Elevate 2020
2020-09-30..2020-11-20
-- online --
Elevate ·
[Elevate 2019 by Plato, Elevate 2020, ELEVATE 2021, Elevate 2023, Elevate 2024]
who it's for
engineering managers, product managers, senior engineers, people managers, tech leads, talent and recruiting leaders, remote team leads
topics
remote team communications and async work; building high performing diverse teams; career ladders and promotion rubrics (PSHE); quantifying quality with telemetry (SPQR); planning remotely with demo scorecards and DRIs; managing up and influencing leadership; prioritization and product vision formation; interview rubrics and diverse slates; balancing new features with technical quality; measuring throughput with merge request rate and burn-up charts
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| David Singleton of Stripe presents with Q&A from Shweta Saraf of Packet at Elevate2020 | David Singleton, Shweta Saraf | 31m |
Claims that preparing earlier paid off: a remote hub launched May 2019 after remote hiring since 2013, teams stay small (about 7±2 people), and remote… | ||
| Building High-performing, Diverse Teams | Nick Caldwell, John Kim | 31m |
Practical, measurable steps: set targets (example goal 50/50 women in tech and 10% Black/Latinx tied to leadership performance); build pipelines via boot camp… | ||
| Jason Warner of Github Talks with Sonali Sambhus of Square at Elevate2020 by Plato | Jason Warner, Sonali Sambhus | 28m |
Companies report ~70% of engineering staff already distributed, so the operational rule is to over‑communicate across every level and treat remote work as the… | ||
| The 7 Biases of Product Teams | Shreyas Doshi | 31m |
Claims seven recurring decision biases that kill products and shows concrete countermeasures: a real case where customers verbally endorse a support-cost tool… | ||
| How to Be Intentional About Career Growth as an Engineer | Roojuta Lalani | 31m |
Breaks growth into three measurable buckets—career, intellectual, personal—and recommends specific practices: ask for timely feedback (Google Form or a virtual… | ||
| How Engineering Teams can Plan Remotely | Eric Johnson | 24m |
Argues teams plan asynchronously by writing decisions into shared artifacts, keeping everything editable and assigning one DRI for execution; contrasts fixed… | ||
| Managing Up for Engineering Leaders | Arquay Harris | 32m |
Managing up means building trust, influencing decisions, and anticipating goals rather than sucking up or manipulating; practical tactics include always… | ||
| Quantifying Quality for Engineers | Keith Adams | 38m |
Framework named SPQR (security performance quality reliability) treats user success as avoiding all unacceptable events and multiplies independent… | ||
| Maintaining High Morale, a Panel Discussion | natalia ceo | 32m |
Panelists describe concrete moves: company surveys show 76% of engineers want to stay remote and managers report higher burnout so teams add mental‑health… | ||
| Youtube to Coda: Building Top-performing Product Teams | Shishir Mehrotra | 27m |
Built a promotion rubric that replaces scope with PSHE (problem → solution → how → execution) and maps people along a performance curve showing a mid‑career… | ||
| How Engineers can Influence Other Engineers and PMs | Wayne Duso, Sabrina Farmer, Nancy Wang | 34m |
Explains practical steps to gain real influence: build trust by showing outcomes not hours, measure influence by who cites and copies your work, partner with… | ||
| Eli Budelli of Automattic Talks About Remote Team Communications at Elevate2020 by Plato | Eli Budelli | 10m |
Automattic defaults to async text work across 1200 employees across 70 countries and removes status meetings, replacing them with written decisions, built-in… | ||
| How to be Intentional About Career Growth as a PM | Lenny Rachitsky, Tiffany Dockery, Jackie Bavaro | 29m |
Practical, specific tactics: get a PM job via internal transfers, hackathons, or APM rotations; prefer teams that ship more frequently so learning cycles… | ||
| Scaling Engineering & Product Teams | Surabhi Gupta | 27m |
Reorganizes product engineering from three broad groups into four focused teams — core product, investing, cash management, app foundations — to reduce… | ||
| Balancing New Features While Maintaining Quality | Gautham Viswanathan, Bhavini Soneji, Vijay Gill | 31m |
Practical rules for shipping: prioritize by measurable impact and effort using t-shirt sizing, balance urgent revenue features against stability by aiming for… | ||
| Aligning Goals & Processes between Engineering & Product | Cathy Polinsky, Teresa Dietrich, Ian Wong | 33m |
Teams organize as epods (engineer product ops) and run recurring design sprints / concept sprints to co-own problems, not solutions, feeding quarterly plans… | ||
| Making an Impact as a Technologist | David Blair, Elaine Zhou, Shilpa Varma | 32m |
Panel lays out concrete moves: run an integrated scrum team (one experiment grows cross‑functional influence), run internal hackathons (some hacks become… | ||
| Career Ladders & Performance Management for Eng. Teams | Shannon Hogue, Alexandra Paredes, Chris Haag | 31m |
Advice: start small and practical — draft a simple engineering ladder with the team, reuse public examples, and tie levels to hiring and promotion decisions… | ||
| Prioritizing Effectively and Forming a Product Vision | Tido Carriero, Ezinne Udezue, Divya Ramachandran | 33m |
A practical playbook for turning vague priorities into funded projects with measurable returns: set a three‑year corporate strategy, group work into five to… | ||
| JB Coger, Cofounder of Plato introduces Elevate2020 by Plato | JB Coger | 10m |
Plato reports concrete scale and outcomes: 16,000 one-on-one video calls across mentors and mentees, more than 40 virtual and physical events plus 400 smaller… | ||
| Vijaya Kaza of Airbnb & Christian McCarrick of Facebook talk at Elevate2020 by Plato & Lohika | Vijaya Kaza, Christian McCarrick | 31m |
Presents a three‑layer scaling pyramid: foundations (automation, CICD and Spinnaker, agile/devops, machine‑learning for business decisions) enable a middle… | ||
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