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.

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.

Claus Moberg, VP of Engineering at Roblox, has scaled his engineering team from a group of eight to a team of 300+ in a short timespan -- all while hiring for roles and addressing technical challenges that have never been solved before. In this fireside chat, Claus will share engineering leadership lessons learned, tips for engineering leaders starting to scale their teams, and insights on how Roblox has implemented a unique, unbiased system and cognitive assessment for selecting the best technical talent.

This session explores how to use automations throughout the SDLC to reduce toil and improve the developer experience. We’ll discuss what are the different types of toil and how they show up across different types of engineering teams, how to prioritize different types of toil based on your context, what you can do to address toil, automation best practices to reduce toil, emerging tools addressing toil, and critical opportunities in the developer experience to automate / reduce toil.

Our brains, like computers, have capacity, limits, and programming that drive us, limit us, and create our emotional reality. If they are overloaded things heat up and without the right cooling systems, will eventually fry the entire machine. Optimizing our lives is critical for lasting, productive, and enjoyable function. While this is as much (or more) art than science, we can achieve greater function and balance by investing a bit of time and thought towards creating a personal decision matrix to better understand where we should and should not spend time to achieve our personal goals. ⁃ Values - Identify your core values and drivers ⁃ Vision - Get clear on your vision for your life ⁃ Goals - Set goals that align with your values ⁃ Priorities - Force yourself to stack rank, it’s critical ⁃ Boundaries - Know your ‘no’s’ and stick to them ⁃ Flexibility - Become comfortable with changing things ⁃ Hygiene - Regular self-check-ins to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what’s not aligned with the life you want Join Chris Cravens and Shobhana Ahluwalia for a candid, insightful, and interactive fireside chat as they discuss their experiences and varying levels of success in creating balance as leaders in dynamic, high-growth environments.

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.

Drawing on a long career working on B2C products and a recent dive into B2B, we’ll take a look at differences in execution cadence, business constraints, and the skill sets required for success in these two worlds.