Brent Miller:

In April we would announce what we were doing for the conference in October... the year before Upscale we got zero done, which was just a terrible situation for us to be in.

...We started working on [Upscale] in the fall after the whiff on our conference, knowing we were going to roll it out in the spring—probably after we made the commitments for the fall—and we were going to have to do the organizational transformation, do all the change management, have everybody look around at the new world and be like, “How the heck does this work?” ...and still produce enough work to land at the conference and have a good talk.

And so the punchline is, we did the Upscale rollout, which culminates in the big self-selection event. We did that in April or May—I believe it was May. And then by October, we not only delivered all the big items, but a couple of extras that were not on the list.

...From one year to the next, we went from hitting zero of the big three to hitting at least the top ten plus extras, having [also] spent all the time and effort to do the transformation.

It was just a mind-blowing result at the end.

In this video, Jade Rubick and Brent Miller talk about Project Upscale, an intensive effort I led to reduce gridlock at New Relic. They look back at what worked, what didn’t work, and what they’ve learned. There are a lot of gems in here. Take a look.