Schedule

The success of an engineer transitioning into management depends on two things: their skillset and the environment. Skillset refers to the engineer’s potential managerial abilities. The environment is their direct reports, the business domain, the tech stack, the stakeholders, and more importantly: you as their manager. As a manager of managers, you’re not just a tourist on a new manager’s journey. Early on, you must be their sherpa.

Later, you can retreat back to coordinate from the mountain’s basecamp. This talk goes alongside an engineer’s thrilling climb of the managerial mountain full of traps, rough edges and tall precipices.

This year the tech industry has seen a shift in hiring, with many larger companies implementing freezes or layoffs. As engineering managers, how do we grow our teams’ ability to execute and succeed when we’re unable to hire more people?

Join CJ as he uses colorful AI-generated images to illustrate three stories about how he approaches this challenge.

As you settle into your management role, work will inevitably pile up, and your team will become hungry for more opportunity. Attempting to do all of the work yourself is a recipe for burnout and will stifle the growth of your team.

Luckily for you, providing your team more opportunity and reducing your workload are both solved by effective delegation! But how should you decide what to delegate? What context is critical to provide? How much autonomy should you give and when? Can you coach on progress or direction without micromanaging?

Learning how to delegate not just tasks, but problems, ideas, and business needs, will enable you to take on larger and more critical challenges without burning out. Delegation gives your team the opportunity to take leadership roles and leads to growth, learning, and career advancement for your team. Growing your team and taking on critical business needs will enable you to take the next step in your career as a leader as well.

With the techniques I present in this talk, you’ll be prepared to delegate, sponsor, and coach your team in a way that empowers them to grow their careers and makes your load manageable. Done right, delegation will be an invaluable tool you reach for again and again.

In any organization, there will be people who behave inappropriately, sometimes grievously so. Here’s the paradox: the more senior the role you’re in, and the more power you have to help coworkers who are facing awful behavior like harassment or bullying, the less likely you are to see those things.

Personally, when I was younger and in junior roles, I dealt with harassment all the time. Now? I rarely see it directly. That's not because it happens less now. Instead, it's because harassment and bullying are functions of power, and people who behave in those ways tend to perceive me as having relative power. So they're generally very, very nice to me. If you’re in a position of power--say, as a manager or tech lead--they’re probably very nice to you, too. So how can you become aware of harassment and bullying that happens when you’re not in the room? And what can you do about it? This talk will look at techniques for surfacing and addressing bad behavior.

You may have heard your boss say it: "You need to be more strategic!". Maybe it came up in your latest performance review. Or you just want to work more strategically in order to fill all parts of your role as a leader. Or maybe your team/organisation needs more strategic support to help them succeed.

But what does it mean to really think and act strategically? What actions can you take to lead more strategically every day? And what skills can you develop that help your ability to think and act strategically?

In this talk, we'll cover these questions to help you become more strategic. With the additional help of examples from engineering leaders, you'll walk away with practical tips that you can start implementing tomorrow to help you become a more strategic leader and, consequently, more effective and successful in your role.

LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!

Many teams depend on code review as a way to maintain code quality, share context across the team, and ensure compliance with organizational priorities such as security standards. When a new engineer joins a project team, they often hesitate to review code, because they feel like they’re too new to any value. But that fresh perspective is often the most valuable asset to an established team!

This talk, borne out of many 1:1 conversations with new engineers, will present a number of different lenses for reviewing code, so that even the newest graduate developer can jump in and contribute from day one. For more senior engineers, I hope to provide a critical framework for thinking about different types of contributions. Thinking about code review in terms of different lenses will help engineers of all experience levels build a vocabulary for seeking and providing feedback in a healthy, thoughtful, and collaborative way.

Interviewing is often too subjective. Is it right to decide a candidate's suitability based on an interviewer’s opinion, from a general impression? Carta values data, and so we transformed our interviewers from decision makers into data gatherers. We wrote specific rubrics which objectively capture the attributes we value in a candidate profile, from technical architecture to organizational influence. Instead of simply giving their subjective opinion, interviewers consult the rubrics to measure a candidate's performance.

