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If you’re anything like me, you’re probably so busy putting out fires and rushing between meetings and high-priority initiatives that your well-intentioned thoughts of “leading well” go out the window in favor of just getting things done. You’re not a bad leader; you just don’t have time or energy to give “great leadership” much thought. 

This approach—moving initiatives across the line through our own directed effort and sheer force of will (and maybe working on weekends)—can only take us so far. After all, when you’re feeling tired or burned out, it’s hard to imagine another 3 months in your job, let alone another 30 years in your career. 

It’s time for an easier way to show up as great leaders (no burnout required). This talk will introduce audiences to the Scrappy/Scale Mindset, a dead-simple framework for leaders that I developed while building high-performing engineering teams at The Washington Post and The Atlantic. “Scrappy/Scale” is a framework for interrogating assumptions about how you need to show up as a leader in any given situation, as well as a useful tool for evaluating your own needs and career trajectory. 

Together, we’ll 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. If scrappy work is what gets us to where we want to be, scale initiatives are what keep us there. By cultivating these two modes of leadership thinking and the skills required for each, great engineering leaders can break free from fire fighting and develop a personal framework for both managing themselves and developing others.

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.

From mass layoffs to a crazy AI hype cycle, it can be difficult to know just how impactful these headlines are on engineering leaders tasked with steadying the ship through these turbulent waters.

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.

From strategy shifts and layoffs to changes in workforce, company structures, 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, I want to create space for exactly that with you, by inviting you to step out of your busy day-to-day. 

Together, we’ll look at:

• What do these changes in our industry look like, contextualized, and what do they mean?
• How can you handle the uncertainty that has been a constant for many leaders, while the industry continues to evolve?
• And what does all of this mean for our roles as leaders in the technology space?

I’m a VP Engineering and coach engineering leaders, and, like you, many of my clients and me have been trying to not just make sense of those changes, but also understand what they mean for me and us. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of what you can do to navigate these changes successfully, and inspiration to reconsider your own role and impact

While frequently well-intentioned, this advice gives developers the message that there’s something wrong with them or their code if they experience code review anxiety - a message that is not just inaccurate, but even damaging. So what can you do about code review anxiety? As a clinical scientist in the Developer Success Lab with expertise in stress and anxiety, I recently decided to go up against this harmful advice with scientific evidence on who experiences code review anxiety, how it is maintained and exacerbated, and what we can actually do to mitigate it. 

In this talk, I’ll share the story of my empirical research conducted with software engineers and developers across industries experiencing code review anxiety. You’ll learn about our new empirically tested model of code review anxiety and the important cognitive mechanisms like self-efficacy, probability bias, and cost bias that maintain and exacerbate code review anxiety. I’ll also share how a brief intervention can help junior and senior engineers manage their anxiety about giving and receiving code reviews. Along the way, I’ll pull the curtain back on how we do “developer science,” sharing the journey of developing and scientifically testing a code review anxiety intervention based on cognitive-behavioral therapies, using a rigorous randomized control experimental design – the same methods that we use to test interventions in complicated real-world settings like healthcare. I’ll end by providing science-backed, actionable recommendations for how developers can reduce their code review anxiety and create a code review culture that preemptively reduces code review anxiety in others.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

We’ve found that knowing when to say goodbye to a team is key to ensuring you’re constantly doing the most impactful thing.

We’ll discuss:

• The benefits of creating fresh teams to set projects up for success
• Our formula for spinning up purposeful teams
• Running flexible and resilient teams to drive pace
• Knowing when and how to shut your team down gracefully 

You’ll leave with a blueprint for spinning up tactical project teams with a clear purpose and knowing the signals that show it’s time to say goodbye.

One that is not often discussed but can be critical is how to approach managing team members out. We all hope that we don't have to move on from anyone but there will be times when it is the best thing you can do for your team. 

In this talk, we'll 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. We hope that by taking these actions a direct will make adjustments to meet expectations. We'll explore ways to frame the situation that is honest and objective, that allows you to constructively move forward with kindness. Simply put, if they are not fit for the role, it's unfair to them, the team, and the organization to not take action. By the end of this process, separation will not come as a surprise to anyone. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on: 

• How to approach defining expectations on the role regardless of the materials your company provide 
• Ways to provide direct, actionable feedback against expectations and avoid ruinous empathy 
• The importance of accountability in the process 
• Aligning your approach to help your directs grow and succeed 
• Holding tough but compassionate conversations when it's clear it's not working out

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.

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.

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.

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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.

In this Q&A, our editor-in-chief, Scott Carey, sits down with the VP of Engineering at Harness, P.A. Masse, to discuss the biggest talking points from this report, including:

• How widespread feature management and experimentation are today
• The gap between engineering and product
• Balancing feature optimization with safety
   

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.

They all began as PLG and eventually scaled to enterprise. But how?

In this session, you’ll learn the blueprint for making your app “enterprise-ready” with proven strategies and tactics to unlock growth and move upmarket.

You’ll leave equipped with actionable insights that are ready to be applied to your business immediately. This talk is perfect for technical founders, product leaders, and anyone looking to expand their TAM.

Learn how building with React-on-Chain facilitates rapid UI development across multiple chains, and offers autonomous, composable, and secure applications that unlock unique capabilities like cross-chain digital asset management, DeFi, and Social, while abstracting Web3 complexities away from users. 

Sometimes your job as an engineering leader is to motivate people and not get stuck in the details and other times, your job is to ensure the details are just right. Because time and energy are finite resources, where you spend these resources is key and becomes even more nuanced the more senior you get in the IC or management track. 

In this talk we’ll give you our two perspectives as a Senior Engineering Manager and Senior Staff Engineer. We’ll share our experiences and challenges when making decisions that impact our engineering organizations. From metrics to reliability to staffing decisions to architectural changes – all of these are facets of working in an engineering organization that can be approached in different ways depending on which side of engineering leadership you are in. We’ll also share what it looks like to partner closely with each other and how we rely on each other to make better decisions together.

In today's devtools landscape, we've seen a huge proliferation of products to outsource much of the underlying services and infrastructure needed to build and operate a complex product at scale. Stripe for payments, LaunchDarkly for feature flagging, Algolia for managed search, and WorkOS for SSO are some examples of products we might find ourselves looking at. But how do we know as engineering leaders how to approach when to build a solution versus buy one? Common wisdom may dictate that it's as simple as "focussing on what's core to your business" but the reality is more nuanced.

In this talk we'll take a look at a decision-making framework we can employ as engineering leaders in order to help make better build-vs-buy decisions. We'll apply this framework to some key real-world software decisions, taking a balanced look at the long-term impact of both directions. Ultimately, giving an actionable set of tips you can go away and use in your next process.

Along the way we'll cover:

• How to run an effective build-vs-buy process (e.g. not just another biased RFP spreadsheet)
• How to collaborate across your product, security, and operations teams when assessing vendors
• A few integration horror stories from the trenches

This session delves into strategies to promote effective teamwork and improved developer productivity. In this session, learn how a collaboration-centric approach can transform the developer experience, making it easier for teams to build, test, and deploy high-quality APIs together.

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.

Furthermore, the code we work with is often non-habitable, meaning that it is poorly understood, poorly tested, and difficult to change. Will GenAI save us from this issue or cause it to proliferate? It turns out that there is a path to habitable code and, if used appropriately, AI coding assistants can help get us there. This talk focuses on the techniques and strategies that can be used across various AI coding assistants to improve code habitability. Conversely, it also covers what to watch out for, so that the use of AI coding assistants do not cause us to proliferate poorly understood, brittle code that introduces defects and gets in the way of software agility.

Especially for a leader, driving an aspiring change, it can be extremely elusive if the target of the change is legacy software riddled with technical debt. 

To spice it up further, throw in some emotional attachment to code, immunity to change and a large dose of scepticism, you have the perfect recipe for disaster, if you don’t have the right toolkit. 

In a multi-disciplinary durable team, working on complex software transformation to build innovative solutions will create a lot of cognitive friction due to varied skillsets and experiences. Emotional dominance can severely inhibit organic innovation and growth for any business. 

Have your ideas ever been considered a threat to other’s professional identities? 

In this case, we become our own blockers and progress is impasse. Interested to hear about what we did to break the logjam? Join me for a case study of one such emotionally turbulent digital transformation journey and learn about: 

1. How we pulled ourselves out of the trenches to complete the transformation. 
2. Strategies used to understand the reason for the complex emotions. 
3. Tools I wish I had much earlier in the process. 4. Biases identified and addressed

But often, process is too heavy-handed and has the opposite effect, slowing teams down, creating the wrong incentives, and demotivating engineers. So how do you strike the right balance? 

There's no universal solution, as it hinges on factors like team size, work type, and collaboration methods. Understanding team dynamics is key to implementing effective processes that drive success. 

Process isn't static either; it must evolve with the team's changing needs. Flexibility and adaptability lead to better outcomes for individuals and the team as a whole.

In this session, Julianna will explore various examples, from cases where light processes hindered velocity and culture, to cases of excessive, heavy-handed process and strategies for adjusting course. Culture and process are intertwined; understanding your team’s culture is key to making sure that the process you’re implementing will match how the team operates and not be too at odds with that culture. 

We’ll delve into planning processes, transitioning from high-level plans to weekly execution. That includes emphasizing the tech spec phase of any project to build solid execution plans that foster accountability over the timeline and outcomes. But you often still need to balance that with some checks and balances, so we’ll talk through how to get engineers to build their own sprints and measure velocity without it feeling overbearing. Ultimately, what’s most important is that engineers have clear goals and expectations and feel ownership over the work that they’re doing. 
 

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In spite of its criticality, understanding of how trust operates within the workplace remains elusive for many leaders. The common misconception that trust is a transactional commodity - something to be acquired and spent - is not only incorrect but also toxic to organizational culture.

In this enlightening talk, we delve deep into the dynamics of trust in management, based on the insights gleaned from real-world experiences. Trust, as we'll explore, is not earned through superficial gestures or rewards; rather, it is validated through genuine care, active listening, and honesty. Instead, it begins with genuinely caring about your team as individuals, not just as cogs in the organizational machine. 

Demonstrating empathy and understanding their concerns lays the foundation for a trusting relationship. Entrusting your team with significant responsibilities and demonstrating faith in their abilities opens the door for a reciprocal trust relationship by acknowledging the inherent value individuals bring to the table. Sharing information openly, even when it's uncomfortable or uncertain, fosters a culture of trust and collaboration. Admitting mistakes and embracing vulnerability further solidifies the bond between managers and their teams, showing that trust is a dynamic, evolving aspect of the relationship. 

Attendees will leave empowered with actionable strategies to cultivate trust within their teams, leading to enhanced collaboration, resilience in the face of challenges, and ultimately, greater organizational success. Trust, as we'll discover, is not merely a token but a tangible asset that drives positive change and fosters meaningful connections within the workplace.
 

Times of planting, times of bountiful harvests and times of famine. The history of the computing technology industry is no different. We have had times of booms, and non-boom. As leaders we need to be prepared with tools to help us navigate the uncertainty in the current non-boom market. These tools are also needed to help our engineering teams thrive at this time. Given that there's no time limit on the current non-boom market, we need to lean into this moment of adversity and not be quick to dismiss it, dreaming that the moment passes quickly. There are three questions that I frequently ask myself that help keep me and my teams grounded. 

1. What do you have in your hands? What you have in your hands comprises all the resources available to you: people, expertise, budget. Focusing on what you have helps build contentment and helps us come to the realization that you likely have more than you think. This was a lesson I learnt from the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown when I could no longer exercise at a public location but needed to use very basic equipment that I had at home. The limitation urged me to find creative new exercises.
2. What is the main thing? Help your teams create ruthless focus on the most important things. Although we do not have the luxury of only focusing on one thing, going through the exercise of prioritizing responsibilities and deliverables helps reorient ourselves and our teams.
3. What is in the way of each person? Each team member is a unique individual with their aspirations. Understanding how each team member is doing, on a personal level, creates the opportunity to support them through their individual challenges.
    

We have to know how to prioritize, manage work to deadlines and perhaps the hardest - lead others. Our role means a shift from doing to guiding and supporting. We must know when to manage, mentor or coach. When we use these modalities well we build capacity in the team, increasing our ability to meet organisational goals. Along with it, people feel valued, we strengthen our culture and create a workplace where people want to come to work.

In this mini-workshop, we'll talk about the difference between each of these skills and how to know when to use them. You'll learn three key coaching skills and have the opportunity to practice deciding which modality to use. You'll walk away more confident in your ability to lead others.

And then it’s even harder to tell if it’s been received or understood correctly. But as leaders, pretty much all of our job is communication: steadying the ship during rocky waters, navigating friction or disagreements, or clearly signposting change. So how do you effectively communicate when there’s so much that can be misinterpreted? 

In this micro workshop, we’ll dive into the common ways that communication can break down (lack of buy-in, lack of clarity, communication overload, confusion about outcomes, etc.) and share techniques for improving. You’ll diagnose your own communication challenges at the team or individual level, and learn how to make sure that your message has landed.