May 14, 2020 by Theresa Ma and Antonio Verardi

About this event

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and one of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen is our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelpers from engineering and product and will focus on themes such as career development, technical skills, workplace challenges and Yelp’s response to COVID-19.

Speakers:

Antonio Verardi, London

Talk: A checklist for OK OKRs — Nowadays Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) play a big role in many organizations when it comes to planning and tracking results and, as a regular activity, they end up absorbing quite a bit of time of managers and technical leaders. I’d like to introduce a short checklist to test the quality of KRs and show how to improve a KR by iterating through the checklist until we check all boxes. I can’t guarantee that this method will be enough to write brilliant OKRs, but I hope that we could get to write at least some “OK” ones :)

Bio: Mainly interested in distributed systems and stream processing, has a taste for open-source software. Having accidentally stumbled upon a couple of degrees and diplomas in Computer Engineering between Italy and France, tries to keep his boring past locked up on LinkedIn.

Theresa Ma, San Francisco

Talk: Playing Well With “Others”: A History of Humankind in the Modern Office — Communication is hard. Collaboration is hard. Strong relationships between design and engineering teams are the foundation for building a strong product. This talk will cover strategies for more effective interdisciplinary communication, drawn from historical & anthropological research and business case studies, as well as anecdotal workplace experiences.

Bio: I’m the Engineering Manager for the Design Systems team. We work closely with designers, product managers, and engineers in different feature areas across Yelp. I have a background in computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy; I love the why’s of questions as much as the how’s. I love bridging different disciplines, seeing how they tackle the same questions from different perspectives, and bringing them together.

Moderator:

Kelly Greenia, Chicago

Bio: I’m Kelly! I started at Yelp 4.5 years ago as a Sourcing Specialist and am currently a Senior Technical Recruiter, having worked on a variety of engineering roles. I have also been Yelp Elite for 7 years. I grew up in the Bay Area, but recently moved to Chicago (during the pandemic!