Eric Müller Podcast Transcript
Eric Müller joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Eric Müeller. Eric Müeller is the VP of Engineering and CISO at Presence, where he has led engineering teams and supported automated processes to deliver high quality digital products for the past decade.
With over 20 years of experience in engineering and security, Eric has worked across various industries, including banking, social media, B2B, retail, fashion, and online gaming. His extensive background includes significant roles at Wells Fargo Bank, Charles Schwab, Razorfish, and Mechanism, where he delivered award winning projects for clients such as Samsung, eBay, and DKNY.
At present, Eric fosters empathetic leadership and transparent communication to build resilient, high performing tech teams.
Well, good afternoon, Eric. Welcome to the show!
Eric Müller: Oh, well, thank you very much! It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. My pleasure. Love doing this every single day, Eric. I do appreciate it. And you’re hailing out of the great state of California there in San Francisco. Love that city. Appreciate you making the time.
Eric, we’re going to jump right into your first question. You’ve had a diverse career spanning over 20 years in various industries, from banking to online gaming. Are there any unique security challenges across different sectors?
Eric Müller: Yeah, I think there are, but you know, for me, I think people can get really kind of caught up in kind of the unique security challenges, you know, and I think kind of lose sight of the fact that the bulk of the issues are very common across all the environments, right? So, example, like, you know, not everyone’s worried about capturing UGC content, but everyone wants to make sure that the person who’s logging in is the person who says they are right.
And, you know, I think, you know, as I kind of reflect back, I guess over the last 20 years. You know, I think the biggest challenge that I’m kind of seeing is that security is really kind of pushing closer and closer to the people who are doing the work. And so, what I mean by that is 30 years ago, everything was in, like, your own data center, right?
And then somewhere along the way, we started doing stuff in co-lo centers, still physical hardware, but you’re in Iraq, maybe with a couple of other people’s machines, but, you know, it was very isolated. And now everything’s up in the cloud. And as we’ve kind of moved towards that model from or away from the model of the data center into the cloud model, we’ve not only we shifted stuff into kind of a shared space into what I think is a more vulnerable space, we’ve also kind of stripped away the staff to support that more secure environment.
And so I would say that the biggest thing nowadays, the biggest challenge that I face is getting people across the whole team to understand that security is something that they need to be thinking about every day. So, you know, the developer, when they’re going and looking at their code, it’s not just, you know, does this logic make sense, but is this logic secure?
Having the business owner, the client understands that the work that’s being done right now, you know, you might have to make some tradeoffs on ease of use to ensure that you have a secure environment and even folks like, you know, your UI UX designers. Having those folks understand that, you know, the decisions they make, alert messages, screens, things like that might introduce security vulnerabilities.
And so, I think at the end of the day, it’s getting everyone together, understanding the security, and then playing together to make sure that we’re delivering really secure product, regardless of the industry that you’re working in.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And that’s helpful, especially for those folks in our audience that don’t understand the nuances of security, but at the end of the day, you alluded to is essentially everybody’s really has their skin in the game.
It’s, it’s not just the security officer or those security types that are having to protect everybody. Everybody’s got to be in the game and being aware. So I appreciate that. And I, I like the fact that we’re moving to that zero-trust architecture, that zero trust environment that we all talk about now.
And can’t wait till we’re fully there as a, as a community, but thank you. And Eric at presence, you’ve led digital product development for over a decade. Can you share how your approach to engineering and security has evolved during this time, especially in the context of rapid technological advancements and changing user expectations?
Eric Müller: You know, it’s interesting. I am deliberate. About moving, right? You know, so that same, you know, move fast and break things. I absolutely hate that, right? Because nowadays break things could potentially mean you’re vulnerable to, you know, some ransomware attack, right? Or you you know, if you move fast enough and break enough things, you end up with airlines being unable to move people across the country because of a really bad patch that you applied to the windows kernel, right?
You know, the crowd strike thing. And so, I really think it’s important to, you want to move at a good pace, but you want to be very, very deliberate about it. Right? You know, you’re on the cutting edge, you’re going to bleed a lot. And so, I take risks, but I think it’s important to take calculated risks. So, there’s a lot of things that are, there’s a lot of hype out there.
I don’t like to jump on the hype. I like to sit down, let’s look at some new technologies. I’ve seen a lot of stuff come and go, you know, people get very excited about something. They jump into it. And then, you know, a year later, two years later, no one’s using it. And you’ve kind of committed yourself to something you wish you hadn’t done.
And so, I think, you know, yeah, I guess that’s kind of the bottom line for me is being very, very thoughtful. Evaluate what you want to do, take those calculated risks, make sure you’re setting your team up for success. And I think you’ll be very happy that way.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Yeah, you can’t always rush out and be on the bleeding edge.
