Amanda Blevins’ Journey to Becoming a CTO

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

We have a returning role on the podcast. It is the America's CTO for VMware. So VP level role, we've had the role on before talking about all things. And today we're going to talk a career, but first we're going to talk trucks. So if you're not into trucks, I say, you know, fast forward about one minute or so, and you'll, you'll enjoy it. So I'll introduce to you, Amanda Bevins, Blevins, I'm sorry, Bevins, Bevins, I completely renamed you a new role in a new name.

Congratulations, Amanda Bevins, Bevins, Blevins with the L, with the L, Blevins, but I thought I said Blevins at first, but it sounded like Bevins, which like, you know, so many people, I don't know what it is about my name that's so difficult. In fact, one of my best friends from high school, I still keep in touch with, he ended up calling me Beavis because of Beavis and Butthead back when we were kids, but also because so many people would just leave out the L and be like Blevins or like, like my name is very challenging.

I don't know why, but. You know what? I get a lot, you know, we have a lot of Indian coworkers and a lot of Indian colleagues in general in the industry. I don't have any coworkers that's Indian, but Keefe is a very difficult name for some reason, and I, like I get every variation and I try to, so at Starbucks, I go by Chuck and the other day I got my Starbucks order and it was Chad. So I think they do that on purpose.

I'm sure they do. They must get some fun. So Amanda, first, let's get the important stuff out the way. Have you gotten squared away your F-150 charging your house when there's a power outage? I have not, you know, I've called my electrician multiple times to follow up and I think that it's just not a problem for them to solve. So I really like them cause they wired the house, my original generator. They've done other custom work, like for my lifts and my shop.

But this one, they just, I don't know, you know, cause it's new. So maybe I have to be more prescriptive or maybe I just have to find someone else, but I really want to be able to charge or, you know, run my house off the truck cause it's pretty cool. So for those, you don't know the F-250 as of, I'm sorry, the F-150, I have a 250, the F-250 doesn't do this yet. Has a onboard generators option and you can actually power your home in a pinch during a power outage.

And I've actually seen RVers using it to power their RVs. Everyone knows I'm into RVing. So I'm super excited to figure out if Amanda gets this squared away because believe it or not, this is tougher than what it seems. You would think that Ford would have just published a thing on how to do this, but there's nothing. No, I asked my Ford sales, my sales guy, I asked service and I'm like, can they just provide the documentation? And it doesn't seem to exist or at least not through those channels.

So if I find it, I will most certainly write a blog and so everybody else can follow that. It will be insanely popular, even for those who are outside of our sphere of influence when it comes to enterprise IT tech and speaking of things that are not very popular, Amanda, you're holding a role that not many women or people of color have held in the past and not just, I'm not just talking about VMware. I'm talking about industry-wide, a CTO title. VMware is very stingy with that title.

Can you give us a little background on the CTO title at VMware? Yeah, absolutely. VMware, we take pride in the accomplishments of everyone at the company. And so when you say stingy, it's true in the sense that we want to make sure that people that receive a principal title or receive chief technologist title and people who receive a CTO title, that everyone knows the amount of work that went into that, that the impact that they've had within the company and the industry and the community, because that is a very rigorous process and something that is not distributed lightly at VMware.

So there are three field CTOs. So Guru is the APJ field CTO, Joe Bagley and Amiya, and then me for the Americas. And somebody emailed me congratulations last week, and he mentioned how he remembered in a professional development talk that I gave quite a few years ago that I said my goal was to become a CTO. And I said, by the time I was 40, so it was a couple of years off. So I did pretty well. But, you know, we were talking about mentors before we started, you know, I guess recording, and there's so many folks that really helped me get here and build up all the skills necessary to be able to work in this capacity.

