Coté
Speaking
I speak a lot at conferences, internal events, and meetings here and there for work. Most the talks I give are listed on my sessionize profile page, but you can always ask for something new. You can see a selection of recordings of my past talks here. Some of the slides are available if you like to collect such stuff. Usually, I’m talking on the topic of doing better software at large organizations. Many of these talks are based on and draw from my books.
Here are few of the talks I’ve been giving recently:
(1) Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms
platform engineering, platform as a product
Here is a shorter, 15 minute version.
Abstract: 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.
See my platform page for more platform related stuff.
(2) 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.
(3) Escaping the Legacy Trap
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. This talk will cover one mindset and methodology that’s been used with several large organizations for escaping the legacy trap, SWIFT.
See my legacy trap page for recordings of this talk and related stuff.
(4) Developer productivity is waste
We’ve become developer productivity obsessed, worse, developer productivity METRICS obsessed. How often do we deploy apps? How many story points did we complete? What’s our MTTR? What’s the network admins eNPS? An obsession with developer productivity is good at small doses, but it becomes a distraction when taken too far. And, besides, who is this focus on productivity really benefit? In this talk, I’ll first give an overview of the latest in developer productivity metrics. Second, I’ll go over some techniques to avoid descending into metrics madness. Finally, I’ll go over what we should be paying more attention to instead of productivity.
Given at DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2024 and NDC Oslo 2024.
(5) Low Growth DevOps
DevOps spread has leveled out, it’s no longer a fast growing mindset and set of accompanying tools. Some surveys show that 70% of people are still not automating their builds, let along production deployment. DevOps companies are facing growth challenges. It can feel like we’re yet again re-discovering the early days of DevOps instead of evolving it to the next stage. Is this bad? Is it good? Is it expected? This talk is an analysis of slowing DevOps growth and what it means for you.
Bio and picture
Here is a short bio of me:
Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.
Here are two pictures, feel free to use whichever you think is appropriate:
