Elevate 2023
2023-11-07..2023-11-08
San Francisco, United States
Elevate ·
[Elevate 2019 by Plato, Elevate 2020, ELEVATE 2021, Elevate 2023, Elevate 2024]
who it's for
engineering managers, vp engineering, platform engineers, developer experience engineers, site reliability engineers, tech leads
topics
architecture dual charter; build vs buy framework; large migration strategies; 10% planning rule; you build it you run it SLOs; platform engineering operating model; developer productivity metrics (DORA SPACE); post-AI technical interviewing (open-book projects); cloud cost efficiency practices; incident detection dashboards and auto rollback; AI/ML platform construction; technical and career ladders
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| How we increase execution by 10x at Coda | Oliver Heckmann | 31m |
Cuts planning to 10% planning rule, shrinking two-week cycles to a single intense week and gaining an extra week per quarter, claims measurable improvements in… | ||
| How we do Architecture at Okta | Monica Bajaj, Mark Voelker | 33m |
Okta defines architecture as a dual charter: level up the tech stack and level up the people stack. Architects embed with teams, run an engineering tech radar… | ||
| How we chose between building vs buying software | Sushma (Sue) Nallapeta | 30m |
A practical decision framework called 7 C's (core capability, cost, complexity, competence, cohesion, competitive advantage, culture) directs whether to build… | ||
| How we try to avoid the technology migration trap at Netflix | Bruce Wang | 36m |
Seven-plus year migration from a Gen2 API/monolith and Falcor into Gen3/GraphQL forces concrete choices: create a dedicated migration team, build a proto… | ||
| How you can land Board Roles | Simi Gupta | 31m |
Boards run 8–12 people, typical terms last 3–4 years, and expect 12–15 hours/month of real work; nonprofit seats are often unpaid while corporate roles pay… | ||
| How we leverage mechanisms at Amazon? | Zak Islam | 31m |
Argues that building repeatable mechanisms beats ad hoc firefighting and good intentions, and shows exactly what was built: dashboards with P50/P90/P99… | ||
| How we do career ladders at Flatiron Health | Cat Miller | 30m |
Flatiron Health formalizes a split IC track (principal = depth, architect = breadth) after finding only two ICs at E6 and growing that pool to seven, which… | ||
| You build it, you run it. | Vlad Cretu | 29m |
Sentry describes a shift to You Build It, You Run It after an ingestion pipeline incident (Incident 27) that degraded for about 12 hours and required writing… | ||
| Scaling Developer Experience at Reddit, Airbnb and Amplitude | Ankit Jain | 32m |
Panel distinguishes developer experience as a user‑focused, holistic approach from productivity metrics and recommends concrete measures like DORA metrics and… | ||
| How we rebuilt our technical interviewing process for the post-AI world at Webflow | Sargun Kaur, Akash Jain | 31m |
Webflow replaces LeetCode puzzles with open-book assessments and project-based tasks run through Byteboard: a 110-minute, work‑style assessment that is… | ||
| How we did Platform Engineering at Datadog | Ian Nowland | 32m |
Defines platform engineering as a real product line that moved Datadog from scattered product-owned tooling to a centralized core org, uses Terraform… | ||
| 05 how we do developer productivity panel | Lila Brooks, Tanvi Shah, Rebecca Yang | 28m |
Panel explains why teams stop tracking estimation accuracy and instead quantify investment profile across deployment, tech discovery, KTLO and new features… | ||
| How I became a VP of Engineering | Tamar Bercovici | 30m |
Joins a small backend team, builds the first scalability layer: database sharding and a database service tier that justifies a new owning team; company grows… | ||
| How to evaluate team effectiveness with a data first approach | Bhavini Soneji | 32m |
Argues for measuring product, process and people with concrete KPIs and follow-through: integrates marketing, finance and ad tooling to standardize definitions… | ||
| Building Platforms to Support a Compound Startup at Rippling | Tony Dong | 28m |
