Agenda

If you’ve been involved in one or more such discussions, you aren’t alone. It has been a rough year for tech, and especially our leaders - our Staff+ ICs and our engineering managers. We are reeling from the after-effects of rapid growth and zero-interest-rates, and have been forced into survival mode. If hyper-growth is marked by spending more to make more, what does building for enduring growth look like? What are key pivots and strategies needed to effectively navigate such different times?

In this talk, we’ll cover:

• Major differences in economic appetites during a downturn vs. an upswing and contextualizing that to our engineering day-to-day
• How to internalize the demands of this changing macro, and adapt your leadership style in an authentic, empathetic way
• How to drive focus and balance between tactical short-term engineering needs, and strategic long-term innovation with compounding returns
• How to drive clarity and bring your teams along the change management journey through a scarcity mindset and reduced coordination overhead
• How to reinforce a culture of diverse perspectives, psychological safety and high trust

As a manager or lead developer, this talk will give you a primer for building adaptability and resilience into your leadership toolkit and leading your teams through chaos and into sustained, enduring growth.

The trick is to make your tasks so they are juuust right and then to learn to let go of any t-shirts and story points.

We all want our businesses to be agile. We want our teams to be able to deliver value continuously starting as soon as possible after the starting gun fires. We want to deliver better outcomes faster and build what was actually required. We want to create useful software and believe in people over process. Teams so often seem to end up spending ages debating whether some task is a 3 or a 5, and then later on why the last task we gave a 3 to turned out to be more of an 8 and the last few 5s were 1s and 2s. Choosing the best Fibonacci number takes time and if you take too long the bears won't need the porridge...

There is only really one question you need to ask: is this task small enough? If the answer is no, then you need to break it down. Apply the same process to the sub-tasks. Once you learn what this juuust right size is for you and your team you will find that you are completing tasks on average at a near-constant rate. Some turn out smaller and some bigger but if you can make the average steady you can predict how long things will take without any size-to-time scale.

This talk will take you through some examples, tips and tricks for making this work.

This talk gives an overview of what is actually possible today and walks through 4 capabilities of Large Language Models that can help us be more effective at software delivery. And it will go beyond coding: How can AI help boost productivity, creativity, and effectiveness in other parts of the delivery lifecycle as well? For which situations and tasks is it helpful to turn to a GenAI assistant, and when are you better off on your own? What are the risks and challenges, and how do you tackle them?

At the end of this talk, you will have a better understanding of the possibilities and risks of using this technology, you will be better able to judge when and how to use them, and better equipped to discuss the question if we will soon be able to build software with half the people.

I am sure that any engineer leader struggle with topics like finding clarity, providing support to their teammates, and rebuilding a healthy team through troubling times.

The good news is that there are things that you can do to help your teammates in these difficult times. Throughout my career as an Engineering Leader, I have been unlucky enough to go through multiple reorganizations and even two rounds of layoffs.

The talk will cover topics of:

• Providing clarity to yourself and finding energy and motivation to rebuild as a leader.
• Providing clarity to your teammates and different ways of offering support
• Organization re-structure with the intent of bringing people together with a clear scope.
• Tips and tricks on rebuilding the culture and team cohesion.

Wherever people are in their career journey, either as engineering leaders or senior individual contributors, this talk should give the audience insights and tools that they can use to navigate uncertain and changing times.

In this talk, we will explore a practical steps to influence stakeholders, be realistic about resourcing, and involve the entire team in making critical decisions on quality projects and technical debt.

We'll dive into 4 key strategies in the product development and planning process that engineering leaders can adopt.

We'll start by talking about incepting the value of quality work directly with stakeholders early and often. We'll explore techniques to realistically evaluate resource constraints and identify areas where investments can be made. You'll learn a framework (with a notion template) that can be used to measure the relative importance of different tech debt items based on factors like impact, risk, and complexity. We'll introduce a collaborative voting mechanism (with a FigJam template) that allows engineers to voice their opinions and prioritize tech debt items collectively. Lastly, we'll share impact-first communication language that will illustrate value and bring you full circle to land quality projects on the roadmap.

Join us to gain actionable insights into fostering a collaborative and efficient approach to managing tech debt.

The adoption of Agile Methodologies and Continuous Delivery has provided solutions for managing project scope and time aspect. However, the cost now lies in maintaining effective communication, collaboration and alignment among cross-functional team members to deliver a cohesive customer experience.

