Agenda

Navigating the non-boom market 

This year was marked by a spate of layoffs, a lack of available funding, and a general sense of unease. The cause is coming from a pretty simple fact - tech is no longer in the boom. As an engineering leader, it means that a lot of the skills you’ve been learning don’t quite turn the lock as smoothly as they used to.

That’s not to say the skills you have aren’t useful any more - but there is a need to adapt them to the new normal. Difficult conversations will be more frequent, decision-making will be more prickly, and you’ll have to steady a ship over increasingly troubled waters. It's time to think about how you can rework your skills for the current environment.

Developing your reports and performance management 

In the last decade of growth, if you needed to increase the output of your teams there was often a simple solution - hire more people. But as companies around the globe have spent a year reducing headcount, this option is no longer a reality for most leaders.

If your team is likely to stay the same, the only way to work faster and more effectively is to develop your people. Mentoring, coaching, and providing good feedback will become more important as you help your team grow, as well as difficult conversations around performance management. We want to know how can you effectively grow your reports.

Maintaining reliability

With layoffs sweeping the industry, there are fewer people in engineering departments. With less people on your team or org, does that mean you’re running fewer services? Chances are the answer is no, which means you’re being asked to do more with less.

We want to explore how you maintain reliability and keep to the same standard of operational excellence with less people. Particularly when leaders in both your engineering org and your executive team consider this to be business-critical.

Tackling build vs. buy

Almost every company in the industry is tightening their belts and for engineering leaders that will have broad effects. It’s not just headcount and resources that will be scrutinised - but also what you’re spending on third-party providers. 

As the prospective budget for vendors decreases, build vs. buy decisions will become an increasingly important role in your strategy. We want to look at:

• Should you utilise hours of internal engineering time to build the perfect solution or do you opt for an imperfect offering from a vendor?
• What, in the long run, will have the maximum impact for the most reasonable cost?

Meet the LeadDev New York programming committee

Check out the all-star lineup of amazing engineering leaders that will oversee new operations, review talk submissions, and activities LeadDev New York. They will facilitate discussions about program priorities, providing on-the-ground information to help ensure the conference content addresses the pain points of engineering leadership today.

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