In the recent episode of ‘groCTO: Originals’, host Kovid Batra engages in a thoughtful discussion with James Charlesworth, Director of Engineering at Pendo, who brings over 15 years of experience in engineering and leadership roles. The episode centers around the theme “Product vs Engineering: Building Bridges, Not Walls.”
James begins by sharing how his lifelong passion for technology and software engineering, along with pivotal moments in his life have shaped his career. Moving on to the main section, James addresses the age-old tussle between product and engineering teams, emphasizing that these teams should collaborate closely rather than operate in silos. He shares strategies for fostering empathy, collaboration, and effective collaboration while highlighting the importance of understanding each team’s priorities and the impact of misalignment.
James also underscores the value of one-on-one meetings for having meaningful conversations, building strong relationships, and understanding team members on a deeper level. He also explores the significant role of Engineering Managers in enabling their teams to overcome these challenges, ensuring smooth team dynamics, and achieving successful product outcomes.
Kovid Batra: Hi everyone. This is Kovid, back with a new episode of the groCTO podcast, and today with us, we have a very special guest. He's the Head of Engineering at Pendo, and he has more than 15 years of engineering and leadership experience. Welcome to the show, James. Happy to have you here.
James Charlesworth: Hi, Kovid. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm actually not Head of Engineering at Pendo. I am a Director of Engineering and I run the Sheffield office here in the UK. So thank you for having me on.
Kovid Batra: Oh, all right. My bad then. Okay. So I think today, uh, we are going to have a very interesting discussion with James. We're going to talk about the age-old tussle between product and engineering, and James, uh, is an expert at handling those situations. So he's going to tell us what are the tactics and what are the frameworks he's using here. But before, James, we move on to that section, uh, we would love to know a little bit more about you. Uh, maybe some of your hobbies, some of the life-defining events for you, who James is basically. Please go on.
James Charlesworth: Thanks, Kovid. Um, yeah, this sounds super nerdy, but my hobby has always been technology and software engineering. Um, I first started doing software engineering when I was probably about 11 or 12 years old. I had a Cyon Series 3 that my parents bought me from a boot fair, and I just learned how to program that. Like, I'll just sit there for ages typing these tiny little keys. Um, and my hobby has been like using software and coding to actually solve problems in the real world and build products. And that's kind of led me towards web development and SaaS products. And that's ultimately what we do at Pendo, is help people build better products. So, um, yeah, that's a pretty boring answer to your question about my hobbies. I do also like play music and things. Um, I played guitar in a band for a long time. Um, so that's the only non-techie hobby I guess I have.
Kovid Batra: No, that's great. Thank you for that sweet, small intro about yourself. Anything that, uh, that entices you from your childhood or from your maybe teenage that has defined you a lot? I mean, this, this is something that I usually ask a lot of people, but from there, we, we get to know a lot more about our guests. So if you don't mind, can you just share some of that, uh, experience from your past that defines you today?
James Charlesworth: Yeah, I think the biggest defining moment that a lot of people go through is when they first leave home for the first time and they don't have a direction because I didn't have much of a direction when I was like 18 years old and I left home. I did the wrong degree. I did a degree in control systems engineering and I ended up doing software. So it took me a while to get into web development because of doing the wrong degree. Um, and actually because I had no real direction, I was just sort of fluttering in the wind and just doing whatever. But through that process of just giving yourself a bit of freedom and going out and into the world and doing whatever you want, you really learn about yourself and you learn about other people, and I think that's when I went from being obsessed with computers to being obsessed with people and the way that people interact with each other and, um, you know, like I met people from all different walks of life, and you notice the similarities between anybody from all across the world, but you want to notice the differences, and you can notice how you can celebrate those differences.
And so I think, like, having that moment of moving away from home and, um, like, living by yourself and stuff like that, um, really opens your eyes up to, like, who you want to be and where you want your place in the world to be. So I'm sorry if that's a little bit, um, esoteric but it's, yeah, there was no like one defining moment really. I mean, it was just one of those and then like being in a band goes in with that because I always wanted to be a rock star. It never really worked out. But this idea of you can just get some friends, get together, get a van and just like go touring and play music, um, across the country, that's really cool, and that's really cool when you're in your sort of early twenties and you just want that freedom. Um, and that goes hand in hand with meeting people from, from all over the place. So yeah, like, you know, I'm obsessed with people. I'm obsessed with like human interactions and the way people, um, the way people like carry themselves and interact with each other and what they care about and how we can all align that. Yeah.
