Kal's extensive expertise in product and technology leadership has been vital in advancing Double Good’s mission. He talks to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise about how Double Good's virtual platform flourished during the pandemic, a key pivot during a moment that challenged traditional in person fundraising.
Kal explains the significance of user-centered design, and the adoption of the Spotify engineering model to enhance his team’s efficiency. We talk hiring practices, core values, future growth strategies, and how Kal’s 25+ years of hands-on leadership has successfully shaped tech-driven organizations.
- (00:25) Meet Kal Walkden: VP of Product Engineering at Double Good
- (01:13) Double Good's Journey and Success
- (06:09) The Spotify Engineering Model
- (13:51) Implementing the Spotify Model at Double Good
- (19:38) Challenges and Future Goals
About Our Guest
Kal Walkden is the Vice President of Product Engineering at Double Good. His past roles include Chief Technology Officer at Paladin; Head of Engineering at HelloFresh; CTO at Lextegrity; CTO at ForeverCar. He currently serves as a mentor at Code Platoon. He holds a Bachelors in Computer Engineering and a Masters in Parallel and Distributed Computing both from Northwestern University.
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Podcast episode production by Dante32.
Full Show Transcript
Patrick Emmons: Hello, fellow innovators. This is Patrick Emmons.
Shelli Nelson: And this is Shelli Nelson.
Patrick Emmons: Welcome to the Innovation and Digital Enterprise Podcast, where we interview successful visionaries and leaders and give you insight into how they drive and support innovation within their organization. Today, we're delighted to introduce Kal Walkden, the vice president of product engineering at Double Good. Double Good's innovative app makes fundraising 100% virtual and contactless, empowering coaches and instructors to focus more on what they love.
Kal brings a wealth of experience to his role at Double Good, having previously served as the chief technology officer of a number of organizations. One of his most recent stops was as the head of engineering at HelloFresh. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Parallel and Distributed Computing, both from Northwestern University. Kal's extensive expertise in product engineering and technology leadership has been pivotal in advancing Double Good's mission. We're thrilled to have him on the show today.
Shelli Nelson: Welcome to the show, Kal.
Kal Walkden: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Really excited.
Patrick Emmons: So Kal, if you don't mind, share a little bit more with our listeners about your role at Double Good, and maybe a little bit about Double Good for those of our audience who aren't parents who have pop-up stores and selling popcorn to subsidize their kids' travel schedules.
Kal Walkden: Yeah. My kids are exactly about three years too old to ever have experienced Double Good as a parent, so I understand what you're saying. Yeah. So, Double Good is a very interesting platform that evolved... We really refined it a couple years before the pandemic, and it's very important for us to focus on user testing, user research, get empirical data before we decide to make decisions. And for us, that's talking to organizers, folks who are actually running these fundraisers on behalf of these youths. And we essentially figured out the way to make these pop-up stores really successful. And then the pandemic happened and we blew up. We really were successful. We were the right thing at the right time. People couldn't do fundraisers in person, they couldn't knock door to door, and we had this platform. It works really well, and we help these organizations earn a fair amount of money. So, buyers buy popcorn, and then we give 50% of that revenue to the organization that's raising funds.
Patrick Emmons: For those who have not had the opportunity to purchase some Double Good popcorn, it's amazing, right? So, it's not only just good and easy to use, the popcorn generally doesn't last four hours in my house. I find myself on the sofa, and it finds its way into my mouth, and that's amazing. So, there's the chocolate caramel stuff. That should be like a Class III narcotic all unto its own, but it's amazing stuff. And it's not just the sports, because one of my kids is in the Civil Air Patrol. And again, it's just so easy for these organizations to engage and do fundraising. It really does make it very easy. So, share a little bit about how the organization got started and a little bit how you joined. When did you join? And what are some of the mandates that you were brought on to help take it to the next level?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. So, company started essentially almost 20 years ago, or maybe more than 20 years ago-
Patrick Emmons: Wow.
Kal Walkden: ... selling Popcorn Palace popcorn in person in the store, and eventually moved its way into helping companies or helping organizations do fundraising, and has since moved on to a digital platform.
