Connecting Your Devs' Work to the Business | A Conversation w/ Shopify, Slack & Stripe
"Is my team solving the right problem?"
To answer this seemingly simple question, we assembled a panel of some of the smartest engineering leaders we know and asked them how they answer this question with their own teams.
Featuring Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Platform Engineering at Slack, James Stanier, Dir. of Engineering at Shopify, and Smruti Patel, VP of Engineering at Apollo, the following conversation debuted in front of a live audience at the Interact engineering conference.
Originally an exclusive conversation for Interact attendees, we listened to our fans and decided to drop the full conversation as an episode of the podcast.
“Often in that absence of clarity on what you should be doing - so clear metrics, clear impact in what you're doing - then all that really remains is the celebration of shipping things, and I think that is a very dangerous culture. You chase the shipping date, you chase the deadline, you chase the deliverable rather than the proof that what you're doing is the right thing.”
Episode Highlights:
(2:33) Introductions
(6:18) Current economic climate
(9:45) "Shipping Theater"
(14:10) Project prioritization
(17:59) Metrics everyone uses
(24:03) Developer experience (DX)
(28:05) Why Rukmini loves cycle time
(32:29) Blameless incident management culture
(37:28) Getting devs closer to customer outcomes
(42:06) How our guests keep their teams happy
Or if you prefer, you can watch the entire interview on our YouTube channel, and be sure to like and subscribe when you do!
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What an all-star group of eng leaders! Please bring them back again for another panel. Would love to see how/if their opinions have changed since this interview came out. Feels like tech has changed dramatically since last year.