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2025-09-25
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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair05:09:39

@joshua.andrew.phillip posted this, describing how his conference/agenda app is now in App Store pipeline — in genuine awe that he got this app written so quickly. Kudos! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joshaphillips_i-came-to-the-enterprise-tech-ai-summit-activity-7376774620797902848-hADq/ cc @steve.yegge

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]13:09:36

Thanks for the reshare Gene! All credit goes to you and Steve for the inspiration and your workshop serving as the catalyst! Hopefully I'll be able to drop an app store link today 🤞 Side note for everyone else: I called my wife this morning sounding like I had just met Luke Skywalker because Gene Kim had commented on my Linkedin 😅

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]13:09:20

Newest feature: conference bingo card generator!

Chris Gallivan (Planview)15:09:02

I noticed the trains are out at the airport. They are saying allow at least 3 hours. Might want to make sure everyone knows this

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SlackMind15:09:01

Get yourself to your seat in the Royal Ballroom for the opening remarks. We’re kicking off the final day of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in 15 minutes at 8:45am PDT! https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GAC5FBEJ/timer.png

Ann Perry - IT Revolution15:09:58

Looking forward to Day 3, starting in about 10 minutes!!

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SlackMind15:09:00

Remember all those talks you attended the first two days of the Summit? Please submit your feedback for those! It’s so valuable for us and the speakers. And after all, feedback is a gift and sharing is caring! Enter your feedback for those talks here: https://etlslasvegas2025.sched.com/ https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GFGYPA0L/feedback.png

SlackMind15:09:00

We want to hear your stories from the Summit. What did you learn? Whom did you meet? What ideas are you taking back with you? What actions are you planning to take? Post in #CB0936XFT! https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09G8DU6LBF/stories.png

SlackMind15:09:00

The final day is starting now – opening remarks and then plenary talks!

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Cat Walsh15:09:02

Let's go day 3!

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Tom Robertson15:09:55

"PEW" Stack. 😬💀

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]15:09:09

It's amazing how approachable and engaging all of the speakers are here! It's so awesome

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Savita Pandit15:09:57

Heavy suitcases and full brains with amazing knowledge base!

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]15:09:11

next year let's do a 52 week ETLS

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Padmaja Duvvuri15:09:19

Awesome week @ #ETLS25 Great sessions. Looking forward to next year already.😊

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Robin Yeman15:09:27

This is definitely my tribe!!!

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]15:09:11

let's keep the slack active throughout the year! I love this community

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution15:09:01

☀️ Please welcome @mgill, Sr Director of Engineering, Core DevOps, GitLab, here to present: Building (and Keeping) GenAI Teams

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair15:09:25

AI features, model validation, the infrastructure it runs on, scouring advance— what did she do right or wrong to get put in this role? 😂

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Sunitha M15:09:51

Amazing week!!! First time here. Learned a lot and met some awesome people!! Looking forward to next year @#ETLS25 thank you program committee!!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:02

This applies to you if your HR manager comes running to you: "Hey, I need an AI engineer (whatever that is)" 😂

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Chris Shinkle (Director of Innovation - SEP)16:09:02

First time at the conference and have been blown away by the quality of conversations where folks get real about the challenges their facing, what’s working, and what’s not… Love the willingness to be transparent and share. ❤️

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)16:09:34

Love that you’re seeing this. It’s a hallmark of this community and one of the many things that makes it so special.

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:12

Michelle just reminded me. I forgot to mention the most important thing about options as it relates today: when uncertainty is high (like in AI, where no one knows anything), do not make long term plans (which deprive you of options). <----

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Marc Eastburn16:09:03

Commit - feels difficult with so much change happening right now, but a good reminder to go back to basics “Working Software over …. “

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Josh Guice (Liatrio)16:09:11

Most doors are two-way now also.

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:09:31

🧑‍💻:skin-tone-4: Next, please say hello to @jbeutler, Head of Solutions Engineering, Strategics, OpenAI, presenting: Making AI Agents Actually Work for You

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Ben Lloyd Pearson16:09:07

Unpopular opinion: I think we should use the term agent even more 😂

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:42

The LOOP! For many, the loop is the most important characteristic of an agent. (We used this definition in the Vibe Coding book)

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:32

What's hilarious to me is that previous to OpenAI, @jbeutler was a solution architect at Stripe — for him to talk about "lack of credibility" is so interesting to me. Sure, he wasn't writing production code, but still! (It shows the unspoken hierarchy within the engineering community.)

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:19

Again, the observation that team sizes are shrinking — who can go further and faster.

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Sam Yeats - TeamForm16:09:39

Wow - codex was built with one PM and a few engineers!

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Robert Kelly (Liatrio)16:09:09

“Agent experience” is the new developer experience.

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:09:53

🚗 And now, please welcome, @david315, SVP of Product & Engineering, Cox Automotive, and @internettitan, Field CTO, Boomi, here to talk about From Technical Debt to Digital Credit: A Case Study in Serial Optionality

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Geraint Levan16:09:02

Another #VibeWithYourTribe moment from a first time attendee. The flow in my conversations has been incredible this week. It feels like there is no handoff tax - just pure throughput of ideas.