Kovid Batra: That's really interesting now. I mean, uh, the kind of role you are into where you are into leadership, you're leading teams, you're a Director of Engineering and this aspect of being aware of different aspects of different people and culture makes you more comfortable when you are, uh, leading people, you, you bring more empathy, you bring more understanding to their situations, and I'm sure that has come, uh, from there, and it, it is definitely growing as you are moving into your career.
So I think, James, this was, this was, uh, really, really interesting. Uh, let's move on to our main section. I think, uh, everyone is waiting to hear about that. Uh, so this has been an age-old tussle, as I said. Uh, the engineers have never liked the product managers. I'm not generalizing it, but just saying, so please, please don't, don't take it wrong. Uh, but yeah, usually the engineers are not very comfortable, uh, in those discussions and this has been an age-old tussle, we all know, know about it. When we talk about product and engineering teams, I personally never think these two as two separate teams. Like it, it never works like that. One thing that I learned as soon as I moved into this industry is it's 'product engineering'. It's not product and engineering separately. So it's not healthy for a team to have this kind of a tussle when you actually are moving towards the same goal and almost every engineering team that I see, there, there is some level of friction there and it's, it's natural to be there because the product managers usually might not be that well, uh, hands-on with the code, hands-on with the kind of daily practices our dev goes through. And then, planning according to that, keeping in mind that, okay, it should be, uh, pushy as well as comfortable for the developers to deliver something. So that's where the main friction starts and you come up with unreasonable requirements which the developers might not be able to relate to that, how it is going to impact the product.
So there are multiple reasons due to which this gap, this friction could be there. So today, I think with that note, I would, uh, hand over the mic to you and, uh, would want to know how you have had such experiences in your past, in your current role and how you end up resolving this so that people operate, like developers and product operates as one single team towards that one goal of making the business successful.
James Charlesworth: Yeah, absolutely. And what you said there about coming together to solve a problem together is really, really important. I think like the number one thing that underpins this is that everybody, product managers, engineers, designers, managers, needs to remember that you're all employed by the same organization and you've got the same shared goals and your, um, contribution to that is no more or less valuable than anybody else's. Like you mentioned that word 'empathy' in your introduction, like empathy is, we're gonna talk about empathy a lot today, right, because empathy is all about putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and seeing what their goals are. Um, and firstly, like trying to steer their goals to what you need, but also trying to like, um, emphasize what your own goals are, um, and align those to the others.
Like the way I always think about product managers is a lot of engineers, they feel like they're on feature factory teams. They feel like they're just being told what to build, and you get into this feature factory loop. Um, and it just seems like all the Product Manager wants to do is add features into the product, add features into the product, add features into the product. Um, and it can feel sometimes like product managers are paid like on commission, like they get a certain commission based on how many features they deliver at a point or something. That's not true. Product managers are paid a salary just like you do, and the way that your success is ultimately measured is the same way that your product manager's success is ultimately measured. And so, it's really, really important to realize that you do align around this goal, and you need to have a two-way conversation about it. Like you need to, you need to really, really explain like what your, you think the priorities should be, and you need to encourage your product manager to explain what they think their priorities should be for the team, and then you can align and find some middle ground that ultimately works best for the business.
But yeah, like in my experience anyway, it's just, you say age-old, like this has been quite a long thing. And before products managers, it was business people. It was maybe, you know, one of my first jobs in software engineering, um, we didn't really have products managers. We just had like the Director of engineering, product research, design, whatever, um, who would just come up with the idea and just say, "This is what we're building." And that's very difficult, um, because you've reported in to that person. So you basically had to just do exactly what they said, and that was super, super unhealthy because that builds up a huge amount of resentment. And I much, much prefer the model we have now, where we have product managers, where engineers don't report into the product managers, because that means that product managers had to lead the product without authority, um, and engineers have to lead the best engineering direction without authority. So you have this thing where you're encouraged to influence your peers on the same team as opposed to just doing the thing that your boss tells you to do, which is how it used to work when I started in this industry.
So it's got, it's got a lot better. Um, and the, yeah, as I've gone through my career and I've worked with some really, really good product managers and some really good product leaders, I've noticed that pattern between the, the product managers that are really, really good, that are really successful are the ones that have that empathy and we will talk about empathy a lot, right? Because it's super, super important. But product managers can have that empathy that can empathize with what engineers actually want to get out of a situation, um, and then align that with their own goals.
