Portfolio of Keith ElderEvangelist Traverses Country to Share Our QL Technology Story
by Keith Elder
Our culture warrants evangelizing. Our values, and how we apply them to technology, deserve to be shared with the world.
As our company's Technology Evangelist for almost a year now, I have spent a good amount of my time spreading the word about the Quicken Loans Family of Companies. This role has taken me on some great adventures, from speaking at conferences of all shapes and sizes to holding a stranger's baby on a plane. It has been a challenge and a joy to share with so many what makes this company that I love so special.
Learning about technology and then sharing what I've learned with others is something I'd done for a long time. As many of you know, when I learn something, I can't stop talking about it. Even in 2004, when I first joined the QL Technology team, I would host "lunch and learn" sessions to introduce new ideas. Not only did this push our teams to be innovative, but we also learned that if you feed a bunch of engineers pizza, they will always show up.
After taking this new role in early spring of 2017, I immediately started lining up several speaking engagements. I scheduled two presentations at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona and two more at a conference in St. Louis, Missouri, both in mid-October. I also took advantage of a unique opportunity to be the closing keynote speaker at Delivery of Things World and fin:Code in San Diego, California the following week. Three cities, six presentations, four conferences, all within a few weeks' time in mid to late October.
My goal was simple: Create two new presentations that would spotlight QL, our technology and our culture. As I spent hours staring at a blank page, I quickly realized that it would be a challenge to articulate and evangelize what's so special about us, our technology and our culture for public consumption. Why was I struggling so much? As someone who had always presented technical and soft skill information, this should have felt more comfortable – but it didn't. As a long time software engineer, I went back to my roots and started to think about success criteria. Here's the list of criteria I came up with for both of these presentations:
- Do not come off as a marketing presentation. People hate that, no one more than me.
- Have a title that will draw in attendees at a technical conference.
- Tell a great story about Quicken Loans. (No airing of dirty laundry.)
- Speak about our technology and accomplishments.
- Do not disclose any of our secret sauce to the world.
- Have a fantastic storyline that will hold everyone's attention.
The first point – to not be interpreted as a marketing presentation – caused me to struggle. The others didn't make the goal any easier either. I knew I was going to talk about our Rocket Mortgage story, but how could I tell the story without sounding like an advertisement? I finally realized why I was struggling: I needed to gather more information. I needed more stories to help tie it all together.
The first team member I called was Regis Hadiaris, product owner for Rocket Mortgage. He would have some things I could share publicly. Hadiaris was super helpful – giving me a lot of metrics and previous presentations he had given on the business impact of Rocket Mortgage, but I needed more material if I really wanted to make it feel like a story about the technology.
One day during the summer, I sat down with Josh Zook to get his perspective on the whole Rocket Mortgage project. After a few minutes of us chatting about things, I asked Josh, "Take me back to the beginning. How did Rocket Mortgage get started?"
"People don't appreciate what we have," Josh said. "In an hour and a half meeting, we made a decision to stop and pivot 75% of the IT team to work on Apollo for more than a year. From that meeting, we had to figure out what we could stop and pause to get these 500 people working on this. Any other company you go to, you have to wait, budget, etc., but that quick of an alignment was awe inspiring."
There it was – the spark I needed. Josh was right. We don't appreciate what we have. Heck, many team members who work here now probably don't even know this story! We are different, and that's what makes our story great. That's what we need to tell the world.
Once I knew the story I was going to weave, I created two presentations. The first was the story of how our encryption system for Rocket Mortgage, called Quicken Key System (QKS), came to be. It was a story I knew very well because the team I was leading at the time built QKS. My main focus in the presentation was to talk about innovation and how it helped us create something so complex in a short amount of time. It was our weekly allotment of innovation time – Bullet Time – that made QKS possible. And it had a significant impact on our business. Talking about our encryption system also allowed me to demonstrate how we used technology that's not very mainstream, and it gave me a chance to plug our open source .NET framework. Finally, the threads were starting to emerge. I named the presentation "Building a Highly Scalable Service that Survived a Super Bowl." Catchy, huh?
