ELC Annual 2023

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 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.

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.

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.

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.