The dilemma of authenticity

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do when the direction of the company that you work for conflicts with your own vision and, of course, your whole career is about being authentic?

Ted Neward: There are easy answers at the edge of the continuum. Your company is breaking the law; what do you do? That's the same for any job; that's not a developer relations thing.

If you're not comfortable with being on stage and taking uncomfortable questions, then you need to question whether or not you want to be in this position. If your company's doing something illegal, and if you're in the news because you're a developer advocate, there's a certain amount of needing to say, "Okay, that's above my pay grade. I don't know what's going on there. I'm just as baffled as you are." There's always that answer as an option. If you're the press secretary for the President of the United States, you're expected to convey his message. Even if you don't personally believe it, you're expected to convey it.

Geertjan Wielenga: At what point should you say that you don't want to be involved anymore?

Ted Neward: That's entirely a personal decision. We don't know where our particular lines are because we haven't explored that, but I guarantee you that they are in different places.

The bigger question is: do you know where your line is? More importantly, the question of illegality is really not the right one to ask. The question is more along the lines of managing a difference of opinion. Mark Mader, our CEO, goes around and tells everybody that Smartsheet is a no-code tool, which, quite frankly, I think is a terrible thing to say.

To give another example, I had been at the company for one week and we were having an engineering leadership meeting.

Mark was saying that we had just had this report in from Gartner or Forrester that used the term "citizen developer." He was very contemptuous of that term. He asked, "Who here knows a citizen developer?"

He was not asking the question; he was making a point. But I know a citizen developer: my dad. He's done a lot of what I would consider to be citizen developer kind of things. Scott Davis also started out as a citizen developer and wrote Excel macros. There are lots of citizen developers in the world. Was right there in the meeting, in front of everybody, the point in time to tell my brand-new CEO that he was wrong?

What I want Mark to do is steal a little bit from the Python community and say, "This is no-code required and, as the Python guys say, it's batteries included. We have all this extensibility out there, but, in fact, if you just want to take it as it is out of the box, it can still be useful."

Now, do I go up on stage and say, "Our CEO is an idiot. He totally doesn't understand the thing that we have built. Listen to me; I'm the smart one." No, you don't undercut the CEO. There are ways to carry your opinion forward without visibly undercutting your CEO and without visibly doing your company harm.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are those ways?

Ted Neward: It begins by socializing the message internally. I want Mark to eventually realize that he's wrong about what he's saying and that there needs to be a nuance there, but I can't publicly put him in an awkward place.

So, I will begin by talking to other people who will socialize that message to him in passing, until at some point he and I will sit down and I will say, "Oh, by the way Mark, I wanted to talk to you about something."

He will then say, "I totally get that and this is what I'm thinking we should do."

Then it's his idea and not mine, which is great because it means he'll own it and it means that I still get my way, even if I don't get the credit, which is also fine because I don't need the credit. If I want the credit, I can go public, but then I may not have a job! This is part of working inside a corporation; it's a living, breathing entity. You can't just go rogue or you may not have a job.

A bigger question in some respects is: if somebody's considering a position in developer relations, how comfortable are they with the sublimation of their own opinions to that of the company as a whole? Frankly, I don't care what company you're at or even if it's your own company, at some point, you and somebody else inside the company are going to differ. You have to have the internal fortitude to be able to say, "You might be right. Let's talk about this. Maybe I don't have the right answer in terms of how to think about this. Let's talk about this further. Let me hear your vision."

I'm pretty sure that I'm right about this no-code thing and I'm pretty sure that Mark also knows that, and that he's using the no-code thing because that's what the board is trying to sell.

If I go to Mark, I think that he'll say that he agrees with me, but whether or not he can change his public messaging is another story, because he's got a different set of concerns than I have.

If you're in developer relations and you think that you get to create the message entirely absent from anybody else's influence, you're fooling yourself. You are very much part of a team and that vision will be something that, in the ideal world, you'll agree 80-90% with. What matters is that you're all pulling in the same direction.

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do when you're doing a presentation and someone asks a question that you don't know the answer to?