Changing how 10 people work is difficult. Changing how 5,000 is near impossible. If you're trying to move beyond your initial success at transforming how your organization builds and runs software, you're experienced this problem. We'll look at common challenges and cover tactics to address them.

Changing how 10 people work is difficult, changing how 100 work is very difficult. And, barring Planck's principle, changing how 5,000 or more people work is, typically, impossible. When it comes to improving how large organizations build, release, and run software, scaling to thousands of people is the real challenge. If you're trying to move beyond your initial success at transforming how your organization builds and runs software, you've experienced this scaling challenge. Thankfully, most of the problems in this challenge are common challenges. Though you may feel cursed and alone, in our experience talking with hundreds of organizations, most of the problems are the same.

This talk will look at several of these common challenges and cover tactics to address them. Part of applying a tactic successfully is understanding why the challenge exists in the first place, which the talk starts with.

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He's been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.