ELC Annual 2023

What’s it like to transition to a ‘Web3’ startup from the ‘Web2’ world? How do you ramp up and become proficient with the new technology? What parts of your engineering leadership experience translate across industries? What types of engineering verticals are in high demand? Join Li Fan (CTO @ Circle) and Sen Xu (VPE & CISO @ OKX) as they demystify the world of engineering leadership in Web3 companies! Li will share her experiences making the transition as an executive leader, how she quickly gained the right domain knowledge, the challenges she faced, and lessons learned about scaling Web3 engineering teams while maintaining agility and innovation!

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 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.

In this decade of expensive venture money, Dheeraj emphasizes the value of essentialism - the disciplined pursuit of less - for focused go-to-market strategies. He will share his insights and learnings on fostering customer-centricity across teams and removing information asymmetry between engineering, product, customer support, and sales. AI's potential, including simplifying tasks and leveraging knowledge graphs, empowers engineering teams to align with customer needs, reshaping product development and exceeding customer expectations.

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.

As a leader at any level, it is important to understand how you are making a wider, deeper, and bigger impact on the overall organization, not just the teams you lead. This session will immerse you in the concept of a First Team mindset. You’ll learn how to implement a First Team mindset in your organizational culture at multiple levels (from the executive team to front-line managers) and how to leverage the first-team approach to create more clarity, collaboration, and accountability, all to help you achieve greater organizational alignment, higher-performing teams, and overall employee engagement.

For high-level engineering leaders, navigating the onboarding of new talent into a company's existing legacy codebase is a universally recognized challenge. As a critical stage, the onboarding process not only shapes the efficiency and integration speed of teams but also greatly influences the overall success of projects. This talk seeks to dissect these challenges, highlighting their impact on team productivity and organizational innovation. In this talk, I'll be your guide through the twists and turns of the codebase onboarding journey. By sharing real-life war stories and shedding light on common missteps, we’ll uncover the impact these hurdles can have on team spirit and company-wide innovation. But don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom. You'll walk away with a treasure chest of strategies, hands-on tools, and tested methods to not just survive but thrive amidst these challenges. Let's flip the script together, turning legacy codebases from a dreaded beast into a catalyst for success. This is about putting you, the leader, back in the driving seat - making onboarding a boost for your team's innovation, performance, and resilience.

From his early career at Disney Imagineering, Samir always tried to bring a 'full stack' mindset to solving problems. At Imagineering, the team thought about the ultimate 'story' they wanted to tell guests, and how to tell that story best via a combination of the senses: sight, sound, touch, and smell (usually not taste). Then, a small number of Imagineers -- often just 1 – would create an initial prototype. Thinking story-first and about the feeling you want to leave guests with has influenced the way Samir goes about solving problems, and forced him to think 'full stack'. In this talk, Samir will go over a few examples of full-stack problem-solving, and some frameworks you can apply to your work to help you break out of the engineering silo, and land the story with your customers.