We built it, and no one came - How to Market Your Internal Developer Platform

You’ve built the perfect platform, but those pesky developers aren’t using it. I’ve hear this story frequently over the years. More than not, it means the platform team is not doing the marketing needed. Branding, t-shirts, platform advocacy, community management, staffing for marketing, and the other basics of a marketing program. I know: you read the word marketing and you feel a little revolted. For a successful platform in a large organization, though, you need it! Thankfully, there are many years of organizations figuring out what platform marketing is and how to do it. This talk will go over what platform and product marketing is and then tactics learned in organizations like Mercedes-Benz, ING, BT, Garmin and others.

If it’s BS work, have the BS-artist do it - Using AI for Bureaucratic Toil Removal

There’s a lot of bureaucratic toil you need to deal with when you’re improving your software culture, tools, and methods inside large organizations. You know: DevOps, digital transformation, and stuff. There’s also just the daily corporate nonsense you need to deal with. This talk will explore using AIs to help reduce bureaucratic toil like: keeping up with status meetings and weekly reports, dealing with glacial-speed governance, persuading people to embrace new ideas like pair programming, vision and strategy, writings tories and managing backlogs, transforming HR policy, working with finance, dealing with the ticket-wall, and more. You’ll see “live prompting” with ChatGPT, even from audience suggestions. Come experiment with using AI to cut through the kind of toil that’s keeping your organization in Westrum’s Bureaucratic column.

Working with Reluctance to Change

The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things, get better, change. However, many more people seem less than eager to change - your co-workers, managers, and the countless “others” in your organization. In the discussions I have with change agents and executives in large organizations, this reluctance to change is one of the top three concerning topics. I invite you to this discussion to talk about why people are reluctant to change, how you’ve worked helped people change, or, perhaps given up, and, hopefully, to share stories about your own experience overcoming reluctance. Our goal will be to move beyond being frustrated with “frozen” minds and middles, and get a sense for what to do about it…if anything. To start the discussion, I’ll start with a few stories and methods for getting people to change that I’ve encountered in the past few years.

Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms

This talk covers best and worst practices for Platform engineering. The trick is, we didn't always use this phrase, so we actually have many years of experience to learn from. Who are you? You're in a DevOps, wait, I mean SRE...nope, scatch that..."platform engineering" team. People are coming at you to get kubernetes up and running and then build some kind of platform on-top of kubernetes. But you just got a build pipeline in place! Getting kubernetes ready for developers may be a new problem, but building and running developer platforms has been going on for at least ten years. This talk will cover the lessons those organizations have learned such as: product managing the platform, attracting and retaining developers, seeding trust and skills, re-skilling existing ops staff, and more. Examples are drawn from organizations like Mercedes-Benz, the US Airforce, large insurance companies and banks, and more.

How to survive and thrive in a BigCo

This talk will go over what I’ve learned working in large companies from my strange adventure working with a bunch of MBAs in corporate strategy at Dell, to working with large companies as an industry analyst, to working with marketing and product people at large companies.

If you work at a small, cool company, you can skip this talk. The rest of us in large, slow moving companies that rely on meetings, email, and inbox 2,000 to get the daily work done need some therapy and advice for thriving in big, “dumb” companies. I’ve worked in such companies and figured out how to thrive in the “back to back meetings” world we’re taught to avoid. They’re big, slow moving, and seem to use Microsoft Office as their core innovation engine. I’ll tell you my tactics.

If people at your work always talk about “aircraft carriers” this is the talk for you.

For whatever reasons you’re there, why not make the best of it and learn how to get along and even thrive instead of letting your head explode in rage? This talk will go over what I’ve learned working in large companies from my strange adventure working with a bunch of MBAs in corporate strategy at Dell, to working with large companies as an industry analyst, to working with marketing and product people at large companies.

Escaping the Legacy Trap - a proven method for application modernization

You're facing a big, multi-year re-write of your core applications. How do you start? This talk will explain one method used by large organizations, SWIFT. Sadly, older applications and services too often slow down and stop business innovation. Yet, 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change. They’re caught in the legacy trap! Organizations simply can’t figure out how to prioritize this invisible work over adding new features and apps. But today, there’s no room to avoid modernizing core systems if your business wants to keep up. No more new features can be added to software and no more progress can be made on transformation journeys until this fear is faced. Come hear how people are escaping the legacy trap. This talk is based on the book by Coté and Marc Zotter, The Legacy Trap.

Thanks for taking the time to consider this talk!

This talk is based on one of my books, found here:

https://cote.io/uploads/2022/345d7a98d1.pdf

Here is a recording of an early version of this presentation with my co-author. The version I give now is less focused on writing the book and other "meta" content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrPLEFOf-z8