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As engineering managers, we’re often caught between cost cuts, tight deadlines, and team well-being. This talk shares real strategies for making tough trade-offs, prioritizing what matters, and keeping everyone engaged.
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As engineering managers, we often find ourselves juggling multiple crises at once: tight budgets, limited resources, and never enough time. Add to that the pressure from leadership to cut costs (hello, AWS bills!), the uncertainty of layoffs, and the constant need to deliver while keeping the customer experience intact, and it’s no wonder the job can feel like a high-wire act.
In this talk, we’ll take a candid look at the messy, real-world challenges of managing a technical team under crisis conditions. Using a case study on balancing cost optimization with ongoing work commitments, we’ll explore how to make tough trade-offs, protect your team’s morale, and still keep things running smoothly. We’ll introduce the idea of the “constraint satisfaction problem” to help guide decision-making in times of pressure – and share practical tips on how to use these trade-offs to keep everyone (yourself, your team, your manager, and even your customers) as happy as possible, without burning out.
This talk isn’t just theory – it’s a hands-on, experience-based approach to surviving the ups and downs of engineering management in 2025. If you’re looking for actionable advice and a bit of empathy in the face of all the pressure, this one’s for you!
Key takeaways
- Strategies for navigating limited resources, tight timelines, and an ever-changing landscape without sacrificing team morale or customer satisfaction.
- A framework for making decisions that feel impossible, and knowing when to adjust your course.
- Insights on managing the emotional side of leadership – how to invest in your “emotional bank account” with your team, manager, and customers so you don’t hit zero.
