New York

October 15–17, 2025

Berlin

November 3–4, 2025

London

June 2–3, 2026

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.

LeadDev Berlin 2025 pano promo
LeadDev Berlin logo

The conference for engineering leaders shaping the future of software

Berlin • November 3 & 4, 2025

Pat Kua

Seasoned Technology Leader & Coach

Emma Bostian

Engineering Manager
Spotify

Charity Majors

Co-Founder & CTO
Honeycomb

Bruce Wang

Engineering Director
Netflix

James Stanier

CTO
Nordhealth
Sam Newman

Sam Newman

Independent Tech Consultant & Author
Sam Newman & Associates
Humera Noor LeadDev

Humera Noor

CTO
Digital Munich Tech GmbH

More about Technical Direction

Top Technical Direction videos

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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.