @theFrontierPod, and we’ll see you next week. (FRONTIER THEME ENDS)