Latest videos
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Leading leaders: Why your greatest strengths are your next blind spots
This talk challenges common assumptions and shares what it really takes to move from doing the work to enabling others to do it even better.
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No promotion. Now what!?
Explore how to navigate promotion denial with resilience, clarity, and strategy to reignite career growth and fulfillment.
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Try, try again
Learn why intelligent retries are essential for resilient systems, and how to implement them safely with proper limits and timing.
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Are we arguing or are we architecting?
Guiding technology decisions at scale is daunting for senior ICs. Spirited debates often feel like conflict, but they’re crucial. Learn to turn these clashes into collaborative, well-informed decisions. Are we arguing or architecting?
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Engineering excellence: New product development in medical devices
Lessons from leading a seven-year development of a NextGen SPECT/CT scanner, focusing on innovation, compliance, and team leadership.
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Reimagining the image pipeline at Squarespace
This talk explores the evolution of Squarespace’s image pipeline—why change was needed, how the architecture adapted for scale and flexibility, and the unique challenges faced along the way.
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Un-becoming the bottleneck
The biggest obstacle to team growth is often Staff+ engineers themselves. Breaking this pattern requires more than just “org-wide impact” it calls for deep, deliberate focus on growing 2-3 key engineers around you.
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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Letting the Best Ideas Win
In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.
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Doing “the most important thing” is a trap.
This talk is little about why you need to say No to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough.
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Filling the Void: Operating as a Staff Engineer in a Leaderless Scope
In this talk, we will detail our experiences as Staff Engineers functioning as Tech Leads, Glues and Facilitators in a leaderless role. We’ll discuss the real-world problems we faced, our solutions, and the lessons learned that allowed us to grow as leaders and as an organisation.
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Deming’s Wisdom for Staff+ Engineers: A Modern Take on Timeless Principles
In this talk, we’ll delve into how Staff+ Engineers can embody Deming’s timeless wisdom to enhance quality, productivity, and both employee and customer satisfaction within the modern engineering landscape.
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Architecting for scale: Revisiting fundamentals for sustainable growth
In this talk, Viktor challenges this approach by advocating for adaptability and a return to basics in system design.
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Influencing Through Getting Your Carrots In a Row
In this talk, I will go through some of the common incentives and motivators as well as real examples that I’ve encountered.
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Growing engineering managers: Breaking down the monolith
This talk will delve into the intricacies of being an effective engineering manager by dissecting the multifaceted role into distinct components. Chiranjiv will explore technical excellence, people management, and delivery, breaking down each aspect into manageable units that can be employed for evaluation and strategic planning.
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Engineering owns velocity
In this talk, I’ll explore what engineering leaders need to do to credibly own velocity and deeply align their work with the company strategy.
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In partnership with LinearBAchieving engineering velocity by optimising developer experience
Engineering teams face compounding pressures to meet business objectives while maintaining operational excellence. The last year, in particular, has forced engineering leaders to maximize productivity with limited resources, forcing them to search for solutions to improve engineering velocity.
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In anticipation of change: Strategies for engineering leaders to stay current and effective
One of the toughest challenges you face as an engineering leader is staying current while preparing yourself and your teams for change.
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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.
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Managing engineering teams in the era of AI
Drawing from my experience as Engineering Manager at incident.io, where I was part of a product team that built the company’s first AI-powered features, this talk combines personal insights and broader leadership strategies.
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How to set goals with people who don’t want to set goals
Setting goals does not come easy to everyone.
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The software bug all stars – and what we can learn from them
Join me for a thought-provoking and entertaining presentation where I’ll take you on a journey through some of the biggest and most impactful bugs in software history, including the example of an interplanetary probe launched by NASA that was lost due to a software bug. This will not only show the importance of attention to detail but also highlight the significance of proper testing and quality assurance.
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Managing the marathon: Leading teams through lengthy migration projects
In this short talk, Lawrence will reflect on his experience leading teams through multi-year migration projects.
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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.
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The Boss’s Shoes Don’t Fit: And Other Surprises of Leadership
Ever fantasized about wearing your manager’s shoes and calling all the shots?
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The Post Office Scandal: what we can learn from its process and human failures
The story of the Post Office scandal not only serves as a warning about tech failure, but also as a reminder of the real-world significance of the software we build.
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Iterate to Greatness: Building High Performance, AI-native Engineering Teams
In this talk, we’ll discuss how Vercel transitioned to an AI-native company and how you too can operate highly effective, AI-native product engineering teams, from the tools used to the way to stay organised amid the rapidly changing pace of AI.
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Making smart investments: A framework for maximizing your ROI in technical decisions
In this talk, we’re going to explore a framework for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of complex tech decisions, illustrated with real-world examples that highlight both the traps to avoid and the paths to success. I’ll share methods for pinpointing key metrics that matter, and how to design experiments or proof-of-concepts to measure ROI. Finally we will discuss the importance of staying objective and adaptable throughout the process.
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Data Science Demystified
This talk gives an overview of Data Science and delves deep into the pipeline data scientists use – right from fetching the data, the Python tools and frameworks used to creating models, gaining insights and telling a story.