you've almost certainly heard of test-driven development then you've probably heard of behavior-driven development but i can make a pretty good guess that you haven't heard of purpose-driven development and this is kind of what this show is all about finding your career purpose as a developer finding your career purpose isn't just a walk at the park it's something that takes quite a bit of work and sometimes some painful experiences to actually get to the place where you know what it is that you are intended to do and it may be something that you uncover yourself or it may be something that someone else kind of points out to you and then you eventually agree it could be many different things that's what we're talking about in today's episode my interview with joshua aziz you're listening to developer t my name is jonathan and i'm going to get out of the way let's get straight into this interview with joshua aziz joshua welcome to the show thanks for having me we were discussing beforehand some of the things we're going to talk about and it feels like every time i have a guest on and you're included in this group that whatever they want to talk about happens to be relevant to my experiences for that week and i'm sure that that is just uh i don't know confirmation bias or something but i'm sure that that is just uh i don't know confirmation bias or something but i'm sure that that is just uh i don't know confirmation bias or something but i'm sure that that is just uh i'm really excited to talk to you so uh you work at transfer wise let's go ahead and and cover this this piece of the puzzle here can you explain first of all what is the the purpose of transfer wise what does transfer eyes do and then what is your role uh in accomplishing that purpose so transfer wise is aimed at making money movement around the world completely borderless we're trying to solve a real problem for people all around the world where when you're trying to move money from one country to another maybe you're a freelancer working for a company in the united kingdom or you have family in australia and you're trying to send home a christmas present you're always trying to move money in the way that the banking system has been set up is super old super expensive they're always taking a really big cut and transfer wise ultimate purpose is trying to save everyone money and make their lives a lot easier when they're moving money around the world so we like to say the mission at transfer wise is one day making international money transfer eventually free instant as easy as possible for as many people in the world as we can and at transfer wise i'm a product manager and my personal purpose at transfer wise is enabling everyone on my team whether they're engineers customer support people in operations to get even closer to that purpose to that goal whether that's helping them find insights talk to users getting my hands dirty and up the customer support line but anything that helps further people getting towards that mission this is an excellent answer let me let me start by saying if you're listening to this episode right now and you don't have that answer for yourself this is an exact kind of a perfect example of why it's so important to establish that kind of purpose both at the company level so you you know if you're leading a company if you're a manager or you know if you're a ceo for that matter uh finding a purpose that everyone in your company can understand and attach to but also you as an individual uh in the context of your work finding what you do to contribute to that larger goal right and so you know this is also why it's so important to understand who you're going to go and work for uh josh's goal is you know to work for transfer wise to accomplish their mission but to do so in this particular way right uh so it's it's not a secondary mission it's not parallel it is a contributing uh kind of uh uh you know structure a support for that larger mission and i'm just very um i can't overstate enough you know how important it is for people uh josh to be able to say what you just told me and we you didn't rehearse that for me we we didn't talk about this beforehand um that was that was something that you already had available yeah i think i think it's really important to to understand what the mission what your personal mission is and what your company's mission is because so many times when people work at a company often when there's a breakdown in communication or someone's working on the wrong thing or they feel like they're not having impact more often than not it's because they're not building towards an eventual purpose or mission and and when you don't when that's not clear to you it's really hard for you to to have an impact on your day-to-day life and josh you mentioned well i guess you didn't mention it yet um i looked into you know the the portfolio of things that you've done in your career uh and one of the things that you've done you worked at grubhub uh so can you kind of explain what your role was there and what the mission of grubhub is and what your role was there and what the mission of grubhub is so when i was at grubhub i also did products and my mission was to or to rephrase the mission at grubhub was to make ordering food and getting food delivered to you easy exciting fun and seamless essentially and my role was working with our web and mobile teams to make it so that when a user picks up their phone they're really hungry maybe they're hungover and they want to get right then and there they don't have to think they don't have to make a lot of guesses they just know exactly what they need to do and it's habitual to them and it's seamless for them so although the mission at at grubhub was to help people discover and and