ELC Annual 2022

So many times we focus on what we want but feel is outside our control: “If only personX would get things done on time!” “If only person Y would communicate more clearly!” “If only leadership would have listened to me the first time!” Yet, you have control over many things that you probably aren’t acknowledging - things like exercising control over your time, choosing when you say “yes” vs “no”, and communicating directly but still authentically. Realizing these things can help you become a more effective and impactful leader, regardless of your title or position. In this session, Megan will share lessons learned from throughout her career as an engineer and engineering leader at Google on how to act deliberately.

How to combat imposter syndrome and build the project of your dreams What would you do if you were not afraid? Studies show that women tend to be more cautious and less self-assured than men in their career decisions. Fear of imperfection, being not able to live up to the expectations of the job, or making mistakes is what often holds us back. But growing in your career requires taking risks. Every successful leader has stories about how their failures led to their success, but sometimes we forget that process happens at every stage of our careers, and in every part of the organization as well as outside of it — in our day-to-day lives. In this session, our panelists — influential women leaders in tech — will talk about how overcoming fears, accepting risks, and making bolder moves have helped them excel in their careers.

The playbook to grow in 2022 and beyond looks different from previous years. It’s never been more important to humanize yourself, your team, and your community. What are the payoffs when your team genuinely loves the product and builds from the customer point of view? How effective can you be if you enter hyper growth without a team that’s in-sync? Engineering leader Ludo Antonov has managed teams during massive growth periods at Hulu, Pinterest, Lyft, and now Whatnot, and will share his perspectives and lessons learned on growing an early engineering team, building community starting from onboarding, developing an engineering brand, and managing technical teams for a community-based product.

As leaders, we make a thousand decisions every day. Clear, high-quality decisions are one of the best gifts we can give our teams. So how do we ensure we’re making good decisions? Success doesn’t depend on perfection, it’s about making a series of good decisions at the right time. So let’s talk about the anatomy of good decisions, the right timing for a decision, and how to make them stick. And most importantly, let’s look at how to delegate decision making effectively, provide autonomy, and make that unscary for your team, too. I will share examples from my experience as an engineering leader, and we'll talk about building a decision-making framework that’s right for you.

The last two years have been monumental in terms of the impact current events have had on modern business. But even before the impetus of COVID-19, there was already a more fundamental transformation taking place with the rise of the developer. Every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. Join us for a discussion with Navin Chaddha, Managing Director at Mayfield, Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO at DevRev and former Founder, CEO & Chairman at Nutanix, and Nikil Viswanathan, Co-Founder & CEO at Alchemy for a discussion on dev-first, product-led growth, and web3 trends. What kinds of platforms and business models are thriving in today’s modern cloud-first companies? Where do developers come into the picture? And what will lead the way tomorrow?

We are in a shift toward people socializing with one another and sharing experiences with each other within immersive 3D environments. Companies that have been building big, reliable cloud systems to support social media and other web apps will need to adapt their tech stacks if they want to support these massive-scale 3D-social experiences. In this fireside chat, Roblox VP of Engineering Nick Tornow will talk about the evolving tech stack for the metaverse and how Roblox -- which has been building a platform for this space for over 15 years -- is leading the way as a specialized 3D Cloud provider for its community of over 54 million daily active users.

Starting with the announcement of OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 in April of this year, enthusiasts and research engineers alike have generated a tidal wave of interest in the latest quantum-leap ML advances for Generative AI—particularly for forms of human expression. DALL·E 2 pioneered a new AI technique known as Diffusion Models: learning from a huge range of photography and visual expression on the open web, then “denoising” an initial input of random noise, while using the power of Transformers to structure how the resulting image evolves based on an input prompt. Over the last 6 months, DALL·E 2 has attracted enthusiastic supporters (and a few critics, as with any new disruptive technology) in artistic, engineering, and research communities. That’s because these models power new forms of expression, including techniques that work “backwards” from images to understand the concepts the model “sees”. In this panel, we’ll compare and contrast the impact that Generative AI has had across a wide range of products and tasks, from the impact on the field of software engineering, to the workflows adopted in creative fields. We’ll also talk about the impact on curation and community on the web, and how the act of discovery and inspiration might change with workflows powered by Generative AI.

In this session, Jonathon will discuss why Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of the most successful relationships, product teams, and organizations. He will provide a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product initiatives fail or underperform. Next, he will highlight how top-performance digital product companies build alignment to inform effective product strategy and empower product teams to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

In this session, Loom VP Product Anique Drumright will break down the nuanced correlation between product and eng teams — and why companies often find themselves on the back foot after underinvesting in front-line engineering managers. She’ll outline why this is such a prevalent pitfall, what the most common blind spots are, and best practices for avoiding it. She’ll also talk about the importance of supercharging your engineering leaders — including instilling the skill of advocacy — so they can play an equally dominant role alongside product managers. Based on hands-on experience building hypergrowth teams, Anique will share successes and tough lessons learned when it comes to hiring execution, quality, and retention at fast-growth PLG orgs.

