Agenda

For both emerging engineering leaders and seasoned veterans, the relentless boom in the tech industry has been the status quo. However, this unceasing momentum is now giving way to seismic shifts, promising to reshape the entire industry. But on a more personal level, it also means that a lot of the skills you’ve been learning don’t quite turn the lock as smoothly as they used to.

Don't get me wrong; the skills we've honed over the years are still incredibly valuable. However, to wield them effectively in today's evolving environment, we are going to need to adapt what we’ve learned for this new setting. In this talk, we’ll be calling out what the folks in the room are thinking, looking at what it means to lead in a post-boom environment, and thinking about how we can create a sense of stability for ourselves and our teams.

The reality is usually more complicated than that. In this session, I'll describe the archetypes of conference speakers (or our teachers, in this scenario), the archetypes of attendees (our learners here), and common pitfalls when integrating knowledge from a conference. At the end of this talk, you will feel empowered to make an action plan to take back home, and you will have compassion for yourself if not everything goes to plan.

Scaling teams and infrastructure is hard. It's even harder when there are not enough graphics processing units (GPUs) left in the world to serve demand. This story is also about staying nimble enough to release new capabilities and respond quickly to a rapidly changing industry.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Why AI isn’t a magical black box 
• How ChatGPT gets the most out of GPUs
• How to scale a company at speed and respond to unexpected demands quickly

• Connect with suppliers of the latest tech and tools in the sponsor hall
• Join a table talk 
• Watch live coaching 
• Make new contacts with our Voltron

We will begin by looking at both the exciting and inspirational potential of recent breakthroughs in AI, and the dangers inherent in using AI assistants in our development process. I'll examine the productivity, pace and product potential of teams who incorporate AI into their process, and highlight some of the ethical, security and legal exposure that companies risk when they incorporate AI-generated code.

The focus of the talk will be on the shape of engineering teams and how they work - including how they have changed over time with the advent of Agile and DevOps - and suggest how this will change as AI-generated code becomes mainstream.

At this point, I will highlight a risk that gets very little airtime - the risk to the quality of engineering talent if their problem-solving (and therefore learning) is neglected, and the holes in skills that will cause and the risks that arise from it.

The talk will then focus on the shifts that need to take place in the structure and skills of engineers to embrace this new world: explaining the role of a junior, how progression will work in the future, and the intentionality required by organisations to protect themselves from - and mitigate - the risks.

In a role that relies heavily on interpersonal interactions, onboarding to a new team in a completely remote work environment is a challenge. What’s more, the techniques that people leaders have historically used in in-office roles to build relationships and onboard are no longer as effective in a remote work environment.

Using my personal experience navigating onboarding remotely, building connections, collaborating across time zones, and implementing processes, I’ll share some tips, tools, and techniques on how you can show up for yourself and your team as an engineering manager. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Strategies for remote personal and team development. 
• Methods to help build connections, instill psychological safety in teams, and onboard quickly. 
• How to avoid the feeling of sustained isolation as a manager, and cultivate a sense of belonging in the team while working remotely. 

With constant high pressure to quickly ship new innovations, especially in the startup space, accessibility unfortunately doesn't always make the cut. However, everyone can do their part to lead organizations toward turning accessibility from a “more” into a “must” baseline requirement of any minimum viable product (MVP).

In this talk, we dive into how to make a case for accessibility in a resource-constrained environment. We’ll also look into low-overhead, high-impact practices you can introduce to integrate accessibility into the day-to-day of organizations at any scale or scope. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Why accessibility can be perceived as low-benefit
• How to frame accessibility as high-value and low-cost
• Where to start with accessibility in an existing roadmap

Live coding sessions don't reflect realistic work conditions. They only allow for the evaluation of relatively short code snippets and are susceptible to candidates’ emotional responses during the interview. Take-home assignments, on the other hand, are substantially time-consuming for both candidates and interviewers, slowing down the interview process, and leading to candidates abandoning the application process altogether.

Instead, a better approach might be code review assignments, which are less commonly used. However, code review assignments are perfect for evaluating candidates’ performance in a realistic work environment, saving time for both parties and allowing for deeper and more objective evaluation.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• What code review assignments are 
• How to implement code review assignments into your hiring process
• Insights on how code review assignments are able to evaluate candidates

My task was to recruit and lead a team that would own, revamp, and create applications for Bloomberg's JavaScript framework, which is used by thousands of the company's software engineers every day. The team's goal would be to develop internal tools following the same application development, research, and UX design principles that are used to create Bloomberg's client-facing financial tools. At the time, few internal tools existed and those that did were not embraced by most engineers, including myself.