We all get that. And sometimes even places that have strong change management processes in place, right? You, you mentioned the CrowdStrike outage that happened last month. That stuff is real and we’re all still human at the end of the day. And we just got to make sure that we’ve got the right control points in place so that we can move through this quickly, agilely, but at the same time, not rush into it.
So, I appreciate that.
Eric Müller: I guess the one thing I was going to add to that, I think particularly for technology leaders, but I think any person in technologies, you have to be willing to speak up and push back. And I’ve seen a lot of times, you know, in my career where folks are like, look, we have to get this out the door and we don’t have the money to deal with the proper security or we don’t have the money to do proper engineering.
And so, you push, you push, you push, you rushed out the door and six months later, there’s a problem. And now instead of spending, you know, when you were six months ago, a year ago, when you were building it, if you’d spend a little bit more time and a little bit more money, you’d be in a lot better shape today, you know, a year later where things are, you have a problem, you know, a security vulnerability, or you have a performance issue and now it’s really expensive to try to fix it.
Right. You know, it’s better when you’re building the car. If you know, you put the wheels on right, as opposed to when you’re rolling down the road and you need to change the tire. That’s the wrong time to do it.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate your insights there for sure. And Eric, other question I have for you today is your background includes working with major brands like Samsung, eBay, DKNY on award winning projects.
What were some of the key takeaways from these experiences that have influenced your leadership style and approach to building tech teams?
Eric Müller: It’s interesting, like three things that I really kind of think about with that. So, the first thing is I really believe in not burning people out. I don’t want people overworking.
So, you know, after about 40 hours a week, every hour that you spend writing code, you’re really running bugs. So, I want people to come in, give me a really solid, you know, 40 hours during that week, and then they can peace out, enjoy their weekend. I find that, you know, occasionally there’s going to be some crunch time, like everyone gets that, but you know, if crunch time is like every two weeks, you’re asking people to put in a 60-hour work week.
Then what I have is really a management problem and not a developer problem. And I really have taken pride in the fact that, you know, I have a lot of people who work for me for years at a time. And I think it’s because I protect them and make sure they’re not working insane hours. Another thing that I think is really, really important is that I want people to have an interest outside of their job.
You know, I kind of feel like we’ve done a kind of a disservice to folks in this industry by convincing them that, well, you know, if you like programming, you should want to program all the time. Like if I’m asking you to work 80 hours a week, that’s your passion, right? You know, and I think that’s wrong. I want a person to come in, do their job and give me their absolute best work.
And if they want a program outside of those 40 hours a week on their own side project, a game or whatever it is, I’m fine with that. But I want them to have the time to do that. Or if they do photography, you know, or they’re a singer, they want to hang out with their family. I absolutely think it’s important to give people the space to be able to explore and live their own life, right?
Their job is not their life. It’s a component of their life. And then finally, I think, you know, one of my favorite sayings is, you know, I have two ears and one mouth. I use them in that proportion, right? And, you know, as I’ve gotten further and further away from the code, I found one of my most valuable skills as a technical manager is listening to the people on my team when they have issues, when they have problems that come up.
So, it might be something very simple, like a problem, coding problem. I’ve often found, you know, I sit down, I kind of listen to them very intensely and they’re 10 minutes, 15 minutes into talking about their problem. Like, oh, I figured it out, right? All they needed is someone to talk to and they’ll figure it out on their own head.
And so, I applied that with not just with coding problems, it was any management situation that comes up. If they’re having a challenge with a co-worker, If there’s a challenge outside of their job, that’s, you know, making it hard for them to work. Or if there’s a client problem. So, what I do is I ask the person to come in.
We talk about the problem, and you know, I’ll ask them at the end. Hey, you know, is there anything you want me to do? Or did you just really want to vent? Did you want to blow off steam? 9 times out of 10? That’s all they wanted to do. And I know when I first started managing my natural inclination was like, Oh, man, they just told me about a problem.
I got to call someone. I got to send an email. I got to there’s all these activities I got to do. The reality is that’s not necessary. Oftentimes you just need to listen. That’s all the person needs. And we need to honor that and respect that. If they want us to step in and help them out, absolutely. I’ll do that.
But otherwise, I’m here to listen.
Brian Thomas: I really love that. You know, to eat takeaways for me, Eric, in your leadership style, obviously is empathy. Right? But also, you know, the listening and so forth, but also that autonomy. I know there are times you mentioned that Hey, we got to work later. There’s an outage.
You got to come in that sort of thing. We’ve all been there. But I like the fact that you allow your staff to jump in, have some autonomy. That’s what you hired them to do, right? They’re the expert in their wheelhouse, right? I really do appreciate that. And Eric, I just want to let you know, it was such a pleasure having you on today.
And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Eric Müller: Oh, well, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll talk again soon.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Eric Müller Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
