Abdallah Shaban, Google - Fluttering Forward: Innovation and Community in Tech

David DeRemer: All right, Abdallah welcome to the podcast. Abdallah Shaban: Thank you so much. It's really, really great to be chatting with you today. David DeRemer: Likewise, can you introduce yourself?

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Abdallah Shaban. I am an Outbound Product Manager at Google. And currently working with a lot of our open source framework and teams, which include Flutter, and then also Go and Genkit.

David DeRemer: Amazing. What an awesome set of technologies to work on. Definitely going to dig into that heavily get us going. ⁓ I like to start with something that's actually not work related.

⁓ what's something about you, something you do in your personal time that you think actually makes you better at your day job. Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, great question. So try to keep my life pretty well rounded in terms of my interests. One my favorite things to do is I'm a musician.

⁓ I play I play keyboards. I try to sing horribly, but I still do it. And that's one of my favorite things to do. And I've also just recently as well.

not recently, been a while now. It's been like five years or six years. I've been getting into Latin dance. My wife's family's from Ecuador.

Latin dance was a really big part of her life. ⁓ And made it pretty clear that if we were to be together, that I needed to learn how to dance. So I've been doing a lot of salsa and So those are, I would say like the two things that I like doing the most, like lots of music, lots of dancing. David DeRemer: That's awesome.

Were you an easy convert to the dancing or did it take a little convincing? Abdallah Shaban: It really helps being a musician, I think. Like, you know your times. Like for me, it's just like, okay, how do I slot into the rhythm?

So it really, really helped. I definitely like, I'm working on my vocabulary now, like, like just like having enough moves and like being able to not think about it as much because that's when my analytical brain comes in and I'm like, okay, I need to make sure I'm doing it in this sequence and stuff. And like, I just need to do it frequently enough for me to like not have to think. David DeRemer: So like music and dance, there's definitely like a, there's like a code to it, right?

Cause there's sheet music and there's like technical aspects, but then there's all the improv that comes with it. Do you, does that come to play in your, in your work? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, ⁓ absolutely. I'm much, would say somebody that likes to build a lot of frameworks for how I work.

I like make sure that if I'm doing things and I'm doing them often, that there's a repeatable way for me to be able to do them. So that's where ⁓ it's kind like your sheet music, like having your sheet music and making sure that you're following the recipe for how to play the song right or how to dance to the song right. But then There's also feel, like you also need to feel the music, you need to feel the dance. And that's where I'm very adaptable as well.

Like, yes, I care about frameworks, I care about processes, but it's also very important to be adaptable, especially in this crazy world that we live in right now, where every other day there's a announcement about a new tool or a new AI thing that has changed the world. So you definitely have to be very, very adaptable. David DeRemer: love that insight. That's, that's amazing.

So tell me about your role. So you're a product manager at Google, but also kind of a flavor. That's this outbound product manager role, right? So can you explain what that is exactly?

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, so I'm actually the first of my kind for frameworks and languages, which is really interesting. the Outbound Product Manager role is, feels to me that the, it's pretty unique to Google because it is actually a role that combines what a typical product manager does in terms of like talking to customers, gathering insights, helping with strategy, where should the product go? And that's where, as a part of my role, that's where I partner with our product teams and be like, hey, like, here's what I'm hearing from the community.

Here's what I'm seeing. then ultimately, the decision makers there about where to take the product. And then the second part of my role is working with a lot of our dev role and marketing teams in terms of we're going to market with a new feature. We have this new release coming up.

There's interesting moments that we want to talk about. How do we make sure ⁓ that we're doing this in a way that's like cohesive across all of the different types of content that we're putting out. And then the third part of my role is really around like truly being a part of the communities that I'm supporting and being like an outward facing ⁓ participant that community. So like being on socials, like talking, ⁓ building relationships with customers and partners like yourself.

I say those are the three pillars that make up what an Outbound Product Manager is. David DeRemer: Interesting. So would you say it's kind of like DevRel is this like you're an engineer, you understand like how to do things and you're helping, you're actually kind of communicating externally to help people understand what to do, but also getting feedback. It's kind of like the equivalent of that to the product side.

It sounds like. Abdallah Shaban: actually is a very good way of putting it. I think of myself as an advocate internally and externally for the product. And I very, very closely with both product and developer relations and our marketing team and help connect pieces or and just make that we're all using the same narrative, the same language and making sure that we all have the same message.

David DeRemer: Yeah, I love it. think, honestly, I can say since you've joined the team, I feel like it's been ⁓ really to see sort of the impact you've already had in terms of like connecting the community and kind of really making sure that it's, you know, community's pulled in the customers, the actually using it, building with it every day and and also kind of, ⁓ you know, getting feedback and engaging them and just helping build the overall story. How did you get this? Let's walk through your career journey.

What brought you all the way to Google? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah. Well, let's see. Let's start from the beginning.

So my family is originally from Palestine, but I grew up in Jordan and I was born in Jordan. Lived there for the majority of my life. But then I was also my time was split between Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. ⁓ was grew up in both those but mostly in Jordan.

