A welcome to LeadDev London 2024 from the host David Yee.

Setting and communicating dates and deadlines is one of the more challenging things to do in software development.

While setting dates is an important reality in business, they are often demotivating and counterproductive to bringing teams together and helping them to work more effectively. Even when dates are set and communicated, it’s usually not clear to different team members what the dates even mean. Then, when dates shift, it causes even more confusion and can contribute to a lack of trust. 

Good communication within a team is incredibly challenging! It’s even more challenging for distributed teams. Dates and the communication patterns around them are a vital element to establishing credibility and building upon values and principles within teams. 

This talk will explore several communication habits that can improve communication and knowledge sharing within your team around dates and deadlines. What communication habits are most important for a team to develop around dates? How can you communicate and ensure a common understanding around dates? What principles can you put in place to bring more confidence and understanding around the dates you set? How can dates become a positive contributing factor to your overall goals? Through specific examples and learnings, this talk will share habits and a common vocabulary around dates that, when used, can help teams to be more effective, motivated, cohesive, and even productive.

Over the last two years, the tech industry has been going through big changes

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

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

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

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

Let me tell you about a mistake I made as a manager.

I thought it would be cool to be as generous as possible with decisions. If there was a decision to be made, I’d open it up to the team for discussions. “How kind and democratic,” I thought to myself. “I’m one of the good ones!” I later found out I was annoying the team. By opening up every decision, I dragged out meetings and dumped extra mental labor onto my reports. How did I get so out-of-touch? Simple. I allowed myself to get feedback from my own imagination. 

When you’re a manager, several barriers stand in the way of self-awareness. For example, you evaluate people’s performance, so no matter how nice or supportive you may be, there are built-in incentives to agree with you. Additionally, it can be awkward for your reports to bring up feedback in one-on-one meetings. As a manager, your title can mean you’re treated as correct by default, and it can be easy to slip into that lens when evaluating your own decisions. These examples can lead to negative outcomes such as missing a harmful trade-off because a report didn’t feel empowered to disagree with you. 

This talk will cover concrete strategies you can use today to improve your self-awareness as a manager. Through a series of fun and not-so-fun cautionary tales, we’ll talk about how to unlock real feedback from your team, when to use a direct versus indirect approach, and how to avoid the traps that lure us into thinking our worst decisions are our best. By the end, you’ll walk away with the tools to become more in touch with your teams and yourself so that you can enable your engineers to do their best work.

Delivering a best in class solution, for a problem no one has is a common pitfall for tech teams and companies.

As an engineering leader, there is a unique non-technical challenge to deliver impact in what we build. This is heightened when there are gaps on our parallel product team or in the companies vision. Have you ever lead a product engineering team that didn’t have a (good) product manager? Have you ever been doubtful of the solution you’ve been tasked to implement? Let’s talk about approachable ways an engineering leader can influence product development without stepping on toes. 

We’re diving into how engineering managers can cultivate ownership in their employees.

First off, let’s acknowledge why ownership is key. Ownership shows that employees understand a companies mission, priority, and feel empowered to action against that mission in their day to day. Teams with high ownership go from underperforming to the dream team. How do we grow this ownership magic? 

As an engineering manager, you probably have a pretty good sense of how a project should be done. But – it’s not about you! It’s about asking the SEs questions that spark critical thinking. Questions lead to that ‘aha’ moment. You can cultivate ownership by validating your employees critical thinking instead of dictating decisions. 

Curiosity is key when asking questions. Even if you think you know the answer, show genuine curiosity in what others think. You’ll be surprised how often there’s a better solution than expected. People know when you are asking questions without curiosity – and that only creates a feeling of needing to be “right”. 

We’ll look at questions, curiosity, responding instead of reacting, gratitude, and 1:1s. We’ll discuss empowering people to decide, while making sure there’s a safety net. Guardrails are crucial (as well as showing them how to ask for help). 

Lastly, understanding values ties it all together. Knowing what matters helps everyone steer in the same direction.

Slack’s desktop application is like a duck.

On the surface, everything has to appear effortless, but underneath, we’re swimming furiously. We have to support hundreds of complex feature interactions and process a constant stream of input from user and server alike, all without breaking a sweat. 

Join Jenna, founding member of Slack’s frontend performance team, as we dive in and explore the performance bottlenecks we’re encountering as the application and team continue to grow and evolve. We’ll dig into how foundational architectural decisions have rippled to create these issues and the wide range of technical and cultural approaches our team is taking to prevent and mitigate the inefficiencies that cause your laptop fans to spin wildly.

Working on teams, we need to help other people every day.

But some of the most common feedback about help given is that it misses the mark: We can give so little support that we’re no help at all, or so much support that it feels like we’ve just taken over the task. How do we calibrate the support we give to the situation? 

I’ve found useful insights for this problem outside the technical field, particularly in the design of puzzles like escape rooms. I’ll share what I’ve learned from the experts in hinting, and some examples of how I’ve applied these techniques, both one-on-one and in the design of better processes. You’ll come away with a concrete model to give better, more effective guidance in any context, whether it’s helping a team member stretch to tackle a new problem, or helping with your child learn from their homework.

