Irina has over a decade's experience in software engineering where she has worked for companies like Google and Uber. As the founder and CEO of The Caring Techie, she curates an audience of over 45,000 engineering leaders who she has helped navigate software engineering leadership.

It is full of uncertainties, research, ongoing problems and stoppers, but since these solutions always have a supporting business case, we have to be ready to deal with plans and schedules for getting things into production. 

In this regard, one of the most difficult tribulations in routine work in the tech industry is when somebody asks for an estimate. If you want a seasoned senior engineer to sweat, ask them for an estimation over a user story: “When will this be ready?". I have always felt that the underlying problem is that expectations and roles over this process have never been correctly understood. 

This way, we usually think about estimations in terms of the cost and effort needed for developing a feature, but in reality, the conversation is all about when something will be ready. 

What if we could change our mental model about estimations? What if there is a model that removes toil from the process while increasing trust and commitment? 

In this talk, I propose a method of switching estimations from cost and effort to a probability map for time of delivery, making conversations about estimates easier with engineers and useful for stakeholders in order to have a better answer to ... "When will this be ready?"

After a decade of boom, a lot of companies have been running layoffs, and headlines were dominated by CEOs talking about a need for “fewer managers”, “more efficiency”, and “more AI.” Throughout this time, many engineering leaders have been really busy turning a lot of these decisions into reality, while trying to make sense of these large and rapid changes beyond just headlines and anecdotes. Many leaders have been wondering what the industry shifts mean for them, asking questions like:

• How exactly have organizations and the shape of the tech industry changed? How have priorities shifted? 
• What role does AI play in organizations, how are they using it and where are they investing in it? 
• How have leaders’ roles and responsibilities changed, and how do other technical and people leaders spend their time now?
• And what does all of this mean for getting into engineering leadership and growing your career? 

I’m a VP Engineering and coach to engineering leaders, and, like you, I’ve been trying to get these answers—and now I’m sharing them with you: “The Engineering Leadership Report 2024”, produced in partnership with LeadDev and based on insight of over 1,100 engineering leaders. Join me for this talk to hear answers to these and more questions about the future of engineering leadership.

You’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of the shape of a changed industry, and the nuances in those changes, as well as concrete ideas for what you can do to navigate it successfully. During the office hours afterwards, co-producer Scott Carey, Editor in Chief at LeadDev, and I will be happy to answer your questions.

This achievement was delivered by the formation of a dedicated tiger team. The presentation offers insights into the intricate process of delivering a complex product within a short duration through a focused team effort. It covers best practices for forming a tiger team, efficient delivery mechanisms, and transitioning the product into a permanent setup, post-launch. The travel companion is live on Booking.com apps in the US & UK, offering users a novel way to search and explore by providing relevant travel recommendations.

Key takeaways:

• Providing an alternate way to deliver complex business critical projects.
• Rapid innovation and implementation: Accelerate the development process by breaking organizational barriers.
• Insights into the Gen AI-powered trip planner in one of the largest travel companies in the world.
• Mixing up the regular development process with a tiger team approach to get the best of both worlds.

They can guide Engineers if they apply them in their day-to-day work . When I was promoted to a Director role, creating Engineering Principles was one of the first things I tackled. However, I quickly found out that just having them was not enough - our Engineers need to remember them to apply them. 

Bringing our Engineering Principles up in 1-on-1 conversations I had with my direct reports proved helpful, but I wouldn’t reach everyone I wanted. 

Should I force everyone to memorize our Engineering Principles, and have them take tests? That feels like 4th grade! 

Instead, I came up with a few interactive games that we play as warm-up sessions or team-building exercises. In this talk, I want to share a few ideas that you can copy, or that inspire you to come up with your own games!

The role of a Staff Engineer often involves work across the org chart, reaching out to unfamiliar teams and colleagues with competing incentives and varying levels of enthusiasm for our unsolicited bright ideas. With no direct reports to instruct, no cash to flash, and no authority to wield, overcoming the inertia of large-scale, cross-cutting projects can seem daunting. Technical Diplomacy is the long game of building relationships, understanding, and a shared vision to make collective progress.

