How is software engineering changing with AI coding tools and agents? An overview of how productive tech companies and teams are utilizing these tools, how their approaches to engineering are changing and – just as importantly – what remains similar to before we had access to these tools.

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How the Core 4 framework helps teams measure and communicate productivity gains while balancing delivery pressure.

Organizations are getting leaner, AI has arrived, and we’re expected to deliver more while tightening up our operations. To do this, we need to invest in productivity, but advocating for this kind of work in the face of mounting delivery pressure is challenging.

How can you convince your product counterparts to reserve some roadmap time for productivity improvements? And how can you show the value of these investments to your execs and board? You’ll find the answers in the new Core 4 framework. From the creators of DORA, SPACE, and DevEx, this new framework gives teams a battle-tested set of metrics to track in order to improve velocity, while also giving leaders clear language to communicate impact back to the rest of the business.

Join this session to learn from Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, about how to apply this framework, and get access to templates, peer benchmarks, and case studies, so you can confidently use these methods to increase velocity on your own teams. You’re going to be asked whether or not your engineering teams can be moving faster. And when that happens, do you know what you’ll say?

Whether you’re on the IC track or the management track (or something in-between), you’ve likely been told that you need to get better at influencing. But how do you actually do that? In this talk we will look at a pragmatic framework covering different types of influence and different methods for influencing different audiences. Take that difficult-to-integrate development feedback and really level up in terms of your leadership, by learning how best to influence.

In this session, we’ll explore the critical intersection of engineering leadership and commercial success, focusing on how to drive tangible business impact through scale and strategic decision-making within large-scale platforms. We’ll delve into the practical realities of managing expansive engineering organizations in today’s fast-paced, competitive landscape, emphasizing the importance of translating technical metrics into concrete business outcomes.

We’ll examine how platform scalability and performance directly influence revenue enablement, cost optimization, and customer value, illustrating how engineering excellence powers business success. Building a culture of commercial awareness within engineering teams is paramount, ensuring everyone understands the ‘why’ behind their work and aligning innovation with strategic priorities.

We’ll explore key system performance metrics and their direct impact on cost efficiency and other critical business indicators. We’ll focus on how metrics like latency, throughput, and scalability translate to operational expenses and user experience, leveraging data-driven insights for informed resource allocation and performance tuning. Balancing speed of delivery with cost efficiency is crucial, particularly when managing complex, high-volume systems.

Finally, we’ll explore how engineering leadership can anticipate market trends, maintain a competitive edge, and uphold the importance of security and trust. Attendees will gain actionable strategies for fostering a commercially minded engineering culture, frameworks for measuring and demonstrating the business value of engineering initiatives, and insights into leading large teams to continuously improve and innovate.

Key takeaways

• Learn how to directly link technical engineering excellence to measurable business outcomes, fostering a commercially aware team.
• Gain practical strategies for balancing speed, scale, and cost efficiency in complex systems through data-driven performance optimization.
• Discover examples of how to lead engineering teams to drive innovation, maintain a competitive edge, and demonstrate the business value of their work.

Many companies reveal their true priorities when times are tough. Have you noticed? When faced with adversity, organizations often shift focus, sometimes at the expense of core values like diversity. As an immigrant, a working mom, and a Diversity and Inclusion volunteer, I’ve seen firsthand how leadership can either uphold or neglect these values during challenging times.

This talk will explore how leaders can continue to champion diversity, even when the company’s priorities change. Leaders have the power to drive change, and during uncertain times, their role is crucial.

Attendees will gain hands-on experience in navigating challenges like limited resources and shifting priorities, all while remaining committed to diversity and inclusion. It’s not just about surviving change—it’s about thriving through creativity, transparency, and resilience. A key takeaway will be the importance of transparency—how to explain the situation to teams, ensure understanding, and keep them aligned with diversity goals despite setbacks.

This talk will empower leaders to stay true to their principles, promote inclusivity, and lead with confidence, even amid uncertainty.

As engineering managers, we’re often caught between cost cuts, tight deadlines, and team well-being. This talk shares real strategies for making tough trade-offs, prioritizing what matters, and keeping everyone engaged.

As engineering managers, we often find ourselves juggling multiple crises at once: tight budgets, limited resources, and never enough time. Add to that the pressure from leadership to cut costs (hello, AWS bills!), the uncertainty of layoffs, and the constant need to deliver while keeping the customer experience intact, and it’s no wonder the job can feel like a high-wire act.

In this talk, we’ll take a candid look at the messy, real-world challenges of managing a technical team under crisis conditions. Using a case study on balancing cost optimization with ongoing work commitments, we’ll explore how to make tough trade-offs, protect your team’s morale, and still keep things running smoothly. We’ll introduce the idea of the “constraint satisfaction problem” to help guide decision-making in times of pressure – and share practical tips on how to use these trade-offs to keep everyone (yourself, your team, your manager, and even your customers) as happy as possible, without burning out.

This talk isn’t just theory – it’s a hands-on, experience-based approach to surviving the ups and downs of engineering management in 2025. If you’re looking for actionable advice and a bit of empathy in the face of all the pressure, this one’s for you!

Key takeaways

• Strategies for navigating limited resources, tight timelines, and an ever-changing landscape without sacrificing team morale or customer satisfaction.
• A framework for making decisions that feel impossible, and knowing when to adjust your course.
• Insights on managing the emotional side of leadership – how to invest in your “emotional bank account” with your team, manager, and customers so you don’t hit zero.

Why building an engineering org that enables “normal” engineers to thrive is a bigger advantage than chasing top talent.

Pretty much everybody understands when and why you should “choose boring technology,” in Dan McKinley’s memorable phrase. But when it comes to building engineering orgs, too many of us keep chasing the same small slice of “top engineering talent” and relying on them to move the business forward. I actually think we have this exactly backward.

It’s a massive competitive advantage to build an engineering org where perfectly normal software engineers, with a normal amount of experience and skill, can consistently move fast, ship code, understand their software, respond to users, and push the business forward a little more every day.

P.S. – A sociotechnical system like this also mints world-class engineers like no one’s business.

Real tools for managers’ mental well-being – from stress management to parenting wisdom – because leading teams shouldn’t mean burning out.

Do you often feel overcooked by people management? Like any master chef, a great manager needs the right ingredients and techniques to guide their team. But when your team’s emotions are in the mix, how do you avoid becoming toast? Let’s create the perfect recipe for sustainable leadership without burning out!

For the past 5 years, the topic of managers’ mental well-being has been one of my main focus areas. Talking with fellow managers, I have noticed that our work is becoming increasingly psychological. Yet most of us don’t have any formal training for that. Unexpectedly, recently I also gained hands-on experience recovering from a mental issue myself.

In this cooking class, we’ll whisk together:

• Kitchen boundaries: keeping your emotional pantry stocked
• Energy preservation sauce: mindful energy management and finding your true rechargers
• Releasing steam before the pot boils over: stress reduction that fits into a busy schedule
• Building your kitchen crew (aka your support network)
• Secret family recipe: using parenting strategies for manager’s well-being

Join to create your personal recipe for a leader’s well-being – no cooking skills required!

Key takeaways

• Manage your emotional health first to effectively support others without burning out – your state determines whether situations energize or drain you
• Energy management is key, but everyone has their unique best way to recharge: experiment until you find your 3 go-to techniques
• Anti-stress routines can fit any schedule – even 30-second techniques make a difference
• Build a support network beyond advice and help. You’ll discover others face surprisingly similar challenges, which itself reduces pressure
• Tap into parenting psychology books – they offer actionable advice and explain human behavior clearly

It’s critical to be transparent about what you expect of your teammates, and what they can expect of you. In this talk, Lara Hogan will talk about how to balance being empowering and being directive as a leader, and how to know when to switch up your approach.

How to resolve the conflict of leadership versus engineering for yourself and your lead developers. First-hand approaches from launching an engineering leadership initiative for 250+ engineers.

I will share first-hand examples so you can:

• Give engineering leaders a map to chart their own path. Guidance for balancing Engineering, Architecture, Leadership and Business Acumen
• Create clearer expectations when leadership and engineering conflict. e.g., “What percentage of my time should I use to code?”
• Make engineering leadership less isolating => How to get leaders to support each other through facilitated peer groups
• Make a compelling business case for this during an age of efficiency => How to make the case, get buy-in, and launch in 6 weeks

We are never going to resolve the leadership versus engineering conflict for good. However, I do believe that these approaches can guide each engineering leader to a better, more human answer for themselves. You might even find a better answer for yourself too.

As much as many bosses try their best, they may not always be the stellar leaders and managers that we all wish we had: Hyper-busy, not great at communicating changes, having trouble sharing their expectations or articulating strategy, oscillating between micromanaging and being very hands-off or even absent, or overloading their reports, many of them struggle to grow their own role as the organization changes. You may even work for someone who has less management experience than you do! And while many bosses care about their direct reports’ career growth, many don’t have the space to do it as effectively as you may want or need.

While many engineering leaders invest heavily in managing their teams and stakeholders, many struggle to effectively manage their relationship with their own boss, leading to misalignment, friction, and frustration for all parties involved. And how effectively you manage up becomes increasingly critical as you advance in your career, as bosses typically become less and less involved.

At the same time, bosses are in positions of power, which makes this whole topic often even trickier to navigate: What they think of your and your team’s work can have a drastic impact. But how honest can you really be with the person who also decides about your career progression and future employment?

As a former VP of Engineering and startup CEO who now works as a leadership and executive coach, I’ve seen all sides of this complex dynamic: I’ve had a wide range of bosses myself, have been a (not perfect) boss myself in fast-growing organizations, and I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders to improve how they partner with theirs.

You’ll learn how to reverse engineer the way your boss works and walk away with a practical framework and tools that you can start using immediately and that will improve how you manage up, including:

• Signs that you need to invest more in how you manage up, common pitfalls, and how to address them
• “Is it me?”: How to assess what you can change and what to ask your boss for
• How to get your boss out of your business: Tools to drive alignment and clarity between you and your boss, and manage their perception of your and your team’s work

As a bonus, you’ll get tips that you can share with your own direct reports or teammates to help them develop this critical skill, too.
This talk is for anyone who has a manager, No matter if you’re a senior engineer transitioning to leadership, a technical lead or engineering manager looking to scale your impact, or a senior leader aiming to improve how you lead, this talk will provide you with practical approaches to transform your relationship with your manager and accelerate your career growth.

In today’s tech landscape, layoffs have become cyclical events. This talk examines the modern layoff process and provides strategies for rebuilding team trust.

In today’s tech landscape, layoffs have evolved from rare occurrences to cyclical events, fundamentally changing how organizations and leaders approach workforce reductions. This talk examines the modern layoff process and provides practical strategies for leaders navigating these challenging transitions while rebuilding team cohesion and trust.

We’ll focus on the critical period following layoffs and address the essential challenges leaders face. Together, we’ll explore managing survivor’s guilt, navigating productivity dips, and rebuilding psychological safety within teams. Leaders will learn approaches for maintaining team motivation despite reduced resources and strategies for balancing empathy with business objectives. We’ll also examine methods for restoring team confidence in organizational stability and setting realistic expectations for team capacity and project delivery.

