Latest
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Preventing burnout with restful work
Restful work can be a great way to mitigate a case of burnout. Here’s a framework you can follow to implement it into your day-to-day.
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What is a staff engineer? Technical leaders who aren’t managers
Staff engineers are technical leaders who have deep domain knowledge, walking the line between tech and the business.
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Grow your influence like a leader, not a boss
Extending your influence past your immediate circle isn’t as straightforward as you’d like to hope. But there are a few strategies you can employ to help.
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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.
Editor’s picks
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.
London • June 16 & 17, 2025
A festival of engineering leadership
Essential reading
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.
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.
Elevating your leadership skills during tough times
What skills do you need to be a great leader during economic uncertainty?
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.
A festival of engineering leadership
London • June 16 & 17, 2025
More about Engineering Management
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LeadDev editor’s picks: August 2023
This month we have 5 articles answering some key questions, such as: where are all the laid-off software engineers going, and how do I prioritize my work?
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Where are all the laid-off software developers going?
This year has been relentless with layoffs across the technology sector, but where are these thousands of software engineers landing next?
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LeadDev editor’s picks: July 2023
This month we have 5 articles covering the benefits and risks of generative AI tools in development environments, tech debt traps to avoid, and how to manage the industry’s recent efficiency drive.
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LeadDev editor’s picks: June 2023
This month we have 5 articles covering using your experience for good, picking up the pieces after a round of layoffs, and watching out for burnout in remote teams.
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Being a tech lead doesn’t mean having all the answers
It is sometimes easy to fall into the unhelpful thinking pattern that tech leads should know everything. But that’s unrealistic and Google’s Jack Franklin is here to show you why.
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How great managers create stability during turbulent times
Great managers can create stability for their teams, even when things within the larger organization feel up in the air.
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Leading as the most experienced engineer in the room
Your domain expertise is essential to your job, but it just might be one of the things getting in the way of you being a truly great engineering leader.
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How to handle layoff survivors’ guilt
While it’s not the same as losing your job, being left to pick up the pieces after a round of layoffs comes with its own challenges. How do those who remain stay sane?
Top Leadership videos
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Sometimes you need to be a cruise director
Some problems staff engineers face aren’t about technical expertise, but clarity and decision-making.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.