Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20 The importance of the Team Retrospective

"It was great chat about Kate's experience working in an agile environment, and learning what artificial intelligence looks like at Optus"

Kate shares her experience of an agile transformation at Optus and the incredible impact it has had on the company. Delivering faster & enabling a sense of ownership & accountability amongst teams.

Kate also shares some great advice from embracing hybrid roles throughout her career, a gentle reminder to never put limits on yourself and adopting a “no risk no return” mentality.

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

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Transcript

Hayley Rodd:

Well, thank you for joining us here on the Easy Agile Podcast. Here in Wollongong things are a little different from when we last had a chat. We've since been put into lockdown as part of the Greater Sydney region, but I'm delighted to bring you this podcast from here in Wollongong. And also it maybe helps ease some of those lockdown blues that you might be suffering if you're in the same part of the world as I am today or if you're in another part of the world that is maybe in the same predicament that we find ourselves here in Wollongong in. So, I'd like to introduce myself. So my name is Hayley Rodd and I am the product marketing manager or one of the product marketing managers here at Easy Agile. And I have a great guest today, an old friend of mine but before we kick off with the podcast, I'd like to say any acknowledgement of country.

Hayley Rodd:

So here at Easy Agile, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we work and we live. We celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal people and their ongoing cultures and connections to the land and waters of New South Wales. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their contribution to the development of this tool. And now, to our guest, Kate Brodie. Kate is an old friend of mine from here in The Ngong or Wollongong if you're not from this region. And has been very successful in her pursuit of a career in technology. So a little bit about Kate. Katie is the director of digital AI and CCAI programs at Optus. Kate is now based in Sydney, Australia and is a leader in AI, digital and new emerging technology. Katie is responsible for Optus's AI, digital, portfolio and chapter working in an agile environment every day today.

Hayley Rodd:

Kate leads the development of new products to take to market and scale routines in an agile environment advocating for build, measure, learn culture. Most recently, Kate has been in charge of leading an enterprise first to market API consulting chatbox in Australia, compatible with Google Home. So obviously Kate is an extremely impressive person and I wanted to chat to her today about her career and also her role in the Agile team. But beyond that, I wanted to touch on women in technology and leadership, something that Kate has spoken about recently with Vogue Australia. So, thanks so much to Kate for joining us today. And I can't wait to share some of the advice from the lessons that Kate has learned through her career. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kate. It's really wonderful to see you. So could you tell me a bit about, I guess what your day-to-day looks like when you're at the office?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, thank you for having me. My day-to-day is quite varied. I would say that in my role, I'm very lucky to work with lots of different people, engineers, designers, business people, marketers and more recently a lot of different partners including Google. So, a lot of my day is working between different groups, strategically thinking about how we're going to continue to create a particular vision and future together for our customers. And then parts of it are related more to the technology and how we're ensuring that we've got our teams performing at a level that will allow us to meet those goals. And yeah, day-to-day, I'm talking to a lot of different.

Hayley Rodd:

So, when we were chatting just before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about your start in marketing and now you've moved over to technology, can you tell me a little bit about how you don't want people to feel pigeonholed, I guess in their careers or in their career path?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, absolutely. I really believe that anyone can get into anything if they put the effort behind it. And so I really think that no one should ever put limits on themselves. For me, it was partly because I was surrounded by really great people who supported me in trying lots of different things. And I think the way in which you build your confidence and start to move between different disciplines is by getting your hands dirty and just having a crack. So, I think it's important particularly and in this day and age for people to be open and not really put strong defined titles on themselves so that they do have a sense of freedom to kind of move around and try different roles because ultimately what is available today is probably going to look very different in 30 years time so... Yeah.

Hayley Rodd:

And do you still consider yourself a marketer or are you something, hybrid? What are you now?

Kate Brodie:

I would say that I am a technologist. I think that it requires the ability to have a bit of a marketing brain because you need to know how you're going to apply it in order to make a real impact, whether that's for customers, employees or commercially. But definitely with a strong kind of technology digital focus now, I wouldn't say that I would be purely seen as a marketer these days, but definitely it's about having that broad skill set and I think marketing's critical to being able to create great products.

Hayley Rodd:

Perfect. So, when I think of AI, I think of self-driving cars, someone who is very new to the technology industry myself. Could you unpack, I guess what AI means for Optus?

Kate Brodie:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that what you've just said is shared by many. Artificial intelligence is just such a broad concept and it really is related to creating intelligent machines that can ultimately perform tasks or imitate behavior that we might consider human life. And so that can range from really narrow experiences like reading a brochure in a different language using AI to kind of rate it in the language that you can understand to kind of these macro experiences like you've just described with self-driving cars and completely changing the way that we travel. So, I think that AI is such a broad term where it will mean different things for different groups. At Optus, it's about creating lasting customer relationships with people and allowing them to connect with others. And so where we use AI in a variety of different places, it can be in our products themselves.

Kate Brodie:

So for instance, we just recently launched a really amazing product called Call Translate. And that's where in the call you can actually interact with people in different languages on that same phone call so breaking down those communication barriers that have existed before. So that's super exciting. And then there's other places where we're using it, for instance in our sales and service functions that we can more easily automate the simple tasks and give more time to our people to grow and create those types of relationships with our customers. So, we're using artificial intelligence in many different ways, but I think it's really exciting in everything that we do, it's more driven towards how can we create a better customer experience. It's not about the technology in of itself, which is what I really like about it.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Nice. And it sounds like that that call translation would just... Could have so many applications and have... I'm even just thinking about in this COVID circumstance we... You're trying to get a message across to people to stay home and all those sorts of things like... Wow. Okay.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And there are some beautiful stories of people who are not able to go home with their young kids, travel home to their countries where their families are. And so they can have the grandkids talking to the grandparents more easily as they are learning different languages. So, it's really cool.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. That's beautiful. So, in your title, there is, I, maybe assume it's an abbreviation, but it's somebody that says CCAI. Could you tell me what that is?

Kate Brodie:

CCAI stands for Contact Center Artificial Intelligence and it's actually a program of work that is used increasingly by different industries and refers to a particular product that Google is working with companies on. And so it's about re-imagining your contact center. So traditionally today banks, telecommunications companies, big organizations with lots of customers have a lot of customers that contact us regularly. And so this is a way of actually, how do we use AI to increasingly get to a point where you don't need to reach out to us but instead we're reaching out to you to better optimize your experiences with us. So, that's a little bit more of a program piece that's attached to my title at the moment.

Hayley Rodd:

Wonderful. So, prior to your current role, we're just going to get into the Agile space, which I know you seem extremely excited about at Optus and it's had some, I guess will be changes in the... Or it has some... Helped some massive changes at Optus. Before your current role what was your experience with that job?

Kate Brodie:

My current role and my experience with Agile has evolved. So, a couple of years ago, we rolled out Agile at a very large scale across our enterprise. So previously we had been using Agile in our IT teams for software development, but we actually started to roll out agile for product development. And I originally started as a product owner. So I was given a goal around creating a chatbot from scratch that would be supporting our teams. And with that, our Agile transformation involved breaking down the silos of divisions. So functional divisions. We started to merge into cross-functional squads and our squad was given the autonomy and the ownership to take on a particular initiative, and in my case, it was chatbot. And so I've actually experienced multiple roles within Agile including as a product owner and as a chapter lead, which was where I looked after a particular craft of people who run across multiple squads in Agile.