Drawing from real-world experiences, we’ll explore specific techniques for rebuilding trust. These include establishing new communication rhythms, identifying knowledge gaps and dependencies, creating up-skilling opportunities for team members, fostering safe spaces for open dialogue, and developing authentic leadership practices. These approaches acknowledge organizations’ business realities and the human impact of workforce changes.

Key takeaways

• Strategies for rebuilding team culture and trust
• Methods to maintain team productivity while honoring emotional recovery
• Approaches to restore confidence in organizational direction
• Strategies to identify knowledge gaps and create growth opportunities in your reduced team

A new model for engineering career progression focused on impact rather than headcount, showing how organizations can retain and grow leaders during stable or low-growth periods.

It is a well known principle that for people to grow in a position, they need to be challenged. And because of that, technology companies currently have an important problem to solve: how to promote their leaders?

With the past decade being focused on company growth, the industry has mostly settled on leadership career growth oriented on team growth: managers become more senior by managing larger organizations. In an environment of slow or nonexistent growth, does it mean managers need to pause their career movements?

This presentation will advocate that they don’t, since all organizations have an almost unlimited pool of challenges to solve. If companies can match the people to the challenges, they can both improve their effectiveness and support the growth of their leaders.

The talk will present the results of an experiment in a company of 200+ engineers in orienting the engineering leadership career ladder, and processes related to it, towards not only engineering teams but also engineering problems, allowing leaders to increase the complexity and impact of their roles without necessarily increasing the headcount.

It will present:

• The problem we were seeing in practice, and the leadership principles we followed in this change
• The practical change in process and perspective, providing a path for leadership career growth focused on engineering workstreams
• The results of this experiment 12 months after it’s execution

Leaders will come out with this presentation with a practical perspective on how they could change their perspectives to allow for leadership growth and retain top talent in the current trying times.

Key takeaways

• Understand how to focus engineering leadership growth in a context of stable headcount
• A practical perspective on how to evaluate leaders for their broad impact and implement changes in that direction
• A view on the actual results of this change in a public technology company

Effective team communication shapes company culture at all levels. In this talk, we’ll explore habits, principles, and frameworks to foster healthy communication patterns.

Communication is the culture of a company – a sort of cultural fabric that weaves everything together. And yet, good communication within a team is incredibly challenging. It’s even more challenging for distributed and hybrid teams. Establishing good communication patterns is a vital element to a company’s success, to demonstrating credibility, and to building upon values and principles within teams.

This talk will explore several communication patterns and habits that can improve communication and knowledge sharing within your team. What communication habits are most important for a team to develop? How can you communicate and ensure common understanding? What principles can you put in place to encourage more voices to be heard? How can you know that your organization is communicating effectively? Through specific examples and learnings, this talk will share frameworks, reflections, and a common vocabulary for communicating more intentionally that, when used, can help leaders and teams to be more humane, motivated, cohesive, and even productive.

Jay Prochnow was a veteran US Navy pilot with thousands of hours in the cockpit, but he had never encountered anything like what he faced on December 22, 1978. He had taken off that morning from Pago Pago, American Samoa on the third leg of an overwater ferry flight to deliver a single-engine Cessna 188 from San Francisco to Sydney, but now he had no idea where he was. The plane’s automated direction finder had silently failed at some point that day, and its arrow had led him to open water in the middle of nowhere instead of homing in on a signal from Norfolk Island.

Now it was nearly sunset, there was no land in sight, and he wasn’t sure how he would survive. Let’s dig into how Jay navigated himself out of this mess and see what we can learn from him about navigating our own challenges.

I see you want to hire talent to work on platform engineering, or maybe internal developer tooling, or perhaps developer experience. Maybe you just need more kickass force multipliers on your team. Whatever it is, you’re solving for the overall generally intangible but admirable goal of “making life better for devs” and “creating exponential leverage”. That’s awesome; you’ve got one hell of a challenge ahead of you.

This role is extremely difficult to hire for. In my opinion, and in my experience, these roles have been the most difficult role in the company to hire for outside of senior leadership, and the most likely to fail; if there ever was a role that burns people out, it’s this one.

Come along with Hazel as we draw on her experiences building “cost-center” organizations that punch above their weight, creating healthy outlier teams that redefine the bar for excellence, and diagnosing hiccups that may occur along the way.

Key takeaways:

• The hiring pipeline and interview loop — Identifying systems thinkers without scaring them away
• Timing, politics, and the meta strategies of justifying cost-center engineering headcount
• Getting to zero from negative — On-boarding rapidly when the role requires deep context
• Avoiding mismatched expectations

An introduction to the science of teaching – pedagogy – how it applies to leadership and techniques to grow our teams in the era of doing more with less.

Mentoring less experienced engineers can be intimidating, but there’s a whole field of study – pedagogy – that we can use to help us. In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the basics of pedagogy, from mental models to (human!) memory. Then – using my experience across IC and management – I’ll show how you can apply these techniques in your day-to-day leadership work. We’ll see how you can mentor and coach your team, leveling them up through effective learning science.

In today’s market, it’s more important than ever to make the most of your resources. That’s why it’s critical that engineering leadership have the skills to invest in and grow our teams.

I learned these techniques by training hundreds of developers over seven years of volunteering at Code Your Future, a free training program for refugees and other people excluded from tech education. Since 2016 we have helped more than 250 people start careers in tech. I’ve become a core contributor to our open-source curriculum, providing proven tools and strategies to our incredible volunteers.

Key takeaways

• Mentorship is a two-way process – we’re learning as much as those we teach
• Some key principles of technical pedagogy, as applied to engineering management
• Three concrete ideas you can use in your daily work: backward design, expert blindspot, and cognitive load

What engineering leaders can learn from the discipline, focus, and strategy of a sprinter.

Sprinting the 100m at an international level taught me more than just how to run – it taught me how to lead. Exploding out of the blocks, maintaining focus through the drive phase, and pushing through fatigue while preserving technique are lessons that have shaped my approach to engineering leadership and project delivery.

Sprinting is not only about speed but also about discipline and strategy. A powerful start sets the tone, but success depends on sustaining momentum during the grind, maintaining technique under pressure, and finishing strong even when fatigue sets in. These same principles apply to engineering projects: beginning with energy and clarity, navigating the inevitable challenges mid-project, and maintaining quality as you push for the finish line.

In this talk, I’ll share lessons from my personal journey as both a sprinter and an engineering leader. From leading high-stakes initiatives at heycar – such as unifying platforms across markets – to delivering complex features under tight deadlines, I’ll demonstrate how adopting a sprinter’s mindset can help you tackle projects effectively, keep your teams engaged, and deliver results with confidence.

Key takeaways

• The power of starting projects with clarity, focus, and explosive energy.
• How to sustain discipline and momentum during the “drive” phase of engineering.
• Strategies for maintaining technique and quality under pressure and fatigue.
• Lessons from elite-level sprinting that apply to leadership and team dynamics.

The talk I wish I’d found when I became a manager of managers. Tips and insights to prepare you for the road ahead.

There are at least two pivotal moments in your journey as an engineering leader: the first is moving from being an IC to a manager of ICs, and the second is from being an EM to a manager of EMs. As I progressed in my career, I found there was plenty of material on the first, which was fantastic, and I absorbed it like a sponge when I became an EM. But there is a surprisingly short supply about the second. Over the last year, I’ve grown from managing one engineering team to managing five teams, and this journey has taught me
a great deal. This is the talk I wish I’d found a year ago.

I’ll share what I learned from those first 12 months of becoming a manager of managers. My goal is to help both leaders currently in the transition and EMs thinking about stepping into a manager of managers role in the future. I’ll share my views on:

• Similarities and differences between the two roles.
• What strengths have you already developed that you can tap into, and where will you need to turn a corner?
• What were my biggest challenges as I stepped into the new shoes?
• Which things proved less challenging than the urban myths suggested?

If you’re considering taking a manager of managers role, this talk will help you decide if this is a path you’d like to try. If you’re in the midst of this journey or about to embark on it, you will take very practical tips (and some templates) to navigate this transition smoothly and successfully.

Key takeaways

• Understanding the differences between the EM role and the manager of managers role. Understanding of the priorities, skills required, expectations, etc. This will help EMs thinking of this career step, leaders currently stepping into the role, and senior ICs who work directly with these senior leaders (staff+)
• Helpful tips to make the transition successful: influencing sideways and up, understanding your first team, assessing how you’re spending your time, how you will gather the information you need now that you’re a bit further from the day-to-day, etc.
• Challenges you might encounter (and how to prep for them). But also a message of encouragement and grounded hope that everything is “figurable”.

Effective team communication shapes company culture at all levels. We explore habits, principles, and frameworks to foster healthy communication patterns.

In many organizations, it’s easier for employees to find a new job at another company than to transfer to a different team internally. But what if moving between teams was easy, encouraged, and part of the company culture? In this talk, I’ll explore how creating opportunities for internal mobility can significantly increase employee engagement, reduce churn, and improve business outcomes.

I’ll share practical strategies for enabling internal moves, from simple team swaps to structured internal hiring processes. We’ll also look at an initiative called the “Transfer Window,” designed to remove barriers to internal movement by making it a transparent and supported process. By fostering a culture of internal growth, you can retain top talent, increase engagement, and build a more adaptable workforce.

Key takeaways:

• How to implement internal mobility initiatives like team swaps and internal hiring processes.
• Practical strategies to improve employee engagement and retention through internal transfers.
• Insights into reducing the costs of employee churn by fostering a culture of internal growth.
• Ideas for encouraging managers to support internal mobility as part of their leadership practice.

A critique of modern performance management, exposing its flawed assumptions and hidden biases, while offering actionable insights for leaders to build fairer, more effective systems that align with their morals and modern organizational goals.

For decades, the performance curve has been a cornerstone of corporate performance management. Originally popularized during Jack Welch’s tenure at General Electric and later infamously implemented as Microsoft’s stack ranking, this approach to employee evaluation has faced significant backlash. Yet, despite being so controversial, the performance curve persists, now rebranded as a tool for fairness and objectivity. But is it?

This talk will critically examine the myths and realities of the performance curve in today’s corporate landscape. We’ll explore why its foundational assumptions – like the bell curve distribution of employee performance – are mathematically flawed, and how it fails to account for the diversity of roles, team dynamics, and organizational goals. Even when not strictly enforced, the performance curve often undermines its intended purpose, introducing subtle biases, distorting performance metrics, and eroding trust between managers and employees.

Whether you’re a line manager grappling with performance reviews or an executive shaping organizational policy, this talk will challenge your assumptions and provide actionable insights to foster a culture where employees and organizations can thrive.

Come prepared to rethink performance management and explore what’s possible when we leave outdated systems behind.

Key takeaways

• The history of the performance curve and its impact on how we do performance management.
• The unintended consequences of using performance curves, even in “flexible” implementations.
• Practical strategies for moving beyond outdated performance models to build systems that are equitable, transparent, and aligned with business outcomes.