In this talk, I will share my experience of changing roles from an individual contributor to a managerial role, the path for building a team to own and revamp an existing set of internal applications, as well as expand the portfolio with new applications, establishing a team culture that emphasizes product ownership, unparalleled customer support, and the branding of each application. I will talk about how this helped us build a strong and high-performance team that, today, proudly owns a wide-ranging family of JavaScript/TypeScript applications and leads innovation related to this programming language at Bloomberg.

In this talk, I’ll address some of the challenges product teams face as their understanding of the end user starts to outpace their ability to ship new features (which is healthy) and how GraphQL can make all the difference in this endeavor.

GraphQL is a query language for your API. It allows your designer to explore the full capabilities of your app so they can create the best UX possible. It empowers your engineers to say “three weeks” to your product manager when they would have said “two months” before. These enhancements have a practical impact on the relationships that are the foundation of your cross-functional team’s success.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• The language’s fundamentals 
• How GraphQL is ideal for A/B tests and productive design reviews
• How GraphQL principles and tooling can give your cross-functional team a practical advantage

As you continue in your career you will meet people with different needs who may challenge how you have practiced your management style so far. In these situations, you will need to learn to adapt to different styles and build your ever-growing runbook of situational wisdom.

In this talk, I will break down some of the big ways in which people are different: communication styles, ways they prefer to receive appreciation, and attitudes toward career progression. Using examples from my own career I’ll share some tips on how to lead different characters in your team. 

You will leave this talk with:  

• Questions that will help you recognize different styles on your team
• Ways to unlock individuals' potential and make them feel appreciated
• Situational examples of how to tailor your leadership to different personalities

After years of high growth, many tech companies realized over the last six months that their projections were too optimistic. As a result, they changed strategy, cut budgets, restructured, and laid off many thousands of employees. Having spent years interviewing, hiring, growing teams, and taking bigger strategic risks, our roles as leaders are now shifting.

In this talk, we‘ll explore:

• What principles can you apply to lead in this time of uncertainty?
• What does it mean to optimize for efficiency as a technical or people leader?
• How can you manage up to keep your boss in the loop and stay aligned?

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.

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• Connect with suppliers of the latest tech and tools in the sponsor hall
• Join a table talk 
• Watch live coaching 
• Make new contacts with our Voltron

Even within organizations that have traditionally valued work-life balance, the pressure on teams to “do more with less” and demonstrate efficiency with fewer people may be creating an environment ripe for burnout. 

I believe that to create efficient teams, we must dial up our own efforts to recognize burnout, react to it quickly, and create space in our teams to minimize burnout risk.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on how to:  

• Recognize signs of burnout in someone who reports to you and support them through it
• Make your team more resilient to burnout in a way that resonates with senior leadership
• Not forget about yourself for the sake of your team

As leaders, we must guide the workload of our teams to fuel employee passion in a sustainable way. Based on my experience in building software for social good I’ll share strategies for organizing a backlog where everything feels urgent and important. 

With these tactics, we can minimize the threat of burnout while we sustain high levels of enthusiasm and engagement. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How to evaluate competing priorities and how to communicate that to your team
• How to have a sustainable incident response system 
• How a team can support each other when the stakes are high  

As leaders, we often find that IC metrics get a bad rap due to these very understandable concerns, and may avoid them altogether. However, it’s possible when employed thoughtfully in collaboration with our ICs, metrics can actually enhance our ability to support them and deliver meaningful value together.

In this talk, I’ll discuss how I worked with my ICs to develop a space where the use of metrics felt less intimidating and more like a valuable tool for growth. Join me where I will share how we  experimented with our development metrics to gain a new level of transparent conversation around job satisfaction, burnout prevention, self advocacy, and healthier team dynamics.

But if you’re not careful, cloud computing can also let you lose money faster than any invention in history. Therefore, every company will come to a point when it must begin implementing cost control on cloud computing spending.

