Lynn Root at ODSC Boston 2015

Metric-Driven Development: See the Forest for the Trees

At Spotify, my team struggled to be awesome. We had a very loose understanding of what product/service our squad was responsible for, and even less so of the expectations our internal and external customers had for those services. Other than “does our Facebook login work?”, we had no understanding of how our services we’re responsible for were doing. How many users actually sign up or log in with Facebook? How many users have connected their Spotify account with their Uber account? Do folks even use Spotify with Uber?

With a 2-month challenge period, my squad and I focused inward to establish those unanswered questions and to establish feedback loops and always-on dashboards. This talk will tell the story of how we chose which metrics are important for us to focus on, what technologies we have used and are using, and how we’ve iterated over our feedback loops to fine-tune what metrics we care about.

Presenter Bio:
Lynn Root is an insomniac software engineer for Spotify, founder of the San Francisco Chapter of PyLadies, board member of the Python Software Foundation, and member of the Django Software Foundation. She holds a business degree in finance and economics but fell in love with programming in 2011.