And then I did my undergrad in computer science. I worked in telecom when I was in Jordan. And one of my proudest projects actually was I launched the first 4G network in Jordan, which was really, really cool. That was one of my babies, like all the way from like getting the hardware, communicating with people in terms of like securing the right deals and which protocols we should be using in our billing and charging systems and fantastic experience.

And then from there, I really felt that I wanted to, felt like I was, like world was really, really small and I wanted to just have like a much wider view of the world. wanted to, I was starting to get jealous of all of my friends that were leaving Jordan and living in all of these amazing places, telling me all these crazy stories. I was like, okay, I think I want to leave Jordan and go somewhere else. And I actually I was going to go somewhere in Europe because they pay for your school.

But ⁓ ended up happening me was that my ⁓ mother had actually moved to and got and moved there and she was like, you have to come to California. This is the place that you need to be. You want to work in tech. Like California is tech.

Like you have to come here and I'll help We'll figure it out together. So that really is what made me go to, to California and ⁓ believe it or not, you're, you're not going to believe it, but literally the words that she used to convince me was you love Google so much. The best chance for you to work at Google is for you to be at California. And this was eight years ago.

So I went I was living in San Diego at the time. I did my MBA there. And I was doing my MBA, I got an internship at Petco, the animal supplies company, expecting to go in for three months, do my internship and leave, ended up finding a lot of really interesting problems to solve that I was able to solve pretty quickly. And A VP reached out to me and was like, Hey, you seem like you really want to do a lot of great work here and you've been doing a lot of great work here.

What do you want to do? And I was like, well, I came to California because I wanted to be a product manager. she was like, okay, you're officially our first product manager. Like she literally like ⁓ key knighted me there.

And I was like, okay, but we don't have product managers here. She's like, okay. Yeah. We've been thinking about creating that function.

You'll be our first one. So I was the first product manager at Petco as an intern, which is really interesting. David DeRemer: It's awesome. pressure there to figure that out.

Abdallah Shaban: And they built up like a whole network of product managers and I was a part of that organization for a while and I really got a chance to grow there. I was there for about four years and I became the product manager that owned a lot of our supply chain tech, our last mile delivery tech, in-store operations, call center operations. So really ops heavy role, which from my way of operating as somebody that likes process and frameworks was like a great fit. So I was able to really do a lot of great work there.

Loved it, but I really wanted to work in tech. So Amazon reached out and they were like, hey, you're a technical product manager that has Flutter on your resume. We'd love to have a conversation with you because we have this Flutter SDK that we're starting up and sounds like you would be great as our first product manager there. So I went and basically interviewed and got in and I was working at AWS Amplify for a couple of years and I was a product manager there owning the AWS Amplify Flutter SDK.

then I also ended up owning the JavaScript/TypeScript SDK our authentications features, and then and analytics as Those were my primary roles. But the moment that I joined, the primary thing that I was looking at was the Flutter SDK. And I noticed that the Flutter SDKs were written as wrappers on top of our iOS and Android implementation. And as somebody that had...

been watching Flutter since 2017, since the alpha days, since the moment that Flutter had gone out, I had been a part of the community. I've been watching Flutter grow. always watching every single keynote when Tim Sneath would talk about all of the new things that Flutter is doing, when Eric Seydel would have all of his deep dives. So was very much in the community.

And when I joined the team, I was immediately like, no, no, no, we're going to make these Dart SDKs. Absolutely not. We need to get web support. We need to get desktop support.

Luckily, there was already a lot of those conversations happening internally. So I was able to sort of like jump on and be able to like really help drive that work. And I'm really proud of the fact that we were able to actually get those SDKs out. we were the first major cloud provider that provided like SDKs that were fully Dart native, which I think was a great thing for the community.

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, we work together. David DeRemer: It was amazing.

Thank you. Abdallah Shaban: a lot like during that time to like just like talk about it, to like make sure that like in the community understand that this is something that's available. So that's really was kind of like my first entry into developer tooling, like professionally speaking. And while I was there, I was seeing the success that we were getting with our full Dart story.

And I really wanted to grow that. really wanted to, a lot of what I was starting to hear from developers is I wish I can build every part of my stack with Dart. I love Dart's tooling. I love the type safety.

I love the null safety. I love everything about the IDE tooling that exists. wish I could use it everywhere in my stack. So I started pitching internally Amazon.

It's like, Hey, we could do this, blah, blah, blah. And there just was not a strong appetite for it. So decided to leave and I, I me and one of engineers that on the Flutter SDK team, AWS Amplify, we started a company called Celest and we got into Y Combinator, was probably one of the most pivotal moments of my life, the amount of things that I've learned in the, you know, three months, four months that I was a part of Celest was just unbelievable. just, it was a lot of de-programming actually, startups.

I thought were a more complicated than what they ended up actually being. When you actually learn from people that have seen thousands of startups go through their pipeline, they teach you a lot Y Combinator about how to. Like I would go in and I'm like, I would have this complicated proposal about how we can get partners to work on Celest with us, blah, blah, blah. And my YC partner, Dalton Caldwell, he basically told me, it took you five minutes to explain to me what it is that you want to do here.

So by default, what you're doing is incorrect at the stage that your company is at. This is no, you need to be scrappier. You need to be faster. You need to be.

So it really like helped reshape the way that I think about building products, which was really cool. I decided to step away from Celest and then I was working in fintechs with specifically in fraud and compliance for fintechs and banks did that for about nine months. And right before I should join that company, Google had reached out and they were like, Hey, my friend submitted a referral for me. And he was like, Hey, like there's this organization that's interested in hiring you.

So I went through the interview process, but I wasn't super excited about that role. So I decided to not take it. But then I joined this other company, worked there for about nine months and then Google reached out again and they're like, Hey, you weren't interested in this other role, but there's this role. it's a newish role.

It's Flutter, Firebase. was like, say no more. I don't know what it is. I'm in like, figure it out.

Like, let's just get me in there. And, and that's, that's how I made it there. So it was like very much, I would say a coincidence that I happened to land in the Flutter team because I had. been in their system and they were looking for folks and I just happened to exactly match what they were looking for.

I'm very, very grateful, very grateful. David DeRemer: What an incredible story. mean, there's so much to unpack in there from your early days all the way through and the building of that all the way from building 4G networks, getting frameworks, getting really operations oriented operations roles into frameworks on the other side. And ⁓ think that's really awesome.

And I will say it again, thank you for all the effort you and the team at AWS put in, because I think that really helped validate like when AWS is doing that kind of work, committing to dark, committing to supporting Flutter at the time, I think that was really important and strong signal and it's awesome to see you also get personally the results by the opportunity to go through by Combinator the opportunity to work at Google. So thanks for everything that you've done and what an amazing story.

I wanted to ask you about product manager the role of that. You you were you said you wanted to do it. You knew what it was or had an idea what it was at Petco right was Petco. Abdallah Shaban: Yes, it was.

I knew about it even before, honestly. going to think I'm just saying this because I'm on this podcast, but like the that made me realize I wanted to be a product manager was Tim Sneath. Watching Tim the energy, the passion he had for Flutter, the way he would engage in the community, the way he would communicate his vision about where Flutter needs to be, like this like of joy, the fact that he was able to be a big part of building the community that Flutter was. I looked at him doing that and I was like, I want to be that.

Like that is, I want to be that. So, so it's, it's very insane to actually be on the team that inspired me to go on this career path. It's, it's very, it's insane. David DeRemer: That's fantastic.

Well, you're in the right spot. when you think about product manager, now you at Google, they've kind of created this outbound. You've got, mentioned sort of a technical product manager. for people that maybe aren't in tech or, or, you know, they kind of encountered a product manager, but they're not maybe working with them all the time.

How do you define the role of product manager? And in particular, those, ⁓ the flavors, like sort of just ⁓ normal manager, technical product manager, maybe outbound. Abdallah Shaban: I don't even think there's a really good answer there, to be honest. I think, and reason why I say that is because I definitely think that the product manager role is very malleable.

And it a role that actually needs to adapt to the needs of the situation and the product that you're on. And ⁓ I say very confidently because I've worked across a lot of different industries and my role was very different even though I had the title of product manager. but I would say typically, its, let's like base foundations of what a product manager does is you're really advocating on behalf of your customers. ⁓ That's at the core heart of it.

I mean, you were a product manager before and you know how important that is. So it is having a close understanding and empathy to your customers. What do your customers actually want? What are some of the missing gaps in your product that's making customers feel that they're unable to use it in the way that they need to?

What are ergonomical things that you can do to help make your product more successful? That's, I would say, like fundamental pieces. But then around that, it's how can I build an ecosystem for my product to be able to thrive? How can I partner with other cross-functional teams to make sure that my product is successful?

So ⁓ a of it is, I would say, a big, big of it is actually a lot of soft skills. It's a lot of Empathy, it's a lot of listening. It's a lot of being able to like really digest a humongous amount of information that you're getting, whether it is from product feedback, from customer feedback, from support requests, and being able to like distill all of that into where are we going? is the thing that we need to build next?

What is the roadmap? What is the vision? Like, what are we, where are we trying to go? I would say like at its core foundations, That is what a product manager does, regardless of whether you're an outbound PM, whether you're like internal, like ⁓ service PM, or whether you're like a technical PM, that's at the heart of it, what you do as a product manager.

David DeRemer: Love that. That's great. someone was kind of up and coming and they interested in getting into this career, what advice would you have for them? What are the things or skills they should develop or how do develop those skills?

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, I've, work with so many people on a weekly basis that reach out and have exactly that question. and one of the best things that I have seen ⁓ is have to find ways in which you can practice those skills in your existing role. That has been the thing that I have seen be the most successful for people that were trying to break into product management. because one of the things that there's a saying that like, I'm not sure you've heard this before.

