Chad interviews Managing Director at thoughtbot, Joshua Clayton, about what a Managing Director at thoughtbot does, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than other teams, and the belief in integrated teams of designers and developers company-wide.
Empathize with Your Customer by Josh Clayton (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/empathize-with-your-customer)
thoughtbot Boost (https://thoughtbot.com/boost)
Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/)
Follow Josh on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadclayton/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/joshuaclayton)
Check out Josh's website (https://joshuaclayton.me/)
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Josh Clayton, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Boost team. Hey, I know that company. Welcome, Josh.
JOSH: Hey, Chad. How are you?
CHAD: All right. I'm back to the show I think. I didn't get a chance to look up the last episode you're in, but it was probably hundreds of episodes ago now.
JOSH: Yeah, it's got to have been a while.
CHAD: [laughs] Speaking of a while, you recently…now time is all messed up for me, but I know that you have been at thoughtbot for a long time. How long has it been?
JOSH: It was 12 years in August.
CHAD: It's been a wonderful 12 years, Josh.
JOSH: I agree. I agree.
CHAD: [laughs]
JOSH: It's been fun.
CHAD: So in that time, you have had a few different roles. But you've been a Managing Director for a while now.
JOSH: Yeah, I think that's...let's see. It was seven and a half years for the Boston team. And then it's 10 and a half months with Boost.
CHAD: So your background is as a developer. And you, like a lot of people who have a background as developers at thoughtbot, myself included, still do development on a fairly regular basis. What does the Managing Director job at thoughtbot actually do?
JOSH: What don't we do [laughter] is maybe a better question. Effectively, we're running that team's business. So it involves some amount of software consulting. It involves software sales. It involves managing the profitability of the team. There are marketing functions, and, I don't know, anything and everything, hiring-related things. We opened up and recently filled our Development Director position, which was open for a couple of months over the summer. We've just opened up a Design Director position. So it's everything. [laughs] It's everything it feels like.
CHAD: At the beginning of this year, we did an episode about the changes that we had made at thoughtbot to reorganize the teams around rather than geographic studios around the types of work that we would do on that team. And that's how the Boost team was created. So in that episode, we gave people an overview. But I'd love to hear in your own words, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than the other teams, and what do you focus on?
JOSH: So what makes Boost different? I think one of the drivers, one of the motivators, is to embed alongside existing product teams, engineering, and design teams, and help them get better, help them grow as well as ship features and fix bugs. So I think that the way that I position it is if there's an existing product that's deployed, people are using it day in and day out. Hopefully, it's been battle-tested. There are probably some funky areas of the code. Those are the codebases that we're operating in. It might be a team of two people; it might be a team of 200 people. But there is an existing product and an existing team. They're looking for our support to help make it better.
CHAD: One of the things I love about Boost and the changes that we've made, especially relative to Boost, is that at thoughtbot, we really believe in integrated teams of designers and de