Sustaining Fast Flow with Socio-Technical Thinking

What is the focus of your work these days?

My work tends to vary quite a bit. My job title is Consultant and normally I work with CTOs, VP of Engineering. Because I've had engineering leadership roles myself, I get involved in different aspects of the job, so sometimes it's about mapping out the landscape, mapping out business processes with techniques like event storming, getting a group of people together to map out business processes either remotely or in person. And then also looking at how teams are organized, how software is architected. The goal is improving how the organization works in general.

Would you say that would be the motivation for your talk? Or was there anything else you'd like to say about the motivation behind your talk?

Yeah. That's the motivation for my talk, really. I want to share what I see across different companies. I think the gap is quite big between companies that are working quite effectively and companies who are looking for improvements or who are a bit behind the curve. Looking at the accelerate metrics, there are some companies deploying multiple times per day, and there are some companies deploying once a month or once every two months, for example. That's a disparity I see. I try to help to promote practices that can close that gap.

And how would you describe the persona and level of the target audience of your session?

I think when I've been designing the talk, I've been thinking about a CTO or VP of Engineering, probably someone who is looking at companies who are performing well and thinking, you know, I want to get my company to that stage. That's the kind of person I'm focusing on. Those are the companies I work with the most, who've got aspirations to be high performing.

What would you like this persona to walk away with after seeing your presentation?

There are a few things I want to focus on in the talk. If I were to summarize things, I would say, not looking for the quick fix, but looking to do what's necessary to improve how quickly work flows in the organization. And also, I want to emphasize sustainability. It's easy in a lot of companies to build things quickly when you're starting with a new product on a blank canvas or a fresh code base. Over time, that tends to slow down very quickly. So I want to get across the ideas to help sustain that flow indefinitely, and it is possible from observing good companies. So there's a few different areas I want to address. I want to talk about incentives, if you want to sustain fast flow, it's important that the engineers are incentivized to create software systems that can be easily evolved over time. Every time you take a shortcut, you pay for that in the long term because the code gets harder and harder to change. I also want to focus on the architectural aspects, how to organize teams and software, how that evolves over time. I talk about concrete practices like event storming that teams can use to improve their architecture.