 You know, most people get into software development because you can create these incredible experiences from almost nothing. The story normally goes, you have this great idea, and you can almost visualize your end user clicking through the experience. And then you get to your desk and you start coding. And all these roadblocks start appearing. Infrastructure, networking, security, policies. And with each one, that hope and excitement slowly fades. At Expedia Group, we're passionate about creating a world-class developer experience. And me and my teams do that by trying to focus on reducing the time from imagination to production so as close to zero as possible. Over the last few years, we've been on that journey and we have a long way to go, but we've also made tremendous progress. And today I'd like to talk to you about that. Now, unlike some of the other talks where we'd focus on technical details and some of the harder challenges that we've solved, today I want to talk to you about what I think is the hardest challenge in an enterprise re-platforming. And that's the people and the culture. I have to admit, it's a little bit nerve-wracking coming to a large conference like this, especially a tech conference and talking about people. It's not often we focus time on that. But in two decades of building and scaling large enterprise developer platforms, I've come to realize that the people challenges are sometimes far harder than the technical challenges. So it doesn't matter if you're on a two-person team or a 2,000-person team. Today, I'm going to show you the playbook for how you can achieve great success and avoid failure in your platform journey. And if there's one thing that I want you to take away from listening to this talk today, it's that it is possible to move incredibly fast and bring everyone along on the journey. At Expedia Group, we have over 5,000 developers running over 200 travel sites in over 70 countries. Our vision is to power global travel for everyone everywhere. And as you can imagine, that means shipping a lot of software and delivering a lot of innovation. Around 2019, we were at the tail end of the DevOps Cultural Revolution. Open Source and Cloud were running an all-you-can-eat buffet on tools, and we had a number of independent teams operating in silos. That created some interesting opportunities in the developer experience. Whenever we looked at a capability that we were providing, there were between three and five competing tools. That created over 100 permutations of build, deploy, and runtime environments. And our developer survey noted that teams were growing frustrated with the amount of time it took to onboard to new projects or just get people started at the company. Added to that, you have the cost of infrastructure, maintenance, licensing, and just keeping all these things running. And we had the formation of what I would call a fun project. So we took on this great challenge. Get to one tool for one job. And so was born the concept that the Expedia Group common developer platform. I've been building and scaling these kind of platforms for many years. And the re-platforming playbook is always the same. It doesn't matter if you are a large team or a small team. If you're operating in a large company or a small company, or you're running a small platform or a large platform, you have to do the same five things. Form an amazing team, pick your tools, find your allies, win over your detractors, and execute like crazy. There's just one problem. Everything is simple in enterprise re-platforming, but the simplest thing is difficult. Now, most people focus on these two areas. And if you're lucky, this will get you pretty far. If you just focus on picking tools, that's what we call analysis paralysis. And if you just focus on executing, that's what we like to call the Leroy Jenkins approach. And it's not going to get you very far. Where the most successful teams spend most of their time is in these three areas. Forming the team, finding the allies, and winning over detractors. And if you want to move at an incredible pace with broad buy-in, this is where you need to focus your time, too. So let's talk about forming the team. The first thing you're going to need is engineers, including the development managers and project managers that come with them. The best thing for you to do in a large company is find the engineers that come from within. The temptation can be to use external resources, but if you use too many of them, you risk alienating your internal partners. At EG, we were fortunate enough to find a number of people with experience with real-world operations running our largest travel sites. And the next group of people we added were product management. It's not often that you get this level of support for an internal platform. We're used to having product management support for external products. But as Jasmine pointed out, even if you don't have someone in the product management role, it's important to make sure that someone on the team is bringing the discipline of understanding your customer's needs and methodically cataloging them to your team. Finally, we added executive support and executive sponsorship. This might sound like a bit of project management bingo, but it's often overlooked. If you get this right, you're building a foundational platform that's high leverage and it's going to drive tremendous value to the company. And that's the kind of thing that executives like and will support and will fund. Let's talk about tool selection. Ah, tool selection. There's a great article from a Twitter engineer called Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom and rip up 999 of them. And the quote in there says, everyone is happy for you to standardize as long as you pick the tool they're currently using. The best approach here is listening and spending a lot of time understanding what your developers are trying to do. Once you understand that, you can catalog