So it is my goal to make sure that everyone has as much opportunity as I did and as much help as I did to get wherever they want to be in their career. So a common question that I get, and I think this will serve two purposes, the first of which is defining what is a CTO? I mean, this role we hear a lot in the podcast even called the CTO advisor. What is a CTO from your lens? Yeah, so, you know, people joke, chief talking officer, you know, officially everyone is chief technology officer, but especially being in a field role where I get to interact with customers and partners, there is that talking aspect where, hey, a lot of thought goes into it beforehand or maybe during, but it's being able to communicate these strategies and these concepts and these ideas and helping folks navigate what their actual business problems are and the best way to solve them and for me to be able to share, you know, this is how we would help or this is what VMware is doing in the future.

I get to talk about roadmaps and other things, but internally it's important for me and anyone, but, you know, for me to be able to collaborate across our different business units and our product teams. And so each business unit or business group has its own CTO, you know, CTO of end user computing, Sean Bass, or, you know, previously Kit Colbert was the CTO of cloud platforms before he moved into his CTO role. So, you know, the folks that are CTOs inside VMware, we have our own forum and, you know, the ability to talk about industry trends and make sure that we are influencing and guiding the company to do what's best for our customers and to also be innovative in the industry to do that thing beyond what folks think that they need today.

So there's an internal and external component of it. Let's talk about that external component a little bit. Like who would be interested in talking to the America's CTO? Well, I hope everyone. I mean, I'm talking to you, so there's one person. Hopefully more people than not. So, you know, I do a lot of customer briefings and, you know, there's super smart, capable people that all have roles in customer briefings. So usually I'll start the day or start the week or, you know, however long the briefing is, and I'll start with the overall, what is VMware strategy?

What is our direction? How do we solve problems today? You know, when folks often ask, like, hey, I have this problem, you know, how do you solve it in the future that I can talk about, you know, roadmap items and company direction? What also, you know, other executives like to speak about are industry trends. That's a little less formal. Maybe we'll have a one-on-one conversation, and clearly I'm not going to share secrets of their competitors or name names, but I will say, you know, in this manufacturing industry, this is what folks are doing, or in the healthcare industry, this is what is happening, or, you know, in IT overall, these are the trends and these are the problems, and this is how to avoid this problem or a way to solve it or things like that.

So I think I have a pretty good sense of what a CTO is, especially within the enterprise IT software vendor space. Just a note, not anything for you to comment on, but just random fact. Amanda is not a huge fan of slides. I've seen you present a couple of times, and I've seen you present two customers, and it's like maybe one or two slides. So I feel heard whenever you present, so there's that. Then there's the, I guess, the second part of it.

You talked about the journey of getting here a little bit. I want to delve into this journey a bit. Like, what is the most—I get this question a lot, and I'm sure you do, too, from people you mentor, people who casually ask, what technologies should you learn to become a CTO? And I know that's a leading question or a trick question, but what technologies do you need to learn to become a CTO? All of them. No, that's just my approach.

So I think the purpose or the role of a CTO is to be somebody that is thinking about the future. Thinking about—well, to me, this is how I look at it. Thinking about current state, what's working well, what isn't, what do people struggle with, what are the common patterns that are problems or opportunities in our industry? And then, can we solve it today? If yes, great. Now we need to communicate to these folks, this is how we can solve it.

But if we can't solve it today, and the industry can't solve it today, the really important part is thinking about how should we or how could we or what are the different options and then be able to weigh those and convincing others or inspiring them to follow to make that a reality. And so to bring that back to technology, I've always been a generalist because I like to pick and choose if I'm going to solve any problem, whether I'm implementing a vSphere environment or I'm designing a data center migration or something, all these jobs I had in the past, I like to be able to choose the best technology, but also the one that fits the best for the overall solution, not just point solutions of what's best.

And so in my past, I've learned clearly servers, virtualization, storage, enough of networking to be dangerous, enough of applications to be able to work with my applications folks, clearly end user computing kind of stuff. And so I've been able to build up this knowledge base of 20, maybe 30 years because I started being a geek when I was really young. Um, and then be able to use that information to build on it, to be able to say, hey, in the past, these are all the ways we solve this problem.