We’ll follow a multi-team project where organisational dynamics had shaped some architectural decisions and inter-team friction was clouding our judgement. We’ll look at how empathy, inclusive language, and collaborative exercises helped to break the impasse and bring a feature from hunch to implementation. We’ll also consider international diplomacy to see the surprising parallels between API design and negotiating with terrorists.

You should leave this talk curious and keen to apply technical diplomacy to your role. You’ll have some ideas for where to start, and what you can do together with your colleagues to build a better understanding. You’ll be able to spot obstacles and will have some tricks up your sleeve for getting around them. And you’ll have no excuse for repeating my silly mistakes. Ultimately, you’ll be ready to embrace your colleagues — even the difficult ones — in the pursuit of shared success.

Key takeaways:

• Preparation for the unknown: Consider extremes, and present examples instead of options
• Activities to build shared understanding
• Little and big things to try when you’re faced with resistance
• Radical empathy: Challenge cynicism, listen, persist, take no nonsense

Explore the world of Green Software and discover how GreenOps seamlessly extends FinOps and DevOps principles. We'll delve into the multidisciplinary aspects of Green Software and how green operations further unlock efficiency and automation – a crucial step in tackling climate change.

Key takeaways:

• Green software seamlessly integrates with existing software engineering practices, becoming essential without disrupting established workflows.
• GreenOps extends DevOps by incorporating eco-friendly practices into software operations.
• GreenOps builds on FinOps' optimisation principles, prioritising environmental sustainability alongside cloud cost efficiency.

In this talk, I’ll dive deep into our story, the challenges, solutions, and the iterative process of implementing a unique on-call rotation when traditional SRE support was unavailable.

Discover how this approach not only reduced costs and complexity but also empowered developers to take ownership of their services, fostering a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous feedback. 

Join me to learn how this new setup improved service quality, and documentation, and brought teams together as a cohesive unit.

Key takeaways:

• Strategies for effectively scaling on-call across multiple teams in the absence of traditional SRE support.
• Insights into reducing costs, complexity and empowering developers to take ownership of their services through innovative on-call rotations.
• Inspiration to implement similar approaches in your organization, driving service quality, documentation, and team cohesion.

This talk will delve into the intimate realities of the candidate experience, powered by first-hand accounts and data analysis collected via the 'What the Candidate says' podcast series and interviews with candidates, hiring managers and recruiters. We'll explore the impact of the recent mass layoffs, scrutinize job market trends, inspect industry requirements, hiring processes, and salary expectations. 

We'll also discuss the psychological nuances of job searching and the significance of empathy refining the candidate experience. The presentation aims to create a well-rounded, transparent picture of what candidates face in today's tech job market, inspiring leaders to revamp hiring practices for a more inclusive, candidate-friendly future

They execute arbitrary code, from untrusted sources on the Internet... by design. And were supposed to be OK with that? Unsurprisingly, how they do this provides some useful lessons in how we can design and build secure systems. This talk, from a security engineer (and recovering browser engineer) takes you through some of these lessons.

But over the last few years, many of us have learned that setting up and maintaining a service catalog is **really hard**. 

Building out a catalog from a standing start can take months, or even years. Too many people get stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation, where you can’t deliver value because you don’t have the data in your catalog, and you can’t convince anyone to spend time helping you because the catalog doesn’t do anything yet. 

We’ll talk about how we can break this cycle, providing an alternative approach for delivering incremental value while building out your catalog. This will include tips to take back to your teams, whether you’ve got a catalog already or haven’t even started. 

We’ll then talk about how we can apply the same principles beyond just ‘services’, to get more value across the rest of your organisation and drive genuinely impactful automation and insights.

Yet so often feedback conversations can prompt feelings of anxiety, fear, and frustration (on both sides), and erode trust and communication within managerial relationships. In this interactive session with a former teacher turned software engineer, participants will discover strategies for offering feedback in a way that opens up communication, makes space for vulnerability, and helps the recipient not only receive but also absorb and meaningfully incorporate the feedback. 