Patrick Emmons: All right. You were brought on, and clearly this is your background specifically with start-ups, technology in the food or perishable product space. What is your mandates, right? You are brought in. What is it that you're trying to get accomplished? How are you assisting Double Good to grow to that next level?
Kal Walkden: Yeah, that's a great question. Double Good has a very experienced, well-run engineering team. Anybody who's used our site and our apps can recognize that they work incredibly well. They're fast, they're slick, good design. We spend a lot of time and effort on design. So, why am I here? We have become quite a big organization now, and when you go from being essentially a small company, where you're just trying to help yourself get things together, to the next place, which is, well, how do I grow thoughtfully? How do I build up processes? And how do I not break the culture, but also get a company to the next level? And that is essentially my mandate, is how do we help ourselves focus more on product and technology? And how do we get better efficacy from our engineering teams? How do we prove that we are successfully building the things that we're building?
And so, I was a head of product in the past. I'm part of the product team, but I'm also part of the engineering team as well. So in a way, I bridge the gap and I speak both languages. And so, I'm able to help identify and then facilitate how we build things forward and how we solve problems. And so, what I'm doing with the team is the engineers that I coach, they are working towards building a world-class product tech organization, world-class engineering organization. And so, what we're doing is we're looking at how other companies are achieving this and what companies are successful and what they're doing. And we have found a way that we want to move forward. And in my previous roles, I've experienced a similar way of doing it that we've built roughly around the Spotify engineering model, and we are essentially modifying that to make it work for our company and for our mission.
Patrick Emmons: Awesome. Yeah. If you could share a little bit, what is that Spotify engineering model for our listeners that may not be aware of that?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. I laugh because the Spotify engineering model is not even used by Spotify's engineering team anymore. So in a way, it could be like a puff of air that existed at one time and went away one of these engineering fads. But increasingly, I'm seeing companies adopt this model or something like it and having really good success.
Before I go into what the model is, I'd like to talk about what the model actually enables companies to do. Anybody who's been part of a large organization recognizes that the organization takes a long time to make decisions. And once it makes a decision, it has a lot of inertia and it starts pushing in that direction. And it's very hard to right the ship or change any direction because people's career start to depend on getting projects done.
If you think about some of these big enterprise projects that take multiple years, you can never step off that project. Otherwise, terrible things can happen to individuals. And one thing that the Spotify model really does enable is it enables constant check-ins and constant visibility to what the teams are working on. And so, that way, these multiple teams that are working on large projects together are actually able to coordinate and redirect. If you think about what feels now like the old days of when Agile was new and everybody was very excited to be working very closely with a small team of individuals who all had the right disciplines to be able to create software and get one good feature out quickly, that's what the Spotify model attempts to do at a larger scale.
Yeah. So, how does the Spotify model organize? So, the main organization body of the Spotify model is what they call a tribe. Them being a European company, you can call things tribe. In North America, it's not a popular term to call things tribes. But essentially, it creates an autonomous unit that has strong ownership of a particular domain, and it's up to the business to decide what that domain is. And inside of that domain you have different squads, and those squads all have their own pieces of ownership. And there's some practices and rituals when they put all that together that make sure that there's really good coordination between the different squads. And then at the tribe level, then you'd have different organizations to make sure that they're all working together as well.
Patrick Emmons: Is this something you've used at previous organizations? And as you mentioned, there was that moment in time when the Spotify model was the go-to engineering model. And it seems, as all things do, they evolve, they change, they meet the test of reality. Is this something that you've used at previous stops, using this as-
Kal Walkden: I have.
Patrick Emmons: ... kind of like that spirit animal?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. So, I don't think it's any secret that HelloFresh is a big Spotify model company, and they've had some very good success doing it. I recognize that some of the teams that I managed were very able to execute on very specific problems and see incredible ROI from their engineers. Even I would see, sometimes, a junior engineer would endeavor to take on a very simple task that had been vetted through user experience research and through the product managers. And that one individual engineer might see 100 or 200 return on investment just from a simple project. And so, if done well and thoughtfully with metrics, they can be very successful. And it can actually scale really large. I mean, HelloFresh's engineering team at some point was 900 people.
