Confirmed line-up and activities

8.00 AM

WELCOME

Registration and refreshments

Welcome to LeadDev New York 2024

9.30 AM

WELCOME

Welcome to LeadDev New York 2024

A welcome to LeadDev New York 2024 from the host David Yee.

Featuring:

David Yee
David Yee
VP of Engineering The New York Times
9.50 AM

The scrappy/scale mindset: A framework for sustainable engineering leadership

In this talk, Melissa will unpack the two working modes common to product engineering teams, explore what teams in each mode need from a technical leader, and learn how to adapt our own leadership style based on the context our team is in.

Featuring:

Melissa  DePuydt
Melissa DePuydt
Senior Engineering Manager Medium
10.20 AM

Dates and deadlines...it's complicated

In this talk, Sara Hicks will explore several communication habits that can improve communication and knowledge sharing within your team around dates and deadlines.

Featuring:

Sara Hicks
Sara Hicks
Founding Partner & Coach The Intentional Organization
10.30 AM

Beyond the headlines: Engineering leadership in 2024

In this talk, LeadDev's editor-in-chief, Scott Carey, goes beyond the headlines using data from our 2024 Engineering Leadership report, where we asked 1,100 engineering leaders how they are feeling about the industry and their roles within it.

Featuring:

Scott Carey
Scott Carey
Editor in Chief LeadDev
10.45 AM

Becoming the leader you can be, in a changed technology industry

Over the last years, the tech industry, companies, and many of us leaders have been going through big changes: From strategy shifts and layoffs to changes in the workforce, company structures, and ways of working, to companies racing to “do something about AI.” Adapting to these changes and turning them into reality has kept many engineering leaders incredibly busy, to the point of being overworked, with not much space to reflect and make sense of it all. In this talk, Lena creates space for exactly that, by inviting you to step out of your busy day-to-day.

Featuring:

Lena Reinhard
Lena Reinhard
Engineering Leadership & Executive Coach
11:05

Refreshments

Network, learn and explore during every break

Chat to every speaker

Office hours is your opportunity to connect face-to-face, ask questions and find out more.

Melissa DePuydt
Senior Engineering Manager
Sara Hicks
Founding Partner & Coach
Scott Carey
Editor in Chief
Lena Reinhard
Engineering Leadership & Executive Coach

Complete your "Voltron Quest"

Inspired by Lara Hogan’s Manager Voltron, build your personal network at LeadDev New York. 

Featuring:

Plum Ertz
Senior Director, Engineering
Maude Lemaire
Principal Engineer

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

How can I tell if my team is doing well?

Janani SriGuha
Senior Engineering Manager
Greyson Junggren
Co-Founder
Kavitha Govindarajulu
Principal Software Engineer

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

How do you build an effective, human-centred on-call process?

Lawrence Finn
Principal Engineer
Sasha Tailor
Engineering Lead
Alicia Collymore
Engineering Manager

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • Push your metrics all the way left

Featuring:

Mike Hoye
Director of Developer Engagement

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • On-call for humans

Featuring:

Eryn Carman
Customer Success Manager
11.50 AM

Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (LeadDev)

In this talk, Carol will share the story of my empirical research conducted with software engineers and developers across industries experiencing code review anxiety.

Featuring:

Carol Lee
Carol Lee
Principal Research Scientist @ Developer Success Lab Pluralsight
12.20 PM

Drive product gaps as an engineering leader

In this talk, Emily Thomas will discuss approachable ways an engineering leader can influence product development without stepping on toes.

Featuring:

Emily Thomas
Emily Thomas
Engineering Manager Invisible Technologies Inc.
12.30 PM

Safety and Belonging - A Ritual to Jumpstart Psychological Safety

Iris, engineering manager at Riot Games, will talk about how a ritual of safety and belonging brought her team closer together after "the Kotaku article" broke and trust was at an all-time low. Iris will talk about 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. This talk will give you a template for how to rebuild trust in your teams and get them working towards the same goal.