Kovid Batra: I have a question here. When you, when you say empathy, I think, uh, in your introduction also, you mentioned, like, when you meet different people from different cultures, different backgrounds, you tend to understand. Your, your brain develops that empathy naturally towards different situations and different people. But that has happened only because you have seen things differently, right? When we put this context into product and engineering, a product manager who has probably never coded in their life, right? Who does not have the context of, uh, how things work in, in the development workspace, right? In that situation, how a manager like that should be able to come to this piece that, okay, uh, if the developer is saying that this is going to take five days or this is difficult and this is complicated to implement and it won't add much value. So in those scenarios, a person who is not hands-on with coding or has never done that piece on his own or her own, uh, how do you think, uh, in a professional environment that empathy would come in? And of course, the Product Manager has his or her own, uh, deliverables, the metrics that need to be looked at. So how does that work in that situation?
James Charlesworth: Well, the same way it works the other way around as well. So the situation you've just described, right? You've got a Product Manager who is trying to get what they need to get done, but they don't understand the full details behind the implementation. You've also got an engineer that does understand the full details behind the implementation, but they don't understand the full business context behind what you're trying to build, right? Because that's the Product Manager's job. So the engineers, they might know exactly how the database is structured and how all of the backend architecture works, which is very complicated, but they don't understand, like they haven't been speaking to customers. They don't know the kinds of things that the Product Manager knows. So both sides need to essentially understand what the other person's priorities are, and that's what empathy is. Empathy is understanding what somebody wants, and not necessarily always giving them what they want, but the very least like comprehending and considering what somebody's goals are in your own way you deal with them, right?
So, um, back to your situation about software engineering. Okay, so if let's say, a Product Manager has come to you and said, "We just need to add this button to this page. It's super, super important. We want to, we want this button to send an email out." And the engineers come back and they say, "Oh, we actually don't have any backend email architecture that can send emails out. So we're going to actually have to build all of that." Um, that, you know, the Product Manager can go, "Well, what's so difficult about that? Just put a button there and send an email out." And the engineers are kind of caught in this rock where they're in a hard place where they're sort of saying, "Well, this is a lot of work. Like that's weeks and weeks and weeks of work, but how do I go to the business and say 'It's a lot of work'?" Um, and so, the solution is to really, really explain and break down to your Product Manager why this is more work than they realize and the Product Manager's job is to turn around to you and explain why we really, really need this. So you both need to align and you both need to understand. Product managers need to understand that some stuff is complicated and the only way they're going to understand it is complicated is if you just explain it to them, right? Like there's no secrets in software engineering. If you spend an hour sitting down and explaining to a Product Manager how your backend is architected and how your databases all fit together and you know, what email service we're using and what the limitations are of that email service, and then they'll understand it. It'll take you an hour to explain that. And equally, your Product Manager can sit down with you and they can show you the customer calls where people are really, really wanting this feature, right? And they can educate you on why we really need this feature, and then ultimately, you'll come, you'll come together where you understand why your Product Manager is pushing for this so hard, and your Product Manager will understand why you're pushing back against this so hard, and you'll find a solution that makes everybody happy in the end. But you do need to listen. You need to listen to the other person's, um, goals and what they want to get out of it. Um, and that's the empathy side. Eventually, it's like, it's on this respecting somebody's motives. It's respecting somebody's, um, like what they've been given, their mandate that they've been given for a certain situation.
Kovid Batra: Right. I think this is one scenario where I definitely see putting in effort in explaining to the other person what it really means, what it stands for. Obviously, anyone cannot be so inconsiderate about the other person when they're working together. So maybe in one or two, uh, situations like this, let's say, I'm a Product Manager, uh, where I have to explain things to the developer, and if I do that for, let's say, two or three such instances, from the fourth or fifth time, automatically that level of trust is built, and you are in a position to maybe, uh, not even explain a lot of times. You get that synchronization in place where things are working well with you.
And on that note, I really feel that people who are joining in large size teams, like, uh, a Product Manager joining in or a developer joining in, usually in large size teams, we have started to see this pattern of having engineering managers also, right? So in your perspective, uh, how much does an Engineering Manager play a role in, uh, bridging this gap and reducing this friction? Because, uh, few of my very close friends who have been from the engineering background have chosen to be in the management space now, and they, they usually tell us what things they are working upon right now. And I feel that that really helps the business as well as the developers to deliver the right things on time and you get a lot of context from both the sides. So what's your perspective on that, uh, of bringing those engineering managers into the system?