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Jennifer Petoff, PgM Director, Google SRE16:09:52

We don't have a crystal ball? Imagine that! 😅

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Christine Hudson16:09:10

--> When there's an earnings miss, what happens? "It's common to cut everything that gives you choices, that gives you options in the future."

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Mike T16:09:28

How do you balance the cost of building with optionality vs the speed building with specificity? Any clear tradeoff frameworks folks are using? I know we can do things like assess risk of modular pieces being replaced like typical, but what are some of the ways you guys look at that differently or how do you decide how much optionality makes sense? Looking for less art more science type ways of assessing and implementing

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Josh Guice (Liatrio)16:09:45

AI is making it easier/faster to run parallel experiments to try out and narrow down options to the most promising.

Josh Guice (Liatrio)16:09:29

Full disclosure I had not seen the presentation content ahead of time. 🙂

Mike T16:09:00

Hah, well it’s good that immediately the answer is part of the

Stephen Fishman20:09:04

We make it easy in the ooops framework for teams to explore and align on this

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair16:09:05

• Formula for optionality: (N × K ÷ T × σ) ◦ N = number of modules ◦ K = parallel experiments ◦ T = time to experiment ◦ σ = risk/uncertainty … a key point here is that you don’t really need to fully quantify uncertainty… you only need to know directionality and order of magnitude because you’re only looking at it as a decision making tool to guide your investments in the composable set of capabilities.

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Tom Robertson16:09:30

Is anyone else impressed that Gene was able to type this on the ipad touchscreen live on stage? Including finding the σ symbol???

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Mike T16:09:49

So is the goal of this formula to maximize optionality given constraints of K as teams or people that can experiment, and T being constraints that we can afford to let them iterate?

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Mike T16:09:54

Interesting that lowering risk increases optionality given constraints in this formula.

Stephen Fishman20:09:57

Set the defaults to favor optionality and Maximize them in contexts where uncertainty is high (while working to lower the cost of experimentation)

Dennis Feiock16:09:30

A quote I seem to remember from somewhere: you can debate the accuracy of a number, but when you're working with orders of magnitude then the specificity isn't all that important anymore

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering16:09:15

We talk about this all the time in the context of flow engineering. We don’t need to know whether cycle time is 2 days or 3 days for a stage when there’s a stage that takes 8 weeks https://www.linkedin.com/posts/devopsto_a-director-of-quality-assurance-asked-if-activity-7376653962290270208-p5w9?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_ios&amp;rcm=ACoAAAIORJIBEoHqn58LQs7XJfr3BzzXs9n47cU

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Christine Hudson16:09:59

"When uncertainty is high, rigidity is dangerous"

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Chris Gallivan (Planview)16:09:53

That compromise is where a lot of outcome leaks out

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Mike T16:09:24

Okay second question - for smaller teams that can’t afford more parallel modules, or where more modules has complexity of maintenance, do you have any formulas for balancing how much modularity you want before you start to have issues with maintenance burden and context burden?

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Josh Guice (Liatrio)16:09:20

Agentic SRE functions will reduce the size of this problem. For now I think you find your Σ

Mike T17:09:24

Interesting thought, so if we build more optionality it probably would make sense to build agentic context as a feature of the module so that you CAN enable agentic SRE…

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Josh Guice (Liatrio)17:09:01

Context engineering 😁

Stephen Fishman20:09:30

@bubthegreat - this is interesting to unpack… I’ll choose to skip over the cost/benefit part given that it’s a long conversation and instead get to what I think is the intent of your question… “how do you pick your spots?” That’s the second part of the OOOps methodology spelled out in UTE - optionality, OPPORTUNITY, optimization We lay out an easy toolset and pattern book for teams to learn how to map it out and align on where to invest (and how to set the defaults)

Josh Guice (Liatrio)16:09:55

Like @jbeutler said…products will start to adapt to the user vs. the other way round (as it becomes easier and easier to add variance)

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Mike T17:09:17

Was this in regards to balancing optionality with maintenance cost @josh.guice ?

Josh Guice (Liatrio)17:09:24

Context was providing user-specific selections of features.

Mike T17:09:59

The implication I’m hearing behind that is that for it to be successfully “cutting the dead weight” we are using that user feedback to actively kill dead branches of modularity that haven’t played out successfully? Just making sure I’m inferring the right expectations - so if my SDLC doesn’t actually include iteratively killing modules that haven’t played failed, that’s on me for having unsustainable tech debt balance issues?

Josh Guice (Liatrio)17:09:56

Yeah I think so…and that “dead weight” can be identified through objective data collected along with user (subjective) feedback.