Offering practical tips for leading neurodiverse teams. Whether you’re neurodiverse or neurotypical – helping you to lead with confidence and support your colleagues to create a more inclusive environment.

If you’re in Software Engineering – statistically the chances are you, a colleague or one of your team members has some form of Neurodiversity. Most of us already know that diverse teams are more productive and build better tech products. But Neurodiversity can create challenges or barriers to a person doing their best work.

Do you feel confident leading those with Neurodiversity? Do you feel you have the skills to help someone navigate their struggles within the workplace? Do you want ideas and tips on things you might be able to implement to help yourself, your colleagues or your team?

In this talk I will reframe thinking around Neurodiversity and Reasonable Adjustments in a way you are probably more familiar with – Accessibility. Talk about the tools you already use in software development that can be applied to solve struggles. And some of the barriers you may encounter and what you can practically do to help make a difference in the inclusivity of your workplace.

Key takeaways

• Reframed thinking around Neurodiversity and Reasonable Adjustments that is more akin to what leaders are used to (ie. Accessibility requirements) so they feel more confident in tackling it.
• A way of applying existing software development approaches to solving struggles (for yourself and others)
• A number of tools and approaches I use or we use at CapitalOne to support and include Neurodiverse Associates
• Recognising that if you’re privileged you can do a lot to pave to way for others who are more vulnerable than yourselves

How a high-growth fintech dealt with a major platform rewrite with 10 years of technical and commercial debt. And, more importantly, my own personal growth journey from tech leader to exec-level CTO.

This is one of those stories about a platform rewrite that did go well. But more importantly, sharing my growth journey as a CTO from moving from a technology leader to an executive leader of the Flagstone business. In case you’re hoping to learn a lot about tackling tech debt, you may be dissapointed (and so was I). The biggest hurdle we’ve overcome was to clear what I’d call “commercial debt.” The commercial decisions that companies make in the early stage hustle phase, that are now holding back the company’s ability to scale. This is the story about rebuilding a fintech with £15 billion in assets, in the midst of its biggest growth phase, and my personal story of how I learned all the things they don’t teach you as a software engineer.

Key takeaways

• People throw everything in the technical debt bucket (and by extension product debt): The biggest risks to scaling up an organisation is “commercial debt”. The decisions you make during the hustle phase, that lead to non-scalable bespoke quirks.
• There comes a point in your growth journey as a tech org that you need to make hard decisions about the future technology. The technoloy that got you to a successful and profitable business over the past 10 years, is not going to get you to the next 10 years. How do you make that decision? How do you convince the board that this investment is worth making?
• I needed to shift my mind set from being a senior technology leader to becoming a member of the executive team, whose primary concern is business strategy and execution where technology happens to be in my portfolio of responsibility. I’ve learned a lot about who your first team is (the exect team, not the tech team), executive stakeholder management and communication. However, how do you balance the exec view, vs you actually needing to know the intricate details of some complex problems?
• Data is always the biggest problem, especially when you have been around a while and have legacy systems. A reflection on when to solve it with code vs solve it with humans.
• How do you create the business case and get buy-in for such complex and expensive projects? I’ve learned that this is very much an agile process, with discovery, iterations, phase delivery, etc. Everything we do in the normal day to day product development, but applied to what appears to be a more waterfall style project.

We asked 1,000+ engineering leaders how their roles are changing in response to a rapidly changing economic and technological landscape. This talk will give you a sneak peek into the results of our Engineering Leadership report 2025.

When should platform teams rewrite a system vs. evolve it? This talk explores how to make the right call, plan and execute migrations effectively, and manage stakeholder expectations along the way.

Platform teams often struggle with a set of interrelated issues: systems that seem unsustainable to operate or that aren’t meeting the current needs, the desire to fix this problem through brand new technology, and the cost of executing on these big migrations from one system to another. In this talk, we’ll walk through these questions: how to decide when to rewrite vs when to evolve, how to plan and execute the work, and how to keep your stakeholders and customers happy during this process.

How Monzo can tolerate a complete outage of their platform while still giving their customers access to their money.

Monzo’s customers reasonably expect to be able to spend on their card, make bank transfers, and see that their money is safe 24/7. Their lives don’t have downtime for maintenance so nor should we. Monzo take reliability seriously so to add another layer of defence against these potential incidents we’ve built a completely separate backup bank called Monzo Stand-in.

Monzo Stand-in is designed as an always-on disaster recovery system, to be kept up-to-date in near realtime, to be constantly tested in production, and to be used in a matter of seconds should we have a critical incident. It runs completely independently to Monzo’s main platform in AWS with entirely new systems and infrastructure running in Google Cloud.

Here we talk through the design of our system, the kinds of decisions and trade-offs we made to achieve it in just 10 months, and how we worked with others across Monzo to deliver it.

Key takeaways

• Principles for running a large programme of work and designing systems that touch every part of an organisation.
• Insight into a proven, pragmatic, system design for a Disaster Recovery system that has continuous testing and immediate enabling built-in, including highly technical detail in particular areas.
• Interesting anecdotes about some of the hurdles, trade-offs and decisions we made along the way that helped us to deliver in just 10 months.

A practical guide for engineers and new engineering leaders on expanding their scope effectively, recognizing when to change their perspective, and maintaining the right balance between strategic thinking and technical depth.

As you progress in your career, you will likely face a common challenge: broadening your scope while continuing to ensure consistent delivery. This change isn’t just about moving _up_ a ladder, it’s about developing the ability to zoom _out_ and navigate between different levels of abstraction and a wider set of disciplines. From executing sprints to planning them, managing people, ensuring product alignment, and supporting cross-functional relationships.

This talk explores the natural evolution of scope, from taking on a higher-level approach to technical work, to planning successful delivery cycles. We will examine the signs that indicate it’s time to zoom out and take a broader perspective, such as recurring problems in teams or misaligned product decisions. Just as importantly, we’ll discuss the risks of zooming out too far and losing touch with day-to-day execution.

Key takeaways

• How to spot the signals that indicate when you need to broaden your perspective or refocus on execution
• What techniques there are for maintaining effectiveness across different levels of abstraction
• How to avoid pitfalls like analysis paralysis or disconnection from technical reality
• How to building strong cross-functional relationships and align technical work with product vision

A deep dive into the challenges of self-hosting language models, covering optimization, deployment, and monitoring with real-world case studies.

Self-hosted Language Models are going to power the next generation of applications in critical industries like financial services, healthcare, and defense. Self-hosting LLMs, as opposed to using API-based models, comes with its own host of challenges – as well as needing to solve business problems, engineers need to wrestle with the intricacies of model inference, deployment and infrastructure. In this talk we are going to discuss the best practices in model optimisation, serving and monitoring – with practical tips and real case-studies.

GenAI is fundamentally transforming software development, but the narrative that it will replace engineers or solve all our problems is misleading. In this talk, we’ll explore how leaders should approach the “70% Problem” – how AI excels at routine coding tasks but still requires significant human expertise for the critical remaining 30% that makes the difference between functional code and excellent software. How teams approach the “30% that matters” will be vital moving forward.

Drawing from real-world case studies at companies like Google, GitHub, and Microsoft, I’ll share practical strategies for engineering leaders navigating this new landscape. We’ll examine how the role of technical leadership is evolving from hands-on problem-solving to strategic guidance and ethical oversight.

You’ll learn:

• How to establish effective “trust but verify” processes for AI-generated code
• Strategies to prevent skill erosion and maintain code quality
• Approaches for upskilling both junior and senior developers to thrive alongside AI
• Techniques for measuring impact beyond speed to ensure long-term code quality
• Frameworks for responsible AI governance and usage in your organization

Whether you’re skeptical or enthusiastic about AI coding tools, this talk will provide a balanced, pragmatic guide to leading effective engineering teams in an era where the question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to use it to build better software while keeping humans at the center of the creative process.

How to clear biases and build more resilient systems through clean-slate thinking, whether or not an actual system rewrite is on the table.

Have you ever stared, frustrated, at a complicated systems issue and thought to yourself – what if we just deleted it all and started over? Well… what if you did? The stigma around full system rewrites as being a paradise of engineering bike-shedding with little business value can make that feel like a Forbidden Thought™, but clean-slate thinking can be a practical tool in unsticking technical thinking around engineering challenges – even if you aren’t ready to kick off a refactor tomorrow. In this talk, you’ll see how approaching critical systems as expendable can expand solutions beyond our current system biases and introduce more system resiliency with real-world examples (including one where yes, we did delete everything). You’ll leave with some practical strategic thinking exercises to take back to your own team, as well as a little bit of code-clearing-catharsis.

Key takeaways

• “Rewrite” and “refactor” are words with a negative connotation implying a lot of time invested for little business value, but can sometimes actually be a much more efficient way to address a system issue.
• Our current system designs are often heavily rooted in previous technical or functional biases, and starting from the ground up can help remove those biases and open up new lines of thinking on approaches to deliver the same (or even better) outcomes.
• As much as engineers may be stereotyped as “always wanting to refactor everything”, it can in fact be challenging to break a team used to shipping as quickly as possible out of the “scrappy” mode of thinking.
• Even if there is not time or staffing to support a full rewrite of a larger system, taking a clean-slate approach to early system thinking can help you back into a more long-term-sustainable technical design.

An overview of the copy and paste stack at Figma, diving into complexities of dependency resolution, file migrations, and browser support across three languages.

Copy and paste seems like it should be a solved problem, but things are always more complicated than they seem. At Figma, when a user copies a node in our editor, a massive pile of wheels (in three different languages!) starts turning behind the scenes. We need to build a dependency tree for all the things needed to render that node, record the versions for both the file and all the entries in that dependency tree, and do all that within the limitations of a browser-based environment. A similar set of wheels all start spinning on paste, ensuring that everything needed to render the copied nodes (but no more!) gets inserted into the target document.

Key takeaways

• See how a software team deals with significant levels of domain complexity
• Dig into real-life C++/wasm use cases
• Learn about the technical details of how copy and paste works under the hood

Practical strategies for evolving systems at hyperscale while balancing innovation, stability, and reliability – featuring real-world insights from Fastly.

Evolving systems at hyperscale requires balancing innovation and stability. We will explore practical, battle-tested strategies for making technical decisions that enable step-wise system evolution without compromising reliability and usability. Drawing on real-world case studies, this talk shares how Fastly approaches system evolution, offering actionable insights for navigating complex transitions. Whether you’re adjusting your strategy for incremental change or scaling to meet the demands of a global user base, this session will equip you with frameworks to build resilient systems and confident teams—because even at hyper-scale, everyone deserves a safe place to land.

How our team went from building simple AI features to multi-agent systems at the edge of what’s possible, and everything we learned along the way.

Every product today would be built differently if starting from scratch with AI. The opportunity for applying AI in existing domains is huge, and we’re all being asked to AI-ify our products overnight. Doing this in a way that is truly transformative demands fundamental changes in our approach to building software.

I’ve spent the last year leading this transformation at incident.io, taking us from simple AI features like generating summaries to fully-automated investigation systems that dig through code, observability data, and historic incidents to identify root causes.

