Engineering leadership can be a difficult and sometimes lonely job… But there are a few things you can do to make it easier! This session with Andrew Lau (CEO @ Jellyfish) & Patrick Gallagher (Head of Experience @ ELC) will cover the dynamics that often isolate eng leaders and important sources of internal & external support you can build. Plus they’ll share approaches & key conversations to help your cross-functional peers become more empathetic and better understand the world of engineering!

Learn about how to define a global site strategy, frameworks for picking sites, and optimizing for long-term outcomes. Ankur will share models, and real-world examples and metrics from their experience.

Leaders who scale teams are constantly faced with a tension between control and agency, ensuring that everyone follows a common plan on one hand, and avoiding micromanagement on the other. Join Marco to learn how Noom's Engineering team achieves these objectives through the application of a principles-based approach that ensures great alignment with lightweight supervision.

Just a year ago, the future of work was often described as one that existed beyond office walls where anyone could work from anywhere. Unknown to all of us then, a pandemic would strike the globe quickly accelerating the future of work to the present-day realities that we see today. The world isn’t going to go backwards in time now that we’ve seen the future. How do leaders adapt to the challenges of building distributed teams in this new reality? In this panel, we discuss the challenges leaders face in building distributed teams and explore solutions.

The global pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and collaborate together. Effectively building and managing teams remotely has gone from an aberration to the norm, and is now more critical than ever. Join a discussion between Prachi Gupta, Discord’s head of engineering and former head of LinkedIn’s feed, and Minal Mehta, head of product management for Next Billion Users (NBU) at YouTube, as they talk about taking over the “virtual” reins of a distributed workforce, her approach to building diverse teams, and her mission to make tech a place where women and people of color thrive.

This talk will offer practical insight into how leaders can scale the values of agile across an enterprise. Despite near universal recognition that we live in a complex and interconnected world, most organizations are still using industrial age management practices. In today's world, where the future rewrites itself in the time it takes to type 140 characters, a fundamentally different leadership style is required for success. Dave will share his experiences building adaptability across a wide range of organizations. His presentation will draw on his 13 year career as a Navy SEAL and 10 years of business expertise helping technology companies lead complex technical programs at scale.

Jason shares communication best practices, the signs of ineffective communication, and other effective protocols for leading distributed teams. He also identifies common challenges found with remote workforces as well as how to align, motivate, and manage distributed teams of engineers to achieve the best results possible.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies around the world to operate remotely, with employees temporarily working from home and relying on Zoom and Slack to collaborate. But what would it mean for a company to work this way permanently? In this conversation, Adam D’Angelo, the founder and CEO of Quora, and Ozzie Osman, co-founder of Monarch Money, will discuss Adam’s decision to make Quora a “remote first” company. They’ll talk about the factors that informed the decision, what it means to be “remote first”, and what opportunities and challenges the company has seen so far.