New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

Leadership

Leadership

Leading high-performing engineering organizations

  • In partnership with DX

    What to do with developer productivity metrics

    There’s no shortage of data available for leaders looking to measure developer productivity, but what happens after you’ve set up your dashboards and the numbers start rolling in?

4 mental models for more effective engineering leadership

Add these to your leadership tooklit.

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.

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.

In partnership with 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.

In partnership with 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.

The festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

More about Engineering Management

Top Leadership videos

  • Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer’s framework

    This talk introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, guiding you to find, evaluate, and scale high-impact projects. Using real examples, like transforming Datadog’s analytics infrastructure, you’ll learn to spot valuable opportunities, invest your time wisely, and iterate after validation. Discover what sets great opportunities apart and how to apply this framework for maximum impact.

  • The scrappy/scale mindset: A framework for sustainable engineering leadership

    Learn how the Scrappy/Scale Mindset helps engineering leaders balance leadership styles, avoid burnout, and adapt to their teams’ needs for sustainable success.

  • Psychologically safe reliability management

    Lesley explores the challenges of driving observability platform adoption in a multi-product organization, using a case study focused on production readiness for a General Election.

  • Starting from nothing

    In this talk, Lawrence shares lessons learned from experiences bootstrapping teams. He’ll draw from experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.

  • Leading your team through a major refactor – don’t be a hero, be a leader

    In this talk Dylan shares his experience leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons learned along the way. 

  • Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context

    In the dynamic landscape of software engineering, there’s a pervasive allure to what Randall calls “Generic Goodstuff™” – universally lauded practices that seem like silver bullets to team improvement.

  • Creating technical leadership in context

    This talk will cover how Joy and Nathan overcame challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.

  • The joy of being staff+

    In this session, Leslie Chapman will celebrate what it means to be a senior individual contributor. What better way to close out the conference than with a love letter to what brings us together?