KEYNOTES & FEATURED
Tuesday, February 8, 2022
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld):Twilio Segment -- Scaling Product Teams for Success After an Acquisition
Join on HopinThere are a host of changes that come with a company being acquired, such as joining a larger organization and integrating teams and product offerings with the parent company. In this session, Jodi will share her first-hand experience leading product teams at multiple companies through acquisitions and spearheading product integration. She will also share best practices for scaling a product organization for growth following an acquisition and building a high-performance team that is aligned with meeting larger business goals.
KEYNOTE: Roblox -- Enabling Developers to Build the Metaverse
Join on HopinOnce seen as a far off idea, the metaverse today is lauded as the future, discussed daily in the media, and prominent in the public discourse — anything but ignored. Many experts have hypothesized what this will look like, and companies across industries and around the world are starting to come forth with their plans for their presence in this next stage of the digital age. For Dan Sturman, there’s one concept that’s central to this vision of the future online — human co-experience. In this session, Dan will outline the five key pillars of creating an ecosystem for human co-experience — fully user generated, persistent identity, universal availability, immediate teleportation, shared fabric — and dive into the latest technologies available for developers within each, including open source software, storage enhancements, Luau programming language advancements, avatar tech, search and discovery, authentication, and more. He will also spotlight how developers across platforms are leveraging technology and advancing what is possible both today and in the future. Furthermore, he will share Roblox’s vision of what will become the foundation of an accessible, safe, creative, and civil human co-experience.
KEYNOTE: Cisco -- How Do You Solve a Problem Users Don’t Know Is There?
Join on HopinNecessity is the mother of invention. It’s a well-known proverb and means that the primary driving force for most new inventions is a need. When it comes to product innovation, those needs or ‘pain points’ are most easily identified when people in different roles tell you about them. You then follow a well-defined product innovation and development roadmap to create a solution to the problem.
But how do you solve a problem users don’t know is there? Steve Jobs famously said “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”. With the ever-increasing pace of tech innovation and its ability to continually disrupt established ways of working, his statement has never been more true. So what is the trigger? How can you identify a ‘problem’ by convincing users that there’s a better way to do something when the current way of doing it works just fine.
Join Sanjeev Mervana, Vice President of Product Management for Cisco’s Emerging Technologies & Incubation team, as he details how to identify, generate, screen, and manage new innovation and incubation ideas that ultimately fuel growth.
KEYNOTE: Amazon Web Services -- Move Fast and Don’t Break Things: Security at Scale
Join on HopinAda Lovelace was one of the first to recognize the ability of a computer to do higher order reasoning. Now, with the move to cloud, you too interact with infrastructure as code, and security as code.
It’s a new security reality: from the moment you start to build, you configure governance and security controls, identity and access management; you make choices around services and resources; you store data and backups and architect for redundancy and high-availability; and so on. To do security at scale, you must embrace the reality that security engineers are developers, and developers are architecting for security. Making the secure thing to do, the easy thing to do, is hard—but it is the only way to do security at scale.
KEYNOTE: Blockchain.com -- Leading Engineering Teams During The Trillion-Dollar Crypto Boom
Join on Hopin2021 has been a breakthrough year for the crypto industry, reaching 100 million+ global users and a multi-trillion dollar market cap. In this session, Lewis will discuss what it takes to lead engineering teams building blockchain-powered products to keep up with skyrocketing mainstream demand. From implementing effective hiring methods to strategizing team roles and responsibilities, Lewis will share how technical leaders can hire and inspire high-impact teams to build industry-leading products. He will integrate key lessons learned while scaling the engineering team at Blockchain.com, increasing technical headcount over 1000% and helping the company achieve a $5 billion-plus valuation.
KEYNOTE: LocalStack -- Fast-track Your Cloud Innovation by Removing Developers Hand Cuffs
Join on HopinPolicies, norms, and practices are an integral part of software development practices and undeniably important for delivering scalable and robust systems at high quality. Yet, they can simultaneously be a blocker to fast, iterative development processes which are vital to creating a culture of continuous innovation across the organization.
Even cloud developers who are striving to build bleeding-edge systems are often restricted in delivering value at their optimal personal speed. Handcuffs are being imposed on them by important, yet cumbersome cloud approval processes, as well as unnecessarily long wait times during deployment and testing stages within their cloud infrastructure.
