LeadingEng New York Agenda - March 16, 2023

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.

When you’re looking to network and find peers while in a leadership position, it’s helpful to rethink some of our mental maps of how we position ourselves with others. Taking a different lens to the various folks around you — beyond titles and years of experience — can help widen your network and surprise you with different types of support you can gain.

In this talk, we’ll go through how the core skills any leader needs evolve, as you go first from directly building software, to building teams that build software, to building leaders that build teams that build software.

Marcus will share how he’s changed his approach to “pulling” and “pushing” – things like 1:1’s, feedback, communication in small and large groups, as well as goal setting, creating outcomes and productively establishing accountability. After the talk, our hope is you will have gotten a new perspective on how the toolbox evolves as you get more senior, but certain principles still apply.

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.

There are a ton of articles online about how to build a healthy culture at work. For example, if Google says "step 1: Provide Employee Training", is that enough? Will the robotic implementation of Employee Culture Training get you there? Spoiler, the answer is no.

In this talk, Jenn will bridge the gap between the instructions senior leaders often get, and the desired outcomes: a workplace where people feel safe to be themselves, ask questions, make mistakes, and grow together.

We are often asked to argue for projects and headcount in terms of value to the business, while our most critical systems are often multiple degrees removed from a revenue stream. In this talk I will cover the best practices I have found that bridge the gap between how business leaders talk about value vs how software development teams tend to.

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.

In this talk, Bruce shares the lessons he learned from his multi-year journey to define a technical strategy, from the excitement of a new job and team, to facing the harsh realities, exploding complexities and now embarking on the next phase of the strategy.

Our senior leaders are identifying skill gaps in their teams. They find themselves repeating certain things over and over. So what are these things?

Oftentimes, these topics are in response to specific business circumstances, so building generic programming is hard or becomes obsolete quickly. In this talk IBK will share how you, as a leader, can take a topic and work on it with your team. IBK will also share an example topic and the format that he shared with senior leaders at Shopify.

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.

When you’re a junior developer, it’s relatively easy to see if you’re moving in the right direction — your code works, or it doesn’t. When you’re a leader with larger goals and longer-term projects, feedback loops lengthen.

It can take months, quarters, or years to assess the success of an important feature delivery or to understand the true impact of organizational or cultural change. In most cases, we can’t wait that long to spot issues and course correct them, to advocate for additional resources, or to communicate and celebrate wins.

By drawing on the same principles of observability that we use when building software, engineering leaders can shorten the feedback cycle and take a data-driven approach to guide their professional growth.