Our data-driven approach helps us reevaluate and continually improve our overall hiring process. Are candidates consistently scoring lower than expected on some attribute? We can improve that rubric to help us recognize their talent. Are some interviewers struggling to gather specific signals? We can offer training to sharpen their understanding of that topic. And we can now measure if interview outcomes actually correlate to performance outcomes and thereby improve both.

Our rubrics also help with leveling decisions, and the signals we gather help avoid particularly difficult and often arbitrary judgment calls when evaluating more senior engineers.

We would like to discuss how we created our rubrics and introduced them to our organization, and what we have discovered about how the process has affected our hiring outcomes.

When you really need to scale your application, adopting a distributed architecture can help you support high traffic levels. The problem is: how should you do that? When can we call a system as "distributed"?
 

In this talk, we will look at many easy examples of how a distributed architecture could virtually scale infinitely, always explaining this... like I'm five!

Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

As technology evolves, so does the complexity. Where once we could throw some simple JavaScript and HTML together to build a web application, modern web development requires expertise in a multitude of areas. At Netflix we leverage our web platform team to remove this complexity for UI engineers so they can get back to building and shipping features. In this talk, we’re going learn what a platform team is, what they do, and why your business needs one.

Six months into my role as an Engineering Director, I embarked on my parental leave for my second child. I did not have many role models of senior women leaders who had taken extended period of time off to focus on family and come back. So I charted my plan with the help of my leaders, peers, friends and mentors. In this talk I will cover what I did to prepare before my parental leave, from the perspective of business and how to keep an org functioning healthy while you are out, and from a personal perspective so I can focus on the new phase in my life. And will cover how I eased back into my role upon return. The talk will also cover what you can do as managers and peers to support your coworkers on parental leave.

CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.

CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.

Scrum, Agile, JIRA, story points, velocity, git statistics, code reviews, DORA metrics... what if we just started over? What do some of the most productive engineering teams look like, and what tools do they use to know they are productive? Just as important, what are things that they don't use and why? In this session, we'll walk through a survey on how various engineering teams work, and what approaches they have found productive. You'll walk away with insights to what developer productivity means, and approaches and tools that you can experiment with.

A recent survey found that 7 of 10 people are considering quitting their job in 2022. 4 of 10 say they will likely quit due to the lack of career progression. Anecdotally, it’s clear to many of us, especially in Tech, that if you’re not getting the raise or promo you want, simply respond to one of the many LinkedIn messages you’re likely receiving and you can get that raise or promo somewhere else. What’s keeping you at your current job? What’s keeping your reports?

True enough, it’s the individual’s responsibility to advocate for their own career, but the people managers who learn how to play a successful and integral role in their reports’ growth will begin to stand out more and more. The people managers who learn how to guide their reports to new growth opportunities and see that those team mates are properly recognized are going to keep many more of them than those who don’t.

I’ve led and promoted engineers from intern through Senior+ levels at start-ups and Big Tech companies. In this talk I’m going to share with you my playbook on Career Planning for your Direct Reports. I’ll share steps, tips, and stories that’ll prepare you to be the type of people manager one wants to leave. During this talk we’ll cover Where They’re At which involves understanding your team charter,your report’s level, and performance. We’ll discuss Where They Want to Go which involves understanding their desired path, their performance delta, and what motivates them. Lastly we’ll discuss How to Get There which involves designing work, coaching and accountability, and the promo process.

Companies extending their individual contributor career tracks is a fairly new development in our field and when people ask “what does that title mean?”. The answer has always been “well it depends”. And it does.

In this opening talk, we will talk about all the things this role can be, the things it is definitely not. We will talk about how to navigate its many facets, how to know if you are being effective, and look ahead to the day of amazing talks on how to be successful.

You've spent the last couple of years building your skills as a Staff Engineer in one place: you know the codebase, you know what’s expected of you, and you know who to talk to in order to influence technical direction.

Now it's time to move on. How do you effectively start off a new job at Staff-level?

We’ll start by talking about building trust and clear expectations with your manager and management chain. You were hired externally for a reason - what is that? Of the many, many different meanings of “Staff+ engineer”, which is your manager’s expectation?