Leadership counts most when situations are most difficult. From economic downturns & layoffs, to turmoil in the C-suite, and even war - 2022 has been an extraordinary year to lead teams. How should leaders respond? How do you maintain trust, and keep your best people engaged? We'll talk through lessons learned from experiences which are rarely in management books, and the role played by activities which are, such as a strong mission statement, leading with empathy, and candid conversations.

As you think about scaling your product platform for hyper-growth, it is important to come up with a technical strategy that includes sequenced work streams and delivering customer value iteratively, ultimately converging with overall company goals, delighting customers, and growing the business. In this talk I’ll share some real-world learnings from Carta’s efforts around, coming up with such a strategy and executing on it.

As you go from Engineering Manager, to Director, to VPE, your role fundamentally changes. As your responsibilities grow, you need to evolve as a leader. This evolution also necessitates what you focus on, and more importantly, what you don't! Join Nidhi for this talk to hear what this journey looks like and how you can get prepared. This will be a fun and interactive session. Be ready to walk away with a leadership roadmap.

Whatnot Head of Growth Engineering and former Pinterest growth leader and entrepreneur Jeff Chang will discuss how to build an effective growth team from the earliest stages, how to structure that team, and how to ensure they drive maximum impact throughout the varying stages of growth to come.

Are you a team looking to deploy more frequently or implement Continuous Delivery? In this fireside chat, we'll discuss pragmatic and actionable steps to transform how your team delivers software so you can deploy to production many times a day. CEO and Co-founder of Sleuth, Dylan Etkin, has guided many teams, at scale, through this transformation. Come join us for a conversation filled with actionable advice that serves as a blueprint for using visibility, communication and pure process to supercharge your team's development processes and outcomes.

At the beginning of 2020 Discord was a small SF-based startup with millions of users and a small team of engineers. Prachi was just hired as head of engineering…and then the world changed. Today, Discord is a hybrid company with 150 million users and hundreds of engineers distributed across the U.S. In this session, Prachi will take us through her journey of evolving a beloved product during the pandemic, expanding her family, and growing the team, while still remaining agile and focused on building belonging and community. She will share strategies on execution, lessons learned through startup trials, and how to give away your Legos.

We spend a lot of time planning. Your leadership expects you to have a plan. PMs develop a product roadmap in partnership with Engineering. Your team expects you to communicate what they’ll work on. There are many methodologies to help drive organizational alignment around proactive planning. However, consider how much effort goes towards unplanned work! How many of your senior engineers are working on things that are not on a list? Customer issues, production incidents, incremental tooling/polish, etc. are all things you can’t put on a roadmap, but benefit immensely from increased awareness and communication. In this session we’ll talk about strategies for how to handle the unplanned, the reactive, and the low-severity incremental work that is normal and healthy for a fast-moving team.

Your team has increasingly good visibility into how users experience apps, from stability and performance metrics to product analytics. But, who decides when stability and performance is good enough and the team can focus on building new features? Join Bugsnag’s VP of Product, Duncan Hewett, for a discussion on how Product and Engineering teams can work together to balance competing priorities.

Great! You have hired a very technical and very senior staff engineer. Now, how do you decide which projects are best for this engineer? How do you keep such a technical engineer engaged? Do you give them more architectural work or hands on coding work? How do they work with your teams? This session is all about engaging and leveraging your most senior engineers. Having been a staff engineer and now managing them, I plan to share my successes and failures. By the end of the session, you should have some good models to bring back to your company.

Media and e-commerce companies intuitively understand the necessity of storytelling, but the practice of narrative crafting is still developing for Machine Learning teams. Storytelling is a superpower, and one that leading technologists must acquire to effectively lead teams. Building a high-functioning ML team means uniting perspectives–on data value, on MLOps, and on how your problem domain evolves. Using examples from Scale AI, including work with media and e-commerce, Vijay will articulate how to structure your ML team's story–in a way which is both inclusive, and committed to solving the world’s most pressing challenges.

Do you worry about breaking things every time you hear "move fast" and wonder how you can sustainably increase your team's velocity? How to create urgency without burning your team out? How to create pace while managing quality? Throughout her career, Fatemeh has led many zero-to-one teams in which speed has been crucial. She will share her learnings on how to increase a team's velocity sustainably.

