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.

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.

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.

In an era where technological advancements hold immense promise, the disconnect between innovation and implementation has become increasingly apparent. Delving into the implications of this disconnect spanning industries and societies, the conversation will also investigate the emergence of a platform company model as a strategic solution - and how Autodesk has been able to successfully transform into that model. Fostering motivation and a sense of purpose within teams involves providing them with data that illuminates their impact. This data-driven approach also aids in identifying areas where teams require support and improvement. Simultaneously, the discussion centers on strategies for alleviating burdensome tasks and streamlining workflows, raising the question of how to effectively eliminate toilsome work from team responsibilities.

We all want to unlock innovation in our companies, and a powerful way to fuel your company’s innovation engine is by cultivating a “startup within a startup” culture! But how does this work? And how do you operationalize this culture into norms, behaviors, and habits to produce greater innovation? Naveen Kondapalli shares his perspective on staying ahead through a culture of innovation, how to build smaller teams with autonomy, how to spin up multiple products, quickly spin down bets that didn’t work, and validate your hypothesis in areas beyond your expertise. Plus how to navigate the innovator’s dilemma while not losing focus on the core business.

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.