Agenda
December 6

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It’s also easy to push some things further out into the future. Ironically, it is during a time of crisis when you might need these things the most. Suddenly you need to decide where you spend your time, where your team is spending theirs, and what priorities to sacrifice for others. In a time when everything is important, a good decision-making process is the one key tool in your box to stay sane.

Come with me on a journey of a young founder, making decisions on a whim and without any kind of structure, always reacting rather than responding, to becoming an executive who’s much more confident in his decision-making. Spoiler alert: that person is me.

I look at how you can pull yourself out of a reactive decision making mode that causes utter stress constantly and make decisions with a high level of confidence and transparency. We’ll talk about what ingredients you need in place for your decision making to flow without you really having to do anything, with just a dash of laziness and looking towards what the future might behold, both good and bad (and neutral).

This CTO is focused internally, that one externally. That one insists that staying hands-on-keyboard technical has been essential to their success, whereas this one hasn’t touched code directly in years but still does well. If you aspire to being a CTO one day (or becoming a better one now!) this can be frustrating and confusing. In this talk, experienced CTO Meri Williams will help you explore the different flavours of competencies & capabilities for CTOs, how to develop in each, and how to mix & match. You’ll leave better equipped to define your own professional development plan, and judge opportunities as they arise in terms of whether they will broaden or specialise you as a leader in technology.

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Over the years I’ve heard all this stuff and looking back I know one thing to be true. If you try to keep all of your teams the same, or even have the quest for stability over change, you will have problems. Team change is inevitable. People are going to come and go from our teams. Especially as your company grows. So how do you build resilient structures that enable change instead of trying to fight it? And how do you include people along the way so they have ownership and input into change instead of feeling that they are pawns in a game of chess? In this talk I’ll share some practical tactics on how to look at your teams today, and grow them into a stronger org that can bend and flex with challenges instead of crumble.

Learn how to create positive change in your work environment and gain buy-in from people in power, your direct reports, and cross-functional leaders. Bring an area where you wish you had more influence; Lara Hogan will walk you through a step-by-step process to identify stakeholders, develop winnable experiments, and kickstart the change you want to see.

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It’s not the raw data out of last quarter’s engagement survey. It’s not the slide deck presented after lunch at an onboarding session. So how can you, as a senior leader, know your place in and influence the actual culture of your company? Let’s talk about how to uncover the real culture at your company and how you can make a genuine lasting impact on it.

Most growing companies are constantly in flux, with new internal and external learnings and challenges emerging almost daily regardless of the type of business or company stage.

To create a healthy business that can adapt and deliver on its plans, it pays to be intentional about how all aspects of the business operate together.

This talk will cover how you can tackle common challenges tech companies face by aligning your Strategy, Execution and People more systematically

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Join us for a 20-minute tech talk that explores the key principles and practical strategies for "Unlocking Lean Efficiency: Turning Knots Where it Matters in Tech Leadership."

In this talk, we will dive into the critical concepts that empower leaders to drive pace and build highly effective engineering teams when expanding the headcount isn't always an option. We will explore the following key ideas:

Aligning on Direction: Learn how to align your team in a clear direction by translating vision, mission, and strategy into actionable goals. Discover techniques for ensuring everyone is moving in the same direction, even when resources are limited.

The Power of Focus: Understand the importance of focusing on what truly matters. Differentiate between essential tasks, nice-to-haves, distractions, and noise. Discover how to channel your team's energy into high-impact activities.

Repeatable Use Cases: Explore the concept of building repeatable processes and use cases. Find out how this approach can streamline your operations, reduce redundancy, and enhance productivity, even in a resource-constrained environment.

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GenAI is forecasted to have a massive impact on the economy and tech leaders are scrambling to rapidly incorporate it into their products and out to market, or risk falling behind.

While (Gen)AI offers transformative potential for growth and productivity the reality is it first increases complexity before it can start to simplify it: by accelerating the pace of software development, requiring challenging prioritization decisions, and creating urgent demand for new technical skills from development resources.

In this talk, we will discuss how leaders are automating through complexity and finding the right balance between the pressure to innovate, business priorities, resources, and the promise of AI business value.

As a senior leader, you are often the in-between person who is matching the business needs, product execution, and the team’s talent. That work requires you to communicate proficiently to ensure everyone understands the needs and the status of progress. In this talk, we’ll cover the basic communication paths to be successful as a senior engineering leader and dive into two of the most difficult parts of it: forward planning and driving accountability in your teams.

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Effective leadership development programs ensure a continuous flow of skilled leaders who can drive the company forward, embrace change, and navigate the challenges and opportunities of your industry.

This session will dive into strategies on how to grow the next generation of leaders in your organization so you can build a stronger foundation for driving the long-term success of your business.

Somehow, I always managed to carve out at least some time for some of these aspects - safe to say that my own more focused learning often took a back seat though. And I suspect that, like most of us, you’re dealing with very similar challenges (and if you don’t, please tell me your secrets).  

But: You cleared up an entire day to invest in your career growth by joining us at LeadingEng Berlin today. To wrap up our day together, I will help you not just celebrate and reflect on what you learned on this day full of practical advice from experienced leaders: We will also make space for you to operationalize turning these lessons into actions. You’ll leave this music-powered lightning workshop with practical tools to own your career growth and be your own biggest cheerleader - today, and beyond.