One of the most difficult things about product management is breaking into product management. And I definitely think it's like a, it's, it's, it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. It's like, need to have a product experience to be a product manager, but then how do you get the experience? So of the things that I tell people all the time is there must be in your current role, a problem that exists that you can truly take on and own full stack end to end.

from defining what the problem is, from advocating for this problem to be solved, from finding how to staff it and resource it, to shipping it, and then actually demonstrating how was this able to deliver a value for you. Find ways in which you can do that in your own role. And no matter what your role is, there most definitely is a problem that is maybe something that you can then take on and then be able to truly be the product manager for that problem. Very cool.

David DeRemer: I love that. That's a good way to think about it. It is full stack, product manager role. It's, you know, problem definition.

And I like how you said, even making sure you're, you're advocating for the problem, you know, cause part of it is getting everyone else to agree that it's a problem to solve. Abdallah Shaban: 100%. I think that's one of the biggest things is as a product manager, you're really doing a lot of selling all the time, all the time. And I noticed that because it really helped me in my startup, actually.

Because I had that muscle. I was constantly pitching my products, my ideas everywhere that I was. having, at the heart of it, a big part of it is you do really need to know how to sell. yeah, so advocating for the problem, 100%.

It's so, so important. Even if you do great work, if you don't have the right people bought in, your work is going to be really hard for it to actually matter for the right people. If it's going to be good for your career, that's going to be good for your product area. It's very, very difficult.

David DeRemer: That's amazing. So now you're at Google and you're working with Flutter and Go and Genkit in the where, know, the model you were following Tim Sneath helped put Flutter on the map and you've been working Flutter for a long time. Now that you're here, what's the big job? You're telling the story of Flutter and you're engaging with the customers of Flutter, right?

Not necessarily... Developers as much as DevRel, but more the customers and the companies working with Flutter. Is that right? Abdallah Shaban: Absolutely.

mean, Flutter's DevRel team is legendary. mean, they're celebrities in my eyes, right? Working with them every day is just like, my god, this is crazy. But yes, absolutely right.

Like, working with individual, like communicating to individual and building up that community that level, I 100 % completely lean on the DevRel team there. I definitely help in terms narratives and like, Helping with some of the admin, of like coordination stuff. But terms of like that's not primary job to be done. My primary job be done is really focusing on our customers, focusing on an enterprise story, focusing on our customers when they scale.

What are things that we can do in order for us be able to really demonstrate how our customers have been able to scale with Flutter and then be able to share these best practices, be able to provide these guides, be able to even elevate up guides that folks like you at VGV or for example, Leancode or Insomnio, like all of these great companies that are been like pillars really in the ecosystem have been, you've been sharing a lot of best practices. So how can we find ways in which we can get the community's hands on them as well?

Eric Seidel has said this to me, he's like, you have a big mic, you better be using that mic. So I'm really that to heart. Like I'm finding ways in which we can. like really use our big social presence, all of the channels that Google gives us in order for us to be able to like really tell that story of Flutter at scale.

David DeRemer: Yeah. so needed ⁓ your role. I'm so happy that Google identified this and made the opportunity for you to come in and help in this area. Cause I think it is really critical to flutters next phase.

When you think about telling that story, the flutter at scale story, the enterprise story, what do think the current story is for flutter? Like where are we in life cycle? And what is the story that you find yourself telling people the most these days about flutter? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, so I joined I already had worked with a lot of enterprise customers, even my time at Amplify, even when I had my startup.

I knew is being used by enterprise customers. That was, to undeniable, because that was my job, talking to all of these customers. I think there's definitely this fud that in the Flutter ecosystem about, well, is Google actually investing? I want to just completely shift this conversation because it's just not productive.

It's not reality, clearly. mean, is actually set up in such a good way for us to be able to really be at the forefront of this next generation of app builders and what these AI-powered experiences going to in the future. Flutter is really at the heart and core of it. So I really would just want focus now the conversation on all the great wins of all of these customers that I'm establishing these relationships with.

to really provide that as like really clear validation that don't have to convince you, I just have to show you the evidence. So really like, that's I I feel like a big part of where the community is right now is just like needing to have that reassurance and ⁓ we're doing best job that like we possibly can to just make sure that we're giving them all the evidence possible that Flutter is growing, our numbers show it, our adoption numbers it. it's... We just need to be louder about telling that story.

David DeRemer: Yeah, and get more people involved, you're doing to tell their stories, because it's one thing for Google to say it or coming VGV to say it's totally other thing when enterprise are out there participating and talking about it. Why do you think when you look your own experience all the way from when you first found Flutter and we're working at AWS through to Google now, what do think it is about Flutter that's made it successful in the enterprise environment specifically?

And why do you think maybe those successes haven't been as visible maybe as they could be? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, so I think definitely the biggest thing that has made Flutter in an ⁓ enterprise is that you look at it on paper, the cost savings are ridiculous. Like the amount of cost savings that I hear from our enterprise customers telling us about how fast they're able to ship their products, how much they're able to just like not have to think about platform dependencies. ⁓ The fact that they're able to really make their teams more cohesive and turn their engineers from platform engineers into product engineers, like how powerful that is for them.

