After building Pinterest from the beginning and rebuilding Reddit's engineering team as CTO, I can safely say building startups is hard. As a founder, engineer, lead, or manager, you not only have to build a great product and secure funding, but also build a great culture. If you don't build a great team, you will fail.
We're going to look at how companies evolve from very early stage startup growth to big companies and many of the management / cultural challenges faced at various inflection points in growth. I'll introduce a model that I used at Pinterest and Reddit to break up the understanding of culture into smaller portions that we can then use to grade ourselves and fix bite sized issues.
Along the way, we'll dig deep into how to how common culture issues appear plus ways to fix them, looking at issues around trust, goal setting, communication, safety, and org structuring.
You can’t impose culture on a team, but you can induce it.
Have you ever noticed that when you work with the same group of people for a while, everyone starts to use similar phrases, metaphors, and jokes? Those are legit memes: self-replicating concepts that form the building blocks of belief systems that drive people’s behavior.
By skillfully curating the memes that are introduced and reinforced within a team, you can have an outsize influence on how team norms evolve. And this isn’t just for bosses. It’s inherently egalitarian, because anyone who can inject compelling memes can steer team culture.
But there is an art to it.
In this talk, I’ll describe a bunch of real-world examples of memes that helped shape engineering team culture during my years at Google and play an epic role at FullStory today. I’ll also discuss tactics for developing your own effective memes, how they can help with tricky topics like management and diversity, and how to make sure they’re sticky without being...schticky.
Ally skills are ways people with more power and privilege can support people with less. Building and rewarding ally skills is crucial to building an inclusive engineering culture. Without them, the responsibility for fixing bias and discrimination in your culture falls to people with the least power and influence. This talk explains why allies should take action, describes some important ally skills, and recommends several concrete ways to embed ally skills in your engineering culture.
Valerie Aurora, Software Engineer & Diversity and Inclusion Consultant
Kubernetes (kubernetes.io) project is becoming the de-facto standard for managing containerized applications. Kubernetes is a success in part because of Google's commitment to making it a community led project. Building strong teams is very challenging, all the more so for an open source community. In this talk, we will go behind the scenes to look at what what made kubernetes community operate as one. Learn how the members of the community applied practices of building organic teams and culture to an open source community, together with what is unique in open source communities and can be applied to any team and strengthen it. The future is bright.
Moderated by Karen Casella, Engineering Leader @Netflix
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) is an important topic in our industry, especially in light of changing demographics, globalization, and the competition for talent. Join industry leaders as they discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating and sustaining an inclusive culture and their experiences implementing diversity & inclusion strategies in technical organizations. We’ll explore how and why diversity is important, key challenges the panelists encountered, success stories and ideas for how each of us can help foster a more inclusive technical organization. Following the panel discussion, join us for the QCon closing reception, where we will continue the discussion about D&I, while networking with fellow conference attendees.
Karen Catlin, Advocate for Women in Tech, Former VP OF Eng, Adobe
Karen Casella, Director of Engineering @Netflix, previously leading architecture teams @eBay & @Sun
Randy Shoup, VP Engineering and Chief Architect @eBay, Previously @StitchFix @Google & @Ebay
Susan Nesbitt, Head of Business Development @ Make School
Steve Johnson, Vice President of Product Design & Creative @Netflix
W.L. Gore & Associates believes that a strong company culture is more than just a nice thing to have. They believe culture drives positive business results.
The company is well known for its distinctive culture, which has been detailed in numerous case studies and books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen, and Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux.
Gore invests significant time, energy and resources into nurturing the right environment, knowing that this foster innovation, contributes to customer engagement and yields a company culture in which highly motivated people thrive.
In the presentation, you’ll learn about the principles, beliefs and practices that were put in place by the founders and are still key to Gore’s successful growth nearly 60 later, leading to more than 2,000 patents and inclusion in the U.S. Great Place to Work list every year from its inception in 1998.
