How Daily Walks with My Teammates Led to a Video Podcast
The story of how a simple resolution to walk every day became a tech leader's way to connect with his team and sparked a new video podcast.
I’ve launched a new video podcast today. You can find all episodes at WalkTheTalk.show.
I didn’t come up with the name. It was coined by Anil Desai, the first of my colleagues who walked with me. When I wrote in Slack the next day asking who else would want to walk around the block with me, a few folks replied, and on the same thread Anil added, “I think you need a sign up sheet for Walk the Talk.” That line named the thing before I had even thought of it as a thing. Only later did I learn it was also a TV show in India by Shekhar Gupta with a similar premise: the host walking alongside his guests, interviewing them on the move.
It all started with a New Year’s resolution I made this year. I decided to pick one that, perhaps, this time I could keep: walk outdoors twenty minutes every day. A way to clear my head, move a little, and create space in the middle of busy days. Like most resolutions, though, I felt myself slipping after a month. I cursed myself more than once for trying to build such a habit in one of the coldest months of the year.
Something else was pressing. My team had grown to several hundred people during the pandemic, and when we came back to the office last year, I realized how many of them I hadn’t met yet. How were we going to keep delivering great products and maintain our large-scale systems if we didn’t really know each other? In an emergency, like a service outage, I am supposed to be trusted with my judgment. But how could they trust me if we had never spent any quality time together?
I tried a few ways to connect, but they weren’t as effective. I remembered the times I was a junior engineer. Whenever I crossed paths with someone far more senior, it felt as if I had run into Gandalf the White on a ridge overlooking Helm’s Deep in the second book. My eyes burning, I would wonder if I was even breathing or blinking right. Dropping into team meetings with the title I hold can shift the room in the same way. Retros and fun sessions can change tone the moment I show up. We have social hours, but they are too loud, scattered, and random to have any depth.
So that cold afternoon in February, I posted in our team Slack room: “I’m going to walk around the block and get some fresh air. Anyone want to join?” Anil said yes. I posted again the next day, and the day after. Twenty minutes around the block turned out to be the perfect size: easy to say yes to, no calendar mangement needed. Over time it grew into an almost-daily ritual. Now, when I’m visiting another office in a different city, I offer multiple walks in a day to make room for more conversations. And when walking in person isn’t possible, I offer a remote walk instead, with both of us on headphones, doing whatever relaxes each one of us, including an outdoor walk.
Beyond getting to know each other, and giving them time with someone who had been around the block a few times, those walks also taught me a few things. First, I was reminded again and again that I am surrounded by smart and passionate people from all walks of life and generations. They taught me about tools I hadn’t seen and pointed me to articles or videos I had missed. It was a reminder that everyone has something you can learn from, and an antidote to one of the great misconceptions of life: that our own generation was the last good one, and that those coming after us are nowhere close. Second, I heard directly about struggles and best practices within their teams that I would have easily missed in all-up reports, and I was able to offer suggestions on solving some of those issues and sometimes apply their practices more broadly. Third, a simple twenty-minute walk can go a long way in bridging the gap. The next time I was in a meeting with someone I had walked with, it was easier to make progress, because the artificial distance created by titles had narrowed.
Doing this every day, I started to notice sets of questions that came up again and again. How do I handle disagreement without damaging trust? How do I navigate across teams when goals don’t align? Should I stay an independent contributor or try the management route?
For many of these questions, I think I have good answers. But for some of them, like whether to try the management route, it is best answered by someone who has done that. I never chose that path. And I am only one person. I have experience, but it is nowhere close to the collective experience we have across my network.
This gave me an idea. What if, on some days, I invited experienced Amazonians to walk with me and record their take on some of those questions as a video podcast? I could add my commentary, but let the person with the experience, role, or superpower that best fit the question share their perspective. That is how Walk the Talk: Builder Conversations began to take shape.
At first, I thought we would record ourselves while walking, but the logistics of that proved to be a nightmare. Instead, we walk together first, discuss the question we want to cover during the walk, then find a place to sit and record a casual conversation. Someone once joked that the podcast should really be called “Sit the Talk” since we aren’t actually recording while moving. Fair point. But the walk is still the spark. It is what leads to the talk on record.
My first take was a disaster. I picked the wrong spot in the Amazon Spheres, with too many people behind us taking selfies and causing distractions. The average quality microphones I bought and thought would do an acceptable job failed miserably. The audio, the most important part of the whole thing, was muffled beyond repair. That first attempt was with Hasan Abbasi. He graciously agreed to do one more take with me, which became an episode that is out now. My next guest, where I finally showed up with better equipment, was Nikhil Dewan. Even then, we had several struggles. My favorite was a custodian rolling two big trash cans behind us just as I was saying the words, “PMs should get their hands dirty.”
I posted a few episodes to Amazon’s internal video sharing platform, and they caught the interest of the folks who manage AWS social media accounts. We decided to release these videos publicly, and now they are posted on the AWS Careers YouTube channel in their own playlist. A shorthand URL is WalkTheTalk.show if you’d like to bookmark it.
Walk the Talk started with a New Year’s resolution that almost died. It stayed alive because it solved a real need: to connect, to listen, and to surface the lessons that repeat.
I have enjoyed every minute of each walk and recording session. I hope you will too!
P.S. Feel free to drop me a note if you have feedback, ideas, or if you are also an Amazonian and interested in sharing your own learnings as a guest in the podcast.
From the Broader Conversation
In this newsletter, I try to bring my own experience to each piece, but I believe the real value comes from connecting that perspective with the collective wisdom of my network and with ideas I encounter elsewhere. Below are from my bookmarks relevant to today’s topic and not promoted content.
From Ethan Evans
Back in 2019, Ethan Evans, a former Amazon VP, wrote The Reason Everyone Wants a Mentor. His argument was simple and still relevant today: schools don’t prepare people for the realities of work, fewer students gain early job experience, and so employees enter the workplace hungry for guidance. It made me remind myself that mentorship, and creating spaces like Walk the Talk, is a responsibility for those who have more experience.
Consider subscribing to Ethan’s awesome Level Up Newsletter if you haven’t already.
From Julie Zhuo
I’ve recently came across this article on Lean In by Julie Zhuo. It is a candid story about how hard it was to start writing publicly. She had been keeping a journal since childhood, but when she first tried to blog, she froze: what voice should she use, what if people thought less of her if she shared insecurities? For months she wrote anonymously, until she realized anonymity made her words hollow. That’s when her writing began to resonate with larger audiences.
This story resonated with me because I’ve struggled with the same question: how much do I share? At Amazon, “being vocally self critical” is part of earning trust, and inside the company I grew comfortable with it. But doing it in public felt different. When I was working on Walk the Talk episodes for the initial release, I kept stalling, re-editing, and obsessing over details. Friends and my wife told me to stop overthinking. Looking back, yes, the hesitation was about microphones or editing, but it was also a bit about bracing myself to be seen more broadly for who I am, flaws included.
Julie closes her article by describing how much she gained once she stopped hiding: warm compliments, her writing being shared, feedback that sparked new ideas, and connections that helped her grow into a better designer and leader. I would love to experience that kind of growth through Walk the Talk. Even now, I’ve benefited in ways I didn’t expect. I used to cringe every time I saw myself on video or heard my own recorded voice. Forcing myself to endure hours of editing has started to change that. I watch my body language, the way I phrase things, and how I come across. I’ve already noticed I feel more comfortable when I deliver a speech in public. I don’t know yet where this podcast will lead, but I’m eager to keep learning.
Consider subscribing to Julie’s excellent
newsletter.