Program

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.  

 

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

This talk is designed to help you become an effective business leader as well as an effective technical leader. It will provide you with the tools to develop strong commercial awareness, frameworks for effective cross-functional working with your management counterparts, and communication skills for influencing non-technical leaders.
 

This talk will give practical examples on how to craft or evolve an effective technical strategy. And, once you’ve crafted it, give guidance on how to communicate it to stakeholders, ensure buy-in and advice on how to adapt it over time.

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
   

This talk addresses the gap in information around moving from operational roles like Director or VP to executive roles such as CTO or CIO. It will explore which managerial skills support executive success, potential pitfalls, and how to balance operational versus strategic concerns. Additionally, it will provide a roadmap for navigating this transition, including advice on prioritizing time with your team, peers, bosses, and supervisory board.

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.

This talk will give guidance and real-world examples of how good leaders balance priorities and investments in technical projects and how to make effective budgetary tradeoffs.