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Stephen Fishman20:09:01

@josh.guice - this is exactly right.. it’s the pace of adaptation that’s changing as the cost of software continues to drop. And… There’s a methodology and pattern book spelled out in the book to make it applicable and practical. - The OOOps methodology - Optionality, Opportunity, Optimization

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Adarsh Awasthi16:09:04

This conference is a life changing event for me. I am so thrilled to include vibe coding in my daily life. Thanks to this community which is so enthusiastic, knowledgeable and caring. I feel rejuvenating my career with confidence and support.

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Cliff Risley - MISO Energy16:09:39

I felt the same way about this Conference last year at my first attendance. Great conference and great community!

Adarsh Awasthi21:09:43

I am glad you felt the same way last year. Many many more years to come.

Maria Muir [Sooner Safer Happier]16:09:08

Redefined MVP - Multiple Variants of Products 🤯

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere16:09:28

Meaning outcomes and clear definitions of success are even more important.

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Ronica Roth16:09:36

Optionality can now be a core -ility, that we build into everything

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Mike T16:09:18

Optionality should now be part of your core table stakes for software design feels like “design with agile iteration as the expectation” - which I love

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Chris Gallivan (Planview)16:09:31

Technical credit

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Mike T16:09:12

Would anyone like to buy some of my technical credit? It’s for sale, and I will give it to you at a hefty discount to make sure it goes to a good home

Mike T16:09:44

My leader said it’s time to rehome it because it’s not working for us, not because it’s inherently a bad technical credit :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Tom Kilcommons16:09:47

I’m obsessed with the idea of technical credit!

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Stephen Fishman17:09:52

Feel free to connect with me to discuss it more along with how to practically create/conserve it

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Tom Kilcommons17:09:05

I’m interested in the potential of making it a currency that you incentivise - so that it’s truly balanced against conventional metrics

Ann Perry - IT Revolution16:09:51

💡 Please welcome @mik, Author of "Project to Product" and CTO at Planview. He will be presenting: Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:20

I heard yesterday from someone that one team is now building so many features, for the first time ever, teams couldn't finish all their feature demos during the 1 hour meeting — big questions ahead!!! More demo meetings? Don't demo every feature?

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Jon Smart [Sooner Safer Happier]17:09:03

Never mind sprint demo, a daily demo

Mike T17:09:18

It’s honestly incredible to me how much success banks on changing the mentality around how to approach things and how much harder that is than just implementing the ceremonies and artifacts, and how often agile transitions don’t focus on changing that mentality

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere18:09:23

Yes, and... There are benefits to acting to your new way of thinking. https://medium.com/10x-curiosity/act-your-way-to-a-new-way-of-thinking-john-shook-d7df580fb10c The anti-pattern is implementing ceremonies in ways that don't actually change how we behave or influence how we think differently.

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:08

@stuart.pearce mentioned on Day 1 on how so little of the SDLC is code generation — suggesting something is very, very wrong.

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Ben Grinnell17:09:32

One of my favourite slides ever from Jon about 10 years ago

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Jon Smart [Sooner Safer Happier]17:09:17

Credit due to Klaus Leopold! 😀

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Mike T17:09:04

This is a great highlight for why so many isolated agile adoptions fail. You can’t be an agile team if every part of the value stream around you is waterfall.

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering17:09:59

Outcome and System focus are the perfect antidote to hype 🙌

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:31

As @gnuyoga said, "for the first time in my career, the business and operations and support and HR asking me to slow down. Versus being blamed for being late, underdelivering, and going too slow."

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Grant Best17:09:32

Our organizations constraint is being able to state the business problem or requirement that needs to be met for the shiny new software they want to experiment with. This resonates greatly to our current state!

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Jon Smart [Sooner Safer Happier]17:09:00

Don’t confuse activity with output or output with outcomes

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere17:09:41

I think a piece downstream of outcomes in Mik's model is "impact" which is generally the business impact that results from achieving (or missing) those customer or employee outcomes. The lagging indicators. Often quantified in revenue, cost management, risk mitigation, etc. https://blog.crisp.se/2019/10/16/christopheachouiantz/output-vs-outcome-vs-impact

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:06

A head scratcher: have you seen how many functional specialities are required to ship these new capabilities? It's like the hospital emergency department: In WWO book, we wrote that EDs were so much safer in the 1950s, because there were only 2 functional specialities (doctors and nurses). Now there are hundreds of functional specialties, far outstripping the Layer 3 ability to coordinate. Establishing flow in these systems require a super sophisticated Layer 3 management system. TLDR: leader's jobs will get more harder, not easier.

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Owen Parker, CTO - Arkana Labs17:09:13

Complexity in healthcare is 100% driven by regulatory change. Almost every physician I talk to would swear that paper charts are faster. Classic automation for the sake of automation.

Stuart Pearce17:09:06

So often the failure occurs before we even begin by not having a strong thesis for why we are building “we believe building x will lead to outcomes y such that impact z”

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Jon Smart [Sooner Safer Happier]17:09:53

Yes, hypothesis with experimentation and data feedback loops of leading and lagging value measures. Amplify what works and dampen what doesn’t. Complex Adaptive Systems are unknowable.

