Presentation: Context Matters: Improving the Performance and Wellbeing of Teams

SC: I'm the director of I.T. at Etsy. We have a number of initiatives. We're in the midst of migrating to GCP from physical data centers. We’re also moving from a reactive and manual process to building automation and proactive models in order to reduce toil and make sure that the effort that we are putting in is actually bringing real value to the business and to the employees of Etsy. Other than that, as an I.T. organization we are always focused on keeping the lights on and trying to find ways to just make things work more efficiently and effectively for the company.

ZC: I’m the Director of Strategy & Operations at Etsy. The focus of my work today is designing and managing the systems and rhythms that help Etsy’s product management, design, product engineering, research and analytics teams set their strategy, reflect on their progress, and deliver on their goals. I’m also responsible for intentionally growing Etsy’s product development culture in a way that drives employee engagement and continuous learning, and that translates to great product experiences for Etsy’s buyers and sellers.

SC: I've worked with a number of teams over the 18 plus years that I've been a leader. It's been a journey! I learned a lot from other people and what they were able to provide based on their experiences. We think there's a Pay It Forward concept where, like open source, as we learn more we're building this whole concept of teams and leadership together as a community. We like being able to give back what we’ve figured out.

The working title of our talk right now is “Context matters - Improving the performance and well-being of teams”. It’s based on experiences here at Etsy and my last role as Director of I.T. at Spotify, and Zofia’s past role as Manager of Strategy & Operations at Spotify. Zofia and I are going to use real-world examples of how different types of teams doing different types of work with different internal and external factors actually have different tolerance levels for change and innovation. Understanding the context and those variables and the situationality of it lets you support and drive teams forward towards becoming healthy and effective.

SC & ZC: This talk would be great for anyone who is managing or leading a team. There's probably gonna be some ‘aha’ moments both for newish team leaders but also for more seasoned team leaders as well, because this is about context and context is so situational.

SC & ZC: We’d love them to walk away with ideas that they can take back and tangibly try and experiment with in one of their teams. And hopefully, create an environment that enables their teams to be healthy and productive.

We're going to talk about it more in terms of frameworks and context theories and give some examplesk for how you could apply them to your team’s context. It should be a fairly universal model where you can assess your team and then  try this or that type of approach.

SC: I have a passion for security and data privacy. I think it's a critical and often overlooked area of software development. It's foundational in the sense that it should be thought of as part of the DNA of everything we build rather than something that you try to engineer after the fact or snap on. It's something that you should be really thinking about as you're designing and building your software.

ZC: I think there’s interesting work to be done in terms of developing strategies for creating more inclusive recommendation algorithms with and for more diverse groups of people that have historically been under-represented (both in terms of how the technology has been designed and developed, but also in terms of diversifying the content that is served up by the technology).