Like that in an enterprise setting is so powerful, like so, so, powerful. Like if I'm a decision maker, the first thing that I'm thinking of is how can I run my business unit in the most efficient way possible? How can I have the least amount of people to get the biggest amount of value? How can I have the least amount of dependencies in terms of my tech stack?

And that's where Flutter really, really, really shines. not only are you like getting like, I'm building my, ⁓ using same code base I'm able to deploy to iOS, Android, web and desktop. But on top of that, the tooling is delightful to use. Like hot reload is, was revolutionary, Like in the space of mobile development.

And then Dart a phenomenal language to use. And it's actually a really easy language to upscale people on. So a lot of the enterprise customers that I talk to, a big question that I ask them is, did you have to rehire your teams? And they're like, no, we just gave them two weeks to go build POCs.

And after that, they're like, yep, we get it. Yes, at scale, they start running into problems. I mean, they need to get deeper expertise, but in order for them to start adopting the technology and actually start building with it, it's very easy, very approachable. David DeRemer: Yeah, I totally agree.

That's definitely been our experience and tracks very, very well. know, I Flutter has ⁓ now the things that people want, what companies are looking for that they're spending money on or that are investing in is two things ⁓ this current market. ⁓ cost savings and efficiencies. The is AI.

And I think actually Flutter does both of those things because there's the whole point of it is efficiency. And I think sometimes we're a little to talk about. You know, the cost efficiency of flutter, because it's, it sort of implies like a buy one, get one free or like maybe, maybe it means like, ⁓ I'm going to reduce my engineering head count or something. But in our experience, that's not ever really what happens.

what happens is that you actually just like with the resources you have, you're doing twice as much or more. and other thing is that with AI. It's moving so fast. It's like changing so quickly.

The things you can do with it are changing so quickly that you need to be extremely flexible and adaptable and with your ability to like get your experiences out the door. And don't want the technology or the platform or how you've implemented it to be the thing that is the bottleneck. And so Flutter is super good at that. So I it's like, like you were before, like right in the sweet spot of what the like AI empowered future could be.

Abdallah Shaban: 100 % because it's like you need speed, but Dart's language, as a language and Flutter's tooling as well, there's so many guardrails that help protect you as you're moving fast. That's what's really, really great. Like to of give you an example, like one of the things that we've been doing a lot is really trying to completely vibe code using, you know, Antigravity or Gemini CLI doing that. just with Flutter and with building also some Dart apps as well.

And the that get your agents can get access to the language server and you can analyze and check the format your code and do all of that with the tooling that Dart has, and the fact that you have the extremely sound type system, all of these things together provide you with a really good guardrails when you're building with agents. makes it so much easier for you to be able to validate that your code actually is going to run the way that you expect it to. The edge cases of your code not running the way that you expect it to, it's like you just have significantly better tooling.

So that's something that we've been really noticing is Flutter is so well positioned for to be able to really in age of you need to be able to move faster to really give you the right guardrails to help you keep moving faster and in the safest way possible. David DeRemer: Yeah, in an environment now where we have a lot of choice, which is really cool, right? Like when you think about native, mean, native is like long as you can coordinate things and you have the resources, it's like you can still make you make amazing things with native.

You got react native, you got flutter. The cool thing about today is you actually have a lot of choices for what you want to pick in order to make these things. I would say, you know, 10 years ago, ⁓ You kinda... if you wanted to make anything really good, seriously, you kind of had to do native.

Like, you know, the other options weren't really good enough with their phone gap and stuff back in the day. Um, but now it was. Yeah. Right.

And I mean, at the time, like you could still do, it was cool. The speed and the accessibility, but it didn't really have the performance. But now I think the average user, if you're using a native app or react native app or Flutter app, the average consumer is probably not able to tell the difference. know?

Yep. Um, Abdallah Shaban: Phone Gap and Cordova user David DeRemer: the developers might, you know, and the people who are paying close attention and people who have, you know, sort of turf wars around these things or, or, get sort of wholly about, ⁓ you know, a technology or something. But when you think about that in your role and you, know, one of the things I assume you guys have to look at is like, what is our competitive set to, right? Like who else are we up against and what are the advantages we have over something or other?

How do you, how do you see the current ecosystem of like different tools that are out there and flutters like unique positioning, or, sort of uniqueness relative to some of the other options? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah. would say that the biggest, the biggest value that you get from using Flutter ⁓ you have a fully integrated stack all the way from how, how actual UI is being rendered on the canvas all the way down to all the language tooling. It all is one completely unified stack that is completely and supported by Google through all of our tooling as well.

So like that, that is a huge benefit. So that means If you're going and you're building an app, a lot of what you need in order for you to be able to build your application is already a part of the framework. So that's a huge, huge benefit. The fact that we provide you with a design library out of the box as well that enables you to be able to iterate very, very quickly makes breaking into Flutter significantly more approachable.

