Navigating any new personal scenario while leading a team can be extremely challenging, but last summer I found myself nine months pregnant and leading our engineering organization through an acquisition while preparing for the birth of my son. On the day he was born, I got the news that the acquisition had been finalized.

Transitioning back to work wasn’t just transitioning back to work: I was coming back to a new company, with a new leadership role and with a new set of external pressures that I needed to navigate every day. The experience really taught me a lot of quick lessons around both how we as engineering leaders can prepare ourselves for transitioning into parenthood, but also a lot about how we can coach our teams to support parents and new parents in the workplace.

In this talk, I’ll walk through strategies and techniques that I’ve used to make work work for me in my new world as an engineering lead who also now has to consider the mom side of her brain. I’ll also walk through what we can do to educate and prepare our teams to help create a culture more supportive of new parents, leading up to the parent going on leave, during leave, returning from leave and re-integrating into work-life.