Organizing 2000 Developers for BFCM in a Remote World - Shopify

What this post added

This post details the program management and communication strategies employed to organize over 2000 developers for BFCM preparation in a remote environment. It outlines the creation of a communication plan calendar, the use of a distributed ownership model with departmental champions, and the implementation of a 'Caution Tape' bot for risk assessment of PRs in critical repositories. It also describes strategies for slowing down the rate of production deployments, including reducing PRs per deploy, increasing canary testing duration, and locking deploys around the BFCM weekend. The post highlights the success of the program in achieving high PR review rates and enabling developers to focus on cleanup tasks and strategic planning, while also identifying areas for improvement in balancing developer productivity and platform stability.