Psychological safety has become a popular buzzword these days in articles and on social media, but what can a manager do to actively cultivate it in their teams?

Iris, engineering manager at Riot Games, will talk about how the ritual of “Safety and Belonging” brought her team closer together after “the Kotaku article” broke and trust was at an all-time low. Hear how she convinced new teams and reluctant engineers to adopt the ritual as an IC, and how she instituted and spread it across Riot Games further as a manager.

Take this practical guide and details on a 3-part workshop to immediately jumpstart psychological safety in teams, and learn from lessons and best practices cultivated over multiple organizational settings.

Datadog made a strategic business decision in 2018 to migrate all our infrastructure to Kubernetes. During this process, a large number of our infrastructure teams were trailblazing the platform to make it work for each shape and type of our workloads for multiple cloud providers and accounting for their idiosyncratic runtime differences.

Managing expectations of 2000+ engineers involved in migrating to a new Deployment Platform while the company was undergoing rapid growth, posed one of the biggest challenges of my management career since it introduced the greatest variable – the intersection of software and people.

During this process, a large number of our infrastructure teams were trailblazing the platform to make it work for each shape and type of our workloads for multiple cloud providers and accounting for their idiosyncratic runtime differences. The hard lessons learnt during this effort in the technical realm have been presented on multiple occasions. However, even accounting for the daunting magnitude of its technical side, transforming and guiding human behaviors on the new way of deploying and operating software turned out to be at least just as challenging as reforming our infrastructure.

What we came to realize during this endeavor more clearly was that we, as humans, form habits very easily and don’t like disruptions to what we have become familiar with. When communicating a change to people who are directly impacted by it, assumptions (and therefore disappointments) are often unavoidable, no matter how clear one believes themselves to be when outlining said change.

In this talk, I’d like to share the lessons we learned building a Deployment Platform that involved an eventual migration of 2000+ engineers, from 250+ different teams, making tens of thousands of changes per week to 3000+ different workloads. I will share the importance of understanding the complexity of human motivations and establishing two-way communication channels, listening reflectively by placing oneself mentally into their positions and thinking what words may be more impactful for their particular situation.

Recently, many Engineering teams have had to make more do with fewer folks to tackle the responsibilities a larger team had inherited over time. This has caused organizations to scramble to find ways to fund feature development, handle maintenance burdens and acclimate to a new normal across smaller teams.

But what if the answer lies in rethinking team structures and mandates and adopting a wholly different team model than what the organization has had in the past? How can we best show up and support the needs of our teams, while also proposing ways to “scale” teams nimbly and keeping organizational changes in perspective?

In this talk, I will share my experience of working on an astonishingly small team on some of the highest-stake problems anyone could throw a computer at and how that inspired a plan to create a new, flexible-model team at Slack to continuously, and creatively deliver top priorities. 

I’ll also highlight the can’t-miss key points of culture-building in a tumultuous time, examine the challenges faced in adjusting to this new way of working, and go over what it means to make a flexible-model team sustainable in the long run. Learn how flexibility begets resilience, how to mitigate risks to morale and business goals and how to recognize when the time might be right for your organization to undertake a similar pivot in the near future.

A staff reduction, if handled poorly, can be a turning point in the minds of employees, from trust in a company to a feeling of betrayal.

The tech industry has been facing new challenges: an economic downturn after a huge surge in hiring, inflation, and higher interest rates. This means that many tech companies are shifting their focus from growth to profitability. This talk focuses on how to retain your people by leading with empathy, building trust, and working with your people to understand their core motivators.

A study shows that 85% of people believe that a good manager is important for their workplace happiness, and 38% have stayed longer at a job than intended because of a good manager. When employees are seeing things in the industry destabilize, it is impactful how we, as leaders, react. First, it’s important that we take care of ourselves, and are prepared to hear the reactions of our reports. In these conversations we must be genuinely supportive, and most importantly, listen.

Moving from growth to profitability means that we need to reprioritize our work. But in doing this, we need to make sure we are properly investing in our people. We need to be smart about how to achieve company goals, not by doing more with less, but by staffing correctly. Retention becomes a higher priority, meaning we need to put people on projects that are both important for the business, and motivating.

Retention in this industry post-boom means we may need to rethink how we motivate our people. We may need to move from focusing on typical motivators like succession planning and job security, to things like building community and a sense of purpose within the company. As managers, it’s our job to dive into each employee’s personal motivators and understand what will keep them excited to come to work everyday.

With the rise of AI, discussions of ethics in technology are gaining steam and making mainstream news. AI has enabled incredible breakthroughs and has also actively caused harm, sometimes to the very populations it aims to protect.

What lessons can historical context teach us about modern technological harms?

In this talk, Christina Entcheva connects historical examples of technology to the modern practice of software engineering today, discusses AI harms, and provides guidelines for mitigation for modern product teams.

Closing session