Kate Brodie:

And now more recently, I've got squads that are working within my area to produce these products and these outcomes for us. My experience with Agile has been brilliant. The amount of impact that it's had on our company is incredible. So, over the last couple of years, and this is pre COVID, we had a big target around moving towards a really digital led experience. And so we've seen our customers who used to choose digital around six...

Kate Brodie:

Around 65% of our customers would choose digital a couple of years ago and now it's more like 85%. So these big swings have come as a result of, I think, breaking down those silos and working in a more Agile way. Just on that I think what I like about Agile is that it's not about showcases and stand ups, it's actually about the culture that Agile allows for. So I think it allows for a lot more ideas and innovation because you have this mix of people who didn't traditionally sit with one another being together. And then also you can just deliver faster because you can cut through a lot of noise by working together. And the last piece I think is definitely that ownership and accountability for driving an outcome as opposed to delivering a piece of the puzzle, I think, yeah, Agile's been massive for us.

Hayley Rodd:

So, and you said that it was a big roll out across the organization. So does that mean that everyone within Optus works within an Agile framework or is there still sections that I guess don't employ Agile.

Kate Brodie:

There are areas of the business that aren't completely agile at this point in time. And I think they are areas of the business that makes sense. So sometimes in research and the like, you need to have a bit more freedom to sit back and ideate, although they would adopt principles of Agile so that they time box ideas and the like. From a delivery perspective, most of the organization has transformed into Agile delivery.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. So it sounds like your customers would be seeing a lot of value from the organization transforming to Agile. You said before that there was a lot of people in your life who allowed you to do things you felt confident in your ability because I guess they helped you get there. So, has there been a mentor that I guess you look back on in your career or even now that has had an impact on where you are?

Kate Brodie:

I think that I've had a lot of different people who have been my mentor at different stages and who I would call upon now. So, I like to probably not have one mentor, but sort of look at the variety of people and their different skills and take a little bit of this, take a little bit of that, learn from this person on a particular area. There have definitely been some people who stand out. And so, early on one of the things that was really useful for me was being supported by a particular general manager who basically sort of pushed me into digital and technology and sort of, I was just very fortunate that he believed in me and said, "Now, you can run this area." I had never really been exposed to it. This is 10 years ago when digital was still sort of seen as more of a complimentary area as opposed to core, to a business.

Kate Brodie:

And by him supporting me in having a go at everything that's been... That's actually one of the most pivotal moments I would say in my career very early on that that's really led the way for me to increasingly get into the area that I'm in today. And along the way, obviously, there's been many people who have made a huge contribution to where I'm at and they're both in my career, but also outside. So, people that you play sport with people that you just have, that you share different stories with, I think that often you take a little bit from everyone and hopefully you give back something to those people too.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, I'm sure you do. So, is there any... Looking back on all those people that you've had throughout your life who have helped you get to where you are, is there a piece of advice that might have stuck with you that you could share with us?

Kate Brodie:

There's lots of different advice. I think one of them is, no risk no return. I really do think that you have to have a crack, you have to put yourself out there. The things that always been the most satisfying experiences have been by having a go at something that I hadn't done before. So I think no risk no return is something that I definitely subscribe to. And then in terms of some practical advice, particularly as a female, I think in your career, something called the assumptive close, which is a sales technique, around almost not asking if someone would like something but sort of implying that they would. I actually would say that I use that technique not to necessarily directly sell to someone, but in everything that I do and I would really encourage most people to use it. It was some early feedback in my career and it's been quite useful along the way.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:18:51] after working in real estate for a little while, I think a lot of real estate agents also assume the sale. So, and it just it... I think it can help with the confidence and going in there and I guess almost putting yourself in a position of power in the conversation when you assume you've got this in the bag. So yeah, it probably comes naturally to some people more than others, myself included, but I would struggle with that, but that's a really good piece of advice. So yeah, I'm sure that it will be helpful for a lot of people who are listening to the podcast now. So what about... What's your proudest moment as a leader there at Optus so far? I know that you're in Vogue recently. That's an amazing moment. And as a person who's known you for a really long time, that was a proud moment for me to see someone that I'd known do that, but for you, what's the proud moment?

Kate Brodie:

[inaudible 00:19:58] I think probably my proudest moment is when I've launched something large. So recently we launched a large piece of technology that will change the experience for our customers, but it wasn't as much the launch as it was looking around me and seeing the people that are there with me doing it. And there are quite a few amazing people that I get to work with. And having sort of started with a few of them in the early days, a few years ago, where we were sort of spitballing ideas and we had no products to now having large products that make a real impact to Australian consumers and to our business. It's those moments where it's actually the team around you that it... I'm most proud of. It's just the high engagement and the drive and the culture that we've created where people want to work in this area and we all enjoy creating these experiences together. So I think definitely I'm most proud of the team culture and environment that we've set.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Sounds amazing. We're lucky enough here at Easy Agile to have, I guess the same... A culture that you can be proud of as well, so, I can understand how it can be something that makes a huge impact every day. So, we're getting close to the end of our time together, but again, I guess I wanted to touch on a bit of gender diversity. So how does gender diversity benefit technology companies? What do you think?

Kate Brodie:

I think diversity in general is going to benefit any business and particularly technology businesses, because it's imperative that you have a representation of the population and the people that will use your technology and the experiences that you're trying to create. So I think that it's only by ensuring that we are tapping into the entire talent pool, that we can represent people and represent customers, but also we're going to get the best ideas. And so that's gender diversity but also culturally and in every sort of facet, the more that we can tap into the entire talent pool, the more we'll create better experiences, better technology, solve more of the world's problems and capture more opportunities.

Hayley Rodd:

Mm. Fantastic. And last question, what advice would you give a young woman hoping to enter the technology industry or a technology company?

Kate Brodie:

I would say go for it. I would say don't ever put limits on yourself and speak up, learn as much as you can and get your hands dirty because it's through that kind of confidence... Oh, sorry. It's through working with lots of different people and creating things with people from scratch that you'll gain your confidence as well. And always ask, don't sit there waiting for someone to sort of tap you on the shoulder, ask for that new opportunity, ask for the salary increase, ask, it won't hurt. I promise.

Hayley Rodd:

That's a good advice. What's the worst they could say?

Kate Brodie:

No, exactly.

Hayley Rodd:

No, yeah.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And that's why.

Hayley Rodd:

Or they might say yes. And then that's awesome too. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Kate, for your time. That was really wonderful. It was wonderful to catch up, but it was also wonderful to hear from someone who's so young in their career, has... But has also done so much and who has reached some amazing goals, has a team behind them. And I think that there's so many people who will watch this, myself included, who will learn a lot from you. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

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On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, tune in to hear developers Angad, Jared, Jess and Jordan, as they share their thoughts on observability.  

Wollongong has a thriving and supportive tech community and in this episode we have brought together some of our locally based Developers from Siligong Valley for a round table chat on all things observability.

💥 What is observability?
💥 How can you improve observability?
💥 What's the end goal?

