LeadDev London video hub
All the videos from our London events
LeadDev London 2024 videos
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Beyond the hype: Practical steps to establishing and scaling your data & ML team
Discover how to build and scale a data team, implement practical machine learning, and drive success with data-driven decision-making in a growing company.
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Mentorship + Sponsorship
To grow our technical leadership skills, it’s critical to lean on one’s network of support.
November 4 & 5, 2025
The leadership conference for tech leads and engineering leaders.
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If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem
Do you feel like you’re constantly surrounded by managers who exhibit toxic behaviours and “shred their team’s confidence” (actual quote)? Diverse and inclusive policies may not be enough to stop these individuals from causing harm.
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Managing engineering teams in the era of AI
Drawing from my experience as Engineering Manager at incident.io, where I was part of a product team that built the company’s first AI-powered features, this talk combines personal insights and broader leadership strategies.
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How to set goals with people who don’t want to set goals
Setting goals does not come easy to everyone.
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The software bug all stars – and what we can learn from them
Join me for a thought-provoking and entertaining presentation where I’ll take you on a journey through some of the biggest and most impactful bugs in software history, including the example of an interplanetary probe launched by NASA that was lost due to a software bug. This will not only show the importance of attention to detail but also highlight the significance of proper testing and quality assurance.
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Managing the marathon: Leading teams through lengthy migration projects
In this short talk, Lawrence will reflect on his experience leading teams through multi-year migration projects.
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Uncertainty of Change
In this talk, I will take you through uncertainty and its impact on our lives by looking at case studies from the cotton mill workers of 19th Century Britain to the fall of Nokia as the world’s No. 1 phone maker and how change connects them both. Then, I will explore how the uncertainty of change can sometimes cause us to ignore, deny, distort, or even try to stop it from happening instead of working with it.
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The Boss’s Shoes Don’t Fit: And Other Surprises of Leadership
Ever fantasized about wearing your manager’s shoes and calling all the shots?
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The Post Office Scandal: what we can learn from its process and human failures
The story of the Post Office scandal not only serves as a warning about tech failure, but also as a reminder of the real-world significance of the software we build.
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Iterate to Greatness: Building High Performance, AI-native Engineering Teams
In this talk, we’ll discuss how Vercel transitioned to an AI-native company and how you too can operate highly effective, AI-native product engineering teams, from the tools used to the way to stay organised amid the rapidly changing pace of AI.
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Making smart investments: A framework for maximizing your ROI in technical decisions
In this talk, we’re going to explore a framework for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of complex tech decisions, illustrated with real-world examples that highlight both the traps to avoid and the paths to success. I’ll share methods for pinpointing key metrics that matter, and how to design experiments or proof-of-concepts to measure ROI. Finally we will discuss the importance of staying objective and adaptable throughout the process.
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Data Science Demystified
This talk gives an overview of Data Science and delves deep into the pipeline data scientists use – right from fetching the data, the Python tools and frameworks used to creating models, gaining insights and telling a story.
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Measure for Change
Picking metrics is one thing. But the harder decisions lie in what to do with them afterward.
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Delivery metrics – the good, the bad and the utterly ridiculous
As an engineering team lead, I spent countless hours pouring over data points, spreadsheets, and graphs in search of the perfect set of metrics to measure our team’s success.
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How to use technology radars to make transparent tech decisions
The talk centres around the benefits of building such a tool, such as transparency, alignment and faster onboarding.
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Managing across timezones; A retrospective
In 2020, Cloudflare moved from being an in office company to 100% remote. This changed the way we work completely.
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From overload to oasis: Creating more time for the cool stuff
Tired of being overloaded with monotonous tasks? Craving more time for the ‘cool stuff’? You’re not alone.
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Tech debt as innovation, reframing this forever problem as an opportunity
Tech Debt is a natural by-product of software engineering, yet we, in the software industry, don’t attack it with the same excitement or fervor as we do with product innovation or feature development.
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Build great engineering teams and have a positive social impact
On the back of working in the tech industry developing great products in highly competitive markets, how can we make society better? Germán and Seraphine will share the story of skills and talent meeting diversity and social impact.
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Revolutionizing engineer growth: the tech-powered blueprint for careers clarity at ASOS
As engineering leaders, it’s our job to make the folks in our team the most effective that they can be and to grow them to their full potential.
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The LeadDev Engineering Management Report 2024
Over the last two years, the tech industry has been going through big changes.
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How do you deliver a feature on the biggest stage in the world?
In this talk, media server engineer Josh McNamee discusses the challenges in shipping Disguise’s ‘Single Large Canvas’, the software feature that lets U2 put images on the inside of the Las Vegas Sphere.
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Embracing engineering’s place at the forefront of business
The landscape of technology has changed over the past decade – and that change has led to the place of engineering changing in the architecture of modern businesses.
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Demystifying neurodiversity in tech with nostalgic video games
What happens when great minds DON’T think alike?
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You are here: The story of the Barbican
If you were standing in this exact spot in early 1941, you’d be surrounded by rubble. Large swaths of London lie in ruins after the months-long Blitz during World War II, and Cripplegate ward where we now sit was almost completely destroyed. The only building you’d see standing would be a heavily damaged St. Giles Church.