all the tools that they're using. And if you know that, you can start evaluating them based on some shared criteria. An expedient group that was support, maintenance costs, migration costs, and how much we were spending on keeping things alive. Once we've made those decisions, we published them out in the open and we told everyone what was deprecated and what was a go-forward tool. And we began the migration. In many cases in tool selection, cloud-native tools gave us a huge advantage. If we just look at Kubernetes, there was a great ground swell within the company. There was a huge community internally and a huge community externally. Using that enabled us to eliminate some of our custom tools that we had put together for a runtime environment. And the CNCF encourages some integration between and collaboration between projects, which means that they played well together often. So we had a great team. We picked our tools. We were ready to go and we got asked to go faster. Any time you're asked to go faster, you have a choice to make. You can either create a mandate or you can create a movement. You can choose to be persuasive or you can choose to be political. An Expedia group, we lean hard into choosing a movement. And that means focusing on finding allies and winning over detractors. Let's talk about allies. I think on the surface of things, finding internal allies seems easy. And the good news is you probably have more than you think. One powerful thing about creating a movement is that you make it your team's mission in life to manufacture allies. Whereas if you rely on mandates, you manufacture detractors and resistance. At Expedia Group, we found our allies by listening intently and reflecting back the jobs that people were doing. You can learn a lot by doing shadowing sessions and listening tours or structured user discovery. And the great thing about allies is you have a lot of them externally, too. Partnering with organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation gave us access to end user groups and partners and special interest groups where we were able to get other people brought into our vision as well and build support outside our company. Just listening is transformative. Any time you can ask the question, what's hard and how can I help? You win someone over. And any time you help someone do a job they're trying to do, you win a bit of their heart. Let's talk about detractors. Oh, detractors. Detractors and resistance are a fact of life in large-scale enterprise replatforming. And to be honest, they can be exhausting. The hardest part is figuring out what is genuine and genuinely concerning versus what's just background noise. And your sole goal when you're dealing with detractors is to figure out, are you doing the wrong thing or are people just being difficult? And the best way to do that is by listening to your detractors, spending time reflecting, not getting defensive or solutioning, and thinking pragmatically is one of the most underrated skills. At Expedia Group, when we go and listen to some of our detractors, we turn the questions that they have into tickets and we investigate each one of them. And when you do that and you commit to that discipline, the people that have a hundred issues with your program end up having three that really matter. And you can take those three and use data and metrics to solve them. And when you do that, it builds trust. And trust turns a detractor into an ally. So we took this great approach. We built a movement. We created an amazing team. We picked some great tools. We found our allies. We won over some detractors. How did we really do? In 2021, we deprecated 149 developer tools. That's almost 12 every month. We freed up 100 developers worth of productivity and returned those to the product teams. And we saved roughly 20% in our license and maintenance costs for tooling spend. It was a huge win. I know what you're thinking. That's great. Mr. Duffy, I don't have time for your movement nonsense. I've got a migration to run. This will never scale. But I can tell you it does scale. And it does require a huge amount of effort. But having run platform transformations the wrong way, I can tell you that running a movement and investing in your allies and winning over your detractors requires far less effort than battling mounting resistance from your detractors in a mandate. In our project, we had to scale. Using our movement, we've mobilized over 500 teams and we're trying to land 10,000 application workloads in 600 clusters. And we're doing it by leading a culture of listening, leveraging the right tools, choosing pragmatically and focusing way more time on the people than we do on the tech. And now we're looking forward to the future, where we're looking to go even faster. And we're doing even more listening. Having a standard tool set and one tool for one job has allowed us to meaningfully map the user journey and put metrics against each stage of it. We've set goals, and we've set our standards for how we're improving it. And that standardization has brought line of sight to our vision for the developer experience. Where everyone is shipping on day one, we have less than 50-minute average lead time to change. And if you're stuck as a developer, we get you unstuck within two hours. And together, those goals are reducing the time from imagination to production to as close to zero as possible. I want to say thank you to everyone involved with this project at Expedia Group. I'm constantly humbled by the skills and the commitment to running a customer-focused migration in the Common Developer Toolkit. And I want to say thank you to you listening to the talk today. My hope is that some of you out there are downtrodden by constant resistance in battling some of those detractors. And you now feel empowered to go and have some conversations and discuss with your detractors how you can help them. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE