Balancing Operational Excellence and Innovation in Engineering with Meir Wasserman

Discover how engineering leaders in gaming navigate the constant tension between keeping the lights on and building what's next. Meir Wasserman shares hard-earned lessons from EA Sports, Amazon Games, and 2K Games on driving change, creating urgency, and evolving as a leader, plus his take on how AI is reshaping the engineering workflow.Main Topics Covered:Balancing operational toil with delivering customer value and new featuresDriving organizational change: why the hardest part is people, not technologyA practical heuristic for deciding which operational problems are worth fixingScaling leadership: staying connected to your org as it grows beyond one teamA skip-level meeting format for staying connected without micromanagingWhy leaders must be the source of urgency for their top prioritiesSimplifying complexity as a core leadership skill to rally teams around problemsEvolving views on AI: from skepticism to excitement about agentic workflowsThe shift from writing code to engineering outcomes, and what that means for the professionBridging the gap between vibe coding and production-grade, enterprise-level codeAI economics and the coming shift from flat pricing to consumption or value-based modelsConnect with Meir Wasserman: LinkedIn + BlogConnect with Stephen Koza: LinkedInConnect with EverOpsReferences:Book: Amp It Up by Frank SlootmanTool: NotebookLM by Google