
Latest
-
Need-to-know tactics for managing up successfully
Managing up can be difficult – even more so when you have a distant leader. Here’s how to make the best out of the situation.
-
DEI crackdown sparks quiet tech rollback
LeadDev’s Engineering Leadership Report 2025 examines how political shifts and investor pressures are quietly reshaping DEI priorities across the tech industry.
-
Who is going to fill the engineering leadership vacuum?
As the tech industry continues its assault on middle management, staff engineers are being asked to step up.
-
In partnership with Octopus Deploy
Measuring productivity without freaking people out
How to keep a healthy culture when you put developers under the microscope
Editor’s picks
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.

Prices for all New York conferences increase on Monday, August 25 ⏰
Essential reading

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.
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.

Elevating your leadership skills during tough times
What skills do you need to be a great leader during economic uncertainty?

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.
More about Engineering Management
-
Being a highly sensitive engineering leader during uncertain times
Being a sensitive leader is an asset that can sometimes feel like a weakness. Learn how to harness sensitivity to help others through the current period of industry volatility.
-
Lessons learned from managing managers
Managing managers is fraught with dangers, here are some common mistakes to avoid when making the transition.
-
Values: The runbook for leadership
Using values you believe in as a runbook for difficult situations can make you a more consistent leader and help you build a healthier team.
-
An engineering leader’s guide to tackling change
Changes in priority, scope, or personnel can leave teams feeling unsettled. Knowing how to properly combat these shifts to improve performance and morale is a key skill when leading engineering teams.
-
Managing complex organizational change
Guiding your team through organizational changes isn’t straightforward. Luckily, there are some ways you may be able to streamline the process.
-
Three ways to develop contextual awareness as a leader
In a fast-changing world, with an equally shifting corporate landscape, leaders must take steps to cultivate the vital skill of contextual awareness.
-
Exercising foresight as an engineering leader
Preparing for future eventualities may seem impossible without a crystal ball, but there are some things you can do as a leader to exercise good foresight.
-
Demystifying managing managers
Transitioning from a manager to a manager of managers is harder than it looks. Here are some common misconceptions about making the step up in your engineering career.
Top Leadership videos
-
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.
-
The scrappy/scale mindset: A framework for sustainable engineering leadership
Learn how the Scrappy/Scale Mindset helps engineering leaders balance leadership styles, avoid burnout, and adapt to their teams’ needs for sustainable success.
-
Psychologically safe reliability management
Lesley explores the challenges of driving observability platform adoption in a multi-product organization, using a case study focused on production readiness for a General Election.
-
Starting from nothing
In this talk, Lawrence shares lessons learned from experiences bootstrapping teams. He’ll draw from experience at GoCardless as a Principal Engineer when leading efforts to build a new Open-Banking payment scheme, and more recently as the engineer who helped go from zero-to-release of the incident.io Status Pages and Catalog products.
-
Leading your team through a major refactor – don’t be a hero, be a leader
In this talk Dylan shares his experience leading a team through uncharted waters and the lessons learned along the way.
-
Beyond generic goodstuff: Helping teams navigate context
In the dynamic landscape of software engineering, there’s a pervasive allure to what Randall calls “Generic Goodstuff™” – universally lauded practices that seem like silver bullets to team improvement.
-
Creating technical leadership in context
This talk will cover how Joy and Nathan overcame challenges at Plaid through the creation of a technical leadership structure parallel to management.