The second presentation I needed to develop was a keynote presentation. I decided to tell our full Rocket Mortgage story, but make it all about our culture and how it enabled us to disrupt an industry. I identified 10 ISMs that played a significant role for Rocket Mortgage to use as the backdrop for the presentation. I called this presentation "Building an Industry Disruptive App with 20 Seconds Left." The "20 seconds" came from a true story about how on the day of the Super Bowl our website wasn't fully functioning across all of the United States until about 20 seconds before our commercial aired. Many of you may not have heard that one either, but it is a fascinating story that exemplifies the ISMs "We'll figure it out," and "Ignore the noise."
With both presentations coming together, it was time to hit the road.
My first stop was Desert Code Camp, held in Phoenix, Arizona. One of our own team members, Joe Guadagno, organizes the event, which is a one-day, community-run technical conference with about 1,000 attendees. Guadagno and Peter Ritchie have been building out a Technology team in our Phoenix office. To help with their effort and give us a significant presence for the conference, we brought multiple Technology team members to speak including Derik Whitaker, Aydin Ackasu, Hilary Weaver-Robb, Craig Bernston, Mike Eaton, Peter Ritchie and myself. We even had a recruiting booth at the conference, run by Nick Tenn. Kevin Lang also joined us to add additional support from a leadership perspective.
It was a great event, with blue skies and great weather. That Saturday evening I gave the presentation "Building a Highly Scalable Service that Survived a Super Bowl." After I spoke about how innovation played a significant role in Rocket Mortgage and showed some demos of the technology we used, Erlang, I was anxious to see how it was received. Here's what some of the attendees tweeted:
So far so good! The next morning I was off to the DevUp conference at St. Louis, Missouri.
I arrived at my gate at the airport and noticed a mother, with a newborn and a three-year-old, was boarding the plane, weighed down by a stroller and a massive amount of luggage. As I advanced to the plane's entrance, she was still struggling with the stroller, the kids, etc. The newborn was crying, apparently scared as passengers passed. I stopped and asked her if I could help, and she let out a big sigh of relief. She removed her newborn from the stroller and asked if I would hold him while she handled the stroller. I said absolutely. She introduced the little fellow as Jacob. As soon as I held him he stopped crying. That made my day.
After that, I made instant friends with the flight attendants and those seated near me. I ran out of business cards. We can apply our ISMs and culture anywhere, anytime – not just while at work. By raising my level of awareness and doing the right thing, helping this struggling mother, I was able to share the Quicken Loans culture and story with a dozen people.
If you stop to think about it, we are all evangelists for our company, everywhere we go. There is always that opportunity to spread our culture and our story to those around us. Sometimes, even to those in need.
But the flight wasn't over yet! My flight attendant Robin had accepted a challenge from a fellow flight attendant to raise money for "Pinktober" (breast cancer awareness month). We joined forces, which included me donning a pink wig and suspenders, and we raised $1,583.82 on the flight.
I met so many amazing people and even got invited to speak to students at Amrita University in India on that flight.
The DevUp Conference is a two-day, community-run event with about 1,200 attendees. If you are a .NET Engineer and looking for a great conference that won't break the bank, I highly recommend it. It brings together tons of great speakers, content and a nice venue. Here I gave the "Building a Highly Scalable Service that Survived a Super Bowl" presentation again and continued talking about innovation. Here are a few tweets from the attendees:
After DevUp, I had a few days back home, and then I was off to San Diego, California to give the keynote presentation at two conferences: Delivery of Things World and fin:Code. I arrived in San Diego to fantastic weather and beautiful sunsets.
Both of these conferences are intimate events, with about 300 attendees, mostly IT executives. You really get to know, mingle and network with attendees.
