Todd Cassidy on Building an Innovative Technology Culture at Capital One

Hey guys. Thanks for the throw. We're here with Todd Cassidy, who is managing vice president and divisional CIO for associate experience at Capital One, and we're talking about what it takes to build and foster a tech culture.

Todd, welcome to the show. Hi, Mike. It's great to be here with you.

You know, everybody and his brother who's in the tech sector is always trying to, uh, get the latest and greatest kind of thing and play with various toys and, and so the attitude is right, but how do you harness that in a way that's productive for the company? Because, well, there has to be something that gets generated at the end of the day, right? Absolutely.

Um, you know, I think it, our, our engineers crave the latest tools in the marketplace and, and we really want to encourage them to take advantage of the evolving, you know, marketplace of tools that are out there. And, um, you know, I, I think a couple things really set this up for us. Uh, capital One's investment, um, in our modern tech stack, I think really gives a, a nice, um, opportunity for our developers to use the latest technologies.

We also work hard to maintain a open culture that fosters collaboration and encourages innovative ideas to solving problems. And we think innovation really thrives when associates feel supported and have room to explore ideas. And that's really where we, we emphasize collaboration, knowledge sharing, and celebrating experimentation.

Um, our developer first culture, um, ensures that our team has the best tools and infrastructure to innovate at scale. And there's really three programs I would, I would call out that we leverage to inspire innovation inside the company. Um, the first is we've had a lot of focus on patent innovations and, um, in recent years we've, we've been at the leaderboard for the number of patents granted each year and have over 6,000 US patents to date.

Um, we also have a recognition program internally, um, that we call Tech Excellence, uh, which is designed to recognize and reward contributions of our technology teams. Um, w we publicly share the winners across the company quarterly, and then those quarterly winners compete for our annual CIO Elite Award. Um, and the recognition that comes along with this is also showcases what accomplishments the team has and, and shares that broadly.

Um, lastly, uh, the one thing I would call out here is we also have an internal conference, um, that allows our teams to demo innovations that they have with the rest of the company. Um, this in, uh, this is an annual conference that we do internally with keynote speakers and curated demos from teams, um, across the company that allows, uh, allows us to share that innovation broadly and, and, you know, create reuse and, and celebrate those accomplishments With the developer first culture, how do you strike a balance between, I guess, what we'll call operational excellence and standardization and the fact that the developers want to be able to play with whatever tool they find and do something? That's a great question.

Um, certainly we have a big focus on being well-managed and, um, resiliency of our infrastructure. Um, but we also recognize that technology advances quickly and our, you know, developers want to work on the latest technologies and apply that to the business problems they have. And I think there's a number of factors that, that we have in place that support this.

First is, uh, we, we have a continuous learning culture and, um, I think that just encourages our associates to continue to evolve their skills, um, to support that. We have an what we call tech college. It's an internal learning platform that allows, um, both self-paced as well as instructor led training that our associates are encouraged to leverage for upskilling.

Um, uh, we also provide our associates with leading industry tools, um, particularly coding assistant tools is, is a hot theme, uh, right now, and we really want to, you know, create time for our developers to experiment and learn these tools and then apply them to, as I mentioned, our modern tech stack. And we have really challenging business problems to apply these new skills towards and take advantage, advantage of the new tools. Um, you know, as an example of this, when we were an early adopter of, uh, Amazon workspaces, um, I'm sorry, AWS um, sorry, I had my other hat on for, for other aspects of my, of my role, but as we proceeded that migration to the public cloud with AWS, we had a big focus on, uh, training our associates about AWS.

And so we had AWS certification initiatives really to help raise the water level because public cloud was not something that we were in before that. And so we wanted all of our associates to learn that. Um, what I would say is, in my experience, when you, when you provide developers with a continuous learning environment or in culture, um, industry leading tools, time to experiment with them and learn them a modern tech stack to apply them to, and then create business challenges to, uh, solve using those tools.

I just think amazing things happen when those things come together. You hear the phrase platform engineering a lot these days, and it's all about kind work making, uh, or providing at least a better developer experience. But I can't help but wonder, were you guys kind of doing that all along and you kind of woke up one morning and said, well, it's nice that somebody put a name to it, but that's kind of the way we operate.

Yes. I, I do, I do think, uh, I would say we, we've always had a focus on this. I think, uh, you know, one learning that we've had is we've moved from data centers to being in the public cloud, is our developers had to take on the role of full stack engineering, including, you know, the, the infrastructure parts with the public cloud, that includes vulnerability management, some run the engine went up.

And so as we reflect on that, we're really focused on automating as much of that as possible so that our developers can spend their time on the most important aspects of creative problem solving and innovating, um, on top of that versus the kind of rote tasks that can kind of come along with managing, um, that. And so the, the more that we can kind of peel away at tasks that are not really necessary for our developers to focus on, um, is a big area of, of, um, of focus for us right now. Mm-hmm.

Do you think maybe, you know, early on with Full Stack, we were all talking about shift left, and I wonder maybe if we shifted too much left and then developers got too much cognitive load and now we're trying to swing the pendulum back to something in the middle? I, well, I guess my perspective was, or is that I do think we shifted left and probably shifted left before we had some of the tooling in place that takes some of the burden off of the developers at as we shifted. Um, I personally still really like the full stack, um, um, accountability that comes along with that and the capability that comes along with that.

You know, if I went back to, um, you know, our data center days, our developers were frustrated that they often had to wait for infrastructure to be ready for them in order to, um, you know, begin their project. If they needed a server and, and we didn't have that capacity, then that might need to be ordered and then be racked and stacked before they could even begin their project today. Within minutes they can spin up new environments and, and really take control.

