Developer Productivity & Effectiveness

Doug Gaff and Emma Tang discuss high-bandwidth communication, innovation accounting, preventing developer burnout, influencing teams, and communicating priorities. They’ll help you move from frustration and survival in remote work, back to optimized productivity!

We were overwhelmed by questions from our event with Doug and Emma! This is a bonus follow up conversation to further dig into measuring productivity through “Waterlining” and Kaplan Meier estimating, hashtags in communication, remote 1:1 best practices, and Doug shows us some of the creative ways he applies Zapier integrations for his personal productivity!

Will Larson CTO @ Calm shares with us how to focus your time on what actually matters. You’ll hear about many of the common traps engineering leaders fall into and his frameworks to help you better target your time to focus on long-term, high-impact work.

Allan Leinwand, SVP of Engineering @ Slack shares his core philosophy & approach to creating developer productivity AND happiness! You’ll learn how Allan combines what developers want most + metrics & analysis of the dev pipeline to optimize productivity. Allan covers how to translate those principles to remote/hybrid work and how to tell (and what to do) if your dev teams are unhappy.

This episode covers productivity practices to scale both your time & mind with Ashton Kutcher (Actor & Investor) & Ryan Petersen (CEO @ Flexport). They share their most essential productivity tools & systems, how to filter decisions & say NO to optimize your time, leverage your company’s culture to scale your time/mind. Plus energy audits, networking hacks, powerful questions, and more!

Richard Wong (SVP of Engineering @ Coursera) shares how the dilemma of speed & quality evolves as a company scales. We cover how to balance building new features & fixing quality issues, internal & external signals to help you determine your priorities, & how to gain alignment. Plus how to avoid over-engineering!

We cover why locked-in cloud commitments are bad for eng teams & how your org can take advantage of elastic pricing models instead! Leon Kuperman (CTO @ Cast.ai) explains the dilemma of locked-in cloud spend, cost planning strategies for SaaS orgs, how to minimize egregious cloud egress cost and drive better cloud utilization through consistent analysis & debates in your eng org. Also learn why Leon is betting on container deployment as the future of software delivery & what that means for Cast.ai!

Customer narratives are a transformative tool to help you build successful products! Marco Argenti (CIO @ Goldman Sachs) explains how to develop these narratives as your team’s guiding vision and help eng orgs better understand “the business” side of software. Plus we cover best practices for investing in developer experience, Goldman Sachs’ transition to prioritize external developers, and the signs, signals and trends Marco’s used to navigate his career across tons of different emerging technology fields.

Shailesh Kumar, Sr. VP of Engineering ClickUp, joins us to share his insights on scaling eng orgs efficiently & cost-effectively. He reveals his strategies for gaining customer insights, identifying areas to invest in, navigating cloud cost efficiency, and optimizing your software & performing a software audit. Additionally, we cover approaches to balancing headcount & team efficiency, creating clarity around a problem, increasing the net output of your eng org, identifying where / when to add headcount, and making your EPD flywheel run smoothly.

Madalina Tanasie joins us to share her unique leadership journey as she transitioned from eng to operations, then back to her current technical role as CTO @ Collibra. We also cover strategies to improve engineering efficiency within your organization, factors to consider when scaling eng teams, maximizing your ROI when it comes to R&D, dispelling concerns when implementing culture changes, frameworks for scaling up, and more.

We tackle the trend toward engineering efficiency with Alamelu Radhakrishnan, Head of Engineering Operations @ Shopify. She reveals strategies to move your eng org toward greater efficiency while maintaining high levels of impact & creativity. We also share how eng leaders can identify opportunities for efficiency, giving engineering a seat at the leadership table during efficiency-focused conversations, frameworks for removing toil within your eng team, how to avoid burnout while optimizing for efficiency, and the role of decision-making in maximizing efficient eng orgs.

Abi Noda, Co-founder & CEO @ DX returns to the show to discuss his latest research on measuring & improving developer productivity, and provides a practical, developer-focused framework to give you clear, actionable insights into what to measure and where to focus in order to improve developer productivity. Abi reveals the inspiration behind his whitepaper / research, elements of their new DevEx framework, and how eng leaders can implement it into their org’s practice in order to increase developer productivity. We also cover the evolution of measuring developer experience (including output metrics, DORA & SPACE frameworks) and the benefits / shortcomings of each approach. In addition, learn not only the importance of having a dedicated DevEx team, but also how to implement these insights if your org isn’t ready to have a dedicated team yet.