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Grant Best17:09:01

"We don't have time to define a thesis.. this takes too much time, boss said we need to replace x with y next week."

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Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere17:09:01

The "we believe" or "we bet" language also requires culture shift from deterministic to emergent thinking. Requires considerable psych safety in place (modeled by leadership) to be willing to be wrong (i.e. intelligent failure) and not be punished for it.

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Chris Gallivan (Planview)17:09:40

We don't do well when outcome lags action in time and space.

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Jon Smart [Sooner Safer Happier]17:09:13

Hence the importance of ‘elephant carpaccio’, minimizing time to learning. And leading & lagging measures.

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Chris Gallivan (Planview)17:09:04

I see us moving on to the next thing vs these practices

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:45

OTOH, we've also heard from many that AI reduces need for functional specialists (e.g., need something done in Drupal, Python, Neo4j, MySQL? Just ask the AI. No need to get a specialist.)

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Ben Grinnell17:09:27

This org change is so right, and constantly demonstrated by conways law, but so hard, especially when my biggest stakeholders are the CFO and CDIO!

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Dennis Feiock17:09:01

Diluted, shared ownership -- also highly correlated to what I call the "rockem sockem robots" management model

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering17:09:36

Operating model and The value stream network seem to be the least popular and simultaneously most impactful aspects of organizational performance :thinking_face: The answer I hear from nearly every leader I speak with is that “nobody owns that”

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Marc Eastburn17:09:54

Need to adopt the Burning Man boss model Gene talked about on day 1

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:54

Implication of Conway's Law: if you have a complex shared resources in a functional organization, you have lots of dependencies and low cohesion/coherence. The countermeasure: duplication, which seems wasteful, but enables independence of action and high coherence

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering17:09:00

Amazon does a great job of making that trade off explicit and intentional, with clear guidance to prefer duplication over dependency or premature standardization 💪

Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:09:14

This was highlighted in a very real way in “Teams of Teams” - creating duplicate missions at the edge but all aligned to a higher common objective

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:56

I think Mik is making the case that in the future, we're going to have lots of modular structures, or lots of duplication -- because that is needed to liberate teams to create value faster. (Many software architects may find this distasteful)

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Robert Jackiewicz - Kablamo Canada17:09:04

I see this every day with my clients. The goal to centralize is not the way. Image if the internet was all centralized.

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Geraint Levan17:09:06

The duplication within the org lets you run more parallel experiments (of entire paths to a target objective). K = parallel experiments

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution17:09:23

📖 And now, a warm welcome to @cbhawthorne, VP of Product Operations and Head of Technical Product Management, Datavant and @cbaldwin, Professor, Harvard Business School. They will present: Design Rules in Practice: Building Shared Capabilities at Datavant

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:01

There are a surprisingly high number of integrals and square roots and exponents in the option value formula and how it's used. (Which is why, I suppose, Merton/Black/Scholes won a Nobel Prize for it.)

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Mike T17:09:35

I was trying to google this and keep getting directed to stock evaluation for it - does anyone have a link for applications in software specific examples or is it just generic application of the formula for a similar “value” assessment that they used for stock options pricing?

Stephen Fishman19:09:18

Hey @bubthegreat - I hear you.. the formulas/calculus are dense… I tend to think of this in a different way. I use @cbaldwin ‘s formula as a decision making tool more than an accounting tool. I.E., to follow the path of small bets placed wide in a sea of high uncertainty, you can set the defaults in your approach to make the happy accidents happen predictably through sequential optionality … one way we talk about it in the book is to use the casino frame. Key point to remember - casinos don’t gamble. They work the math because they know how probability works… no bet is guaranteed but “small bets placed wide works in their favor because they have the edge over the bettor” it’s not mathematically possible for them to lose because of the scale With tech options, it’s bit different and the bets are longer term in nature. While you’re not guaranteed to win just by having the option … you’ve improved your propensity because your cost/time to capture market share in a time of change is shorter than competitors who’ve taken the “shortcut by default” path that’s so pervasive in enterprise IT where the normative behavior is to compress teams and cut approaches that don’t have a deterministic outcome. I.E., it’s hard to justify decomposition for use cases you don’t know about yet… but that’s the point. The ones who are most ready to capitalize when the future arrives will have the best chance to exploit it. You can see it play out this way with AI in the last few years… so many of the digital giants were able to embed AI throughout their platforms in wildly short times… they could do this because the platforms themselves were both decomposed and built in the context of externalized use -> they built up technical credit and cashed the chit in when the future arrived

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Stephen Fishman19:09:33

The pithy phrase: preparation beats prediction

Stephen Fishman19:09:22

Please check out unbundling the enterprise… it’s more than the academics of it. It’s got concrete patterns and methods to help you apply it … all based on real world case studies across a wide array of industries. It also has a leader/practitioner guide section to help you keep your teams on the rails with clear and concrete risks and mitigation strategies so you don’t have to learn from your own mistakes… you can learn from the hard won experience of others who’ve done it at scale

