Dev Interrupted Iteration Velocity is the Key to Engineering Success | Vercel’s Malte Ubl
Oct 1, 2024
Malte Ubl, the CTO of Vercel, dives into the vital role of iteration speed in enhancing team productivity. He explains how platform engineering reshapes modern software development by balancing centralized and decentralized teams. Malte shares insights on leveraging AI tools like GitHub Copilot to streamline workflows and accelerate development cycles. The discussion also highlights the importance of effective team structures and the evolving roles of individual contributors and managers in this rapidly changing landscape.
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Iteration Velocity Is The Core Metric
- Vercel optimizes for iteration velocity as the core value to reduce the cost of being wrong.
- Faster feedback loops let teams react to change and ship better products more reliably.
From Small Team Work To Google Platform
- Malte described building Google's microservices orchestration and a widely used client-side framework early in his career.
- Those efforts later fed into Google's creation of a larger central platform product area.
Stand Up A Platform Team Around 100 Engineers
- Create a dedicated platform engineering function once engineering headcount nears ~100 to avoid organizational inertia.
- Centralize platform work to professionalize tooling and keep teams productive at scale.