CTO Corner #9: Be open-minded. Be humble. Be confident.
In this edition of the CTO Corner I talked with Patrick Allen of Streak Media about the decisions you need to make as a one-person team and what mindset to approach your challenges with as a new CTO.
How did you get into engineering?
I’ve always been into software and computers and I got more into it in college. I’d always done web development. I had a side job in high school, and I worked for my friend as a sales and product person. I needed to figure out a way to build more complicated websites and products and got sick of relying on other people to do it for me. So I switched all my classes to computer science, jumped into my new major, and cancelled my study abroad plans. It was a good decision. But it was purely out of necessity and wanting to be as close as possible to it.
Where does this ambition come from?
It’s something that just excites me. That, at a very basic level, is something I think is worth spending time on and learning about. The other thing that I fully realized in college was how crazy a time we live in, from especially a technology standpoint. There’s never been a point in history where people less than 30 can make such big contributions at such a young age. I had that realization that it’s an exciting time to be in this space and the more you learn and the more you discover allows you to take advantage of the technology.
What are the challenges of being a young CTO?
The best way for me to answer this is from my own experience. Basically, we have a super small team and I am a relatively new programmer still, so the biggest challenge for me is managing complexity. On a one-man team, you can’t have tons of cool features, things that aren’t well defined, and lots of moving pieces that aren’t organized. For me, it’s always been about trying to make things as simple as possible so they don’t break. It’s just me on the team, so it really needs to be bulletproof. On a very small team, building things that can operate and are so simple that they’re not going to break is so important because it lets us be nimble.
How is building a media product different than what you’ve done before?
I’ve pretty much always been doing consumer type stuff. My first brush was building websites for small businesses. I guess something I really didn’t know anything about is different ad platforms and how they work and different ad automation strategies. But a new company with not a ton of money can do a bunch of really targeted advertising campaigns with little investment. The democratization of those ad channels was pretty mind blowing to see. But now you can do super targeted, super high quality advertising especially on Facebook, and that’s something I didn’t know anything about. Now I’d consider myself a novice and think it’s a really cool thing for entrepreneurs to know about.
How do you work with product management and the business side to stay focused on high priority tasks?
That’s the hard part; figuring out that balance. What Mike Nardella (CEO of Streak Media) and I do really well together is he’s more product and I’m more engineering, so it’s about figuring out how can we keep this simple from everybody’s perspective. I don’t want it to break. Mike wants something that’s going to sell and create a ton of value for our clients. From our clients’ perspective, they want to be able to actually get these actions done right. Our users want to be paid $5 or more for tasks that take ten minutes or less. It’s a four way balance board, so if you add too much to one side it’s going to tip over. That helps manage what features are in, what features are out, and making sure all four of those parties are totally satisfied. You have to keep everyone happy, you have to keep it working, you have to keep it simple. We’ve tried things that we thought were simple but people didn’t understand how to use, so we have to have that empathy for the user. It’s about keeping all those parties happy and being really choosy with what we do. The way we do that is by making sure everything is very focused and simple and everyone knows how it works and slowly building new things on top of things that really work. We’re forced to be disciplined.
Pretend you’re the user and have a really negative attitude: “I installed this app, I think it’s the dumbest thing, why would I use this?” It sounds silly, but it really helps put you in that critical mindset. People who like what you’re doing are great, but how do we get more people to use it? By addressing the people who don’t like it.
Do you have any advice for engineers coming right out of college?
I still feel like a new programmer and I am not that far out, but my answer would be make sure that you stay open to new ideas and if you’re younger than 30, you don’t know that much about the world. So know that there are always things you can do better.
We had a coach who is a Python expert and we brought him in a couple times a month for a while and he would review my code and tell me all the things I did wrong, which is really good on a one-person team. You need to open yourself up to feedback.
You have to have some level of confidence, too, so having an open mind and knowing you need to learn but also have to ship something. So you’re humble knowing it isn’t perfect code. Be coachable, have an open mind, and don’t be super set in your ways. There’s no reason to be like that at this age and while tech is changing so fast. So having super strong opinions about languages or ways to be is an awful attitude. I do see people who have that attitude, and I always think, “Why, what is the advantage of being so set in your ways?”
At the same time you have to pull the trigger and ship stuff.
A saying that my friend Matt Ricketson likes to say: “Strong opinions, weakly held.” You want to be confident in your work and have strong opinions about standards, but always be willing to change your mind.
You always want to make sure you’re keeping an open mind right out of college.
That level of honesty is probably missing in a lot of workplaces. Coaching and people who will tell you when you’re wrong is so important.