In this talk, we will provide a framework for cost savings in the cloud that can be applied to any organization, regardless of size or industry. We will cover the life cycle of cost savings, which includes identifying areas of waste, moving on to optimizing your services, and performing specific actions to optimize cloud infrastructure. We will also discuss the importance of building the right team for cost-saving measures, including determining the necessary skill sets and fostering collaboration and communication.

Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, this talk is for anyone who wants to optimize their cloud usage and reduce unnecessary expenses. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How to tackle cost savings in the cloud 
• How to get organizational support and buy-in from higher-ups
• How to overcome resistance to change 

Engineering leaders are constantly fighting fires and rushing between high-priority initiatives. Each day’s new and unending assortment of challenges can easily drive us to feel burned out, and tired of making hard decisions that come with tradeoffs and risks.

Leaders in our industry could learn a thing or two from the way that news editors and journalists tackle breaking news in a fast-paced, hectic newsroom. They spend their careers handling news in real-time, deftly adapting to whatever the day requires. The best ones thrive by cultivating multiple modes of leadership, and managing how they respond in the context of each event.

In this talk, I will share the power of thinking like a journalist and offer a framework to help engineering leaders do so, based on my background as a reporter and editor, and as a leader on high-performing engineering teams at The Washington Post and The Atlantic.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:

• How to make decisions quickly under pressure 
• How to evaluate unexpected fires and disruptions based on context
• How to identify the right leadership approach for any given situation

While a Project Manager can and should be in charge of things like cross-functional coordination, burndown charts, and other gory process details, they are ill-equipped to oversee the launch from an engineering perspective. This talk covers what makes a good Release Captain including topics like:

• How to think about rollout stages:
  • Do you need a percentage ramp-up?
  • Over what cadence?
  • Cross-platform rollout considerations
  • Go/no-go conditions and health checks
• Rollback strategy planning
• Environment planning for sustained QA
• Cross-functional dependencies like help content and customer service traffic
• Delegation and aggregation.

The Release Captain can’t do everything, but they can aggregate and review what feature owners produce in order to make sure the aggregated launch will be successful.

All of the larger players in today’s current market seem to be in a race to incorporate generative AI features into their products. Microsoft has announced more than 10 billion dollars worth of investments in OpenAI, having integrated ChatGPT into their Power Virtual Agents platform. Companies like Google, Amazon, etc., are even building their own conversational generative artificial intelligence tools. 

As a data scientist or a data science leader, staying on top of tech’s latest trends is a must. But, how do you translate this knowledge to the wider org? It can be overwhelming to scale the system architecture and educate wider company leaders in this journey. 

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to become a champion for data science, ML, and AI team members and lead your company through a successful journey in today's LLM and AI landscape. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How to act as a representative for your team 
• How to translate LLM and AI knowledge to the wider company
• How to leverage some of the AI tools in the market

• Connect with suppliers of the latest tech and tools in the sponsor hall
• Join a table talk 
• Watch live coaching 
• Make new contacts with our Voltron

The more an application grows, the more teams are needed to support different functionalities. This growth can become unmanageable if the right infrastructures aren’t in place. 

Challenges in communication, conflicts in code, busy pipelines, and interdependency for releases are common hurdles when dealing with a front-end monolith.

Micro frontends, architecture that allows isolated applications to be maintained and deployed independently from one another, have become increasingly popular as an alternative to deal with these issues. But how do you get from a monolithic frontend to micro frontends?

In this talk, we'll go through the steps to split a front-end application. We'll discuss techniques to disintegrate the code and how to do that safely without impacting the production environment.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• What a micro front-end consists of 
• How to approach splitting monolithic structures into microstructures
• Tips for how to safely split apart monolithic architectures

We’ve all experienced the curse of meeting bloat – the proliferation of meetings that occurs when communication is lacking – but how many times have we seen these meetings successfully address the root issue? Just because a group of people are in a meeting together doesn’t ensure that communication is happening effectively. 

Communication is a critical part of the engineering process but is not usually treated as something to be engineered or optimized. Let’s take some time to talk about how we as managers can build effective meetings.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Identifying the failure modes of ineffective meetings
• Tips for becoming a stronger meeting facilitator
• Structuring meetings around desired information flow

Shifting left has become increasingly important in the software development industry as organizations strive to release high-quality software products more quickly and efficiently. By integrating observability, security, and testing practices earlier in the development cycle, developers can identify and address issues more effectively.

