Building technology that endures with Melissa Binde #47

Melissa Binde, VP Engineering, Cloud @ Splunk, shares lessons from her time building Amazon Apollo. You’ll hear the origin story of Amazon Apollo, how to define the right problem, identify the right solution, and what makes technology endure 20+ years. Plus how to improve your engineering storytelling and pitch the right product features to the right stakeholders!

"We were heavily influenced by an early project manager I worked with who called it, the 'JEDI principle' - You make just enough decisions to implement! And so anytime we hit something. We would actually stop, if we were arguing, we'd stop and go, 'Well, wait, hang on. Do we actually have to decide this now? Or can we kick this down the road?' And so that helped us avoid getting too tied up in philosophical arguments."

ABOUT MELISSA BINDE

Melissa Binde previously served as Splunk’s VP of Platform and Observability. Prior to joining the company, Melissa led Google’s GCP Site Reliability organization for almost five years, supporting GCP’s growth from 250M revenue in 2015 to almost 9B in 2019. Before that she led engineering teams at Nordstrom, helping them transition to online and cloud, a cloud startup providing business continuity as a service to SMBs, and several other startups. Ms. Binde began her career as one of Amazon’s first 1000 employees, spending almost ten years there developing tools and technologies that are still part of the company’s core AWS stack. Ms. Binde holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College.

LINKS

Check out Melissa's hand-made pens: https://motleywoods.com/
 

SHOWNOTES

• The origin story behind Amazon Apollo (2:44)
• Pitching the right features to the right audience (10:48)
• Solving the right problem vs. what you were asked & the value of owning outdated projects (12:15)
• Selling, pitching and building buy-in for new projects (16:21)
• How do you know the problem defined isn't the problem you should solve? (20:56)
• How to determine if you need a technical, process or organizational solution (27:35)
• Building enduring tools & technology (30:23)
• How to become a better storyteller (32:44)
• Other examples of determining the right type of solution (36:08)
• Lessons on project naming (38:44)
• Rapid Fire Questions (40:10)
• Takeaways (44:50)

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