He observes that a team\u2019s ability to make decisions can suffer as a result. \u201cTheir decisions are wishy-washy or not final. That\u2019s a sign something is not right. It could be that the team members don\u2019t trust how leadership is going to perceive whether they succeed or fail.\u201d<\/p>\n
A recent example of how senior management buy-in can help team decision-making occurred when a Mailchimp customer faced a backlog in trying to email eight million customers. Describing the problem, Muntz says: \u201cIt was taking two or three times as long as their normal campaigns. It would have taken about 15 hours to get this full campaign out, which is not right. That\u2019s not production-ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muntz says the engineering team made a few optimisation changes to the database and were pretty confident the mailout speed would improve. But it was still sending out the mailshot very slowly, so Muntz then divided the problem into two teams \u2013 one tasked with actively tracing exactly what was happening, the other given the task of examining a potential idea to parallelise the work so that it could go faster.<\/p>\n
He says the tracing team identified some back-end machine learning code that was slowing down the workload, while the parallelisation team figured out a way to use MapReduce across the eight million records.<\/p>\n
Muntz admits it may have been a little risky using MapReduce to boost performance. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have extreme confidence that it would be safe,\u201d he adds. \u201cThat\u2019s when I stepped in. I was helping with the on-call situation and said I was willing to take business responsibility given that the situation couldn\u2019t get any worse. If it went wrong, we could just revert back.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of building out a team, Muntz says IT leaders need to aim at developing a well-rounded team and recruit people who fill specific gaps in expertise. \u201cOne of the things I really believe in, and what I\u2019m most proud of over the 13 years I\u2019ve been here, is our apprenticeship programme, which was built to bring people from other departments into engineering,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The programme takes in people from elsewhere in the business and gives them a three-month position inside the engineering team. This helps people decide if they want to work in engineering or prefer their existing job. Muntz says more than 70 people in engineering began their work life at Mailchimp in a different department.<\/p>\n Rather than having a prescribed way of working, Muntz believes in offering a flexible work environment that enables people to work at their best. \u201cIt\u2019s not the same for everyone,\u201d he says. \u201cSomeone might want to get on the whiteboard and write code, someone else may prefer to do pair programming, and some people may just want to have a conversation about architecture and infrastructure and how it works.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/i>Hiring and apprenticeships<\/h3>\n
![](\"http:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/executive-interview-eric-muntz-mailchimp.jpg\")
<\/div>\n