A welcome to LeadingEng Berlin 2024 from the host Lena Reinhard.

Transitioning from an engineering leader to a CTO is about more than managing technology—it’s about evolving into a strategic business executive.

In this talk, I’ll share my journey and lessons learned in shifting from leading technology to shaping company vision, balancing innovation with business goals, and influencing organisational direction.

I’ll cover how you can bridge the gap between technology and business strategy, lead with influence, and embrace executive-level accountability.

Additionally, I’ll share my observations on how to get technical managers to think beyond engineering and become business leaders who drive the company’s success.

Today, we face many challenges in the tech industry, many of which are business-related. To succeed, we need to be more efficient, deliver accurately, and drive business success. We are developing better business sense and commercial awareness. Our biggest challenge is doing all this while keeping products stable, maintaining a great culture, promoting team spirit, engaging our organization, supporting career growth, and providing motivating challenges, all at the same time.

This talk will cover how to visualize the business impact of tech initiatives and establish a Tech Business Score that helps with alignment, prioritization, and stakeholder management.

In this talk we’ll cover:
 

• the skills needed to drive success in your engineering teams and drive your business forward
• strategies to turn engineering from a cost center into a revenue generator 
• the communication skills for influencing non-technical leaders.

Modernizing legacy monolithic systems is crucial for sustaining operations while unlocking new business opportunities.

This session offers a practical guide for engineering leaders to transform legacy architectures into modern, scalable systems.

In this talk, I will share my own experience of creating and implementing a technical strategy at HelloFresh. I will cover strategies for transitioning to decoupled, cloud-based, and modular designs while minimizing disruptions.

I will provide insights on how to maintain system stability and manage technical debt while enabling new growth paths through modernization.

Attendees will leave with tools to modernize systems effectively without compromising operational health.

Key takeaways:

• Balancing modernization with operational health
• Incremental vs. Big Bang approaches
• Enabling new business opportunities
• Managing risks and dependencies

Many organizations face the challenge of delivering more with limited budgets, while also meeting the increasing demands of their customers for innovative products and improved service.

For engineering leaders, this means carefully prioritizing engineering work and investments in technical projects, while also considering the need to develop new technologies. However, choosing which engineering work to prioritize involves making effective budgetary tradeoffs and identifying the most impactful investments for the business. 

This session will explore practical tools such as SLOs, KPI Trees, and the FinOps culture to make cost management a shared responsibility across the organization. It will also focus on influencing without direct authority, driving transparency, and integrating cost optimization into the engineering culture. 

During this talk, participants will learn how to:

• connect infrastructure investments to business success using actionable frameworks
• enhance cost awareness and accountability within your teams
• influence key stakeholders to align on strategic cost decisions.

Major changes to how our organizations work, from reorgs to strategy shifts to new teams, often expose growth areas in our organizational culture.

Yet soon after such a change, we frequently see teams make a mad dash towards velocity improvements, skipping over the fundamental work of investing in the culture necessary to support the change. This can create a nearly invisible impediment to the velocity we’re striving to attain.

However, there are also situations where culture can ensure clarity and drive sustainable velocity, where your organization’s culture becomes a force multiplier for your change work. How can leaders examine proposed changes and prepare their teams to move from a culture that impedes progress to one that enables strategic change?

Key takeaways:

• Helping our teams acknowledge and navigate necessary culture shifts will take time initially, but long-term, can help us move faster, with greater clarity and predictability
• Clear examples where culture change supported our strategic change
• How to map to the culture and values you need to support a proposed change

Amidst the buzz about technical debt, there’s another crucial matter that warrants our attention: management debt.

These are the shortcuts we take in management, which could come back to haunt us later – a bit like how tech debt works. Sometimes, these decisions seem reasonable, but they can add up to trouble over time.

In this session, we’ll delve into management debt – the collection of inefficiencies, unresolved issues, and missed opportunities in how we manage teams. Just like its technical counterpart, management debt accumulates, quietly impacting the organization over time. Drawing insights from real-life scenarios in managing engineering managers, I’ll uncover various forms of management debt. From lacking a performance management or employee feedback process to having unbalanced teams and inflated titles and compensation, we’ll explore practical ways to tackle these challenges. Throughout the talk, I’ll share personal stories that highlight the vital importance of addressing management debt.

Together, we’ll work through actionable solutions to confront and manage this debt. It’s time to monitor, account for, and start paying down our management debt, ensuring we don’t go management bankrupt and keep our organization healthy.

Key takeaways:

• Understanding of the concept of Management Debt, including its definition and the significant impact it can have on organizations.
• Tactics for identifying and assessing existing debt within your own organizations.
• Practical tools and a structured framework designed to help track, manage, and mitigate Management Debt

The 3As of effective engineering management.

Alignment brings a shared purpose, dissolving silos, while Autonomy empowers mastery and builds trust. Accountability then sustains this trust, creating a foundation of psychological safety. Together, these principles ensure that teams feel valued and engaged, while allowing leaders to oversee progress without micromanaging.

As leaders, we are in a unique position to cultivate the 3As within our teams. Let’s explore how we can achieve this!

This talk is designed to help you get your teams working effectively on the most impactful tasks. It will deliver practical tools to set priorities and roadmap, identify and debug delivery issues,  and measure your organizational performance.  

The step from manager to director oftentimes feels like a leap.

The scope of skills that you need to become a senior leader is way broader than just engineering. From how to understand business & commercial topics, to build relationships with cross-functional peers, to influence less technical colleagues — whilst retaining responsibility for technical teams and topics. Join this talk as Dana discusses how you can identify the skill gaps in your teams and support your manager as they transition to leadership.

Closing session