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"This was a great episode to be a part of! Jess and Jordan shared some really interesting points on the newest tech buzzword - observability""

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

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Transcript

Jared Kells:

Welcome everybody to the Easy Agile podcast. My name's Jared Kells, and I'm a developer here at Easy Agile. Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and extend that same respect to any aboriginal people listening with us today.

Jared Kells:

So today's podcast is a bit of a technical one. It says on my run sheet here that we're here to talk about some hot topics for engineers in the IT sector. How exciting that we've got a couple of primarily front end engineers and Angad and I are going to share some front end technical stuff and Jess and Jordan are going to be talking a bit about observability. So we'll start by introductions. So I'll pass it over to Jess.

Jess Belliveau:

Cool. Thanks Jared. Thanks for having me one as well. So yeah, my name's Jess Belliveau. I work for Apptio as an infrastructure engineer. Yeah, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

I'm Jordan Simonovski. I work as a systems engineer in the observability team at Atlassian. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, tech wise. But yeah, working on building out some pretty beefy systems to handle all of our data at Atlassian at the moment. So, that's fun.

Angad Sethi:

Hello everyone. I'm Angad. I'm working for Easy Agile as a software dev. Nothing fancy like you guys.

Jared Kells:

Nothing fancy!

Jess Belliveau:

Don't sell yourself short.

Jared Kells:

Yeah, I'll say. Yeah, so my name's Jared, and yeah, senior developer at Easy Agile, working on our apps. So mainly, I work on programs and road maps. And yeah, they're front end JavaScript heavy apps. So that's where our experience is. I've heard about this thing called observability, which I think is just logs and stuff, right?

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, yeah. That's it, we'll wrap up!

Jared Kells:

Podcast over! Tell us about observability.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah okay, I'll, yeah. Well, I thought first I'd do a little thing of why observability, why we talk about this and sort of for people listening, how we got here. We had a little chat before we started recording to try and feel out something that might interest a broader audience that maybe people don't know a lot about. And there's a lot of movements in the broad IT scope, I guess, that you could talk about. There's so many different things now that are just blowing up. Observability is something that's been a hot topic for a couple of years now. And it's something that's a core part of my job and Jordan's job as well. So it's something easy for us to talk about and it's something that you can give an introduction to without getting too technical. So we don't want to get down. This is something that you can go really deep into the weeds, so we picked it as something that hopefully we can explain to you both at a level that might interest the people at home listening as well.

Jess Belliveau:

Jordan and I figured out these four bullet points that we wanted to cover, and maybe I can do the little overview of that, and then I can make Jordan cover the first bullet point, just throw him straight under the bus.

Jordan Simonovski:

Okay!

Jess Belliveau:

So we thought we'd try and describe to you, first of all, what is observability. Because that's a pretty, the term doesn't give you much of what it is. It gives you a little hint, but it'll be good to base line set what are we talking about when we say what is observability. And then why would a development team want observability? Why would a company want observability? Sort of high level, what sort of benefits you get out of it and who may need it, which is a big thing. You can get caught up in these industry hot buzz words and commit to stuff that you might not need, or that sort of stuff.

Jared Kells:

Yep.

Jordan Simonovski:

Yep.

Jess Belliveau:

We thought we'd talk about some easy wins that you get with observability. So some of the real basic stuff you can try and get, and what advantages you get from it. And then we just thought because we're no going to try and get too deep, we could just give a few pointers to some websites and some YouTube talks for further reading that people want to do, and go from there. So yeah, Jordan you want to-

Jared Kells:

Sounds good.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. I hopefully, hopefully. We'll see how this goes! And I guess if you guys have questions as well, that's something we should, if there's stuff that you think we don't cover or that you want to know more, ask away.

Jordan Simonovski:

I guess to start with observability, it's a topic I get really excited about, because as someone that's been involved in the dev ops and SRE space for so long, observability's come along and promises to close the loop or close a feedback loop on software delivery. And it feels like it's something we don't really have at the moment. And I get that observability maybe sounds new and shiny, but I think the term itself exists to maybe differentiate itself from what's currently out there. A lot of us working in tech know about monitoring and the loading and things like that. And I think they serve their own purpose and they're not in any way obsolete either. Things like traditional monitoring tools. But observability's come along as a way to understand, I think, the overwhelmingly complex systems that we're building at the moment. A lot of companies are probably moving towards some kind of complicated distributed systems architecture, microservices, other buzz words.

Jordan Simonovski:

But even for things like a traditional kind of monolith. Observability really serves to help us ask new questions from our systems. So the way it tends to get explained is monitoring exits for our known unknowns. With seniority comes the ability to predict, almost, in what way your systems will fail. So you'll know. The longer you're in the industry, you know this, like a Java server fails in x, y, z amount of ways, so we should probably monitor our JVM heap, or whatever it is.

Jared Kells:

I was going to say that!

Jordan Simonovski:

I'll try not to get too much into-

Jared Kells:

Runs out of memory!

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. So that's something that you're expecting to fail at some point. And that's something that you can consider a known unknown. But then, the promise of observability is that we should be shipping enough data to be able to ask new questions. So the way it tends to get talked about, you see, it's an unknown unknown of our system, that we want to find out about and ask new questions from. And that's where I think observability gets introduced, to answer these questions. Is that a good enough answer? You want me to go any further into detail about this stuff? I can talk all day about this.

Jared Kells:

Is it like a [crosstalk 00:08:05]. So just to repeat it back to you, see if I've understood. Is it kind of like if I've got a, traditionally with a Java app, I might log memories. It's because I know JVM's run out of memory and that's a thing that I monitor, but observability is more broad, like going almost over the top with what you monitor and log so that you can-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's going over the top. I think it's maybe adding a bit more context to your data. So if any of you have worked with traces before, observability is very similar to the way traces work and just builds on top of the premise of traces, I guess. So you're creating these events, and these events are different transactions that could be happening in your applications, usually submitting some kind of request. And with that request, you can add a whole bunch of context to it. You can add which server this might be running on, which time zone. All of these additional and all the exciters. You can throw in user agency into there if you want to. The idea of observability is that you're not necessarily constrained by high cardinality data. High cardinality data being data sets that can change quite largely, in terms of the kinds of data they represent, or the combinations of data sets that you could have.

Jordan Simonovski:

So if you want shipping metrics on something, on a per user basis and you want to look at how different users are affected by things, that would be considered a high cardinality metric. And a lot of the time it's not something that traditional monitoring companies or metric providers can really give you as a service. That's where you'll start paying insanely huge bills on things like Datadog or whatever it is, because they're now being considered new metrics. Whereas observability, we try and store our data and query it in a way that we can store pretty vast data sets and say, "Cool. We have errors coming from these kinds of users." And you can start to build up correlations on certain things there. You can find out that users from a particular time zone or a particular device would only be experiencing that error. And from there, you can start building up, I think, better ways of understanding how a particular change might have broken things. Or some particular edge cases that you otherwise couldn't pick up on with something like CPU or memory monitoring.

Angad Sethi:

Would it be fair to say-

Jared Kells:

Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:11:02].

Angad Sethi:

Oh, sorry Jared.

Jared Kells:

No you can-

Angad Sethi:

Would it be fair to say that, so, observability is basically a set of principles or a way to find the unknown unknowns?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Oh.

