 Thank you, Jim. And thanks to everyone for joining me here this morning. My name is Bindi Belanger, and I'm an executive program director at Ticketmaster. I've been with Live Nation and Ticketmaster for a little over four years. And in that time, my role has evolved quite a bit. Today, I partner with our leaders in the platform and technical operations teams to facilitate strategic planning, resource alignment, and project delivery. In other words, I help the leaders figure out what we should be working on, how do we organize ourselves effectively to work on that stuff, and then to ultimately help ensure successful execution. A little bit about Ticketmaster. It's actually a 40-year-old company, which means we have lots of really fun legacy challenges to work on. In 2010, we partnered with Live Nation to join forces to power live experiences. So until recently, we've sold over 565 million tickets to events at 37 different countries across the globe, which means we've been able to help fans of over 539 million in number get to see the live experiences that they want to see. Last year, we did about $25 billion in gross transaction value, which is basically the value of all the tickets that we sold. So that makes us a top five e-commerce website. But the best thing about working at Ticketmaster and Live Nation is that we get to power unforgettable moments of joy. Somewhere in the world, every 20 minutes is a Live Nation event. It's pretty cool to know that we're basically in the business of selling fun and great memories. So you might be wondering why someone from Ticketmaster is here speaking at an open source summit. Well, open source is in our DNA with over 5,000 physical servers, 22,000 virtual machines and EC2 instances, basically a really large footprint. 95% of that runs on Linux and other open source software. Our biggest projects these days are on Kubernetes Terraform, Prometheus, GitLab, and Reddit. We are heavy Node.js users, Grafana, Python, et cetera. Most recently, last year, we joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as an enterprise member and recent contributions to the open source community include the tech maturity model that we open sourced about four months ago, which is a model that helps software engineering teams measure their maturity in a number of different software development capabilities. And then just a couple of months ago, we worked with CoreOS to build and release an ALB ingress controller for Kubernetes, which is something that we needed to be able to run large workloads on-prem with Kubernetes and wanted to make sure it was available to the rest of the community as well. But today, I'm here to talk a little bit about partnered leadership. We've all heard the saying that two heads are better than one, and we definitely see that applied on our engineering teams when you think of paired programming. But we don't often apply that idiom to leadership. Traditionally, we see leadership as a hierarchy where one person sets the path and direction for his or her team, an alpha wolf of the pack, so to speak. You rarely see two people in charge of a single team, right? And I think we do that to ensure singular accountability. But by doing so, we also expect that our leaders excel at everything. So the best leader ever would be someone who's able to define a vision. Where are we going? To also come up with the strategy, how will we get there? To be able to successfully execute and figure out how to organize the team to accomplish the goals that they've set. We want them to be really good at motivating people so that our teams go above and beyond on every single project. We also want them to be able to empower other leaders so that they can delegate but still make sure that their overarching vision is achieved. We need them to be able to prove their success. What metrics and measures are they using to know that they're delivering on time, on budget, and hitting their business targets? We want them to be able to manage well during wartime and peacetime. And we've defined war as everything is on fire. We need to be able to mobilize teams to move fast, meet deadlines, prevent disaster, but regardless of cost or temporary impact to team morale. That same leader should also be able to manage well in peacetime, to be able to plan thoughtfully so that we can deliver the highest quality products, deliver within budget, all the while creating meaningful career paths for everybody on the team. We want them to be able to create a really meaningful culture, to be able to pull all of the above together in order to keep and attract top talent while making sure that Wall Street is happy every day and every quarter. We want our leaders to be all the things. In other words, what I call a tech leadership unicorn. Now trust me when I say that unicorns do exist, and I'm sure we've got several here in the audience today. But these are not easy people to find. I mean, combining tech wizardry and rainbows is not something you can put in a job description, right? But the truth is that leadership unicorns are not born. We have to grow them. Leaders who eventually become masters at all these different skills typically do so because they've learned from experience and mentors and other examples along the way. Many leaders are fortunate enough to have those examples and to be able to pick up certain skills from other dynamic leadership styles over several years. But we don't always have that kind of time in tech. We need leaders who can cover all of those bases now so that we can rapidly develop new software and new technologies at the pace that our customers, and in the case of the open source community, are peers needed. So what's the answer when we can't find leaders who excel at everything? One solution is partnered leadership. It's not a new concept. In fact, we see it everywhere. In sports, we see it with general managers and coaches. In education, we sometimes see it with two vice principles who will split up the role and take different responsibilities to get the job done. And most notably, in the business world, we see it with our C-suite, where each of the senior executives is responsible for ultimately ensuring the success of their business area. But what does partnered leadership look like in the tech space? Let me start by giving you a few examples of leaders who don't necessarily have every single one of their unicorn leadership traits. First, we've got a really strong technical leader who either doesn't have the interest or the experience in managing people. Now, this could be a personal preference, or it could just be that they didn't have the training or the experience that they needed. Unfortunately, what we see a lot here is that people continue to grow and excel as a technologist, and then we try to force them to be managers. Sometimes that works and you create a unicorn, and sometimes it doesn't. The flip side of that coin is that you have a great people leader who is great at motivating teams and organizing people, but doesn't necessarily have the technology skills or expertise to be able to drive a project on their own. We've also got the leader who's got great vision, knows where they want to take the team or company, but they couldn't put a plan together to save their life. You've got the excellent planner and organizer who often gets buried in the details and fails to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And then, of course, there is the leader who is the perfectionist engineer, but unfortunately continues to miss deadlines because they refuse to work on what we always refer to as MVP, and they want to make sure it's perfect and that every single feature that they think is important is included in that first release. But instead of seeing people's limitations, we should be looking for