November 4 & 5, 2025
The leadership conference for tech leads and engineering leaders.
Videos from previous years of LeadDev London
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You are here: The story of the Barbican
If you were standing in this exact spot in early 1941, you’d be surrounded by rubble. Large swaths of London lie in ruins after the months-long Blitz during World War II, and Cripplegate ward where we now sit was almost completely destroyed. The only building you’d see standing would be a heavily damaged St. Giles Church.
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Building for the new developer
So we’ve bought a Copilot license for our teams….AI in software solved, right?!
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Managing at the threshold: Examining our principles in a moment of change
David Yee talks about managing at the threshold: Examining our principles in a moment of change
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Engineering a more equitable hiring process
Jason Wodicka lays out some of the places where bias enters our hiring process, and shares concrete actions you can take to make your own hiring more efficient, equitable, and effective.
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The 9.1 magnitude meltdown at Fukushima
Nick Means takes us to mid-afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the ground in Tōhoku began to shake. To the operators at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it seemed like the shaking would never stop. The way their team operated during that fateful week has a lot to teach us about helping our own teams be at their best, both in crisis and out.
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Building bridges: The art of crafting seamless partnerships between engineering, product, and design
James Stanier, Winter Wei, and Janet Balneaves join us for a panel discussion on the art of crafting seamless partnerships between engineering, product, and design.
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Orchestrating thousands of bots from the cloud
James Donkin talks about how we now provide an end-to-end platform for smart online grocery to some of the world’s largest grocery retailers. At the heart of our model are automated warehouses which are the most advanced of their kind. Thousands of bots collaborate seamlessly on 3D grids to fulfil customer orders.
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Why onboarding to a company’s legacy codebase sucks, and how to make it work for your team
Shanea Leven discusses the history and context of the problems that plague codebase onboarding. And with problems come solutions such as tips and tools that make it easier for engineers to onboard a legacy codebase.
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The awful agony of the app store: When software delivery goes wrong
Clare Sudbery shares a dramatic tale of ups and downs, tears and triumph, and the very sharp end of the sunk cost fallacy. Via the rollercoaster ride of a failed iOS app, Clare uses the experience to highlight several key components that contribute to successful software development… and offer understanding to those facing obstacles beyond their control.
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Driving positive change through performance improvement plans
Cristina Yenyxe Gonzalez Garcia describes an approach to PIPs in which the manager helps to set the employee up for success.
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Building for the underserved, solving for all
Serah Njambi Kiburu will remind us about the levels and weight of responsibility we carry as builders and leads in tech, zero in on the need for prioritising people-centric approaches in the design and development decisions we make everyday and implore us to move beyond only employing best practices in our work.
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Creating inclusive career ladders
Sally Lait will cover some common pitfalls, and will go through a practical set of prompts to help you make sure your career ladder can work well for everyone.
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Parents who code: How to welcome your developers back after parental leave
Sinead Cummings is going to talk through how you, as Development Leaders, can provide visibility of key decisions to those who have been on leave, ensure they aren’t overlooked during their period of absence and how you can prevent cognitive overload when they return, guaranteeing your best and brightest return feeling empowered, valued, and ready to code.
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Keeping your team health after a layoff
Leandro Cesar Silva will discuss how we can support and care for the team and then move forward, based on what I experienced at Loggi, where it was possible to overcome in a healthy way.
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Build a data-driven on-call workflow for your team with atomic habits
Bianca Costache will walk you through a data-driven on-call framework, clearly derived from first principles. You will get the WHY, our journey towards adoption, and the results after more than 2 years of implementation.
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Feature flags unleashed
Roger Gros will show you how you can use feature flags to run complex data migrations, enable canary releases, easily build plans on top of your product, customize for specific clients, and much more.
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Cultural post mortems: an approach to learning and recovering when your people systems fail
Winna Bridgewater will share how they planned and executed recovery work. Our aim is to inspire you to consider a systems approach when something with your team goes wrong, and we’ll provide a template for what we think worked well.
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Riding the rollercoaster of emotions
Gabriel Michels covers key topics such as understanding and managing emotions, reflecting on them, developing emotional intelligence, and being in control of our thoughts.
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How to effectively “Spike” a complex technical project
Aditya Bansal explains what a spike is, how to successfully spike a project, and lessons learned from leading several technically complex projects across 3 different companies, and various different teams.
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Platform engineering is all about product
Gal Bashan wants to make sure you leave this talk with an understanding of platform engineering and how it relates to DevOps; what makes an IDP and a platform team successful; and finally, practices you can use to build a successful platform, and pitfalls to avoid.
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Exit plans and how to talk about them
David Kiger covers why the answer to that question is important, how to set up the culture to enable the conversation, how to actually have the conversations once the foundation is laid, and the benefits that both employees and the company get out of it.
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How we support making architectural decisions
Olena Sovyn takes a deep dive from the principles based on which this group operates to the specific how-to that made its work beneficial for the company and shares what we’ve learned from this whole experience so far.
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How to drive pace in your team ??♀️
Alicia Collymore delivers actionable advice that’ll help you to improve your teams’ delivery and pace without a data-first approach.
