Generalists are Special
Chris Merrick, Director of Engineering, RJMetrics
Chris Merrick - Director of Engineering, RJMetrics
Tue - 01:30-02:30 PM, Salon E
Management

Generalists are Special

Software is easier to write today than ever before. With little understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, a marketer can stream an API firehose into a distributed system to perform a data analysis in just a few lines of code. The proliferation of open source projects and sites like GitHub and Stack Overflow has created a broad toolset and reference library available to anyone with a web browser. At the same time, PaaS and IaaS providers have made one-click deployment and maintenance a reality.

This evolution has caused dramatic changes in marketing and operations departments, where more employees are writing and maintaining their own code, leading to the rise of new titles like “Growth Hacker” and “DevOps Engineer.” It has also fundamentally changed engineering departments, where specialists with deep domain expertise are no longer as mission-critical as they once were.

We will explore how RJMetrics has embraced this evolution by building our technology team around empowered software engineering generalists. These engineers are given broad exposure to enable context-aware decision making, and autonomy to execute those decisions without interference.

Learnings from Building and Scaling Gilt
Michael Bryzek, CTO & Co-founder, Gilt Groupe
Michael Bryzek - CTO & Co-founder, Gilt Groupe
Tue - 02:45-03:45 PM, Salon E
Management

We built and scaled Gilt by building an environment where great engineers can create amazing things.
This talk is a reflection on what we have learned along the journey from startup to one of the leading ecommerce companies. We start with a baseline of behavioral psychology – and reflect on the decisions we made and tradeoffs we considered as we scaled, with an in-depth look at the benefits and challenges of a micro-services architecture.

What Development Teams Can Learn From Experience Designers
Kimberly Blessing, Director of UI Development, Think Brownstone
Kimberly Blessing - Director of UI Development, Think Brownstone
Tue - 11:30-12:30 PM, Salon E
Management

Organizations are increasingly looking at experience design as a means to creating better, more engaging customer experiences – but truly innovative organizations are also applying experience design principles to their internal processes and tools to create and sustain a more engaged workforce. In this session, learn what these principles are and find inspiration in examples of how other organizations are transforming themselves as a result of putting them in to practice.