Berlin

November 4 & 5, 2024

New York

September 4 & 5, 2024

Leadership

Leadership

Leading high-performing engineering organizations

Adapting your leadership for a downturn

Leading through a downturn requires a different approach. Here’s how to realign your leadership to suit this new set of challenges.

How to lead individuals with advanced technical expertise

If you’re a manager of individual contributor’s who have more years of experience on you, you may be confused on how best to lead them.

How can I rebuild a struggling team’s confidence and trust?

When there’s friction in the team you’re managing, morale, performance, and trust all take a hit. How can you rectify the situation?

How to lead senior engineers as a new manager

If you’ve just entered a management role, cultivating your relationship with the senior engineers on your team may be a daunting prospect. Here are a few ways to get that relationship off to a good start.

Reasons to step into a leadership role (and the reasons not to)

Thinking of becoming an engineering leader? Let Pat Kua help you with the first step of the journey.

4 mental models for more effective engineering leadership

On our Leadership playlist

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.

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.

Content sponsored by Apollo

Elevating your leadership skills during tough times

What skills do you need to be a great leader during economic uncertainty?

Hywel carver

AI and tech leadership

Hywel Carver talks AI and tech leadership.

Content sponsored by 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.

festival of engineering leadership

London • June 16 & 17, 2025

More about Engineering Management

Top Leadership videos

  • Friends don’t let friends debug their leadership skills in production

    In this talk, Hywel will discuss the skills needed as engineers progress on different career paths (both technical leadership and people management), and how they can be learned outside the ‘production environment’ of the team.

  • Mentorship + Sponsorship

    To grow our technical leadership skills, it’s critical to lean on one’s network of support.

  • Uncertainty of Change

    In this talk, I will take you through uncertainty and its impact on our lives by looking at case studies from the cotton mill workers of 19th Century Britain to the fall of Nokia as the world’s No. 1 phone maker and how change connects them both. Then, I will explore how the uncertainty of change can sometimes cause us to ignore, deny, distort, or even try to stop it from happening instead of working with it. 

  • The LeadDev Engineering Management Report 2024

    Over the last two years, the tech industry has been going through big changes.

  • How do you deliver a feature on the biggest stage in the world?

    In this talk, media server engineer Josh McNamee discusses the challenges in shipping Disguise’s ‘Single Large Canvas’, the software feature that lets U2 put images on the inside of the Las Vegas Sphere.

  • Embracing engineering’s place at the forefront of business

    The landscape of technology has changed over the past decade – and that change has led to the place of engineering changing in the architecture of modern businesses.

  • You are here: The story of the Barbican

    If you were standing in this exact spot in early 1941, you’d be surrounded by rubble. Large swaths of London lie in ruins after the months-long Blitz during World War II, and Cripplegate ward where we now sit was almost completely destroyed. The only building you’d see standing would be a heavily damaged St. Giles Church.

  • 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.