Featuring:

Iris  Zhang
Iris Zhang
Manager, Software Engineering Riot Games
12.45 PM

Self-Awareness for Managers: Avoiding the antipatterns that block your team

This talk by Yaphi Berhanu will cover concrete strategies you can use today to improve your self-awareness as a manager.

Featuring:

Yaphi Berhanu
Yaphi Berhanu
Engineering Manager Squarespace
1.10 PM

Lunch

Network, learn and explore during every break

Chat to every speaker

Office hours is your opportunity to connect face-to-face, ask questions and find out more.

Featuring:

Carol Lee
Principal Research Scientist @ Developer Success Lab
Emily Thomas
Engineering Manager
Iris Zhang
Manager, Software Engineering
Yaphi Berhanu
Engineering Manager

Career next steps Q&A

  • Tech Leads

Featuring:

Aisha Blake
Anirudh Perugu
Tech Lead
Manasi Tamboli
Technical Lead
Dhiraj Devkar
Tech Lead
Julie Qiu
Tech Lead

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

  • How do you manage your team's workload spikes?

Featuring:

Amit Gupta
Software Engineering Manager
Tess Shapiro
Engineering Director, AdTech MarTech
Hamza Zia
CEO

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

  • How to cultivate security excellence as part of your engineering culture.

Featuring:

Omar Biggie
Senior Staff Security Engineer
Ryan Cooke
Engineering Manager
Arti K
Senior Director, Information Security

Community representation group

Connect with other leaders with similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey. 

  • Women leaders

Featuring:

Jen Krieger
VP, Engineering Operations
Mica Alaniz
Senior Engineering Manager

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • Enhancing the developer experience with an integrated software delivery platform

Featuring:

Martin Reynolds
Field CTO

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • Teaching old code new tricks: Modernizing legacy with Swimm

Featuring:

Melissa Strauss
VP of Sales

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

Coaches:

Lena Reinhard
Engineering Leadership & Executive Coach

Engineering in action

Hear how real engineering teams turn ideas into practice. Learn about the challenges they faced, the issues they worried about, the mistakes they made, and how they eventually succeeded.

  • How we took control of our incident response

Featuring:

Lawrence Jones
Product Engineer
Lakshmi Subbramanian
Senior Engineering Manager
Perri Lapidus
Group Engineering Manager
Val Akkapeddi
Director of Engineering
2.35 PM

A nudge in the right direction: How to give just enough help

In this talk, Jason will share what they've learned from the experts in hinting and some examples of how they've applied these techniques one-on-one and in designing better processes.

Featuring:

Jason Wodicka
Jason Wodicka
Engineering Advocate
2.50 PM

Sponsor Presentation

Spin it up, shut it down

Join Alicia and Martha as they share their insights on creating, maintaining, and gracefully shutting down teams. Learn how to set up new teams for success, keep them flexible and resilient, and understand the importance of knowing when it’s time to disband to focus on what’s most impactful.

Featuring:

Alicia  Collymore
Alicia Collymore
Engineering Manager incident.io
Martha  Lambert
Martha Lambert
Technical Lead incident.io
3.20 PM

Cultivating great teams: Managing out with kindness

In this talk, Marty Haught will go over a framework on how to approach managing out humanely. We'll start with the foundation of setting expectations, providing direct feedback, and working with your report to bring out their best.

Featuring:

Marty Haught
Marty Haught
Engineering Leader
3.30 PM

Managing expectations: Lessons from making large-scale platform changes

Datadog decided in 2018 to migrate all of its infrastructure to Kubernetes. And while it was a daunting technical undertaking, dealing with people and process was equally hard. Seshendra will share lessons learned from this large-scale migration, including how 2000+ engineers, across 250+ different teams made tens of thousands of changes per week to 3,000+ different workloads. He’ll give tactical tips about how to set up a project for success - and how to land it effectively.

