When building digital products and enhancing user experiences through AI, gathering user feedback is crucial. However, traditional methods such as surveys often aren’t enough to generate explicit feedback. In this session, Amplitude's Shadi Rostami and Dusty Pierce will explore the important role that user behavior tools play in effectively capturing user feedback and improving AI models. The audience will walk away with an understanding of the challenges associated with gathering user feedback, how user behavior data can better inform our AI models, and how organizational shifts can also be an effective tool in orienting a company around CX. In this fireside conversation, Shadi and Dusty can also share practical insights and strategies for integrating user behavior tools into the development process.

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.

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.

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.

As the technical workforce becomes more diverse, managers and leaders are challenged to integrate junior engineers of different backgrounds and varying levels of technical knowledge and practical experience. It is important for engineering leaders to understand how to integrate and cultivate talent from such groups to build more cohesive and better-performing teams. Reprogramming higher education to create the most diverse generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders, CodePath partners with leading companies such as Amazon, Bloomberg, Capital One, Meta, Salesforce, and more, to expand their talent pipelines with industry-ready and diverse tech talent. Leaning on the expertise and experience of our engineering leadership partners, this fireside chat will provide engineering managers and team leads with the knowledge and real-world examples necessary to build internal cultures that allow junior engineers to hit the ground running and translate technical knowledge into practical experience. Attendees will walk away with actionable strategies and examples to help team leads build, retain, and cultivate diverse, early career talent to maximize team productivity.

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.

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.