What does it take to build product features that hold up under massive traffic while still delivering a great user experience? Karen Risvig, Head of Product & UX at Queue-it, joins Smooth Scaling to share how her team designs for scalability, resilience, and security from day one. From invite-only waiting rooms to real-time visitor analytics, Karen breaks down the product decisions behind some of Queue-it’s most exciting features—and the trade-offs that come with building for scale.

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This episode's guest is Karen Risvig. Karen Risvig is a dynamic product leader with extensive experience in the SaaS industry. As Head of Product & UX at Queue-it, she leads product strategy, roadmap execution, and a team of product managers and UX specialists. She brings a data-driven approach to decision-making and excels at turning complex challenges into clear, high-impact solutions. Karen is known for fostering cross-functional collaboration and delivering products that align with both user needs and business goals.

Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. Each week, he’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that perform at scale.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (01:05) - Career Journey
• (03:45) - Projects vs. Products: Shifting Perspectives
• (05:25) - Feature Spotlight: Invite-Only Waiting Rooms
• (08:49) - Leveraging Customer Insights and Behavioral Data
• (10:21) - Capturing User Attention
• (11:48) - Reducing Purchase Friction
• (13:17) - Early-stage Feature Evaluation and Idea Validation
• (17:50) - Balancing Problems and Opportunities
• (19:27) - Core Requirements: Scalability, Resilience, and Security
• (25:14) - Scalability in Practice: Handling Massive User Interaction
• (27:29) - Trade-offs in Product Development
• (29:33) - Lessons Learned at Queue-it
• (31:52) - Rapid-fire Q&A: Resources and Advice
• (33:55) - Outro

In this episode, Yam Shal-Bar, CTO at Radview, discusses the the evolving world of load testing and how it's used to prepare for peak traffic. He covers the most common system bottlenecks, the importance of iterative testing, and strategies for accurately simulating user journeys. Yam shares insights into common misconceptions around testing, best practices, and trends like AI for test analysis and API-level testing. Whether you're launching a new web app or tuning an existing one, this episode is packed with practical advice for testing systems for resilience and scalability.

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This episode's guest is Yam Shal-Bar. Yam Shal-Bar is an experienced development leader and software architect with over two decades of expertise in managing distributed teams and delivering enterprise-scale software solutions. As CTO at RadView Software, he drives the company’s technical roadmap and leads the development of core products, including RadView’s performance testing platform and web dashboard. Throughout his career—including leadership roles at British Telecom, Reliance Infocomm, and Vodafone—he has championed Agile methodologies, DevOps practices, and CI/CD pipelines to deliver robust, scalable systems.

Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. Each week, he’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that perform at scale.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:59) - Yam Shal-Bar and Radview
• (02:20) - Simulating User Journeys
• (05:00) - How to approach load testing?
• (06:25) - What are common finds when load testing?
• (10:42) - Different perspectives on "capacity"
• (16:05) - The playbook of load testing
• (18:50) - What are common bottlenecks in complex systems?
• (20:32) - Third-party services and load testing
• (23:33) - What exactly are you load testing?
• (26:11) - What is changing within the load testing space?
• (27:39) - API and User Journey testing
• (30:56) - Rapid-Fire Questions
• (35:25) - Wrap Up

What makes a system scalable? In this episode, Mojtaba Saroonghi explains why simplicity is the secret to scalability. Saroonghi explains why avoiding complexity helps minimize the risk of failure while improving troubleshooting, deployment, and the overall scalability of a system. He walks though how Queue-it has maintained simplicity as it has grown, the allure of complexity, and how architects can incorporate simplicity into their system design and development.

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This episode's guest is Mojtaba Saroonghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it. Moji was one of the company’s first employees, starting his journey as a software developer over 10 years ago. He is highly experienced with AWS services, product and architectural design, managing developer teams, and defining and executing on product vision.

Host Jose Quaresma is the VP of Technical Engagement at Queue-it, working on the frontlines with some of the world’s biggest businesses on their busiest days, from Ticketmaster to Zalando to Home Office U.K. Each week, he’ll be joined by experts across industries, uncovering how major organizations design, build, and deploy systems that perform at scale.

This podcast is hosted by José Quaresma, researched by Joseph Thwaites and produced by Perseu Mandillo.

• (00:00) - Welcome & Introduction
• (01:08) - Moji’s Background
• (01:59) - What Makes a System Scalable?
• (05:19) - Trade-offs of Simplicity vs. Complexity
• (11:37) - Simplicity in scalability
• (13:00) - Simplicity and complexity in Queue-it
• (17:32) - Everyday Complexity in Engineering
• (19:22) - Quickfire Round
• (23:40) - Wrap-up