Drawing from learning science and best practices in teaching, as well as my unique perspective at the crossroads of education, professional development, and engineering, I will share techniques for effective feedback that range from narrowing and defining the scope of your feedback, to understanding your audience and meeting them where they are, to returning to, building upon, and recognizing progress made on past feedback. Through interactive activities audience members will experience and internalize key learning science concepts, such as the zone of proximal development and the role of working memory, and apply those concepts toward optimizing their approach to feedback. Attendees will leave feeling empowered to make their next feedback conversation more effective, human-centric, and growth-oriented.

The Airbus A330 operating the flight was one of the safest planes in the sky, with zero major accidents in 15 years of commercial service, so what was different the night that AF 447 crashed into the Atlantic?

When the aircraft’s black boxes were finally recovered from the ocean floor two years later, they told the harrowing tale of an accident sequence that only lasted four minutes and twenty-three seconds from start to finish. Let’s dig into what happened that night because there’s a lot for us to learn from this aircraft and crew about the systems we build and how we build them.

After all, sometimes we need to build something fast to test and learn, meet an external deadline, or have to accept something imperfect to make progress. But the problem comes when you start paying your mortgage on your credit card. 

In this talk, join a seasoned CTO talking through their real-life experiences of categorising, understanding, evangelising about and tackling tech debt across a range of company types and sectors. 

Yet, acknowledging accessibility as both a social responsibility and a driver for product quality and innovation, resulting in business value, seems to be no priority for most organizations. The reason for this is simple: a lack of awareness and practice. 

We have integrated automated tests as a crucial part in our development flow, profiting from faster feedback cycles and enabling continuous integration. Nevertheless accessibility is often tested - if at all - on a manual or end-to-end test level, leading to longer feedback times, higher test fragility and increased implementation costs. 

In this talk we are going to explore how established testing patterns, such as the testing pyramid, can be applied in the context of accessibility and can help us to overcome these challenges, as well as improve the product quality.

One of those projects so big, so important, and with urgent expectations that may burn out your whole team in a sprint, if you are not careful.

I did, and I was concerned not only about being able to pull this off but also about my team’s mental health and my own. Burnout takes months to recover from. My goal and whole purpose became to see everyone through this exhausted, but not burned out. 

In this talk, I’ll share my experience with you, and walk you through the strategies we implemented to achieve this, at team and personal levels, and the importance of practicing self-compassion. You should walk away with some new ideas and an understanding of how caring about the people in your team can be key to delivering projects successfully.

This colossal mission wasn't just about mastering new technology, but also about ensuring operational excellence, continuous feature development, and navigating the high seas of scale. We encountered numerous challenges, setbacks, and multiple iterations, each teaching us valuable lessons. This talk offers a candid exploration of those lessons and a guide to the pitfalls to avoid when embarking on your own tech migration adventures.

Takeaways:

• Practical insights into the transformation from a poorly designed architecture to a scalable tech platform.
• Understanding the challenges and strategies of managing continuous development and operational excellence during a tech migration.
• Lessons learned from the iterative process, failures, and successful scalability during tech migration.
• Strategies for ensuring team understanding and adoption of a completely new technology.

I experienced this myself when I went from being an Engineering Manager with two teams to Head of Tech with seven teams. I tried making it work for three years, but in the end had to accept that although my performance was good, I was not able to reconcile the extra stress with my personal life.

I quit, took a break, and applied as a single-team-EM at a different company. And I consider this the best decision I ever took concerning my career.

In this presentation, I will describe my experiences and thought processes to maybe help others in the same situation make the right call.

Specifically, I will discuss:

• the main differences when going from "your" team to leading multiple teams
• the initial warning signs that this might not be a great fit for me at this moment
• why I did not act on them
• why I did finally act on them
• why I still see this as a positive experience

The goal is to nudge people who either haven't thought about the "right" level for them or people who think about it only in a "line goes up" kind of way to start thinking about what their "right" place on the engineering management ladder might be.