Featuring:

Seshendra Nalla
Seshendra Nalla
Senior Director of Engineering Datadog
4.00 PM

Refreshments

Network, learn and explore during every break

Chat to every speaker

Office hours is your opportunity to connect face-to-face, ask questions and find out more.

Featuring:

Jason Wodicka
Engineering Advocate
Alicia Collymore
Engineering Manager
Martha Lambert
Technical Lead
Marty Haught
Engineering Leader
Seshendra Nalla
Senior Director of Engineering

Career next steps Q&A

  • Engineering Managers

Featuring:

Aisha Blake
Lyly Rijmen
Senior Engineering Manager
Nikka Padilla
Senior Software Engineering Manager
Vinod Goje
Engineering Manager
Frankie Lamar
Engineering Manager

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

  • How do you embed observability into your engineering culture?

Featuring:

Rodney Cobb
Principal DevOps Engineer
Jonathan Connolly
Director of Software Engineering
Jemiah Sius
Senior Director of Developer Relations

Community representation group

Connect with other leaders with similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey. 

  • Asian leaders

Featuring:

Iris Zhang
Manager, Software Engineering
Anisha Ramnani
Senior Software Engineer
Melissa Xie
Staff Engineering Manager

Table talks

Join facilitated group conversations with other leaders on:

  • How do you foster collaboration within and between teams?

Featuring:

Amberley Romo
Engineering Manager
Alex Barnett
Head of Developer Relations & Community

Community representation group

Connect with other leaders with similar backgrounds and experiences to you, and build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey. 

  • Black leaders

Featuring:

Quincy Iheme
Engineering Manager
Marqueze Sawyers
Senior Manager Software Engineering

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • How to effectively use AI to manage engineering backlog

Featuring:

Corentin Trebaol
Co-founder

Demo stage

Discover solutions for your technical issues:

  • Securing your applications with Auth0

Featuring:

Will Johnson
Senior Developer Advocate

Speed coaching

Watch or participate in free 1:1 coaching

Coaches

Lena Reinhard
Engineering Leadership & Executive Coach
4.40 PM

Making do: Scaling expertise on teams you can't grow

Mica will share her experiences of working on an astonishingly small team on some of the highest-stake problems anyone could throw a computer at. She’ll talk about how it inspired a plan to create a new, flexible-model team at Slack to continuously, and creatively deliver top priorities. She will 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.

Featuring:

Mica Alaniz
Mica Alaniz
Senior Engineering Manager Slack
5.10 PM

Retaining Your People After the Tech Boom

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.

Featuring:

Kat Ross
Kat Ross
Engineering Manager Spotify
5.20 PM

Ethics in the age of AI: Strategies for mitigation and their historical context

With the rapid, widespread adoption of generative AI, discussions of ethics in technology are gaining steam - and not just within engineering, but beyond in the mainstream news. And where AI has enabled incredible breakthroughs - it’s also actively caused harm, sometimes to the people it aims to protect. Christina will take a look at the imperative questions we must have around AI as engineers, looking at some of the historic harms caused by technology and how we can work to ensure that we don’t replicate them in the age of AI.

Featuring:

Christina Entcheva
Christina Entcheva
Director of Software Engineering GitHub
5.50 PM 10 min

CLOSE

LeadDev New York 2024 Wrap-up

Closing session

Featuring:

David Yee
David Yee
VP of Engineering The New York Times
6.00 PM

Networking mixer

Spend some time with other attendees after Day 1 of the conference.

Chat to every speaker

Office hours is your opportunity to connect face-to-face, ask questions and find out more.

Featuring:

Mica Alaniz
Senior Engineering Manager
Kat Ross
Engineering Manager
Christina Entcheva
Director of Software Engineering

Become a LeadDev contributor AMA

Hear from the LeadDev content team on the secrets of crafting winning speaker submissions, effective article proposals and how to get involved with the community.

Featuring:

Rob Smith
Content Producer
Mariana Valette
Content Producer
Scott Carey
Editor in Chief

It doesn't end here - scroll back up to see what's happening on Day 2! ☝️

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