Interview with Melissa Benua

Software Crafts Podcast

This week we feature Melissa Benua as our guest. She will share her experiences and opinion about the heuristic “Distribute power and decision making” from the Simon Wardley Doctrine (https://wardleypedia.org/mediawiki/index.php/Doctrine_Patterns#Distribute_power_and_decision_making).

She will share her heuristics to move between different leadership styles, such as Command and Control and Misson Command. We discuss the merits of the different styles, as well as how a manager can sense and discuss it with the people and the teams. We end up with the differences between an enterprise and a scale-up, and the trade-offs for a manager.

Melissa recommends:

• State of DevOps report - https://cloud.google.com/devops
• Accelerate book from Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim

Melissa Benua (@queenofcode) has worked in nearly every software development role—dev, test, DevOps, and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She's created and run high availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana, and Xbox One, and now for mParticle's enormous data platform. Melissa discovered her love of massively-scaled systems while growing the Bing backend, where she honed the art of keeping highly-available complex systems up while undergoing significant code churn. Now a director of engineering with mParticle, she’s passionate not only about maximizing efficiency both in her product code and in her developer tools but also about sharing best practices among colleagues and the tech world at large.