Bobby D takes inspiration from the popular game “Among Us” to address the challenges engineers face in understanding their value and the importance of developing team awareness to support one another, and shares practical strategies for embracing individual strengths, fostering team collaboration, and building bridges through empathy and inclusivity.

Nayana Shetty shares some tips and tricks to identify rocks, pebbles and sand you can fill your jar with, ways they enable you to create impact and build trust across the organization and some common challenges you will face when you prioritize your work using this technique and ways to overcome those.

Michael Tweed will cover a case study of the problem “how do we ensure all our teams are meeting code quality standards”, looking at approaches that are likely to (and have!) failed, vs. those which are much more likely to lead to results and long-lasting buy-in.

Sabrina Leandro shares how to define your development journey as a staff+ engineer, figuring out what you should be working on, how to set your goals, and how to you define your backlog of work. You’ll also learn how to track your progress so you can keep growing as an engineering leader in the individual contributor track.

James Ford reflects on his two year journey as a Staff Engineer and how a mix of documentation and working groups has been a surprisingly effective strategy for influencing the opinions of the individual engineers as well as the non-technical stakeholders.

Blanca Garcia Gil looks at how the expectations of your role imply changes in how you manage your time, strategies to avoid feeling like you are being stretched in multiple directions, understanding how you work best, and identifying which strategies apply to you.