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Mike T22:09:28

For what it’s worth, I’m not worried about the formula density just making sure that I understand the conceptual application

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:41

Flow process -> assembly line; job shop -> ticket queue

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]17:09:54

this is a master class in clearly explaining the key topology issues I see everywhere at large enterprises, amazing explanation. This is giving me such clear language to use to describe these things back in my own day to day life

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)17:09:11

From the person who literally wrote the book on this. 🙌

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Stephen Fishman17:09:59

The book (design rules) is more than a writing/creative effort … the research, analysis, and synthesis are stunning in how well it explains and proves how optionality works… it’s not theory, it’s observable reality with so many enterprises & products

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Julia Bellis17:09:33

Such a fascinating set of abstractions from Dr Carliss Baldwin. I love how clearly she explains how many things can be the same 'kind of thing' over time.

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Clare Hawthorne (2024)20:09:42

@jonathansmart1 - I love the Cynefin framework!

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering17:09:46

This is what got John Rauser and I so excited when we wrote Wiring for Flow. This concept of the “spanning layer” as platform, a constraint that productively connects the infinite variety of producers/origins to consumers/destinations (e.g. Internet Protocol is that constraint, and allows for optionality. The spanning layer on the internet that allows for effective operation/flow across all that variety) https://itrevolution.com/product/wiring-for-flow/

Topo Pal17:09:07

This is not a conference talk. This is a classroom. Thank you ITR!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair17:09:21

Thus the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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SlackMind17:09:00

The breakout sessions are starting in 5 minutes. Start navigating your way to whichever session you’re attending. https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GAC5FBEJ/timer.png

Matt Ring (he/him) - Sr. Product/Engineering Coach, John Deere18:09:08

John Willis: "I'm just gonna scare the heck out of you for the next 30 minutes." :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: Buckle up!

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Andy Domeier18:09:51

It's working! :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:09:23

If I remember right, @topo.pal , while at Circuit City, was on the team that created the JAR file format for Java. Must have been early 2000s?? Amazing! (This must have predated and enabled the creation of Maven?)

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Andy Domeier18:09:33

I sure hope @botchagalupe closes with some kind of warm fuzzy! :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Heidi Waterhouse18:09:36

I'm not liking our chances

Amy McCain - Disney18:09:47

So every vulnerability is now a zero-day. Yikes.

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:09:40

Welcome to this brave new world. There is no going back. (Had Claude Code corrupt some of my data -- luckily, a friend told me I need to make a "one command to backup production database" command. Restore took an hour.)

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Cat Walsh18:09:33

Would love to learn more about the solution you deployed here Gene! Something that I'm thinking about as we try to set up our devs to do more vibe-coding (with the right guard rails in place!)

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair18:09:26

(I asked it to fix the query, but it changed the data instead. 😂 😂 I now automated the database restore process. I'll never go back to the old way — beats coding by hand!)

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Greg18:09:58

@botchagalupe great presentation!

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Cornelia Davis19:09:20

great talk from @botchagalupe this morning called "AI for Managers" but was all about "AI and Security (or a lack thereof)" - John, any chance to have a list of all of the reports, studies and other resources you highlighted throughout? That list alone would be an amazingly useful resource.

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SlackMind20:09:00

The breakout sessions are starting again in 5 minutes. Start navigating your way to whichever session you’re attending. https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GAC5FBEJ/timer.png

Tom Robertson20:09:02

Any other Obsidian nerds attending? I've had some fun using the codex CLI to traverse my vault for all my notes about the conference, traverse the wiki links I'm creating, and creating a summary of the major themes from the conference (so far) based on my notes. It's so fun! I remoted into my mac mini at home to run it so I can have the agent running while my laptop is asleep.

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Michael Winslow, Director of Engineering, Amazon Music20:09:51

Tom, look up my SDM "Marc Rawji" on LinkedIn if you want to geek out on Obsidian. He has contributed to it and get kudos regularly.!

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Chris Shinkle (Director of Innovation - SEP)21:09:56

Hey @tommertron would love to chat about Obsidian and what you’re doing with it, how you structuring your vault, what you’re doing with AI, etc

Tom Robertson21:09:47

Always love talking obsidian! Happy to meet in the hallway outside the main ballroom after this talk (~230).

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Marc Eastburn20:09:38

Love the shirt @azimman

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Heidi Waterhouse20:09:53

How do we allow users to accept the changes in our software at their place, not ours?

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Jeff Gallimore (CTIO - Excella)21:09:33

“We bought all the tools. Because more tools are better, right?”

2
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Christine Hudson21:09:00

"With all the fun dev tools, we got a 16 day improvement in lead time. Awesome, right? But that was only 6% improvement."

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Max Reele21:09:28

"To be great at AI integration, you need to be great at DevOps"

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Bjorn (Liatrio)21:09:56

Don’t put AI horse before the CI cart - @scott.prugh 🔥

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Christine Hudson21:09:28

"How do you use AI to reduce coordination costs?" Yessss. This.

