Berlin

November 4 & 5, 2024

New York

September 4 & 5, 2024

All our video highlights from webinars to live events

  • 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.

  • Scaling yourself by helping your colleagues grow

    In this talk, I will share different techniques that help you grow your colleagues to a level where they can do a part of your job. I will explain the difference between delegating, mentoring, and teaching, and demonstrate with examples how little effort it takes to turn your everyday tasks into teaching moments, improving your understanding of your own skills in the process.

  • Mastering Visual Communication for Software Development

    In this session, learn from a hands-on solution architect – and thought leader in communication design and documentation – how to tailor your visuals to your audience, choose the most appropriate standards (or not) and level of detail, and apply patterns to improve accessibility for all audiences.

  • Scaling leadership: Insights from the first Staff Technical Program Manager in the room

    This talk offers the perspective of a Staff Technical Program manager as the first one hired in a company, deconstructing the evolutionary journey that paved the way for hiring more of them.

Highlights from our conferences

Measure for Change

Picking metrics is one thing. But the harder decisions lie in what to do with them afterward.

Drive product gaps as an engineering leader talk by Emily Thomas in LeadDev New York 2024 Conference

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.

Smruti Patel

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?

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.

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.

  • Scaling sustainably from seed to IPO

    Navigating your way through organizational growth

  • Universal Apps: Architecture for the Modern Web

    “In today’s web environment, performance and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are important to successful apps. Universal architecture provides a hybrid approach to building web apps that combines server-side rendered applications and Single-Page Applications (SPA). This architectural approach improves the user experience and makes it easier for your site to serve content to search and social bots.

    This talk will explain the methodology and benefits of the universal approach. It will explore some of the tradeoffs and challenges that come with universal architecture. Finally, we will cover the various implementation options available today. At the end of this talk, you’ll be able to evaluate if universal architecture is a good choice for your projects.”

  • Traps on the Path to Microservices

    After Netflix helped popularize microservices, you probably heard the architectural pattern labelled a boon. However, if your team is tasked with implementing the pattern it is too easy to find yourself in a place where you’ve significantly increased your architectural complexity without deriving any of the benefits that microservices purport to bring, especially if implemented without proper organizational maturity or careful foresight and follow-through.

    ThoughtWorks has led many teams and organizations along the path from monoliths to microservices and this presentation covers three of the major traps that we’ve experienced (as well as how to avoid them). The traps covered are, underestimating the cost of a microservice, overcentralization, and neglecting the monolith

  • Traps on the Path to Microservices

    After Netflix helped popularize microservices, you probably heard the architectural pattern labelled a boon. However, if your team is tasked with implementing the pattern it is too easy to find yourself in a place where you’ve significantly increased your architectural complexity without deriving any of the benefits that microservices purport to bring, especially if implemented without proper organizational maturity or careful foresight and follow-through.

    ThoughtWorks has led many teams and organizations along the path from monoliths to microservices and this presentation covers three of the major traps that we’ve experienced (as well as how to avoid them). The traps covered are, underestimating the cost of a microservice, overcentralization, and neglecting the monolith

  • Shaping culture in distributed engineering teams

    Establishing inclusive practices for remote teams

  • Designing effective criteria for assessing engineering candidates equitably

    Unlock engineering talent through equitable hiring

  • Recognizing and rectifying your mistakes as an engineering leader

    Openly acknowledging and accepting our faults

  • Creating and sustaining motivation in engineering teams

    Energizing and uplifting your direct reports

  • Building and conveying vision

    Until a certain point in your career you’re likely to be told the strategy for your company. If you need guidance, you’re able to look up to the people above you.

  • Taking risks in production

    Being an engineer, we all have at least one common thread: We like to build things. That is why writing code and architecting platforms that scale for millions of customers is appealing.

  • Avoiding “shiny object” syndrome when building software

    Technology is fast moving, and devops tools pop up like wildfire. Teams are desperate to solve their problems & often make implementation decisions based on word of mouth, “kick the tires” syndrome or superficial evaluations.

  • Designing effective OKRs

    When they work well, OKRs have the potential to be a powerful tool that can clarify vision at all levels of the business, all while providing autonomy for smaller functions to set their own goals and objectives.

  • Finding potential in your interview processes

    Hiring engineers is hard. And with over half of C-suite executives saying that the future of their company relies on being able to source engineering talent, making the correct decisions about who to hire has the potential to transform the fortune of your company.

  • Tradeoffs on the road to observability

    SRE and infrastructure engineering are about allocating adequate time to do project work that improves the long-term sustainability of our services. But what do we reward SREs for doing? Does your company have a culture of “not invented here” or the converse of “ask the consultants to design it for us”?

  • Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software

    If you think back to the work you were doing last year, it probably feels miles away – and that’s great! As engineers, we’re continually building and creating great new stuff – it’s what we do.

  • Investing in your accessibility workflow

    There’s no arguing that building accessible websites is a force for good. Everyone, regardless of ability or disability, ought to have the right to participate on the web.

  • Powerful questions and active listening

    As leaders in technology, we’re problem-solvers. We’re practiced in having good answers, and we are often promoted based on our ability to provide the “right answers” – solutions to business problems. But what about asking the “right questions”?

  • I’m newly remote under coronavirus, AMA

    In this session, we’ve assembled a group of engineering leaders who have had their working life affected by coronavirus. Attendees will have the opportunity to pre-submit questions to the panel to understand how this has changed the way they’re working, how they recommend making the switch, and how to mitigate the tensions that will initially occur.

  • Strategies for Rapidly Pivoting to Remote Work

    Over 74% of engineering teams now have team members who work remotely. And while remote work has the potential to bring many benefits, it also has unique points of tension that, if handled incorrectly, can damage the health of your team.

  • Leading Engineering Teams Through Times of Uncertainty

    At the core of an engineering managers’ role is the responsibility to ensure the happiness of your teams. As a leader, you’re expected to shield your teams from outside noise and create a stable environment for work – but what happens when there are situations too big for you to resolve?

  • Engineering leadership in the time of coronavirus

    As unprecedented situations occur, as a company it is your duty to ensure the safety of your employees. As such, you’ve made the decision to work remotely; you’ve made sure everyone’s safe and that they can connect to your systems. Their Instant Bloomberg (IB) dots are green.