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Regardless of if someone is going through hypergrowth, just onboarding their first customers, or has already scaled ten times over, this talk will cover how to not let perfect get in the way of good when on a tight timeline, and how “more time” needs to be paired with removal of bias towards existing patterns, continuous cross-functional advocacy, and strong metrics and milestones to drive success.
“If you build it, they will come” works great for sports fiction, but the reality is we don’t start out building for scale – we build to see if it works first. For some, the scale never comes. For one telehealth company, the scale came pretty much overnight – and we fumbled it pretty hard.
In this talk, we’ll follow the story of how to prepare for high scale (and the gotchas that got us) with a scrappier approach in a seven-day timeframe, and how having more time alone didn’t guarantee us the win next time around. We’ll dive into the playbook for scaling the architecture while operating it in parallel – not only the services and tools, but also the larger technical strategy and cultural shifts that were required to break us out of our structural slump and help us score a major scaling goal.
When approaching scaling challenges (or any large system-wide architectural challenge):
- Start somewhere – don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
- More time does not mean better outcomes on its own
- Understand your critical path and follow it from start to finish
- Find your guiding metric/north star and measure against it regularly and consistently
We will discuss load testing tooling, automation approaches, system benchmarking, as well as organizational/technical strategy elements.
