Ep026: Driving a Culture of Innovation through Optimization

We feature a panel discussion from the AWS for Software Companies Executive Forum at re:Invent, featuring software leaders from Appen, Coinbase, Rapid7 and AWS sharing strategies and best practices to optimize their businesses to free up budgets and enable further software innovations. 

Panelists:

• Bobby Smith, Vice President of IT and Engineering, Appen
• Sumanth Sukumar, Vice President Engineering, Coinbase
• Elaine Hardwick, Director of Engineering, Rapid7
• Sree Ratnasinghe, Director, NAMER Tech, Amazon Web Services

Topics Include:

• Potential future market and impact of driving optimization
• How optimization drove innovation
• Using optimization to free up budget & time for growth programs
• Optimization becomes part of the organizational culture
• Lessons learned through optimization
• Running internal competitions to drive innovation and modernization
• AWS’ “Experience Based Accelerator” 3 day hackathon-style optimization program
• Leveraging AWS to help optimize to invest in generative AI
• Investment returns in Bedrock and Code Whisperer
• Ensuring team alignment for optimization focus
• Making roadmap trade-offs – features v optimization
• Final thoughts, panel wrap up