Key takeaways:

• Director and above can be lonely
• question your motivations for getting promoted
• factor in the complexity of other parts of your life
• try new roles, but know the signs of things not working
• allow yourself to realise you were wrong

We now have AI systems that process, categorise and make predictions on data for ever increasing types of applications from various recommender systems, medical condition detection, teacher grading scores and many more. We have systems adding filters to photos, airbrushing images or creating new images from words. We have systems that handle our customer service queries, drive our cars and verify our identities. All this progress has resulted in the average automated system being significantly larger in scale and complexity than a decade ago. 

This acceleration is partially enabled and driven by the development of tools facilitating anyone and any company, from experts to novices, to develop and launch models to the world. In 2023 there were 1,426 companies offering ML tools, compared to 139 in 2012. This represents a +1,000% increase! Evidently there is a huge need for tools to support the various technical requirements of your ML workflows. However, simply adopting one of the sometimes costly tools available is not likely to be sufficient to solve your challenges and accelerate your ML development by itself. 

The cornerstone of your ability to stay competitive and to innovate with speed and confidence using AI and ML technologies is employing a holistic approach to your ML platform and operations. 

In this talk, I will discuss: 

• What is ML platform and operations? 
• How to assess your ML platform maturity? 
• How to discover, understand and prioritise the requirements for your ML platform? 

Last but not least, I will discuss real lessons from building and scaling our own ML platform and operations from scratch.

But, from day to day, engineering managers are tasked with low-level, immediate-term decisions: What work should be scheduled next? How should it be organized and tracked? Who should implement, who should review, and who should take ownership?

This talk is about the finer mechanics of day-to-day engineering management, and how small decisions accrue an effect over time on team dynamics. I've been a fan of role-playing games for my entire life, and even though different games take different approaches to storytelling and battle mechanics, the most fun role-playing games have one thing in common: the hero's party. In the greatest role-playing games like Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, XenoGears, and more, we consistently learn that a well-balanced party leads to the best endgame outcomes.

This talk will illustrate how an engineering leader can optimize for the entire party, not just the "hero", by creating just enough structure, clarity, and accountability. Building a team with diverse skill sets and experiences, and then intentionally managing the day-to-day "experience point distribution" of the team is journeying along the path to an empowered, high-performing team.

Key takeaways:

• Engineering managers should seek to create lightweight processes that clarify ownership and decision-making
• Intentionally distributing work while maximizing equity of opportunity leads to better overall outcomes for the team
• The teardown of silos will naturally enable organic leadership within the team, and we should strive to do this
• Role-playing games aren't a perfect analogue for real life, but they can teach us a lot about success on diverse teams!

These talks have been instrumental in educating our community on critical topics, shaping our perspectives, and encouraging positive change. However, amidst these commendable efforts, there remains a significant knowledge gap in our community when it comes to working with, managing and supporting colleagues with hidden disabilities. 

Recognizing this genuine problem, it is time for us to address this void and shed light on an important facet of diversity: neurodiversity. In this conference talk, I propose to share insights gained from my personal experiences and learnings as I navigated through my journey of running an employee resource group for individuals with disabilities. 

Neurodiversity, an umbrella term encompassing various neurodevelopmental conditions, will be the focal point of this talk. We will explore conditions such as ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia. Drawing from my direct experiences, I will candidly discuss my own journey, starting with the discovery of my dyslexia and dyspraxia at the age of 17, followed by my realization of being autistic during the pandemic. 

By sharing these deeply personal experiences, I aim to foster empathy and understanding among the audience. Together, we will delve into practical strategies and perspectives that can help create a more inclusive and supportive environment for individuals with hidden disabilities. This talk will serve as a catalyst for change, equipping attendees with actionable insights to become better allies, managers, and contributors in the journey towards embracing neurodiversity. 

Join me as we embark on a transformative exploration, where personal narratives converge with practical guidance, unveiling a world that celebrates the unique strengths and perspectives of every individual, regardless of their neurodiversity. Let us together take this step towards a more inclusive future.

Well - not so fast. Are we going to use the default approach of using the OS vendor recommended tools such as Xcode with Swift and Android Studio with Kotlin? That seems inefficient to write one app for 2 platforms. Maybe we can use one of those cross platform frameworks, like Xamarin, React Native, Ionic or even Flutter. 

