Words Matter: Ubiquitous Language and Throughput @CircleCI (Rob Zuber)
Channel: Productivity Engineering Silicon Valley
Date: 15/12/2018

Words matter. They’re shortcuts to meaning, and they are powerful tools that can either make your team incredibly effective, or incredibly confused, slow, and frankly, angry. In this talk, Rob Zuber, CTO at CircleCI will share lessons learned from managing teams of 3, 6, 10 and now 60+ engineers on how important words and naming are for keeping the effectiveness of your team up. Much has been said on the challenges that come as you grow your team, but we don't talk enough about why words and names are so important. Come to hear some lessons learned on why we've changed our naming practices at CircleCI over time, and leave with tips you can bring back to your team to help you be more precise about language.

Speaker bio: Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a four-time founder, three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI as CTO three and a half years ago, Rob has seen the company through its $18 million Series B and $31 million Series C and delivered on product innovation at scale. Over that same period, Rob has grown CircleCI’s engineering team four-fold as it has been recognized as one of the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work by the San Francisco Business Times. In addition to overseeing teams in San Francisco and Toronto, Rob also leads a global team of CircleCI engineers across 9 countries and 10 different time zones.