Discover this year's key themes

Even within organizations that have traditionally valued balance, the pressure of needing to do more with less, combined with stress caused by the world outside of work, may be creating an environment ripe for burnout. I believe one of our most critical responsibilities as leaders is fostering a supportive and resilient engineering culture through managing and minimizing work stress.

In this talk, I'll discuss:

• What burnout is, and what it looks like
• What you can do as a leader when you spot signs of burnout in someone who reports to you
• Actions you can take to minimize the risk of burnout on your team

Team members who feel passionate about their work are an excellent asset to a team, but over time even passion, met with an endless backlog of important tasks, can slip into burnout. As leaders, we must guide the workload of our teams to fuel employee passion in a sustainable way.

Lexi will share lessons learned from her experience building software for social good, and strategies for organizing a backlog where everything feels urgent and important. By the end of this talk, you’ll have a framework for evaluating competing priorities, and example messaging for communicating to team members why the group is focusing on one and not the other. We’ll also touch on sustainability in incident response, or, how a team can support each other when the stakes are high.

But if you’re not careful, cloud computing can also let you lose money faster than any invention in history, with the exception of cryptocurrency and Enron stock. 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.

Getting organizational support is crucial to the success of any cost-saving program, and we will address how to build support and buy-in from higher-ups for cost-saving initiatives. We will also discuss strategies for overcoming obstacles and challenges during implementation, including resistance to change, lack of expertise, and shifting business needs.

By the end of this talk, attendees will have a clear understanding of how to implement a cost-saving program in the cloud, how to build the right team, and how to win organizational support. 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. By following our framework, you will be able to achieve cost savings, increase efficiency, and improve scalability in the cloud. Join us for this informative and practical talk, and get ready to begin your cost savings journey in the cloud!

It is natural to be inclined to fight so you can win.

However as you become more senior, winning individual decisions at all cost can easily become more harmful than helpful. Or sometimes, things don't go your way and you cannot win. 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.

This talk distills my own experience learning how to lose gracefully and wisely, so that I can win in the long term. We'll discuss people, technical, and organizational aspects of long term planning, with techniques, including:

• Considering past history and future direction of organizations to predict sore topics and produce future alignment.
• Being flexible on individual battles produces fewer zero-sum mindsets, more win-win collaboration
• Planting seeds of the technical and organization direction you want, and gardening them over time, to produce future alignment.

Attendees will leave with a new perspective on the potential value hiding in "failures" and an appreciation of the power of playing long term games.

Perhaps you can relate. We’ve all experienced areas in our processes that slow us down, cause churn, and create waste. You see it in how we prioritize, how we design and build, how we launch, how we address customers, how we scale. We can’t keep the same structure in place and expect it to naturally improve. We have to take clear measures and be all-in on executing them.

Our goal is to build a more effective model of software development & delivery by doing fewer things with greater impact, being disciplined about what we choose to build, and evaluating the success of choices. We started with an engineering transformation centered around roadmap alignment and prioritization with our product managers and designers, backlog and process transparency, continuous learning, and a disciplined definition of done.

Next, we fully automated our processes, reducing environment set up time required from 3 days to 6 hours, saved 75% development time establishing a broad test automation and CI/CD pipeline, and reduced security vulnerabilities by 81%. We also know better what value we are delivering. We also added more visibility into the allocation of work, tracking at granular levels directly from source repos, showing how we compare to other companies we benchmark against in terms of new function development, tech debt, and support work.

This type of “scrappy” leadership—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. As leaders, we need to balance our scrappiness with efforts that allow us also to operate at scale, creating systems that foster successful teams around us and, importantly, fulfilling long-term careers for ourselves. If scrappy work is what gets us to where we want to be, scale initiatives are what keep us there.

In this talk, I will tell my own story of developing early leadership experience by running toward scrappy work on high-performing engineering teams at The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and I'll share what I’ve learned about the importance of “scale” efforts in growing others and sustaining myself in my work. “Scrappy / Scale” is a framework for interrogating assumptions about how you need to show up as a leader in any given situation and a useful tool for evaluating your own needs and career trajectory. By cultivating these two modes of leadership thinking and the skills required for each, engineering leaders can break free from fire fighting and develop a personal framework for both managing themselves and developing others.

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

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.

There is a lot of fantastic management advice out there, but much of it works well for one specific type of person. As you continue in your career you will meet people with different needs who may challenge what you have practiced so far as a manager. 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 towards career progression. I’ll walk through a few (anonymized) examples from my career when I used a tactic that wasn’t well suited towards a particular person and had to change directions. For example, I’ll talk about someone who did not appreciate spoken recognition and how I was able to appreciate them without making them feel exposed. Learning your team’s intricacies can help unlock their potential and make them feel appreciated in ways they have not experienced before.

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

Microsoft has announced >10 billion worth of investments for OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT into their Power Virtual Agents platform. Other companies like Shopify, Instacart, Slack, and many others are integrating with chatGPT to power new features. Companies like Google, Amazon, etc., are building their own conversational generative artificial intelligence tools. There is almost a race for every company where they must associate with generative AI features to stay competitive in this market.

Suppose you are a data scientist or a data science leader in this environment. In that case, you must catch up with the latest and the newest trends, scale up the architecture, and educate your company leaders in this journey. The newfound enthusiasm for AI and shipping AI features in an inclusive way where everyone is interested in learning and participating in this field can sometimes be overwhelming. Still, it will eventually act as a champion for data science/ML/AI teams and team members. In this talk, I will illustrate how to participate as a data science professional and leader to take your company through a successful journey in today's LLM and AI landscape, releasing features and enhancing ROI, and doing all this with AI as your friend, leveraging some of the AI tools in the market, giving you speed and increasing productivity.

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

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.

But you probably have more power than you realize.

This power can be used for many good 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.