With an ever evolving landscape of ways to build apps for iOS and Android, it can be hard to know which approach to choose when starting out. Worse still, what if you’ve already chosen a technology and are wondering whether it is worthwhile changing to a different framework? 

Over the last 15 years, I have experienced delivering native apps across a variety of frameworks, from native ObjC/Swift and Java/Kotlin to Xamarin and React Native, and a fair few things in-between. I have also dabbled in that questionable approach deservedly relegated to history; PhoneGap !! 

In this talk I introduce the approaches to native development that are worthy of consideration in 2024, and the reasons and motivations that may lead you to consider one over the other. This will be an evidence based exploration of how companies are making some well known apps that may well be on your phones today. 

Factors I will discuss include maturity of framework, availability of support, hirability of required skills, performance, and other key points that need to be considered. 

You will leave this talk with a good outline understanding of the factors you should consider when choosing the right technology for your iOS and Android app.

However, it is challenging because it takes work to provide constructive, unbiased, and influential feedback that will motivate your team to grow. This task becomes even more complicated when working in an intercultural team (as most of us are today), as cultural differences can affect how feedback is received and perceived. How you provide feedback plays a significant role in team performance and morale. It is essential to understand the cultural nuances and tailor feedback accordingly during feedback sessions. During this talk, Alisa will help you navigate this challenge; there are several easy-to-remember tips and examples that you can use during one-on-ones and feedback talks. By implementing these tips and considering cultural differences, you can elevate your feedback sessions to a new level, thus improving team performance.

At first, it was complicated and hard to understand, even though we were running 50 experiments at any given time. But with a team effort, we made it better by breaking it down into smaller parts and improving them bit by bit. In this talk, I'll share how we did it, from fixing what wasn't working to making it easier for everyone to join in and be creative. We'll talk about the challenges we faced and how we made experimenting faster and better for everyone. Our story, full of new ideas and interesting twists, will inspire you to think differently about how we do things. Come along as we show you how we turned confusion into clarity and made experimenting together a lot more fun.

You have weekly 1 on 1s with your engineers, talk shop in your daily standups, create moments for feedback like retrospectives, and run team events every once in a while. These interactions create trust in your leadership, enable hard conversations to happen with ease, and make the work more fun.

However, moving up can mean that you start managing managers, creating layers of separation between you and the people that you’re ultimately trying to support and influence. Interactions with engineers become more high stakes; your touch points may cover more high-level topics like market conditions, company strategy, and organizational change. Meanwhile, they know less about how you work and who you are as a person.

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to build trust and empathy with your team when your organizational lines and remote working setup don’t create those moments organically. We will go over tangible strategies for building rapport within a large and distributed team. For example, you may have heard about skip-level 1 on 1s, but what should you talk about, and how often should you do them? Outside of those, how do you build continual moments of connectivity and make space for difficult conversations when those moments feel sparse?

Having a strategy around connection not only creates levity in the day-to-day, but also clues you into focus areas for your organization. Engineers reveal information that can help find commonalities among projects, possibly leading to streamlined execution and mentorship moments. You may learn more about underrepresented folks on your team who might need more attention or opportunities. Either way, a little bit of effort in this area can go a long way towards strengthening your team.

These lessons were often learned the hard way as an individual contributor and as an engineering manager. I’ve often wondered what I would say to myself if I could go backwards in time and help past versions of myself become compatible with what I know now. This talk is that conversation. Attendees will learn how to better guide their own careers in software development today from the things I wish I knew in the past. 

Key takeaways:

• Your career isn't something that just happens to you. You can drive it in the direction you want to go.
• There are key things to learn in the first year as a software developer that will become axioms for the later years.
• Once you become an engineering leader, one of the most important words to learn is "no". This talk will provide a model for using the power of "no".
• One of the greatest legacies you can leave in software development has nothing to do with code. It's the kindness you show to people.

But what can be even more valuable is finding “sponsors”, who help us find new opportunities and improve.

As sponsorship is especially important for members of minoritized communities in tech, Lara Hogan walks through tactics you can employ today to be a sponsor for those around you, too.