This talk focuses on skills for engineers to master in order to foster a business and product mind set.

We’ve been developing our mobile applications using native technologies for several years, and in pursuit of a solution with better performance, maintainability, and scalability, we chose to rebuild our product with Flutter, which is an emerging open-source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.

We are here to share our transformation journey: how we upskilled our native mobile engineers to Dart and Flutter, migrated our codebase to the new tech stack, and rolled out the new product to our users, ensuring the best possible transition. We will highlight the challenges we faced, the solutions we implemented, and the objectives we have achieved for our business and engineering team. We will also provide insights into the best practices and lessons learned during the process.

There were a lot of onboarding challenges, professional and personal, but we successfully integrated 15+ nationalities into the engineering organization. With the advent of the remote world, we were required to change most of our processes to ensure our team kept its performance correctly. In this talk, I will discuss our most significant challenges and the strategies we use to overcome them. I will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of such a strategy.

Has your team transitioned from being on-site or hybrid to being fully remote, and have you noticed a decrease in team spirit? Are you currently starting a new remote team and struggling to foster a sense of camaraderie? You are not alone.

Previously, when we were all in the office, team spirit often developed organically through simple activities such as having coffee together, chatting with coworkers, eating lunch together, or going out for drinks after work. However, with the transition to full remote work, these activities have become much more difficult or sometimes impossible.

In this talk, I will share my experiences and provide resources that have worked for me, as well as discuss the failures and difficulties I encountered while attempting to foster team spirit in a remote environment. By implementing the right strategies and tools, it is possible to create a similar level of camaraderie and bonding as in an on-site team. By the end of this talk, you will have new ideas for improving team spirit and building a powerful and connected remote team.

The best engineering leaders know that you can have both speed and quality when developing software. Indeed, the only way to keep up the pace of delivery is to build high quality software. Everybody wins.

However, all too often, it can feel like you are not in control of the quality of your code. You can feel like your team doesn’t have time to develop high quality code. You can feel like you are forced to make a trade off between the quality of code and speed of development. And when you do you typically end up with neither.

How do you take back control of your code quality? How do you get your team and stakeholders to believe that this will enable you to develop faster? What practices do you need to put in place to make this true>

In this talk I will share stories from my experiences in leading engineering teams that illustrate the dynamics between team members and with stakeholders that lead teams to lose control of code quality.

And I will share a set of practices and techniques that you can take away and use to support your team to take control of their code quality, deliver rapidly and keep stakeholders on your side.

However, there's a crucial topic I've noticed remains largely untouched: menstruation. It's not enough to merely celebrate diverse teams; we must understand and embrace the experiences that come with them. For leaders in the tech space, understanding these nuances isn't just about being considerate; it's a strategic imperative. Menstruation and conditions like endometriosis aren’t merely personal challenges; they have tangible implications on performance and team dynamics. In this talk, I'll spotlight the often-underestimated influence of menstruation on tech teams. Through personal anecdotes, I'll offer actionable insights on fostering conversations around this topic, paving the way for both inclusivity and heightened productivity. Gone are the days where we sidestep topics like menstruation. Addressing them head-on can lead to optimized workplaces where every team member feels validated and supported. By shedding light on menstruation and its workplace implications, we champion a tech industry that's not only diverse but also informed, compassionate, and at its productive best.

However, organizations, including digital natives, find it difficult to leverage one of their most valuable assets to the fullest. As a result, there is a never ending blame-game from business executives to data teams to product teams. Furthermore, as businesses grow, the need for data to drive business decisions as well as integrating analytics/AI into technology products to delight customers and stay competitive increases. So, how might data organizations collaborate with software teams to deliver customer value and strategic impact for organizations?

In this talk, we will look at how a data team was led through a difficult reorganization to deliver company-wide impact and customer value. We will cover common pitfalls in setting up data organizations and how to lead data organizations to success based on:

• Collaboration with engineering & product organization
• Faster analytics delivery cycles
• Customer value and strategic company impact, not leaving out people development.

With different I mean: not worse nor better. Just different connections wired in the brain. Predictions, behavior, communication, social interaction, and more are different. In this talk I will explain how autism works, what the traits are and how you can coach people with autism in tech. I explain how the different traits can manifest. I will talk about the underlying patterns and layers, and how traits that at first sight are a disadvantage can be an advantage in the right context. I teach you coaching techniques helping you to change the context. If you change the context, you change the outcome. I will also explain how you can coach yourself if you have autism. This is because coaching can come from external resources, but also from within. If you start to know yourself from the inside, you start seeing patterns what works in which scenario. This is a very powerful tool to be more productive, more happy and more successful in life.