opportunities to pair people up so that their strengths combined allow them to form a great leadership team. For example, we had a strong senior architect who was an amazing problem solver and believed strongly that they designed the right solution, but is having trouble getting buy-in from the rest of the engineering team on their approach. If you were to partner them with a strong people manager who excels at facilitating collaborative working sessions, who's really good at negotiations, who can engage the team to ask the right questions and then contribute their suggestions to the overall final solution, we've got a great partnership here. Or in the case where you have a strong visionary who knows what the end game should look like, but doesn't really know how or where to kick things off. If you partner them with a detail-oriented planner who will be able to ask great questions and help break the work down, create a step-by-step plan, and then figure out what skill sets are required in order to get the job done, you're much more likely to accomplish that vision. And in the case of the leader who is consistently delivering high-quality code with their team, but refuses to push anything to production until it's absolutely complete and perfect, if you partner them with a little bit more of a faster-paced leader who's good at breaking down the work into smaller iterations but also in defining a great process where quality assurance is highlighted, that's another great partnership. So you might think that some of this sounds pretty obvious, right? So what stops us from doing this everywhere? And I think the answer to that is accountability. If you put two people in charge of something, or even three, what happens when the other person doesn't hold up their end of the bargain? Does the other partner just point the finger of blame and say, well, I had the vision and you couldn't come up with a good tech solution, or I came up with the plan and you didn't motivate the team? One way to address this is to be very clear in defining roles and responsibilities. In the example I've got here up on the screen, you might have someone called the general manager, which is a role that we've been using more and more at Ticketmaster. That person would be accountable for defining mission and success criteria and ultimately ensuring that the project was successfully delivered. Partner them with the great product leader who's really good at understanding what the users need, writing user stories and acceptance criteria, add in a really strong tech leader who is ultimately accountable for the final design architecture and then making sure we've got the right engineers to build quality software, add a program leader who will be responsible for planning and organizing delivery, and then make sure that the engineering managers, those people managers, are available and accountable to making sure that the engineering teams have the skills, coaching and training that they need. So here's an example of where partnered leadership might be beneficial. Let's say you need to solve a technical problem and get buy-in from end users. If you had a single leader that might have been a tech person that didn't necessarily have the strong engagement skills in order to make sure that they were building the right thing, you might be setting yourself up for a failure. Instead, if you create a partnered leadership team where you have a product lead who is ultimately accountable for the full delivery, working with a program lead to get feedback from users and facilitate those sessions, define the access criteria and then add the tech lead to design and oversee the implementation of a technical solution, you've got much more of your bases covered there. Another example is if your company was trying to kick off a large new business initiative. If you had a general manager without really strong planning skills or maybe because they've been in a leadership position for so long, is a little bit disconnected from the technology, they may be able to define a big long-term vision but unable to figure out what the details are in order to get that work done. If you partner them with the program lead to break that work down into milestones and a tech lead that can help figure out how to iteratively deliver on that solution, you're much more likely to accomplish that vision. So when does this work well? This works really well, I think at large companies or enterprises where you have a big talent base of functional leaders or people that are really strong in their specific area where you have a wide variety of skill sets to work with and you have an organization that embraces change and is willing to consider trying this new style out. If you don't have that, the alternatives are investing in training, investing in coaching or developing a mentoring program in order to bring in either external talent or leverage leaders in other parts of your business to help. And of course, there's always the option to hire the talent that you need. So when putting together successful partnerships, there's just a couple of things I wanna call out on this slide. First is that as a senior leader, it's really important for you to know what your functional leaders, areas of strengths and weaknesses are but also how they might harmonize or clash with the other leaders on your team. That is super important. Also, when you put your teams together, you need to create time and space for them to develop strong working relationships. And then also know that you should be able to dynamically adjust those partnerships when you need them. So for example, if you're focusing at the early start of a project on creating a product roadmap, you might wanna put together a product and a program lead but later let's say you found a major issue in production, it would be a good idea to partner your tech lead with someone who is really strong with communication to both internal and external audiences. And then being a partner on a leadership team, obviously knowing your strengths and weaknesses and how you can leverage other people's strengths where you may be falling a little bit short but also knowing that your contributions on project by project may vary. So in some cases, you may be adding the value of creating and defining the vision. In other cases, you may be more responsible for motivating team members. Some of the benefits of doing a partnered leadership approach are that you can maintain singular accountability while sharing responsibilities but also it allows leaders to work together and be able to have the opportunity to pick up the skillsets of other people. This is ultimately a way that you can start developing your unicorn leaders. At Ticketmaster, we've got a couple, we've got actually partnered leadership across the company. On the left hand side is myself and my partners, Craig Amador and Justin Dean. And on the right hand side, we've got our fan experience senior leadership team. The picture of us is in Quebec earlier this year. If you're looking for team building activities, surviving a blizzard is a really good one, I recommend it. So in closing, I'd like to say that while partnered leadership is not a new concept, I hope that my thoughts on the subject will have given you a new or at least a different perspective on how you might evaluate leadership and leadership development in your organization. So before I go, I just wanna say that we'd like you to join us tonight at the all attendee party. Ticketmaster being in the business of powering live events, of course needed to bring in a live band for the party, so we're excited about that. And we are hiring, so if you have any questions about what we do at Ticketmaster, about our Kubernetes projects, stop by the core OS booth and we will be happy to chat with you. Thank you.