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PeteB21:09:26

“Can we just smear AI on everything and make the problems go away?”

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Michael Winslow, Director of Engineering, Amazon Music21:09:41

"My dad has an awesome set of tools! He can fix it!" - Jeff Spicoli, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

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Randy Shoup21:09:51

Oh, the fact that you had to say the movie name is sad. The kids these days! 😉

Cat Walsh21:09:37

Could we get the example case studies from the slides after this presentation? This is going to be so useful for our organisation and AI adoption journey ahead!

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Christine Hudson21:09:10

Love this quote about this conference “My professional Disney land exists!” Thank you for letting me share it @geraint.levan

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SlackMind21:09:00

The final plenary sessions are starting again in 5 minutes. Start making your way back to the Royal Ballroom. https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GAC5FBEJ/timer.png

David Alisch22:09:35

I think @genek is talking about Vibe Conferencing

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution22:09:47

> Welcome to the last segment of programming for the conference! Some of you may be wondering what we have in store for you, and I can promise you that there will be things that are novel and new. > But before then, I want to share what an incredible 2.5 days here it has been for me at this conference, and I so much appreciate all the fantastic conversations I’ve had with so many of you. > But what I find even more exciting is that you are connecting with so many of your fellow travelers, not just to communicate but also to collaborate. > Since the beginning of this conference in 2014, people have asked for ways to continue these types of conversations — we’ve done some experiments, but something seemed missing. > But several of you asked for a structured way to cohorts of you to meet regularly, say, monthly for 90 minutes, between now and the next annual conference. It would be a combination of open conversation, facilitated discussion, and guest lectures from experts. All under Chatham House rules, where people can share and use information from meetings freely, but without revealing who said what or even who attended. > This seems so potentially valuable now, when the field is changing so quickly, and there are so many experiments happening that we can collectively learn from. > If this interests you, I’d love to explore this with you — just please respond with an emoji to this Slack message.

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Cornelia Davis22:09:14

💯 interested!

Ann Perry - IT Revolution22:09:49

🛠️ Please welcome @ericc, Director - Engineering Effectiveness, and @philip.sears, AI Enablement Lead from Grainger, here to present: When Vibe Coding Doesn’t Vibe: Hard Truths in Enterprise AI

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:06

Who counts lines of code anymore? 😂

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Leaf22:09:26

The human who has been asked to review it ;)

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:13

Afraid? Just because it deleted some data from our production database? That's what backups are for! Onwards!

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Clare Hawthorne (2025)22:09:42

Can someone from Grainger share the "Sensible Defaults" -- I would LOVE to take a look!!

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Emily Rosengren22:09:30

I will look into if we can share that publicly. They will largely look familiar to this group I think :-)

Clare Hawthorne (2025)22:09:14

🙏 🤞 (we've been trying to codify ours, but it would be amazing to have a place to start from)

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Cornelia Davis22:09:48

"As an engineering leader I am able to express my views with prototypes and PRs instead of powerpoint" 👈 This!

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:58

Don't take a screenshot like I did of that list of AI vendors, like I did — those company names were AI-generated, to comply with some corp communication rules about not naming real vendors. 😂

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Jason Yip22:09:58

Any similarity to real AI vendors is purely coincidental

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philip.sears22:09:39

Protecting the innocent 😆

Emanuel Budisan22:09:35

Both safe and fast. Finding ways to operate within the beautiful balance of optimism and realism.

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Dennis Feiock22:09:34

"No one tool to rule them all" -- if you are in enterprise sdlc tooling then limiting your platform to just the one way will quickly alienate the customers you're trying to serve

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:48

Super interesting — they're underscoring that when there's lots of uncertainty, don't make long term commitments.

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:04

Taking a step back to look at the value stream before applying AI means implementing solutions where the most impactful problems are 🙌

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eric - Grainger22:09:13

We learned from the best @steveelsewhere !!!

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Andy Domeier22:09:09

Grainger - ya'll have all had a great story all conference. Thanks for all your time and energy coming here to share your journey throughout all the 3 days! Appreciate your investment in the community. thankyou

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eric - Grainger22:09:56

We were honored to give back to the awesome community!

Cliff Risley - MISO Energy22:09:08

ETLS - The Conference for the Ones who get it Done [Powered by Grainger]

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eric - Grainger22:09:12

Love ❤️ it!

Andy Domeier22:09:44

Custom rules in a simple .md has been an awesome win for us too... almost too easy but works.

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Ronica Roth22:09:26

"this is the worst AI we're going to use"

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Jennifer Petoff, PgM Director, Google SRE22:09:37

Ask AI how to measure the impact of AI 😊

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Patrick Egan22:09:04

Grainger sensible defaults (10) Build for production Build in security Trunk based development Test driven development Pair programming Team ownership of quality Automated deployments Continuous Delivery Fast automated builds Smaller stories

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gratitude-thank-you 3
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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:34

Only cost centers brag about cost savings — the reward is budget cuts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. 😆

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Dennis Feiock22:09:05

"Surveys aren't enough" -- Producing sound surveys is much harder than most would expect. Just ask the State of DevOps folks 😂

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:33

“Meet them where they are” is perpetually great advice 🙌

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Geraint Levan22:09:52

So many good one liners. "Commit document bankruptcy if you have to."