Jess Belliveau:

And better equip you to find, one of the things I find is a lot of people think, you get caught up in thinking observability is a thing that you can deploy and have and tick a box, but I like your choice of word of it being a set of principles or best practices. It's sort of giving you some guidance around these, having good logging coming out of your application. So structured logs. So you're always getting the same log format that you can look at. Tracing, which Jordan talked a little bit about. So giving you that ability to follow how a user is interacting with all the different microservices and possibly seeing where things are going wrong, and metrics as well. So the good thing with metrics is we're turning things a bit around and trying to make an application, instead of doing, and I don't want to get too technical, black box monitoring, where we're on the outside, trying to peer in with probes and checks like that. But the idea with metrics is the application is actually emitting these metrics to inform us what state it is in, thereby making it more observable.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, I like your choice of words there, Angad, that it's like these practices, this sort of guide of where to go, which probably leads into this next point of why would a team want to implement it. If you want to start again, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, I can start. And I'll give you a bit more time to speak as well, Jess in this one. I won't rant as much.

Jess Belliveau:

Oh, I didn't sign up for that!

Jordan Simonovski:

I think why teams would want it is because, it really depends on your organization and, I guess, the size of the teams you're working in. Most of the time, I would probably say you don't want to build observability yourself in house. It is something that you can, observability capabilities themselves, you won't achieve it just by buying a thing, like you can't buy dev ops, you can't buy Agile, you can't buy observability either.

Jared Kells:

Hang on, hang on. It says on my run sheet to promote Easy Agile, so that sounds like a good segue-

Jess Belliveau:

Unless you want to buy it. If you do want to buy Agile, the [crosstalk 00:13:55] in the marketplace.

Jared Kells:

Yeah, sorry, sorry, yeah! Go on.

Jordan Simonovski:

You can buy tools that make your life a lot easier, and there are a lot of things out there already which do stuff for people and do surface really interesting data that people might want to look at. I think there are a couple of start ups like LightStep and Honeycomb, which give you a really intuitive way of understanding your data in production. But why you would need this kind of stuff is that you want to know the state of your systems at any given point in time, and to build, I guess, good operational hygiene and good production excellence, I guess as Liz Fong-Jones would put it, is you need to be able to close that feedback loop. We have a whole bunch of tools already. So we have CICD systems in place. We have feature flags now, which help us, I guess, decouple deployments from releases. You can deploy code without actually releasing code, and you can actually give that power to your PM's now if you want to, with feature flags, which is great.

Jordan Simonovski:

But what you can also do now is completely close this loop, and as you're deploying an application, you can say, "I want to canary this deployment. I want to deploy this to 10% of my users, maybe users who are opted in for Beta releases or something of our application, and you can actually look at how that's performing before you release it to a wider audience. So it does make deployments a lot safer. It does give you a better understanding of how you're affecting users as well. And there are a whole bunch of tools that you can use to determine this stuff as well. So if you're looking at how a lot of companies are doing SRE at the moment, or understanding what reliable looks like for their applications, you have things like SLO's in place as well. And SLO's-

Jared Kells:

What's an SLO?

Jordan Simonovski:

They're all tied to user experiences. So you're saying, "Can my user perform this particular interaction?" And if you can effectively measure that and know how users are being affected by the changes you're making, you can easily make decisions around whether or not you continue shipping features or if you drop everything and work on reliability to make sure your users aren't affected. So it's this very user centric approach to doing things. I think in terms of closing the loop, observability gives us that data to say, "Yes, this is how users are being affected. This is how, I guess the 99th percentile of our users are fine, but we have 1% who are having adverse issues with our application." And you can really pinpoint stuff from there and say, "Cool. Users with this particular browser or this particular, or where we've deployed this app to," let's say if you have a global deployment of some kind, you've deployed to an island first, because you don't really care what happens to them. You can say, "Oh, we've actually broken stuff for them." And you can roll it back before you impact 100% of your users.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. I liked what you said about the test. I forgot the acronym, but actually testing the end user behavior. That's kind of exciting to me, because we have all these metrics that are a bit useless. They're cool, "Oh, it's using 1% CPU like it always is, now I don't really care," but can a user open up the app and drag an issue around? It's like-

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, that's a really great example, right?

Jared Kells:

That's what I really care about.

Jess Belliveau:

The 1% CPU thing, you could look at a CPU usage graph and see a deployment, and the CPU usage doesn't change. Is everything healthy or not? You don't know, whereas if you're getting that deeper level info of the user interactions, you could be using 1% CPU to serve HTTP500 errors to the 80% of the customer base, sort of thing.

Angad Sethi:

How do you do that? The SLO's bit, how do you know a user can log in and drag an issue?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. I think that would come with good instrumenting-

Angad Sethi:

Good question?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, it comes down to actually keeping observability in mind when you are developing new features, the same way you would think about logging a particular thing in your code as you're writing, or writing test for your code, as you're writing code as well. You want to think about how you can instrument something and how you can understand how this particular feature is working in production. Because I think as a lot of Agile and dev ops principles are telling us now is that we do want our applications in production. And as developers, our responsibilities don't end when we deploy something. Our responsibility as a developer ends when we've provided value to the business. And you need a way of understanding that you're actually doing that. And that's where, I guess, you do nee do think about observability with a lot of this stuff, and actually measuring your success metrics. So if you do know that your application is successful if your user can log in and drag stuff around, then that's exactly what you want to measure.

Jared Kells:

I think that we have to build-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah?

Jared Kells:

Oh, sorry Jordan.

Jordan Simonovski:

No, you go.

Jared Kells:

I was just going to say we have to build our apps with integration testing in mind already. So doing browser based tests around new features. So it would be about building features with that and the same thing in mind but for testing and production.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah and the actual how, the actual writing code part, there's this really great project, the open telemetry project, which provides all these sort of API's and SDK's that developers can consume, and it's vendor agnostic. So when you talk about the how, like, "How do I do this? How do I instrument things?" Or, "How do I emit metrics?" They provide all these helpful libraries and includes that you can have, because the last thing you want to do is have to roll this custom solution, because you're then just adding to your technical debt. You're trying to make things easier, but you're then relying on, "Well I need to keep Jared Kells employed, because he wrote our log in engine and no one else knows how it works.

Jess Belliveau:

And then the other thing that comes to mind with something like open telemetry as well, and we talked a bit about Datadog. So Datadog is a SaaS vendor that specializes in observability. And you would push your metrics and your logs and your traces to them and they give you a UI to display. If you choose something that's vendor agnostic, let's just use the example of Easy Agile. Let's say they start Datadog and then in six months time, we don't want to use Datadog anymore, we want to use SignalFx or whatever the Splunk one is now.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think NorthX.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. You can change your end point, push your same metrics and all that sort of stuff, maybe with a few little tweaks, but the idea is you don't want to tie in to a single thing.

Jordan Simonovski:

Your data structures remain the same.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. So that you could almost do it seamlessly without the developers knowing. There's even companies in the past that I think have pushed to multiple vendors. So you could be consuming vendor A and then you want to do a proof of concept with vendor B to see what the experience is like and you just push your data there as well.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. I think our coupling to Datadog will be I all the dashboards and stuff that we've made. It's not so much the data.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. That's sort of the big up sell, right. It's how you interact. That's where they want to get their hooks in, is making it easier for you to interpret that data and manipulate it to meet your needs and that sort of stuff.