There are so many different ways to grow in our industry, and one of the best potential shortcuts to turbocharge your growth is to join a hyper growth startup. You will be given responsibility beyond your title, you will wear many hats—you will experience a ton in a shorter, intense period of time. We’ll discuss ways to succeed at these startups: how to have a growth mindset, to keep an open-mind and optimize for learning above everything else. During your time at one of these companies, it's imperative to try and absorb the enthusiasm and knowledge that you will be able to glean from everyone around you, and to in-turn learn to foster and share your energy with others. We’ll also touch base on learnings beyond engineering: you will be in a position to influence cross functional partners—there are few other roles where you as a senior leader will have such a critical part to play in the running of the company.

What's helped you succeed in the larger company you are at / or left, seldom translates in the new smaller company you find yourself in. Embracing the differences and adjusting to the constraints is crucial for you, the team, and the company you join. In this session, we explore the mindset & leadership shifts required to make the transition from large established companies to startups. Vinod Marur shares about his journey from senior leadership at Google to becoming SVPE @ Databricks, how to look for opportunities, adopt the right mindset, effectively make the transition, and leverage your past learnings in a constructive way.

Advances in cloud infrastructure and the broad adoption of hybrid/remote work models have given organizations new options for driving productivity and operational efficiency. Now that so many devices are connected to our networks outside of the data center, we’re seeing a significant rise in security attacks around the world. Join us for a fireside chat with Anand Oswal, SVP, Network Security for Palo Alto Networks, to discuss how the cybersecurity industry is innovating with AI to respond to the changing threat landscape. One of the most exciting developments is adoption of Deep Learning techniques to stop attacks before they happen.

There is no better predictor of a leader’s success than the caliber and passion of their team. Leaders are measured by the output of their teams - and legendary leaders take pride in handcrafting their team. Despite having such a profound impact on one’s success, leaders often find it impossible to prioritize the warranted diligence. Handcrafting a team is tough. It takes grit, patience, and a lot of work. This provocative session will inspire you to go all in on building your team. We cover the fundamental building blocks to help you become an awesome recruiter, a source of energy for your existing team, and shaping the culture of your team.

How you look back and forward at your career will shape you. If you can learn to visualize the story of your future you can make choices today to grow to new heights. If you're exploring new opportunities, the way you pre-tell that story will help you to know if you've found your next right thing or not. In this session Lindsey will walk through his career journey and share tales of paths taken and not - how they look from the rear-view mirror and what the future holds at Vercel.

Cash App’s engineering team has historically had a very bottom-up culture where teams are chartered with constraints and goals, and are empowered to achieve those goals however they choose. And while we share a lot of technical foundations, such as service containers, frameworks, common/shared infrastructure, tooling & developer experience, teams may choose to adopt different tools, vendors, technologies, architecture or programming languages & paradigms if this allows them to achieve their goals more quickly or efficiently. However, while this approach has allowed us to build a successful business, as we’ve grown in scale to almost 1,000 engineers, it has started to show signs of failure, and manifests as overchoice, confusion, redundancy, and lack of leverage. In this presentation we will walk you through some of the history of Cash App’s engineering team, how we developed the culture that we have, our successes, and the unique challenges that this causes. We’ll talk about how we’re approaching solving them with a high level of engagement & alignment across our entire engineering team.

This session covers the career journey of Sri Viswanath, General Partner at Coatue and previous CTO of Atlassian, from engineering leader to venture and the lessons he’s learned along the way. Sri will share stories of the pivotal learning moments from his early career navigating the transition from IC to executive leadership, and insights from leading across small and large scale companies. He will also discuss how he translated his experience as an engineering leader into a career as a venture investor - and what you can do now to prepare yourself for a successful transition into a career in investing.

According to Gartner, only 53% of machine learning proofs of concept (POC) are ever scaled to production. Even fewer manage to deliver the intended and measurable business value. On the bright side, Gartner projects that by 2024, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI, driving a 5x increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures. Machine learning ops (ML Ops) is a practice and methodology for preparing, deploying and managing machine learning models in production. Productizing ML Ops is hard, but in reality, it’s a requirement for AI scalability and success. In this Q&A session, Sapta Girisa, Senior Director at Lohika and Capgemini Engineering will discuss key considerations for ML Ops, why it’s essential to AI scalability and how to accelerate your AI engineering.

In this session, we explore the leadership journey of Cal Henderson and the different ways he had to evolve as “force multiplier” through the different phases and scales at Slack. We cover the early days of eng leadership at Slack, different inflection points/phases & scales at Slack where Cal needed to scale-up or transform his approach to leadership, and how “thinking like an engineer” helped him become a force multiplier for the company. Plus we discuss debugging management (and other topics).

Working well across disciplines is imperative to shipping great products; however, this is rarely the case. Learn what’s going wrong and how to cultivate XFN teams from Naveen Gavini, who has led engineering, design, and product teams scaling Pinterest from small startup to a public company.