ELC Annual 2023

Engineering leaders today are faced with the aftermath of a global pandemic, a challenging macroeconomic environment, and a huge change in working patterns. Conventional wisdom on onboarding to new roles and building high-performing teams is not enough when faced with these challenges. Join Rajashree to learn the leadership lessons hard-earned in driving successful engineering transformation under chaos and uncertainty.

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.

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.

In this session, you’ll learn how to save 95% of your time on test automation by leveraging breakthroughs in Generative AI and move 90%-100% of the work to the product management organization. We’ll cover how to improve SDLC to allow you to move up to 30% faster with up to 90% less bugs in production, and how Generative AI can be helpful to eliminate 98% of the effort on maintaining end-to-end tests.

Inspiration starts with inclusion. As a visual discovery platform with over 460M global users, Pinterest is committed to engineering an inclusive product experience where users can see themselves represented. Join Pinterest’s Jeremy King (SVP of Engineering and CTO) and Pedro Silva (Senior Machine Learning Engineer and Inclusive AI Tech Lead) in a conversation about the technical opportunities and challenges in building empathetic AI and inclusive technology.

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.

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.

Generative AI is transforming how we design software. This session covers how different engineering organizations are evolving their software development process to optimize for & be more effective with new AI tools. They’ll also share their approach to inputs and prompts to better leverage AI tools. Featuring Scott Werner (CEO & Founder @ Sublayer) Tony Ren (head of Risk Engineering @ Brex), Daniela Miao (Co-founder & CTO @ Momento) & Luis Fernando De Pombo (Co-founder & CEO @ Alan Technologies).

We write software for an uncertain world. From agile development to progressive delivery, we've built software delivery practices around the assumption that we'll build the wrong thing *and* we'll build it wrong. So we optimize for fast feedback and adjust on the fly. But how do you architect a system if you're not sure what you're building? In this fireside chat, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber will explore the role of architecture in the face of ambiguity–from identifying the things you *do* know to designing systems centered around change. With a focus on deeply understanding your domain and your business, this chat will venture into DDD, system evolution, technology choices, and how to put your energy into the most impactful decisions.

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.

Generative AI is changing the way we work and will disrupt most industries. This means that technology leaders need to be prepared for change and develop new skills and competencies in order to lead their organizations through (and beyond) this disruption. In this session, I will discuss what the likely changes are, what new requirements leaders will have, and how you can start developing the competencies you need to lead in this next generation of technology leaders.

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.

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.

Developer productivity is a matter of business efficiency. But fixating on metrics like cycle time and speed to ship reduces software development to a chore – especially at a time when developers are expected to do a lot more than code. As leaders, we must ask ourselves: are my developers actually experiencing the joy of creation that brought them here in the first place? Atlassian believes fostering developer joy is the secret to reconnecting them with the love of the craft by removing friction and empowering teams. After all, happy developers aren't simply more efficient – but the passion they pour into their work results in better software. Atlassian’s Head of Engineering, Preeti Kota, will share the key ingredients (and challenges) to creating a culture of developer joy in any organization, including how leaders can achieve executive buy-in and elevate it as a company-wide goal.

Are you delighted or frustrated about your and your team’s relationship with Product Management? Do you get the customer perspective and guidance you need to innovate and develop compelling solutions for your business? If you’ve ever dwelt on these questions, this session is for you. Come hear from two seasoned tech industry leaders, Barbara Nelson and Laura Fay, representing Engineering and Product Management respectively, discuss the ideal partnership between a Product Manager and their Engineering counterpart. Based on their decades of experience and industry research, Barbara and Laura will discuss the impact of an excellent PM/EM relationship on the overall product development process, and conversely, the broad impact that a poor PM/EM relationship can have. They will discuss how to ensure that your PM/EM will be most effective, pitfalls to avoid, and some of the best practices that they have put in place to achieve this.

In this presentation, Lawrence will cover the tensions that arise in an engineering team as a startup transitions from the “0 to 1” stage into a stage of growth, customers, and company building, and how you, as an engineering leader, can navigate the pitfalls and set your team up for success! To view the sildes for this session, click here: https://hubs.la/Q026N03q0

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.

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!

At any rapidly scaling company, there comes a point when engineering and go-to-market leaders clash -- this can be a healthy tension, but it's imperative that companies find balance. This session will cover strategies to help eng and product leadership better partner and collaborate with GTM leads to deliver impact on business growth. Topics will range from what input GTM should have on the product roadmap, how to maintain innovation as a company scales, anti-patterns to stay away from, and tactics for collaboration.

