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Introduction
This chapter explores effective incident management strategies, introduces incident.io's guide to incident management, and showcases the launch of peer groups. It also emphasizes the significance of organizational behavior in fostering a culture of innovation by embracing safe failure and maximizing throughput.
In one of our most anticipated conversations of the year, we got the chance to sit down with three of Spotify’s eng leaders: Krisitan Lindwall, Director of Engineering, Data, Insights, Experimentation, & ML Infrastructure; Mark Grey, Senior Staff Engineer; and Pooja Dave, Director of Engineering, Music Promotion. They share insights from their experience building a culture of experimentation & innovation at a massive scale and what elements are necessary for experimentation at scale. They share the origin story of Spotify’s experimentation platform, how to develop eng leaders to think strategically & execute effectively, mistakes to avoid while scaling your experimentation capabilities, and navigating the balance between structured processes vs. unstructured time to ideate.
Kristian (@klindwall) is an engineering leader at Spotify. He has over 10 years of experience managing and coaching a broad variety of engineering and product teams. He is currently based in New York where he manages the engineering teams working on the company’s data, insights, and machine learning platforms. Prior to that, he led parts of the agile coach practice at Spotify for a few years and has been very active in supporting the growth of a strong agile and lean approach in the company. Before Spotify, Kristian spent 8 years in fintech in Stockholm where he built and grew the engineering team at the largest online broker company in Sweden.
"How we behave in the organization is really what reinforces and drives the culture and I think there's a few things driving that culture of innovation. Connecting hands to heads, meaning give people an opportunity to engage in ideation and make sure people are involved in strategy work and in the full process of figuring out where we're heading.”
- Kristian Lindwall
With over a decade of experience building and leading several R&D organizations in ad tech, marketing tech, and platforms servicing those, Pooja currently runs the organization at Spotify that helps artists engage and grow their fanbase. Prior to Spotify, she worked at Microsoft on several products including Devices, Browser Rendering Engine, and Advertising/MarTech SDKs. This diversity in experiences has given her a well-rounded exposure to engineer solutions and lead teams with strong backend architecture, client, machine learning, and data practices.
“For Spotify, failure is the paradox to success.”
- Pooja Dave
Mark is a Senior Staff Engineer at Spotify, where for a decade he has worked on a broad range of distributed systems related to experimentation, data processing, and analytics. Having operated and scaled solutions at all stages of growth, his primary focus is on technical strategy and platformization.
Prior to Spotify, Mark worked at the New York Times on personalization infrastructure such as near-realtime article recommendations.
"We want to ideally maximize the throughput on those things that we see pan out or don't pan out. So kind of a fail faster, double down model and there's all kinds of practices and tools that we put in place that Confidence is just one among many that allow us to increase that throughput. So try and derive insights from a small experiment, validate your hypothesis quickly, and then proceed and scale up from there.”
- Mark Grey
incident.io is trusted by hundreds of tech-led companies across the globe, including Etsy, monday.com, Skyscanner and more to seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish. Intuitively designed, and with powerful and flexible built-in workflow automation, companies use incident.io to supercharge incident response and up-level the entire organization.
ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.
Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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