Discover this year's key themes

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In this talk, we explore 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 four 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.

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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 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 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.

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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.

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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.

Want to see more like this?

Watch all of the talks from LeadDev Berlin 2023 with a digital pass.

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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.

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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.

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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.