Las Vegas 2022
Lessons Learned in Engineering Leadership
Lessons Learned in Engineering Leadership
MW
Michael Winslow
Distinguished Engineer / Executive Director, Comcast
Transcript
The next speaker is Michael Winslow, who has spoken here at DevOps Enterprise six times. Uh, he's spoken as a technology leader. Comcast ranked number 26 on the Fortune 500, uh, with over 8,000 software developers over those years. He's been a director of engineering later, a senior director. And today, uh, and, uh, uh, that story was about how he was asked to lead the SRE initiative for a critical service that was Xfinity back office. When I say critical, it's because it enabled revenue generating services, such as activation, uh, for direct to consumer and storefronts. And then he moved into the role of a distinguished engineer. So, by the way, congratulations. So to explain what he's going to talk about, I wanna give some background. So here at this conference, as I described on day one, uh, we have a huge preference for experience reports. We want real stories of how you've solved problems with evidence that someone actually appreciated the work that you did, uh, that you and your teams did.
But I love the advice that I would give myself earlier in my career that Luke Reddick from Target gave the focus on specific skills from Paul Gaffney, uh, that Courtney Kissler gave, and I specific we will have more, uh, topics like that in the future. And, and same with, um, uh, from Dean. And so due to a specific decision that Mike made a couple weeks ago, I asked Mike to talk about why he chose to switch from a management role to an individual contributor role and what it would take to get him to switch back. Here's Mike
<laugh>, what y'all trying to do?
What's up? DevOps Enterprise Summit. How y'all doing? Make some noise up there in the back. Let's make some noise.
All right. All right. DJ Kelly, thank you so much. And DJ Marguerite, who's been helping out here. Hey, for anybody who might be taking a picture right now and wants to post it somewhere, I wanna make sure that you have some context as to why I came out so flashy. This is not how I'm gonna do the whole talk. When I was researching this Chelsea Theater, I found out that in 2013, when they opened the theater, Bruno Mars was the resident act here for two years. And I, that excited me a lot because I'm a huge Bruno Mars fan. So I wanted to be a little flashy on my way out. So now you know why. So go ahead and post away, but put context in there, <laugh>.
All right, let's go back to who I am. 'cause I'm not Bruno Mars. My name is Michael Winslow. I am a distinguished engineer at Comcast in Philadelphia. Um, I'm also, I put executive director there because that's the role that I am, the equivalent role from a management standpoint. So Jean, uh, mentioned that I'd spoken here six or seven times already. And anybody who's seen any of my other talks, for the most part, I give these talks in ways where I speak about the team. This time, gene had asked to come and tell my story, and I'm a little uncomfortable with that. I don't, I I always like to talk about the team. I don't necessarily like to talk about myself too much, but because I'm a leader, I'm comfortable with being uncomfortable. So today I'm gonna talk about myself. All right? So a quick backstory, uh, for this, and when I say the word backstory, it's funny because people like, uh, Marvel and Disney and Jason Cox have made it so that every time you hear backstory, you start thinking to yourself, oh, it's a superhero, right?
Somebody that can breathe underwater, or someone that can fly, or maybe there's a cyborg that replaces all their body parts or something like that. Well, it just so happens that those things are true about me. So <laugh> no, I'm just kidding, of course. But in all seriousness, I was raised by wolves. So this is me, 1975 with, uh, my dad actually raced huskies. And so trust me, I am not afraid of dogs. I think Huskies are the most beautiful animal in the world. That's me and my big brother Sean, right there. And that's Bobo and asso. All right? And then a couple of years later, uh, fast forward to 1985, uh, I was about 10 years old. I was in middle school and I didn't have a lot of friends. In fact, I had one friend, and that one friend had one computer, and I think he had the only computer in the neighborhood.