That's also a huge competitive advantage. I say also that the thing that I consistently hear is in comparison to all of the other tooling out there, if you are in the business of wanting to have truly custom designs that completely match what your brand's designs are, then Flutter really is best in class when it comes to giving you that experience. I think that is the angle that we're really leaning If that your desired outcome, then Flutter is the best choice out there right now.

That's how I think about it. David DeRemer: like that a lot. mean, one my phrases over the years, a little bit tongue in cheek has been like the problem with react native is the native part, right? Because, you know, one of the things people point to as a benefit is like, well, when there's a new version of iOS or Android, I can automatically get the new, you know, widgets, the new, ⁓ the UI elements, because it's native UI.

But there's a cost to that because now if I'm using that and I'm, I have a of customers and there's somebody who's on a super old version of iOS or Android. Now when I ship an update and it's using the native components, I gotta go back and I gotta check that and be like, how does that look? You know, does it still work? Does the UI still hold up with flutter?

The cool thing is since the rendering engine shipping with the app, it's going to work and be beautiful and consistent in how you want it as a brand on all of those variants of the operating systems. It's not going to change based on the current UI that was, you know, in the, in the OS, on whatever version you're running. And I think when you're building that custom thing, that is massive in terms of control of your brand, but also just in terms of effort to test and validate that your experience is consistent across all those different variations.

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, in my time at AWS Amplify, I also was supporting React Native customers because I owned the JavaScript and TypeScript SDK. I completely agree with you. That was consistently something that we had to figure out how do we handle for our customers because we also had this notion of these components that give you that implement specific opinionated feature sets, like for example, authentication.

or a data table. And it's sort of like a and drop, ⁓ like a, yeah, exactly, like a drag and drop solution that you can drop into your application. And then now you have like an authentication screen fully in. And for React Native, there were a lot of really difficult conversations about, how do we do this?

Do we do this in such a way where we just rely on the native underlying components and then have it just like render natively? Or do we... opt of that and then maybe use React Native Skia or do we do something else? There were a lot of conversations and decisions that we needed to make there that really slowed us down.

What I liked about Flutter is absolutely, you don't to think about that. David DeRemer: Yeah, and I do think Flutter for the AI world is an incredible tool because it runs on so many platforms. It's truly multi-platform, which a lot of the other tools and solutions are not. If you get down the Swift, at least right now, the Swift, you're kind of locked into iOS or Apple sort of devices for the most part.

And there's a lot of different ways you can build things. And I think sometimes in the AI world, are like, well, AI will write the code. The cost of writing code will be super cheap. maybe we'll just write all this code for all these different platforms, right?

And it's like, well, yeah, but AI is non-deterministic. So somebody needs to babysit that and check everything and make sure it works. Do you still, do do you need, do you want that many babysitters across every platform? What if you just had one plot, like one code base, AI is helping you write and you check it and it works everywhere.

That still seems like the better choice, even if AI can write all the different platforms pretty easily, you know, not to mention environmental costs and costs to run all those LLM. So. Abdallah Shaban: you look at the space right now, Swift just recently announced ⁓ a for Android, believe. Then you have ⁓ Kotlin I think there for a really long time, being in this space, was this notion of, no, native devs will never use anything cross-platform.

The tooling that we have is because we want to get the best level of fidelity for the platforms that we support. ⁓ cross-platform is this other thing that like, ⁓ that's just not as pure and as good as using native. But then I look at all of these tools and I'm like, all of these tools are starting move ⁓ cross-platform. Like ⁓ this notion of building the same exact thing multiple times for each platform is just not efficient.

It's just not efficient. Absolutely. If are there instances where you might need to actually do completely native things? David DeRemer: doesn't make any sense.

Abdallah Shaban: Perhaps, yes, there might be certain situations where that's absolutely something that you need. We cannot dismiss that. But in reality, the majority of apps could be built using cross-platform frameworks, and you would get excellent experiences with that. David DeRemer: I agree.

And you know what, at the end of the day, we are very fortunate to be in this ⁓ modern time we have so much choice, so many great tools, so many new coming out. ⁓ Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, I agree. that's one of the things that I've actually been trying to make sure that I say it out more loudly in the community. So one of the things that I make sure I made sure to reread this.

So Philip and Emily, original OG DevRel team for Flutter. When they left, one of the things that they did was they created a blog post that was about what would we want? to remain as part of the spirit of the Flutter team. And one of the things that they talk about is we shouldn't be shoving Flutter down people's throats.

Like there are certain situations where Flutter is not the right choice and that's okay. we should really focus on where it is that we actually are able to solve a problem. Where is it that we actually make sense for customers and developers and focus on that. And as a community, we should be open to the idea that there are choices out there and choice is good.

because choice breeds innovation. Choice also brings inspiration. Like one of the things that we have done internally is like our iOS and Android engineering lead basically has set up an Android and Kotlin multi-platform and a Compose multi-platform training for the Flutter team so that they get the chance to experience what it's like to be a Compose developer, a Kotlin multi-platform developer, an Android developer. That's great.