Patrick Emmons: Holy cow.
Kal Walkden: So, it was a pretty big organization, and each of the tribe has multiple different squads. It's a pretty big organization. But I attended multiple tribe lead meetings in Berlin, and all 120 people were there.
Patrick Emmons: Wow.
Kal Walkden: Engineering leads plus the product leads. And we could have some really good conversations and work out different things in groups just like as if we were small teams. But, of course, we're thinking about how we make 40 or 50 people work together.
Patrick Emmons: I'm curious, man. Again, I've never worked in an environment that complex, that big. What are some of the things that are necessary for that to work? I think about what are the attitudes that the individuals have to have, right? Obviously, collaborative, I got to believe, is in there, but almost too collaborative would almost be its bigger risk, is that we're not really moving forward without agreement from everybody else. So from your experience, what are some of the things that... Because we see it in corporate environments, these things, they get lost in the sauce a little bit on, "What are we trying to accomplish? And then, how does it really work?"
Kal Walkden: Yeah. So, that's actually where I'm a real believer here is when I've seen... The tribes all have very strict ownership of a particular area. So, let's say there's a tribe that owns the buyer experience, the checkout experience. You have another one that's going to be focused on customer retention. And when you want to take on a project that has multiple different pieces, so the way that that works is to have a high amount of trust between the tribe leads and between each other, and a lot of transparency. That actually creates an organization where people believe what they hear, and then people also can't hide, which is actually really important as well, and also that folks are all working towards a single mission to be successful.
So, if I think about when you have a company as large as I saw HelloFresh, you're going to have incidents that happen on an occasional basis. And when I see you have a problem and it's not clear where the problem is, and you see tribe leads step in and start helping each other out and being able to say, "Here's what I think is going on. Here's the hypothesis," and then someone else saying, "Well, I don't think that's the reason, and here's why, and here's the data," and being able to come to those kinds of decisions really quickly, that's in an incident case. But when you're working on a project, when you're trying to redesign a large piece of the system that was designed five years ago that you're no longer in, that same kind of thinking, where you can have a very thoughtful and trusting conversation with somebody and say, "I don't know how this works. Can you explain it to me?" and that's really important, and just all that shared goals.
I mean, I think one thing that I observe that works really well is because everybody has a domain that they own, you don't have a lot of opportunity for folks to become interested in somebody else's domain in a predatory way. If I think about the old days of... If you read stories about Ford. Ford Motor Company long time ago, the executives were always after each other's real estate, and that was just the way the company was set up. That's how leadership set it up. That's how Henry Ford set it up from the beginning. And it reached its logical conclusion. It became very ineffective, and the company had to make a change. And what I like about having teams that are high trust, that are autonomous is that some of the bad nature of what people eventually fall into for various reasons, it's actually very hard to get to that place where you exhibit really bad behavior.
Shelli Nelson: Kal, you mentioned earlier that you've been doing a lot of hiring, so I'm just curious, number one, how you've set up your teams, and number two, what do you look for or what's attractive to engineers who want to join your team?
Kal Walkden: So, the way we've set up internally at Double Good is we looked at the Spotify engineering model, and then we said, "Here's what we think works and here's what we don't." So, what we like about that model is stream-aligned teams or experience-aligned teams. So, we have a team focused on a particular part of a consumer's experience, and that works really well for us. And we also have guilds that kind of tie things together. So, a customer experience doesn't only touch a single piece of the application. You have people who are working in the backend, people working in the front end in our mobile app. That encompasses an entire experience. And then we have the normal things that one expects from companies, which is chapters and guilds that are like front end, backend, QA, that cover across the spectrum.
And when I think about, so this is specific to Double Good, is that we have a really strong focus on our Double Good operating system. It's essentially our core values and operating principles. And when we're doing hiring, we're hiring and evaluating our candidates against those operating principles and our core values. And when we think about how we're building out our version of our engineering model, we also think about those as well.