Getting there required us to reinvent how we build software. After all…

How do you test a system that never gives the same response twice? How do you make your product feel snappy when every request takes seconds? We’ve had to build totally new foundations: eval frameworks to grade AI behavior, tools that introspect multi-step AI interactions, and patterns like speculative execution to hit our latency targets.

Beyond the technical, these tools fundamentally affect how teams work. Even our most experienced engineers found themselves doubting their abilities, watching features that worked perfectly one day fail mysteriously the next. We ended up building tools that could prove our progress: tracking every AI interaction, grading responses, and giving engineers concrete evidence they’re moving forward, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

In this talk, I’ll share what we have learned from working with AI. I’ll show you our debugging tools, training harnesses, and architectural patterns. You’ll see real examples of how we build and test AI features, and how we’ve built resilience in our team to handle constant experimentation and frequent missteps building systems no one has built before.

AI isn’t replacing engineers but it is changing how we build software. Like devops bringing operations into the lives of software engineers, this is a revolution in how we work: challenging to master, but entirely learnable. Come see how we did it.

Key takeaways

• An overview of the challenges faced by engineering teams who begin working with AI
• Blueprint for applying ‘evals’ to your codebase just as you would normal test frameworks
• Optimisation tricks and patterns like speculative execution that get the best performance from AI
• See real-world examples of tools that help grade, debug and track AI interactions in production
• Discuss strategies to evolve engineering culture and build resilience when working with emerging technologies like AI

Intercom decided to bet on “legacy” and re-implemented perfectly functional micro-services in a monolithic Ruby on Rails application, with good outcomes.

Success stories of embracing “legacy” are rare compared to stories of migrating to fancy new frameworks, languages and complicated distributed systems. Intercom mostly runs on a majestic Rails monolith running on basic Cloud-based building blocks, however also had a bunch of standalone services implemented in Golang, Java and Ruby on Rails that serve important customer facing functionality. Over the last few years we have replaced most of these services by bringing them back into the Ruby on Rails monolith. This talk will cover the reasons why these services existed in the first place (spoilers: worrying about the scalability of Ruby on Rails, as well as people doing what worked well elsewhere), why we felt the need to move them into our monolith, whether the moves back into the monolith were successful (more spoilers: they were!) and what we learned along the way.

Key takeaways

• Embrace boring technology, and not just for net new functionality.
• Respect what came before. Working systems are the result of a huge amount of undocumented decisions, once-off fixes and Chesterton Fences (and this is fine).
• Long-term thinking leads to outsized results – in the long term.

Understand how to transform chaotic observability and “dashboard soup” into an intuitive product engineers love using. Create consistent dashboards and structured debugging flows that remove the barrier to understanding your systems.

Every engineering team has observability tools, building observability your engineers actually want to use is difficult. It’s so common to exist in “dashboard soup” – a mess of single-use dashboards created in panic during incidents which are impossible to find when you need them again.
Great observability doesn’t come for free when collecting the right data or choosing the right tools. Creating an experience that engineers reach for instinctively is the difficult part.

In this talk, I’ll explain how applying UX principles to your o11y approach is the answer to creating an experience engineers reach for instinctively. I’ll use worked examples of our own dashboarding and structure to show how this has transformed our teams ability to debug incidents, but also to deeply understand our systems and their capacity.

You’ll learn how to:

• Build a consistent design system for your dashboards that makes them intuitive to use
• Link your separate tools (traces, logs, dashboards) to guide engineers through the end to end debugging flow
• Structure metrics, logs, and traces to tell a coherent story about your system’s behaviour
• Make observability accessible to everyone on your team, not just your infrastructure experts

We’ll explore practical techniques like event logging patterns, exemplars, and dashboard hierarchies that make observability feel great. You’ll see how thoughtful UX choices can have a dramatic impact on your teams usage of your tooling, and consequently, their ability to act quickly and calmly during incidents.

Key takeaways

• Learn how to structure dashboards in a consistent hierarchy that guides engineers intuitively from high-level system health to detailed debugging.
• Discover practical patterns for designing logs, metrics, and traces that tell a coherent story about your system’s behaviour.
• Understand how to treat observability as a product by applying UX principles to make monitoring tools engineers actually want to use.

While there are no *perfect* decisions, we can all learn to be *better* at deciding. This talk covers the intellectual and emotional aspects of making technical decisions effectively within in our complex sociotechnical environments.

Since writing a book about the importance of decisions in the practice of software architecture I get one question more than any other: “so, how do you make the perfect decision?”

Deciding is hard at the best of times and so this talk will consider what a “perfect” decision might be in the world of software architecture. I’ll consider the importance of awareness (right context), participation (right people), timing (right moment), execution (right implementation), of flow (right delivery), of autonomy (right coupling), of alignment, of feedback, of transparency, and of outcome.

This will all be illustrated with examples and you will leave with a new awareness of who your decisions are “perfect” for, and how instead there might be better goals to have in mind.

Key takeaways

• how a rapidly made bad decision can be better than a slowly made great one
• how involving people who will be affected by your decision, in he decision process yields benefits for everyone
• how including those who disagree with us, even very strongly, can make our decisions better.

Unearthing the lessons of Y2K to avoid future coding catastrophes and build more sustainable software.

Remember the Millennium Bug? That looming digital apocalypse that threatened to crash planes, melt down nuclear reactors, and send us all back to the Stone Age? Yeah, that was a thing. And while the world didn’t implode on January 1st, 2000, the Y2K scare left a lasting legacy for software engineers.

This talk isn’t about fear-mongering or rehashing doomsday scenarios. It’s about digging into the technical nitty-gritty of Y2K, exploring the historical context of those infamous two-digit year fields, and unearthing the valuable lessons learned from this global code crisis.
We’ll rewind to the era of punch cards and COBOL, when storage was precious and those extra two digits seemed like an unnecessary luxury. We’ll dissect the cascading consequences of this shortcut, tracing the potential for chaos across interconnected systems and critical infrastructure.

But more importantly, we’ll examine the massive global effort to avert disaster. Think armies of programmers battling legacy code, rewriting systems, and testing for every imaginable scenario. We’ll analyze the successes and the near misses, the strategies that worked and the ones that almost didn’t.

And finally, we’ll fast-forward to the present, drawing parallels to modern software development. We’ll explore the enduring relevance of Y2K in an age of agile methodologies, cloud computing, and ever-increasing system complexity. Think technical debt, long-term maintainability, and the importance of anticipating unforeseen consequences.

This talk is a cautionary tale, a celebration of collaborative problem-solving, and a reminder that even the most mundane coding decisions can have far-reaching implications. So, dust off your debugging tools and join us for a deep dive into the bug that almost broke the world, but ultimately made us better engineers.

Key takeaways

• The Long Shadow of Legacy Code: Understand the lasting impact of past decisions and the importance of proactive maintenance to prevent future crises.
• Anticipate Unforeseen Consequences: Consider the long-term implications of your code, even seemingly minor choices, in an interconnected world.
• Value Collaboration and Communication: Recognize the power of collective effort and open communication in tackling complex challenges.
• Technical Debt is a Ticking Time Bomb: Prioritize managing technical debt to ensure the long-term health and sustainability of your software.

Discover practical patterns for designing and building systems that scale across regulatory regimes and requirements. Learn from real-world implementations, which focus on maintainable solutions.

In today’s global marketplace, building software in complex regulated environments presents unique engineering challenges—whether it’s financial services, HR tech, or other regulated domains. This is particularly true when it comes to payroll products. What can appear as a simple business requirement—like calculating an employee’s salary or onboarding a new client—becomes surprisingly complex when you add regulatory constraints. These constraints vary greatly by country, region, product, and market segment.

So, how do you build systems that remain maintainable and scalable while satisfying complex compliance requirements?

Yinka Omole, Lead Software Engineer at Personio, draws from his experience building systems at scale for both a global investment bank and one of Europe’s leading and fastest-growing HR tech companies. This talk explores practical patterns for engineering in regulated environments. We’ll examine how regulatory requirements shape technical architecture and dive into patterns that enable both compliance and engineering velocity.

Attendees will leave with actionable insights on building adaptable systems that thrive amidst regulatory change, achieving both scalability and compliance without compromise.

Key takeaways

• Learn patterns for designing systems that scale across diverse regulatory regimes.
• Understand how state management can effectively model compliance-heavy systems.
• Discover strategies to handle regulatory changes without rebuilding your systems.
• Identify common challenges in designing systems that must meet regulatory requirements and learn how to overcome them.

This talk shares how the secure-enough software challenge can be solved by building an engineer-led security culture, leading to a culture of collaboration and confidence in good security choices.

Securely designed and maintained software is a must-have, but there are never enough experts to work with every team, review every design, and solve every problem.

The solution is often centralized control and managed releases that push engineers out of ownership of both security and software operation. Other orgs take a different path and risk the land of do-as-you-please, hoping their engineers make good enough choices with what they happen to know and focus on. Trust, enablement, and partnerships are rarely on the menu.

In the early 2020s, I had the opportunity to solve these problems. Valuing autonomy and flow in software delivery as much as solid security, I took a different approach: treating security as a platform to support and enable engineers and the company.

This talk demonstrates how a small team of engineers can have a big impact on security across a set of engineering teams. It will show how Product Squads can grow to co-own security with an organization’s IT stakeholders; so teams can keep shipping features whilst becoming more secure.

We’ll explore how you can engage with your engineering teams to own secure and safe delivery, empowering them to make timely, educated, and informed decisions. It provides a map of the journey we took, the values we lived, and what we learned on the way. It will help you create places in your culture where security can blossom and deliver more safety to your customers.

Key takeaways

• How enabling your Product teams to co-own security can scale security operations
• How a small team that’s focused on enabling this change can make a big difference
• How to bring knowledge and set a standard that supports security knowledge growth in your teams
• How the building of connective tissue across the org can support security and resilience

An engineering and product shared point of view for a complex system re-architecture process. The strategy, roadmap, and business decisions that lead this process to maximum impact, and the engineering behind it.

When our tiny startup was acquired by a giant corporation, we tried to understand all the possible implications for our engineering organization. We thought the giant scale would catch up with us at some point, but like everything in tech that’s at high velocity, it came much sooner than planned. We quickly understood that our infant system built for our first phases was starting to break down under a million-user scale.

We needed to re-architect… and under fire! With the sudden influx of production clients, we couldn’t disappoint.

But that wasn’t all! We needed to do so while pivoting our app to be user-facing for the first time.

In this talk, we’ll discuss tackling a whole new set of challenges for a small fish suddenly thrown into a huge ocean – including architecture breakers, scaling up, and re-building ourselves with a reliable, scalable, user-friendly, and facing system.

Key takeaways

• Designing complex and long-term technical solutions
• Communicating deep tech to non-technical stakeholders
• Engineering and product roadmap negotiations
• Effective collaboration across departments
• Measuring the success of infrastructure

Learn to optimize mobile development strategies with insights on tech selection, team structuring, process refinement, and platform expansion for maximum business impact.