James Charlesworth: Yeah. I mean, I think the primary, number one responsibility of an Engineering Manager is to empower the engineers to do all those things that you've just been speaking about, right? So like your number one responsibility, engineering managers tend to have better people skills than engineers. That's why people go into management. Um, and your job is to teach the engineers on your team how to do that, all of those things you've just described. Sometimes you have to step in and sometimes there's a high pressure situation where you do actually have to say, you know, "I'm going to bridge the gap here between engineers and product." But your primary job as an Engineering Manager is to enable the engineers on your team to all have that kind of conversation with the product managers and with the business. Um, and so it's coaching. So it's support. So it's, um, career development, and also, you know, hiring the right people, that's quite a large job of an Engineering Manager. Performance management. Um, and so, a lot of that. Engineering managers should never be the one person that bridges gap between product and engineering because then they're going to become a bottleneck, and also the engineers are never really going to learn to do that themselves.
Um, so yeah, that's always been, and I learned from some really good engineering managers or software development managers about this, about like, um, you know, empowering the people that you've put in charge. Engineering managers aren't in their position because they're necessarily better at everything than the engineers. They're usually better at one or two things. Um, but they're not as good at things like technical architecture. So as an Engineering Manager myself, I would never overrule an IC's opinion on a software architecture because that's not my job. My job is not that. I might know, I might have been doing software for years and years and years and I understand how systems are architected and how databases work and stuff. But I'm also employing people who are better at that than me, and that's the point. And so I would never overrule them, and I would never overrule how they collaborate with their Product Manager. But I would guide and coach them towards being able to do that. Um, and so, that's the case of speaking to engineers, speaking to product managers, trying to find out if they're talking past each other, trying to find out, you know, where, where the disconnect is, and then trying to solve that between the two groups of people. So I think the answer to your question is like the main role of an Engineering Manager is to become a force multiplier on their team, essentially, and to enable everybody to do that. Um, yeah, you can't have engineer managers who are just there to fix the gap. It's just not scalable. That's not a good thing.
Kovid Batra: No, I totally understand that. So when we are talking about bringing, uh, this level of comfort where people are working together, talking about your experience in your teams, there must have been such scenarios and you must have like put in some thoughts at the time of orientation, at the time of onboarding the team members that how they should be working to ensure that things work as a team, uh, can you just tell us about a few incidents and how you ended up solving them and how you put in the right, uh, onboarding for the team members to have that inculcated in the culture?
James Charlesworth: Yeah, the best onboarding is like that group effect of just observing something happening and then joining in with it. So like, by standard the best way to onboard somebody is just to add them to a high-performing team. Like honestly, you just put someone on the team that's super, super collaborative and they will witness how people can collaborate. But I've had you know, I've had positive and negative experiences in the past with joining a team, primarily back when I was a software engineer. I remember I once joined a team for the very first time and I just never really got on with my Product Manager. Like I don't think we clicked as people. We never really had any kind of conversations or anything. Um, and I was never really onboarded properly. So at the start I did have a slightly, um, rocky relationship with this Product Manager where I just couldn't understand, I couldn't understand what they were trying to do. They never explained anything. They just said, "This is what we are doing." So I just had to say, "Well, that's going to take longer than you think." And I tried this for ages. And I spoke to my manager. My manager sort of gave the advice that I've just been trying to give, um, your listeners here, which is like, you know, you need to go out and do it yourself. I'm not going to fix this for you. So what I did is I took this Product Manager and I just said, "Look, let's go for a coffee once every two weeks. We'll just have a one-to-one." This was before COVID. So you can actually go out and do these kinds of things. Um, and we would, every lunch, every Monday, every two weeks, we would just go down the road and have a coffee in a cafe, um, in London where I was working at the time. And I just got to know them as a person. And I really, really got to understand that like, this is a person that is under a lot of pressure in their job and they're very, very stressed out, and they take that sometimes out on their team. It's not necessarily their fault, but that is the way that they deal with things. Um, and if I can just be a little bit, have a little bit of sympathy to that sort of situation they're put in and I can work out what's going on behind that, and I would ask them about like what they want to do, what their career aspirations, what do you know, what do they want to be one day, where they want to work and this sort of stuff. And those kinds of small conversations, like I say, half an hour every two weeks, just a one to one, um, completely fixed the relationship and completely fixed everything else, because you just build up so much more trust with somebody if you're just having small one-on-one conversations with them.
