
Latest videos
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How to master change and drive impactful transformation
Change is inevitable—but leading it effectively is a game-changer.
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In partnership with O’Reilly
The metrics you loved to hate in 2024
And other key findings from the 2024 LeadDev Engineering Team Performance report.
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From engineer to executive: Leading the shift and inspiring business-minded tech teams
Explore the journey from engineering leader to CTO, with insights on bridging technology and business strategy, leading with influence, and fostering business-minded tech teams.
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What we talk about when we talk about leadership
Exploring key leadership themes from years in tech, this talk offers guidance and practical strategies to help engineers become the leaders they want to be.
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Ice, confusion, and the 38,000ft crash
Uncover the critical lessons from AF 447’s final moments – how small factors spiraled into disaster and what it teaches us about building resilient systems.
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Estimates as probabilities
This talk introduces a probability approach to estimations, aiming to transform delivery discussions into stress-free, trust-based conversations between tech teams and stakeholders.
Highlights from our conferences

Measure for Change
Picking metrics is one thing. But the harder decisions lie in what to do with them afterward.
View all videos from LeadDev London

Drive product gaps as an engineering leader
Discover practical strategies for engineering leaders to influence product development effectively, even in the absence of strong product management and a clear company vision.
view all videos from LeadDev NEW YORK

Growth in a downturn
In this talk, Smruti Patel asks, if hyper-growth is marked by spending more to make more, what does building for enduring growth look like?
view all videos from LeadDev berlin

Idea to Innovation
Join me as we embark on a journey to dissect the anatomy of innovation, uncover strategies to unlock the full potential of ideas, and transform them into impactful realities. Let’s build a strong culture of innovation, and make sure that it is not just a buzzword but a tangible outcome.
view all videos from staffplus london

Slack enterprise key management: Senior to staff lessons
Explore the key lessons and skills Audrei gained during their first Staff+ project, Slack Enterprise Key Management. This talk offers insights for anyone growing in their Staff+ career.
view all videos from staffplus NEW YORK
All videos
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Finding opportunities and maximizing Impact: A staff engineer’s framework
This talk introduces the Listen-Act-Share framework, guiding you to find, evaluate, and scale high-impact projects. Using real examples, like transforming Datadog’s analytics infrastructure, you’ll learn to spot valuable opportunities, invest your time wisely, and iterate after validation. Discover what sets great opportunities apart and how to apply this framework for maximum impact.
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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.
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Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (StaffPlus)
Code review anxiety is often dismissed as a “junior developer issue,” but this talk challenges that misconception with scientific research. Carol Lee shares findings from studies on the causes and effects of code review anxiety, revealing cognitive factors like self-efficacy and bias that worsen it. You’ll also learn about an empirically tested intervention to help developers manage anxiety and create healthier code review cultures.
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The scrappy/scale mindset: A framework for sustainable engineering leadership
Learn how the Scrappy/Scale Mindset helps engineering leaders balance leadership styles, avoid burnout, and adapt to their teams’ needs for sustainable success.
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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.
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Psychologically safe reliability management
Lesley explores the challenges of driving observability platform adoption in a multi-product organization, using a case study focused on production readiness for a General Election.
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Simplify streaming application development: A declarative approach at Airbnb
This talk discusses the growing importance of streaming applications in today’s tech landscape and the engineering challenges involved, such as handling multiple data sources and complex transformations.
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The (big) picture of debt
What is the true cost of a choice to e.g. share a database, and what does it take to change it? When is the right time to tackle something like this, and how can we tell? Tali shares experiences with these questions that will set you up for success with your own enormous debt payment.
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Starting from nothing
In this talk, Lawrence shares lessons learned from experiences bootstrapping teams. He’ll draw from experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.
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Being a force for cultural change in your organization
Your responsibility to work toward this change also increases dramatically with your privilege. Nicole talks through some concrete ways to magnify the change you effect in your work while doing things you already do anyway.
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Leading your team through a major refactor – don’t be a hero, be a leader
In this talk Dylan shares his experience leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons learned along the way.
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Substrate engineering: Engineering foundations in a world of LLMs
We need to start investing much more in migrating to better programming languages, building better tooling, and authoring new frameworks where correctness is built in. What does that look like for your engineering organization today?
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Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context
In the dynamic landscape of software engineering, there’s a pervasive allure to what Randall calls “Generic Goodstuff™” – universally lauded practices that seem like silver bullets to team improvement.
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Creating technical leadership in context
This talk will cover how Joy and Nathan overcame challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.
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Self-defense for change agents
In this session Amy will talk about her experiences as a change agent and what she learned about how to do it sustainably, even when the change ahead is drastic.
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When to know you’ve outgrown your monolith and what to do about it
This talk will dive into the most ambitious tech debt paydown project that was ever undertaken at Stripe.
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Reducing infrastructure cost during development and in production
Sally shares lessons learned from her experience at different companies to reduce costs from the product development stage to running a service in production.
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The joy of being staff+
In this session, Leslie Chapman will celebrate what it means to be a senior individual contributor. What better way to close out the conference than with a love letter to what brings us together?
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The path from Director to CTO: How to follow it, or how to mentor it
This talk is aimed at both aspiring Chief Technology Officers and those who are in a position to mentor future CTOs. Explore the journey from a Director of Engineering role to a CTO, focusing on the skills and experiences needed for this transition and how experienced leaders can guide others on this path.
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Budgeting: Your (unexpected) opportunity to be a hero
As you advance your career as an engineering leader, managing a budget becomes a highly critical part of your job.
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Building products is a team sport: Cultivating effective engineering-product partnerships
With new AI developments happening almost every day, team roadmaps evolve fast to adapt to the product and business needs; this requires a close partnership between engineering and product leaders.
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Adventure beyond the keyboard: Growth strategies for senior leaders
When you’re at the top, getting direct feedback gets tougher, and figuring out how to improve becomes a bit of a puzzle.
This talk is your guide to cracking that puzzle, and make leadership growth less of a mystery and more of an adventure!
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In partnership with Swarmia
Post-ZIRP engineering leadership
This talk explores the evolution of the engineering leadership role from the growth-focused 2010s to today’s environment of increased scrutiny and accountability.
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Leading with policy, consensus, and conviction: Three distinct leadership styles for effective engineering leadership
In this talk I’ll share the situations that exposed my limited toolkit of leadership styles, the new styles I’ve added, and how I got comfortable using them.