Latest videos
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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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In partnership with HarnessHow can developer experience boost team productivity?
Want to learn some practical, realistic strategies that will make your developers’ jobs easier and more enjoyable?
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How to balance technical direction and leadership work
But as is often the case in business, priorities constantly shift and where you focus your efforts will too. So how do you strike the right balance between working on the technical direction of the business and those tasks that require you to put your leadership hat on?
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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.
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What’s my job again? Developing self-management
The more we move up the org chart, the less input we’ll get from our own managers, and the more we need to expand our range as a leader to be successful.
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Mentorship + Sponsorship
To grow our technical leadership skills, it’s critical to lean on one’s network of support.
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If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem
Do you feel like you’re constantly surrounded by managers who exhibit toxic behaviours and “shred their team’s confidence” (actual quote)? Diverse and inclusive policies may not be enough to stop these individuals from causing harm.
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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Dealing with times when change isn’t happening
There are times when someone on your team will approach you saying that something needs to change, maybe it’s a piece of company culture or a practice.
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Difficult listening and having difficult conversations
As leaders, we talk often about offering good feedback and direction, but we often fail at its deceptively difficult counterpart—the craft of listening. How can you better understand the underpinnings and science of a listening practice applied specifically to difficult situations—in which you have little opportunity to control the context—and build better skills for comprehensive, empathetic listening?
In this session, we will discuss tactics for supporting safe and open one-on-one spaces for listening and understanding constructively.
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Navigating organizational changes as an Individual Contributor: a matter of perspective
In this session, two speakers will give their perspectives on a situation involving a difficult conversation. One perspective will be from the manager, and the other from the person being managed.
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Imperfect Processes: Navigating the fuzzier parts
It may sound clear cut, but we know that no process is 100% foolproof and it’s much messier in the real world.
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A process is never done
In the final talk of this session, we’ll be exploring what happens when a process is no longer fit for purpose, how this can affect people’s jobs and their identities within an organisation, and how you can ensure the next process will be an improvement from the last.
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Scaling up sustainably through better processes
In this talk we’ll take a look at processes and scaling up, thinking about the types of processes that help to establish growth, when it’s too early or late to introduce a process, and the times you’d choose to not apply a process.
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What makes a good process?
In this talk, we’ll explain the how, what, and why of a good process and offer ways of thinking about defining and building processes. We’ll also discuss how to build in inclusion from the start.
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Developing teams at different levels
Engineering leaders at different levels of seniority reflect on what they’ve learned.
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Growing teams and culture with actionable feedback
We’ll consider why developing a strategy around delivering feedback is important, how feedback can be optimized for reception and action, and why the consistent delivery of positive, reinforcing feedback makes feedback of all types more impactful.
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On engineering impact
Tough technical problems are exciting to tackle and often engineers can think this is where they’re driving the most value.
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Harnessing the power of storytelling to become a better leader
When we’re talking to engineers about change, we often just talk about what the change will be and not the context, why it’s necessary, and why we think it will be successful.
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Crafting a mission and vision for your team
As you progress in seniority as a leader, the time horizon of your work progressively gets longer.
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Sponsored by: you
We’ll also explore how to sponsor individuals by raising their visibility in an organisation and providing them with opportunities.
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Why we must strive for belonging in our engineering orgs
Spotify’s focus on diversity has been the foundation of an enriched environment of culture, ideas, and innovative business solutions. However, diversity alone does not ensure open communication or retention in the workplace.
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Preparing your software engineering teams for times of financial uncertainty
Financial crashes are cyclical in nature and although we can’t predict the timing of the next crash, we know that they are an inevitability.
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Supporting employees through redundancies and business closures
Reality sometimes makes decisions for us. Teams and businesses come to an end or need to focus elsewhere. But lives go on…
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Living without pre-production environments
Historically when we developed large monolithic applications we had several ‘lower’ environments such as dev, test, staging, pre-prod for verifying different stages of our development life cycle. These were particularly used for manual testing – integration testing, gatekeeping, acceptance testing.
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Remote Inclusion in Distributed Engineering Teams
Increasingly, companies in business centres like London are combining offshore with local developers. Maximising the effectiveness in a mixed team environment is therefore critical to business success.
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Cracking the cadence of your software engineering 1:1s
One-to-ones provide perhaps your greatest opportunity to survey how well things are going with your team.
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Eliminating hero culture in software engineering teams
As a woman with a few years of experience in engineering I have often noticed that every team has a “Hero”, as I have been one myself. The hero is usually identified as the hardworking, highly talented and knowledgeable team member.
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Changing attitudes toward legacy code
Legacy is an inevitability in any business – systems that were once cutting edge naturally age, but still require careful maintenance. And although it’s important work, it can feel less rewarding than working on shiny new features.
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How simplifying software can save your engineering teams’ time
We’re conditioned to think from an early age that exciting things are the best. That attitude can extend to engineering, too.
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Creating efficient, accurate, software estimations
Estimating projects is hard. Whether it’s negotiating technical debt, understanding new requirements, or grappling with a lack of useful documents; the number of moving variables make it difficult to judge just how long a project will really take.
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Increasing your influence through building a professional network
Have you ever wondered why you aren’t having a bigger impact at work? Why your colleagues aren’t listening to your advice or why those next career opportunities aren’t coming your way? Stop wondering and start influencing.