Agenda - June 29

Sometimes it feels like there is more disparity between CTOs and CTO roles than commonality. 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.

Whether you’ve moved through levels as an engineer, been thrown into the dizzy heights of executive leadership or sidestepped across disciplines; it can be difficult to stay in touch with yourself, your progress and make the next best step. How do you continue to work on yourself when having a growth a mindset isn’t enough? As you become more responsible in your role how do you carve out time to do better? What do you focus on? Does it even matter and how do you deal with the potentially overwhelming pressure to still be the same you that people have already learned to work with? In this talk, Dan Blundell will help you explore ways to understand yourself and your own capabilities in the infinite quest to be better by applying familiar engineering patterns and practices to your own development. You’ll take a look laterally, learning from ideas in adjacent disciplines, spot patterns and relatedness and apply them to your own growth leave with tools to help define what’s important to you.

It can be challenging as you juggle management of the growing team, more complicated communication and delivery management processes, not to mention the increasing pressure to move faster and deliver bigger and bigger projects. Setting up your organization for fast and efficient decision-making and the ability to deliver work with others is what makes a difference between a successful leader and a burned-out one. In my talk, I will try to give you some tools that will help you understand the challenges ahead and techniques I developed over years for moving past them.

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.

At Duolingo, we identified nurturing resilience as a company priority to elevate the efficacy of managers and teams and further embody our "candid and kind" culture.

In this talk, André will discuss how Duolingo thinks about resilience in the workplace, the tools provided to managers to help them develop their own resilience, as well as their direct reports, lessons learned and pitfalls avoided.

Organisations are complex and organic, however, and for all the experience we do have, there’s plenty we’ve missed out on. So, how do we work out what perspectives we’re missing? By investing more thoughtfully in collegial relationships in our organisations - going broad not only across functions but also across levels of experience - we can build more of the insight we need and develop broader skill sets. In turn, this will help us identify commercially valuable opportunities in the businesses we help lead.

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.

The answer should be that you are guided by your technical strategy, but often, that strategy is undocumented. It exists because how you approach challenges and what you choose to do IS your strategy. But if it isn't written down, you may find different people have very different views about what you should be focussing on, and teams will make decisions for local reasons that may not support the needs of the whole organisation.

Documenting your strategy is important, but it's only the first step. You need to communicate it effectively so that people can use it to make decisions. And finally, you need to track your progress: are you delivering what you need to? Is the strategy still the right one?

In this session, I'll cover:

• What makes a good technical strategy
• How to document it
• How to use it to align different teams
• How to track progress and adapt to change

We’re all aware that the health of any organisation depends to a very large degree on the health of the leadership, but we give surprisingly little thought to how we can foster healthy leadership teams. Without that cohesion, an organisation’s growth can slow and ultimately fail to deliver on its goals.

As leaders, we tend to focus solely on the teams we support – ensuring their success, accountability, and career growth. But when we don’t pour that same level of rigour into building healthy leadership teams, we’re laying the grounds for an unstable organisation.

The foundations of a high performing leadership team are built on strong relationships that are rooted in mutual trust and common goals. In this talk, we’ll discuss practical ways to create a cohesive and supportive peer group that role models the behaviours you want to foster in your organisation.

In this presentation, I'll break down how to identify the right goals and opportunities for learning, and useful strategies you can use to reach them. These strategies were developed through my experience being the sole caretaker of my elderly father while helping companies take leaps forward in their digital product development. My approach encompasses fulfillment, social impact, upleveling yourself and your teams, career trajectory, and time management. You'll walk away with greater certainty and clarity on where to focus your energy as the landscape continues to evolve.