And we started going to Electronic Boutique, and we started buying these magazines that had code in them in GW basic. So imagine 1985, 10-year-old writing GW Basic. That's pretty much all we did. Um, so then we started getting into graphics. And anybody who was in graphics back then can recognize this tiny graph paper. We would trace the, uh, stuff, and then we'd have to write out the coordinates in there. So hopefully this is a good walk down memory lane for a lot of people. I know it says 1985 on there, and you'll check me on this. Clearly it's 1993. 'cause there's the Jurassic Park symbol right there, <laugh>. Alright, so I'm, I'm actually building to something here. A few years later, I decided I wanted to try to be cool. So I went to the barbershop and I asked them to go ahead and put the year in the side of my head, <laugh>, so that there I am entering high school. And, uh, I wanted to be the cool guy. I wanted, I didn't want to be the computer geek anymore. All right? I, and a few years later, I even took it a step further. I started a rap group called Suburban Underground. So that's me right there, <laugh>. And, um, and then fast forward a couple of years later, and I wrote my own DJ software, and there's a lot of people who kind of know me here for that. This was our first ugly website for DJ Boo Boo right here, <laugh>.
All right. And so the point I wanna make with all of this, that leading up to this so far, is that you can see that I was a curious person. I had a lot of different, uh, things that I wanted to tackle. And so even at a young age, it was about problem solving and learning new things. All right? And the other thing you wanna do, if you're curious and you wanna get into leadership, eventually, it's one thing to be curious and take in for, in information. The other thing is to share the information freely. And with that, I wanna quote my late uncle, who was my, uh, mentor for many years. Um, and he told me when I worked for him in Amsterdam, a true professional should be able to speak for five minutes intelligently about any subject. Okay? Those words changed how I viewed interactions with everybody, all right?
When somebody started saying something to me that I didn't think was that important to me, in fact, I think I was an intern at one point and somebody said that they do medieval recreation on the weekends. They paint their selves blue and they make arrows, all right? And I was about to just write it off, like say, I'm going get the hell outta here. And I remembered my uncle's words and I said, tell me more about that. A decade later, I had a grand boss who did the same thing, and I shared that story with them, and it helped me in my career. Okay? Alright, so on sharing, I'm here on stage right now because I wanna share, I wanted to get on stage on this same stage in 2018, and this is how successful I was. Gene, you didn't know I had the rejection note letter, do you <laugh>, this was my first submission.
Uh, I wanted to do automated release notes, and it came back word to the wise. If you get an email and it doesn't say congratulations in the subject, you didn't get it. All right, <laugh>. All right. And I really was at that point, dejected. This was the first year I was gonna be coming to this place. And, and I basically said to myself, well, I'm not gonna fly over to Vegas and go there. And my very good friend Chuck Mounts, who had been to this uh, event before, said, give it a shot. You're gonna love it. It's what we talk about all the time. So I did come, and some people may remember a talk that I gave that year called There Are No Side Projects. And I talked about a lot of the things we just talked about, and I talked about the DJ software that I wrote and how that helped me in my professional life.
Alright? So here was, uh, me on stage. So that was the beginning of my real coming out party, not just here at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. It went back to Comcast, it went everywhere. It just, I wanted to share knowledge all the time. All right? And that brings me to the next, uh, point that I wanna make. Building a natural brand for yourself. You know, everybody tells you to build a brand and then you try to wonder how you can, what are the tools you can do to build a brand? The more natural it feels, the easier it's gonna be. You're not even gonna know that you're doing it. Alright? So at Comcast for me and Chuck Mountz, that's when my friend Chuck Mountz DevOps started being our brand. Everybody said, when they said DevOps, they pointed people to one of us. Um, and at first I didn't even know what DevOps was when I first started talking to, uh, to Chuck and, and others.
All I know is that I loved helping people succeed, especially engineers. I loved automation. And so when I would talk to people that didn't know DevOps and didn't talk know automation that much, I would bore them to tears. So one particular woman, Cindy, after listening to me and being bored to tears, said, I need to connect you with Chuck because you're speaking his language. And that's how we, that's how I got introduced to Chuck. And we became the face of DevOps at Comcast. All right? And so right around this same time when we were synonymous with DevOps, there was a super secret project going on around the corner within the walls of Dev, uh, within the walls of Comcast. But it was secret to everybody. They weren't allowed to talk about it. This project was called Project Modesto. All right? That probably doesn't sound familiar to you, but Modesto was this small room on the 36th floor that was locked and nobody could get into it.
