8:00 1h 45min

Registration & Refreshments

10:00

WELCOME

Welcome to LeadDev New York

A welcome to LeadDev New York 2023 from the host David Yee.

10:10

Doing the right thing, better: How to lead with efficiency in mind

Leading in a tech downturn is challenging for you and for your teams. Applying the steps outlined in this talk will help you change the way you think and operate, and will help you be the leader that your business and your team needs during this time of uncertainty.

10:40

How successful hackathons increase belonging, decrease anxiety and help people imagine new identities in tech

In this lightning talk, I’ll share an example of a successful internal hackathon at Pluralsight and how it impacts developer experience. I’ll present evidence from our original research study, where we used rigorous research measures of anxiety and imposter syndrome to find quantitative evidence for the benefits of hackathons with 64 participants, using pre- and post-measures from behavioral science.

10:50

Good technical debt

This talk presents an investment-based approach to thinking about software development. I'll discuss how this framework was used to rapidly build and ship Squarespace's Email Campaigns product in less than 15 months. Along the way you'll get several practical guidelines for how tech debt can supercharge your technical investments, with real examples from inside Squarespace.

11:20 30 min

Refreshments

11:50

The (updated) story of why we migrate to gRPC and how we go about it

How do you get 400 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale with minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user? This presentation will address these questions alongside more technical discussions of advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, load balancing, and traffic management and how they are essential in large distributed systems.

12:00

Leading from Incidents: How past incidents can be used to guide company decisions

Every company has things that take them out of their day-to-day, that require immediate coordination and attention. Whether or not folks call those incidents is one thing, but these events take us away from our day-to-day which impacts our productivity, planning, and goals. In this talk, Nora will dive into how we can get the most out of these events before they become our culture in a way we didn't intend.

12:30

Enabling the motivated: Facilitating role switches smoothly

This talk describes how an engineering lead can identify prospective team members, enable them to gain experience in the proposed role, and ultimately make the switch.

12:40

What to do after being laid off: Lessons on being my own CEO for a change

In this talk, I share my layoff experience. Recounting this, I hope to share some practical considerations and grounding thoughts that might be of use regardless of your employment situation.

Featuring:

13:10 1h 20min

Lunch

14:30

Building healthier mission-focused organizations

How do companies truly manage to innovate and outpace their competition? The answer is communication. Social science researchers have shown that how managers communicate plays a pivotal role in company success. In this talk, you will hear about the three main categories of communication — pathological, bureaucratic and generative — and the important role they each play in a company's success and failure.

14:40

Security from scratch

Many teams know it's time to start getting serious about security, but don't know where to start. In this talk, I'll try to tell you as much as possible in 30 minutes about what you do need to worry about, when you need to worry about it, how you can fix it, and what you don't need to worry about — yet.

15:10

Setting up your team for success during your extended absence

As more and more companies offer longer than before parental leaves or sabbaticals, we as engineering managers are faced with the grappling question of - how will my team fare when I am gone? Will all hell break loose? Will things remain about the same? In this talk I will share the things you can do to ensure success for your team while you are away.

15:20

How to kill your team’s product

Layoffs. Canceled projects. Unexpected re-orgs. You may not have experienced these yet, but if you’re a people manager for long enough, you will. I’ll share how the mistakes I made early in my career as a manager helped prepare me to handle a terrible situation in a way that stayed consistent with our values and got the members of my team to the best, most empathetic outcome we could hope for.

15:50 30 min

BREAK

Refreshments

Enjoy some refreshments during the break

16:20

How low (level) can you go

Leaders: come learn why this matters to your product, engineers, come learn why the investment is worthwhile.

16:50

Using a learning-themed retrospective to strengthen your team’s learning culture and reduce learning debt

In this talk, Kristen Foster-Marks will share her experience of leading a learning-themed retrospective, which encouraged her team to reflect on their personal beliefs about learning and up-skilling, their team’s learning culture, and the ways in which these beliefs and culture can both encourage and discourage engagement in on-the-job learning and up-skilling activities.

17:00

Making the manager of manager's mindset

This talk will cover the difference between the two roles and the key mindset shifts leaders need to make to manage managers.

17:30 10 min

CLOSE

LeadDev New York 2023 Wrap-up

Closing session

17:40

NETWORK

Networking mixer

Network with our community

19:10

Close

End of event

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