WeAreDevelopers Logo WeAreDevelopers
Sign in
For You LIVE
World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

Trust at scale

Mike Fynes

Mike Fines warns that hiring to solve organizational friction only deepens underlying trust fractures. Discover how this DoorDash leader enforces definitive boundaries to build hyper-scaling engineering teams.

Pause
Mute Enter Fullscreen
#1 about 2 min

Defining the core concept of absolute team trust

A classic movie reference illustrates the ultimate organizational goal of establishing unquestioned interpersonal reliability.

#2 about 1 min

Managing scale across distributed engineering teams

Sustaining rapid organizational growth relies on establishing effective collaborative practices rather than continuously increasing headcount.

#3 about 2 min

The initial failure to build autonomous teams

The transition from individual contributor to management frequently exposes the pitfalls of eager over-involvement and unintentional micromanagement.

#4 about 2 min

Breaking team trust through top-down technical overrides

Overruling a team's thoroughly researched technical decision destroys their initiative and silences their input during planning meetings.

#5 about 3 min

Understanding the three concentric layers of trust

Human interaction is governed by an operating model consisting of broad societal norms, role-based implicit assumptions, and direct explicit relationships.

#6 about 2 min

Relying on explicit trust within small organizations

Early-stage companies function efficiently by depending entirely on direct interpersonal contacts and familiar processes.

#7 about 2 min

The societal responsibility and faith placed in engineers

Businesses and society place immense faith in software systems like cloud infrastructure and financial platforms to operate without interruption.

#8 about 2 min

How organizational growth degrades interpersonal team trust

Surpassing organizational thresholds weakens established engineering ceremonies and inadvertently isolates functional groups from one another.

#9 about 3 min

Avoiding the trap of tribalism and toxic silos

Encouraging a strongly inward-looking group identity fabricates short-term cohesion while ultimately damaging broader company alignment.

#10 about 2 min

Gaining trust in drops and losing it in buckets

Professional reputation relies on a delicate asymmetry where minor repetitive successes build confidence but singular failures cause instantaneous reputational damage.

#11 about 4 min

Rebuilding team autonomy by stepping out of technical decisions

Deliberately avoiding architectural discussions and acting privately as a devil's advocate forces developers to reclaim project ownership.

#12 about 3 min

Scaling inter-team trust to avoid invisible efficiency taxes

Unreliable dependencies between engineering functions manifest as padded delivery estimates, excessive oversight, and inefficient technical workarounds.

#13 about 4 min

Hiring for autonomy and building operational reliability

Achieving true organizational maturity requires hiring engineers capable of independent execution and solidifying operational stability prior to adding headcount.

Matching moments

4:21 min

Leveraging trust to launch new developer communities

Angie Jones Angie Jones +3 · WWC 2024

2:22 min

Expanding the trust landscape to additional stakeholders

Alexander Günsche Alexander Günsche +1 · WWC Europe 2026

2:11 min

Scaling organizational trust across hybrid multi-repository workflows

Laura Thorson Laura Thorson · WWC Europe 2026

3:57 min

Building organizational trust and embracing remote developer teams

Rudi Bauer Rudi Bauer +1 · Cappuccino with HR

2:28 min

Three habits of high-trust hybrid developer teams

Laura Thorson Laura Thorson · WWC Europe 2026

8:09 min

Diagnosing crises of trust in system performance

Ivan Milanov Ivan Milanov · Europe 2026 Virtual

More from World Congress 2026 Europe

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA) thumbnail
29:17
about 1 month ago

Building the Nervous System of AI - Michael Kagan (NVIDIA)

Michael Kagan, Sead Ahmetović

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote thumbnail
19:41
about 1 month ago

Five Things in Tech that Matter Now - WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2026 Closing Keynote

Christian Heilmann

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend thumbnail
32:06
about 1 month ago

The Sound of Your Secrets: Teaching Your Model to Spy, So You Can Learn to Defend

David vonThenen

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes thumbnail
35:13
about 1 month ago

Super scaling for the Super Bowl: How to survive 30 million users hitting your backend in 30 minutes

Irina Branovic

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬 thumbnail
24:23
about 1 month ago

Running Secure Life Science Research at Scale using Hybrid GPU HPC and Kubernetes 🧬

Jeremy Murray

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat thumbnail
30:26
about 1 month ago

Angstfreude - AI and Corporate Culture - The Thrill and the Threat

Axel Ebert, Karin Krobath

Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Culture Doesn't Scale Itself: Leading Engineering Teams Through Hypergrowth and the AI Transition

Thanos Baskous

VP of Engineering and Co-founder of Cogent Security

Thanos Baskous
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Evals Are Infra: Building AI Systems Developers Can Actually Trust

Phoebe Wang

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI

Phoebe Wang
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

It passed auth, then production caught fire

Alex Olivier

Co-founder & CPO @ Cerbos | OpenID AuthZEN Co-chair

Alex Olivier
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Who Tests the AI? Building Trustworthy AI Systems at Enterprise Scale

Him Raj Singh

PayPal, Manager, Software Engineer

Him Raj Singh
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Zero-Trust Architecture for Agentic AI: Securing Multi-User Access and Third-Party Integrations

Borko Djurkovic

Member of Technical Staff at Cohere

Borko Djurkovic
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Stop Running Mystery Meat in Production

Jeroen van Erp

Technical Advocate @ SUSE

Jeroen van Erp

Related videos

How Not to Get Tied Up in Knots: Leadership for Complex Structures thumbnail
43:54
Europe 2026 Virtual • about 1 month ago

How Not to Get Tied Up in Knots: Leadership for Complex Structures

Ana Gil Amor, Elena Guidi

Five Ways to Break Silos in Your Engineering Organization thumbnail
28:49
WWC Europe 2026 • about 1 month ago

Five Ways to Break Silos in Your Engineering Organization

Daniel Schniepp

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering thumbnail
32:00
WWC 2023 • almost 3 years ago

Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering

David Singleton, Thomas Pamminger

From Code to Culture: Why Leadership Determines Software Quality thumbnail
30:07
Europe 2026 Virtual • about 1 month ago

From Code to Culture: Why Leadership Determines Software Quality

Oskar Kruschitz

Engineering culture: Why ownership is the secret ingredient thumbnail
42:41
WWC 2021 • about 5 years ago

Engineering culture: Why ownership is the secret ingredient

Eric Rabinovich

Trust as the Key Concept in Future Mobility thumbnail
56:45
LIVE • about 3 years ago

Trust as the Key Concept in Future Mobility

Peter Busch

Related articles

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.