grow and and eat food and and be happy i personally felt like a mission that resonated more with me was doing something bigger and for me that was transferwise and the problem in the mission that transferwise had was a bit clearer for me and that helped me kind of get to the point where i was like okay i'm going to do this and i'm going to shift my career and and make a different decision of where my purpose lied and where i eventually wanted to go yeah and that's so that you know that's a perfect example of making that kind of crucial decision a lot of people think you know that uh even on the show we've talked about the importance of loyalty and the importance of you know growing in where you are uh being able to you know focus long enough that you're not constantly discontent right uh you're not constantly there there is uh a lot to be said for um finding a way to maximize wherever you are today and and i think a lot of people unfortunately they give up really good opportunities things that are healthy for them uh things that have a lot of potential to grow them as an individual as well as a professional programmer or professional developer or product manager or whatever that role is people give that up because they constantly feel like they're making a difference and they're missing out on something or you know they see a little bit more opportunity uh across the street and you know this show we've had on the show we've advocated for uh sticking to something long enough to understand you know why you're there and and long enough to get something out of it but this is a perfect example josh you outlined a reason um at a at a more value-driven level a reason to change directions in your career and absolutely we're not an advocate here of never changing direction uh that that would be you know most people who come to development unless they started in development most people are coming from a different industry most people come to development uh having been burned or you know maybe they felt like their uh potential was limited in a different industry industry and they come to development because they see new opportunity they see growth they get better they get better they get better they get better they get better they get better they get excited about that possibility of participating you know with something that they actually have some ability to influence the world uh through software and that's such an exciting thing so absolutely do not you know we we don't recommend by any means to stick in a job that you hate that's that's not the point um but josh you outlined a perfectly good reason for shifting directions in your career and i actually have some some domain experience with this uh at whiteboard we've worked on projects where we want to move money from one country to another and it's actually pretty surprising how uh first of all you know potentially corrupt a lot of these um various gateways are right um you know moving moving money from one country to another there are people who are taking advantage of the difficulty of that process today the crazy part too is moving money around the world isn't a new it's it's existed ever since currencies have existed and it's always surprising to me especially when i talk with i have co-workers who work in europe and australia and a few other countries and whenever they come to the u.s and they see how our banks are set up and how money movement really works here they're often so surprised and it's crazy that in today's day and age something as normal like sending money to a bank is not a normal thing to do and i think that's a really interesting thing to do and i think that's a really interesting thing to do and i think it's so difficult and and has so much money grabbing and it can be expensive and it's hard and it's tough and it's it's not a new thing and so i think that's what also leaves it kind of ripe for disruption yeah yeah it definitely is you know it's one of those it's it's a category of business that i believe there's still a lot of you know kind of real estate available and that is logistics logistics is a huge part of the business and it's a huge part of the business and it's a huge huge business and strangely enough uh the logistics of moving money um is not bound to that physical reality but it is bound to policy realities it's bound to the humanity realities that you can't really jump over right if there is a law for example against uh and i'm not i'm not sure if this is even the case but you know if a if a country has not accepted uh the usage of bitcoin by and large then bitcoin is not going to be an acceptable resource for people to use in that country if they can't exchange for you know whatever their country's currency is then they're kind of out of luck and now this thing that uh you know bitcoin or whatever other uh e currency that you want to fill the blank with this currency is now essentially only valuable outside of that country or to a very small group of people in that country and you know in the united states we have the ability to uh to easily transfer between those currencies and there's very i won't say there's very little regulation but the the regulation is not so prohibitively expensive that uh that i wouldn't be able to expect to receive payment in that kind of alternative currency uh so that makes transfer for me very easy but that's not true everywhere uh so would you say josh that that assessment of cryptocurrency does that apply uh to the way that transfer wise you know is transfer wise kind of working in that field are you interested in that field or are you hoping to kind of unify this and actually do direct currency uh manipulation or not manipulation but trading between currencies at transfer wise we think that there