Move Fast, Break (Fewer) Things by Richard Wong
The top priority for any startups is to find their product-market fit through rapid iterations of their products. “Move fast, and break things” becomes the de-facto motto and reality for many. After years of hard work, your product finally attracted millions of loyal users, including many paying customers. Your users developed high expectations, and trust on your product. At the same time, technical debts and “breaking things” gradually shifts from a convenient aspect you chose to ignore, to become major concerns raised by your users, customers, and even many of your teammates. In this session, the speaker will share Coursera's journey on quality as they scaled, and how they took a head-on approach to overhaul its technology, dev process, and culture to drive quality focus with their hundreds of engineers. You will hear what worked, what did not, valuable lessons they learned. This session is for audiences who are interested in driving quality focus for their company, as well as those who are interested in sharing their own stories.
Richard Wong
Richard Wong is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Coursera. He oversees Coursera's infrastructure and product development. Prior to joining Coursera, Richard held various engineering leadership roles at the early days of LinkedIn, with key focus of scaling Jobs marketplace and Talent Solutions to become its first billion-dollar product. Richard also oversaw the product development for Linkedin international expansions. Prior to LinkedIn, Richard spent over a decade at Microsoft leading various product development teams including MSN Hotmail, Active Directory, Windows Server, and System Center. Richard received his Master’s degree from Stanford University.
