[00:00:00] Eiso: Welcome to developing leadership, the podcast where I, Eiso Kant, and my cohost, Jason Warner, talk about our lessons about Engineering Leadership throughout the years. Today, we're joined by Sam Lambert, CEO and President of Planet Scale and previously VP of engineering at Git Hub.

Sam built one of the highest performing teams in the world while working in GitHub, and so he joins us today to share his toolkit on building exceptional teams and being an influential leader. If you want to build a high-performance team, you have to start with yourself. So today we shared our tips and understanding of yourself and bringing a sense of calm into your decision making as a leader. If there are technical terms or topics you would like to learn more about, check out this episode's show notes linked in the description.

[00:00:44] Hey everyone. We're back again for another episode of Developing Leadership, today Jason and I have with us a very special guest, Sam, currently CEO of Planet Scale and a former colleague of Jason at GitHub. As we get started, Sam, can you maybe give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself?

[00:01:04] Sam: Hi everyone, my name is Sam Lambert, I'm based out of San Francisco. As you said, I work as the CEO of planet scale before that I was at Facebook. And then before that I was at GitHub. I'm incredibly passionate about building tools for developers and working with developers. I think developers are the greatest audience you could possibly build software for. And yeah, I just love what I do building kind of the world's best database, that's how we feel.

[00:01:30] Eiso: Fantastic. And so Sam, you and I had a great chat a while back and in it we were talking about your experience at GitHub. And before I ask you about them, I'd love for you Jason to kick it off, maybe with a story about Sam.

[00:01:47] Jason: Sure. So Sam when I got to know each other, obviously as I joined GitHub and worked there for four years, Sam had been there for a couple of years already. Sam, could go into his history much deeper than I can, but, you know, he started out as the first DBA quickly started realizing that databases need infrastructure around it, started putting together one of the best infrastructure teams in the world. And eventually over the next couple of years built one of the best infrastructure teams the planet has ever seen at GitHub to scale GitHub.

[00:02:19] And I remember one story in particular, I think I was three weeks in to GitHub, and there was a scaling issue that we were hitting. We were hitting some limits somewhere and having an issue. And I asked a room of people that reported to me at the time what was happening, and not a single person had an answer or looked like they were going to take any sort of responsibility, and Sam said "I know exactly what the issue is. I know where it is. It's just not on our team and we'll dive into fix this and figure it out. But we're going to have to take a different approach to solving this piece. We can't do this again from the side."

[00:02:59] And, you know, I walked away from that meeting thinking, "okay, maybe this is a little bit deeper than I really would have liked, but it sounds like there's somebody over in Sam that we can kind of lean on here to figure this out." Went back and talked to him about the, what the problem was, Sam and three people he pulled into that meeting had such a handle on the issue, that it gave extreme confidence in the fact that like, no matter what we're going to get through this. The other side of that was a bunch of other people in the room had no accountability. Sam who was not on the hook for this, it wasn't in his group, it wasn't in his code base, put his hand up. That's what ownership inside an organization looks like. He didn't own it, but he was going to take ownership over it because the company needed it to succeed.

[00:03:43] Eiso: That's amazing, and Sam, from your side on the other side of the table, you know, three weeks in essentially a new boss, so to say, what was running through your mind in that situation?

[00:03:53] Sam: Yeah so, for some reason at GitHub whenever we had incidents, I used to just feel it in my gut. I hated it. Like it just, I hated the thought that users were getting a bad experience. And it used to just bother me. Like I always wanted to be around for every instant and just making sure I could help out however I could.

[00:04:10] And, you know, we needed to help here, right. Something was going on and, you know, I had a new boss, he was coming in, he was trying to turn our organization around and just kind of change how things are being done. And I know at that point, you can't just wait for someone to dig in and, and kind of go deep. And if you can, and you have people that will willingly do it with you, you should, at the end of the day, we all get paid out of the same bank account, right? Like, no matter what's going on. You, you have to just get here and help with things.

[00:04:43] And I noticed that with Jason as well. And I think that's one of the reasons we kind of bonded is we never really, we both shared the idea that no matter what was affecting the company, it was somewhat ours to try and fix it together and work on it together. And that was something I think we, yeah, we definitely shared this as a core value and I still believe that today. I don't, I don't think anything else is someone else's problems. And at the end of the day, if, if things start to fall apart and degrade, it becomes everyone's problem in a way that's really, really, problematic. And if you build a team of people that really care about the company succeeding and getting things done, you can benefit in so many other ways. And it avoids the need for reorgs.

[00:05:21] And it took me a long time to, to learn this, and I used to do the same thing, every kind of middle manager tends to do is that they seem to think you can solve problems with reorgs or, "oh, you know, I could fix this thing if only that team reported to me," it's like a super common thing that people do. And I used to be the same, like I honestly did. And now it's a behavior that actually really irritates me because. I don't think that's necessary.

[00:05:44] And one thing I noticed and I saw at Facebook that really I loved was that on your way in, right, now, and I went in as a director and I went through their director interview processes. They test really heavily that you can lead with influence and speaking and, this is something they talk about a lot on the interview processes, is leading with influence, because it means that you can actually go in and you can work with people, help find problems, help them see their own problems without having to play power games or without politics, you just be influential and you know, to be influential, you need to be competent. You need to know what you're talking about. You need to be good natured and have good intent. And it's something that's really, really important. And it's something that I've carried with me for a long time. And so it started to become more of a fundamental principle of how I kind of try and lead and, traits I pick in other leaders.