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.

Leading B2B companies like Verkada, Ramp, Rippling, and Brex are now leveraging engineering for remarkable growth - But for most engineering leaders, this is an area of the business we don’t typically impact, yet there’s a huge opportunity for engineering to play a transformative role in driving growth and revenue! Join us as we explore case studies on how eng leaders can leverage growth engineering in B2B sales, and the emerging fusion of Engineering and AI in sales to help you expand engineering’s impact and ROI on the business!

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.

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.

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.

Why should you stay in startup companies your entire career? How do you identify, evaluate, and decide on the right startup opportunity? How do you navigate and endure the tumultuous operating environment? This fireside chat between serial startup engineering leader Claire Hough (CTO @ Getlabs) and Ali Irturk (VPE @ CommerceHub) covers why and how Claire stayed in startup companies for her long-standing career - we’re talking at 12+ startups! Learn how to keep the excitement, engagement, and resilience through the ups and downs of startups. Plus how to set the right goals for yourself, ask the right questions, and find the right role that enriches you throughout your career.

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.