In this talk we will shed some light on common inefficiencies and roadblocks that cloud developers face when developing against public clouds. We will discuss how to give back control and autonomy to developers over their own dev environments and tools with local and hybrid cloud development patterns, to foster innovation and fast feedback loops. Most importantly, we will highlight how the same concepts which give full autonomy to individual developers can also be leveraged to substantially improve team collaboration and feedback loops across team borders, for the best possible developer engagement across all stages of the CI/CD pipeline.
If you feel like you are not getting the full potential out of your cloud team, join me in this thought provoking session and let’s discuss strategies on how to free your development teams from their handcuffs - while embracing security, quality, and compliance.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): UserTesting -- Leveraging Digital Transformation to Help Product Teams Succeed
Join on HopinThe challenges of product managers are shifting. The pandemic underscored the need for digital transformation in many companies, and often product managers have often found themselves leading those changes. That increased attention is great, but it also puts additional demands on the time of product managers who were already in fully occupied. How do you fulfill the company’s needs for transformation without working nights and weekends? Michael Mace, UserTesting VP of Market Strategy, will discuss the challenges and opportunities and give practical examples of what to do. Topics will include:
• The importance of identifying customer needs beyond just features, and covering the whole customer experience
• How to avoid the order-taking trap
• Balancing the conflicting roles of product owner and product manager
• The opportunities and challenges of digital transformation, and how product managers are using the transition to help their companies succeed
• How to use real-time human insights to make high-confidence customer-driven decisions without slowing down the development process
KEYNOTE: Passport -- Breaking the Monolith: A Case Study in Starting Over
Join on HopinIt's estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 million traffic tickets are issued each year. Most of these tickets are issued due to antiquated systems such as physical signage and parking meters. Commuters simply don't know that they are committing a violation.
On the enforcement side, cities struggle to collect revenue from outstanding parking tickets. It's a lengthy and inefficient process that ends up being overly punitive for their residents and expensive to follow through on from the city's perspective.
It doesn't have to be this way. Imagine a smart city ecosystem where there are fewer parking tickets only reserved for those who intentionally disregard the rules, but cities still collect more revenue from the tickets they do issue.
Like most things, the answer to the nationwide parking crisis is coders. What does scaling a smart city API across thousands of cities that all have unique needs and requirements look like? Brad Powers, CTO of a leading smart city and mobility platform, breaks down his technical learnings and offers best practices for developers tackling similar challenges across any industry.
KEYNOTE: Fast -- Building a Ship While it Sails (During a Pandemic)
Join on HopinHow do you launch a product with a bare-bones team working remotely in the middle of a pandemic?
In June 2020, I was tasked with taking an idea to launch in just eight weeks with nine engineers. I’d never met this team, and wouldn’t for almost two years: the pandemic had just locked everyone down.
But the investments had been made, and a date was set. I had to create a long-term vision with moments to spare and weeks to deliver.
There’s a saying: Take the leap, and build your wings on the way down. So that’s what we did.
But before you wonder how many 24-hour days the engineers put in? Not many. How frantically decisions were made? Not at all. How did the time crunch inform our tech stack? (Hint: we love Python, but Go was faster). And how does one cobble this all together, anyway?
The key to building and launching a product against outlandish technical constraints isn’t by grinding a small team into dust by making them row the boat until they can’t move. It’s by building that boat smartly, beginning with the end in mind, so you can build as you row with thoughtfully selected parts that move and scale with you from the get go.
The audience will learn:
How to replicate - or modify for themselves - my unique approach to tripling our remote team around the world in just two months
How to structure their organization for optimum collaboration, management, and conflict resolution during incredibly tight release schedules
Create 24/7 workflows without working your teams 24/7
How to choose the right tech stack for the project to get a massive project to market in a competitive timeline – without churning engineers or running into multiple dead-ends and refactors due to hasty decisions.
KEYNOTE: Puppet -- Wrangling Configuration Complexity: How It's Gotten Even Harder
Join on HopinOur ability to manage infrastructure, reason about the impacts of changes and keep it secure and compliant has grown in complexity. Full stop. The proliferation of development tools in the market with a variety of teams adopting different solutions on different infrastructures creates a silo effect that is real and painful for many operators today. Choices that were once the domain of the operations team are now handed directly to application teams, with an ever increasing push to adopt new technologies. This talk will focus not only on “the why” of this complexity but more importantly on “the how” to get your team on the right path to manage this complexity in a way that allows you to continue to deliver software and services quickly but in a secure and scalable way. It will explore how tools, practices and organizational structures all play a role in not only surviving, but thriving in a world of ever expanding infrastructure complexity.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Little Otter -- Taming the Monster - The Art of Saying "No"
Join on HopinSaying no is hard and is also what makes for good strategy. Saying no is particularly hard when we as product people are expected to build connections, lead through influence, effectively collaborate with teams that we might be saying no to (very) often, and build an amazing product that solves real user problems and achieves concrete business goals.
