What it takes to scale engineering (Interview)

This week we’re talking to Rachel Potvin, former VP of Engineering at GitHub about what it takes to scale engineering. Rachel says it’s a game-changer when engineering scales beyond 100 people. So we asked to her to share everything she has learned in her career of leading and scaling engineering.

Discuss on Changelog News

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Session Replay! Rewind and replay every step of the user’s journey before and after they encountered an issue. Eliminate the guesswork and get to the root cause of an issue, faster. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
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Featuring:

• Rachel Potvin – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

• Rachel adores EngFlow (investor and advisor)
• Rachel’s 2016 paper on Google’s developer infrastructure
• Harvard Business Review on Psychological Safety

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(00:55) - Sponsor: Sentry
(02:46) - Start the show!
(12:57) - Requested by name
(20:35) - How did you know or learn what to do?
(25:39) - Understanding constraints
(27:25) - 100 people is a game-changing threshold
(37:33) - Lead by caring for people
(39:56) - What's worth building now?
(47:42) - Using decision logs
(51:40) - Choosing the right tools for communication
(56:24) - This is NOT my problem
(1:04:12) - What is psychological safety?
(1:10:07) - Scaling, but maintaining code health
(1:21:29) - Wrapping up
(1:24:15) - It's been fun
(1:24:35) - Outro