Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Up next is one of the few speakers who has spoken at every conference we've held over the last ten years — Jason Cox, Director of Platform and SRE at the Walt Disney Company. Over the years I've learned so much from him. The labels we use to apply to the amazing work that Jason and his team have done have changed a bit over the years, but what he actually does has not changed. I would call it: how do you create shared services and shared functional expertise in a way that isn't terrible, that doesn't suck.

Over the years I've always been dazzled by the number of times he's been able to save teams across the Walt Disney enterprise — his team saved their day. So I'm so delighted he'll be presenting with his boss, Alexi Varanko, VP of Cloud and Data Transformation Engineering, who I've heard about for years. I'm super excited that he's talking because many people hear Jason's stories and say, "I would love to save the day across my organization, but my teams are stretched too thin. They have too many existing commitments, and we just can't." What makes me so excited about Jason and Alexi talking is that they will describe not only how they fit into the massive Disney enterprise, but they're going to talk more about how to create a funding model that actually allows for enough capacity to enable the teams to have enough slack so they can fund these emergency response services. So up next is Jason and Alexi.

Jason Cox

Well, hello everyone. So good to see everyone. I gotta ask real quick — how many of you have seen Inside Out 2 or Deadpool? What do you think? Hey, listen, we at Disney love to tell story, but you know what we love even more? When you get to be part of the story. So we're going to try to pull you into our story today. We're going to tell you a little bit about stuff we're doing, but before that — a word from our sponsor. Watch this.

[Sizzle video — voice-over from Walt Disney: "In our modern world, everywhere we look, we see the influence science has upon our daily lives. Discoveries that were miracles a few short years ago are accepted as commonplace today. Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow." Followed by Disney technologists on screen: "At Disney, we'll continue to push the boundaries of innovation through global storytelling, creating enchanting experiences that not only solve the problems of today, but put the best experience out there for our customers and our guests everywhere. If the guests walk away talking about the technology, we haven't done our job. It's all about the experience. We're storytellers. We're the greatest storytellers the world has ever known. Since the dawn of time, storytelling has really been one thing: a person has a story, they tell it to you, you see the world through their perspective. In the coming century, that's going to change. Now we're going to be able to see things from different perspectives — we're going to get different viewpoints. We'll continue to innovate and tell great stories in all the new mediums being created. It's an awesome, unique opportunity to connect compelling stories that we have at Disney with audiences all over the world through delightful product experiences and through amazing technology. We believe that a close partnership between art and technology is essential to creating compelling stories with engaging characters in believable worlds. There's so much passion on the part of all the teams behind what we do to make sure what we're building lives up to that Disney expectation. With industry-leading technologies like augmented reality and machine learning behind the scenes, we are creating awesome experiences. That to me is super exciting as a technologist — to continue to move at the very front edge of the technology in so many different areas. The tech at Disney is so boundless to take us further, to disrupt entertainment for our guests. I believe technology will power the magic. During the last few years we've ventured into a lot of different fields. We've had the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of wonderful people. We hope that you will join us, and that you'll find here a place of knowledge and happiness." "Ready to be part of the story."]

Yeah, thank you. I am privileged today to be on stage with my boss. And I'm going to tell you this — not because my boss is standing here — but I have the best job ever. Seriously. I get to work with all these different divisions all across Disney that really has this mission: entertaining, informing, and inspiring our human family across the globe through the art of storytelling. And guess what? We can use technology to make that happen. As a computer scientist, being able to have tech to amplify us as humans, to make this a better place — that translates to our jobs, helping us to bring that entertainment, that inspiration, to the world in a greater, more powerful way. I love what Bob says here: "We needed to embrace technology to the fullest extent, enabling the creation of higher quality products, and then reaching our customer in more modern and relevant ways."

