Berlin

November 4 & 5, 2024

New York

September 4 & 5, 2024

Leadership

Leadership

Leading high-performing engineering organizations

  • A roadmap to working with your legacy codebases
    Content sponsored by Swimm

    A roadmap to working with your legacy codebases

    Gain expert insights on modernizing legacy systems, improving developer satisfaction, streamlining discovery, and effectively documenting complex, large-scale codebases for better productivity and collaboration.

Adapting your leadership for a downturn

Leading through a downturn requires a different approach. Here’s how to realign your leadership to suit this new set of challenges.

How to lead individuals with advanced technical expertise

If you’re a manager of individual contributor’s who have more years of experience on you, you may be confused on how best to lead them.

How can I rebuild a struggling team’s confidence and trust?

When there’s friction in the team you’re managing, morale, performance, and trust all take a hit. How can you rectify the situation?

How to lead senior engineers as a new manager

If you’ve just entered a management role, cultivating your relationship with the senior engineers on your team may be a daunting prospect. Here are a few ways to get that relationship off to a good start.

Reasons to step into a leadership role (and the reasons not to)

Thinking of becoming an engineering leader? Let Pat Kua help you with the first step of the journey.

4 mental models for more effective engineering leadership

On our Leadership playlist

What we talk about when we talk about leadership

Exploring key leadership themes from years in tech, this talk offers guidance and practical strategies to help engineers become the leaders they want to be.

From engineer to executive: Leading the shift and inspiring business-minded tech teams

Explore the journey from engineering leader to CTO, with insights on bridging technology and business strategy, leading with influence, and fostering business-minded tech teams.

Content sponsored by Apollo

Elevating your leadership skills during tough times

What skills do you need to be a great leader during economic uncertainty?

Hywel carver

AI and tech leadership

Hywel Carver talks AI and tech leadership.

Content sponsored by Swarmia

Post-ZIRP engineering leadership

This talk explores the evolution of the engineering leadership role from the growth-focused 2010s to today’s environment of increased scrutiny and accountability.

festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

More about Engineering Management

Top Leadership videos

  • Sometimes you need to be a cruise director

    Some problems staff engineers face aren’t about technical expertise, but clarity and decision-making.

  • Scaling yourself by helping your colleagues grow

    In this talk, I will share different techniques that help you grow your colleagues to a level where they can do a part of your job. I will explain the difference between delegating, mentoring, and teaching, and demonstrate with examples how little effort it takes to turn your everyday tasks into teaching moments, improving your understanding of your own skills in the process.

  • Scaling leadership: Insights from the first Staff Technical Program Manager in the room

    This talk offers the perspective of a Staff Technical Program manager as the first one hired in a company, deconstructing the evolutionary journey that paved the way for hiring more of them.

  • Tips on scaling your leadership outside of your comfort zone

    In this talk Michael will talk through lessons and tips he’s learnt when working on a project that pushed him outside of his comfort zone, and how you can effectively utilise the skills and knowledge of those around you to build alignment when leading across a broad set of teams who are often using very different technologies.

  • Letting the Best Ideas Win

    In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.

  • Doing “the most important thing” is a trap.

    This talk is little about why you need to say No to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough. 

  • Filling the Void: Operating as a Staff Engineer in a Leaderless Scope

    In this talk, we will detail our experiences as Staff Engineers functioning as Tech Leads, Glues and Facilitators in a leaderless role. We’ll discuss the real-world problems we faced, our solutions, and the lessons learned that allowed us to grow as leaders and as an organisation.

  • In anticipation of change: Strategies for engineering leaders to stay current and effective

    One of the toughest challenges you face as an engineering leader is staying current while preparing yourself and your teams for change.