Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

Ian White, Director of Platform Engineering at DAT, joined the company to scale their Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure, which has come under stress as their business has grown over the past couple years. Here he shares how he partnered with developers to learn about their challenges, how we conveyed a vision for how the company needed to evolve, and how he’s been working with development teams and business stakeholders to successfully drive change.

Show Notes

Ian White, Director of Platform Engineering at DAT, joined the company to scale their Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure, which has come under stress as their business has grown over the past couple years. Here he shares how he partnered with developers to learn about their challenges, how we conveyed a vision for how the company needed to evolve, and how he’s been working with development teams and business stakeholders to successfully drive change.

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(01:00) - The challenges DAT was facing as Ian joined 

(05:13) - How Ian used customer interviews to understand problems

(10:48) - The typical journey companies take as they scale their infrastructure as they grow 

(16:20) - How early changes were positioned and received 

(20:00) - The four personas Ian identified 

(25:14) - How Ian evangelized the vision

(28:48) - Areas of pushback Ian foresees as they introduce new changes

(33:00) - Handling teams that want to stay on self-managed infrastructure instead of moving to a managed infrastructure 

(41:55) - Managing business stakeholders

(45:00) - Partnering with finance 

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Where to find Ian:

Creators & Guests

Host
Abi Noda
Abi is the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com), which helps engineering leaders measure and improve developer experience. Abi formerly founded Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub.

What is Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda?

This is a weekly podcast focused on developer productivity and the teams and leaders dedicated to improving it. Topics include in-depth interviews with Platform and DevEx teams, as well as the latest research and approaches on measuring developer productivity. The EE podcast is hosted by Abi Noda, the founder and CEO of DX (getdx.com) and published researcher focused on developing measurement methods to help organizations improve developer experience and productivity.