And my kind of hack for engineers, if you like, is to have one-to-ones. People think one-to-ones is just for managers and it's for people to talk to their boss or it's for people to talk to people that report to them. Anyone can have a one-to-one with anyone in the business and set up a regular, no-agenda meeting every couple of weeks. That's just half an hour where you just chat with somebody, and that is a super, super valuable way of building up rapport with people that will pay off dividends in the future, like half an hour invested between a Senior Engineer and their Product Manager, half an hour every couple of weeks will pay off dividends in the future when you meet, uh, when you meet a conflict and you realize that, oh! Actually, I know this person really quite well now because we have coffee every two weeks, every Monday, right? And so you don't need to be somebody, you don't really need a massive reason to have a one-to-one with somebody. Just put it in the calendar, chat to them and say, "Look, I, you know, I really like us to work more effectively together. Um, let's have half an hour every Monday. I'll buy you a croissant or something, whatever it is you want to do." Um, and then just ask them about their life, asking about their career goals, ask them about like what kind of challenges they're facing. And yeah, before you know it, you'll be helping each other out. You'll be desperate to help each other out because that is human nature. We like helping each other. So yeah.
Kovid Batra: I think I would like to, just because I've been working with a lot of engineers and engineering managers these days, what I have really felt is that throughout their initial years of career, they have been talking with a computer, right? It's very difficult to find out what to talk about. I think the advice that you have given is very simple and I think very impactful. I have experienced that myself, but I have, I would say, I have been an exception to the engineering and development space because I have been a little extrovert and have been talking about things lately, at least in my comfort zone. Uh, so I was able to find out that space with people who are themselves very introvert, uh, but still I could break through and I could break that ice.
It's very difficult for the other side of the people who are developers throughout their career to come back and like start these conversations on their own. So what are the things that you really think we should be talking about? Like, even if a Product Manager is going to the engineer or the engineer is wanting to break that ice and like build in that empathy and understand that person, what kind of things you look forward to, uh, in such kind of conversations, let's say?
James Charlesworth: That's an interesting one. Like a lot of, there's a lot of people that are introverted in this industry. A lot of people use introversion as like a crutch or as an excuse, and they shouldn't. Be just, you know, being introverted doesn't mean you can't connect with other people. It just means you connect with other people differently. It means that, you know, you look inwards for experiences and things. Um, and so the practical advice would be to try and recognize how another person functions. You might find that your Product Manager is actually more introverted than they let on. A lot of people just put on a show. A lot of people are super, super introverted, but they put on a show in day-to-day, especially in work life, and they'll, you know, pretend to be all extroverted and they'll pretend to be all confident, but they're not. And I've known many people like this, that if you have an actual conversation with them, they'll admit to you that they're actually super introverted and they get super, super nervous whenever they have to talk to people, but they do it and they force themself to do it because they've learned throughout their careers.
So, um, yeah, I'm not suggesting people should push themselves too far out of their comfort zone, but In terms of practical advice, speaking in statements is quite a big thing, though a lot of people don't realise, but, um, I can't remember where I read this, this is from some book or something on like how to make friends and influence people, I don't think it's that exact book, but essentially, if all you're doing is asking somebody questions, then you're putting all of the onus in the conversation on them, and that's not actually that comfortable in conversation. So if you're talking to a Product Manager and you're just asking them, like, "Why are we doing this?" "Why does the customer want that?" "What's the point of this feature?" That's actually not, that's not a nice thing to do because you're making them lead everything. What you really want to do is just talk in statements. You just want to say, "Hey, like I'm just building this. It's really cool. We've got, we've got connectivity going on between this WebSocket and this backend database. There you go. That's the thing. Um, we've just realized that this is a little bit late. And so, it's going to be a few days extra, but we found an area over here where we can cut some corners." Like just to say things, say things that are going on, tell people stuff that's going on in your life. Um, and then there's no pressure on them to intervene. And this is like standard small talk, right? If you just tell people things, then they can decide to walk away or they can decide to engage you in conversation, but you're not putting too much pressure on them. You're not asking them a barrage of questions that they feel like they have to answer. So that's standard advice for introverts. I think if you are introverted and you feel like you need to talk to somebody to share, share details about what you're working on, share details about, um, you know, your current goals and where you are and see what happens, they might do the same. You might learn something.