And one day somebody came to me and said, I'm gonna take you to that room and the 36th floor. And I went in and they said, we heard that, you know, DevOps, and so we need you to come be a part of this. And that project was the beginning of Xfinity Mobile in 2015, right? We couldn't say what it was in the beginning because we had so many partnerships we were building and things like that. But the big point, and Gene was make, was sure to make sure that I say this, there was no job postings for this thing that they needed. It was my brand that got me this job. They wasn't gonna find it. I wasn't gonna be able to apply for it. All right? So once I got in there, this is another part that, that we need to know for, uh, you know, leadership. You can't be afraid to have opinions. And I've had a lot of them, right? And so I wanna quote Steve Jobs, if you wanna make everyone happy, scoop ice cream for a living. All right, <laugh>.
So let me tell you a story about a time that I had a disa disagreement with my leader at Xfinity Mobile, at Xfinity Mobile. Before my new leader had come, come in there, I had led the mobile back office team, and we created the most beautiful monolith you'd ever see. And I'm not even joking, I was in love with this monolith. It was, it had, it was domain driven design. Uh, it was, it was perfect. Spring, MVC implementation. It was great. My new boss came in and said, arbitrarily, we're moving to microservices. This was seven months before we were gonna launch a brand new product. He said, we're moving to microservices. And I said, no, we're not. And he said, yes, we are. And guess who had a bigger voice? He did. Right? But I disagreed vehemently. But I committed when I knew that, uh, that, that we were gonna have to do it.
The reasons why we didn't have a big team size, that's one reason you would move to microservices. We didn't have to limit our blast radius. We could literally just load balance this, uh, as a monolith. We could not take advantage of auto scaling because we were not in the cloud, uh, the public cloud. Um, this was an operations nightmare to move to this, uh, at this late stage. Versioning was a, a big, big problem for us at the time. Once you moved to microservices, every micro has its own version. And we had a tight timeline, like I said, seven months, okay? I lost the battle, but we still made a great application because we basically disagreed and then committed. Um, but the great thing that came out of this, because I didn't just quit on 'em because I just didn't throw things down. One of the best talks, best received talks here that I've given called What Tech Leaders Need to Know About Microservices came about because I fought so hard that I learned everything about microservices in a, in a able to do it all right?
I wanna point out one quick thing there. At this time, I was a director. This was 2018. Okay? I want to talk about the real power of this community, all right? And, and, uh, I don't think I'm gonna get emotional, but I might because this, this community has done so much for me. So after speaking here and meeting Gene and, uh, Jeff and so many other people, I went back to Comcast and Chuck and I shouted from the rooftops, we need internal DevOps conferences. And this community came to together and helped us learn how to throw conferences inside Gene Kim, Jeff coming to our facilities, making sure things happened, helping even the, the, the person running the lean coffee, taking them aside and making sure that we mentored them correctly. You know, Nathan Harvey knew he was gonna be in this. He knew it. I can't tell, I can't talk on stage without mentioning Nathan.
I love you, man. I love you, <laugh>. All right. The other thing that happened there, 'cause we're talking about community and community doesn't have the walls that are sitting here in this Chelsea Theater. I am a part, I'm a huge part of an organization called the Engineers at Comcast, all right? The black engineers. And when I started picking up this new skill of, of having, uh, public speaking and, and, uh, throwing conferences, the same community came and helped our black engineers do the same thing. And we started having engineers comp in 20 20, 20 22, it became the largest external conference that Comcast has, the engineers comp. We have it every February, 2023. We're gonna do it again virtually, uh, be on the lookout for, for that, okay? And so here's, uh, some of the people, one of those people, Jay Jossen, all the way on the right. She is my employee now for the Dojo. Um, you know, all through the connections that we've made through this. Um, and very excited. These are the engineers. Please look us up. Google us. I'm very proud of the group. All right? So thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. So the very real power is just to recap the real power of this community. It doesn't stop here within these walls. Don't just attend these places, uh, these, uh, events. Be active and try to solve real problems while you're there. Share stories and ideas freely. Note not trade secrets, but be, be, uh, willing to share freely. All right? So now to what you had asked for, and I'll get it done quickly. This would be a lightning round. So from team leader to organizational leader, okay, how did I go from senior manager slash director to executive director? And, uh, then individual contributor again, does anybody recognize insights evaluations here? Yes. This was mine. I can't believe how truthful this thing was about me to help you read it. This over here kind of is, uh, an idea of what your personality is like when you're not around other people, you're by yourself.
