NYC

Estella González Madison

@chicagoing

Revitalizing a
cross-functional product organization

Deepa Subramaniam
& Lara Hogan, Wherewithall
@iamdeepa & @lara_hogan​

Seamless collaboration requires clarity

Lack of role clarity manifests as inertia, chaos or ambivalence.

Create living product processes and documentation

Without it you risk re-inventing the wheel, duplicating efforts and unnecessary disagreement.

Set ground rules for meetings

Don’t interrupt someone while they're talking.

  • Stay curious

  • Everyone is smart and trying

  • No open phones/laptops

Etsy’s charter of mindful communication

  1. Reflect on the dynamic in the room

  2. Be aware of your medium

  3. Elevate the conversation

  4. Listen to learn

Join forces

Disjointed things happen in siloed teams.

Lead cross-org meetings. Send cross-org emails. Roll out information to everyone in tandem.

Collaborative Debugging

Jackie Luo, Square
@jackiehluo

Assumption: Each person should claim a bug,
then fix it.

If we had been debugging collaboratively, each person would have left breadcrumbs for the next person to make sure as little progress was lost as
possible.

Traps on the Path to Microservices

George Woskob, Thoughtworks

3 major traps on the path from monolith to microservices

  1. Underestimating the cost of a microservice

  2. Overcentralization

  3. Neglecting the monolith

Underestimating the cost of a microservice

• Operational costs
• Integration costs
• Developer’s costs

It's all about automation!
• Dev workstation
• Test data
• Networking

Contract tests

Overcentralization

  • Too much shared code can create too many dependencies and tie you to a particular stack

  • QA can become a blocker (organizational overcentralization)

  • Avoid too much shared code by following rules of library design, have a consensus on standards over shared implementation, no business logic

  • Integrate Ops and QA on your dev teams

Neglecting the monolith

  • The monolith will be gone soon!

  • Monolith's are a panacea

  • Always be improving your monolith!
    (test it)

  • Ensure you use Martin Fowler's strangler pattern

The Critical Career Path Conversation

John Riviello, Comcast
@JohnRiv

Myths on becoming a manager

  • It's the same job

  • It's less work

  • It's a promotion

  • Verbal contracts are binding

  • Always have an office

What John learned about managers

  • 1/10 have all the talent

  • 2/10 have some tallent

  • 82% of the time companies choose the wrong candidate

  • Talented managers contribute ~48% higher profit than avg managers

  • Always have an office

Switching tracks:
going back to being an IC

  1. Come up with the transition plan: try to align it with a reorganization.

  2. Talk to your directs reports and let them know it was you that made the decision, and highlight the benefits of working somewhere where they have that flexibility.

Ask yourself

  1. What excites you

  2. Immerse yourself in the skills of a manager

  3. Life is sharing

Feature Flags

Fear of the computer

Maggie Zhou, Slack
@zmagg

The continuous culture 

Kim van Wilgen, ANVA
@kimvanwilgen

What is a feature flag?

A technique to toggle some functionality of your application on/off, via configuration, without deploying new code.

Play key part in CI scheme where features are constantly being deployed but not necessarily "released" into production.

Helps avoid

• too many branches
• merge conflicts
• cherry-picking / reverts
• destabilizing your codebase

Martin Fowler's example

It's not really A/B testing

For true A/B testing you want to use a tool like Heap or Optimizely.

Intersectional & Inclusive Standards for Developers

Patricia Realini,
@patriciarealini

Double consciousness

W. E. B. Du Bois

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
 

Gaslighting

Tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.

Barbara Carrasco

Chicana artist. In 1999, she made a portrait of Dolores Huerta.

“There are so many icons of men, and icons of women painted by men, that I wanted (as a woman) to create an iconic image of Huerta to recognize her as an equal of César Chávez and, historically, the most important negotiator for the United Farm Workers.”

Underrepresented groups are often not given credit where credit is due.

Ringelmann effect

The tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases.

Social loafing

Phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone.

 

In a work setting, avoid this by:
• keeping teams small
• dividing work equally

1:1s

Managers should ask about people's communication styles.

 

Ask how someone recharges to help them deal with toxic situations they can't avoid.

 

Give specific feedback and objectives tied to business goals.

That's it!

Questions?

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