Rippling builds an opinionated platform called Rippling Unity centered on a single employee graph that unifies 30+ product SKUs so 600+ engineers avoid… | ||
| Real-life Tips and no-BS Stories of Exceptional Engineering Leaders | Rukmini Reddy, Jeremy Rishel, Ian Nowland | 24m |
Companies with ~700 to ~2,000 engineers describe promotion as evidence-driven: write packets, pull 360 feedback from a review panel, and show sustained impact… | ||
| How we evolved our cloud infrastructure | Michael Galloway | 31m |
HashiCorp’s cloud platform moves from a monolithic repo that managed tens of thousands of data planes to a decomposed architecture with componentized repos for… | ||
| How we set a technical direction that lasts(and stuck to it) at Suvoda | Andrew Mcveigh | 30m |
Suvoda becomes a multi-tenant SaaS platform for complex clinical trials and commits to an ambitious North star with conservative increments that aligns tightly… | ||
| How we built a Product Engineering culture at Great Expectations | Lawrence Bruhmuller | 30m |
Describes how a startup-grade Product Engineerin culture actually gets built: reorganize into full-stack teams aligned to value streams, create an Epic lead… | ||
| How we do cloud cost efficiency at Notion | Tanner Johnson | 33m |
A small cloud infra lead identifies an August 2022 AWS spike caused by an EMR autoscaling misconfig running ~20x idle instances, fixes it and helps save… | ||
| Celebrating the Plato Community + Community Awards - Opening Keynote Elevate Day 2 | Jean-Baptiste Coger | 26m |
Plato reports more than 10,000 mentoring calls last year, launches circles with 150+ sessions, and shifts to a mentor compensation model (mentors set prices… | ||
| How we do developer productivity at Slack | Sridhar Ramakrishnan | 28m |
Quarterly anonymous developer surveys across thousands of engineers plus automated weekly metrics in Slack surface pain points like CI failure rates and deploy… | ||
| How are we transforming the org to achieve 99.99% uptime at DigiCert | Wade Choules | 30m |
DigiCert pursues a concrete target: raise uptime from ~99.5% (~3.65 hours monthly downtime) to 99.99% (under five minutes). The team adds endpoint health… | ||
| How we do customer bug management at Clari? | Shravan Sogani | 30m |
Clari centralizes customer defect intake through Technical Support so 95% of cases never reach engineering, funnels the rest into a single Jira Service Desk… | ||
| How do we build engineering resilience at Carta | Javier Lopez | 30m |
Three concrete practices drive resilience: prioritize one-on-ones to surface patterns (career goals, personal crises, tool complaints), publish plain-language… | ||
| How we elevate our management game together at Headspace | Swapna Savant | 29m |
Headspace realizes post‑merge with Ginger that managers lack time, feedback skills and prioritization, so the company runs an assessment of leadership… | ||
| How we do AI at Amplitude | Shadi Rostami | 27m |
Amplitude builds a custom columnar datastore called the Behavior Graph to answer exploratory queries in near real time, runs in-house small models plus… | ||
| What I Learned About Coaching in the Back of an Ambulance | Kent Beck | 31m |
A medical emergency that causes temporary loss of speech forces a rethink: coaching improves by ditching a bag of techniques and instead preparing, investing… | ||
| How we went from Slipping to Shipping products | Manu Gurudatha | 33m |
Pagerduty moves from chronic slips to predictable shipping by enforcing a 20% max slip rule, publishing a biweekly status reports Google Doc company-wide… | ||
| How did we build an AI/ML Platform at DoorDash from the ground up | Sudhir Tonse | 30m |
DoorDash builds an ML platform starting in 2019 by productizing ETA prediction as the hero use case, then generalizing to search, recommendations, fraud and… | ||
| How we prioritized engineering escalations at a Series B company | Balki Kodarapu | 31m |
Series B support analytics company runs into 50–70 customer-found defects that are noncritical but important, closing ~45–50 (≈70%) a month and letting backlog… | ||
