How to keep everyone happy (on a shoestring)?
summary
A midsize SaaS quarter spirals into an avalanche: an accidental AWS bill that blows budget, key engineers leaving, security bounty emails and a Black Friday launch all collide. The concrete claim is that framing this as a constraint satisfaction problem leads to actionable heuristics: build a happiness sparse matrix to map limits vs stakeholders, run a pizza trade-off rotation (seven slices for eight people) plus triage, impact-weighting, Slack incident notices, and emotional‑bank-account rituals like paid lunches and credit sharing — enough fairness and transparency to stop burnout and keep delivery moving.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:11Four parts of the talk
- 1:53Limiting forces in dev
- 3:41Real problems and crises
- 5:47Happiness sparse matrix
- 8:18Pizza trade-off heuristics
- 10:28Classifying problems
- 11:55Triage and good-enough fixes
- 13:46Prioritizing by impact
- 15:14Preventing burnout
- 16:39Emotional bank accounts
- 18:53Summary
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