Abstract
Scaling a complex technology can get messy without a clear north star or a shared technical strategy. Product strategies from different functions can each deliver impact but may lead to disconnected solutions or inadvertently introduce various forms of technical debt. Without a shared strategy, every technical design decision may be optimizing locally, not considering the bigger picture.
The primary purpose of this talk is to show the methodology, learnings, failures, and wins of setting a company-wide north star and technical strategy. When done well, a great strategy can lead to better execution, less confusion, and a higher chance of reaching the north star.
During our discussion, I'll pull on real examples from my career at Netflix. We'll deep dive into patterns such as:
- Finding the idea - How do you seek the right problem to set a strategy, what to solve now versus later, what type of northstar or strategy is needed?
- The pitch - How to convince folks to tackle a broad problem that has a lot of uncertainty.
- Tech leading a tiger team - How to curate the right team, establish scope, ownership, handle disagreements, and dissent.
- Northstars - Why writing 10 words can be super hard, why they are actually valuable, and best practices.
- Strategy bets - What they are, how to use them, pitfalls, how to reconcile conflicting bets, and deciding what goes above the line.
- Communication - How do you actually align an entire company on a strategy this broad? We'll cover techniques like growing rings of support and scaling through others.
- Feedback - Gracefully working through feedback, including conflicting feedback, dissent, gaps, and vocal opponents.
- What we got wrong - What were all the fails that happened when running this playbook and what can we learn from them?
Attendees will leave this talk with problem-solving patterns that they can apply immediately in their work.