Product people that always say “yes” end up with monster products that do everything and nothing at the same time. They say “yes” because it is very hard to say no effectively.
If those concerns sound familiar, this talk is for you. Gabrielle will share how you can tame your monster by implementing effective & scalable product strategy. She will send you off with actionable steps so that you can immediately get to work, develop a strategic way to say no, and, most importantly, tame your monster!
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
KEYNOTE (CloudWorld): Linux Lifeline - Threat Awareness & Mitigation Strategies to Protect your Org
Join on HopinAs of 2017, 90 percent of public clouds workloads ran on Linux. Linux allows organizations to make the most of their cloud-based environments and power their digital transformation strategies. Many of today’s most cutting-edge cloud-based applications and technology run on Linux, making it a critical area of modern technology to secure.
According to a recent Linux Threat Report, most threats arise from systems running end-of-life versions of Linux distributions. This includes 44 percent from CentOS versions 7.4 to 7.9. In addition, 200 different vulnerabilities were targeted in Linux environments in just six months. This means attacks on Linux are likely taking advantage of outdated software with un-patched vulnerabilities.
This session will reveal steps you can take to ensure the security across workloads and cloud presence powered by Linux and how to effectively respond to the possible threats.
Join Aaron as he walks through the data, speaks to the threat, and highlights the top three mitigation strategies for all enterprises.
Attendees will learn:
• How to utilize free Linux native tools including Iptables, seecomp, PaX, etc., for configuration assessment, vulnerability patching and activity monitoring.
• Simple steps you can take to secure containers effectively.
• Best practices in Appsec, including testing, scanning and Open Source (SCA).
KEYNOTE: JupiterOne -- Complex IAM Permissions Analysis Using Graphs
Join on HopinAccess control in AWS is done via IAM policies. Policies and permissions in IAM can get really complex really fast, leaving a ton of room for mistakes and misconfigurations. To put this in perspective:- There are six types of IAM policies- Policies can have a combination of Deny and Allow statements- Each statement includes Actions, Resources, Principal, Conditions- Each statement can also have negations (exceptions) such as NotResource or StringNotEquals in Conditions- And many other details and tricksIt is best practice to configure least privileged policies. However, to get it right is often more challenging than it looks. As a result, most policies are written with wildcards (*) in Actions, or Resources, or both, with no meaningful Conditions.It is also very difficult to understand the net effective permissions of a policy that contains both Allow and Deny statements, with seemingly contradicting conditions and exceptions. AWS provides an IAM policy simulator that helps, but only helps to a limited extent. With the IAM policy simulator, you have to specify the service(s), action(s), and/or resource(s) and get a “yes/no” answer back telling you if a policy grants the permission to that known combination. It cannot answer the broader question of “given a policy, what resource permissions does it grant access to” in general.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Wex -- Your First 90 Days as a Product Manager
Join on HopinYou just got hired! Congrats! Now what? It takes most new product managers six to eight months to reach full productivity. Most companies and managers don't have onboarding training designed specifically for product managers. This means you would spend half of your first year haphazardly gathering the bits of information you need to be an effective product manager. You need to create a learning plan to conquer your first 90 days. These first 3 months set the foundation you will build off of. Learn what to do and what not to do in your first 90 days. Join this practical session on how to navigate your new role and discover the information necessary to be successful.
KEYNOTE: CircleCI -- What We Learned about Hiring Engineers after 6,000 Technical Interviews in One Year
Join on HopinLast year, CircleCI hit hyper-growth and needed to hire more engineers quickly. But the process was taking too long, so we had to figure out how to improve it.
We tried many things, including outsourcing technical interviews to a third party. When we still weren’t moving fast enough or finding the right talent, we iterated on our process again and again.
After conducting more than 6,000 engineering interviews in one year, Michael Stahnke, VP of Platform at CircleCI, shares what our engineering organization learned about how to scale the technical interview process and find top tech talent for growing startups.
KEYNOTE: Netlify -- Developing the Modern Web with Jamstack
Join on HopinThe Jamstack movement has forever changed the trajectory of the web by decoupling backend and frontend technologies. Today, the Jamstack provides nearly limitless choices to developers designing the best customer experiences in web applications. Netlify’s platform unites the Jamstack ecosystem of modern web technologies with a great developer experience, helping developers create dynamic, scalable, secure apps..
