In this panel discussion, engineering and recruiting leaders from Stripe, Facebook, Dropbox and Sequoia will talk about their experiences managing and maintaining quality hiring during hypergrowth—how to grow beyond your core networks, how to work with recruiting, how to hire faster through expanding to new geographies, and more.

What really separates the best product teams from the rest? In the best product companies, rather than silos with product management responsible for "requirements," product design responsible for wireframes, and engineering responsible for code, there is a very different working relationship - one where the three disciplines collaborate both in understanding the problem, as well as discovering the necessary solution. In this talk we'll describe what this means in practice, and how this impacts the role of engineering, and the resulting level of consistent innovation.

Hiring is often touted as the biggest priority of an engineering leader, but in practice, both high-level strategy and day-to-day tactics are usually handled by the recruiting team. Is this the right approach? What do the numbers tell us? In this talk, Aline will dig deep into hiring funnel data to quantify the opportunity cost of engineering leaders taking a backseat in hiring and outline the best way to maximize ROI on very limited time and resources -- as an engineering leader how do you best allocate these to maximize hires while minimizing interruptions, lost engineering time and productivity, and bad decisions? Should engineers actually do sourcing? How can just a few hours of involvement from engineering leadership drastically increase close rates? How do you build an actually productive relationship with your recruiting team where you each play to your strengths? Aline has been on all sides of the hiring table (engineer, engineering manager, head of talent) and will leverage both my experience and industry hiring funnel data to lay out exactly what role engineering leadership should play in recruiting and how engineering leadership can build the best hiring process for their org from day one.

As an engineering leader today, the war for talent understates the bigger challenges you face. The landscape is littered with new competitors who are fighting for the same talent you are trying to acquire and keep. While your mission and culture may have been enough to win, now compensation and rewards are becoming an inordinate challenge and stress in many cases. Figuring out how to acquire talent you need in a reasonable timeframe without alienating or losing your existing talent is a daily worry. There is no one right answer, especially as a company scales. Ashish Raina will lead a conversation with a few engineering leaders to uncover strategies that work and pitfalls to avoid as you build the rewards pillar in your engineering culture. Among other topics, we will discuss how to overcome challenges when others can pay more, how to communicate your rewards and how to build a framework for career development and mobility through levels.

From tough 1:1 conversations to term sheet negotiation to rallying up a team to take on the world, it all comes down to communication in leadership. Executive coach to Silicon Valley's top CEO, Alexis Rask, will share her insight into how leaders can master communication to drive success.

Super Bowl 2020 set a new record for peak concurrent live streams while also offering the content at a new quality bar - UHD HDR - for the first time. For Fox Sports, this meant 5X'ing its previous platform record on the highest stakes day of the year when several things broke, but customers never knew! In this talk, Melody Hildebrandt, EVP of Engineering at FOX, will share lessons learned from preparations to deliver this event digitally - from architecting a highly scalable API tier to aligning 20+ technology partners against a common objective.

Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with a pair of pliers? While you may succeed eventually, the process is inefficient and frustrating because you’re using the wrong tool. The same holds true for developers who try to work with application performance management (APM) solutions to monitor mobile and web applications. Because these solutions are designed for DevOps and infrastructure teams to monitor backend systems and performance, they don’t provide the insights developers need into release stability, errors, and how these are impacting the customer experience. Then there are application stability management (ASM) solutions, which are built specifically for engineering organizations. ASM provides actionable insights into how stable the application is, where bugs exist, and how to improve the end user experience. Join James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag, as he explains the differences between the two solutions and outlines the benefits organizations can achieve when APM and ASM are provided to the right teams.

Just a year ago, the future of work was often described as one that existed beyond office walls where anyone could work from anywhere. Unknown to all of us then, a pandemic would strike the globe quickly accelerating the future of work to the present-day realities that we see today. The world isn’t going to go backwards in time now that we’ve seen the future. How do leaders adapt to the challenges of building distributed teams in this new reality? In this panel, we discuss the challenges leaders face in building distributed teams and explore solutions.