Today we want to talk to you a little bit about that magic in our space. I'm going to give you these three things that you can take away that you're going to hear from Alexi and I. First of all, technology empowerment through enablement — how do you build an organization to be able to empower technology in a company? And through embedding — how many of you have listened or seen, or were here last year to see the talk that Amy [Brown] and I gave about how we deploy embedded teams? Okay, well I'll skip that part. No, sorry — we'll do a brief piece of that, but, you know, any of you have internet at home? Well you can watch it at home, okay. So anyway, we unpack it even further — how we do the embedded approach at Disney. And then finally, as Gene was talking about, we'll wrap it up with how do we fund a flexible model that really works for our businesses.

What do we do at Disney, real quick? We have this incredible portfolio of iconic brands, businesses, teams, creative talent that is delivering the content, products, and experiences that delight our guest all over the world. We're part of this big green bar at the bottom — corporate. And so often when we would show up to all these different divisions and say, "We are here to help. We love you. We're here to help" — this is what they saw. You know? Yes. Whoops, it's a Star Destroyer. No, no, no, no — that's corporate. Yeah. And, you know what our businesses told us? "Help, you do not!" — to quote Yoda. How many of you are in corporate? Is this not true? You probably hear that from your segments or the different businesses. "Help, you do not — but hungry, I am" — to quote Grogu. Well, I'm not sure what he says, but I'm thinking it's something along these lines.

This is really what we're trying to go to: how do we make technology magical? To start off, I'm going to let Alexi talk about how we design the org for empowerment.

Alexi Varanko

I like it. Perfect. Thank you, Jason. So, I've had the privilege of having Jason as my partner for the last thirteen years. I say this because thirteen years ago Jason showed up at my door and said, "Hey, I'm Jason Cox." I was working at the studios at the time within one of our business units, and he showed up and he said, "I just want to find out what your problems are, and is there anything we can do to help you with that?" And I said, "I got some problems. I need some help." Fast forward thirteen years later — we're working together within corporate, really trying to transform and carry that out into the greater organization, really delivering value to the business, empowering the business so they can focus on the most important thing — and that's creating magic.

How do we do that? Gene asked that we talk a little bit about my organization and how that comes together. Within the company, we sit within enterprise technology, and I have five groups underneath me that work with me. It's really one team across these different groups.

The first group is really focused around product and data engineering. This team is focused on figuring out the why and the what, engaging our customers, understanding what they need to help them produce business value and realize that faster. Data engineering is another critical area that I think commonly gets overlooked, because we have a ton of data that we're sitting on, and if we can unlock the power of that data, we can actually make better decisions in what we're doing here.

We have a software engineering team. Their focus is taking those requirements and building platforms — and a lot of those platforms help enable other teams, but they also have an interesting relationship with the end customer too. It's one thing to have a product engineer talking about requirements and building the relationship, but when you partner that with the software engineering team that's curious and wants to understand and get down into the tech and understand "how can we really help enable you" — that's truly magic.

We also have another platform engineering team that's really focused on internal data-center platforms. We have a big footprint in the cloud, and the platform engineering team on-prem is really focused on how do we actually bring that cloud experience down on-prem so that people can realize the business value faster. They also focus on developer enablement, making it easier for the developers to gain access to the tools they need to do their job, as well as providing the right guard — the right golden path — to actually onboard onto them.

We also have another platform engineering team — I'll get back to you, Jason — that's embedded with Marvel. They really focus on helping the Marvel Entertainment business deliver business value as well.

And then we have Jason Cox. Jason's done a great job. He's helped run parts of these teams in various different capacities over the years. He really focuses on the embedded SRE team and the business unit support.

When we thought about this, we thought about how can we actually transform our organization in order to deliver more business value? I'm sure everybody's aware of Conway's Law that's been talked about here multiple times. We've seen the problem where organizations focus on designing their organization structure based on some sort of process or some sort of flow. What I've seen is teams tend to take a look and say, "Am I going to be aligned to a framework? Am I going to be aligned to a process base? Or should you be aligned to more of an outcome-based organization or a product-based organization?"

