Agenda
October 18

Through it all, new products and features are developed while maintaining existing systems and supporting higher load. Engineering leaders have to operate in high degree of ambiguity, uncertainty on investments and do more with less. This talk will look at two common themes - trust and adaptability - in systems, teams and process. As we navigate through constantly changing times, these themes continue to adhere for sustained innovation, and may bring out the best in you too.

What companies are looking for in these roles varies greatly: From hands-on technical involvement, to strategic work, to mandates like “handle the people and process stuff that I don’t want to deal with” (real quote). At all levels from engineering manager to CTO, there’s rarely much clarity on expectations beyond “achieve results.” This makes it confusing for anyone striving to grow their leadership career, let alone start one. At the same time, you’re way past the stage where your boss is having career development conversations with you. So where do you turn?

You start with yourself - and this workshop, in which you’ll check in with yourself and your career, understand better what matters to you, and develop a plan to hold yourself accountable to your goals. No matter if you’re an ambitious go-getter or ambivalent about careers, experienced engineering executive-turned-leadership-coach and accidental career changer Lena Reinhard will help you get more clarity on building the career you want and how to make deliberate choices about what you optimize for. You’ll leave better equipped to own your career design, and become your own cheerleader as you design steps to make it real.

But, success in the business world has shifted over the past two decades, making software delivery the key driver. This revenue generation change added a new mandate for the engineering leader: Driving Business Outcomes.

In this lightning talk, Karat VP of Content Don Gannon-Jones explains how a focus on job readiness will empower you to manage the overflow of applicants and interviews without resorting to outdated tactics that require candidates to do a lot of guess-work and game-playing.

The best VPs of Engineering know this isn't true; the ideal role shape is contextual and based on the needs and stage of the company. Emily will talk about different archetypes that are common for the VP of Engineering role, how to assess what type your organization needs, and how the role can evolve over time. She'll also talk about how to best prepare for the role in your organization if you're interested in being a VP of Engineering someday, as well as how to build manager-of-managers skills that are essential to the VPE role.

This talk explores one of the most common contexts for that ambiguity: the structures and signals of power in your workplace. Formal org charts and values statements can serve us well in situations that they were designed to address, but they often fail us as we attempt to bring change to bear. All organizations have a shadow—the rules, people, and hierarchies that influence our team’s cultures and decisions. Participants in this workshop will explore that shadow, hold it up against their organization’s formal rules and structures, consider their position in it and what purpose (or harm) it serves, and decide how to leverage it even as they bring that shadow to light.

We will discuss how to take a systemic approach, promote happy and productive teams, and nurture growth, teamwork, and business outcomes. Attendees will gain practical insights and actionable steps for building and maintaining a positive and effective culture within their own engineering teams.

From water, to power, to the internet, we only notice them when they’re disrupted. In your dev environment, you also have a set of critical infrastructure: your cloud provider, your code repositories and IDE, maybe even Slack. However, if you’re not considering your observability tooling as part of that critical infrastructure stack, you’re exposing yourself to significant risks. In this session, we will discuss:

• What does critical infrastructure mean in a development environment?
• Why observability is critical infrastructure and what happens when it goes away?
• How you can protect yourself and mitigate observability risks

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

Time gets spent trying to navigate the org, building things that get thrown out, or building nothing at all. It's all cash out the door without bringing value in. In the year of efficiency, this waste is more apparent than ever. This talk focuses on building a technical strategy that serves the needs of the business, reduces ambiguity and distraction, and leaves room for growing your people.

Led by Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI, this session dives deep into the realm of technical strategy. It explores why technical strategy matters, how to align it with business objectives, and how to measure the impact. By providing practical insights and real-world examples, this session equips senior engineering leaders with the necessary expertise to create a compelling technical strategy that supports organizational priorities and reduces waste while still giving your people room to grow.

As economic realities challenge our best attempts at success, it can be tempting to dig in and plow forward with what feels like progress but may be detrimental to your full operating potential. Velocity has a direction - not all movement is forward movement. In this talk, I'll help you establish focus, cut through metrics that don't matter, and sharpen your team's execution so that you can meet your business goals.

The scope of skills that you need to become a senior leader is way broader than just engineering. It also includes delivering high-impact projects, building relationships with cross-functional peers and senior leadership, and developing a followership of great engineers.

Join this talk as Kathleen discusses how you can identify the skill gaps in your teams and support your managers as they transition to leadership.

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.

If leading a team, our duty is to guide, not command. We should ignite passion, not condescend. Communication is our primary instrument. A leader's ability to tackle challenges and stimulate individuals is crucial. I'll share stories about how I moved from being a process-oriented leader to putting people over processes.