Summer Replay - Breaking Down Productivity Engineering with Micheal Benedict

Aug 1, 2024

In a thought-provoking discussion, Micheal Benedict, the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Airtable and former Head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest, delves into the intricacies of productivity engineering. He shares insights on the evolution of internal platforms, emphasizing the need for streamlined operations and reduced friction in large organizations. Micheal also tackles challenges related to cloud outages and emphasizes the importance of communication and clear priorities. His experiences highlight the critical nature of collaboration and the legacy of engineering excellence.

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ADVICE

Focus on Developer Enablement

Enable developers to focus on their best work by providing a fast, safe, and reliable path to production.
Abstract away infrastructure management to minimize distractions.

INSIGHT

Internal Platforms and Centralization

Internal platforms evolve as companies grow and engineers spend more time on operational tasks than product development.
Focus on centralizing common tasks like OS upgrades or Kubernetes patching, to free up engineers.

ADVICE

Starting an Engineering Productivity Group

Start with solving specific problems like inconsistent deployments.
Expand by addressing bottlenecks like slow builds or monitoring issues, not by adding new systems.

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In this Summer Replay, we revisit our 2021 conversation Micheal Benedict. At the time, he was the Head of Engineering Productivity at Pinterest, and today, he’s Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Airtable. Micheal tells us what exactly it means to lead engineering productivity and divulges more details on productivity engineering. He traces the history of productivity engineering at Pinterest and offers some distinct observations on building out internal teams. Micheal talks about what it is like in his day-to-day complexities of working in AWS. Tune in for Micheal’s take on the specific details of productivity and the cloud.

Show Highlights:

(0:00) Intro
(0:55) Panoptica sponsor read
(1:36) What is product engineering?
(2:44) The effectiveness of internal platforms
(7:46) Solving AMI problems
(10:23) Building foundations and learning woes
(13:06) Micheal’s day-to-day at Pinterest
(15:31) When engineering productivity starts to make sense
(18:58) Changes Micheal would've made at Pinterest
(20:56) Panoptica sponsor read
(21:19) Biggest mistakes at Pinterest
(23:46) Navigating outages in the cloud
(30:51) Corey’s personal experiences with Pinterest
(36:20) The legacy of code
(40:31) Where you can find more from Micheal

About Micheal Benedict:

Micheal Benedict is an engineering leader with a decade of experience in building and scaling infrastructure for consumer and enterprise companies.

He currently heads Infrastructure Engineering at Airtable. Previously, he led teams at Databricks, Pinterest, and Twitter, enhancing developer productivity, scaling infrastructure, and driving efficient use of multi-million $ cloud budgets.

Micheal holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University at Buffalo.

Links:

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/micheal
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michealb/

Original Episode:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/breaking-down-productivity-engineering-with-micheal-benedict/

Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/