There are tons of frameworks out there that can help guide you down the way — a lot of them have different acronyms: CMM, ITIL, PMBOK, COBIT. But when you take a look at those, how do they actually scale for large organizations within the enterprise? How does it help them move faster? How does it help them enable teams to move forward? Some of them have like 26 different processes, and not all 26 processes are done really well. So it's kind of like — is there really value there?

An example of this we've seen: an organization framework where you have an engineering organization, you have an operations organization, you have some outsource provider. We've seen this in the wild where people open up tickets and it bounces from queue to queue, sits in different queues for a number of days, and you've got this long latency period before you actually get stuff done.

Jason Cox: Yeah, that's right. In a lot of what we do, we tend to say, "This is very hard for us to understand," because we're so used to operating at the speed of the business where we want to move fast, we want to go fast, and we want to deliver quickly on these things. How do you enable that flow so you can have your teams deliver quickly? Having some of the processes that go into place say, "Here are the gates and here are the requirements" — they're good guardrails — but how do you automate those and make it easy for people to have that flow through versus having to go from ticket queue to ticket queue and wait on people to do things?

Alexi Varanko: Product line teams, I think, tend to be a space we're gravitating towards. The big thing there around product teams is really looking to operate with a common goal. Those product-based teams — they're full-stack engineering teams. They're responsible for building it and running it. And there's a camaraderie that I've seen get built across the team that you don't always see within IT organizations, because they're all working towards a common goal: produce the best product possible. They always want to reduce the toil that exists in the organization. They're typically T-shaped teams. A lot of times they tend to leverage platforms because they say, "I want to focus on the most valuable and most important things — the commodity stuff I'd rather just consume as a service or a platform, but I want those to be easy to use and not slow me down."

As a part of that — I kind of came up with this a little bit and used some different reference points for this, so I can't take full credit for this — but we have product teams: these are teams that are built to build applications and products. We have platform teams — they're focused on building that platform. We have enabling teams. Enabling teams are something that tends to get overlooked time and time again. Jason Cox is an example of an enabling team — he shows up and says, "We're here to help," but he's not like, "I have to run this and own this forever." He's like, "I just want to help get the business value, move on to the next big problem that's there." And then we have service teams — your typical white-glove service that you want to provide your end users, really around things like help desk, workforce enablement, and security.

I leave you with this: I want to make sure that you use the force wisely. There's the light side of the Force, where you want to build trust, you want to align to outcomes, you want to keep it small — keep those team sizes small. You want to own accountability, and you want to hire lazy engineers. I say lazy engineers because I like lazy engineers, because they tend to take a look at the problem and say, "I'm going to code on how to do this. I don't feel like doing this six times a month." So they end up building in that automation for it.

Then there's the dark side. Steer away from building things where you're giving orders, you're over-indexing on the academics of it and the academics of technology. You're trying to build an empire underneath you of people. The other thing that I caution teams on: "the system is my identity" — I am so bound to the system that if it goes away, so do I. And then avoid kind of "Center of Excellence" framing and really focus on communities of practice, because those tend to be much better and much more well received.

With that, I'm going to turn it over to Jason Cox to talk about organizing for empathy.

Jason Cox

All right, thank you. Thank you, Alexi. Yeah, so this is the part — if you have internet at home, you could watch a whole talk on this — which is about how we embed our team into all these different businesses all over Disney to help amplify what they're doing. We're plugged in, supporting them, listening to them with empathy — actually helping. And that's key. That's super key. And you know what? That's what we hear back from them: "Hey, you're not like everybody else. You actually understand our business. Your shared services teams need to support and amplify our value." That's what they find in our group.

We hear that over and over again from all these different divisions. "Thank you for your team. You get what we do. Your team's unbelievable. You help us deliver world-class outcomes."

And you know how we do it? We go on location. We're embedded in all these different locations and businesses all across Disney to help make it happen. Sometimes we just get on the ride, I'm just saying — helping our artists amplify what they do. Sometimes we're out there with hard hats. Whatever is necessary to understand the business to deliver the value — that empathy is critical. That frame of reference is how we change things for the better.

