New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

Technical direction

Technical direction

Making better technical and architectural decisions

How to build an effective technical strategy

Building a tech strategy requires a lot of moving parts. Learn about what routes to take and whether decisions should be top-down.

On our Technical Direction playlist

Modernizing legacy systems: A technical strategy for evolving monoliths into modern architectures at HelloFresh

Gain insights into transforming legacy systems into scalable architectures, with practical strategies for balancing stability, managing technical debt, and enabling growth opportunities at HelloFresh.

Jonathan Maltz

Technical Vision vs. Technical Strategy: The difference and why it matters

Jonathan Maltz digs into the nuts and bolts of setting a successful technical strategy. Startin by talking about the difference between technical vision and technical strategy.

In partnership with Apollo

How to implement platform engineering at scale

In this webinar, we’ll hear from enterprise engineering leaders who’ve overcome cultural barriers and team silos, and successfully adopted platform engineering practices in their orgs.

Jon Thornton

Good technical debt

Jon Thornton discusses how this framework was used to rapidly build and ship Squarespace’s Email Campaigns product in less than 15 months. Along the way, you’ll get several practical guidelines for how tech debt can supercharge your technical investments.

Creating, defining, and refining an effective tech strategy

Having a defined tech strategy creates alignment and keeps everyone on the same page. So how can you ensure yours is most effective? Panelists Anna Shipman, Randy Shoup, Papanii Nene Okai, Nimisha Asthagiri and Anand Mariappan share their tips.

The festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

More about Technical Direction

Top Technical Direction videos

  • Making smart investments: A framework for maximizing your ROI in technical decisions

    In this talk, we’re going to explore a framework for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of complex tech decisions, illustrated with real-world examples that highlight both the traps to avoid and the paths to success. I’ll share methods for pinpointing key metrics that matter, and how to design experiments or proof-of-concepts to measure ROI. Finally we will discuss the importance of staying objective and adaptable throughout the process. 

  • Data Science Demystified

    This talk gives an overview of Data Science and delves deep into the pipeline data scientists use – right from fetching the data, the Python tools and frameworks used to creating models, gaining insights and telling a story.

  • How to use technology radars to make transparent tech decisions

    The talk centres around the benefits of building such a tool, such as transparency, alignment and faster onboarding.

  • Tech debt as innovation, reframing this forever problem as an opportunity

    Tech Debt is a natural by-product of software engineering, yet we, in the software industry, don’t attack it with the same excitement or fervor as we do with product innovation or feature development.

  • Start with an exit in mind: How to be effective by being selfish as a staff engineer

    Staff engineers often get overwhelmed by long-term ownership of critical projects. This talk explores how to avoid burnout by starting every project with an exit strategy—whether transferring ownership, pausing or bootstrapping a team.

  • Explosive overflow: Lessons from rocket science

    Thirty-nine seconds after launch, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded—caused by software design errors. In this talk, Mark analyzes these historical flaws to explore key lessons in resilience and product security. We’ll discuss testing, validation, legacy code, design assumptions, and the challenge of proving when things don’t go wrong.

  • Focus on project value using businesses strategy

    Staff+ Engineers often fear working on the wrong projects. This talk explains how that fear stems from misalignment with your company’s business strategy. Learn to identify your company’s strategy, align your projects with it, and communicate value to stakeholders. Maximize your impact by refocusing efforts on work that truly matters.

  • Software security as a force of nature

    In this keynote talk, Kelly explores principles, practices, and patterns that are actually effective at sustaining systems resilience, from the overlooked to the counterintuitive.