Dan strives to help organisations take a “people first” approach in a technical world. Growing a culture where smart, talented people have the space to think creatively and the freedom to make decisions helps companies innovate faster and deliver products that customers love. His career of over 20 years has included experience in software development, operations, consulting and startups. In recent years Dan has led digital product strategy at News Corp, consulted for software engineering teams at REA Group, and lead the recent DevOps transformation at MYOB. Dan is the founder of Leadership of Awesome, a community of growth minded, people focused leaders from around the tech industry. He is also leading the engineering effort to transform how customers can purchase products at Xero.
Past Talks
5 March 2021
Often an overhaul is the only way to guarantee a stable, secure and performant user experience. Whether it be technical debt, architectural improvements, over time or even migration commitments, overhauls are a fact and can be detrimental to the team in terms of timing, productivity and balancing general work pressures. Our panelists will discuss how to approach a product overhaul and the key steps needed for success no matter what area you're working on.
3 March 2021
Dan Harper and his teams at Xero just wrapped up big changes within the business. With involvement required from 40+ teams, changes to many critical legacy systems and the need to build several new platforms, they carried massive risks throughout the project and particularly when "going live" to customers.
In this talk, Dan will share the learnings on what worked, what didn't work and the continuous delivery practices they implemented that helped the team reduce risks and incrementally deliver changes to production across global regions and different customer segments.