The Importance of Having a Blameless Culture

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I wanted to ask you, just to clarify, talked about having a committee and there's a moderator. But I really like how you mentioned you bring in leadership to sort of spectate or be involved in these sessions. It brings that visibility we were talking about earlier into behind the scenes problems and challenges that the engineering organization is facing. Can you clarify sort of the individuals who are actually in these different roles?

Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.

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Discussion points:

(1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability
(3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization
(4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on
(4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify
(8:32) The essence of DevOps
(10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams
(13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality
(15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems
(18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process
(19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process
(28:10) How their incident review process works
(31:55) The roles involved in an incident review
(33:40) The value of having incident reviews
(35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews
(38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals
(40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on
(43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify
(51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts
(52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue

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Mentions and links:
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
Jack’s article from his time on Shopify about their Merge Queue
Jack’s talk on Shopify’s Merge Queue at GitHub Universe 2019