You've migrated your business to the cloud. You've embraced DevOps. All your engineering teams operate the systems they write. You don't need central teams any longer ... or do you? In this talk, we discuss how Netflix balances the need for product teams to stay loosely coupled yet how it maximizes the leverage for productivity and velocity that healthy central teams provide.

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Role of Central Teams
in Organizations
Ruslan Meshenberg
VP, Productivity Engineering
Netflix, Inc.
D E V 3 7 0

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Who needs Central teams?

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Small company

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Central teams forming

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Central + Local Central teams

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Cloud frees the engineers to
do the right thing
No more waiting for approvals
Resources are just an API call away

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Cloud adoption gave way
to the rise of…
Moving from traditional
Dev / Ops / QA model
to full end-end ownership

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DevOps—Engineers own the full lifecycle

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Why do you need the Central teams?

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Let’s talk about the SW lifecycle

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How many of these do you need?

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How many of these do you need?

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Central teams create leverage

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Challenges

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No Central teams
mandate at Netflix
Freedom & Responsibility
Reigns

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What are you optimizing?

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Leader or fast follower?
Dangers of getting to far
ahead of too far behind

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Leader or fast follower?

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Build or Buy
When do you build a
bespoke solution instead
of leveraging an existing
one?

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Open source what you build

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Effective communication
How do you continuously update
your customers on what’s new
and improved?

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Generalized vs. specialized needs
or

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Product management

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Finding the right engagement model

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Finding the right engagement model

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Customer and partner relationships

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Driving change

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Aligning central teams

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Fragmentation
Deliberate and accidental
fragmentation

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Conclusions

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Focus on the business value

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Celebrate adoption

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Soft metrics
(e.g.,customerhappiness)
are valuable

36. Thank you!
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Ruslan Meshenberg
@rusmeshenberg

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