These two conferences focus on the world of DevOps, Agile and continuous integration/continuous deployment among other things. The fin:Code event specifically caters to financial institutions. Companies like PayPal, MasterCard, US Bank, Charles Schwab, TD Bank, Visa, Fannie Mae, USAA and Capital One were represented, just to name a few. I got to sit in on talks from PayPal, MasterCard and US Bank. I learned how they handle their DevOps teams, which I found interesting. For example, PayPal is made up of about 4000+ Engineers. About 10% of them work on their DevOps platform.
As I listened to various sessions throughout the day, it became clear just how different their cultures are from ours. I was starting to get nervous and doubt my plan to talk about our culture because everything I was going to say was so opposite from other talks. That's OK, I thought. They need to hear how different things can be.
Finally, it was my turn to close the first day of the conference with my keynote. We sent 300 ISMs books to the conference to go along with my presentation. I grabbed one off the back table and took my spot on stage. As I held up our ISMs book, I began.
"I was excited to hear so much talk about culture today as I sat in on various session, because that's the focus of what I'm going to be talking about today," I said. "I brought you all a gift from Detroit – a Quicken Loans ISMs book."
I explained that our company processes mortgages, and that we are not the same company that creates accounting or tax software. I told the story of how and why we created Rocket Mortgage, from start to finish, and I weaved our ISMs throughout the story. As I glanced at the crowd, one gentlemen had a blank stare, and his jaw hung open. I pushed forward, but doubt was creeping in. Was this getting through to anyone at all? Are they getting it? Is this boring? I honestly couldn't tell. They were laughing at my jokes, so at least they weren't falling asleep.
I ended to applause, and I stuck around to answer any questions. The feedback was amazing. Many were blown away to hear how we do things and wanted to take extra ISMs books with them. It was awesome to see how everyone gravitated to our culture.
Giving a presentation, you often don't know if you genuinely impacted anyone. But a few days later, after I had returned home, I received an email from a fin:Code attendee. Remember the gentlemen with the blank stare? It was him, and the email was addressed to Dan Gilbert and Jay Farner.
Greetings Mr. Gilbert, et al.
I was given a great gift last Thursday (10/26). It was your “ISMs in Action” book. A colleague of yours, Keith Elder, spoke at a conference I also spoke at called Delivery of Things World in San Diego. He was the day one closer, and he brought down the house! The name of his presentation was “Building an Industry Disruptive App with 20 Seconds Left.” It was by far the best experience I had at the conference. I say experience, because it took me on a ride. I hung on his every word as he skimmed the surface of the culture you and your team have cultivated over the years. He told the incredible story of Rocket Mortgage. It was so engaging and shocked me, in the best possible way, as I inched toward the front of my seat as each minute passed.
On my flight, back to my home in Texas, I read the book cover to cover. I smiled the whole time, when I wasn’t tearing up from the external and internal emails providing impactful positive feedback. I know you are a busy guy, but I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for instilling these values in the people who work hard throughout your portfolio of companies. Thank you for the frankness and unwavering pursuit of accountability to the philosophy and culture you have helped build.
This is the culture I have been longing for. I have been fighting and fighting to bring just a few of these great principles to my current company with little luck. “After this project is done” and “Once we meet the date” are phrases I get inundated with from my management. There is never a follow through, just excuses. I put my all into what I do and it would be amazing to work with other people that get it and share in my core beliefs. “Do the right thing,” “Yes before no” and “Obsessed with finding a better way” being some at the top.
I will work on discovering what opportunities exist within your portfolio of companies that I could bring my passion, enthusiasm and loyalty to, but in the meantime, thank you and thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Brian Mericle,
Distinguished Engineer, Choice Hotels
Brian's words of encouragement are fantastic, and reinforce my belief in all that I evangelize. We are different, and that is what makes our story great. That's what we need to tell the world. We are all evangelists. Each time you interact with someone, you have the opportunity to spread our culture and tell our story. Remember that the next time you are in the checkout line at the grocery store, or chatting with someone on an airplane. Opportunity is everywhere around you.
If you are wondering what ever happened to Brian, he joined our company about a year later as a team leader.