Channel
Interviewed Person
Malte Ubl
In this episode of The Leadership Exchange, host Tracy Lee chats with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl about shipping software faster, breaking down barriers in development, and fostering collaboration across teams. Malte shares lessons from Google, insights on iteration velocity, and how Vercel’s tools like feature flags and AI-driven prototypes are transforming workflows. They also discuss AI’s role in reshaping how software is built and preview exciting upcoming events. Key Points from the Episode: - Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, highlights the importance of iteration velocity in software development. He defines it as the speed and direction of progress, which enables teams to ship better software faster. Tools like HMR (Hot Module Replacement) and Vercel's Preview Deployments accelerate feedback cycles and decision-making. - Vercel replaces approval-based processes with veto-based systems, empowering engineers to ship quickly while holding stakeholders accountable for active intervention when necessary. This approach simplifies decision-making and removes unnecessary bottlenecks. - Vercel’s v0 tool allows non-developers, such as product managers and designers, to prototype and iterate independently. By minimizing handoffs and fostering collaboration, AI tools like v0 create smoother workflows across roles. - Vercel brings foundational practices from Silicon Valley, such as feature flags and A/B testing, to organizations of all sizes. By encouraging scientific decision-making, Vercel helps businesses adopt high-efficiency engineering processes even without large-scale experimentation. Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction to Vercel's V0 Tool 0:37 - Welcome to The Leadership Exchange 1:03 - Introducing Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel 1:09 - Tracy & Malte’s History at Google 1:50 - Vercel’s Viral Billboard Campaign 2:29 - The Philosophy of Shipping Faster 3:10 - Malte’s Background at Google 4:20 - Reviving Google Desktop Search 5:59 - What Holds Organizations Back from Shipping Fast? 7:01 - The Concept of Iteration Velocity 9:21 - Speeding Up Development with HMR & Preview Deployments 10:28 - The Power of Feature Flags in Deployment 12:05 - Differences Between Big Tech & Other Companies in Software Development 14:23 - The Challenge of A/B Testing in Large Organizations 16:44 - The Magic of Silicon Valley & Engineering Culture 18:31 - Vercel’s Mission to Bring Big Tech Practices to All Companies 19:08 - AI’s Impact on Software Development 22:22 - How AI is Changing User Behavior in Search & Beyond 25:07 - The Next Step in AI-Powered Software Development 26:48 - Vercel V0 & Empowering Non-Developers 28:06 - Expanding Roles Across Teams with AI 30:08 - Reducing Friction Between Designers, Developers & PMs 32:07 - The Future of AI-Driven Development Tools 34:49 - Personal Software & The Democratization of App Development 35:41 - Advice for Engineering Leaders to Ship Faster 36:52 - Switching from Approvals to Vetos in Decision-Making 38:36 - Where to Find Malte Ubl Online 38:59 - Upcoming Leadership Event in Dallas Let me know if you need any changes! Follow Malte Ubl on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/cramforce Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malteubl/ Sponsored by This Dot: thisdot.co
what I think is The Next Step Beyond like literally seeing with our tool V Zer that we're building which is a tool that can generate apps from Proms and we're seeing that the impact is actually bigger for all the other roles let's say your pm and your job used to be that you describe to a designer kind of what your vision is and and then they come back and they kind of show you something no no no not like that I want something else right vzer is really good at design and so you can just type your prompt and it will give you something back and you can iterate on it for for however long
you want and so and now you have work protype even though you don't know how to code hey everyone and welcome to this episode of the leadership exchange I am so excited to be here today my name is Tracy you can follow me on Twitter at lady Le or on LinkedIn at Tracy slee uh Malta do you think I should switch to saying X now I feel like maybe feel like maybe it's the time it's very optional I think um so I'd love to go ahead and introduce my guest today Malta ubel who
is the CTO at versel welcome to the show thanks for having me yes and Malta we know each other from your Google days um gosh I can't remember where was it was it like during the maybe it was during the like the the P pwa lit slash all it might be it's been a long time might have been a JC or something like that yes I I feel like you the we we will
we'll call those uh preco days that's right it was definitely very pre-o preo days yes and it's so exciting to see you at versell now I mean versell has definitely done an amazing job at just hiring so many amazing leaders in the Tech Community including yourself um and I know you guys are going viral right now with a billboard uh tell me a little bit more about that well yeah we there actually were a few of those but the the one I
personally like a lot is it just says you can just ship things MH which you know obviously you can put into all kind of comical circumstances with respect to physical shipping but it's it's really our philosophy that we want to bring to the world is how teams can ship software with higher velocity and with kind of fewer things in the way of the engineer writing the code and eventually getting shipped out of the door yeah I love that I love that I can't I'm going to SF in a
few weeks so I'm going to be looking for there should be you know you guys should create an app you know how there's an in SF there's a poop app you've seen that right where you can see where is there's like a poop meter and so you should have like a versel billboard meter and you know maybe like you know people go Vis the Android statues at Google right and the Apple at campus but then people can go because of the Billboards uh by versal too that would be really fun there's a lot of you know they're very
accessible because they're just out there yeah I love that well okay so I know you quite well but I think other people don't so can you tell us a little bit just like about your experience at Google and kind of what you're doing at forell now yeah absolutely so I'm the C now forell it's been three years um I I love it before that I was at Google for 12 years and kind of at Google I initially
joined a team working on front infrastructure so I built a framework called whiz which is running essentially every Google consumer web app out there um it actually was always kind of it wasn't secret but you know wasn't really talked about but recently it was announced at like the angular conference that they were merging it with with angula I'm actually not sure how true that actually is in practice but um it's uh so that's what I did I also built something else called B which was a it's been kind of microservice orchestration