How to Meet the Biggest Deadline of Your Career: Lessons from Streaming the 2024 Paris Olympics
Paris Olympics: 6 strategies for any large-scale project
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by David Markley, a technology executive with over 30 years experience leading teams at Amazon, Discover, Warner Bros, and more. In this post, David will walk you through planning a technical program that’s not only “good,” but rock-solid. And while the stakes might not always be as high as an Olympic launch, the principles of backwards planning, building in slack, beta testing, and risk management apply to every serious launch.
David outlines the 6 keys to ensuring success for the 2024 Paris Olympics using tried-and-true strategies for any large-scale project:
Start at the End: Backwards Planning for Unmovable Deadlines
Clear Objectives: Establishing a “North Star” for Every Team
Building Slack into the Schedule
Milestone Mapping
Risk Assessment
Resource Allocation
David also co-teaches the new course Lead Large-Scale Tech & Excel as a Technology Executive with Ethan (first cohort starts February 15, 2025).
You can learn more about David on his website.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
If there’s ever been an ultimate test for program planning, it’s delivering a flawless tech experience for the Olympics. Streaming the Olympics is like, well, the Olympics of live-streaming events.
As the VP of Sports Streaming for Warner Bros Discovery, leading the teams that brought the games to your living room was on me. The stakes were high, and it was my responsibility to make sure things ran smoothly and were delivered on time.
The 2024 Games, like every other before it (except 2020!), had an unmovable deadline, unparalleled visibility, and a live audience of millions around the globe demanding perfection.
In short, there was not a lot of room for error.
Here’s how we ensured success for the 2024 Olympics using tried-and-true strategies for any large-scale project.
1. Start at the End: Backwards Planning for Unmovable Deadlines
For the Olympics, every minute detail is dictated by the start date of the Games.
In our case, this meant working backwards from the opening ceremony. By beginning with the end in mind, we were able to outline key milestones and work our way back to the earliest planning phases. This technique forces the team to consider dependencies, potential risks, and key resources from day one.
Why Backwards Planning Works:
Backwards planning is like setting up a domino line: each milestone has to fall in sequence. With backwards planning, the main goal is to ensure all pieces are in place well in advance of the go-live date so that any hiccups in the schedule don’t jeopardize success.
This means that every milestone – from prototype testing to beta release, to full-scale launch rehearsals – had to be carefully plotted out, with enough buffer time (a luxury in any high-stakes program) for adjustments and repairs.
Action: Try starting with your deadline and then mapping out the work backwards. This method helps identify what’s most critical and forces a realistic view of dependencies. In turn, this allows you to allocate resources and establish a timeline that aligns with both ambition and feasibility.
2. Clear Objectives: Establishing a “North Star” for Every Team
When you’re dealing with a large launch, program objectives and expectations must be crystal clear.
For the 2024 Games, this meant aligning on specific deliverables, user experience goals, and system performance metrics early on. Establishing these North Star objectives early on helped steer the entire program and help everyone make decisions that pointed towards the same goal.
How We Set Our Objectives:
Our objectives for the Olympics were set in collaboration with key stakeholders, which included internal engineering and product teams as well as marketing, partner networks, and broadcasting teams. We held workshops to make sure every team understood not only their role but also the “big picture” and how each piece of the puzzle fit together.
For example, we worked together to set the following objectives and communicate them to every team:
Uptime Goal: 99.999% streaming availability for all live events.
Latency Benchmark: Reduce streaming latency to under 5 seconds across all supported platforms.
Scalability: Ensure the system could support peak traffic, which we estimated would reach 1.5 million concurrent viewers.
Action: When setting objectives, make them tangible and measurable. Objectives should be specific enough that anyone on the team can see if they’re being met, even before the final deadline.
3. Building Slack into the Schedule
Every program, especially one of high complexity and importance, needs buffer time (or “slack”) built in.
Some people equate slack with inefficiency, but in reality, it’s a lifesaver. Without it, teams inevitably pad estimates and extend the timeline, making it impossible to gauge real timing or resource needs. By adding a designated slack period, you create a transparent safety net that allows the team to operate effectively.
How Much Slack Is Enough?
In my experience, a reasonable slack buffer for any program should be about 10-20% of the program length. For the Olympics, this meant that the system was production-ready approximately six weeks before the opening ceremony. This cushion allowed for final tweaks, testing, and a little breathing room in case anything needed an eleventh-hour adjustment.
We also allocated some of this slack time to an internal beta testing phase, which doubled as a final layer of quality assurance. Since our stakeholders could see the product in action during beta, they understood the value of this period and supported our decision to include it.
Action: Communicate the value of a “slack” period, and inform stakeholders that this period can be used for beta testing.
4. Milestone Mapping
Large launches and long programs require a detailed map of milestones, and each milestone is like a progress check to keep you on track.
The best way to ensure a high-quality program is to make sure the plan breaks down into smaller, achievable chunks, so that teams can track progress and course-correct along the way.
Key Milestones for 2024 Olympics:
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