We discuss rapid prototyping & how eng leaders can develop better product instincts with David Crawshaw, CTO & Co-Founder @ Tailscale! He shares his leadership journey from Google to Tailscale and how the early product development days at his startup lead to incorporating rapid prototyping principles within their eng org. We also cover strategies and recommendations for those who are new to rapid prototyping, how to work with design & product teams while quickly iterating, navigating the tension between speed & quality, and how to avoid common pitfalls while implementing the process.

Laura Tacho, CTO @ DX, joins us to discuss why changing what you measure doesn’t necessarily lead to improved productivity (and what to do about it)! How to define and measure productivity in your eng org is one of the hottest topics for eng leaders… We cover best practices for identifying what productivity looks like in your org, what motivates your team to reach those goals, how to harness behavioral psychology, and antipatterns to avoid when you focus on productivity. Plus Laura shares some of her favorite practices to identify your skill gaps, and how define what success looks like for yourself and your teams on your productivity journey.

This is Part 2 of our Top 10 Challenges series! In this episode, we’re focusing on three common team challenges that eng leaders face: how to increase velocity without losing quality, measure productivity & create meaningful metrics, and work cross-functionally with other teams. We identified these challenges based on conversations with hundreds of eng leaders from podcast episodes, ELC events, and more. For this ep, we’ve pulled insights from various eng leaders, including Richard Wong @ enrich, Fatemah Alavizadeh @ Notion, Andrew Fong @ Prodvana, Randall Koutnik @ Jellyfish, Abi Noda @ DX, Barbara Nelson @ InfluxDB, Laura Fay @ L Fay Associates, and Jeremy Henrickson @ Rippling.

Dave Rhodes, CEO @ Sauce Labs, joins the pod to discuss the value of great digital experiences & how/why quality issues affect companies’ bottom lines, and how to connect bugs to the business! Dave dissects strategies for addressing quality issues, examples connecting quality with the bottom line, best practices for quality testing strategies, and incorporating the philosophy of embracing the impossible within your eng teams. We also cover highlights of Dave’s recent report, “Every Experience Counts” exploring the relationship between broken experiences, lost consumer trust, and topline revenue. And to set the stage & magnify the stakes, the Crowdstrike & Microsoft outage coincidentally happened the day we hit record.

What does measuring productivity mean and what does it enable? While many engineers love making data-driven decisions, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-indexing to a few numbers that only tell a small part of the whole story. In this session, we’ll explore several different ways engineering teams can effectively measure productivity and some common traps to avoid. We will discuss best practices for illustrating and sharing what we measured to motivate and evaluate the internal team as well as keep upper management and stakeholders informed. Finally, our speakers will share their personal experience on productivity insights during these peculiar pandemic times.

Strong technical knowledge and high team performance are certainly key ingredients for an engineering organization to deliver the results the business needs. But there is obviously a lot more to it, especially in times of accelerated organization growth. In this session, we want to quickly talk about the importance of adaptability and experience: in a rapidly changing world, software engineers are constantly challenged with situations that require them to quickly adapt - new technologies they need to learn, new processes they need to embrace, conflicting and ever-changing requirements, different people they need to interact with, etc.

Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with a pair of pliers? While you may succeed eventually, the process is inefficient and frustrating because you’re using the wrong tool. The same holds true for developers who try to work with application performance management (APM) solutions to monitor mobile and web applications. Because these solutions are designed for DevOps and infrastructure teams to monitor backend systems and performance, they don’t provide the insights developers need into release stability, errors, and how these are impacting the customer experience. Then there are application stability management (ASM) solutions, which are built specifically for engineering organizations. ASM provides actionable insights into how stable the application is, where bugs exist, and how to improve the end user experience. Join James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag, as he explains the differences between the two solutions and outlines the benefits organizations can achieve when APM and ASM are provided to the right teams.

The state of software is driving to get software out the door more quickly, an ever-accelerating pace. We admire companies doing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, even if we aren’t there ourselves. What can you do as one person in an organization or one team in a company to make your software ready for the world more quickly? This talk is for people who are frustrated at how hard it can be to change things sometimes, and ways that they can advocate for change and show it is safer than people assume. This talk will cover these concepts: - Release vs. Deployment - Feature flags - CI/CD requirements - Ring deployment - Flags for all departments!