We know what the gaps are in the future. We need this type of thing, um, right to, to be able to, to help folks with multi-cloud or to be able to help them at the edge or whatever it might be. So I know that didn't really answer your question of what technology, but I did joke and say all of them. And so there's CTOs that focus in very specific areas. So if you want to be CTO of end user computing, well then all end user computing technology and anything that touches that.

If you want to be more of a journalist CTO, well then the industry trends, what was successful in the past, what didn't work, what's working now, what isn't working now. And then just look out there and see what everybody else is doing and what they're planning for in the future. And I'm sure if I was to talk to Sean, who's the, uh, EUC CTO, he would probably mimic that. I think he, when I'm talking to him, it's even broad, even within EUC, like he's sure a level deeper, but still you still need, he still needs to know network, compute, storage, application development, just focused on EU, the, uh, application of EUC.

The other thing that, as I'm listening to you from a technical perspective, that seems overwhelming, but also from this whole presenting thing and talking to customers and making sense of it, like I'll ask this question the same way it was asked to me when I adopted the CTO advisor brand. Like Amanda, what the hell? Like, how do you, how do you learn all of that stuff that isn't put into a certification exam? The, the, the networking, compute, storage, I understand it. I know how to test for that and train for that.

How do I learn this other thing that people call soft skills that you're very good at? Oh, thank you. You know, it's funny that you compare it to like a certification exam. Like, you know, I had a bunch of MCSE certs and, you know, EMC proven professional and BCPs and some other certs back, you know, when I did more hands-on stuff and actually had a really hard time preparing for those exams because hands-on I could make it work, right? Like it was excellent.

It was implemented well. The architecture was documented. There weren't any issues or if there were issues, it was never ever before seen by the company that was providing the, you know, the technology and have to work with them to figure it out. So I knew it very well, but when it came to those exams, I'm like, I've been doing this for years and I've never had to know this piece of information. Right. And so then I'd have to study the actual questions that would exist on the test.

And then I could pass that too. And almost rarely, very rarely would I ever need that information ever again in the real world. And so the reason I say that is because all that information and knowledge that we amass by doing our jobs and by observing other people's jobs and understanding how we need to help them and integrate with them and provide them what they need, it will never show up on a test that that's the exact information you need to have to see that big picture, to see the patterns and to be able to start thinking through, OK, now I know what it is.

How can it be better? Or now I have a new problem to solve. What can I pull from in the past or what do I need to create? And so I spend a bunch of time just like, you know, Google News will pop up some trend or scrolling through Twitter and seeing something. And it might not be an area that I would ever work in myself. But the more knowledge I have across technology and science in general, I can use those critical thinking skills.

I can use that random knowledge that I've obtained. And somehow it always ends up applying. At least it helps me out in understanding things and be able to explain them to others. Yeah, the I learned this the hard way earlier in my career, not too early. When I was at PWC, we would do things we would just create. Outputs that would never see the light of day, and I never understood why I'm like, why are we just doing all of this random work that will that will never get credit for?

And it was it will we will always have like this slide that was at the ready because we did the work beforehand. And I think that's partially what you're describing, this ability to just have this knowledge bank that you can pull forward at the at any given client meeting. You last topic, which is this myth of the CTO, you talked about how thinly spread your role is across so much, you know, VMware. I took a look at the some of the product portfolio page, and we've talked about this when I worked at VMware for a short period, just the mass of of technologies.

VMware introduced a blockchain group. There's virtualization, there's telco, there's the various cloud health components. There's cross cloud. I can go on end user computing on and on and on. And, you know, you're sitting across from a CIO, CTO one day talking big picture, kind of like, how do we pull all of these assets together to deliver business value? And then you have to shift and go to the internal product teams and talk tech to them. How deep of a knowledge do you need in technology wise?

