Beyond Ping-Pong and Catered Lunches

location_city Sydney schedule Dec 6th 04:30 - 05:00 PM AEDT place The Loft

At SafetyCulture, our culture is foundational to everything we do.

Our engineering team has doubled to 60 in the space of 6 months and continues to grow. Not having a good handle on our culture we’re trying to build or preserve would be like driving a formula one car blindfolded and without a steering wheel. We'd crash and burn.

This talk moves beyond ping-pong tables and catered lunches to get to the core of what makes up a healthy engineering culture, where everyone gets out of bed each day to be a part of something they find meaningful, and accomplish big things as part of a team.

In the talk, we’ll cover what ingredients are essential to a healthy culture, and what that means to the team. Culture doesn’t stand still, so we’ll also cover how to maintain what’s important as the team grows or changes, and how to keep it fresh over the course of time.

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Talk

  • Overview of SafetyCulture and the growth
  • What culture means to us
  • How we preserve our culture - practical applications
  • Consequences of neglecting our culture
  • Our key lessons along the way

Learning Outcome

An engineering lead attending this session will take away an impression of the importance of culture in establishing a high performing team, the effort required to maintain a healthy culture, and practical ideas for enhancing their own engineering culture.

Target Audience

Engineering Leaders

Prerequisites for Attendees

Understanding some of the challenges of scaling engineering teams would be helpful, but not mandatory.

Slides


Video


schedule Submitted 5 years ago

  • 30 Mins
    Talk
    Executive

    As technology leaders, we spend endless hours on solution design reviews, costing, project management & vendor contracts... yet we rarely spend enough time on the thing that has the biggest multiplier impact: your people architecture. This session will be a worked example of how restructuring an organisation to address a significant Theory of Constraints issue achieved results beyond what was expected, and used architecture concepts to get the technology teams on board and help improve autonomy and engagement.

  • Lindsay Holmwood
    Lindsay Holmwood
    Dev Team Lead
    Envato
    schedule 5 years ago
    Sold Out!
    30 Mins
    Talk
    Advanced

    You’re probably familiar with Conway’s Law, that “organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." But did you know that there’s a tradition in academia spanning as far back as the 1960’s that has studied it in action?

    Our understanding began in the traditions of organisational design, product design, and organisations-as-complex-systems. Conway’s Law is a separate tradition in technology, embracing our idioms and ways of storytelling.

    But all three traditions point back to the same underlying concepts.

    Conway’s Law has been studied across auto, aviation, software, banking, and healthcare. Each study has revealed how humans organise to build systems, and how those systems influence how we organise ourselves.

    The results are not what you’d expect.

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