And just our speed to market has, um, advanced dramatically. I would also say our, the resiliency of the solutions we put in place has, uh, also dramatically increased. Um, with that said, though, I, I think the focus we have around the automation around some of those aspects and just taking some of that burden off of their workload is, is, uh, key to where we're headed.

Of course, you can't walk down the street these days without somebody leaping out to tell you about their great new AI thing, but what are you guys doing with AI as it relates to software engineering? So we, we have, um, a number of, you know, large initiatives across the company on ai. And I think Capital One's investment in our modern tech stack and our data ecosystem, along with the strength of our AI specific talent, I think really dispositions us to be at the forefront of leveraging ai.

We have a number of initiatives internally, um, where we are building our own LLMs and, and applying that in different ways across the company. Um, I, I think, you know, all, all, you know, we're also providing a lot of, uh, you know, commercially available products for our associates, particularly coding assistance as well as Gemini, um, Google Gemini, which we rolled out across the enterprise this year, not just for our technology organization, but for the entire organization. And we intend to have that in the hands of all associates by year end.

Um, I think, you know, there's a common theme here across these, these tools. We're gonna be building things internally ourselves. We're also gonna use commercial products and, and roll those out to our associates.

But I think empowering them to learn and get the most value out of those tools is gonna be a bit of a journey. Um, so far we, we've, uh, you know, we're allowing a lot of experimentation, um, but I think that there's more we can be doing in, in, in our intending to do to really help our, as associates take the, take the most and get them, you know, get the most value out of these tools as we look ahead. Yeah, I think one of the issues that people are wrestling with is we're clearly generating more code, but more code doesn't necessarily translate directly into more applications being deployed, because a lot of that code needs to be reviewed and there's a lot of other processes.

So how do you kind of go in and start looking at some of the bottlenecks in the process, and how do you think about eliminating those? I think it all comes down to automation. Um, you know, we, we have objectives to automate testing, um, to where we don't do any manual testing before deployment to where we can get to a place to where we're doing, uh, continuous deployment, um, across the environment.

And I, I think that will be a big unlock for us now, clearly, um, the, the resiliency of our solutions and, and making sure that we don't have disruption as we have change is gonna be important. I would say that we, we've been on a really incredible journey of, of just the resiliency of our, so solutions, I'll say cloud-based, you know, advantages, uh, play out pretty big here in what we've seen from a resiliency perspective in recent years. And we're really proceeding, we're performing right now at all time lows as a company in terms of you, you know, technology outages and disruption.

Um, and what's pretty amazing about that is we've had a pretty robust, um, you know, technology agenda as we've been transforming our tech stack moving to the public cloud, and a number of other things that we've been doing as we've made that shift and our number of releases has continued to rise dramatically. Um, our number of incidents has decreased dramatically along that same time period, which I think just shows our balanced per, you know, balanced approach from wanting to be more productive, but also doing that in a well-managed way. Mm-hmm.

I don't think it's much of a secret that occasionally developers and the centralized IT team don't always get along. So how did you, you know, bring together these two disparate cultures in a way that kind of gets them to work together cohesively short of, uh, maybe locking everybody in a room until they see sense? Yeah.

Um, you know, I have, uh, I've been with Capital One for a long time and I've worked in all different areas of the company from our, our card business two, some of our enterprise technology functions. And, um, I just think our collaborative culture and, um, having shared goals across teams, I don't see major issues. Um, with this.

Now, I will say it was a bit more challenging when we had a separate infrastructure team that was managing data centers from, you know, the ability of what comes with public cloud. It just allows a lot less dependencies across teams as the, you know, the full stack developers have control of their infrastructure through the public cloud. And, and it minimizes some of that, but, but your question's a good one.

I think, you know, clearly there's still gonna be dependencies, um, across many of our horizontal functions, whether it's with cyber or network. Um, you know, the team that I, I lead our associate experience team and others that partner closely, um, with those, with, um, you know, our, our customer-focused, uh, teams across the, the company. So ultimately, what's your best advice for your fellow CIOs when it comes to dealing with developers?

Well, you know, we, we believe that attracting and growing talent is the most important role, um, that our technology leaders have. And I think from a, uh, attraction perspective, you know, or sorry, from attracting developers to our, to our environment, we look for builders, people that are naturally curious and, and passionate about solving problems with technology. Um, and, you know, technical skills matter, but we also look for creative problem solvers and adaptability and a learning mindset.

And once those engineers join, we invest heavily in their growth, um, through a bunch of different things from structured learning programs, mentorships, internal events, great assignments, um, and rotational experiences, which are really intended to expand impact and growth. Um, you know, from a, um, how we continue to grow our associates, I think there's also a bunch of factors that come together from, um, creating a, a, a learning, uh, a continuous learning environment, I think is critical. Um, I think setting example of that and encouraging that, whether it's through, you know, an internal tech college like we have or other mechanisms, um, we also provide our associates with, as I mentioned, industry leading tools and time to learn and experiment.

Um, which I think is, is, is really important I think in my experience. When you provide developers with a culture that's, you know, pivots around continuous learning, industry, leading tools, time to experiment and learn a modern tech stack in challenging business problems, just amazing things happen when those things come together. Um, folks, you're heard it here when it comes to software development and developers in any age, there's no substitute for a good culture.

Hey, Todd, thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Mike. It was great to be with you.

All right. And back to you guys in the studio.