Do you need to practically still be able to code to be the type of CTO that you are? Well, considering I never really coded because I'm terrible at it, I guess the good news for people that are not good coders is you do not need to be able to do that for my role. I do have a degree in computer science, and I managed to get through it, but definitely not my favorite thing. So frustrating. So, no, you don't need to code.

And I don't think necessarily you need to spend a bunch of time doing hands on stuff, but I do think it's really beneficial. So I like to pick a tech for six months or a year and have this goal of I'm going to learn this new thing. Like, I'm going to learn Kubernetes. I'm going to increase my security knowledge. I'm going to learn a lot more about secure software supply chain, things that are not within my comfort zone and not areas that I just inherently can pick up really easily.

Like some of these things I have to work a lot harder to understand. So I think that by doing that, it's important to do that to be able to stay in touch with reality, right? Because otherwise you're just talking theory and academia and perfect use cases and things like that. But without being connected to the real world, whatever I might say would maybe not hold value or not be useful without understanding the details that go behind it. And so while I certainly do not have time to install, configure and play with every VMware product that we have, I even use hands-on labs to do stuff.

I organize internal tech talks and I request the speakers of things that I need to know about. So clearly it helps the community, but it also helps me because I feel like, hey, I need a deeper dive on that. Or I'll meet with a field team or a product team and just say, hey, can you help me understand that? Or I'll ping one of our principal engineers or other CTOs and say, hey, can we have a conversation about this? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

So there's a range of solutions, right? Besides self-service reading and browsing and tweets and LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff. But really finding the people that I trust and respect and look up to and understand their viewpoints and their opinions on it, because they probably say something I've never thought of before or I never thought of in that way. And then it just expands my mind and the way that I approach it and have more appreciation for the larger system and therefore can start to help solve for some of those things.

So Amanda, one last question. You're a VP. Not that I didn't respect your time before, but now I have to respect your time even more because I know your schedule is slammed. But I would like for you to talk specifically to the women out there. If you're a woman and you're looking to aspire to become an Amanda, that is something I have to appreciate that there has to be some type of pressure on you. But in general, for the women looking to get to the highest level of corporate America and not seeing other faces that look like them and have the same challenges to them, what general advice would you like to give them?

Yeah, this might seem trite, but don't give up. I'm very well known for my grit and persistence, probably to the annoyance of many. But at the end, it works out. And even some of my previous mentors or colleagues commented, hey, you know, your grit and persistence got you here. And so what I mean by that is don't continue to take the same exact route, because that's grit and persistence, too. But we already know it's not successful. So let's find a different path, right?

And so find the mentors and the coaches and sponsors that can help you. Find the ones that open your eyes to another opportunity. But just because you're meeting resistance or people don't like what you're doing or like your approach or whatever, there's ways to figure out how to modify it a little bit so folks receive it better, because they still need to hear and listen and accept without losing the authenticity that makes you you. So the more authentic you are and the more that you learn to interact with others and meet them where they are and adjust your styles as much as possible to, and not in a way that you're giving up any of what you believe in or your values or yourself, but adjust in a way that you can communicate better with humans.

And this is true for any gender or anything, right? That will help you get much further, because that was the thing that I had to learn probably the most. And I continue to learn, continue to misstep, but also improve, and I'm better at it. So don't give up. Be persistent. Set your dreams and follow them. Figure out how to get there. If the people in your life are not the ones to help you get there, then find different ones, add to your team, and set that goal and talk to others that do it.

Talk to others that do something parallel. Talk to those that do nothing at all that's related to what you're trying to aspire to. And use all that information and build your plan and verify it and get support. I love that Angela Duckworth referenced grit, one of my favorite authors in Line of Thinking. Amanda, thank you so much for spending the time. For those of you who don't know, we've had a ridiculous amount of trouble getting this podcast recorded, just, you know, user error, user error on our part.

For those that want to follow you online, the Twitter handle and everything will be in the show notes. com. Me on Twitter, at CTO Advisor, is the Twitter handle. You can DM me. Talk to you next, CTO Advisor podcast.