So, one of our core values is people matter and is to own it. And those fit really well when you're building an engineering team, especially when we're thinking about, well, we want our... We call them pods instead of tribes. So, if we want a pod to own a particular experience, they own it. But also, at the same time, we want to make sure that it's the right kind of work for our engineers. So a pod encompasses front end, back end, mobile app development. All of those pieces come together. An engineer is never going to get bored. There's always more complex problems to be solved, so there's an opportunity for somebody to go from one place to another. And so, we've built our operating model, we call it our pod operating model, we've built that around our core values as well.
Shelli Nelson: Nice.
Kal Walkden: You were talking about since we're doing hiring, how do I explain that to a candidate? Because we've been talking a little while now, and we're still really having... This would be a hard conversation for me to talk to a candidate and also evaluate their skills at the same time. So, the way that we introduce this to our candidates and the way that we talk about it with them is that we have multiple different people in the organization who talk to these candidates. And it's not just the technical review. So, we do technical review. Depending on the role, we might do live coding. We might actually solve a problem together with them. But we also just essentially hang out with them and talk about their past experience. And as we're talking about their past experience, we're also evaluating if the way that they naturally want to work conforms with the way we work.
Patrick Emmons: I guess with where you're at with Double Good, is there a certain size or a scale... When is it a good idea to use this? Because, obviously, there's a certain level of complexity, and you've scaled it to the appropriate size, but when I think about other types of scaled Agile frameworks, I always think, "Well, there's got to be a certain amount of people involved in this where that cost of doing business has value." Is there a certain size where you think this would fit? Do you have to have a certain amount of tribes or pods or guilds?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. So, this is a little bit more art than science, right? So when you think about how you scale your company and how you choose a way of working, I think any type of framework that isn't just three to five people sitting in a room working together incurs some amount of extra cost and inefficiency. Oftentimes, you can turn that inefficiency into a strength, but there is certainly a cost to it. You have to have people who manage the managers and coach the people. And I don't think I have an easy answer to that, but I will say that one thing that we've thought about is: what does it look like to be a single team that works together all the time? And what is it like to be multiple teams that work together all the time? And what does it look like to be multiple, multiple teams that work together all the time?
And where Double Good was years ago was just one team, and everybody could essentially be in the same place if they wanted to be. And when you think about where they were a little while ago, we are starting to separate ourselves into people who were in the core engineering side and people who are more on the product experience side. We were managing it from that perspective. And then now where we're at is that we have a really strong buyer experience, and we have a really strong seller experience, and we have really strong organizers of these fundraising events. And they're all a little different. And they're just different enough that if we had focus on that and we had user experience researchers focusing on that, and designers who know what's really good for buyers, and designers who know what's really good for organizers, there's going to be some slight differences, then we think that, we see, that it provides more value than just essentially scaling up a bunch of small teams that aren't organized in a particular fashion.
Patrick Emmons: Interesting stuff. What do you see as your biggest challenge from here to the end of, maybe not just this year, but end of 2025, right? What are the things that you hope to accomplish, and what do you think is going to be some of the bigger risks?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. So, what do I hope to accomplish? I think that what we hope to accomplish is just to continue to grow in our capabilities. I think that's number one for us. And what is really important to us is that there was a point in time during the pandemic where nobody could fundraise in person and you could only fundraise virtually. And what we're seeing now is we see people who are making copycats of ours. We were the first, but then we see people who are making copycats. We can see that this is a viable way, an interesting way to build things. And so now what's where we want to be in the future is we want to be looking at what's next for these organizers? What's going to really solve their problem? And that's going to look different than it did five years ago or four years ago for us. And so that's what I hope to accomplish from the business side and from the product side is that we want to meet customers where they're at.
From the engineering side, we want to grow our engineering capabilities into, really, a world-class engineering team. And that is good for the business, but it's also good for the engineers, because we've had incredibly great retention. We might have had one or two people ever leave the engineering team, and we've only been growing. And so for those individuals, when we build our platform, we build our platform on some of the newest technology that existed seven, eight years ago. And now that technology is well proven and works very well for us. However, don't look at what is next and we don't innovate then we will find ourselves in a bad place and fall behind. And so, it's very important to us to constantly be looking at the engineering trends, see what's working elsewhere, and then also experiment internally and find out what we need to do next.
Patrick Emmons: Very interesting. You've worked at quite a few places, and from your perspective on these growth strategies, what are some of the more important lessons as you've grown and you understand the engineering side, what are some of the growth implications of these different organizations that you've worked for?
Kal Walkden: Yeah. I mean, I think, so growth is an interesting topic because from an engineering perspective, I either care or I don't care about growth. And so, I would run my engineering team differently if I knew I was growing or not growing. Because if the business was to be the same size in five years as it is today, I would be looking at something like hardening the system so that it would be easy to manage. But if I know I'm going to be growing, I have to invest in innovation and I have to be thinking about, "How do we work better in the future? How do we help this team? What does this team look like if it's twice as big? Do we have acceptable practices? And do we have acceptable developer support and operations for company size or a team size that's twice as big?"
When I think about growth at other companies, when I see mistakes, it's when the company doesn't know where they are on the growth curve. If I think about other companies that we've seen out there that have failed spectacularly, where they have hired huge teams for a business that may or may not have existed, and then at some point the reality hits, and then they have to remove half, three quarters of their workforce. You see this in a small way in the 2021, 2022 hiring frenzy where companies were hiring like crazy, salaries were going up, and it was so hard to find any engineers. And then, at some point, these companies realized they hired too many.
But if you look at... Some of these companies doubled the engineering team's size, and then they laid off people. And it was 20, 30% of the staff, of the new people who got hired, were laid off. But you'll still see actually growth in these engineering teams. And I think if those companies had been a little bit more thoughtful and cautious about growth, they might not have hired so many people and created this situation where it was feast or famine, right? You had these candidates who were getting almost attacked by recruiters for years and years, and then one day nobody wants to talk to them. And you see people who are looking for projects for quite a long time. So, I think looking at where a company is and looking at reality I think is actually very important, but also very hard as well. I mean, some of it you can't know. You can't control everything.
Patrick Emmons: Right, right. Yeah. But I think you're talking about 2021, 2022, and we're all of the age to remember 2001 and the craziness that occurred there too, where things went into... It was off to the races, hire everybody you can to suddenly abrupt, stop kind of situation. So, I don't know about you, but I'm looking optimistically at 2025. How are you feeling about post-election? I guess I'll put it to you that way.
Kal Walkden: Yeah. It's funny, I got asked a couple of weeks ago when I was in Europe. Somebody detected my age by looking at me, I guess, and they said, "Kal, you've been in it." I was like, "What do you mean?" They're like, "You were working in 2021, and you were working in 2008, and you just went through the pandemic. Which one was worse? Tell me." What I thought was, it's kind of an interesting question because depending on where you were, which one was worse? But it does kind of feel to me, and we have gone through it through pandemic, and I think a lot of companies have readjusted their expectations and their business models have hit reality now...
And the hardest thing is looking at 2019 into 2020 and then looking at you're trying to use metrics to make decisions, use data to make decisions. And everything's different in 2020. And then 2021 is different, and 2022 is different. 2023 is even different. 2024 kind of looks like normal, maybe. But either way, companies now have very little data to be making decisions on. And so if 2025 looks like 2024, then great. That would be good. I mean, the economy still is growing, so if I had to predict, I think we'll be fine in 2025, but I don't know. I can't say what fine looks like. Is it going to be crazy good stock growth? I couldn't tell you.
Patrick Emmons: Yeah. Well, we're all going to find out together.
Kal Walkden: Yes, we are.
Shelli Nelson: We're going to hold you to that, Kal.
Patrick Emmons: Hopefully. Hopefully, we'll all be there together. Right. Well, Kal, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to talk with us today.
Shelli Nelson: Yeah.
Kal Walkden: Absolutely.
Patrick Emmons: We also wanted to thank our listeners. We appreciate everyone joining us.
Shelli Nelson: And if you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, you can subscribe by visiting our website at dragonspears.com/podcast, or find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Emmons: This episode was sponsored by DragonSpears and produced by Dante32.
