Episode Description:
Our work could be more fun if…. My engineers could be happier if… Is this the right problem to solve?… Software development is all about solving hard problems in fun and creative ways and asking these questions in the work we do allows us to think more creatively. Our guest, Brit Myers, loves to ask these types of questions and solve them with her high performing teams. Today, we dig into how we can make sure we are asking the right questions to ensure we are solving the right problems, learning from failure, how to build high performing teams, how we can think about metrics as feedback loops and more!
Brit was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has 4 kids. She received her BS in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon and has recently completed her Executive MBA from University of Michigan. During undergrad she had no intentions of getting into tech but during an internship she fell in love with programming. With over 15 years of experience now under her belt, she is a technology leader with experience in scaling high-performing engineering teams and building platforms across various industries. She worked at Hyland as AVP of Cloud Engineer, at Firebolt Analytics as Head of Cloud Engineering, and currently is the VP of engineering at System Initiative where she leads a team of talented engineers creating a new collaborative power tool designed to remove the “papercuts” from DevOps work.
When our guest is not eliminating papercuts from DevOps she is spending time with her family, building DIY projects with her kids, or working outside in her garden. Her passion is building amazing things with amazing people, so it was only fitting she join us on the show today.
Enjoy!
Connect with Brit
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Show Notes and useful resources:
- Brit Myers Readme
- Second Wave of DevOps blog post by System Initiative’s Co-founder and CEO, Adam Jacob
- Important advice she got from her grandfather: Figure out what people in power want and find a way to give it to them
- She views metrics and trends more as signals to ask questions rather than definitive answers; you need to look at context
- Strongly values empowering teams and giving them autonomy to make decisions
- Asks for feedback often to model good practices and help teams develop skills
- Focuses on facilitating the right conversations and alignment through process
- At System Initiative, she is building a collaborative DevOps platform to create infrastructure simulations and remove friction from workflows
- System Initiative is described by Adam Jacob (CEO) as if Figma and Miro had a DevOps Baby and it is changing how we collaborate
- Overall advice: Keep focused on the outcomes you want to achieve in software development and don’t lose sight of them amidst new technologies and frameworks
Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com
Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.