Snowflake’s playbook for operational excellence

Engineering Enablement Podcast

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Snowflake’s playbook for operational excellence

Snowflake leaders Gilad Turbahn and Amy Yuan reveal how they drive operational excellence by treating teams like customers and use roadmaps plus advisory boards to align priorities and scale planning.

Abi Noda

Jun 20, 2025

Transcript

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In this episode, I talk with Gilad Turbahn, Head of Developer Productivity, and Amy Yuan, Director of Engineering at Snowflake, about how they approach operational excellence. We dig into how they build trust with engineering teams, the communication rhythms that keep their org aligned, and how they treat internal teams like customers. Gilad and Amy also share how Snowflake uses roadmaps, advisory boards, and direct feedback to drive priorities—and how they’re evolving their planning practices to scale with the company.

Some takeaways:

What operational excellence looks like at Snowflake

Do what you say you’ll do—on time—to build trust.
Treat internal teams like customers.
Use documentation and help channels to support engineering teams at scale.

Creating a strong feedback loop

Feedback is only valuable if it’s followed up on—Snowflake closes the loop with a tracking system (tracking each person spoken to) and a weekly ops review.
Show how the feedback is reflected in the road map, or explain why it isn’t.

Snowflake’s five-part communication rhythm

Weekly newsletters
Surveys to gather and prioritize needs
Interviews across levels
Roadshows and all-hands
A mix of top-down and bottom-up adoption strategies

Barriers to operational excellence

Lagging adopters and resistance to change
Wrong leadership style for the team or individual—leadership should be tailored to the individual and team needs.

Customer engagement, redefined

Treat engineers like customers—tailor time and communication to their needs.
Attend team all-hands, host listening sessions, and use data to show trade-offs.
Snowflake adjusts session length from quick 5-minute syncs to deep 60-minute sessions depending on the needs.

Converting detractors into allies

Snowflake PMs are highly technical and dive deep into engineers’ pain points.
They walk through problems collaboratively and validate concerns.
Customer Advisory Boards help create evangelists from within.

Customer Advisory Boards at Snowflake

Boards are built from diverse teams and levels—both promoters and detractors.
They look for people who are vocal.
Members are identified either in interviews or nominated by directors.
Meetings are informal with no pressure to make every single meeting.
They use Slack to keep the feedback loop active.
Moderate effectively: At Snowflake the process is to introduce a road map, design, quarterly plan, or survey results. Then ask members what is top of mind.

Planning and goal-setting at Snowflake

Planning at Snowflake is done both annually and quarterly.
They balance OKRs with a long-term North Star.
They are currently experimenting with “thematic prioritization.” Thematic prioritization uses main themes that can make a difference to customers.