In this presentation, we’ll explore practical strategies for optimizing mobile development to achieve exceptional results. We’ll delve into the nuances of technology selection, comparing options like native iOS-Android, hybrid frameworks, Flutter, React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform and so on. Additionally, we’ll discuss structuring mobile delivery processes, effective team organization, role assignments, process refinement, and leveraging appropriate tools. Furthermore, we’ll examine the potential expansion of mobile solutions to web, TV, and desktop platforms, along with insights on smooth platform migration for enhanced optimization. Join us as we uncover actionable insights to elevate your mobile development endeavors to new heights.

Key takeaways

• Understand the pros and cons of different mobile development approaches, including native, hybrid, and cross-platform solutions like Flutter and React Native.
• Learn practical strategies for organizing teams, defining roles, and refining processes for optimal mobile delivery.
• Gain insights into expanding mobile solutions to additional platforms such as web, TV, and desktop.
• Explore actionable methods to align mobile development strategies with broader business goals for maximum impact.

How LLMs can help engineers unblock themselves, reduce cognitive load, and improve collaboration – without sacrificing quality or delivery pace.

Getting stuck is a universal engineering experience. At RailsConf 2019, Steven Hicks explored the psychological aspects of being stuck and how different mindsets help engineers unblock themselves. Today, we face a new dimension of this challenge: how LLMs are reshaping our industry and the way we approach problem-solving.

The perception of LLMs among engineers varies—from fear of replacement to skepticism about their usefulness. However, when used effectively, LLMs can free up mental space, enabling better teamwork and decision-making. Instead of interrupting colleagues for basic tech questions, environment setups, or company documentation, we can delegate these distractions to an LLM. LLMs can also accelerate prototyping by generating rough PoC code that doesn’t require high-quality craftsmanship.

But the true power of LLMs lies beyond automation. They can act as thought partners, helping us structure documentation, refine communication, and navigate complex problem decomposition. However, knowing their limits is key – we need clear escalation policies to determine when human expertise is required.

By strategically integrating LLMs, teams can shift their focus from cognitive overhead to meaningful collaboration, fostering trust, knowledge sharing, and stronger engineering relationships – without sacrificing delivery pace.

Key takeaways

• How LLMs can reduce cognitive load and improve engineering flow
• Practical ways to integrate LLMs for unblocking and problem-solving
• When to rely on LLMs – and when to escalate to human expertise
• How LLMs can enhance teamwork and communication instead of replacing it
• The impact of LLM adoption on engineering culture and skills

How Trainline uses observability dashboards to measure, align, and improve repository health, providing visibility into the platform’s state and aligning with its tech vision.

Tracking repository health over time can be challenging, often relying on subjective assessments of where work is needed. At Trainline, we’ve taken a different approach by programmatically defining health standards and using data to score, visualize and enforce alignment with these standards.

This talk explores how the Trainline web platform team uses dashboards to consolidate its web estate and align it with the company’s broader tech vision. I’ll share the practical impact of this approach, including:

• Improved visibility into the size and status of the repository estate.
• Enhanced communication around repository health.
• Tools for tracking changes over time and identifying trends.
• Encouraging self-service for repository management.
• Working towards consistent developer experience across all repositories.
• Prioritizing work with the most significant impact.
• Redefining repository ownership and tracking progress.
• Automating health observability and incentivizing contributors to make improvements.

While our blog post covers the technical foundations of this dashboard, this talk will focus on its human impact: how it fosters collaboration, improves alignment, and drives behavior change.

Attendees will leave with a new perspective on observability – not just for code in production but as a powerful tool for managing repository health at scale.

You’re not supposed to rebuild from scratch, where’s the fun in that? Come hear about how I did one against conventional wisdom and what I learned. It’s the best or worst decision I ever made.

“A rebuild is never finished, only started”

“Technical rebuilds are doomed to fail”

“It takes 3 times as long as you expect to rewrite a system”

We’re rebuilding Culture Amp’s second-largest product – performance. It came in as a Series A acquisition in 2019 and has thousands of customers today. Against conventional wisdom, we’re rebuilding it from the ground up with an aggressive timeline. The underlying model is outdated, slow to iterate on, and not extensible. The monoliths are riddled with tech debt, tightly coupled, patched, and band-aided over many times, and won’t take us towards the $3b global Performance market we’re targeting.

That wasn’t challenging enough already, so I’m also using this opportunity to rebuild our engineering culture. Setting a high bar for engineering standards and ways of working and hoping to improve engagement as we go.

In this talk, I’ll share:

• How I came to this decision
• How we got buy-in from execs and the board for a purely technical rebuild
• How we tried to set up for success, our principles and standards
• Where we failed
• Where we succeeded
• Lessons that could be useful for anyone thinking about rebuilding a product that’s hampering speed and hindering your ability to innovate or deliver value to your customers.

The rebuild is still in progress. I don’t have all the answers (or any!). But we’ve already learned much – what to do, what not to do, and where the spiders are hiding.

Key takeaways

• Deciding when a rebuild can be the right choice, including when not to do it
• A framework or steps to set a rebuild up for success
• Lessons on what worked and didn’t work well via our case study

The talk focuses on sharing ways of optimizing for cost in large-scale data-intensive systems, infra, and pipelines.

One key trait of efficient engineering systems is operational excellence. However, cost monitoring and optimization can be a significant challenge in distributed environments, where observability is often limited. This talk will guide you through strategies for structuring your data and microservices infrastructure to optimize for cost, as well as techniques for running audits and improving efficiency.

Key takeaways

• Auditing for operational excellence: learn different ways to audit your systems to ensure they are running efficiently and cost-effectively. This includes identifying areas for improvement, spotting inefficiencies, and implementing better monitoring practices.
• Gain actionable tips, tricks, and best practices for optimizing costs across your entire data stack and microservices infrastructure.

Game engines like Unreal, Unity, and Godot are transforming industries beyond gaming, from simulation to robotics and much more. Take a quick tour of these versatile and powerful developer tools.

Game engines aren’t just for games – they’re powerful, customizable platforms that blend cutting-edge technologies to create groundbreaking solutions. From AI training to robotics, simulation, and video production, their potential reaches far beyond entertainment.

In this talk, Dan, a web engineer turned XR developer, will demystify game engines like Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot. You’ll learn what makes them so versatile, how they’re driving innovation across industries, and how you can leverage them to build the technologies of tomorrow. Whether you’re curious about their potential or ready to dive in, this session will spark your imagination.

Key takeaways

• Gain an understanding of the capabilities of game engines and where Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot have strengths.
• Learn about the core concepts of game engines and how building with game engines differs from building with traditional developer platforms
• Look at impactful examples of game engine projects across a diverse set of use cases
• Know how to get started working with game engines

Join us for a case study from Auto Trader, where a development team fully embraced building a data product alongside their new operational product. See the ups and downs of their journey.

When Auto Trader kicked off our digital retailing project, bringing together multiple aspects of buying cars online, we decided to go all in on the accompanying data product. We hoped the data would open up a broad range of analysis options to give us the best possible chance to build a successful product in the long term. This meant committing to producing a rich event stream more complete and complex than anything we had attempted before alongside a product launch.

In this talk, I cover how we came to this decision, our journey and mindset throughout the project build, how the investment has paid off, and where the costs have hit us hardest.

Key takeaways

• Whether going all-in is right for you
• The benefits (not just analytical) of investing in data this way
• Where we encountered pain points firsthand, and some ideas so you don’t have to

Rethinking team stability – how demand-led planning reorganizes teams each quarter based on demand, optimizing alignment, motivation, and outcomes.

Most software delivery models are designed around “stable, long-lived teams.” Team Topologies embraces this as a core assumption, with the possible exception of short-lived “enabling teams.”

What if we turn this model on its head? Each quarter, the entire program team, anything from 20 to 200 people, reorganize themselves based on the expected demand for the next quarter. Surely, this is a recipe for chaos, confusion, and disaster?

This session describes demand-led planning, a model that has evolved over more than a decade to optimize the people around the work. The resulting team structures may well be TT-inspired, but I explain why there is no need for teams to be either “stable” or “long-lived,” and show how people can be more motivated, aligned, and successful through regular re-teaming.

Learn how tech strategy groups drive technical alignment while fostering ownership – balancing autonomy and collaboration to fuel speed, innovation, and impactful decision-making across teams.

How can organizations balance the creative autonomy of their teams with the need for technical alignment and impactful collaboration? At Spotify R&D, we’ve tackled this challenge through our Technical Steering Groups (TSGs) – a lightweight but powerful mechanism for guiding technical strategy across autonomous teams.

In this talk, I’ll share how we’ve evolved Spotify’s Core Infrastructure TSG to act as a “virtual tech lead” for the department. We’ll explore:

• How we navigate the balance between autonomy of our teams and alignment within our organisation in a landscape that demands efficiency and lean processes.
• How we nurture ownership within teams that fuels our speed and innovation and at the same time become better at making the broad decisions fast.
• How we make this the space for our Senior and Staff+ engineers to drive broad impact

Through the challenges we’ve faced and the steps we’ve taken, I’ll share practical insights into what has worked, what hasn’t, and how we continue to adapt. From proactively addressing overlaps and gaps in our technology stack to ensuring alignment with studio-wide technical direction, TSGs have proven to be a critical tool for balancing autonomy and alignment.

Whether you’re a leader, an engineer, or part of a growing organization, this session will leave you with actionable insights and inspiration to shape your own approach – achieving alignment without sacrificing agility.

Key takeaways

• Balancing autonomy with alignment: Learn practical strategies to maintain team autonomy while fostering technical alignment across the organization, ensuring teams stay innovative without losing direction.
• Empowering senior engineers: Discover how to pair senior engineers up with staff+ engineers to shape technical strategy, drive cross-organizational impact, and engage in meaningful work beyond their immediate teams.
• Enabling faster, informed decisions: Gain insights into lightweight frameworks and processes that help organizations make hard technical decisions quickly while maintaining collaboration and efficiency.

A reality check on AI coding assistants – what works, what doesn’t, and where the tech is headed.

After over 2 years of high attention on coding assistants, many engineering managers are disappointed by the measurable results, and engineers are suffering from hype fatigue, even the ones who have learned to love their new AI team mate. Meanwhile, the pace of change in the AI tooling space is still quite high, which contributes further to the fatigue.

This presentation gives an overview of the tooling and features available today, what works and what doesn’t, and what might work with more technical advances. It will mostly focus on AI assistance for tasks that involve writing, reading and changing code, but also touch on software delivery tasks that don’t touch code directly, like requirements analysis. This whirlwind tour of the AI landscape is based on Birgitta’s experience as Thoughtworks’ global SME for AI-assisted software delivery.

We explore making codebases approachable, onboarding efficient, and learning stress-free. Discover tools, metrics, and techniques to build a codebase your team enjoys working on and feels confident contributing to.

What makes a codebase approachable, and why does it matter? A codebase that’s hard to understand creates frustration, slows onboarding, and increases mistakes. In this talk, we explore practical ways to make codebases easier to work with, ensuring smoother onboarding and more effective collaboration.

