Community Session: CTO AI AMA

Hello everyone. It's so nice to see so many of you here already. Jacob, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. How are you? I am good. It's cold here in the UK. It's cold here in Toronto, too. Yeah. Awesome. Well, it's warm here in the community space, which is great. Um, so yeah, welcome everyone to this week's uh Versel community session. Uh, really

excited to have everyone uh join us. If this is your first time in one of our sessions, I'm Pauline. Um, and this is Jacob. Um, you may have seen us around in the community space answering questions. So, it's always a really great opportunity to jump in here uh to connect with our community, customers, and our users live. Um, if you are tuning in um on any other platform, so uh on X for example, and you want to

engage with us in the chat, uh be sure to join our community platform over at community.versal.com and you should see a banner for this session. All you need to do is sign in and click going in the event box to unlock the chat. I'm really excited about this session today, Jacob. Yeah. Yeah, me too. It's going to be a good one. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, if you're going to hang out in the chat, just remember to be respectful and follow our code of conduct. And I'd like to introduce our guests today. We have Andrew and Malta.

Welcome. Hey, how's it going? Hey team, look at that uh background. I I can't stop fangirling over this background. It's awesome. Yes, this is definitely going to be the last time you see it because we are moving offices in like uh whatever, two weeks. Yeah. So, uh yeah, I don't think we're going to take this with us. We could Oh, you're not going to recreate the space. I mean, we're going to take the sign, but

very substantially attached to the wall. I don't think you can. I don't think the wall has enough triangles, right? Yeah. I hope the new office has like a blank space with like triangles where you can just stick lots of triangles. That's the new That's That's a new design. Um, amazing. Should we kick off, Jacob? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, we've got a got a few questions here. Um I guess the first one uh for you Malta. Uh what is the most important metric for engineering teams?

Oh my god. That's a that's we're doing management stuff here. Uh famously like I mean I only have two reports. So how why do I care? Um that's that's that's our CPO that has to care. No, I'm I'm I'm kidding. the the the so I have I have some like personal hot takes on this but what I really care about is more at the team level that people iterate and make progress over time and I like there is this notion of velocity

which is that's both important for the iteration which is that like you're moving fast and you're moving the right direction over time but also like there has to be some throughput like uh if teams just go hiding for for three months. I think that never works well and so it but you know but it's overall there's a little bit of vibes like where I feel like okay they're they're doing well they're not doing so well on the other hand when it comes to performance reviews uh we had Versell just went through a cycle um which was fun and I think I do look at personal throughput

in in terms of like number of PRs and and and so forth which is sometimes controversial but I I like I think it's a really good starting point for a conversation where you ask like okay uh you're you're like in the lowest 20 percentile why or I mean you're also the opposite right you're in the top 10 percentile like why is this you personally or is it your team or like can we learn from you so I think it it is actually very worthwhile looking at like how kind of from a p pure