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The new engineering operations playbook

June 17
AI coding tools are making individual engineers faster. But speed without structure creates new problems — and most of them land on engineering operations.
When engineers and their agents generate more code, the operational questions multiply. How do you maintain quality standards when half the code is AI-generated? Who owns all that new code? And how do you measure any of this when the old baselines no longer apply?
For engineering operations leaders, AI is a reason to rethink how your entire function works.
Watch Fred Calvez (Senior Director of Product & Engineering Operations, Smartly) and Rachel Magasweran (Director, Product Operations, Staffbase) in conversation about what AI means for the people responsible for how engineering organizations plan, execute, and scale.
In this conversation:
  • How to embed quality standards, governance, and code ownership expectations directly into AI-powered workflows
  • What changes about productivity measurement when AI shifts the baseline, and how to avoid metrics that reward the wrong things
  • How engineering operations is evolving from process support into a strategic function, and why AI accelerates that shift

Speakers

Fred Calvez
Panelist
Fred Calvez
LinkedIn
Senior Director of Product & Engineering Operations at Smartly
Fred Calvez leads Engineering Operations at Smartly, where he focuses on improving how engineering teams plan, execute, and scale. His work sits at the intersection of engineering leadership, operational excellence, productivity insights, and organizational effectiveness.
Rachel Magasweran
Panelist
Rachel Magasweran
LinkedIn
Director, Product Operations at Staffbase
Rachel has over a decade of experience building the foundations that help engineering organizations run efficiently — from capacity management and developer productivity to AI-driven ways of working. At Staffbase, she leads engineering and product operations, metrics, insights, and enablement.
Otto Hilska
Host
Otto Hilska
LinkedIn
Founder & CEO at Swarmia
Otto Hilska is the founder and CEO of Swarmia, the engineering intelligence platform used by companies like Miro, Bolt, and Lovable. Before Swarmia, he served as Chief Product Officer at Smartly, where he led a fast-growing engineering organization through the scaling challenges that eventually inspired Swarmia. He’s also the co-author of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization.
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