Your team as a distributed system

As you level up in technical roles, you may find yourself thrust into team leadership and management. This sneaks up on you and can leave you without the skills to adequately understand, engage with, and lead your team—which inevitably has a negative effect on your team, and this effect is multiplied as you scale. What if you could reach into the toolbox you use to understand technical problems—software architecture and distributed systems theory—to understand your team? Could you learn to better manage people?

Andrew Harvey (Microsoft) explores the dynamics of teams and how they map to your understanding of distributed systems. Using this understanding, you can apply distributed systems theory to help unpack some of the dynamics of your team and optimize them for scale. From communication to culture, Andrew breaks down the components of the distributed system, explaining what makes it tick, using things like CAP theorem and the eight fallacies of distributed systems. You’ll walk away with some tools to help understand your team and set yourself up for successful scaling.

This session was recorded at the 2019 O'Reilly Velocity Conference in San Jose.