Level Up - Building High performing team culture

What does it mean to strive for ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE? As your engineering organization grows, you want to encourage teams and individuals to develop and improve their technical proficiency and practices. Growth puts stress on your teams' ability to deliver kick-ass code consistently. To help them improve and grow, we built the LEVEL UP model to represent everything that's expected of an excellent engineering team.

In this talk, I’ll review why we built this model, refined it and how we got teams to adopt it and the effects that it had on our department. I will also give you the tools to either use our model or fork your own specific one for your organization.

Transcript

1. @yonbergman LEVEL UP Building high performing team culture
2. @yonbergman YON BERGMAN VP of Engineering @ WeWork Technology
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4. @yonbergman t e c h n o l o g y
5. Sam Altman
 @sama If you notice something at your company below standards and don't fix it or make sure someone else does, you have set a new standard. Complaining about it does not count as fixing it.
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7. @yonbergman DEPLOYMENTS LEAD TIME FAILURE RATE TIME TO RECOVER
8. @yonbergman 46 TIMES MORE 2,555 TIMES FASTER 7 TIMES LOWER 2,604 TIMES FASTER DEPLOYMENTS LEAD TIME FAILURE RATE TIME TO RECOVER
9. @yonbergman 2.5x PRODUCTIVITY PROFITABILITY MARKET SHARE
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11. @yonbergman OWNERSHIP
12. @yonbergman Backend Ninjas Front-end Hipsters
13. @yonbergman Backend Ninjas Front-end Hipsters Test Automation Rockstars OPS Wizards
14. @yonbergman https://stripe.com/reports/developer-coefficient-2018 Developers spend 42% of their time on code maintenance
15. @yonbergman –@mipsytipsy “It's about software ownership…
 Align your incentives so that the people who break the deploy are the people who feel the pain, and the rest will more or less fall into place”
16. @yonbergman https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/
17. @yonbergman Backend Ninjas Front-end Hipsters Test Automation Rockstars OPS Wizards
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22. @yonbergman –Jeff Bezos, Amazon “If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”
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25. @yonbergman Credit: @lynnandtonic
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30. @yonbergman LEVEL UP
32. @yonbergman https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/16/squad-health-check-model/
33. @yonbergman MEASURE
 LEARN
 GROW GUIDANCE
 &
 SUPPORT
34. @yonbergman LEVEL UP - TRACKS • Design & Architecture • Writing Quality Code • Testing • Rolling out to production • Engineering Ops • Data orientation
35. @yonbergman DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE • Data Indexing • Best Practices • Design Docs & Reviews • Design Principals
36. @yonbergman WRITING QUALITY CODE • Code Reviews • Tech Debt • External Libs • Linting and Standards
37. @yonbergman TESTING • CI • Unit Tests • Integration Tests • Testing in Production
38. @yonbergman ROLLOUT TO PRODUCTION • CI/CD • Feature Flagging • Rollbacks • Canaries
39. @yonbergman ENGINEERING OPS • Blameless Postmortems • Monitoring • Logging • Incident Management
40. @yonbergman DATA ORIENTATION • Data Collection • Data Processing & ML • Dashboards • Experimentation
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42. @yonbergman website.com
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44. @yonbergman Design Code Test Deploy Operate Data “CLASSICALLY PLATFORM”
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47. @yonbergman 2.0
48. @yonbergman level-up.we.co
49. @yonbergman TECH RADAR
50. @yonbergman Polyglot Programming
51. @yonbergman POLYGLOT CHALLENGES • What tech does my group use? • What new piece of tech can I pick? • What do other groups use? • What did we stop using and why?
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56. @yonbergman PILOT — Technologies in a limited pilot. It has not been decided yet if there should be wide adoption
 ADOPT — Technologies we feel strongly that we should be adopting this, and use it where appropriate.
 HOLD — Proceed with caution, as we are looking for alternatives, but no replacement is available yet.
 RETIRE — Technologies we need to actively replace at a reasonable pace balancing with new work.
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58. @yonbergman Group A Group B Group C Go Pilot Adopt Java Adopt Javascript Adopt Adopt Adopt Ruby Hold Adopt Adop
59. @yonbergman website.com
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63. @yonbergman @yonbergman @yonbergman THANK YOU THANK YOU