Balancing Operational Excellence and Innovation in Engineering with Meir Wasserman

Discover how engineering leaders in gaming navigate the constant tension between keeping the lights on and building what's next. Meir Wasserman shares hard-earned lessons from EA Sports, Amazon Games, and 2K Games on driving change, creating urgency, and evolving as a leader, plus his take on how AI is reshaping the engineering workflow.

Main Topics Covered:

• Balancing operational toil with delivering customer value and new features
• Driving organizational change: why the hardest part is people, not technology
• A practical heuristic for deciding which operational problems are worth fixing
• Scaling leadership: staying connected to your org as it grows beyond one team
• A skip-level meeting format for staying connected without micromanaging
• Why leaders must be the source of urgency for their top priorities
• Simplifying complexity as a core leadership skill to rally teams around problems
• Evolving views on AI: from skepticism to excitement about agentic workflows
• The shift from writing code to engineering outcomes, and what that means for the profession
• Bridging the gap between vibe coding and production-grade, enterprise-level code
• AI economics and the coming shift from flat pricing to consumption or value-based models

Connect with Meir Wasserman: LinkedIn + Blog

Connect with Stephen Koza: LinkedIn

Connect with EverOps

References:

• Book: Amp It Up by Frank Slootman
• Tool: NotebookLM by Google