Speaker
Abstract
“If you build it, they will come” works great for sports fiction, but the reality is we don’t start out building for scale - we build to see if it works first. For some, the scale never comes. For one telehealth company, the scale came pretty much overnight - and we fumbled it the first time around.
In this talk, we’ll follow the story of how to prepare for high scale (and the gotchas that got us) with a scrappier approach in a seven-day timeframe, and how having more time alone didn’t guarantee us the win without strong metrics and milestones alongside removal of bias towards existing patterns. We’ll dive into the playbook for scaling the architecture while operating it in parallel – not only the services and tools, but also the larger technical strategy and mindset shifts that were required to break us out of our structural slump and help us score a major scaling goal.
Whether you are going through hypergrowth, just onboarding your first customers, or have already scaled ten times over, you will leave with a playbook for:
- Where to start when tackling scale of a complex system
- How to identify key metrics and track progress towards your throughput goal
- When to take a big risk and when to build in more iterative steps
$2,835, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends September 8th. All pass options.
QCon San Francisco 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.