Reimagining DORA Metrics & Leveraging Feature Flags | Split's Ariel Perez

**Ariel Perez** (0:00)
The reality is actually that about 70% of everything you put in production has either little or negative value. 70%, imagine that.

**Dan Lines** (0:12)
That's crazy.

**Ariel Perez** (0:13)
70% of everything you ship has little, no, or negative value, so only 30% of what you're doing actually has value for the customer. It's unbelievable, right?
So, how do you think about that idea of value? So, the Dora Metrics and even the reimagined world of Dora Metrics with feature flags and that granularity help you ship faster.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:36)
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**Dan Lines** (1:18)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your host, Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO.
And today we're joined by Ariel Perez, a VP of engineering at Split. Ariel, welcome to the show.

**Ariel Perez** (1:36)
Thank you for having me, Dan. I'm very happy to be here.

**Dan Lines** (1:39)
Yeah, super awesome to have you on today. Really been looking forward to having this conversation.
You're really passionate about engineering effectiveness, which for me is something that I care a lot about. We care a lot about at Linear B. And I know you also have thoughts on DevOps and some Dora metrics. And of course, do the split feature flags and how they play into these topics. But before we jump into our main topics today, can you give the audience a background about yourself and how you got into engineering?

**Ariel Perez** (2:17)
Definitely, thank you for that. Well, I'm born and raised in New York.
Background, I got into engineering even I think as far back as high school, dating myself a bit.
That was the day, those were the days where DHTML was a thing. So it got me really into playing with CSS and JavaScript and making things move dynamically on a page and really pulled out my passion for programming. So I went to college for programming. I was a computer science major at that time. Jobs in New York City, when it came to technology, were primarily in the financial services space. Facebook had just started, Google had only just been around. So people didn't really go to fangs just yet. Amazon was barely new as well. So I worked in financial services, did that for many years, grew to many roles, individual contributor, managing teams, lead engineer, got to travel around the world quite a bit, working with international teams, then decided to change it up and start going back to start up smaller companies. So bounced around a few startups, built my own startup for a while, was consulting, then came back to big company. I was working at JP Morgan Chase on the Chase side. That's what got me really passionate about feature flagging because I got my opportunity to build my own feature flagging platform there for use at scale.
Fast forward a few years, got to take that to the UK and built Chase in the UK. Awesome experience building a digitally native mobile, native bank, and then landed here at Split, really putting together my ability to understand feature flags having built my own and a passion, particularly for measurement and learning.

**Dan Lines** (3:50)
That's amazing. I mean, one thing that I really like about that background, I mean, oftentimes we'll talk to people more so like on the West Coast and, you know, that startup vibe, and maybe I'm jumping from company to company until like I hopefully get like a big hit.
But you were saying like you were in the New York City area. So maybe some of those like financial firms and larger organizations.
What did you learn the difference between a startup and a, you know, much larger company?
And the reason that I'm asking you that is now, of course, you're one of the VPs of engineering, right? At Split and a lot of people want to progress their career to get to that type of opportunity. So any tips, you know, on how we can do that based on your background?

**Ariel Perez** (4:39)
Definitely, I think, you know, we can speak about broad, you know, in broad strokes, but in general, one of the key differences I saw in my first move from big company financial services to small startup.