ELC Annual 2023

2022 has seen tremendous headcount reduction. There’s also a clear shift from growth at all costs to profitability. Embracing the constraints is paramount for you, your org, and your company. In this session, Madhuri will cover lessons learned through her experiences of running product and platform engineering organizations at Carta and Clover. We will explore strategies to structure teams, prioritize product vs platform initiatives, invest in the right tech stack, and tackle tech debt.

Generative AI is the "it" productivity tool of the moment, but we're still at the very early stages of incorporating it into everyday workflows. In this session, Shailesh Kumar, SVP of Engineering at ClickUp, and Kelly Ehret, Latitude, will contemplate how engineering teams can take advantage of the "Era of AI" and use it to optimize and accelerate their work. Specifically, Shailesh can share his own experience as an engineering lead at ClickUp, offering anecdotes and advice on how generative AI has helped his team work more collaboratively across departments. He will also share his perspective on encouraging more AI adoption across teams and how to measure success. Listeners will walk away from this session with a tactical understanding of how to motivate engineers to use AI in their day-to-day to achieve meaningful productivity gains.

Leading engineering teams at GitHub in the fast-paced, ever-changing space of AI development while building GitHub Copilot, the first at-scale AI pair programmer used by millions of developers today, requires adaptability, technical expertise, and visionary guidance. In this fireside chat, Scott Densmore will share how GitHub is leading the charge on AI for developers, including how GitHub blends software engineering and data science to bring AI further into all areas of the GitHub Platform and how GitHub Copilot is empowering developers globally to build with AI. You’ll walk away with an understanding of how GitHub builds with AI, how AI can boost productivity amongst your engineering teams, and best practices for how you can introduce AI within your own organization to supercharge engineering teams.

Scaling beyond early market fit presents unique challenges - Where’s the highest leverage? How do you build things that scale & avoid getting stuck with 1000+ MVPs? How do you manage increasing orders of complexity in your teams and product? Where are the greatest opportunities for real vs. perceived velocity? In this session, Marck Robinson, VP of Engineering @ Brex, will unpack strategies for sustaining velocity and efficiency, offering a roadmap to fuel your organization's journey to enterprise scale. Marck shares actionable insights from his experiences operating at massive scale at places like Microsoft Azure, New Relic, and now, Brex.

In this presentation, Lawrence will cover the tensions that arise in an engineering team as a startup transitions from the “0 to 1” stage into a stage of growth, customers, and company building, and how you, as an engineering leader, can navigate the pitfalls and set your team up for success! To view the sildes for this session, click here: https://hubs.la/Q026N03q0

In this session, you’ll learn how to save 95% of your time on test automation by leveraging breakthroughs in Generative AI and move 90%-100% of the work to the product management organization. We’ll cover how to improve SDLC to allow you to move up to 30% faster with up to 90% less bugs in production, and how Generative AI can be helpful to eliminate 98% of the effort on maintaining end-to-end tests.

The choice between building an in-house solution and buying from a third-party never goes away. Engineering bandwidth is precious and there’s no shortage of SaaS options promising easy deployment and big returns. In this panel, experienced leaders get together to talk about how they tackle this challenge. We’ll go beyond the obvious and share how our panelists approach these decisions and reflect on the outcomes.

The GenAI WAVE will dramatically alter organizational structures, your customers, the market, your team's roles and needs, and yours. Waiting to “see how it plays out” is simply not an option for leaders and companies that want to survive it. Why not lead it? Join Andrew Lau (not ChatGPT) as he discusses the evolving roles of engineering as the toolsets change, the changing demands of the engineering function as the industry leverages GenAI, case study on how CoPilot truly impacts an engineering team's productivity, the shifts in leadership requirements and skill sets from hiring to the boardroom, how to use experimentation and empirical data to learn what works for your org and what doesn’t, and why it’s more important than ever to highlight and protect innovation. Transformative technology will continue to change the world, but supporting it with empirical data is essential. And even more importantly, this is all happening right now; if you aren’t paying attention, you must.