Sign up to our DirectorPlus newsletter
Subscribers get the best engineering leadership content in their inbox every month.
Newsletter archive
AI agents and the missing link in DevOps
AI agents aren’t just assistants anymore – they’re making decisions. Are engineers ready for the shift or are they just too skeptical?
Carving out time for large-scale engineering chores
Determine what to prioritize, set out a path, and be prepared for some hiccups along the way.
Encouraging a passion for productivity
In this edition of DirectorPlus, Neha Batra, VP of Engineering at GitHub, explains how she creates a culture of productivity.
Framing AI rollouts in the right light
How can you introduce AI into teams in a way that doesn’t invite unrest within your org? It starts with presenting it in the right light.
Latest
-
Testing is a skill. Quality is a discipline.
As quality assurance makes way for quality engineering, how do you change mindsets?
-
The great engineer hiring paradox
“The story isn’t that jobs are vanishing, it’s that the bar for skills is rising.”
-
Why Zig is moving on from GitHub
A scathing review has broader implications for AI use by major platforms.
-
Why AI economics are fundamentally broken
Making money from software is not the same equation in the AI era.
-
If 95% of generative AI pilots fail, what’s going wrong?
Learning the right lessons from that MIT study
London • June 2 & 3, 2026
Rands, Nicole Forsgren,
& Matej Pfajfar confirmed
Essential reading
What is a Director of Engineering? The glue keeping engineering together
A director of engineering is responsible for keeping an entire engineering function humming. Find out what skills you need to climb the ladder to this vital position.
On our DirectorPlus playlist
Strategies to hone commercial awareness and drive business outcomes
Learn effective strategies for enhancing commercial awareness in tech teams, turning engineering into a business driver through alignment, impactful initiatives, and stakeholder engagement.
The path from Director to CTO: How to follow it, or how to mentor it
This talk is aimed at both aspiring Chief Technology Officers and those who are in a position to mentor future CTOs. Explore the journey from a Director of Engineering role to a CTO, focusing on the skills and experiences needed for this transition and how experienced leaders can guide others on this path.
Making the manager of manager’s mindset
Suzan Bond covers the difference between the two roles and the key mindset shifts leaders need to make to manage managers.
The festival for modern engineering leadership
London • June 2 & 3, 2026
More for managers of managers
-
Unlocking performance management for start-ups and scale-ups
Performance management is tricky terrain to navigate, especially when you’re in a start-up or scale-up. Here are some frameworks to help.
-
The key to quickly unblocking decision-making
Unlock quick decision-making by evaluating what you know, what you don’t know, and, based on those things, hypotheses you can make.
-
In partnership with YLD
How to get started with GenAI
Successful adoption of Generative AI starts with a solid foundation, both with your data and your people.
-
Preparing your team for a tense election season
And should we even talk about politics at work in the first place?
-
Can you lead a struggling team to success?
Taking a leadership position of a struggling team isn’t exactly a smooth ride. With ups and downs, it can be difficult to see a positive end.
-
Retaining engineering talent in a chaotic market
With Bloomberg’s global head of engineering, Adam Wolf.
-
How “you build it, you run it” improves team performance
Whether it’s recruiting new talent, team accountability, or streamlining processes, “you build it, you run it” is the philosophy for you.
-
In partnership with WorkOS
The engineering leader’s guide to becoming enterprise ready
If you’re responding to enterprise demand, or just preparing for the day, here are three areas to consider to make your products ready.
Videos for managers of managers
-
What does innovation really mean? And how did Games Engineering navigate through it as a “startup” within Netflix
Learn how embracing paradoxes, discovery-driven learning, and integrative decisions enabled collaboration and unlocked innovation at Netflix.
-
Hold on, let me prompt that
Explore how to lead with clarity and conviction in the GenAI era, balancing powerful tools with authentic, independent thinking.
-
LLMs: An operator’s view
Explore a pragmatic approach to using LLMs to boost team productivity, enhance products, and evolve your leadership strategy.
-
Leveling up engineers in an AI-driven world
Learn how to mentor junior engineers in an AI-driven world by reinforcing core skills and balancing AI-assisted workflows.
-
Painless compliance, and a thousand audits a day
Turn compliance into code: automate audits, integrate with CI/CD, and achieve painless, continuous, zero-drama compliance.
-
What if I don’t want to climb?
Rethink career growth by exploring how non-linear paths, flexible frameworks, and exploration-first mindsets create stronger, more inclusive teams.
-
In partnership with EppoFrom evals to experiments: How to ship successful AI initiatives by failing cheaply
Discover practical ways to blend qualitative evals with quantitative experiments to reduce risk, improve learning speed, and deliver impactful AI projects.
-
In partnership with HoneycombMeasuring system performance in 2026
Insights from the inaugural LeadDev Engineering Performance Report, with Honeycomb.
-
High-performance tech talent: Build, don’t buy!
Learn how CodeYourFuture develops diverse, high-potential individuals into advanced engineering roles while helping companies build exceptional, sustainable tech talent.
-
Leading leaders: Why your greatest strengths are your next blind spots
This talk challenges common assumptions and shares what it really takes to move from doing the work to enabling others to do it even better.
-
In partnership with CloudflareDetect malicious attacks at 84M RPS with ML under 500us
A deep dive into the high-performance, distributed architecture and machine learning optimizations Cloudflare uses to detect malicious attacks at a global scale with sub-millisecond latencies.
-
Engineering leadership in 2025: Thriving when budgets shrink
Find practical strategies for leading engineering teams through budget pressure by aligning decisions with impact, focus, and value.