What it takes to scale engineering
This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.
This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.
Changelog++ members get a bonus 7 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
- Sentry – Session Replay! Rewind and replay every step of the user’s journey before and after they encountered an issue. Eliminate the guesswork and get to the root cause of an issue, faster. Use the code
CHANGELOGand get the team plan free for three months. - Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
- Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
- Rachel Potvin – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
- Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
- Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
Show Notes:
- Rachel adores EngFlow (investor and advisor)
- Rachel’s 2016 paper on Google’s developer infrastructure
- Harvard Business Review on Psychological Safety
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Timestamps:
(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(00:55) - Sponsor: Sentry
(02:46) - Start the show!
(12:57) - Requested by name
(20:35) - How did you know or learn what to do?
(25:39) - Understanding constraints
(27:25) - 100 people is a game-changing threshold
(37:33) - Lead by caring for people
(39:56) - What's worth building now?
(47:42) - Using decision logs
(51:40) - Choosing the right tools for communication
(56:24) - This is NOT my problem
(1:04:12) - What is psychological safety?
(1:10:07) - Scaling, but maintaining code health
(1:21:29) - Wrapping up
(1:24:15) - It's been fun
(1:24:35) - Outro