Like now we have so much that inspired us from there to be able to be like, okay, these are interesting ideas. These are interesting things that we can add the Flutter frameworks. I everybody wins when there's more choice. David DeRemer: I totally totally agree.

Where do think this all goes? What's what's the what's the next five years look like you think? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, mean, so Seth Ladd and I have been talking a lot about this, about where should Flutter go next. And I've really, really, really excited about GenUI.

I'm really excited about what that means for the future of Flutter. I really think that Flutter is so well positioned to truly be the experience that powers any sort of ephemeral or generative UI experience or any dynamic UI experience in the future. on any surface. really, really excited about that future.

And really think we're building the right foundational steps to get there. ⁓ And have a lot of internal support to really be able to realize that future. And it seems like headwinds are really moving in the right direction for us. So that piece really, excited about.

David DeRemer: That's excellent. It's been very cool to see that and the Genui thing. I think we're just in the early days of what that is even means. Sorry, go ahead.

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ yeah, and one of the things that was really interesting to me is, so ⁓ did a study about how would people use generative UI. And one the things that we were concerned about is how is this going to come across with the community? Are folks going to feel like, ⁓ this is going to replace my job because I actually don't need to build the UI that GenUI is generating.

And all of the... All of the evidence that we're seeing is actually no, it just shifts a lot of the thinking that you have to do a lot earlier in the process of when you're actually wiring up and creating your GenUI experiences. now you actually need to think a lot more about what are all of the ways that somebody is going to be engaging with an agent that is then serving all of the generative UI experiences and really thinking deeply about all of the possible user journeys and then making sure that you have the right components that are all bright.

brand compliant that can then potentially serve all of the different ways in which these experiences could be presented for your users. it very, very interesting. It's actually a lot more thought process. It just disrupts the order of this process.

So I thought that was very fascinating. I actually did not think of it that way. So ⁓ I don't think generative UI is going to be a thing that replaces engineers. I actually think it's just going to disrupt the way that we work and just have us think of different ways in which generative UI experiences change our workflows.

And one of the really interesting things is that it actually was a source of inspiration for people that were using it. ⁓ like, I didn't realize that when you asked the AI this question, it ⁓ wants generate this type of UI. ⁓ if I give it this additional component, it's going to make the way that it generated this specific screen. significantly more So I'm going to go back and update my prompts, update my catalog.

So yeah, very, very interesting. David DeRemer: Yeah, Yeah, it's an exciting new moment and I think this is the kind of stuff that kind of gets us back excited as people who are building these user interface type products where, you know, it changes the story of like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but just how we actually do it and execute is a little different, you know? And I think that actually creates a lot of opportunity for us to think about the what and the why something exists and it work for someone and kind of like let the LLM help with the various ⁓ edge cases use cases and all the different things that you can do.

One idea that someone said that I really liked was like, you know, when you build a product, a lot of times it'll be like an A-B test or something like that. And you tend to pick the things that the majority of people prefer. But if you run an A-B test and it's like, let's say 80 % of people prefer A and 20 % prefer B, well, you pick A, but that means 20 % of people picked B, you know? And you're not giving them what they want.

And I think GenUI will give us more opportunity to serve so many more people and so many more unique needs, which is really, really exciting. Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree. David DeRemer: I want to change a tactics or direction little bit.

You're being that your is on a product team as a product manager. When you think about how to bring together designers, engineers ⁓ on the Flutter team, the dev rel people and managers and leadership and stuff, what are some sort of things you've seen that are the hallmarks of like really high performing technology product teams? Like what are some of the rituals or ⁓ or philosophies or ways of interacting that people have that seen be really correlated with success. Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, really think it starts with hiring.

You really need to hire people that... that really thrive in collaborative environments. would say that's like number one, like that's the most important thing. And the Flutter team is a honestly fantastic example of that.

Like I joined, I this really vague role that's very new. I am successful if people pull me in and I start setting up meetings with people and I have my first leads meeting and they're like, you're here to help? Here's a hundred things we'd like you to do for us. And that was fantastic.

Just to like immediately be like, no, let's pull you in closer. Let's work together. There's a lot of things we want to do. There's a lot of things that you can help us with.

So like starting off with that, like, like having like that sense of collaboration, I would say that's one. what I have seen like throughout my career as well, what's like really sign of like performing teams is repeatable rhythms, like having a rhythm of an operational mode in which the runs. Like for, for. ⁓ Like for people that want to concentrate on building, not having to think about process because you live it day by day and it just happens around you and you're just a part of it is actually very energizing.

And it's very counterintuitive to what I've worked a lot of engineering teams that were very, very hesitant to have process in place. And I'm like, I promise you the moment we put it in place, you don't have to think about it. I'll run, I'll run it around you so that it works for you. And I think really good high performing engineering teams have that.

