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Pat
Kua
Seasoned Technology Leader
By purchasing a workshop pass add-on, you receive an additional full day of tutoring and group roundtable training and discussion alongside the LeadDev event. Our workshops are reserved on a first-come, first-served basis due to limited venue capacity.
Congratulations! You’re now a Tech Lead? But what are you supposed to do differently than when you were just a software engineer?
Congratulations! You’re now a Tech Lead? But what are you supposed to do differently than when you were just a software engineer? Many companies do not prepare people for the transition into a new role, that demands new skills. In this course, we will explore the definition of a Tech Lead, understand the different skills required to be an effective Tech Lead and learn some tools that you can immediately apply in your own team.
This course focuses on technical leadership skills through discussion, theory, and practical exercises.
Level: Intermediate
This workshop is aimed at Tech Leads, Lead Developers, or Senior Software Engineers about to or already leading a development team
Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with 20+ years of experience. His current mission is accelerating the growth of technical leaders through coaching, mentoring and training. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organisations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including The Retrospective Handbook, Talking with Tech Leads and Building Evolutionary Architectures and runs the free popular newsletter for leaders in tech, “Level Up” (http://levelup.patkua.com) and the Tech Lead Academy, offering online training for technical leaders. You can find him online on Twitter as @patkua or running his very popular “Shortcut to Tech Leadership” workshop. Join Pat on December 7, 2022 for his workshop 'Shortcut to tech leadership'.
View Pat's LeadDev articles and talksLeading in a tech downturn can be challenging for you and for your teams. Applying the steps, tools, and frameworks shared in this workshop will help you change the way you think and operate.
Leading in a tech downturn can be challenging for you and for your teams. Applying the steps, tools, and frameworks shared in this workshop will help you change the way you think and operate.
After years of high growth and a focus on scale, we’ve been seeing a retraction in the tech industry at large. Many companies changed strategy, cut budgets, restructured, and laid off employees, while still maintaining ambitious goals. Leadership teams have been focusing much more on their engineering departments’ performance, productivity, and efficiency - while still wanting to achieve ambitious goals and avoiding to sacrifice quality: “Doing more, with less”.
Engineering leaders’ roles have been shifting alongside: After years focused on hiring, growing teams and scaling operations, teams and their leaders are now facing increased scrutiny when it comes to engineering teams’ performance. Increasingly, leaders hear questions like “how productive is your team?”, “what returns are we expecting from this investment?”, and are expected to achieve their goals with lower budgets and smaller teams.
Many engineering leaders got into this line of work to build great, high-performing teams, not wrangle spreadsheets - and many of leaders never received formal business training, making it harder to navigate these changed expectations. This new operational mode is a fundamentally different way of building and running teams than what many leaders have been focusing on in the last years. At the same time, many leaders are deeply invested in their teams’ well-being, and wonder how to build great teams and motivate employees in a time like this.
Managing in a downturn like this one is challenging. And as an engineering leader, the responsibility lies on your shoulders to guide your team through these challenges successfully. In a time like this, you need to radically change the way that you and your team operate and consider not only whether you’re achieving your goals in the desired quality (effectiveness), but also how you’re doing so (efficiency): What people, budget, time, and engineering approaches can you use to achieve your plans at as low a cost as possible?
So how can you be an effective leader when the industry, your company’s strategy, and the demands towards your role have changed? What steps can you take to increase efficiency while maintaining quality, a respectful and humane working environment, and helping your company achieve its goals? How can you utilise metrics, tech, and collaboration with your team members to get better results? And how do you motivate your team(s) during a time of uncertainty like this one?
Leading in a tech downturn can be challenging for you and for your teams. Applying the steps, tools, and frameworks shared in this workshop will help you change the way you think and operate. By using real situations and questions from attendees, we’ll delve into common issues leaders may face and how to combat them. You will take away concrete steps to increase efficiency on your team(s), do more with less, and be the leader that your business and your team needs during this time of uncertainty.
This workshop is aimed at all engineering leaders who are looking to help their teams be more in their organisations. It will be particularly useful for any leaders who are in organisations with high degrees of ambiguity (e.g. teams operating in agile environments, fast-growing organisations, start-ups, large organisations undergoing transformation).
Some job titles that may attend include:
Time | Activity |
AM |
Foundations & principles Adapting your role and operational mode Creating & maintaining alignment with accountability by taking your team(s) along for the journey Identifying and addressing improvement opportunities to increase team efficiency and productivity |
PM |
Managing for high visibility Strategies and tactics for continuously improving together with your team |
Lena Reinhard is an engineering leadership coach, mentor, and organisational advisor supporting technology leaders in growing themselves, their teams, and companies. As an experienced executive leader, she has dedicated her career to helping leaders and their organizations excel in times of high change and challenging markets. Her experience includes several leadership roles in NGOs, bootstrapped companies, as well as in VC-funded startups and corporations. In previous roles, Lena served as VP Engineering with CircleCI and Travis CI, and a SaaS startup co-founder & CEO. She has a business background working in finance, including during the 2008 financial crisis, and brings a unique perspective on systems of technology, business, and people. Find her writing on leadership and more about her work at lenareinhard.com.
Lena Reinhard has dedicated her career to building successful, high-performing globally distributed engineering organisations, and helping teams thrive in times of high change like hypergrowth. She now offers transformational leadership coaching and consulting for leaders. Previously, Lena served as VP Engineering with CircleCI and Travis CI, as well as a startup co-founder & CEO, and through her cross-functional background and experience, she brings a unique perspective on systems of technology, business, and people.
View Lena's LeadDev articles and talksExplore the science, art, and theory to becoming good at leading, managing, coaching, mentoring & developing people.
People are hard, so why are they called “soft skills”?
Much like technical skills, there is both science and art, theory and experience, to becoming good at leading, managing, coaching, mentoring & developing people. In this workshop, we’ll look at some of that theory, share experiences and boost your ability to develop yourself and others.
In this workshop, we'll cover:
Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. She particularly enjoys helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organisations and works as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose. She has led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organisations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others. A published author and international speaker, she is the chair of The Lead Developer conference and a tech advisor for Kindred Capital. She’s also a trustee at Stonewall, the UK’s leading LGBTQ+ rights charity and together with her wife runs micro-charity One Goes Up to help young women & enby folks pursue STEM education & careers.
View Meri's LeadDev articles and talksWorkshops are full-day (9am-5pm) sessions hosted by tutors with decades of experience in building successful technology organizations. You will have the opportunity to put new skills into practice with hands-on activities and guided pair/group discussions.
Estrel Congress Center, Ziegrastraße 225, 12057 Berlin, Germany
"Meri is a brilliant teacher and her experience shows, I very much would recommend this to others."
"Lena is awesome and presented content that anyone on any level could understand! I love that there were so many interactive pieces. She seemed like a genuine human being and you don’t always get that in lecture/workshop-type things."
"I was positively surprised [by Pat Kua's workshop]. Knowledge sharing experience that I would recommend to anyone who thinks about being or working with Tech Leads."