| How we evaluate engineering performance at Gusto | Eddie Kim | 31m |
Gusto evaluates engineers on a four-axis performance axes: project impact, better engineering, people impact, and better organization, each rated 1–5 twice a… | ||
| How we increased developer productivity 2x | Dave Burgess | 30m |
Pinterest reports 1,600 engineers, 400M ML inferences/sec, 60M events/sec and over an exabyte of data; analytics starts with 300,000 datasets so a metadata… | ||
| How do we code review at Slack | Roojuta Lalani | 30m |
Slack enforces crisp, small pull requests with a PR template with revertability flag that includes JIRA links, before/after UI, monitoring and test checklist… | ||
| How we use AI to deliver Telehealth at Transcarent | Praful Kaul | 32m |
Telehealth flow starts with an AI chatbot (acquired product 98.6) that triages patients, generates a curated question sequence, and produces top-5–10 diagnoses… | ||
| How to thrive as an engineering leader at a Pre-IPO company | Anant Gupta | 31m |
Defines thriving as align values strengths growth and gives concrete tradeoffs: join the right stage company, lean into ambiguity, and turn exclusives into… | ||
| How we turn data teams into better engineers at Netflix | Andrea Hairston | 29m |
A small team of eight software engineers enables a 400‑person data org by building tooling and running platforms so data practitioners focus on analytics not… | ||
| How a Niche Focus Catapulted Me from Engineering Manager to $300k Solopreneur | Marian K | 35m |
A niche-focused solopreneur describes testing mentorship models, landing 300+ mentoring sessions across 20+ companies, charging $350 hourly rate and sustaining… | ||
| How we Innovate in a Regulated Environment | Jeremy Wight | 31m |
Care Message operates under HIPAA TCPA CCPA and shifting carrier rules and sends about 6–7 million messages per month with a 20‑person engineering team, using… | ||
| How We Are Building External and Internal Communities at Reddit | Chris Slowe | 31m |
Explains how Reddit turns product features into social structure: built subreddits and moderators with a wiki, rule sidebar and a first-class rules engine so… | ||
| How we Handle Tech Debt at Kiddom | Allen Cheung | 31m |
Series C edtech with ~50 engineers establishes a vocabulary called gardening and runs a two-week garden party as a deliberate stop the world sprint to buy time… | ||
| How unorthodox rituals helped us "survive" an acquisition at Slido | Marek Suppa | 31m |
Company survives a surprise Cisco acquisition by formalizing rituals: three days a month rotate organization days, low‑hanging‑FR days and hackathons; a weekly… | ||
| How did we create a culture of ownership and accountability at Adobe? | Archana Chaudhary | 30m |
Adobe runs concrete programs: 25 innovations from a 30-person team comes from Innovation Week, an internal grant awards $10,000 to nonprofit board members, and… | ||
| What I learned about teams from building the Jenkins project | Kohsuke Kawaguchi | 31m |
Built Jenkins as a plugin-driven CI system that now reaches 300,000 installations and thousands of contributors, the project uses plugins all the way down and… | ||
| How we do Platform Engineering at Viva Engage (Yammer) | Diego Quiroga | 28m |
Viva Engage (Yammer) platform team moves from reactive support to proactive self-service by tracking inbound work with ticketing dashboards, formalizing office… | ||
| How we drive Platform Innovation at Netflix? | Shweta Saraf | 28m |
Platform networking at Netflix drives innovation by tying experiments to business outcomes: one-week ideation idea THS events lead to funded 40% of ideas and… | ||
| How to build an anti-burnout tech organization | Irina Stanescu | 30m |
Claim: burnout is systemic not personal and it costs productivity, turnover and lost tribal knowledge. The concrete response is a five-step framework—commit… | ||
| How we drive Developer Productivity at Yelp | Kent Wills | 32m |
Engineered a decade of developer productivity at Yelp: moved from a monolith with millions of Python lines and 100,000 tests (running two days sequentially)… | ||
| nothing matches | ||