We’ll examine tools like cyclomatic complexity and hotspot analysis to identify areas for improvement and discuss techniques for fostering clarity and consistency in your codebase. But it’s not just about tools—leadership plays a critical role. We’ll dive into practices that encourage open communication, shared knowledge, and a culture where asking questions and learning are encouraged. Building a high-performance team needs a codebase that will enable that team. This talk is about what to concentrate on, whether you inherited a legacy codebase or are starting from scratch.

You’ll come away with actionable strategies to reduce friction, improve maintainability, and create a codebase your team feels confident contributing to. Whether you’re managing a seasoned team or welcoming new developers, this session will help you turn your codebase into a foundation for trust, growth, and long-term success.

Key takeaways

• What constitutes the approachability of a codebase
• How you can measure it – so that you can improve it
• What tools are available for measuring and improving it

Discover five characteristics of team processes that can save your sanity, improve your relationships, and let your team take pride in being a well-oiled machine.

Have you ever sent your developers second, third, or fourth reminders about team processes? Did you wonder when you stopped being their respected peer and became a micromanager – or worse, a nagging parent?

New team leads can find themselves spending significant time enforcing adherence to processes they know are needed. It’s tempting to complete small but important tasks for your developers when the alternative is seeing your interactions with them devolve into mutually frustrating diatribes on process. Either choice ultimately leads to decreased team autonomy and wastes time that your processes were supposed to free up for higher leverage activities.

In this session, Antonia shares her journey from frustration to freedom. She reflects on the reasons her team resisted process, her attempts at turning things around, and the five characteristics of self-sustaining processes she discovered along the way:
– Minimally invasive: find the smallest ask you can make of your team. What can you automate (or give up) to minimize cognitive load?
– Self-healing: borrow from coding tools like linters to flag process violations as soon as they happen and suggest remediation steps
– Transparent: develop automated systems that show their work, to help team members understand how their actions impact the process
– Socially reinforcing: encourage people to take responsibility for a shared system with a touch of social pressure
– Worth it: demonstrate the value you create with the time and energy you save

We will explore the case study of a mostly-automated project tracker that saves team leads and developers hours of busywork every week and has become so successful that it is now being implemented company-wide. You will walk away with ideas on how to apply the principles from the case study to processes in your organization that need a little push.

Key takeaways

• Five characteristics of self-sustaining processes: Minimally invasive, self-healing, transparent, socially reinforcing, worth the investment
• How to evaluate which processes are worth investing in

Utilizing research by professional poker player Annie Duke, we’ll explore how to better understand the ambiguity that exists in estimations engineers provide. Doing so will allow your teams to better deliver, with more accurate estimates.

How many times have you received an accurate estimate from the engineers you work with? Likely, you can count the answer on one hand. With increasing pressure to deliver in organizations today, being able to develop more accurate estimation ability within our projects is paramount.

What if there was one key question you’re missing that could greatly improve the way you work with your teams to better understand the scope of ambiguity that exists in their estimation?

Using research about estimating by professional poker player Annie Duke, we’ll explore how to better uncover and, ultimately, reduce ambiguity within a project. You’ll walk away with a new way to work with your team that won’t exactly give you all the answers, but it will give you a new found ability to steer into the ambiguity with more clarity. This, ultimately, will allow you to better predict timelines and communicate effectively with stakeholders.

Key takeaways

• A key question used to define how much ambiguity there is in an estimation
• Follow up questions that enable you to dig deeper in understanding the ambiguity
• Guidelines on how to facilitate an estimation discussion with your team

“Just try harder” isn’t a strategy. Learn three proven approaches – monitoring bugs, managing legacy systems, and optimizing feedback loops – that empower teams to deliver better software.

“Just try harder” doesn’t solve bugs, bottlenecks, or inefficiencies in software delivery. In this talk, you’ll discover three proven strategies that go beyond working harder to help your team deliver high-quality software with less stress. These approaches combine technical practices with leadership insights, offering a holistic way to catch bugs earlier, improve team efficiency, and accelerate delivery timelines.

1. Find Bugs Before Your Customers Do

What if you could catch bugs before they ever reached users? I’ll share how my team launched a critical healthtech service with zero room for errors. Using feature flags, real-time monitoring, and parallel operation with a legacy system, we identified and resolved issues early, ensuring reliability and maintaining trust.

2. You Can’t Inspect a Fourth Leg onto a Three-Legged Table

Migrating legacy systems can feel like patching a sinking ship. I’ll explain how adopting the strangler fig pattern helped us migrate a fragile, tightly coupled platform to a scalable architecture. Through automation and streamlined approvals, we shifted from biweekly, error-prone releases to fast, reliable deployments every two days.

3. Get Feedback in the Time It Takes to Make a Cup of Tea

Slow feedback loops frustrate teams and delay delivery. Our test suite took 30 minutes, disrupting developer flow. I’ll show how we reduced feedback time to under five minutes by prioritizing critical tests, optimizing pipelines, and parallelizing processes. These changes boosted productivity, reduced stress, and reclaimed valuable development time.

Key takeaways and what to expect:

This talk is for engineering leaders who want practical strategies to improve team performance, enhance delivery reliability, and build better software. You’ll leave with actionable steps, real-world examples, and frameworks to implement these strategies, transforming how your team works and leaving “just try harder” behind.

• Learn how to implement monitoring and observability to catch bugs before they impact users.
• Understand how to manage legacy systems using the strangler fig pattern for safer, incremental migrations.
• Discover how to optimize CI/CD pipelines and test suites to reduce feedback loops and boost productivity.
• Gain practical examples and frameworks that improve team performance and delivery reliability.

A practical guide to evolving an engineering organization from functional to product-based to user-centric – rooted in real experiences at Flo Health.

In today’s fast-paced digital industry, traditional organizational structures struggle to keep up with evolving user needs. Starting as a period tracking app with a flat team structure, we evolved through multiple stages to become a comprehensive women’s health platform serving 70M+ monthly active users.

We’ll dive into our journey from a traditional functional structure with separate mobile, web teams to a product-based organization with autonomous teams. Then, we’ll explore our latest transformation towards a Jobs-to-be-Done approach, where we organize around user needs rather than products.

Using real examples from Flo Health’s evolution, we’ll discuss:

• How to identify when your organization needs structural change
• Practical steps for implementing Conway’s Inverse Maneuver
• Ways to balance platform teams with product teams
• Techniques for transitioning to user-centric organization
• Methods for measuring transformation success
  The presentation will provide practical frameworks, lessons learned, and actionable insights for engineering leaders facing similar challenges in scaling their organizations while staying focused on user needs.

Key takeaways

• Learn how to identify and execute the right organizational structure for your company’s current phase
• Understand practical applications of Team Topologies patterns for tech companies
• Master the transition from product-centric to user-centric engineering organization
• Discover key metrics for measuring organizational transformation success

Engineering leaders often rely on traditional metrics like velocity and cycle time but are these truly driving better outcomes or just adding pressure? Early in my leadership journey, I saw firsthand how well-intentioned KPIs could create friction, misalignment and even burnout.

In this talk, we’ll challenge conventional wisdom on engineering metrics and explore how to balance delivery-focused KPIs with developer experience. Using frameworks like SPACE and real-world examples, we’ll unpack how to measure team effectiveness in a way that fosters engagement, alignment and long-term success.

Walk away with a fresh, actionable approach to metrics that helps your teams deliver great results without burning out.

Everybody wants high reliability, but the path isn’t exactly clear. This talk is for people who need to know what works and what doesn’t.

As Plaid has grown from a 2-person start-up to a 1000 person enterprise, our customers have been asking for ever higher levels of service and reliability. Every company is searching for ways to improve their uptime. But what does that actually mean in the real world?

In this talk, I will cover how Plaid thinks about reliability, how we tackle reliability issues, what has worked, and what hasn’t. We will cover strategies to improve reliability for each 9 your company is looking to add, how much you should invest in each step , and how to communicate expectations with your customers. We will also cover how you need to think about reliability and what reliability pitfalls will slow you down.

No matter where you are on your reliability journey, this talk is for anyone who is interested in providing an unstoppable service to their customers.

Key takeaways

• What 99.99% actually means when it comes to selling services, because what engineers hear and what salespeople say is really different.
• What strategies they will need to employ to hit 2, 3, and 4 nines.
• When these strategies should be deployed and what strategies should be avoided.

CrowdStrike lost $5.4B, Sonos stumbled into a $500M crisis – and they’re not alone. Learn battle-tested leadership strategies to protect your organization from quality catastrophes that can shake your business to its core.

For engineering leaders at every level, quality failures aren’t just technical issues – they’re difficult stakeholder conversations, team morale impacts, and business risks. Recent examples like CrowdStrike’s $5.4B impact on Fortune 500 companies and Sonos’s $500M ongoing crisis demonstrate how quality decisions at the leadership level can cascade into major business crises.

This talk explores quality through a leadership lens, revealing how engineering leaders can protect their organizations from costly failures through strategic decision-making. Drawing from my journey from QA engineer to CTPO, I’ll share insights about translating quality risks into business impact, influencing organizational strategy, and building resilience at the leadership level.

We’ll examine how successful engineering leaders navigate the complex balance between growth, speed, and quality. Through real case studies and personal experiences, you’ll learn how to make quality visible in executive discussions, influence strategic planning, and build organizational structures that prevent million-dollar mistakes.

This isn’t a talk about testing processes or quality practices – it’s about executive decision-making, organizational strategy, and leadership approaches that protect your business. You’ll learn how to position quality in board discussions, manage stakeholder expectations, and make strategic investments that prevent costly failures.

Key takeaways

• Learn how to effectively communicate quality risks and their business impact to influence strategic decisions at any leadership level
• Master practical strategies for building quality-focused organizational structures that prevent costly failures, whether you’re leading a team or a division
• Discover how to elevate quality conversations from technical metrics to business strategy, making quality visible and valuable to all stakeholders

What senior leaders mean by “delivery management,” why it matters, and how to improve it with practical tools and techniques.

Your VP of Engineering just gave you feedback that you need to improve “Delivery management”, but you’re unsure what they mean. In this talk, we’ll give you a whirlwind tour of why senior leaders care about delivery management, what they mean by it, and why it’s critical for you to master it.

Whether you’re a Senior Individual Contributor, Staff or Principal Engineer, or an Engineering Manager, join us to learn practical tools and techniques to enhance your delivery performance, boost team efficiency, and align with leadership expectations.

Master the art of efficient decision-making and turn slow, ineffective engineering decisions into a powerful competitive advantage.

Every day, engineers face choices that can make or break projects. Yet, decision-making is often slow, painful, and ineffective. I’ve interviewed over 50 tech professionals to uncover why—and how to fix it. Scaling engineering teams struggle with overly complicated or non-existent decision processes. Processes like RFCs (Requests for Comments), which should facilitate rapid, informed decisions, have instead become bureaucratic bottlenecks. In this talk, I’ll share battle-tested strategies to transform your RFC process:

* Cut decision time in half with streamlined templates and clear timelines
* Use the DACI model to engage the critical stakeholders
* Automate feedback gathering and stakeholder updates
* Create living documentation that prevents rehashing old debates

You’ll hear real stories of teams that turned their decision-making from a liability into a superpower. By the end, you’ll walk away with a toolkit, templates, and methodologies that fit any team setup and tech stack. Let’s make your team’s decisions faster, smarter, and more impactful. Don’t let indecision hold you back—join me to learn how to turn your RFC process into a secret weapon for engineering success.

