Jack Li explains how his production engineering team rolled out a new incident review process, how they’ve made the case for investing in reliability, and specific tools his team has built to improve reliability.

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Discussion points:

• (1:25) How Jack became interested in reliability 
• (3:24) Where the Instagram Reels team fits into the broader organization
• (4:05) What Jack’s team focuses on
• (4:55) The role of production engineering at Instagram versus Shopify 
• (8:32) The essence of DevOps
• (10:44) Pros and cons of having product-focused teams
• (13:35) How Jack’s team defines and tracks quality
• (15:46) Signals the team monitors outside of systems 
• (18:10) Revamping Instagram Reel’s incident management process
• (19:46) Making the case for improving the incident review process
• (28:10) How their incident review process works
• (31:55) The roles involved in an incident review 
• (33:40) The value of having incident reviews
• (35:55) Why leaders should be part of incident reviews 
• (38:34) Why Jack’s team builds tools for driving reliability goals
• (40:06) The types of tools Jack’s team focuses on 
• (43:09) What a merge queue is and why it was built at Shopify
• (51:20) Using a Slack bot for ‘failed build’ alerts
• (52:32) When a company should consider implementing a merge queue

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Mentions and links:
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
Jack’s article from his time on Shopify about their Merge Queue
Jack’s talk on Shopify’s Merge Queue at GitHub Universe 2019