Uploaded January 2024 | Updated September 2026, 17 hours ago

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In this keynote, Kent Wills, Director of Engineering - Engineering Effectiveness at Yelp takes us through a decade-long journey of developing Yelp's engineering effectiveness (EE) group, charting the adoption of technology, growth of teams, and the evolution of methodologies. He details the challenges faced, solutions found, and Yelp's initiatives toward creating effective developer productivity strategies.
Kent is a Yelp veteran, entering his 10th year at Yelp, and has led EE initiatives since its inception back in 2013.

00:00 Introduction and Background
03:13 How it started
06:29 Yelp’s EE Journey: Part 1 – The Monolith Problem
11:00 Yelps EE Journey: Part 2 – SOA
19:52 Yelp’s EE Journey: Part 3 – Best Practice
22:00 Yelp’s EE Journey: Part 4 – Current State
24:00 Upcoming challenges and opportunities
25:30 Q&A Session

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This talk was recorded at Elevate 2023, Plato's flagship engineering leadership conference hosted in San Francisco on Nov 7 and 8 2023.