Like a Fitbit for engineering teams with Grant Jenks from LinkedIn

Grant Jenks is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn.

In this episode of Engineering Unblocked, Rebecca and Grant discuss how LinkedIn approaches the challenges of keeping its software engineers (and others) happy and productive, and how the Engineering Insights organization informs its work and the work of teams across LinkedIn.

Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/grant-jenks-linkedin-like-a-fitbit-for-engineering-teams

Timestamps (00:00) Introductions (01:00) Grant’s current role and his career journey (03:51) The origins of the productivity organization at LinkedIn (05:22) From building “tools” to maintaining critical development infrastructure (06:40) Incorporating commodity tools (08:06) Choosing which problems to solve (09:21) How the team’s metrics inform work across LinkedIn (12:05) Using the metrics to help teams set goals (13:30) Choosing the right metrics for the problem (15:32) Unique user problems at scale (18:07) Different problems and different perceptions for different personas (23:09) Working with productivity champions at the team level (23:40) Defining “happiness” and soliciting feedback (28:05) Spotting trends in the sentiment data, and choosing the right cadence (30:26) The product is productivity, and users can do surprising things (34:00) Making change happen at scale (38:33) Using metrics in a productivity emergency

Where to find Grant • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantjenks/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/Grant_Jenks

Where to find Rebecca • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/ • Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmurphey

Links and mentions • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/ • GitHub Codespaces: https://github.com/features/codespaces • Horizontal initiatives at LinkedIn: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/03/scaling-decision-making-across-teams-within-linkedin-engineering • Artifactory: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/