software + caffeine = blog
At GitHub we have a weekly executive leadership operations review meeting for an hour. The meeting starts with a review of availability numbers from the previous week and then an engineer or engineering manager from the company gives a presentation about a hard availability problem.
Most weeks, every engineering VP is gathered in this room to listen to the presentation and it is a rare time that you will get every VP’s attention. For many of the presenting engineers it is the first time they have presented in one of these types of meetings.
I feel privileged that I have gotten to sit in on these meetings (and sometimes talk) for over a year. From that time I have seen some great presentations and others that ended with crickets.
Recently, I was advising someone about how to do one of these presentations and it made me think I should write down my own thoughts on how to give a good engineering LT focused presentation about an availability problem.
It’s easy to forget how busy engineering executives are. The thing you are focused on for your entire day, most days, is a blip on the radar for them. It may be the 10th most important thing they need to address that day and even if it is number one, it is likely to be competing with a few other things.