That very red, high red bar means I like to get stuff done, okay? And I, and I concentrate, and I don't let anything get, get in the way. This is how you are when you're around others. You know? How does your personality change when you're around others and you're quote unquote putting on a show. Now, the interesting, the thing here is look at that yellow bar. Go up. That yellow bar is your sense of inclusion, all right? And I think that my personality knew that in order to get stuff done by yourself, you don't need that much sense of inclusion there. But the moment that you start trying to get things done as a team, you need to tie into that and get it as high as possible. These were the top three things that that evaluation said, motivated me, tasks, which predominantly involved the group.
A relentless drive to competency and effectiveness, special task teams to interact with. All right? Those were my top things, and they were the reasons why I was suitable to be a large organizational leader, you know, and I, and I was, I was willing to take that on. I'm gonna skip past this real fast because this is a great graphic I put together, but I'm talking about how quickly my calendar started filling up when I became an organizational leader, all right? This wasn't something I was not prepared for going from an individual contributor to a leader, and all these things just started getting in there. And then once my calendar got completely, uh, up, and this is why I went back to an individual contributor, I still tried to say, let me just take a real quick, uh, ticket here and take care of it. And you know what happened?
All of a sudden, all these one-on-ones that are so important with my direct reports started falling at the wayside. I was failing my team because I was deciding to pick up code. And why? It's because when you do that, this is, this is your focus when you're coding, right? Nothing around you makes sense, except for that one little dot that you're staring at. If you want to keep coding and you're, uh, uh, a large organizational leader, do this. Go into your windows, go to the ribbon tab, check that developer box, and do all your automation within Microsoft Word. Don't, don't go into production code with your team. It's just not that helpful. So you can do code, do code things like your status reports. You can data comparisons, and maybe you can make yourself a bot. All right? All right. So I just wanna shout this person out real quick because I need to, she has spoken here so many times. She is our matriarch. She's the first female distinguished engineer and the first black distinguished engineer at Comcast. She might be watching right now. Can everybody give a round of applause for Leslie Chapman?
Leslie's the one that inspired me to get outta the game again and come back to being an individual contributor. I want to thank everybody so much for your time. Really quickly, I want to give a shout out to, I know I'm going through these real quick. My team right here who came, this is the first time I've actually brought a team with me and they enjoyed so much. This is Abha and Jay. All right, now, what's the road ahead for me? It's very uncertain. My time at Comcast has been a wonderful thing. I'm not exactly how much longer it's going to be. I want to explore my love of music and technology as my next step. So hopefully the next time I'm on stage here, you may hear about an opportunity that I've taken to actually, uh, blend technology and music together. And with that, I say thank you everyone.
Does you have five? You have four minutes if you wanna make a point. I do. Yeah. Oh,
Thank you.
Four, four minutes.
Bonus time glasses or no, I'm gonna say <laugh>. That's great because, uh, one thing that Jean always wants that I didn't get a chance to talk about, what do I need from you? What I would love to see for anybody who has come to this conference with 10 or more people from your company, I would like to know how that journey went to either come to a, to convince the people at your company to do so. Comcast and the DevOps Enterprise Summit have had a great partnership together. For some reason, we haven't gotten over that hump to bring 50 people like American Airlines did 25 people like Discover did anything like that. We want next year to come in force, and we'd love to hear your story about how you made that happen. So thank you very much, everybody.