London

June 28–29, 2027

New York

September 15–16, 2026

Berlin

November 9–10, 2026

400 Tech Leads. Same problems. None of them technical.

Why tech leads struggle despite strong technical skills, and the small leadership shifts that remove overload, friction, and self-doubt.

Speakers: Anemari Fiser

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June 02, 2026

After training and coaching 400+ tech leads, one thing is clear: their hardest problems aren’t technical. This talk explores the real blockers and what helps.

LDX3 New York lineup

After training and coaching more than 400 tech leads across different companies, industries, and levels of experience, one pattern keeps repeating: when tech leads struggle, it’s rarely a technical gap.

In this talk, Anemari Fiser shares the most common challenges tech leads bring into coaching sessions and why “getting better technically” almost never fixes them. Instead, the real blockers show up as overload, unclear expectations, ownership confusion, and assumed alignment. These patterns consistently lead to slow decisions, delivery friction, and burned-out tech leads, even in teams with strong engineers and modern tooling.

Drawing from real coaching sessions, training group discussions, and concrete case studies, this talk explores where tech leads consistently get stuck. For each pattern, it looks at what the tech lead thought the problem was, what it turned out to be, and the small but meaningful shifts that helped them move forward: from rethinking 1-on-1s, to making expectations explicit, to letting go without losing trust.

This isn’t a talk about abstract “soft skills.” It’s about the invisible leadership work tech leads are expected to do without ever being taught how. Attendees will leave with concrete ways to spot people problems early, make expectations explicit, and reduce the load they carry as tech leads.

If you’ve ever thought, “I didn’t expect the role to be this hard,” this talk is for you.

Key takeaways

  1. Why tech leads feel overloaded and how to reduce it at the source
  2. How unclear expectations create self-doubt, even in experienced tech leads
  3. How assumed alignment quietly creates friction and slows teams down – and what to do about it”