Like they have a rhythm that is very, very, very predictable. And they have a way in which you get inputs, something happens in the middle, and then there's good output that happens at the end. would say that's like number two. And then the third thing is you have people that are able to like have the right channels to escalate when things are not going well.

And having the safety for people to feel that they can voice that, hey, like these are... things that are not working well, here's examples of them and have it be without blame. But like, what can we do to fix these problems and have like this continuous improvement mindset? are the three things I would say that to me have been like in places where I found a lot of success.

I've often noticed that those three things exist. David DeRemer: That's amazing. Love that advice. Everybody take notes on that stuff.

Yeah. What's one lesson from your career you think will still hold true 10 years from now? So much change, all this AI stuff. What do you think is something you've learned that feels pretty evergreen?

Abdallah Shaban: Oof, man, so much. I've been pretty lucky about having people come through my way that have given me a lot of good nuggets. One of them is, I'd like the biggest one, honestly, is don't burn bridges. Like you never know.

You never know when this person that you're working with is gonna somebody ends up being a decision maker somewhere that you're gonna need to collaborate with. Never burn bridges. Try best never to do that. That's like number one, top of my list.

second one, which is very relatable is be dependable. Really be dependable. Like when you say you want to do something, do it. If you can't do it, say you can't do it.

And that's okay. It's really important to be dependable because if people cannot depend on you, people will stop pulling you in into important conversations. People will stop pulling you in into important decisions that need to be made. So very, important.

The third one is be very curious. ⁓ I'm very, very curious. And what I mean by that is one of the things that I do, for example, in my role as somebody that tries to really embody being a product manager and open source is I try to play with package in the ecosystem every week and give feedback to the author, whether that is documentation, whether it is ergonomics about the developer experience, just Just finding something that I've seen a lot of people talk about that I haven't used and then actually using it and really getting a feel for it, just so that I get a chance to learn something new.

And that's just one example of what I do. Another thing that I do is just I consistently play with a lot of these AI tooling that comes out. I'm actually very much in love with Antigravity right now. I'm actually building an MC that's going to help me co-host a hackathon that we're doing with the Firebase team.

And I'm making it sound like an old timey wrestling announcer. then I'm actually wanting to use GenUI so that I basically can have it pop up like the team's details and stuff. And I'm able to interact with it using Gemini Live API. But be curious and build with your own hands.

There is not a time to build than right now. It's phenomenal. So being very, very curious in building, I think is just going to take you so far because you up so many skills along the way. Yeah, I would say those are the three things that are top of mind.

David DeRemer: I it. Amazing. I feel like we could keep going for hours and hours and hours. So many good insights and stories here.

Maybe we'll wrap up with a fun question of like down the line, if one day you were to write a memoir or someone wrote an autobiography of you or something, what would its title and tagline be and why? Abdallah Shaban: Yeah. for my memoir. ⁓ David DeRemer: Could be from today or could be 10 years, 20 years down the line.

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah, a tale of random fantastic adventures. ⁓ David DeRemer: love it. why would you, why do you think that? Abdallah Shaban: Cause I'm very much somebody that loves going on adventures.

think my startup was an adventure. think leaving Jordan, coming to the U S has been an adventure. married has been an adventure. think when was at Amazon, I was traveling maybe once or twice a month.

I was able to really, really see a lot of the U S see a lot of the world. And I'm going to continue to do that in my role here at Google. I'm, I'm adventures are if don't get an adventure in once a month, once every other month. then I feel my soul starting to fade away.

So and I try to keep a very well-rounded life. I like to do a lot of creative things. I like to do a lot of like brain heavy things. So yeah, so I would say a lot of adventures.

David DeRemer: That's great. Adventure seems kind of like the key, right? Like what's, you know, ⁓ else, what are we doing here otherwise? You know, we're going around.

⁓ know, we gotta, we gotta get out there and learn some things. Be curious. That seems to be a definite theme in your career and the things that you do. And even in your work as as an outbound product manager, being curious about customer need.

So thank you so much for doing this. This was great. ⁓ You have lot of great information here. And I think a lot of people in the Flutter community are going to be.

Abdallah Shaban: Yeah. David DeRemer: Really happy to learn about you and to have you as part of this community. So thanks so much. Abdallah Shaban: Absolutely.

Thank you so much, David. And I do want to say before we end this, that thank you so much for being just such a great, like such a great pillar and part of the Flutter community. mean, I've been working with you now for what, like four years at this point, even since I was at Amplify. And I've always found you to be somebody that's extremely approachable, somebody that is willing to help at whatever capacity that you can.

And I know this from personal experience that you're willing to help people that are even considered your competitors, because you think that the bigger that we can grow this ecosystem, the bigger we can grow this pie, the better it's going to be for everybody that's a part of this. So I just want to say thank you so much for, for really embodying, like having a growth mindset. And I just really, really appreciate working with you. David DeRemer: Thanks so much for saying that.

Likewise, so thank you. appreciate that. thanks for being on. Abdallah Shaban: Absolutely.