Jordan Simonovski:

Observability suggests dashboards, right?

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, perhaps. You used this term as well, Jordan, "production excellence." And when we talk about who needs observability, I was thinking a bit about that while you were talking. And for me, production excellence, or in Apptio we call it production readiness, operational readiness and that sort of stuff is like we want to deploy something to production like what sort of best practices do we want to have in place before we do that? And I think observability is a real great idea, because it's helping you in the future. You don't know what problems you're going to have down the line, but you're equipping your teams to be able to respond to those problems easily. Whereas, we've all probably been there, we've deployed code of production and we have no observability, we have a huge outage. What went wrong? Well, no one knows, but we know this is the fix, and it's hard to learn from that, or you have to learn from that I guess, and protect the user against future stuff, yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

When I think easy wins for observability, the first thing that really comes to mind is this whole idea of structured logging, which is really this idea that your application is you're logging, first of all. Quite important as a baseline starting point, but then you have a structured log format which lets you programmatically pass the logs as well. If you go back in time, maybe logging just looked like plain text with a line, with a timestamp, an error message. Whatever the developer decided to write to the standard out, or to the error file or something like that. Now I think there's a general move to having JSON, an actual formatted blob with that known structure so you can look into it. Tracing's probably not an easy win. That's a little bit harder. You can implement it with open telemetry and libraries and stuff. Requires a bit more understanding of your code base, I guess, and where you want tracing to fire, and that sort of stuff, parsing context through, things like that.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think Atlassian, when you probably just want to know that everything is okay. At a fairly superficial level. Maybe you just want to do some kind of up time on a trend. And then as, I guess, your code might get more complex or your product gets a bit more complex, you can start adding things in there. But I think actually knowing or surfacing the things you know might break. Those would probably be your quickest wins.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, let's mention some things for further reading. If you want to go get the whole picture of the whole, real observability started to get a lot of movement out of the Google SRE book from a few years ago. The Google SRE stuff covers the whole gamut of their soak reliability engineering practice, and observability is a portion of that, there's some great chapters on that. O'Reilly has an observability book, I think, just dedicated to observability now.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think that's still in early release, if people want to google chapters.

Jess Belliveau:

The open telemetry stuff, we'll drop a link to that I think that's really handy to know.

Angad Sethi:

From [inaudible 00:26:12], which is my perspective, as a developer, say I wanted to introduce cornflake use Datadog at Easy Agile. Not very familiar, I'm not very comfortable with it. I know how to navigate, but what's a quick way for me to get started on introducing observability? Sorry to lock my direct job or at my workplace.

Jordan Simonovski:

I would lean, I could be biased here. Jess correct me or give your opinion on this, I would lean heavily towards SLO's for this. And you can have a quick read in the SRE-

Jess Belliveau:

What does SLO stand for, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

Okay, sorry. Buzz words! SLO is a service level objective, not to be confused with service level agreement. An agreement itself is contractual and you can pay people money if you do breach those. An SLO is something you set in your team and you have a target of reliability, because we are getting to the point where we understand that all systems at any point in time are in some kind of degraded state. And yeah, reliability isn't necessarily binary, it's not unreliable or reliable. Most of the time, it's mostly reliable and this gives us a better shared language, I guess. And you can have a read in the SRE handbook by Google, which is free online, which gives you a pretty good understanding of Datadog.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think the last time I used it had a SLO offering. But I think like I was mentioning earlier, you set an SLO on particular functionalities or features of your application. You're saying, "My user can do this 99% of the time," or whatever other reliability target you might want to set. I wouldn't recommend five nines of reliability. You'll probably burn yourself out trying to get there. And you have this target set for yourself. And you know exactly what you're measuring, you're measuring particular types of functionality. And you know when you do breach these, users are being affected. And that's where you can actually start thinking about observability. You can think about, "What other features are we implementing that we can start to measure?" Or, "What user facing things are we implementing that we can start to measure?"

Jordan Simonovski:

Other things you could probably look at are, I think they're all covered in the book anyway, data freshness in a way. You want to make sure the data users are being displayed is relatively fresh. You don't want them looking at stale data, so you can look at measuring things like that as well. But you can pretty much break it down into most functionalities of a website. It's no longer like a ping check, that you're just saying, "Yes, HTTP, okay. My application is fine." You're saying, "My users are actually being affected by things not working." And you can start measuring things from there. And that should give you a better understanding, or a better idea, at least, of where to start with what you want to measure and ow you want to measure it. That would be my opinion on where to get started with this if you do want to introduce it.

Jared Kells:

We're going to talk a little bit about state and how with some of these, like our very front end heavy applications that we're building, so the applications we build just basically run inside the browser and the traditional state as you would think about it, is just pulling a very simple API that writes some things into the database with some authentication, and that sort of stuff. So in terms of reliability of the services, it's really reliable. Those tiny API's just never have problems, because it's just so simple. And well, they've got plenty of monitoring around it. But all our state is actually, when you say, "Observe the state of the system," for the most part, that's state in a browser. And how do we get observability into that?

Jess Belliveau:

A big thing is really, there's not one thing fits all as well. When we talk about the SLO stuff as well, it's understanding what is important to not so much maybe your company but your team as well. If you're delivering this product, what's important to you specifically? So one SLO that might work for me at Apptio probably isn't going to work for Easy Agile. This is really pushing my knowledge, as well, of front end stuff, but when we say we want to observe the state as well, we don't necessarily mean specifically just the state. You could want to understand with each one of those API's when it's firing, what the request response time is for that API firing. So that might be an important metric. So you can start to see if one of those APIs is introducing latency, and so your user experience is degraded. Like, "Hey when we were on release three, when users were interacting with our service here, it would respond in this percentile latency. We've done a release and since then, now we're seeing it's now in this percentile. Have we degraded performance performance?" Users might not be complaining, but that could be something that the team then can look into, add to a sprint. Hey, I'm using Agile terms now. Watch out!

Jared Kells:

That's a really good example, Jess. Performance issues for us are typically not an API that's performing poorly. It's something in this very complicated front end application is not running in the same order as it used to, or there's some complex interaction we didn't think of, so it's requesting more data than expected. The APIs are returning. They're never slow, for the most part, but we have performance regressions that we may not know about without seeing them or investigating them. The observability is really at the individual user's browser level. That makes sense? I want to know how long did it take for this particular interaction to happen.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. I've never done that sort of side of things. As well, the other thing I guess, you could potentially be impacted in as well as then, you're dealing with end user manifestations as well. You could perceive-

Jared Kells:

Yeah sure.

Jess Belliveau:

... Greater performance on their laptop or something, or their ISP or that sort of stuff. It'd be really hard to make sure you're not getting noise from that sort of thing as well.