Key takeaways

• Faster Decision-Making: Participants will learn how to make their team’s decisions faster without compromising on quality or stakeholder involvement.
• Stakeholder Management: The talk will introduce the DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) model, helping leaders effectively map and involve critical stakeholders in the decision-making process.
• Real-World Applications: Attendees will see practical examples of how other teams are working with RFCs.
• Toolkit and Templates: The talk promises to provide templates, tricks, and methodologies that fit various tool stacks, giving attendees concrete resources to implement in their own organizations.

This talk explores how Phorest shifted to an observability-driven culture by aligning technical vision with customer pain, empowering teams through proactive ownership, and embedding observability into software practices to enhance customer trust.

In this talk, I’ll share the journey of transforming Phorest’s engineering culture to embrace observability at its core. Moving beyond traditional monitoring, we focused on embedding observability into how we build, monitor, and operate software, enabling proactive service health tracking and customer-centric improvements.

You’ll learn how we aligned technical vision with business priorities, rallied cross-functional teams, and introduced tools like OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb to unlock deep insights into production systems. Key highlights include creating a movement around our initiative, crafting impactful SLOs that reflect customer experience, and navigating challenges to foster accountability and ownership across teams.

Whether you’re a leader or practitioner, this talk will provide actionable insights into mapping business problems to technical vision, turning ideas into impactful cultural shifts, and empowering your organization to deliver software that performs seamlessly—because “we know before they call.”

Key takeaways

1. Mapping Business Problems to Technical Vision – Learn how to identify real customer pain points and translate them into a clear, actionable technical vision that drives organizational change.
2. Bringing Vision to Life – Discover practical tools, techniques, and strategies to turn a vision into a movement, from branding initiatives to empowering teams with the right tools and metrics.
3. Building Confidence for Change – Gain inspiration and confidence to lead cultural and technical shifts within your organization, with insights on overcoming challenges and creating lasting impact.
4. Customer-Centric Observability – Understand how aligning observability practices with customer experience through SLOs fosters better collaboration between engineering and product teams.
5. Proactive Service Health – Explore how shifting from reactive monitoring to proactive observability improves system reliability, reduces firefighting, and builds trust with your customers.

Web accessibility is seen as a chore, something to suffer through. This view ignores the needs of people with disabilities and diminishes their worth as humans and worthy customers. How do we change the process?

When you look at web accessibility from the standpoint of requirements and ignore the ‘WHY’ behind it, then the incentive is to ignore it or to use it as a checklist exercise. This way, you deliver projects and apps, receive promotions and pat yourself on the back that you did your job.

In a dev world where speed of delivery, DX and optimisations are core focus points, the human factor of the tech spec requirements is missed altogether. By asking the WHY behind web accessibility requirements, be it WCAG or best practices on top of it, we can humanise our work. Once we understand that what we do is with humans for humans, with all the imperfections of the process and all the hard work that comes with it, then we’ll create a more engaging and fulfilling product.

Web accessibility is not WCAG, it is not stuff you HAVE to do. Web accessibility is the work we should do because we care about our end users. We want Susie, a blind user of our application, to be able to buy her grocery. We want to ensure that Mark, an adult with autism and with enormous social anxiety, to be able to speak with his GP via our online form. We want to ensure that Laura, an elderly 70 year old fashionista, is able to buy her new glittery dresses from our online shop. Crucially, we want to ensure that our colleague with vestibular disorders, Abby, will be able to use our internal tools without becoming dizzy due to excessive movements on the page.

In the UK around 25% of adults between ages 18 to 65 have some kind of disability. For people over 65 years of age the ratio of people with disabilities grows to over 40%.

We can do better for a huge part of our customers, hence the process needs to emphasise the impact our work has on people with disabilities. Using a framework where requirements are split between “do not harm”, “do not block”, “support” and “enhance” should help in that direction.

Key takeaways

• the why behind web accessibility
• highlight impact on people with disabilities, visible or not
• suggestion on how to market web accessibility work inside companies

Learn how to tackle the real challenges of managing global engineering teams – avoiding miscommunication, preventing team friction, and ensuring accountability – so you can drive on-time deliveries and build a motivated team that delivers quality software.

Managing global engineering teams can present several challenges. Time zone differences, cultural diversity, communication breakdowns, and unclear responsibilities often hinder smooth collaboration and timely project delivery. This talk will focus on strategies for overcoming these challenges, thereby enabling engineering managers to lead remote teams more effectively.

Practical approaches to improving communication and bridging cultural gaps will be discussed. By understanding how different cultures influence team interactions, stronger relationships can be built, and misunderstandings can be avoided. An emphasis will be placed on creating an environment of trust and openness, allowing teams to share ideas freely and resolve conflicts before they escalate.

The issue of diffusion of responsibility in global teams will also be addressed. When teams are spread across various locations, accountability can sometimes be overlooked. Techniques for clarifying roles, setting measurable goals, and tracking progress will be explored, ensuring alignment and accountability across the team.

Additionally, the talk will also cover strategies for keeping remote teams motivated. It will be shown that happy teams are productive teams, and simple methods for maintaining morale—even when working across time zones—will be discussed. By fostering a positive team culture, engagement and focus on delivering high-quality software on time can be maintained.

By the end of the talk, attendees will have gained actionable insights and strategies for managing global teams effectively. These approaches will lead to smoother project deliveries, stronger collaboration, and the creation of valuable software through happy, motivated teams.

Key takeaways

• Practical strategies for overcoming communication barriers and cultural differences in global teams.
• Techniques to avoid team conflicts and foster a collaborative, high-trust environment.
• Methods for ensuring clear accountability and preventing the diffusion of responsibility.
• Tips for boosting team morale and maintaining motivation across time zones and distances.

OKRs are a simple- and useful-sounding idea, but in practice, there are all kinds of troubles people get bogged down in. Here are 10 things, rarely mentioned, that can help.

I’ve used OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and other goal-setting techniques at several companies, and tried lots of variations with them to help them be useful. For such a simple-sounding idea, they endlessly cause confusion.

I’ve been helped enormously by investigating how OKRs were really used by the companies that introduced them in the first place, and by reading case studies and talking to people at many places they’ve been used since. All this has helped me understand where we might be going wrong with them at various companies I’ve tried using them. There’s a range of “aha!” moments I’d like to share from this work.

This talk will cover the important aspects to consider when using OKRs – including how to decide if they’re the right tool for your situation at all. It will include lots of examples both from my own varied experience, and from the reading / talking I’ve done to learn from others.

I will attempt to cover 10 different things you haven’t heard before – but if it manages only 7, that’ll still be a great outcome. Yes, that was an OKR joke.

Key takeaways

• A collection of key details and decisions to work through when applying OKRs, to help get the most out of them
• An idea of pitfalls and antipatterns and how to avoid these
• Confidence to start using OKRs more effectively when they get back to work.

Learn the theory behind the operating systems of high-performing engineering teams. Leave with a practical idea of how to design a flexible team operating system with rhythms, tools, and feedback loops for your team.

Engineering teams of all size and complexity need a structured operating system. Without this set of rhythms, processes, and tools to guide how your team collaborates, communicates, and executes, silos emerge, context is lost, and priorities become muddled. In this talk, we’ll discuss the essential components of an effective system, digging into the theory of why some things you’ve tried before have worked and why some things fell flat. We’ll also examine how to design a system tailored to your team’s size, maturity, and unique goals, emphasizing that the best operating systems aren’t static—they grow and evolve alongside the team.

Attendees can expect to hear about collaboration norms, decision making frameworks, and feedback loops and to learn about effective cadence and rhythms for all of these things. And by the end of this talk, attendees will walk away with actionable insights to audit their current systems, implement meaningful changes, and drive alignment across their teams.

Join Meg Adams from the New York Times to learn how a well-designed team operating system can transform your engineering team.

Key takeaways

• What is an operating system and why does my team need it?
• What are the components of an operating system?
• What are the theories I should know to inform the design of my team operating system?

In short: By the end of this talk, attendees will walk away with actionable insights to audit their current systems, implement meaningful changes, and drive alignment across their teams.

Learn how to build a creative practice to help you become a more creative leader.

“Creativity is a mindset, a way of being – and one of the key business skills of our time. The trouble is people think “I’m bad at drawing” and miss that creativity is a much wider skill set that can be developed.

In this talk, we’ll explore the connections between the brain, technology, and creativity. You’ll learn the benefits of creativity, how to practice it, and how you can use it to make you a better person, technologist, and leader.”

Key takeaways

• Debunk myths around creativity and show you how building software is a fundamentally creative act.
• Learn how to build your own creative practice that will help you have fresh ideas in work and in life.
• Tips to get unstuck in business and in your creative practice.
• Inspire you to get creative and drive innovation at your organization.

Our experience is our best resource when it comes to incident prevention, so why are we so resistant to learning from our past mistakes?

In engineering, incident is not just a scare word, it’s a reality we live daily. Given the often costly nature of incidents, it makes sense to invest some time and effort in their prevention. The recipe is simple: Do a blameless analysis of the root cause and identify actions to address it. Yet, the execution is often sloppy, and as a result, our learnings turn out to be surprisingly shallow.

Treated as bureaucratic exercises, postmortems often become checkbox tasks once the dust settles. Many of them lead to superficial conclusions, finger-pointing, or even acts of virtue signaling, where individuals confess to errors to project accountability. Human error is often put front and center, diverting attention from weaknesses in the system, sending us down that spiral of repeating the same mistakes again and again — those same mistakes we identified as the root cause of the incident.

This behavior is not a novel phenomenon, and identifying it is not an exciting discovery. It’s a cliché, a commonplace of our guild, but this makes the fact that we keep doing it even more intriguing. In this talk, we’ll dive into a rabbit hole of hopefully relatable anecdotes from our engineering experience and identify some (anti-)patterns in how we handled incidents. Along the way, we’ll try to offer some fresh perspective without being too judgy (postmortems are supposed to be blameless after all!), and by the end, we’ll hopefully find our way out with a clearer understanding of how slightly adjusting to from a reporting to a learning mindset can help us move beyond annoying paperwork — from surface-level problem-solving to addressing the heart of recurring issues.

Key takeaways

• Postmortems are learning tools, not just reporting tools.
• Shift focus from human error to addressable weaknesses in systems and processes.
• As an engineering leader, it is your responsibility to ensure your teams live by the above principles.

Innovation doesn’t just happen—it’s a skill that must be trained. Learn practical techniques for fostering innovation in engineering teams, from mindset shifts to structured frameworks.

Many leaders talk about innovation, but few actively train their teams to be innovative. Innovation isn’t luck—it’s a muscle that must be developed through the right processes, culture, and mindset. Without structured innovation, teams fall into execution mode, missing opportunities to create game-changing solutions.

