Talks: 1st half 2017

I’ve been remiss in posting since I’ve been back in Seattle. Readjusting to life in the states, and adjusting to the new role has kept me busy. I hope to rectify that in the future. I have been lucky enough to be invited to speak several times this winter and spring in the US and Europe. If you’ll be there or live nearby and want to meet up, drop me a line on twitter and let me know!

How Spotify Builds Products – my slides from May 2016 talks

These are my slides from the talks I gave at infoShare in GDansk and to ao.com and Think Money in Manchester. The talk in Poland was a shortened version of this content. This is a sort of mega-mix of many of my previous talks. This talk ends up presenting a bit more of a coherent picture on how Spotify’s culture and organization go hand-in-hand with it’s data-driven product development.

As with most of my talks, the majority of the content was in the spoken parts instead of the slides. I will hopefully have a video to share soon from one of these talks…

Innovation, Autonomy and Accountability: my talk to the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport

I was asked to speak at the UK Department of Media, Culture and Sport in January. One thing that often comes up when you talk to people about autonomous organizations is the subject of accountability. This is something that we even discuss within Spotify, from time to time.

When talking to a government organization, especially one who is responsible for distributing funding for programs, like the DCMS, the concern around accountability is paramount. At the same time, governmental organizations are also looking to innovate to provide better services to their constituents.

My goal with this talk was to present the idea of how a governmental organization could innovate by using autonomous teams while maintaining accountability by picking good metrics to measure success of programs and measuring those metrics on an ongoing basis. This would allow the programs to have autonomous control of their work and innovate, while having a objective measurement of the value that they were returning.

Video of my talk “Apportioning Monoliths”

This was my talk at the Daho.am conference. Listening back to it now, I am struck by how often I said “many, many.” And I cursed! I usually try not to do that. So, it’s a bit of a looser take on this presentation. Luckily the audience had beer (this was in Bavaria, after all), so all were fine with it. I had flown in from Stockholm that morning, so I might have been a bit more tired than I thought…

I was really impressed by the lineup of speakers and the content of the presentations. A really good day. The Stylight engineering and event teams did a great job.

The Spotify Tribe: My talk from Spark The Change last week

The organizers of Spark the Change in London asked me to speak about the Spotify matrix model. I was only too happy to comply. It was a great conference, and I met a ton of good people. As usual, I tend to talk to my slides, as opposed to putting a ton of text on them. Hopefully, you can still get something useful from it.