We'll talk about strategies for coming up to speed technically and building networks with other ICs. We'll discuss acclimating to a new environment: how to apply your expertise without over-indexing on the challenges of your past role and company.

You’ll leave this session with:

• Frameworks for defining success in those first few months. 
• The tools to have productive conversations with your management chain about what your role will be. 
• Tactics for maximizing your unique value as a new employee.
• Excitement and confidence in approaching your next role!

LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!

Influencing decisions at a Fortune 50 company is challenging for anyone, but it's even more challenging when the people you need to influence to support those decisions don't report to you.  Building and maintaining trust in order to be an influencer is one of the key roles of an individual contributor.  In this session, Leslie will talk about the ways she has built trust and gained influence over her 20+ year career in technology.

In January of 2021, I was asked to step into a Director of Engineering role, and despite thinking I was solidly on the technical track, I decided to take on the challenge of leading an engineering team. There was so much that I loved about leading that team, but by the end of the year, I knew that leadership wasn’t for me. And so, I asked to move back into an individual contributor role, and I specifically requested to stay on the team that I had spent a year leading. What I’ve found since making the transition is that because of that year in leadership, I’m a stronger, more confident, and more efficient software engineer than I was before. In this talk, I’ll discuss the specific ways in which leadership has accelerated by growth, impact and efficiency as an individual contributor. Some of these include my strengthened bonds with my teammates; my newfound initiative to take ownership of and suggest change around team processes; my willingness to advocate for time to upskill; and the ditching of my long-time imposter syndrome. I’ll provide specific examples of mindsets and behaviors connected to these growth areas both before and after leadership in order to best illustrate my professional development, with the dual goals of helping existing senior engineers understand their current or potential superpowers, as well as equipping engineering leaders with ideas around how to coach and develop their engineers.

Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

What do Geocities webpages and green screen monochrome monitors have in common? Other than being ancient relics of technologies past, we can actually learn a lot from them when it comes to Accessibility. As organizations lean into creating more inclusive web experiences, we’re seeing more emphasis being placed on techniques that can now be considered retro.

Let’s climb into our Wayback Machines and delve into some foundational approaches and processes to facilitate and test for Accessibility compliance on the web.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: “Climbing the career ladder” is about expanding leadership, influence, and scope. We aim to answer the question “How should engineers think about the skills to sustain the expansion?”
First, the distinction between “leadership” and “management” can be blurry. Even worse, it’s rarely explained explicitly, and engineers enter management on “You never know until you try 😉”.
We aim to clarify things by making things less clear and breaking “leadership” into three kinds of management, which has helped senior ICs at Two Sigma:
* Team management - Organizations function better when they are happy and socially coherent? Managers are accountable, but Staff+ contribute.
* Project management - Completing multi-quarter or multi-year projects requires a certain skillset. So does feedback.
* People management - How do you manage and direct individuals, especially those who are junior and need more hands-on attention. The “tech track” expects mentorship, and effective Staff+ engineers do not rely on managers “making people do things” to scale projects beyond their own capabilities.

Second, Staff+ involves more than leadership. For that, we present five abstract skills helpfully organized with an R theme: risk, reliability, reputation, relationships, and reducing complexity. In contrast to concrete skills, which explain the how tos (how to write a better document, how to balance meetings with coding, etc.), abstract skills explain the hows and should permeate planning, execution, and communication.
* Risk - Many Staff+ role descriptions include phrases like “sets own priorities.” You’re an expensive asset! How do you get the organization to trust you to invest your time?
* Reliability - What does delivery look like when objectives become more abstract?
* Reputation - How are you representing yourself and your team?
* Relationships - How are you building and maintaining trust?
* Reducing complexity - Are you able to effectively communicate complex information? Are you comfortable with summaries from others?

Tackling complex, long-term, cross-org projects can feel like you are planning a mission to Mars - how do you ensure success when the end goal feels like it's millions of miles away? 

