Operationalizing Values and Principles with Andrew Fong, VP of Infrastructure @ Dropbox #19

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

Andrew Fong shares how to identify, operationalize, and reinforce values in your organization as well as his strategies to scale organizations through values-based decision making and in cultivating values-based environments. You’ll also hear stories about the massive role values had in the outcomes of several large-scale infrastructure projects at Dropbox.

"If we can operationalize this, the micro decision making on the ground becomes much more powerful and it doesn't force us into a command and control environment." - Andrew Fong

ABOUT ANDREW FONG

Andrew is the Vice President of Infrastructure at Dropbox. In this role he oversees all infrastructure engineering and operations efforts which are responsible for scaling Dropbox’s infrastructure stack in order to support hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Prior to Dropbox, he was at YouTube, Google, and AOL in various infrastructure capacities

SHOWNOTES

• What it means to “operationalize values” and why it matters (2:12)
• How to operationalize values in OKRs (4:45)
• How to identify values in your team or organization (8:01)
• How to reinforce values in your organization in meetings, all-hands, and personally (14:35)
• How to operationalize values in recruiting (18:52)
• How operationalized values impact projects: Dropbox’s data center migration story (20:41)
• Lessons learned from Dropbox’s “Magic Pocket” project (26:09)
• How to make values endure beyond people in projects with long time horizons: be explicit with your decision making process (29:27)
• How to operationalize values in small teams and start ups (34:46)
• How Andrew operationalizes his personal values (40:31)
• Takeaways (48:11)

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