ABOUT ME

Ryan Taylor Hulu Production Operations Leader

6 years ago, I founded AllTeamz, a family of web and mobile apps. The experience enabled me to take on responsibilities I had little practical knowledge of previously. I was the product manager, system administrator, architect, development team, the sales and marketing team, and the sole individual responsible for customer service. As a result of the successful side project, a top 20 paid sports app, I became a more well-rounded TechOps leader. The experience allows me to understand business needs, the reliance on tools, data, support, and stability provided by our tech organizations.

I have over 15 years of experience leading Technical Operations teams with some of the most respected companies in streaming media, finance, and security technology. As Hulu's Director of Production Operations, my teams are expected to maximize uptime/availability for our DMVPD and VOD products by leveraging operators, a talented engineering team, and the analytical tools built by those teams.

PHILOSOPHY

  • Transformational leadership philosophy to change, elevate, unify, and inspire others to pursue challenging and shared objectives
    • Team members should serve as mentors, coaches, role models, and leaders
    • Everyone has the ability to lead
  • Operations is not a team, it's a cultural value
  • Operations are present at every stage of the product life cycle
  • Buy for industry standards. Build for the gaps.
  • Indentify, plan, and then buy or build to enable reliability across the engineering organization
  • Enable feedback processes and observability across the engineering organization
  • Data is the language of partnerships
    • Product, Customer Care, and Engineering KPIs have their language
    • Combine Operational KPIs with external data to tell the story
  • Reactive actions are candidates for proactive and automated improvement
  • ITIL is still a valid framework for modern infrastructure and microservice architecture
  • The Operations Center concept is still valid but with a focus on SRE
  • Incident response is the catalyst for greater resiliency and quicker recovery
  • Every failure is an opportunity to improve

FACTS

99.99%
UPTIME 2020
3%
TOTAL INCIDENT FREE TIME 2020
3 Minutes
MTTE (ENGAGE)
30% FEWER
MAJOR INCIDENTS 2020

Testimonials

Ryan is a capable and compassionate leader with a clear vision for how Operations can and should run. He has studied incident response throughout many industries to distill the most effective, efficient, and expeditious approaches. Ryan tirelessly pursues data-driven and highly automated solutions. But, I think the most important thing is that Ryan cares about his team like family. He takes the time to get to know and, in many cases, mentor his folks. Ryan has been a helpful and motivational force in my career development at Hulu. He is the rare manager that I would feel comfortable to call about advice on anything.

John Martin Hulu Engineer

John Martin

I’ve had the good fortune of partnering closely with Ryan since he started at Hulu. He is an Operations expert. When he started at Hulu, he learned the Live TV domain & architecture at an unbelievable pace. He set up Hulu’s Network Operations Center from ground zero and has consistently matured the practice over the years. He is honest, unbiased, handles confrontation professionally, and never afraid to venture into unchartered territory. As a person, he is kind, compassionate, inclusive, and thoughtful. He’s great mentor for many, and I’m grateful to Ryan for being a wonderful person to watch and learn from every day, and for being a wonderful friend.

Kalyani Narayanan Hulu TPM

Kalyani Narayanan (Ramajayam)

Ryan was key in helping me learn and navigate the social and political ecosystem at Hulu. Without having him as a guide, I do not think I would have the recognition as Hulu’s Problem Manager, the visibility to leadership that I have today, or the growth and promotion I’ve recently achieved after 15 months at Hulu. Ryan really helped contribute to my success as he enabled me to focus not only on driving process improvements for problem & change management but allowed me to act as the day-to-day process manager for these functions with great autonomy. I think that his trust in me as a leader helped me to take my own actions about the future of problem & change management, with great success

Steve Stevens Hulu Resiliency Advocate

Steve Stevens

WORK EXPERIENCE