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eric - Grainger22:09:37

Gotta do it! It turns out AI can’t do any better than humans when they get 5 copies back from Confluence.

Ann Perry - IT Revolution22:09:55

:shopping_bags: Next, please welcome @rshoup, SVP Engineering at Thrive Market, here to present: How We Doubled Engineering Productivity at eBay, but Still Didn't Save the Company

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Andy Domeier22:09:10

"Context is key" - Isn't it a little sad that we seem more willing to have good documentation because it helps us AI better... but our new engineers have needed this for YEARS!

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Christine Hudson22:09:59

The most quoted person in the DevOps handbook! Thanks for reminding us. I had forgotten that amazing bit about @rshoup

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Chris Shinkle (Director of Innovation - SEP)22:09:26

I loved Grainger’s talk — It was a great reminder for me that every org and every person is on a different learning journey. While it’s exciting to see so much buzz around vibe coding, it doesn’t mean everyone should (or even can) jump in right now. Some people are ready to experiment; others may need more time, safety, or context first. I love that this community encourages one another, shares what we’re learning, and remembers that growth happens at different paces for each of us.

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Dennis Feiock22:09:18

"I also owned the platform organization" -- the value of having a strong executive champion to bring resources to bear to address problems

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Maria Muir [Sooner Safer Happier]22:09:20

Love the Q: if you needed to deploy every day, what would get in the way? >> impediment backlog creation

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:46

Bryan Finster shared this with me the first time I heard it: “What is preventing us from deploying to production today?”

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Christine Hudson22:09:21

"I had no original ideas during this period at all. We just followed the DevOps playbook." <-- While I do not believe the bit about "no original ideas", I do love executing via deliberate practice of devops principles. 🙂

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:32

Mobile app: 2010: By 2024, they had become big balls of mud.

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Christine Hudson22:09:00

Yes. Love the way he said it. "Very much NOT modularized. Very much balls of mud."

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Martin Deslongchamps - Triton Digital22:09:14

> And we automated what we call a patch pipeline, where we could consistently do infrastructure upgrades, security patches upgrades dependencies, etc. Interesting! 💪:skin-tone-2:

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]22:09:27

Randy has the best speaking style 😆

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Christine Hudson22:09:41

Awwww. That's not a fun place to be, where you don't believe things will change. "He didn't fight me. He just didn't think it was possible."

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:29

"Every user-facing change met with near-revolt ("Seller Straightjacket")"

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Amy McCain - Disney22:09:50

“This is how we’ve always done it, why change?” — never been a fan of that risk-averse, innovation-killing mindset.

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:58

Randy summarizing such complicated dynamics in monolithic planning in 4 points is amazing :star-struck:

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Clare Hawthorne (2025)22:09:18

$1.5B to learn how to take credit cards 🤯

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:37

50 teams needed to coordinate for releases. Wow.

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:23

Sounds like The Checkbox Project! 😅

Robert Jackiewicz - Kablamo Canada22:09:52

That’s a lot of people to take out to lunch

Jason Yip22:09:44

It seems like the unit of work for metrics should have been the coordinated release more than individual services.

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Chris Shinkle (Director of Innovation - SEP)22:09:07

anyone else wish they had as much energy as Randy after 3 days of conference talks!?!?

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair22:09:27

I wanted to applaud, but didn't want to appear to be rude... It just seemed wonderfully epic.

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:51

Winning at the micro scale =/= winning at the macro scale :melting_face: See: winning at output =/= winning at outcomes

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Jason Yip22:09:51

Smells like “earned value management”

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Tom Herron22:09:59

This is a wonderful, and rather refreshing, talk!

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Robert Jackiewicz - Kablamo Canada22:09:33

Easily top 3 talks of the conference!

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Marc Eastburn22:09:30

And still more to come!

Blair Salmon (Liatrio)22:09:03

My elevator buddy! An amazing talk @rshoup

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Randy Shoup22:09:37

Hey, man! Couldn't have done it without you 🙂

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:06

What’s most interesting about this to me is that AI helps with none of this and will actually make it all worse 😬

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Jason Yip22:09:38

Business strategy and culture agent?

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Steve Pereira - Co-Author of Flow Engineering22:09:53

Agentic human factors and psychological safety 😂

Randy Shoup22:09:10

Absolutely true. AI intensifies these pathologies.

Emanuel Budisan22:09:06

Is VP X in the room with us? 🙂

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Robert Jackiewicz - Kablamo Canada22:09:11

Don’t know whether I should show this talk to my clients, or if it will completely scare them. But the first step to recognizing you have a problem is knowing you have a problem.