To deliver the speed and agility that developers need when moving to a modern Jamstack architecture, Netlify continues to expand its platform to provide a workflow and productivity that natively integrates with every major web framework, API and developer tool. In this session, Matt will introduce the concepts of this architecture, highlight how to best utilize this integrated platform, and unveil how these workflows can unleash developer productivity for your team.
KEYNOTE: Uplevel -- Burnout and Productivity: Overcoming Emerging Engineering Team Difficulties
Join on HopinOver the last ten years the role of a software engineer has evolved drastically. Software continues to reach unprecedented scale and complexity. Organizations from all industries are now becoming software companies and with the pandemic everyone is feeling the effects of burnout. Creating an industry with healthy productivity is paramount but too much of a focus on “going faster,” without addressing burnout, is a recipe for failure. Engineering managers need to constantly balance both and as we move increasingly remote, these problems are even more acute. Ravs Kaur, CTO of Uplevel will share insights on how today’s engineering managers can ensure an efficient pipeline while making sure engineers are happy and healthy.
KEYNOTE: ClickUp -- The 4 P's of Pragmatically Scaling your Engineering Organization
Join on HopinIn a world of tech debt, shadow IT, app sprawl, and reliability—the concept of "scale" can quickly spiral into speculative decision making, complete re-writes and delays in delivering customer value. While planning for growth is key for any organization, the methodology around how (and when) to scale an engineering org can be much more opaque. In this session, we'll cover the 4 P's of Pragmatic Scaling - People, Process, Product & Platform, and how to ensure you're maximizing the productivity and efficiency of resources through hyper-growth.
Join Shailesh Kumar, Sr. VP of Engineering, as he shares his customer-centric approach to engineering that helped scale ClickUp's platform from zero to over 800,000 teams in just four years.
KEYNOTE: Intel -- Simplifying Design and Development to Solve for Edge AI
Join on HopinAs data drives new and evolving IoT opportunities across all segments of the market, the role of the developer becomes increasingly important in being able to utilize existing tools to drive new ways to create Edge AI solutions. However, solving for Edge AI can be a complex design and development process as it requires determining the right selection of sensors, hardware, deep learning frameworks, or deciding how to deploy the unique use case.
By democratizing access to AI and simplifying development, organizations can enable their developers to quickly experiment with different algorithms, processors and optimization techniques or prototype and customize without having to spend weeks obtaining and setting up development boards. In this session, Bill will discuss how organizations can achieve this and empower their developers to build innovative Edge AI solutions – solutions that will improve lives and transform industries.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Cleo -- What Can a Three-Legged, New-Age Product Organization Do For You?
Join on HopinBeing a high-growth, product-led company in today’s versatile, pandemic-stricken world means you need new organizational structures for rapid innovation so you can meet the demands of the business and still come out on top.
One such trending organization model is the three legged product team owning and driving product strategy, product management and product marketing. Modern SaaS companies must organize product teams in a way that enables continuous value creation and value capture.
When scaling, companies cannot assume the market is in the same state as it was during initial product work. This means companies must continuously adjust product strategies to invest in their next opportunity in shifting markets. Adopting the “three legged” approach to products allows companies to listen to customer needs, innovate new solutions that fit neatly into industry demands, and deliver rich capabilities in a predictable way. This approach is critical to driving continuous improvements in value and, therefore, growth.
KEYNOTE (ProductWorld): Amazon -- Demand or Supply - Prioritized Side for Platform Businesses
Join on HopinWhat does the ongoing backlog prioritization looks like for platform business model that has users on demand and supply side for example divers and riders on Uber, home owners and renters on Air BnB, etc. This is most tricky and challenging part in platform product management lifecycle. I have touched upon this topic in my book Effective platform product management. I will cover the prioritization techniques, challenges that product managers face and mistakes to avoid while feature prioritization of platform business models.
KEYNOTE: Wiz -- Look to the Right, Shift to the Left: A New Approach to Cloud Security
Join on HopinThe Shift Left paradigm is broken. If companies start moving their controls to the left, they miss out on their actual security posture in production. If they deploy tools in the CI/CD in addition to the tools running in production, it creates complexity and inefficiency as they get different results from different tools and struggle with duplicate exception flows and lack of visibility across. A new approach is required!
In this talk, Ami will review Log4shell and other recent real world incidents, analyze where legacy approaches fail and present a new paradigm to cloud security: “look to the right and shift to the left.” Companies deploy a single policy across the stack, with central visibility across the process, creating a new and efficient way for security teams to work with dev teams.