Observability provides real-time insights into software application behaviour, enabling proactive problem-solving and the identification and resolution of performance or scalability issues. Incorporating observability practices early in the development process can enhance software quality and reduce development time and costs. Similarly, integrating security testing and analysis early on can identify and address potential vulnerabilities before they become more difficult and expensive to fix, reducing the risk of security incidents.

Overall, shifting left encourages greater collaboration and communication between developers, testers, observability engineers, and security experts, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and learning. By prioritizing early testing, observability, and security, teams can achieve greater efficiency, reduce the time and effort required for testing and debugging, and ultimately deliver more secure, reliable, and successful software products.

So, what are some ways to be really successful at it?

Throughout my career, I have learned to lead with a systemic approach, focusing on understanding how the work works and how various elements come together to create a system where teams can thrive.  

This talk will provide a practical perspective on using systemic leadership to drive a software engineering team. Engineering managers will gain a high-level perspective and in-depth insight into how to focus on systems to manage their teams better, from theory to practical solutions.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• The main concepts behind systems thinking and how they relate to software development
• The processes within a software team and the tools engineering managers have at their disposal to improve them
• A practical perspective on solving common software development issues with systems thinking

The power of a Staff+ engineer can be used for many things, such as clarifying your team’s priorities, promoting a healthy work/life balance, and helping the engineers around you to grow into larger roles.

In this talk, I’ll discuss a multitude of ways that you can use your power to improve your organization’s culture and feel good about the work you are doing.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Powerful behaviors: techniques to guide situations toward your goals
• Powerful phrases: words to help you guide interactions toward a positive outcome
• Mentoring and leadership techniques: actions and words to help your colleagues grow into the best version of themselves

Staff+ engineers come with a plethora of experience, well-earned respect, in-depth knowledge and strong opinions. For a new engineering manager, it can be a daunting task to provide feedback, coaching and direction the these unique builders. Failing to mentor these engineers however, could be the biggest pitfall a leader makes. Unraveling expectations, common challenges, setting clear career progression and de-mystifying communication between an engineering manager and Staff+ engineers is one of the most impactful ways to create a highly efficient team. Let's talk about how do to just that.

If you’re responsible for a team, a product area, or an engineering organization, you should be thoughtful about your organization design, as it will impact the shape of the end product. But there are a ton of different possible organization structures: matrixed organizations, siloed organizations, cross-functional organizations, and more. How do we know what structure is best for our given problem space and stage?

Over the last 18 months, I had the opportunity to build the second product at semgrep from the ground up. At a few different stages, I had to decide the shape of our product development organization. Through research, conversations with other managers, trial, and lots of error, we evolved our organization to meet the changing needs of the product as it went from an idea, to an experiment, to launch and revenue.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How the design of your organization impacts product success 
• What structure is best for your scenario 
• Practical insights on how to apply this knowledge

• Connect with suppliers of the latest tech and tools in the sponsor hall
• Join a table talk 
• Watch live coaching 
• Make new contacts with our Voltron

We’ve all experienced areas in our software development processes that slow us down, cause churn, and create waste. We see in prioritization, design and build practices, product launch, interacting with customers, and rapid scale. 

Using my experience at IBM, this talk will explore efficiencies in software development and delivery, meaning doing fewer things with greater impact, being disciplined about what our teams choose to build, and evaluating the success of those choices. 

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How to minimize “waste” in engineering teams and invest in engineering efficiency
• How to align on your roadmap and prioritize with product managers and designers
• How to have more visibility on the allocation of work

This daunting task took 3.5 years, replaced over one million lines of code, and required almost 50 person-years of effort to complete. We achieved this all without any downtime or significant user impact. In this presentation, we will share the lessons we learned from our multi-year journey, including project planning, team management, technical challenges, testing and deployment, and post-project analysis. Our goal is to help other engineering managers and leads successfully navigate similar projects, avoid some of our pitfalls, and achieve a successful outcome.

As you become more senior, trying to win individual decisions at all costs can easily become more harmful than helpful. 

Deciding how you lose, with an eye toward the ultimate long-term goal, can produce better outcomes, improve colleague relationships, and transform a short-term loss into a long-term gain.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• How to predict sore topics and produce future alignment
• How to plant seeds of the technical and organizational direction you want, and garden them over time 
• Being flexible on individual battles in the name of more win-win collaboration