But no matter how many times someone says that to me, it still feels bad when it happens. This talk shares some ways to help you make fewer mistakes by making better decisions. I’ve heard people say as a joke that engineers “type for a living”, but I think it’s more realistic to say that we make decisions for a living. Decisions about what code to write (or not write), what to learn next, whether to hire a candidate or not. Whether to invest in or close down one project or another, or to reorganise teams. And that’s saying nothing about personal decisions like whether to move house or change jobs. And then even if you make the decision, how do you know it was the right one? Making a bad choice, in hindsight, usually feels bad, and could have a negative impact. Making mistakes is not necessarily bad - it’s one way to learn - but it can be stressful. But there are tools and frameworks that you can use to sense-check when you’re about to make a difficult choice, to help you have the best possible outcome (or to learn better from a choice that in hindsight you think was wrong). This talk is aimed at engineers, tech leads, managers, humans - anyone who makes decisions. Making better decisions is a skill that you can improve on, and this talk will introduce some ways to do that.

This talk contains the secret sauce to building high performing teams that thrive in any economic climate. You will learn practical strategies to keep growing your team’s careers (as well as your own), retain your top talent, bolster morale, and get shit done!

Downturns can be scary; top worries are about job security quickly followed by lack of opportunities for growth. But, they also present unique opportunities for growth and efficiency. Slow team growth doesn’t need to put a stop to team and personal development, in fact it presents a great opportunity to focus on the craft of leadership. This session will leave you with actionable strategies to harness the power of a stable team, do more with less while avoiding burning out, and adapt your leadership style to thrive through the downturn.

This talk presents my journey in helping my company successfully modularise its frontend codebase, that started off being single product single platform to multiple products spanning multiple tech stacks across web, mobile and TV platforms today. Finding simplicity in growing complexity is essential as tech companies grow and is just as important in the frontend as it is the backend. I cover how we solve the problems of complicated dependency graphs between modules of front end code, and how the problems of “dependency hell” are minimised in a large group with multiple teams with similar and potentially conflicting dependencies. I show how we have leveraged concepts from backend architecture (microservices) to deliver similar benefits in the frontend.

We strive to design our systems in a way that allows us to scale, both technically and organizationally. In a way that allows a fast flow of change. Succeeding in doing so will be a significant competitive advantage. But how do we ensure we follow the right architecture principles across the organization, in times of empowered teams and extreme ownership? Lutz will talk about the importance of a strategic approach to software architecture, that prevents teams from becoming architecture firefighters, who spent an excessive amount of energy applying short-term fixes to architectural problems. He'll explore the options to implement architecture strategy in a modern software development organization that is built on value stream aligned teams. Developers in such organizations will flat-out reject any "ivory tower architects", or needing approval of architectural decisions by some governance body - and rightfully so. Having experience as a software architect, as a manager of an "enabling team" of architects, and as an engineering manager in setups with no designated architects at all, he will share his learnings and provide some heuristics on which approach to choose when.

Most likely, when that happens, the only such role on your team would already be taken: by you. While you can’t immediately resign and have the person in question get a new title, there are ways to help them prepare for the next opportunity, one of which could be by having them manage a few of their peers as a team lead. In this talk, Anna will share the learnings from growing 2 team leads within her org, where the change ended up being a win-win-win situation for her, the teams, and the new team leads. Anna will cover the steps she took with her team leads to help them get started in the role: forming teams, getting the leads trained and mentored (Anna’s focus was on giving and receiving feedback, having difficult conversations, and overall creating a set of behaviors expected from leads), making announcements, and actually transitioning into the new team structure. Anna will also talk about ways to grow the leads' visibility in the organization beyond initial responsibilities, and some mistakes she made with the steps above. Most of the ideas from this talk also apply to the process of training a successor for a manager.

In this talk, I will share my own experiences in this transition, the errors I made, and how I overcame them. I will offer practical advice on tailoring resumes for management roles, unexpected return of cover letters, preparing for leadership-focused interviews, the crucial questions to ask potential employers, and other nuances of the job hunt.

