This is the story of our teams saving 50,000 hours of engineering time for our business. We work in cloud productivity engineering here at Capital One and, alongside other specific business goals, spent a year working with a ‘north star’ goal of “saving 50,000 engineering hours”. This means process improvements, delivery optimisations, reworked tooling, but most of all being user centric; understanding our engineering needs and troubles to find the best ways to save time.
The experience was fantastic, but reasonably not without some bumps in the road, so we want to talk about how we came up with the idea, the many successes we got from it and the things we’d change about it as we head into 2025. We hope this is an inspiring talk to generate discussion about how tech organisations can optimise their deliveries and what methods work best based on our experience.
The talk will be made up of a story of our journey and experiences through this goal. We'll
The experience was fantastic, but reasonably not without some bumps in the road, so we want to talk about how we came up with the idea, the many successes we got from it and the things we’d change about it as we head into 2025. We hope this is an inspiring talk to generate discussion about how tech organisations can optimise their deliveries and what methods work best based on our experience.
The talk will be made up of a story of our journey and experiences through this goal. We'll
- cover why we went for a big goal like this, and how we decided on this one,
- discuss people’s reaction and perception throughout trying to achieve the goal,
- address the various challenges we experienced with the goal and what to watch out for, plus how we dealt with issues,
- talk about the key impacts we got from it and why/how others can adopt mindsets to achieve similar good results,
- And to finish off, conclude with how we are trying to evolve it to continue improving the developer experience at Capital One.
Tom Clifford-Clarke
Capital One
My software engineering past includes delivering software for large-scale corporate clients, products for specific end users and custom tooling to address delivery needs, all of which has lead me to my position now working in cloud productivity engineering. My focus is the developer experience, and how we can have happier engineers delivering brilliant work at a high, precise and sustainable pace. I'm using all of my experience in product delivery to influence and improve that process.
Serge Harjau
Capital One
Hi! I work for Capital One, leading a software team whose purpose is to improve the experience (and productivity) of ~15,000 engineers! One of the ways in which we're doing that is by increasing the efficiency of our unified CI/CD platform - essentially making it faster to deploy to the cloud safely.
My previous experiences include building an Autonomous Racing Car which competed in Formula Student AI (winning 2 out of 3 races), and representing the UK in the World Robotic Sailing Championship (bringing home 3rd place).
My previous experiences include building an Autonomous Racing Car which competed in Formula Student AI (winning 2 out of 3 races), and representing the UK in the World Robotic Sailing Championship (bringing home 3rd place).