You started small. "2 pizza" team with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. You were a hero. People literally threw rose petals everywhere you walked. And then you were asked to scale it across the entire company. That's when everything changes. You went from hero to zero real fast. Don't be that zero. Attend this talk. Scaling DevOps means making everything easy. Self-service is the mantra. We'll tell you how to create an easy to use self-service platform. How to democratized automation so that nothing is manual. When and how to encourage people to take risks. And what guardrails help avoid the fallout of production mistakes. About our speakers. Sanjeev Sharma and Ahmed Datoo have been in the trenches and have the scars to prove it. Sanjeev is a VP at a major Fortune 500 bank and the author of "DevOps for Dummies" and "The DevOps Adoption Playbook." Ahmed is a serial entrepreneur who's helped engineering organizations scale from 5 people to thousands of people.

Today, Pinterest has hundreds of engineers working to bring Pinners the inspiration to create a life they love. Bug management is a critical part of ensuring a high quality experience for those Pinners. Every week, we identify hundreds of bugs, and it is crucial to have a scalable system for identifying, tracking, managing, and addressing them in a timely manner. In 2018, we realized our processes around bug management were no longer sufficient for our rapidly scaling product, team, and technology base. Our teams were working hard to fix bugs, but the number of issues in our bug DB was growing. At the same time, confidence in the quality of the data in the bug DB was shrinking. To address this challenge, we implemented a Bug SLA (Service Level Agreement) process, and it has significantly improved our ability to understand and raise the quality of our product. Putting this process in place at scale required a combination of project management, technology, and - most importantly - engineering cultural change. We'd like to share what we learned along the way about the benefits and limitations of this approach, how it fits into our overall strategy of building a strong technical foundation, and the next steps we're taking to further improve quality.

The top priority for any startups is to find their product-market fit through rapid iterations of their products. “Move fast, and break things” becomes the de-facto motto and reality for many. After years of hard work, your product finally attracted millions of loyal users, including many paying customers. Your users developed high expectations, and trust on your product. At the same time, technical debts and “breaking things” gradually shifts from a convenient aspect you chose to ignore, to become major concerns raised by your users, customers, and even many of your teammates. In this session, the speaker will share Coursera's journey on quality as they scaled, and how they took a head-on approach to overhaul its technology, dev process, and culture to drive quality focus with their hundreds of engineers. You will hear what worked, what did not, valuable lessons they learned. This session is for audiences who are interested in driving quality focus for their company, as well as those who are interested in sharing their own stories.

In this talk Allan will tackle the topic of balancing the desires of engineering teams to build innovative products at a fast pace while at the same time avoiding building up an unhealthy amount of technical debt. Too much innovation and engineering teams can lose focus on their customer and product-market fit while too much technical debt can crush the strongest of engineering teams with continual firefighting. Achieving the right balance is a skill that engineering leaders need to work on continuously to have healthy and productive teams. Allan will share his techniques that have helped scale teams at Cisco, Zynga, ServiceNow, and Slack.

Leadership is as operational as it is inspirational. Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Petersen discuss the nuts and bolts of managing and optimizing your scarcest resource in order to scale yourself and your team or company.

This conversation covers the cost of technical debt, and the dynamics of managing the cost of code during different stages of your company.

One of the most powerful trends in software today is building large systems out of composable microservices. Many large-scale web companies have migrated over time to this architecture – and for good reason. But, as with any powerful technique, microservices come with their own brand of tradeoffs, and it is important to be aware of them before deciding whether they are appropriate in any particular case. They are not for every scale of problem, for every stage of company, or for every team. This session takes a pragmatic approach to microservices and compares them to the alternatives at different stages of company evolution. Using examples from Google, eBay, and Stitch Fix, as well as from smaller organizations, it makes practical suggestions about whether, when, and how an organization should consider adopting a microservices architecture. Assuming microservices are the appropriate choice, it outlines an experience-based, incremental approach to making a successful re-architecture to microservices.

Broken data is costly, time-consuming, and nowadays, an all-too-common reality for even the most advanced data teams. In this talk, I’ll introduce this problem, called “data downtime” — periods of time when data is partial, erroneous, missing or otherwise inaccurate — and discuss how to eliminate it in your data ecosystem with end-to-end data observability. Drawing corollaries to application observability in software engineering, data observability is a critical component of the modern DataOps workflow and the key to ensuring data trust at scale. I’ll share why data observability matters when it comes to building a better data quality strategy and highlight tactics you can use to address it today.