Tom Barkan-Benkler

Director of Product @Spotify- Platform, Dev Experience. Born in 🇮🇱, live in 🇬🇧. Twitting about life, tech, football & F1 💙⚽💛🏎️

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

This is spot on. The success of the product/business is what matters, all the rest are frameworks/tools to help you to get there

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

For highly ambitious, talented, entrepreneurial product people in their 30s: it is counterproductive to create your inner professional identity around things like “I create awesome OKRs” or “I send great status updates” or “I respond quickly on Slack” or “I know the Kano model (and all my peers don’t)” or “I talk to 5 customers/week”, etc. etc.

All of these are mere proxies. They are not the main thing. Often they are very poor proxies.

If you must create an identity, consider making it about building winning products & successful businesses. That is the main, non-negotiable thing.

This is a powerful reframing because, once you internalize it, you will see that most of the activities, qualities, and labels incentivized by large groups do little to secure success for your product & your company. Of course, you will still have to do some of these nonsense, low leverage activities. But you will stop getting the dopamine rush you get today with these activities. And that is a great first step that many product people never take.

After you take this first step, you will begin to get more excited & energized by activities that actually determine your product’s success. These activities are not always glamorous & cool. And most of the time, your peers will be confused about why you aren’t doing the things everyone else is doing. Some jealous & cutthroat peers might even complain vocally.

But you won’t care because you know exactly what game you’re playing, and why. You are playing to win, while everyone else is busy chasing their next dopamine hit to just get through their workday.

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would take a leading supercomputer over 10^25 years, far beyond the age of the universe(!).

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

This is awesome! 👏🏼

[Stripe @stripe]

We built a machine to track Black Friday/Cyber Monday on Stripe.

Explore real-time data all weekend: https://t.co/67Jw9zaOpQ.

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

🦫 Hey @KubeCon_! Come to booth Q15 and meet the beaver (and @Spotify's Backstage team). We're talking developer productivity and Spotify Portal — our new cloud-hosted IDP that's ready to go on day one.

#KubeCon #BackstageCon #Backstage #DevEx #CloudNative #TechConference

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

Bowie the Backstage Beaver is now pocket-size! #innovation

Before you leave #BackstageCon, stop by the @Spotify table and learn how we can custom fit a #Backstage IDP for your engineering org.

@KubeCon_ #KubeCon #BackstageCon #Backstage #DevEx #CloudNative

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

The @Spotify table is hopping! If you're at @KubeCon_ and #BackstageCon today, stop by to chat about supercharging your internal developer portal. And meet Bowie the #Backstage beaver!

#KubeCon #DevEx #CloudNative #TechConference #Networking #Innovation #Kubernetes

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

BackstageCon was so fun!

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

And #BackstageCon is on! Tom talked about how #Backstage unlocks creativity for developers, furthering @Spotify's mission. And Mitch &amp; Djamaile shared how to use open source tools to simplify maintaining your Backstage instance. #KubeCon #DevEx #CloudNative #Innovation

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

This is the week! Tom and the @Spotify team welcome you to Salt Lake City for #BackstageCon and @KubeCon_.👋

#CountdownToCon #KubeCon #BackstageCon #Backstage #Devex #CloudNative #TechConference #Networking #Innovation #Kubernetes #EventAlert

[Platformers Community @PlatformersC]

#ICYMI Here are some awesome pics from our first-ever meetup! 🤩

A huge thanks to the good folks @logzio for landing us their beautiful space &amp; to our friend @horovits for making the connection &amp; delivering a great session along @the_good_guym (@Komodor_com)...

[Platformers Community @PlatformersC]

...Shahar Shmaram (@AppsFlyer) &amp; our special guest @TomBarkan (@SpotifyEng) Thank you all!💚

To all the new &amp; existing Platformers Community members that came out for this event - we hope you enjoyed our first attempt at meetups. This is only the beginning &amp; you're already a...

[Spotify Engineering @SpotifyEng]

Everything you wanted to know about supercharged developer portals but were afraid to ask. 👉 https://t.co/UMf4m54g5G

#backstage #devex #idp #plugins #portals

[The New Stack @thenewstack]

New Spotify Portal for Backstage Eases Platform Engineering https://t.co/qlHeP3RaSI @jkriggins @pia_nilsson #SpotifyBackstage #PlatformEngineering

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Spotify’s getting serious about its enterprise and dev tools business play https://t.co/jvrIboLWwe

[𝙳𝚘𝚝𝚊𝚗 𝙷𝚘𝚛𝚘𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚜 ✈️ DeveloperWeek 🇺🇸 @horovits]

What's @Spotify's next big move in monetizing the Backstage open source project? SaaS.
Its spokesman told @TechCrunch: “Portal is our first step on that journey, but in the future, we’re going to expand our offerings as managed”
https://t.co/yO4VzJMkBK
@BackstageDX @SpotifyEng

[𝙳𝚘𝚝𝚊𝚗 𝙷𝚘𝚛𝚘𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚜 ✈️ DeveloperWeek 🇺🇸 @horovits]

a taste from last week's first in-person meetup of the @PlatformersC community, which we hosted @logzio TLV offices.
I spoke about #PlatformEngineering alongside @TomBarkan of @BackstageDX @SpotifyEng, Shahar @AppsFlyer and @the_good_guym of @Komodor_com https://t.co/27DF91A561

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

@kellyjandrews This is great @kellyjandrews thanks for sharing!

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

Tell me your product is too good without telling me that product is too good #AI #OpenAI #ChatGPT #ProductManagement

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We’re developing a new tool to help distinguish between AI-written and human-written text. We’re releasing an initial version to collect feedback and hope to share improved methods in the future. https://t.co/4dQE3dX6vX

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

It makes such a difference when an API is designed with empathy for the developer and the job to be done, compared to an API that is designed by what is 'architecturally right' #API #devex #APIs #platform #ProductManagement #developers

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

@gethackteam Visual Basic 6.0 - legendary 😃

[Tom Barkan-Benkler @TomBarkan]

@johncutlefish From what I saw in a couple of companies:
1. The leads are not measured on the same goal, or their success criteria is different.
2. There is no consistency of the structure across teams who should work together