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. There are tools like Sentry, I guess, which do exist to give you a bit more of an understanding what's happening on your front end. The way Sentry tends to work with JavaScript, is you'll upload a minified map of your JS to Sentry, deploy your code and then if something does break or work in a fairly unexpected way, that tends to get surfaced with Sentry will tell you exactly which line this kind of stuff is happening on, and it's a really cool tool for that company stuff. I don't know if it'd give you the right type of insights, I think, in terms of performance or-

Jared Kells:

Yeah, we use a similar tool and it does work for crashes and that sort of thing. And on the observability front, we log actions like state mutations in side the front end, not the actual state change, but just labels that represent that you updated an issue summary or you clicked this button, that sort of thing, and we send those with our crash reports. And it's super helpful having that sort of observability. So I think I know what you guys are talking about. But I'm just [crosstalk 00:35:25], yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, that's almost like, I guess, a form of tracing. For me and Jordan, when we talk about tracing, we might be thinking about 12 different microservices sitting in AWS that are all interacting, whereas you're more shifting that. That's sort of all stuff in the browser interacting and just having that history of this is what the user did and how they've ended up-

Jared Kells:

In that state.

Jess Belliveau:

In that state, yeah.

Jordan Simonovski:

I guess even if you don't have a lot of microservices, if you're talking about particular, like you're saying for the most part your API requests are fine but sometimes you have particularly large payloads-

Jared Kells:

We actually have to monitor, I don't know, maybe you can help with this, we actually should be monitoring maybe who we're integrating with. It's actually much more likely that we'll have a performance issue on a Xero API rather than... We don't see it, the browser sees it as well, which is-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, and tracing does solve all of those regressions for you. Most tracing libraries, like if you're running Node apps or whatever on your backend. I can just tell you about Node, because I probably have the most experience writing Node stuff. You pretty much just drop in Didi trace, which is a Datadog library for tracing into your backend and your hook itself into all of, I think, the common libraries that you'll tend to work with, I think. Like if you're working for express or for a lot of just HADP libraries, as well as a few AWS services, it will kind of hook itself into that. And you can actually pinpoint. It will kind of show you on this pretty cool service map exactly which services you're interacting with and where you might be experiencing a regression. And I think traces do serve to surface that information, which is cool. So that could be something worth investigating.

Jess Belliveau:

It's funny. This is a little bit unrelated to observability, but you've just made me think a bit more about how you're saying you're reliant on third party providers as well. And something I think that's really important that sometimes gets missed is so many of us today are relying on third party providers, like AWS is a huge thing. A lot of people writing apps that require AWS services. And I think a lot of the time, people just assume AWS or Jira or whatever, is 100% up time, always available. And they don't write their code in such a way that deals with failures. And I think it's super important. So many times now I've seen people using the AWS API and they don't implement exponential back off. And so they're basically trying to hit the AWS API, it fails or they might get throttled, for example, and then they just go into a fail state and throw an error to the user. But you could potentially improve that user experience, have a retry mechanism automatically built in and that sort of stuff. It doesn't really tie into the observability thing, but it's something.

Jared Kells:

And the users don't care, right? No one cares if it's an AWS problem. It's your problem, right, your app is too slow.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, they're using your app. Exactly right. It reflects on you sort of thing, so it's in your interest to guard against an upstream failure, or at least inform the user when it's that case. Yeah.

Jared Kells:

Well, I think we're going to have to call it, this podcast, because it was an hour ago. We had instructed max 45 minutes.

Jess Belliveau:

We could just keep going. We might need a part two! Maybe we can request [cross talk 00:39:21].

Jared Kells:

Maybe! Yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

Or we'll just start our own podcast! Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

So what were your biggest learnings today, given it's been Angad and I are just learning about observability, Angad what was your biggest learning today about observability? My biggest learning was that observability does not equal Datadog. No, sorry! It was just very fascinating to learn about quantifying the known unknowns. I don't know if that's a good takeaway, but...

Jess Belliveau:

Any takeaway is a good takeaway! What about you, Jared?

Jared Kells:

I think, because I we were going to talk about state management, and part of it was how we have this ability, at the moment to, the way our front ends are architected, we can capture the state of the app and get a customer to send us their state, basically. And we can load it into our app and just see exactly how it was, just the way our state's designed. But what might be even cooler is to build maybe some observability into that front end for support. I'm thinking instead of just having, we have this button to send us out your support information that sends us a bunch of the state, but instead of console logging to the browser log, we could be console logging, logging in our front end somewhere that when they click, "send support information," our customers should be sending us the actions that they performed.

Jared Kells:

Like, "Hey there's a bug, send us your support information." It doesn't have to be a third party service collecting this observability stuff. We could just build into our... So that's what I'm thinking about.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, for sure. It'll probably be a lot less intrusive, as well, as some of the third party stuff that I've seen around.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. It's pretty hard with some of these integrations, especially if you're developing apps that get run behind a firewall.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah

Jared Kells:

You can't just talk to some of these third parties. So yeah, it's cool though. It's really interesting.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, I hope someone out there listening has learned something, and Jordan and I will send some links through, and we can add them, hopefully, to the show notes or something so people can do some more reading and...

Jared Kells:

All thanks!

Jess Belliveau:

Thanks for having us, yeah.

Jared Kells:

Thanks all for your time, and thanks everybody for listening.

Jordan Simonovski:

Thanks everyone.

Angad Sethi:

That was [inaudible 00:41:55].

Jess Belliveau:

Tune in next week!

"It was great to be able to have this conversation with Maysa and have her share her story. So many great takeaways." - Nick Muldoon

Join Nick Muldoon, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Easy Agile as he chats with Maysa Safadi, Engineering Manager at Easy Agile.

As a woman, growing up in the middle east and being passionate about pursuing a career in the world of tech, don’t exactly go hand in hand. Navigating her way through a very patriarchal society, Maysa talks about her career journey and how she got to where she is today.

Having the odds stacked against her, Maysa talks about challenging the status quo, the constant pressure to prove herself in a male-dominated industry, the importance of charting your own course and her hopes for the future of women in tech.

This is such an inspiring episode, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

Hi, team. Nick Muldoon, co-founder co-CEO at Easy Agile, and I'm joined today by Maysa Safadi, who's an engineering manager here at Easy Agile. We'll get into Maysa's story and journey in just a little bit, but before we do, I just wanted to say a quick acknowledgement to the traditional custodians of the land from which we are recording and indeed broadcasting today, and they are the people of the Dharawal speaking country just south of Sydney and Australia. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people that are joining us and listening in today. Maysa, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Maysa Safadi:

Thank you, Nick. Thank you for inviting me.

Nick Muldoon:

So, Maysa's on today. We're going to explore Maysa's journey on her career to this point, and I think one of the things that interests me in Maysa's journey is she's come from a fairly patriarchal society in the Middle East, and has overcome a lot of odds that some of her peers didn't overcome, and she's managed to come to Australia, start a family in Australia, has three beautiful children and is an engineering manager after spending so many years as a software engineer. So, Maysa, I'd love to learn a little bit about the early stages of your life and how you got into university.

Maysa Safadi:

I was born and raised in United Arab Emirates. I am one of nine. I have three brothers and five sisters. I'm the middle child actually. Dad and mom, they were very focused on really raising good healthy kids and more important is to educate all of their kids regardless if they are boys or girls. Started my education at schools there. When I graduated from high school, I end up getting enrolled in a college like what you call it here in Australia, TAFE.