is still a lot of room to grow and a lot of big problems we can solve using the existing banking and currency frameworks so the way that if you're not familiar with transfer wise is that you can't just use the existing banking and currency the way it works is we have a big infrastructure of bank accounts and connections in lots of countries around the world and when you're trying to send money from say the u.s to the uk right you're sending usd to gbp normally the way it would work with your bank is they do an international wire transfer it'd be expensive it'd be slow it has to go through all these like manual checks or manual it it can't it sometimes it's not necessarily as safe what we instead do at transfer wise is we use the money that people are sending from the u.s to the uk um to help match payments that are coming from the uk to the u.s so we actually use money domestically and we're able to avoid the money moving internationally even though at the end of the day the person you're sending money to gets it on the other side we can save a lot on the the slowness and the infrastructure costs by by keeping things local so that's one way we've been able to use the existing banking system to make things really accessible for people and i think to to get back to your point about maybe countries that don't have that as easily accessible we're always looking for for new ways to solve that whether it's with mobile payments um different types of partners that sort of thing we can find ways that that we can make it more accessible for people make it successful because at the end of the day going back to your point about purpose-driven development or just having a purpose as a company one of those big things in the in the transfer wise mission is making sending and receiving money around the world accessible to everyone and i think whatever we can do to get closer to that regardless of what that technology is is something we're going to always chase that assessment is so interesting i love this mission i love the idea that you know payments shouldn't be transferring resources shouldn't be uh um you know a limited right if i have resources and i want to transfer them to another person the market uh the global market should be able to kind of support that i love that mission uh realistically i know about one one hundredth of uh the information that you know josh about uh transferring currency around the world so i appreciate you you know kind of uh educating the educating me first of all but also the audience a little bit about the about this mission i'd love to know uh if you can kind of back up a little bit and kind of give me a background where do you come from how did you end up becoming a product manager you know what is your education background and your personal background what were your interests that led you to this so i was born in canada i'm not a native u.s uh u.s citizen but i i was born in canada raised in southwestern ontario right near the border of detroit michigan so i was surrounded by you know the big three automotive companies my uncle was a mechanical engineer my cousins worked in automotive industry and i was constantly around people who who built things and invented things and that's always interested me from a young age and as i grew up and was going to school math and science and physics always kind of tickled my fancy and i went to school at the university of waterloo which is a university that's located in canada and it's one of the larger computer science and engineering schools in canada and i studied engineering there and something that was really important to me because like so many young people i didn't really know what i what my purpose was i didn't know what i wanted to to truly be when i grew up and choosing a college choosing your study form it can be really hard so i knew i was interested in engineering but i didn't know if i would really like it so i went to waterloo and one of the big draws for me was i was interested in engineering and i was interested in they have a co-op program they're one of the largest ones in canada that allows you to work in different industries at different jobs throughout your college career so as i went through college and i was figuring out you know where do i want to specialize in engineering do i want to go more to computer science do i want to do mechanical engineering i actually tried out different internships so i worked in an automotive plants i worked for a bank actually surprisingly for a little bit doing software development and i was interested in engineering and i was interested And as I went through that, I found one, I myself wasn't necessarily a great engineer. I wasn't very effective at coding. And I worked at a company where the engineering team was just kind of told what to do by the sales team. And this was a little bit before product management and customer-driven products had really started to kick off. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if there was someone who could help talk to the marketing folks who can't necessarily resonate with engineers, but make sure we do the right things for customers. And that's kind of how I fell into product management. And I saw I was a lot more effective at helping engineers be even more impactful engineers and reach their purpose than I did when I was an individual engineer myself. And through that, I kind of fell into product management. And I got a job in the US right after I graduated college. And a few steps later, I'm now here and still loving it, still loving making. And I'm seeing engineers have happy, happy days. Yeah, that's so cool. And I have a very similar passion in terms of empowering other engineers. It's the reason the show exists. You know, this is not, I'm not coding right now, right? So this, you know, I really appreciate and enjoy building software still. And I do that on almost daily basis now, depending on the day. But I also have this. I drive to help other developers truly succeed and in a way that is genuine and fulfilling for them. So I resonate pretty deeply with that sentiment. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. Linode has been a sponsor of Developer Tea for a while. So if you're a listener of the show, then you've heard the pitch quite a few times. But what you may not have heard is that Linode is always developing new stuff. They're not. They're not a static company. They're actually moving things forward. In fact, they even have, they didn't, they didn't send this to us. I actually went and found this. Linode block storage. It's in beta right now. You can actually opt in. It's a public beta. You can opt in your Linode index page. This is something that's live right now. I found that because they actually have an IRC channel. So Linode is not your average hosting company. They want to get connected to you, the developer. They want to serve. Their customers closely. That means talking to you one on one. They have a forum for that. They have 24 seven customer support. This is such an important factor in deciding who you're going to stake your, your application, the hosting on who, who do you stake that on? Of course, that great customer service only matters if the product is great. And Linode's product is great. Their deals are fantastic. The best gigabyte per dollar ratio that you're going to get on the market. Yeah. Linode is offering you a $5 a month, one gigabyte of Ram server. That's $5 a month. That's so cheap for a gigabyte of Ram. And you can get that spun up in just a few minutes. Of course, Linode also has high memory plans. For example, there are 16 gigabytes of Ram for $60 a month. Go and check it out. Linode is also offering you $20 worth of credit on your new account. When you use the code developer T 2017, head over to spec.fm slash Linode to learn more. Make sure you use the code developer T 2017. When you sign up. Thank you so much to Linode for setting the standard on customer service. When it comes to service providers, more specifically hosting providers. Thank you for connecting with this community and for supporting developer T. So your story is interesting. It has some, you know, some turns and, and I, I assume that at some point along the way, you experienced kind of a dark period or some kind of you know, kind of a low point. I'd love for you if you can to kind of reach back into your memory and share with us one of those low points where you felt like you weren't really sure what your direction forward would be. That's a great question. I think an example of this, that, that came from my past was in, in one of my past roles when I was doing one of those internships, I, you know, I was young. I was working at a company where I thought my, every move I was making was being watched. I was getting stressed out over, you know, a project that probably didn't need to be that stressful for my time and my age and, and what I was trying to experience. And it felt like one of those weeks where you're consistently spinning plates, and you feel like no matter what I'm doing, I just feel like I'm adding something to the to-do list and I'm not really, really having impact. And that week, you know, and when I was, I was feeling very down on my job, I didn't know if the career choice I had sort of made or the career path I had started a car for myself was the right choice. Kind of just blocked me and stumped me and really stressed me out. And it was hard to, hard to just keep face when you're working in your career, especially when you're a young person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. kind of just blocked me and stumped me and really stressed me out. And it was hard to just keep face when you're working in your career, especially when you're a young person surrounded by people who are older than you. And I think something that helped me turn that around was team members of mine, you know, some of these people who were five, 10 years older than me, you know, I was 20, I think I was like 22 at the time, quite young. And them just celebrating like the little successes or, you know, patting me on the back and treating me like an equal. And I think that really helped me to break out of my dark zone because there are so many times when someone joins a company and they're new, or I think especially for young people, where you just always kind of assume the worst and that can just be cyclical and break down in your mind, break down in your mind. And you almost have not self-affirmations, but whatever the opposite of that, that would be, you know, you're depriving yourself. And I just think like the little things can go a long way. And so I've tried to take that lesson and apply it in my career. When someone does something that's helpful, even if it is kind of just normal expected, I try to celebrate it because for me, you know, it doesn't take that much effort, but to that person, maybe they're going through a dark time and it can help them get out of their funk or get them out of that stress zone. And I think it's important. To be wary of your friends and your team members and how you can make them feel a little better. That's really good. You know, people all around us, this is a reality that either we can face it or we can ignore it, but it doesn't change it. People all around us are going through really difficult stuff. And even people who are really, really good at their jobs, very often they can feel like they're failing every single day. And this happens. This happens with good developers. It happens with