Dennis Feiock22:09:13

This is the sort of real-talk that orgs should be having challenging conversations about

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Chris Shinkle (Director of Innovation - SEP)22:09:16

LOVE this talk from Randy! (except for the fact that he's describing some behaviors in my org.)

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Ronica Roth22:09:20

I consulted into eBay (on agile adoption) back in ~2009. I'm so surprised/ not-surprised that nothing changed in so long.

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Andy Domeier22:09:31

VP X sounds like a Marvel movie villain :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]22:09:46

I have definitely worked for VP X and survived just to watch them get fired. Honestly even when you survive you're pretty spent on the organization at that point (even though my next supervisor was great)

Jason Yip22:09:48

Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer comes to mind

Ann Perry - IT Revolution22:09:09

🎧 And now, please say hello to @michael.s.winslow, here to present: Delivering Music and Spoken Word at One of the World’s Largest Tech Companies

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James22:09:53

What an awesome talk. Thank you Randy!

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Burak Erol22:09:36

It was one of the best stories of the conference for sure, thanks @rshoup !

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Dennis Feiock22:09:09

The creative folks certainly do things different 😂

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]22:09:29

re:invent energy stopping in to visit ETLS25

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Weylin - Allegiant Airlines22:09:08

Shout out to the lighting designer in the back of the room who must have been waiting all summit for that moment to show off their skills (could they use AI though??)

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Burak Erol22:09:40

I haven’t expected all of us listening to Kendrick Lamar during this summit :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Andy Domeier22:09:11

@genek I am thinking your connection with @michael.s.winslow has been underutilized for after party entertainment at ETLS. :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Dennis Feiock22:09:32

"Once we realized we were being measured" -- people will always game metrics. The trick is to drive maturity when people do it

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Clare Hawthorne (2025)23:09:08

i love a good reference to The Hawthorne Effect 😂

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Gene Kim, ITREV, Program Chair23:09:31

"Make my character Sarah." 😂

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]23:09:39

I love this idea, great way to build a digestible narrative! I wonder if it can be transposed to other media "Make all the characters members of Monte Python's The Holy Grail"

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Christine Hudson23:09:49

@michael.s.winslow I would be interested in your waste identification algorithm... I hope connecting as humans is a value add activity? 🙂

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Michael Winslow, Director of Engineering, Amazon Music04:09:04

Oh this is definitely not waste. It would likely fall under "necessary non-value-add" at worste.

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Ann Perry - IT Revolution23:09:11

ssh Bringing us to a close will be @jonathansmart1, who will present: Certified Really AI Practitioner (CRAP)

👏 4
Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]23:09:00

hahaha omg I'm glad I stayed for this

😂 5
Tom Herron23:09:00

Jon are you available for parties?

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]23:09:01

we need to get this talk over at Enterprise Platform Tech at Capital One, it would kill

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Andy Domeier23:09:16

"Fast to build, Slow to Matter" :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

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Ronica Roth23:09:29

"Fast to build, slow to matter!"

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Josh Phillips [Feeling the Vibe]23:09:44

can we crowdsource John Smart to make an Office Space / IT Crowd style movie based on this talk?

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Christine Hudson23:09:42

"AI doesn't need to eat, sleep or have awkward emotions."

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Christine Hudson23:09:02

SO much learning and meeting SO MANY amazing humans. Thanks, everyone!

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Padmaja Duvvuri23:09:57

Hard to believe we’re already at the last day of the summit! Grateful for the incredible sessions, insightful discussions, and most of all, the chance to connect with such inspiring leaders. Looking forward to staying in touch and carrying these learnings forward.

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Chuck Boyer23:09:01

Not sure where to post this question, so just going to go for it… Our security experts are concerned about the security around MCPs. How are you securing your internal MCPs? Are you using particular vendors or technologies? When using external or 3rd party MCPs, do you have similar concerns around the security/validity of the information exchanged?

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Ian Eslick01:09:48

We’re evaluating vendors like Portkey and Cequence who are thinking about this and helping manage user level authz between agent tools and systems. For unblocking quickly - you can vibe code a simple server that integrates with your identity system and can provide some basic tools to agents while you are working on a more scalable enterprise solution.

Stephen Fishman03:09:23

@chuck - that’s something the Boomi has been working on … we’re very invested in agent security and governance/guardrails

Betty Junod05:09:24

This is definitely a work in progress as it’s not natively in MCP but I’ve seen movement in the ecosystem. Okta recently announced some work they are doing around it. We are also working on things in this area at Heroku too

Annie Vella03:09:42

I’m very interested in security around MCP servers so would be keen to learn and share learnings on this topic too!

👍 1
Ian Eslick04:09:41

Thread on this forum to capture collective learning and heard from some of our vendor-partners?

👌 3
SlackMind23:09:00

Please submit your feedback for the talks you attended. It’s so valuable for us and the speakers. And after all, feedback is a gift and sharing is caring! Enter your feedback for those talks here: https://etlslasvegas2025.sched.com/ https://devopsenterprise.slack.com/files/U06GCH026KT/F09GFGYPA0L/feedback.png