Education in United Arab Emirates, it's not free. Being one of nine and having that aim and goal for my father to educate all of us. When it comes to education, it was two factors that play big part of it. Can dad afford sending me to that college or university? and then after I finish, will I be able to find a job in that field? One of my dream jobs, I remember growing up I wanted to be a civil engineer, and I remember my older brother, he's the second, was telling me it's good that you want to study civil engineering. Remember, you will not be able to find a job.

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me why.

Maysa Safadi:

United Arab Emirates, it's male dominated country. Civil engineering is a male dominated industry. If you are going to look for a job after a graduation, it is pretty much given to males and Emirati males first. So, kind of it needs to go very down in the queue before it gets to me, and to be realistic, sometimes you give up your dreams because you know that you are not going to have a chance later in life.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, my gosh, this is demoralizing.

Maysa Safadi:

Unfortunately.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay,

Maysa Safadi:

So, the decision for me to get to engineering, it was, again, I couldn't really go to university because it was too expensive. My older sister had a friend who told her about this institute that they are teaching computers. When it came to mom and dad, they really told us, "Do whatever you want, study whatever you want, it is you who is going to basically study that field and you need to like it and you need to make sure that you can make the most of it." So, with that institute, it was reasonably okay for my dad to pay for my fees and they were teaching computers. I thought, "Yeah, all right, computers, it is in science field, right? I can't maybe study civil engineering, but I'm really very interested to know more about computers."

Nick Muldoon:

Similar, close enough.

Maysa Safadi:

Close enough. I end up getting enrolled and I remember the very first subject was fundamentals of computers or computer fundamentals, something like this, and I thought, "Yeah, all right, that is interesting," and I did really finish my education from there. After two years I ended up getting a diploma in computer science.

Nick Muldoon:

So, was this a unique situation for you or were most of your girlfriends from high school also going on to college?

Maysa Safadi:

It's unique actually, unique to my family. I'm not saying it's rare, you will find other families doing it, but it's not common. It is unique because, yes, most of the girls, if not all they go to school, it's compulsory in United Arab Emirate, but very small number of them pursue higher education. Pretty much girls, they end up finishing school and the very first chance to get married, they end up getting married and starting their own family. I remember-

Nick Muldoon:

And you've chosen a different path because-

Maysa Safadi:

Oh, yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

... yes, you have a family today obviously, but you established your career, you didn't finish school and get married.

Maysa Safadi:

I think I really give so much credit to mom and dad in that sense. They told us education is more important than starting a family or getting married. They said, "Finish your degree, finish your education, then get married." The other thing they said, "Do not even get married while you are studying because for sure you won't be able to finish it. Maybe because your husband wouldn't want you to finish it. Maybe you will become so busy with the kids and you will put it back." I remember actually so many times with my older sisters when someone, it's traditional marriage there, when some people come and propose to marry or to propose for their hands, my dad always used to say, "No, finish your education first."

Nick Muldoon:

So, this is interesting because I think your eldest was born when you went and actually continued education and got your master's, is that correct?

Maysa Safadi:

Yes. I got diploma in computer science. However, I always wanted a bachelor degree. I knew that there is more to it. I fell in love with computing but I wanted more, and always I had that perception in mind, "If I'm going to get a better opportunity, then I have to have a better certificate or education." So, I thought getting a bachelor degree is going to give me better chances. I was working in United Arab Emirates and saving money, and Wollongong University had a branch there in Dubai. So, I had my eyes on finishing my degree there. Eventually I end up enrolling at Wollongong University, Dubai campus, to get my bachelor degree in computer science.

Nick Muldoon:

So, just for folks that are listening along, Wollongong is the regional area of Australia where Maysa and I and many of our team live. So, University of Wollongong is the local Wollongong University that has a branch in Dubai.

Nick Muldoon:

So you were with University of Wollongong doing this bachelor degree, and how did you make the transition and move to Australia?

Maysa Safadi:

When I was studying at Wollongong University, Dubai campus, and was working at the same time to be able to pay the fees, I met my husband at work, and happened that he has a skilled migrant visa to come to Australia, coincident. So, I was thinking, "All right, he is going to go to Australia, he is a person that I do really see spending the rest of my life with. So, how about if I transfer my papers to Wollongong University here in Australia, finish my degree from here, while he gets the chance to live in the country, and then we can make our minds. 'Is it a place for us to continue our life here?' If not, it was a good experience. If good, that is another new experience and journey that we are going to take." So, we end up coming to Australia. I finished my degree from here.

Nick Muldoon:

What did you find when you arrived at Australia? How was it different from United Arab Emirates? How was it different for women? How was it different for women in engineering given what your brother had said about civil engineering in Dubai?

Maysa Safadi:

I had a culture shock when I came to Australia. Yes, I was in a country that.... male-dominated country, third world country, no opportunities for females, to a country where everything is so different. The way of living, the communication, the culture, everything was so different. When it comes to engineering, because I didn't really finish my degree in United Arab Emirate, so I didn't even get the chance to work in engineering though. However, knowing about the country and knowing about the way they take talents in, I knew I had slim chances. Now, coming to Australia and to finish my degree at the university, it was challenging. Someone from the Middle East, english is second language, being in computer degree where looking around me, "My god, where are the girls? I don't really see many of them around." And then, yeah, getting into that stereotype of industry or of a field where it is just only for males.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, so a bit of a culture shock coming across. I guess fast forward, you've spent a decade in software engineering and then progressing into engineering leadership. What was the change and how did you perceive the change going from a team member to a people leader?

Maysa Safadi:

I graduated from Wollongong University and I end up getting a job at Motorola as a graduate software engineer. In the whole team there was three females.

Nick Muldoon:

How big was the team?

Maysa Safadi:

How big was the team? It was around 20.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Maysa Safadi:

Yep. There was the network team which had, I can't remember how many, but it was a different team. The team I was in, it is development team, and there was three girls in there, one of them another graduate that end up coming to the program and one that started a year before. Interesting, these two females, they are not in IT anymore. I really loved the problem solving, I really loved seeing the outcome of my work in people's hands because I was developing features for mobile phones. So, all was in mind then as an IC, how to become better at my work, how to learn more, how to prove myself to everyone that I'm capable as much as any other male in the team.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, Maysa, that that's something that you've had to do throughout your career to prove yourself?

Maysa Safadi:

Yes, yes. It's a tough industry. Really not seeing so many females it makes it hard because you look for role models that makes you think, "Oh, she made it. I can make it. If she's still in there, then I can learn from her." I missed all of that. I never had another mentor in my career or having even a female manager in all of the jobs I had before. So, always I was dealing with males, always I was trying to navigate my way to show them the different perspective I can bring. Even the subtle interactions I used to have with them giving me that, "You are not capable enough. You are not there yet. This is our territory. Why are you here?" All of these things, it does really, without you think about it, it does really sink your self-esteem and the self-worth when you are in industries like this. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

So, I'm conscious, you know are in this position now, you've kind of talked about you can't be what you can't see. If you can't see a woman that's a people leader and you're not reporting to one, then it's hard to see how you can become that. But, here you are, you have become that, and for our team here, you are one of the women leaders in the company, which is fantastic. So, I guess, what are the sorts of activities that you are undertaking to try and be present and be visible that you can be a woman people leader in the engineering field. I think it was earlier last month perhaps that you were at WomenHack in Sydney.

Maysa Safadi:

Yes, I've been-

Nick Muldoon:

What's WomenHack?