good product managers. It happens to people who are extremely talented and it happens to beginners just the same. And even if you've been in this for a long time and you have a lot of experience under your belt, you know, that doesn't always make up for the affirmations. It doesn't always make up for the simple fact that as humans, sometimes we go through periods of uncertainty. And that's such an excellent reminder. And, you know, if you're on a team to encourage the people that you're working with, it seems simple, but as it turns out, it's incredibly effective to just look someone in the face and say, you are doing a good job today. You know, you are actually executing well on your job. And I appreciate you being here. That sounds like it's overdoing it if you're the person that's giving that message. But I read a quote recently on the subject, it said that, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not going to get it exactly right, but kind words are very cheap to give, but very effective to receive. It's such a simple thing. So yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that kind of moment of darkness or that dark period in your career. But I want to kind of flip around and ask about, you know, what was a moment of epiphany where you feel like, you know, in just in that one day that you had kind of the haze lifted for a moment and you realized something that changed your perspective for the long run that you actually, now you're walking away with a new way of thinking that is going to affect the way you do your job, the way you live for the rest of your life. So there's a story I really enjoy from actually working at TransferWise where on the other hand, on random occasion, sometimes customers get confused, regardless of their age, and they find out our office address on the internet because we have it listed on the website and that sort of thing. And this older gentleman wandered into our office and was a bit confused. He thought he had to come to TransferWise to make money like a, you know, like a Western Union or another physical money transfer service. And a bunch of us were sitting there like confused, saying, I wonder what this guy's doing. Can somebody help him out or something? And without even anybody saying a word, one of my coworkers, this great engineer from Estonia, his name's Martin, he's got this goatee. He can look super intimidating. And he just stands up, walks over to the guy and he's like, I'm Martin. I'm an engineer here and I want to help you. And he brought this guy into a room and sat him down and showed him the product and heard him out and helped him with his problems. And it, it, it kind of just like was an epiphany for me of like, this is what having a clear mission is all about. This is what like purpose-driven development is about. When you have an engineer or anyone who's working, not be like, oh, I'm just supposed to be coding right now. I should be doing this thing. Just being like, I'm all about helping out every single customer. And that includes this man who wandered into our office. And I think it just, it totally changed for me the way I think about how can, how can you make that mission or that purpose even clearer amongst your team? You know, I, before that I'd focused a lot more on what are the, what's the priority of the backlog and what's the recent dashboards and data saying. And from what I saw, the actions he took from that, it's like, you know, so much more impact if you can get a team aligned behind a purpose and a mission. And, and sometimes it can lead to an actual fun, cool experience like that. So. Yeah, that is so cool because, you know, realistically, if you're doing your backlog correctly, if you're, if you're setting things up right, then what you're doing with code hopefully is doing exactly what that engineer did that day. It's, it's actually accomplishing the same mission if, if things are, are done properly. And when I say properly, that's a really loaded term, of course, because, you know, there's so much that goes into what does it mean to, to align every effort to that mission. But I love that story. That's, that's such an interesting thing. How many people would be confused and, you know, maybe not confused, but certainly paralyzed and not know how do we, how do we handle this very strange situation? And realistically, you know, there are people on the end of your software, or there are people who are operating the computers that are on the end of your software. And if, if we can't connect to that as developers, then we're going to build the software to that end. We're going to build it only for the sake of the software. And unfortunately, you know, that's going to leave people like this gentleman who wandered into your office. There's going to leave him confused. He doesn't understand it. He's, and if we can't connect to that reality and sit down at a table with a person and say, Hey, this is the product that we've built. Tell me, what's confusing. Help me understand how to help you better. That's, that's the reality of product management, right? Having that mission of helping that person. Yeah. It's, it's interesting. I think it even applies to engineering that so often we talk about focus on the customer. Everything we do is for the customer yet, you know, ask yourself, when's the last time you actually saw one of your users in person that can make such a difference. And the way that you build products and the way that you perform as an engineer and the way that you handle customer support, that sort of thing. I think try to actually have face to face time with your users if you can, because it can make such a difference. