Agenda - April 8

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.

It's sometimes lonely as an engineering leader. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Building a network of other engineering leaders and managers can help you feel part of a real community, more inspired in your day to day job, and like you're growing your career in new ways. In this talk you'll hear ideas about how to build and maintain a network of peers and mentors that helps you with all three.

One of the most important things an organization can focus on is how to reduce their feedback loops. A great team will optimize the amount of time it takes to get a single line of code out to the world, setting themselves up for success at any scale. We'll take a look at the sociotechnical practices that help us build teams that nurture great engineers.

All engineering teams are not created equal. Even within the same company or department how different engineering teams should spend their time will vary. In this talk I'll share how I used a proposed allocation and an actual retrospective to drive alignment and set more effective product and engineering goals.

At some point in my leadership journey, I began to notice that the problems, opportunities and options in my sphere of influence require planning quarters, if not years, ahead.

As such my most important contribution to my org has been forming and deputizing a team of capable leaders to act on my behalf. Without them, I’d have neither the focus nor scale necessary to run a multibillion dollar line of business.

Leadership at this level requires a keen understanding of scales, while remaining empathetic to the individuals who have entrusted their livelihoods to you.

In this intimate conversation, I intend to share four dimensions critical to growing the type of leaders who can Observe—Orient—Decide and ultimately Act (OODA) with the intelligence and integrity necessary to succeed.

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.

Many companies spend a lot of time talking about how to preserve their culture. But winning teams embrace the notion that their culture is ever changing. So how do we ensure that our cultures change for the better?

As you further your careers into Engineering leadership, you'll find yourself starting to be involved more and more with business partners outside of Tech. Through this you'll be introduced to a lot of jargon that may be new to you but required to understand in order to be successful in your role. I'll be sharing some of this jargon as well as how you can navigate understanding the business and why that will make you a better Engineering leader.

One of the challenges of senior leadership is balancing the technical needs of your team with the business goals of your company, and ensuring that your team understands the why behind their work. In this talk we will discuss approaches for aligning your strategy, and how to craft high-level goals for your organization that speak to both the technical and business needs. 

The need for change is a constant, even in the most successful organizations. Internal and external forces will certainly require us to transform what and how we operate. Having a well thought out transformation strategy is key to being successful when that need for change is upon you. But how will you get people to buy-in to YOUR strategy?

• How do you create awareness that a change is needed?
• How do you communicate your understanding of the risks involved?
• How do you motivate stakeholders at all levels to act?

In this talk I will discuss techniques that have helped me get multiple transformation strategies noticed and approved.

Do you work in Engineering? Can you increase your velocity without hiring? Do you have a backlog? Let’s talk about one weird trick your Support team wants you to know.

When you’re creating a product specifically for developers, developer experience (DX) is paramount. Introduce friction, they churn. Not enough onboarding resources, users never convert. But if you can provide these things, paired with real solutions to problems they’re already having in their day-to-day work, you might bring them into your community, or even grow that relationship into an external advocate.

Platform.sh a Platform-as-a-Service and a DevOps platform that places few restrictions on the types of applications you can deploy. We support 9 runtime and 15 managed service containers. With that flexibility, there are a vast number of frameworks and patterns across programming languages our users want to give a spin on our platform.

Providing documentation, let alone ready-to-deploy examples that always work, became the biggest problem at the heart of our DX struggles. Any chance we had to connect with a developer ends the moment example code fails to deploy correctly. Problem is, we had nearly 100 of these codebases that needed attention and a long-term maintenance plan. This talk describes the Platform.sh template journey.

You write slide decks instead of code. Your life is run by your calendar, which could stand defragging. The last time you got into deep flow was the day before you went into leadership. Keeping up is hard, let alone keeping current.

In this talk I'll cover a different approach to keeping up to date with technology and industry trends, how to embrace being a generalist, and how to find the time and energy to keep learning.

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.

Most of us have developed our expertise as engineers through a mix of literature and experimentation. The software industry moves at a higher speed than others because we can try and study complex, real-world systems in the comfort of our bedrooms and personal Github accounts.

When you become a leader, especially one who leads other leaders, things get a little more complicated. There are books, but they tend to contain generic advice. There are patterns, but the nature of the job makes it harder to identify when and how to apply them. 

In this session, I want to walk through a few things that have worked for me when you don't have a lab to try things out. Let's explore processes, tools, and resources to continuously improve your skills and expertise when there is no StackOverflow and no coding dojos.

The shift from manager to leader isn't a step forward, it's a leap. As an engineering leader, you need to scale your impact: broadening the scope of your vision and honing your efforts on actions that will provide the greatest results. 

Your peers change, your focus shifts from team to the larger organization, and you take on more of your own career development. To have true impact as a senior leader, you’ll need to scale yourself, shift your management style, navigate organizational friction, and develop productive feedback loops.

In this full-day workshop, we’ll focus on:

• Understanding your value and success criteria as a senior engineering leader
• The skills you need to have impact and enact change
• The difference between managing ICs and managing managers 
• How to build strong relationships with your reports, cross-functional team, and wider org
• Tools for navigating organizational friction as a leader
• How to create feedback loops to get productive feedback for self-improvement. 

During the day, you’ll participate in interactive exercises that will allow you to convert the day’s learnings into practical actions. You’ll leave the day with new knowledge, resources, suggestions for self-improvement, and the ability to start implementing your learnings immediately in your role.