I can't remember why this is in there, but it's really cool, isn't it? No — we actually are helping our ILM partners to deliver some really amazing things. And sometimes we invite some of you to come and help us. That's right — we have a Jedi Engineering Academy, and if you'd love to come and speak at Disney at our academy, reach out to us.

All that for this, right? Embedding so we can help create this magic, ship this content, products and experiences better, faster, safer, and happier. And if you don't understand those, please go talk to Jon Smart, 'cause he's got a whole book on that. You know what I'm saying? It's really important. Super important. Helps us go from this to this.

And now we're going to talk about this. Now we're going to talk the money.

So, how many of you that have a shared service get asked to do more than your staff is able to do? Have you ever had that problem? Yeah — there's a lot of us in here. Well, that was our problem too. And the only way we could jump in when there was an emergency, when they needed our help, was — you had to do what? Deprioritize something else, which also was an emergency, right? Which creates four more.

So we thought, "We've got to change this." The challenge we had was, "Listen, here's the problem, Jason. You only have a fixed budget. We run an annual operating plan. Do not deviate. Flat cost recovery — it's got to be there. Can't change it." So I said, "Of course… I'm altering the deal."

Let's change this. So we reached out to our finance partners and we came up with a solution. Let's pivot to an agency model. Hey, let me bill them hourly, monthly, and yearly — and way overcharge them. Then I can hire a whole bench of people, right? And then we can jump in when there's a problem. Turned out that's exactly what we were able to do. Now, it took a bit of time for the finance team to kind of recover from my request, but we put it into place so that we could do just that — create a buffer of team sitting on the bench, if you will, to be able to deploy at a moment's notice for those emergencies, those things that we need to do to jump in and be able to help.

And we have that right now. In fact, I gotta be honest, my bench is currently empty because there's that many fires going on right now. Can I get a witness? You know what I mean? That's how it is.

We have flex team — literally just give us a resource for a month. We need some talent to be able to deliver this for a month, which turns into about two years. But anyway, you know what I'm saying. And there's some cases we're like a dedicated team — we can help support and amplify what they're trying to do. Well, that's what we came up with.

My recommendation, if you want to pursue this: you definitely have to partner with your finance team. But be transparent with your partners. Again, that comes back to the empathy anyway. What we found is, "Listen, we have to charge some upcharge to be able to allow us to have the capacity to jump in at a moment's notice." Overwhelmingly they've supported that, and in some cases say, "You're still cheaper — I'll take two!"

But that transparency allowed us to open the door to be able to do this. And then of course, we use these multiple different methods to bill out. In some cases, "Here is a WBS number." You know what that is, right? Yeah, here's your cost code to be able to charge to you. In other cases it's like, "Can you just bill us?" And I said, "Sure. Do you have a credit card?" Yeah, no. Or yearly — do it in our AOP in the allocations there.

Well, hopefully that's helpful to you. Any of you that want to go on that journey and want to even find out more details — feel free to reach out, happy to talk to you about what we've done. But it has really changed so much of what we've been able to do now. I think my team would all say "and more please," right? Because, again, they found us — and so we have more and more demand. But I think it's a good problem to have, and now we have a model that helps us support it going forward.

All right, so here's the help I need. We would love to hear any examples of other flexible models. Maybe we're missing something. That wasn't my specialty — I was a computer scientist. So if anybody has some accounting suggestions, I'd love to hear. And then, how about other examples of organizational design? How do you align for empowerment, similar to what Alexi talked about for us? And then finally — how do you set, track, and report SLOs? Or I'd swap that out and say, how do you get rid of a CMDB, right? Would that be the thing? Yeah. Oh yeah. But anyway, that's what we're looking to do. So if you have any suggestions, come and talk to us.

All right, I'll end on this. I always do. "There's really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious — and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Stay curious. Thank you.