This talk explores why training innovation is critical for engineering teams, drawing from real-world experience leading technical programs and architecting large-scale initiatives. Topics include:

• Why innovation training matters – How organizations stagnate without it.
• The myths of innovation – Why it’s not just about creativity but structured thinking.
• How to train innovation in your team – Practical methods to foster structured ideation, experimentation, and problem-solving.
• Balancing execution with innovation – How to create space for new ideas without slowing delivery.
• Building a culture of continuous improvement – How to embed innovation into daily work.

Attendees will leave with proven frameworks and practical techniques to train their teams in innovation, ensuring they stay competitive and adaptive in a rapidly changing tech landscape.

Key takeaways

• Why innovation needs to be trained – It’s not just talent, it’s a skill.
• Practical methods for fostering innovation – Real strategies that work in engineering teams.
• Balancing innovation with execution – How to make space for creativity without disrupting delivery.
• Overcoming common innovation blockers – How to break past fear, inertia, and risk aversion.
• Building a culture of continuous ideation – How to make innovation a habit, not a one-time

“That’s OK, the secretary can type.”

That is what my manager said as they fired me from my first job. The idea that writing, typing, and creating documentation are all roughly equivalent is something that keeps coming back into vogue, this time with AI instead of administrative assistants. Although LLMs can be very helpful with well-structured data, and can increase the reproducibility and consistency of similar information, writing useful documentation involves understanding many things that exist outside a data corpus, such as indexing, functional tasks, and human nature.

Join me for a realistic and actionable discussion of how AI can be helpful for doing documentation, and what still needs the human touch.

Key takeaways

• Where you can usefully apply automation to documentation problems.
• The most impactful places to spend limited resources on documentation.
• Using metrics to determine the best places to focus documentation effort

An effective engineering strategy is not just about technology choices. It’s about processes, organisational design, and culture. Good strategy has clarity and, more importantly, is successful because it can be executed. This workshop will equip you with the skills to evaluate and develop a successful technical strategy for your organization.

This session will provide you with:

• The skills to understand what makes a good technical strategy and what makes a bad one
• An understanding of how to align your technical efforts with your business’s organizational goals
• The tools to build, articulate, and communicate a fully realized tech strategy
• Tips on how to adjust your strategy to a shifting market

Conversations on how to drive revenue through engineering activities and turn engineering from a cost center into a revenue generator.

Discussion includes:

• Honing commercial decision-making and trade-offs
• Understanding and affecting revenue streams.

Conversations on extending your impact and influencing key stakeholders in your business.

Discussion includes:

• Influencing non-technical leaders
• Effectively advocating to the Board
• Influencing organizational goals, strategies, and outcomes.

Conversations on re-prioritizing technical work to focus on the most impactful work.

Discussion includes:

• Strategic planning and resource allocation
• Balancing technical debt and innovation
• Collaborating, and aligning with Product and other stakeholders.

Conversations on quantifying the impact of GenAI investments and how to communicate those insights to your leadership team.

Discussion will include:

• Defining the right metrics to measure productivity gains
• Crafting a compelling narrative that balances realism with optimism
• Exploring real-world business cases for GenAI

For senior leaders, there are myriad challenges to overcome when structuring effective engineering organizations – particularly in cost-cutting environments. A keen strategic approach is needed to create adaptable structures that align and evolve with your business goals. This workshop will equip you with insights into fostering engaged engineering teams that can meet organizational objectives without overburdening them.

This session will provide you with:

• An understanding of how to build flexible, scalable organizational structures that can quickly adapt to shifting business goals
• Strategies to keep engineering teams engaged, motivated and aligned with company vision.
• Techniques for preventing burnout while maintaining productivity on high-priority tasks.

Conversations on evolving your leadership style when managing managers.

Discussion will include:

• Finding the balance between empowerment and accountability
• Learning how to delegate effectively
• Shifting your approach from “hands-on manager” to guide or coach

Conversations on giving your teams autonomy to execute while simultaneously ensuring high velocity.

Discussion will include:

• Developing teams to operate autonomously under constraint
• Building trust and transparency
• Delegating scope, leadership, and authority

Conversations on clarity and alignment around performance and compensation.

Discussion will include:

• Defining clear metrics for performance
• Balancing the need for transparency with the complexities of performance calibration and compensation decisions
• Retention of top performers when opportunities are limited

Conversations on de-mystifying organisational health and creating practical frameworks that serve you and your team.

Discussion will include:

• Defining organisational health in alignment with your business goals and values
• Systematising leading and lagging indicators
• Operationalising metrics so they can be adjusted when needed

Senior engineering leaders are required to take a highly strategic approach when building the frameworks needed to create resilient systems, lead high-performing teams, and navigate risk in uncertain times. This workshop will explore how systems, processes, and teams can build safer products that minimize downtime, effectively prepare for potential threats, and recover quickly.

This session will provide you with:

• The ability to detect and mitigate technical, operational, and organizational risks
• The tools to design robust architectures and cultivate adaptive, high-trust engineering cultures
• Frameworks for responding effectively to incidents and making high-stakes decisions

Conversations on strategies to improve your leadership of critical incidents.

Discussion will include:

• Assessing incident response readiness
• Using better diagnostics
• Learning from incidents and improving readiness

Conversations about how to embed security into the organization’s overall software development strategy.

Discussion will include:

• Balancing fast product development and security
• Building a DevSecOps culture without slowing down innovation
• Managing security debt in legacy systems and rapid scaling

Conversations on aligning with evolving regulations, mitigating risks, and embedding ethical practices across product and engineering decisions.

Discussion will include:

• Ethical and responsible AI development
• Untangling data complexity
• Understanding long-term risks

Conversations on fostering a culture of cost awareness and accountability and how to influence key stakeholders to align on strategic cost decisions.

Discussion will include:

• Keeping cloud costs under control
• Balancing cost and innovation
• Addressing legacy systems and migration costs

Great strategy delivers nothing without great execution. This practical session will provide strategies for achieving efficiency, scalability, and adaptability through effective processes, team alignment, and strong technical execution.

What you’ll learn:

• Proven processes to drive clarity, accountability, and predictable delivery.
• Strategies for optimizing cross-functional collaboration
• Techniques for balancing speed and quality: ship faster without compromising reliability or technical excellence.

Conversations on how to motivate your teams to work faster

Discussion will include:

• Defining appropriate metrics that drive pace
• Reporting to the Board on the state of the engineering org
• Fostering a culture of continuous improvement

Conversations on how to position yourself most effectively as a leader and drive your teams towards success.

Discussion will include:

• Avoiding communication bottlenecks
• Counterbalancing alignment and autonomy for teams
• Monitoring and course correcting as the project progresses.

Conversations on how leaders can balance prioritizing their goals while working cohesively with other departments in a cost-cutting environment.

Discussion will include:

• Avoiding misalignment of goals and priorities
• Establishing shared success criteria with Product
• Addressing communication gaps and language barriers
• Balancing speed vs. quality and building a culture of trust across teams

Conversations on minimising conflict and maximising collaboration between product and engineering teams.

Discussion will include:

• Aligning engineering goals with product demands
• Managing unrealistic product roadmaps and expectations
• Prioritization between product features and tech debt

If you’re inspired by a talk, want to learn more, or just want to chat about it with other folks, head to our Office Hours area where our speakers will be waiting for you.

Meet other leaders to supercharge your personal development

Engineering leadership is a team sport and we’re better as leaders when we can learn from each other. Building and expanding your support network is one of the most valuable things you can take away from LDX3 – so it’s super important to meet new people.

During the first break, there’s a dedicated space for you to come and meet folks who are trying to fill their Voltrons, just like you. Whether you’re looking for someone with a different management style, someone who works in a different industry, or even just a good listener – this is the place to be.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Building great software comes with unique challenges in every industry, and often, the best insights come from others who are in the same boat. Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges, and exchange solutions.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Sponsored by:

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Building great software comes with unique challenges in every industry and often, the best insights come from others who are in the same boat. Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but folks who are underrepresented in tech often face their own unique set of challenges. And that can lead to people feeling isolated in their experiences. 

Come to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar backgrounds and experiences to yours, and where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your journey.

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for tackling the role of a Tech Lead

Get tailored advice on your real-life problems

Learning new information is always great, but sometimes solutions can feel too one-size-fits-all for your specific circumstances. How can advice be applied to a team of 10 or a team of 10,000?

On the other hand, coaching is directly tailored to your specific challenges and the specific environment they exist in. Experienced coaches will be hosting one-on-one coaching sessions with attendees to get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges they’re facing. Come and have a conversation, or peek into the challenges other leaders are facing.

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of a Principal Engineer

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Trade tactics for tackling everyday challenges

Sometimes it can feel like every problem has only one answer – but the truth is, in leadership there’s never a single solution. But when you’re in the thick of a problem, it can be hard to get the headspace to see other ways to tackle a challenge. 

In our solution swap sessions, attendees will get the chance to say how they’d tackle a common issue and compare their ideas with how other leaders would confront the same problem. Our coaches will give direct feedback about the possible consequences (both positive and negative) of the ideas – and will ask the key question – if you were to do this, and then this happened – what would you do next?

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for making the leap to Engineering Manager

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for diving into the role of Engineering Director

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for the path to CTO

This interactive workshop empowers StaffPlus engineers to amplify their influence and create adaptive, growth-oriented engineering environments. Participants will explore four thinking mindsets—Solutioning, Bridging, Resolving, and Learning—derived from diverse fields like software consulting and professional coaching. The workshop aims to equip engineers with practical strategies to improve leadership skills, drive initiatives, increase their influence and mentor effectively.

Interactive elements include self-reflection exercises, small group discussions on applying mindsets to work situations, role-playing scenarios to practice mindset switching, and action planning for implementing new strategies. This hands-on approach ensures participants not only understand the four thinking mindsets, but also gain practical experience in applying them to real-world engineering challenges.

By the end, attendees will identify their default mindset, assess situational needs, and switch between mindsets to better support colleagues.

Do you feel that you are perpetually overwhelmed by meetings, emails, and the demands of others? Do you feel like you’ve lost control of your most valuable asset—your time? If you do, then you are not alone and this is the workshop for you.

In this transformative workshop, we will challenge the limiting beliefs preventing you from managing your time. You will gain clarity on the power of managing your time, how to increase your impact and identify areas for change. Additionally, you will develop practical strategies to prioritise what truly matters and lead with purpose

You will leave the workshop with a specific set of actions and experiments for you to take back into your work

Being an engineering leader requires many skills – prioritizing, meeting deadlines, and perhaps the hardest of all – leading others. Our role shifts from doing to guiding and supporting, making it essential to know when to manage, mentor, or coach. When used effectively, these approaches build team capacity, help meet organizational goals, and create a workplace where people feel valued and motivated.

In this micro workshop, we’ll explore the differences between these leadership skills and how to apply them in the right moments. You’ll learn three key coaching techniques and practice deciding which approach to take. Walk away with more confidence in your ability to lead.