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to actually ask you a question that sounds unrelated, but in my mind, it totally led to this. I'd love to know, do you have books that you've been reading recently? Maybe a book list, a thing, something that you would recommend to people who are, again, being kind of lit up by this idea. Any books that you feel like are really particularly right in line with what we're talking about? That is a good question. Or maybe books that you have been reading recently that have been inspiring to you or are kind of informing the way that you think and do your job. Right. One book I recently read, I think came out several years ago already, was this book called Hooked that Nir Eyal had helped write. And it was about building habit forming products and how when you're designing a product or when you're coding or when you're thinking about an idea, how you can tie that back to something someone does in their day to day lives and how you can help them to form habits about your product. And the thing I found interesting about it wasn't so much about, you know, how do you just make your app or your website or your, your tool, whatever you're building, just super engaging for people to use a lot. But it, it was another thing that tied back to what are, what is your, what are your users doing? Like who are the people who are using your product? What do they do in their day to day lives? Not how do they interact with your website, but what are they grabbing a cup of coffee and then thinking about sending money internationally or whatever it is, you know, actually tying back to real people and real interactions. Because, again, so often, and this even happens to me from time to time in my daily life at work is you can get so separated from the people you're trying to solve problems for. And so I think books like that or, or reading techniques and stuff, try to try and really challenge myself to think, how does this relate back to the end user from a real person standpoint? Um, I found it very refreshing. Yeah. The reason I asked this question, uh, as, as you were discussing, you know, getting back to the customer's perspective, uh, I'm listening, audio book, listening to, uh, to blue ocean shift right now. And this is an excellent book for, uh, uh, first of all, you know, if you're, if you're building a product or if you're trying to make a pivot, uh, trying to expand your market, trying to define the market, this really helps think in new ways. But, um, more, uh, explicitly, there's a discussion in the book of actually walking through the customer experience, which is something, uh, that we're not doing. And, you know, we, we don't do often enough. Uh, and this is true at so many levels. You know, we think that market research means understanding who our users are, but typically that market research gives us just a picture of who they are. It doesn't give us, you know, the putting our shoes on in the morning and being that person walking through their journey, understanding each of their pain points. Uh, one of the discussions, uh, in the book actually relates to what it means to be a customer. So, uh, what is the process of being a customer? And, uh, what is the process of being a customer? And, uh, what is the process of being a customer? Uh, they asked, uh, some employees, uh, that, that are at a pharmacy. Uh, if they got sick, what would they do? And all of them unanimously said that they would all come into work. And they wanted to understand why would they come into work rather than, uh, doing something that, by the way, brings the pharmacy, uh, money, which is go see the doctor. Right. Um, so they walk through that process and they found that, you know, the long, arduous process of, of calling in sick to work and calling and getting appointment with the doctor and, you know, dragging your kids to the doctor's office and waiting and then eventually getting in. And there's all of these, you know, there's tons of hurdles between me being sick in the morning and actually taking a sick day that it's pretty much, it's less painful for me to just go to work. Um, and so they walk through that whole thing and this opened up their kind of their perspective on what can we do? For our customers. And for the first time, instead of focusing on how can we fulfill orders two or three minutes faster, uh, or how can we increase sales of cough drops, you know, like instead of posting, focusing on those things, they're focusing on how can we understand things that have nothing to do with us, uh, tangibly to begin with, but eventually they end up here. How can we understand the customer's entire experience? So that's the first part of my interview with Joshua Aziz. I hope you will join me for the second part. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes, including the second part of this interview, go and subscribe right now before you close out your podcasting app and move on to your next activity. Otherwise it's very likely you're going to forget. And we post a lot of episodes on this show. Uh, we're well into the 400s heading to 500 by the time that this episode airs, uh, we will probably have broken and we're going to have to get back to the next episode. We're going to have to get back to the next episode. So if you want to be a part of that and go and subscribe right now, of course, those 8 million downloads wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. And thank you to today's sponsor Linode. You can get a Linode server up and running in just a few minutes, uh, for $5 a month. And for those months are essentially going to be paid for, uh, right away by Linode. If you head over to spec.fm slash Linode, use the code developer T 2017 at checkout, and you'll get $20 worth of credit. Thank you again to Linode. Thanks so much for listening until next time. Enjoy your tea.