Maysa Safadi:

Okay. WomenHack, it is organization to bring diverse talented women intake together, to support them, to educate them, and not just only that, to try to connect them with other companies that they appreciate diversity and inclusion, and basically try to recruit... Pretty much, it is finding opportunities for women in tech, in companies that they do value the diversity.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. So, I think it's interesting, I see these parallels here between your mom and dad that kind of went out on a limb and extended themselves financially to get six girls through a college and university education in the Middle East, and they were doing something that was perhaps fairly progressive at the time. You said it wasn't common. It sounds like WomenHack is bringing together more progressive companies these days, that are creating opportunities for women to get into leadership or even to accelerate their careers.

Maysa Safadi:

Yes, it is so pleasing to see the change that has happened over the years. When I reflect back in 2000, when I graduated and end up working in IT, and all of the behaviors, there was no knowledge or there was no awareness how much diversity is important, and they were not even aware that really females are really quitting the field or not that many females enrolls in the first place in degrees like computing or engineering. Even education through the school, no awareness was there. Then you see now the progress that is happening, more awareness is during school. Universities, they are trying to make the degrees or the fields more inviting for females and diversity. They are trying to bridge the gaps. So, many companies that are taking action to make it easier for females to be in the field and to progress in the field.

So, WomenHack, there are so many other groups like Women in Tech, there are so many companies that are allies to females in tech as well, where they are trying to really support and make their voice heard by other companies. Is as well all of the research and the science, are really proving that having diversity in teams, it is going to be more beneficial for the companies, for the teams, to have more engaging teams having these differences. So, yeah, there is a lot of awareness happening at the moment, and so many companies are trying to do something about it. I wish if that was early on.

Nick Muldoon:

Earlier in your career.

Maysa Safadi:

Earlier in my career, yes. So, many times I felt so isolated. So many times I was sitting back and saying, "Is it worth the fight?" Why do I have to work always twice as hard, to just only prove that I'm capable? Why does it have to be this way? Why I'm not equal?" That what actually made me change my career from IC to people leader. I didn't want to put other females... Being people leader wasn't just only for females, it was for me to voice, to be able to help pretty much. People leader to be able to help anyone in the field regardless if they are males or females. Moreso is to lead by example, is to be a role model for others, is to show others that if I can make it, then definitely you can as well, is to provide the support, it's to build that trust.

Nick Muldoon:

So, how can we, as an industry, I guess, how do we change... I'm reflecting on Iran at the moment, and the activities that have taken place over the last 60 days in particular, but really just more media coverage for hundreds of years of oppression of women. What do you hope, you being a people leader, a woman that's come from the Middle East, what do you hope for these young women and girls in our Iran over their trajectory? If we're still making a journey here in Australia, in a male dominated industry, what sort of hope do you have over the 20 years from here to 2040, for these women that are in the Middle East today and still haven't found a progressive society?

Maysa Safadi:

Politics. It's the game of power. Really hoping is the awareness to get there for these females in locked countries to know that there are better opportunities for them. They need to be stronger, they need to support each other, they need to empower each other. As much as it is easy said, it's not that easy done. However, all of that frustration that is built in them, it is surfacing from time to time. I'm really hoping for Iranian women, not just only Iranians, I'm really hoping for every woman in the world, regardless if it is a third world country or even if it is advanced country like Australia, is to always feel that they are worthy, is always to feel that they can have a voice, they can be part of life, and they are doing meaningful things.

Now, if they are raised in a way that always being told you are second, always being told you role only to get married and raise family, they will believe it themselves. So, it needs to come from women like us, leading by example, being role models, sending the awareness. Really media, we need to use the media very well so we can get to these people who are really locked in their countries now thinking that this is normal. It a lot of work needs to happen.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, that's an interesting observation. It is normalized for them, isn't it? So, look, reflecting on my own upbringing, I remember that my parents would always say you can achieve anything you put your mind to, but I could open up the newspaper, I could look on TV and I could see a host of people that were people that look like me, that is white males that were Australian, that were successful in business, and so I believed that I could do and be whatever I wanted to do and be. So, I guess, how do we get this message out? How do we tell your story more broadly to get this message out? That you can do whatever you put your mind to, you can achieve whatever you hope to achieve. There's something interesting for me to reflect on about the media piece that you're talking about.

Maysa Safadi:

Yeah, and I think the countries that they are advanced, the countries that they are really recognizing women more and more, they are more responsible in sending that awareness. They have to do more. It is basically, yeah, media, it is such an important thing. This is what people read everyday or watch everyday.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess, I'm conscious, like we're talking about half a world away in the Middle East, but you're actually involved in a community group here at home. What's that group that you're involved in and how's that helping women?

Maysa Safadi:

Yeah, I'm a board member for organization called Women Illawarra. It is run by women, for women. Basically this organization is to help women in domestic violence, it's basically to set them in the right path. It gives them services and it does educate them and even help them with the counseling, with legal support so they can get out of these situations. Make them believe that they can be part of this society, that they are important voice in the society, in the community, and they can really contribute and make an impact. So, by providing this education and this support, it is empowering these women to take matters their hand, and again, to really set the path for their own life and their own success. They need to take control back again, and yeah, even help their kids see their moms that they are really doing the right thing.

Nick Muldoon:

It's this interesting thread that comes through in your entire life story and your journey, that mom and dad wanted you to have an education so that you were empowered to chart your own course in life-

Maysa Safadi:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

... and here you are today, giving back to other women, trying to help them get an education and feel empowered so that they can chart their own course in life. I think that's fantastic. Thank you, Maysa.

Maysa Safadi:

Thank you.

Nick Muldoon:

What is your hope for women over the next 10 years? Because it sounds like we're on a trajectory, we're making progress in some countries, we're not making as much progress in other countries. What's your hope for 2030? What does it look like?

Maysa Safadi:

My hope for 2030, or my hope for... I really hope it is even five years, less than 10 years. My hope for 10 years is not to have conversations about how to reduce the gap between males and females, because by the 10 years time, that should be the way everyone operates. My hope in 10 years time is to have equal opportunities for anyone regardless what's their gender, background, language they speak, physical abilities, it needs to be equal, it needs to.... Equity, it is such an important thing. Giving exposure to the same opportunity, it is so important regardless what's your abilities. Stereotyping, I need that to get totally erased from the world.

We are all a human, we did not really choose where we born, who our parents are, what our upbringing, what our financial situation, it wasn't our choice, why do we have to get penalized for it? We have responsibility toward the world to help everyone. We are social people, we really thrive when we have good connections and good bonds, we really need to tap into the things that makes us better. So, we have so many talents that we can use it to the benefits of the world. I know countries always going to have fights and politics, that everyone is looking for the power, that's not going to disappear. But us, as people part of this world, we really need to try to uplift and upskill everyone around us. I really hope for the females in all of the other countries to know that they are worth it, to know that they are as good as anyone else. They have the power, they don't realize how much strength and power they have. So, it comes from self-belief. Believe in yourself, and you will be surprised how much you will be able to achieve.

Nick Muldoon:

There you go. Believe in yourself and you'll be surprised with how much you are able to achieve. Maysa Safadi thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Maysa Safadi:

Thank you so much Nick. Thank you everyone.