Like a Fitbit for engineering teams with Grant Jenks from LinkedIn

https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts116/v4/5f/87/9b/5f879bd2-bc0b-c60b-512e-844a872d84ac/mza_4092883241998265269.jpg/600x600bb.jpg

Engineering Unblocked

Swarmia

27 episodes

4 days ago

Keeping software engineers in flow and unblocked is one of the key responsibilities of software development leaders. In each episode of the Engineering Unblocked podcast, Rebecca Murphey interviews leaders who have navigated challenges of scale, complexity, and growth. You’ll hear from people with lived experience across the software development ecosystem, from CTOs and VPEs to directors and line managers to product managers, program managers, tech leads, and more.

Technology

RSS

All content for Engineering Unblocked is the property of Swarmia and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Technology

https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_episode/37693965/37693965-1699279033581-db90f92cf772e.jpg

Like a Fitbit for engineering teams with Grant Jenks from LinkedIn

Engineering Unblocked

44 minutes 4 seconds

2 years ago

Like a Fitbit for engineering teams with Grant Jenks from LinkedIn

Grant Jenks is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn.

In this episode of Engineering Unblocked, Rebecca and Grant discuss how LinkedIn approaches the challenges of keeping its software engineers (and others) happy and productive, and how the Engineering Insights organization informs its work and the work of teams across LinkedIn.

Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/grant-jenks-linkedin-like-a-fitbit-for-engineering-teams

Timestamps (00:00) Introductions (01:00) Grant’s current role and his career journey (03:51) The origins of the productivity organization at LinkedIn (05:22) From building “tools” to maintaining critical development infrastructure (06:40) Incorporating commodity tools (08:06) Choosing which problems to solve (09:21) How the team’s metrics inform work across LinkedIn (12:05) Using the metrics to help teams set goals (13:30) Choosing the right metrics for the problem (15:32) Unique user problems at scale (18:07) Different problems and different perceptions for different personas (23:09) Working with productivity champions at the team level (23:40) Defining “happiness” and soliciting feedback (28:05) Spotting trends in the sentiment data, and choosing the right cadence (30:26) The product is productivity, and users can do surprising things (34:00) Making change happen at scale (38:33) Using metrics in a productivity emergency

Where to find Grant • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantjenks/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/Grant_Jenks

Where to find Rebecca • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmurphey

Links and mentions • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ • GitHub Codespaces: https://github.com/features/codespaces • Horizontal initiatives at LinkedIn: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/03/scaling-decision-making-across-teams-within-linkedin-engineering • Artifactory: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/