Kovid Batra: Yeah, sure. I think, I think everyone actually wants to do that, but it's just that there has to be an initiation from one side. And if it's more relevant and feels like, uh, coming very naturally to build that bond, I think this would really, really work out.
Cool. So I think this was, this was really, uh, again, I would say a very simple, but a very impactful advice that one-on-ones are really things that work, right? At the end of the day, we are humans and at least for developers, I think because they are day-in and day-out just interacting with their computers, I think this is a good escape for them to actually probably go back and talk to people and have those real conversations and build that bond. So yeah, I think that's really amazing. Anything else?
James Charlesworth: You can talk about computers.
Kovid Batra: Sorry?
James Charlesworth: You can talk about computers. Like, if you're really into software, like, this is why gaming, I'm not really a gamer, but I know a lot of people connect over gaming, a lot of people bond over gaming because that's something that you get into as like an introspective thing, and then you find out that somebody else is also into it, you're into the same game, and you can connect over that, and it turns something that was a really insular, inward looking experience into like a shared group sociable thing, right? So like, yeah, I'm in many ways, I'm quite jealous of people that are into gaming because it does have that social aspect. So yeah, talk about computers. Like, just because your life is staring at a screen and talking to a computer, you can still share that with other people and even product managers as well. Product managers in tech companies, they're super, super technical. They might not be able to code, but they definitely know how computers work and they definitely know how systems work. They're designing these things. So talk to them about it. Talk to them about, um, you know, the latest Microsoft Windows version that can spy on your history of AI. Like, talk to your Product Manager about that. They will have opinions on this sort of stuff. And so, yeah, sorry to cut you off, but like, honestly, just because you're into computers and you're into coding, like that, that can be a way to connect with people. It doesn't have to be a way to stay isolated.
Kovid Batra: Definitely, definitely. Uh, perfect. I think more or less the idea is to have that empathy for people, do more one-on-ones and build that trust in the team, and I think that would really solve this problem. And I think one thing that we should have actually talked in the beginning itself, uh, the impact of this problem, actually. Like for our audience, I won't let that question go away like that. Uh, there must have been experiences where you would have dealt with consequences of having this friction in the team, right? So maybe the engineering managers, the product managers, the engineering teams out there, uh, who are looking at delivering successfully, I think they should be, uh, aware of what are the consequences of not putting some focus and effort in solving this problem before it becomes something big. So any of your, uh, experiences that could highlight the impact of this problem in the teams, I think that would be appreciated.
James Charlesworth: I mean, like pretty much all systems out there that are absolutely laden with tech debt and every product is late, is the result of this. It's the result of the breakdown between what the business needs or what the product owner needs and what the engineers are building. And I've worked on many, many systems that have been massively over-engineered because the engineers were given too much free reign. And so it was, you know, you know, not much tech debt, but really, really, really over complicated and took forever to deliver any value to any customers. They've also worked on systems that were massively under-engineered and they fall down and they break and there's bugs all the time. And that's because the engineers weren't given enough reign to do things properly. So you need to find that middle ground. And yeah, like honestly, I've worked, I've seen so many situations where the breakdown in conversation between product managers and engineers has just led to runaway bugs, runaway tech debt, runaway like people leaving their jobs. I've seen that happen before as well. Yeah, and that's, that's really bad. These are all bad outcomes for the entire business, right? You don't want engineers quitting because they don't get on with their Product Manager, and that's something I've seen before. Um, you don't want a huge amount of tech debt piling up because engineers are too scared to put their hands up and say, "Look, we're accruing tech debt here. This approach isn't working." So they're too scared to do that. So they just do the feature factory thing and they ultimately, build up loads of tech debt and then, a huge bug is released. You don't want that. Um, but you also don't want engineers to be just left to it and put in a room for a month and come back with some massively elaborate overengineered system that doesn't actually solve the problem for the customer. So all of these things are bad situations. The good situation is the one that is an iterative approach with feedback and collaboration between engineers and product. It's the only real way of doing it.
Kovid Batra: Definitely. Great, James. Thanks a lot, uh, for giving us so much practical and insightful advice on, uh, how to deal with this situation, and I'm sure this would be really helpful for a lot of engineering teams, product engineering teams out there to be more successful. And we would love to have you back on the show once again and talking about such insightful topics and challenges of the engineering ecosystem. But for today, I think it's time. Uh, thank you so much once again. It was great to have you on the show.
James Charlesworth: No worries. Thanks very much, Kovid.
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