Breakpoint Speaker Spotlight: Lawrence Mandel, Shopify

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Lawrence Mandel, Director of Production Engineering, Developer Acceleration at Shopify, will be speaking about taking stronger technical opinions to promote innovation through advanced tooling and automation. In his role at Shopify, Mandel leads the Developer Acceleration team which focuses on making commerce developers highly productive by scaling Shopify engineering. He is also interested in leadership, strategy, planning, people management, and mentorship. Mandel's session will cover taking stronger technical opinions to reduce decision-making and promote innovation with more advanced tooling and automation. In his view, a leader's role is not to make every decision but rather to ensure that every decision is made by listening to others and being willing to change one's opinion based on new information. Mandel is currently reading about 'Antifragility,' which explores the concept of something becoming better when broken, as opposed to fragile things that get worse when broken.