In this session, Katie will recount how she successfully led the planning and execution of a Mars-sized foundational rewrite to enable Progressive Web App (PWA) technology on Etsy.com - by taking a page from NASA's book, and first stopping at the Moon. She'll share what she learned about how to collaborate across teams and orgs, how to structure a project so you can measure success and set expectations at every step on the journey, and how to function as a "Consulting Architect" throughout every phase of execution and level up your team in the process.

CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.

CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.

I’m an architect, and I think a lot about architecture. Mostly I think about how irrelevant architecture is if it doesn’t get shipped to production. I worry a lot too. I worry about how to help all the teams I’m supposed to be helping, without slowing them down, getting in their way, or making their lives harder rather than easier.

Traditional (i.e. hands-off, blessed-few) approaches to architecture rarely (if ever) work. But in the world of microservices, autonomous teams, and continuous delivery, architecture is more important that ever. Is there an alternative?

This session will introduce you to a mindset and an associated set of practices which do away with the traditional idea of “Architects” while bringing the practice of “Architecture” to the fore. I’ll explain how everyone can become an architect, without things reducing to chaos (though there might well be a healthy dose of anarchy).

When I was young, I knew I wanted to have a job where I was able to write software for a living. In retrospect, I was thinking too shallow. Today, I'm a professional bridge builder. I don't build bridges over water, but instead, constantly create structures that build paths over obstacles. In my session, I want to share how I came to find out that I was a bridge builder and how that carried through my journey as a senior engineer to where I sit today as a VP-level engineer in a public company.

A global pandemic, fluctuating economic market, sudden changes to social policies. Historical moments like these used to happen once every few years, if not once a decade. In the past two years alone, we’ve been through a lot. Coupled with regular change that may happen to a business, like staffing challenges, layoffs, acquisitions, pivots in strategy, the workforce today is left grappling with how to manage lots of change in both their personal lives and at work. What’s more, many employees are now working remotely, they’re feeling more isolated and overwhelmed at work than ever before.

Change is inevitable – and it's important in pushing companies and people forward. Managers have a responsibility to lead their teams through all kinds of change, but it’s now more important than ever that they do so with a human approach. The best managers will be able to prepare teams for moments of uncertainty–from world events to internal organizational changes–and help them transition from panic and resistance to understanding and commitment.

In this session, Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering at Slack, will share her perspective on why change is a must and the positive impacts that can come with it when you can gain buy-in and trust from the people on your team behind the change. She will walk through change objectives and best practices for communicating change, and how managers can be positive change agents for their organizations by approaching change management through a human lens.

It's sometimes lonely as an engineering leader. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Building a network of other engineering leaders and managers can help you feel part of a real community, more inspired in your day to day job, and like you're growing your career in new ways. In this talk you'll hear ideas about how to build and maintain a network of peers and mentors that helps you with all three.

What is important to you? What is important to your people? What is important to your company? What is your organizational direction? All of these influence the workplace culture and how you build your story.
 

Culture has become a big expression as part of each of our organizations and it encompasses a lot of things. No culture is the same. Every leader brings their own experiences and microinequities to their culture.

Studies have shown that having a distinct culture is important to a business' success. And having a clear business strategy helps to create a positive culture.

Simply stated, a positive culture is all about aligning values, belief systems, attitudes, and assumptions. This talk will outline what are the essential facets of building your culture and how you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging go hand and hand.

Throughout your tech career you have used code as a tool to help your companies realize business value without truly understanding the company’s business. Understanding your company’s business can help you to apply your technical skills to deliver the best solutions and products that are aligned to business goals.
This talk will focus on strategies and skills that can help you develop business understanding including key concepts related to finance and product strategy. Learning these skills will allowyou to build better partnerships, products and solutions that are aligned with business goals.

LinearB is a developer productivity platform that offers DORA & VSM metrics, R&D investment analysis, and developer experience-related workflow automation. We’d love to learn more about you and your team!

Keeping current is one of the biggest challenges of the role. As engineering leaders, you often worry about losing your technical sensibilities and you also want to maintain credibility in areas that they’re the most knowledgeable about. But in order to make informed decisions, you need to develop an array of other skills while staying current. So, how do you overcome the challenges of staying technical while being a manager? And most importantly how do you carve out time to learn?

