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
Speaker
Plum Ertz
Senior Director, Engineering @Ro, Specializing in Digital Accessibility, UI Development, and Scaling Systems and Teams
Plum Ertz is an engineering leader, baker of noms, and casual economist, with a degree in one of those things. They specialize in digital accessibility, UI development, and scaling both systems and teams. They have applied those skills as employee number 8 and number 800 in the marketing, media, and fintech spaces, building everything from interactive multimedia experiences at live events to quizzes about sexy fruits. Plum is presently building accessible direct-to-patient healthcare as a Senior Director of Engineering at Ro.
