Vilas Veeraraghavan
Vice President, Engineering
San Francisco, California, United States
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Vilas is an experienced Engineering leader who has spent his past work life at Comcast, Netflix, Walmart and Bill building high performance teams that focus their attention on efficient software delivery of distributed workloads in the cloud, chaos engineering, CI/CD at scale and improving DevEx across the enterprise by enabling engineers to do more with tools. He has deep expertise in varied industries like Media Streaming, Retail, Fintech and the transportation and logistics industry.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Mindful Scaling: Reducing Cognitive Overload in Engineering Leadership
In the dynamic landscape of technology and product development, engineering teams and leaders are often on the frontline of scaling innovations. However, this pursuit of growth frequently leads to cognitive overload and burnout, posing a significant challenge to both productivity and well-being. This talk is about strategies to reduce this cognitive load for Engineering teams and leaders as they build products at scale.
Attendees will learn:
- Strategies to mitigate cognitive overload, utilizing real-world examples from high-performance teams to identify and reduce stressors.
- Techniques to simplify complex systems, based on successful applications that enhance focus and efficiency.
- Leadership practices to prevent burnout, including setting realistic goals, fostering clear communication, and promoting a balanced approach to work-life integration.
- Tools and technologies that support reduced cognitive load, ensuring teams remain agile and creative during scaling.
This talk distills theoretical insights and practical experiences into a guide for engineering leaders to navigate scaling challenges effectively, prioritizing team health and sustain innovation. Attendees will depart with strategies to foster resilient, high-performing teams in fast-paced environments.
The Unspoken ROI: Navigating the Tension Between DevEx Investment and Business Value
This talk explores the uneasy balance between developer needs and business outcomes and how to address the often overlooked challenges and uncomfortable truths in quantifying DevEx investment
Driving go-to-market decisions using signals from DevEx and Quality metrics
Far too many businesses attack the issue of decreasing velocity and reduced quality in a reactive manner - after an incident has occurred in production or a customer has escalated an issue. Instead, leaders should rely on DevEx and quality metrics as leading indicators of how successful a product rollout will be - these metrics can predict engagement, retention rates, as well as provide clear signals for adoption of new innovations by the end customer. This talk will share stories from the experimentation culture at Netflix and Walmart with a specific emphasis on how every organization can course correct their future delivery by comprehending and acting proactively on these metrics. The talk will define the DevEx and quality metrics, clarify how they are distinct from DORA metrics and will provide insights to the audience on how they can implement these metrics in their own firms.
Conflict resolution in high performance teams via Active Inclusion
This talk stems from my learnings during my transition from Netflix to Walmart. At Walmart, I got an opportunity to not just build a team from scratch but also influence the DevOps culture in a positive way. At any company, building and maintaining high performance dev teams is a tough job. Most high-performing developers are passionate, talented and very opinionated individuals. For Managers and Directors leading such areas, conflict resolution could become a burden. I realized early that it doesnt have to be this way. Using simple "Active Inclusion" techniques that I derived from Netflix's core principles, I was able to empower teams to come together and resolve conflicts quickly and amicably. In some cases, we have seen a rise in accountability and ownership due to "Active inclusion" tactics. We will discuss some real world scenarios and case studies during this talk. The audience can learn the techniques I relied on and honed at a Fortune One company (Walmart) that have influenced a rapid transformation of DevOps culture across our (extremely) large organization.
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