In this short and fun talk (yes it’ll be fun!) - we’ll lament about the top blockers of PRs, but cheer up - because we’ll also provide insights into how to unblock them. We’ll share better mechanisms for qualifying PRs than just the binary block/allow, and how and why you should codify your development process (and not just rely on oral tradition). You’ll come away with good ideas for how to mix and match rules and inputs to intelligently delegate PRs to the right people and optimize your PRs for the process so they don’t just end up in the dead queue of a failed build.

As a manager leading a distributed team in the wake of Russian aggression in Ukraine, I have had to draw on exceptional leadership capabilities and resilience to ensure my team's success and impact on our product and users. In this talk, I'll share my management experience and insights from leading a team of 8 senior engineers. I'll highlight the key leadership strategies and techniques that enabled me to succeed despite adversity. From fostering a robust and outcome-oriented team culture to maintaining productivity in challenging life circumstances — I'll provide practical tips and guidance that engineering managers and leaders can apply in their work and to their own teams.

Growth requires a certain set of skills and we as an industry have become very good at detailing the best practices to make sure it can occur smoothly. However, in the current macroeconomic environment many of us have found ourselves in a situation we have never experienced where growth is no longer the primary goal. Instead we are shifting to a state where stability is the most important for organizations, and in some cases this means having to make difficult decisions.

In this talk I will go through some of the key actions a manager should take to make sure their team gets through difficult times . Whether it’s managing expectatioñs, focusing on the essential, or celebrating small successes, you will leave with the essential toolbox you need to weather the storm.

Including resolute technophobes, and how just 18months after launching over half of our firm now use python - including compliance officers, communications professionals, operations analysts and lawyers! Roughly 10 years ago I learnt Python, and I soon found it so powerful, so useful, that I had an idea to bring the power of Python to the masses – to resolute non-programmers and technophobes. We've taught critical technical skills, predominantly python, to: all teams such as our lawyers, sales, HR professionals, to our charitable partners with the aim of improving diverse representation in tech, and to our clients too. I’m going to tell you what I did with this idea, where I failed, how we've taught almost 300 people critical technical skills in our first 18months, how to manage the risks that this unleashes, and why you should embark on a similar initiative to teach python, data science, basic machine learning (including generative AI), and technical operational risk management to anyone who will let you! No prior knowledge is needed for this talk.

As a South-Asian woman, I was conditioned from a young age to prioritise the needs of others over my own, limit my self-expression, take up as little space as possible, and be adaptable, even at the cost of my own personal and professional growth. This talk is about my ongoing journey towards recognising the different patterns of people pleasing that I tend to fall into, like countless other folks, and how this impacts my work as an engineering leader.

Most importantly, I'll share strategies and learnings on how to break free from the people-pleasing trap, while still being an effective, empathetic and authentic leader. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out in your career, I hope you’ll leave this talk, having had some aha moments of your own tendencies, and a deeper understanding of how people-pleasing can hold you back and how you can overcome them.

It comprises the skills and behaviours that support continuous improvement and nudge us into the funnel of flow - that joyous place where we become one with our work. As engineering leaders, it is important then, that we consider the learning culture and capabilities of our teams if we are to support them in delivering value. But how? In 2022 I spoke at LeadDev Berlin about a Lean DevOps approach to continuous learning. Towards the end of the talk I raised the question: How can we measure learning culture? I invited people to come forward and be part of an experiment aimed at answering this question. In this talk, I’d like to share what I have learned since. Specifically, I will talk about how I have been measuring learning culture and using the data to uplift learning capability in different organizations and teams. While still an experiment in progress, the methods and tools I’m using are mature enough to be shared, so as to invite commentary and feedback from fellow practitioners. I’ll also make a case for letting teams own and discover their learning and development goals and tooling, explaining why, in a sector that is constantly in flux, a team-first approach to learning is one that makes sense.

Decisions taken in engineering teams can have an unexpected widespread impact on factors like diversity, accessibility, security, privacy, and mental health in our society. This will cause a shift in roles and responsibilities of engineers and product specialists. In this talk, we share insights on how to adapt to this changing landscape, and factor in the human impact of our work while building systems and products with AI. The talk also explores some of the ways in which Gen AI affects society (ie how reliable and accurate is the info provided by a LLMs and GenAI-powered applications, would It make job’s redundant, how can engineers and technologies build GenAI products in a ethical way)