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.

With the recent advances in Generative AI technology and the new generation of LLMs, many products can now layer “AI” features very quickly into existing and new products to provide domain-specific ChatGPT-like experiences fairly quickly. There are countless new startups racing to market with products, while incumbents are adding GenAI features at a breakneck speed. But does that mean that there’s essentially no moat around these AI features? While the no-moat was a prevailing perception in the early GenAI days, it’s becoming clear, at least to us at Lexion, that this is not entirely true, and that a lot of data, intellectual property, and technology investments are still very much necessary to build compelling GenAI applications, especially for quality-sensitive domains. In this presentation, Emad shares his team’s experience in building and evolving one of the first GenAI applications and the first in the end-to-end contract lifecycle management space.

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.

Drawing on a long career working on B2C products and a recent dive into B2B, we’ll take a look at differences in execution cadence, business constraints, and the skill sets required for success in these two worlds.

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.

Leading engineering teams at GitHub in the fast-paced, ever-changing space of AI development while building GitHub Copilot, the first at-scale AI pair programmer used by millions of developers today, requires adaptability, technical expertise, and visionary guidance. In this fireside chat, Scott Densmore will share how GitHub is leading the charge on AI for developers, including how GitHub blends software engineering and data science to bring AI further into all areas of the GitHub Platform and how GitHub Copilot is empowering developers globally to build with AI. You’ll walk away with an understanding of how GitHub builds with AI, how AI can boost productivity amongst your engineering teams, and best practices for how you can introduce AI within your own organization to supercharge engineering teams.

Scaling beyond early market fit presents unique challenges - Where’s the highest leverage? How do you build things that scale & avoid getting stuck with 1000+ MVPs? How do you manage increasing orders of complexity in your teams and product? Where are the greatest opportunities for real vs. perceived velocity? In this session, Marck Robinson, VP of Engineering @ Brex, will unpack strategies for sustaining velocity and efficiency, offering a roadmap to fuel your organization's journey to enterprise scale. Marck shares actionable insights from his experiences operating at massive scale at places like Microsoft Azure, New Relic, and now, Brex.

How are AI-driven tools revolutionizing efficiency, creativity, and problem-solving in the world of software development? What are the innovations evolving and reshaping how developers create, collaborate, and iterate? What are the potential barriers to adopting new, transformational tools? Join Ashmeet Sidana (Chief Engineer @ Engineering Capital), Lalit Wadhwa (EVP & CTO @ Encora) & Abbas Haider Ali (GP at GTM Operators Network & VP Customer Success @ GitHub) for a conversation on Generative AI & the future of developer tools!

For high-level engineering leaders, navigating the onboarding of new talent into a company's existing legacy codebase is a universally recognized challenge. As a critical stage, the onboarding process not only shapes the efficiency and integration speed of teams but also greatly influences the overall success of projects. This talk seeks to dissect these challenges, highlighting their impact on team productivity and organizational innovation. In this talk, I'll be your guide through the twists and turns of the codebase onboarding journey. By sharing real-life war stories and shedding light on common missteps, we’ll uncover the impact these hurdles can have on team spirit and company-wide innovation. But don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom. You'll walk away with a treasure chest of strategies, hands-on tools, and tested methods to not just survive but thrive amidst these challenges. Let's flip the script together, turning legacy codebases from a dreaded beast into a catalyst for success. This is about putting you, the leader, back in the driving seat - making onboarding a boost for your team's innovation, performance, and resilience.

In this session, we cover how AI Regulation will impact engineering leaders, data scientists, ML Engineers & Saas companies building AI/ML products. You’ll hear from Yu Pan (Executive VP, Chief Model Risk Officer @ US. Bank), Grace Chu (Former Senior Product Counsel, AI/ML @ Adobe Experience Cloud) Sushant Hiray (Sr. Director of Machine Learning @ Ring Central) & Remy Theiller (Head of Growth & Strategic Partnerships @ Vectice) about the coming wave of AI bills, models that fall under regulation, and what will be expected of data scientists & ML engineers. They'll share lessons from other regulated industries (like banking / finance). And in a world where most models will be regulated, you’ll hear what should you start doing today to set up smooth compliance.