Speaker
Abstract
The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business. As a staff platform engineer, I built systems my team couldn't live without; but turning the products my team loved into something everyone loves is an art not a science. Let me share the journey to a16z Speedrun so you can navigate your own path.
What You'll Learn: This session shares the real lessons from my journey from staff engineer to a16z-backed founder, focusing on what actually worked (and what spectacularly didn't):
- Platform thinking evolution: Transform toolchains into roadmaps, engineering roles into customer personas, and SLAs into investor-grade metrics that tell a compelling growth story
- Technical product strategy: Write a one-page Platform PRD that defines personas, boundaries, and "paved roads" for sustainable adoption
- Operational excellence at scale: Install trust layers (SLOs, error budgets) that enable velocity rather than gate it, plus self-service architecture that eliminates ticket queues forever
- Proving platform value: Use a mostly proven 30-60-90 rollout framework with four critical metrics—lead time, change-fail rate, time-to-first-value, and platform NPS
Actionable Takeaways: You'll leave with battle-tested templates: Platform PRD framework, persona/JTBD worksheets, SLA/SLO starter pack, paved-road deprecation policies, self-service implementation checklist, phased adoption playbook, and a board-ready metrics dashboard that translates engineering impact into business value.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2025 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.
From the same track
Monday 17 November
10:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Mobile App From Founding Engineer to CTO to CEO – At the Same Startup Trisha Ballakur Co-Founder and CEO @Pointz, Forbes 30 Under 30 2025, Previously @Techstars and @Adobe As a college sophomore, I founded Pointz, initially building its core routing engine from scratch. I architected the platform’s safety rating algorithm, integrating geospatial data structures, crowdsourced inputs, and multi-criteria decision-making to deliver context-aware routing. 11:45 Pacific DEKJ Session Startups From Staff Platform Engineer to a 16z Founder: What I Wish I'd Known Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado CTO & Cofounder of @Mocksi.ai, Staff Platform Engineer Turned Startup Founder, Turns Developer Platforms into Products, Temporal & MCP Fanatic The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business. 13:35 Ballroom A Session Startups Maximizing Success with Limited Time, Resources, and Energy: Lessons from Startup Engineering David Gudeman Co-Founder and CTO @Velocity AI Startups are the harshest environments for engineers. Limited time, resources, and energy force teams to make decisions under pressure — and those decisions can determine whether a company survives or stalls. 14:45 Ballroom BC Session AI The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn’t Enough Ben Greene 4X Founding CTO, Co-Founder and CTO @Tessi, Co-Creator of FreeFormula.Exchange, CTO-in-Residence at Techstars Boston Since the first compiler, software has been a stack of human-friendly abstractions translated into machine instructions. The engineers who understood at least some of what was going on under the hood were essential—indispensable even. But now? 15:55 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Early Stage Startups 17:05 Pacific DEKJ Session Beyond the Build: Early-Stage Mindset for the Everything Engineer Aiyesha Ma Founding CTO @Nureon, Previously Founding CEO @FluidCloth, Technical Lead @Cisco Tetration, Data Science @OpsClarity & ModCloth In an early-stage startup, the lines between roles blur, and engineering can become less about building and more about what makes the company attractive.