This talk will dive into strategies you can use for staying technical while being a leader of the organization and as well give you tools to identify the areas that you need to be up to date on and what can you manage without knowledge.

The need for change is a constant, even in the most successful organizations. Internal and external forces will certainly require us to transform what and how we operate. Having a well thought out transformation strategy is key to being successful when that need for change is upon you. But how will you get people to buy-in to YOUR strategy?

• How do you create awareness that a change is needed?
• How do you communicate your understanding of the risks involved?
• How do you motivate stakeholders at all levels to act?

In this talk I will discuss techniques that have helped me get multiple transformation strategies noticed and approved.

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The more effective you are as a manager, the more likely it is that you’ll move from managing one team to managing many. When you do, the challenges you face will change. As a manager of managers, your distractions will multiply, and it will become crucial for you to cut through the noise and focus on the actions that drive the most impact in your organization.

As an enterprise leader, you have two significant responsibilities: articulating a shared vision and coaching your managers to execute on it. Unlike planning technical roadmaps, choosing the right technologies, and delivering at scale — all important topics you will undoubtedly contribute to — these responsibilities are the ones your teams rely on you to deliver on. In this talk, we’ll discuss how to get there.

I'll touch on socializing your vision for your teams and then focus on coaching your managers to make that vision a reality — by steering them away from common mistakes, building collaboration among them, and delegating ownership to them (instead of just responsibility).

Build a team that values an inclusive design approach, and your organization can excel at creating accessible, inclusive products for all. What key considerations will get your team to that unified place? Hear from Perry, Fable’s Director of Engineering, on how he has approached hiring, professional development, processes, and culture with a lens of accessibility. Regardless of seniority, every team member can contribute to a mindset shift of developing products that work better across users.

Many companies spend a lot of time talking about how to preserve their culture. But winning teams embrace the notion that their culture is ever changing. So how do we ensure that our cultures change for the better?

Networking for leaders at LeadingEng London

When launching a new product to replace an old one, it’s easy to rally behind the mission and make good technical decisions. But once it’s launched, the vision is not so clear, corners cut to get the site live come back to bite, and things can very easily lose focus.

Based on my experience with the launch of two major sites (FT.com and GOV.UK) this talk is about how to bring things back on track.

• Why is it so important to set a new vision after the launch
• What a good tech strategy looks like and how to set one
• Common challenges after the new product has launched
• Handling gnarly code that has grown unchecked
• Addressing new operational concerns
• Tending a system that will live on, rather than be replaced again a few years down the line
• Learnings a year on from setting the FT’s tech strategy

CodeSignal is the leading technical interview and assessment solution, helping companies identify the right candidates with the right skills—even if they don’t have the “right” profile. For far too long, companies have spent too much time sifting through all the noise produced by traditional resumes, homegrown assessments, and inconsistent interviews when all they really want to know is how well candidates can do the job.

CodeSignal helps companies go beyond the noise with smarter assessment questions, a simpler process, and a stronger platform. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by leading companies like Netflix, Capital One, Meta, and Dropbox.

You write slide decks instead of code. Your life is run by your calendar, which could stand defragging. The last time you got into deep flow was the day before you went into leadership. Keeping up is hard, let alone keeping current.

In this talk I'll cover a different approach to keeping up to date with technology and industry trends, how to embrace being a generalist, and how to find the time and energy to keep learning.

As a senior engineering leader, you'll have an impact on the culture of a group of teams - or maybe even your whole engineering org. And well-developed culture leads to positive changes in an organization.

So how do you define what culture facets are important to you - and how you do sow them throughout your engineering organisation? And how do you ensure diversity, equity, and belonging are fundamental parts of your culture.

In this talk, we’ll cover how you can positively impact your teams' performance, through culture change.  

Growing as an engineering leader was very challenging to me. The more senior I became, the more difficult it was to find the mentorship I needed to remain effective. In this talk I will share tactics on getting constructive feedback from peers, learning from new mentors and the strategies we can use to keep growing our skills and expertise as engineering leaders.