Engineering Culture & Team Collaboration

One of the most important aspects of success is a team’s ability to collaborate – but it can also be one of the most challenging parts. In this episode, we’re highlighting a popular session ELC Annual 2024 on how to encourage collaboration, ultimately increasing productivity and creating more likely outcomes of success. This conversation features Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering @ Figma, and Arquay Harris, former VP of Engineering @ Webflow. This conversation also features a robust Q&A session from ELC Annual attendees on their most pressing collaboration questions – including diagnosing teams that are struggling to collaborate, how to measure the success of collaborative tools, strategies for building rituals / processes around collaboration, and much more.

“Leadership is about scaling problem-solving.” This challenge only intensifies when your company faces extreme hypergrowth needs. So, how do you scale your leadership to stay ahead of your company? How do you build a culture where people aren’t afraid to make mistakes, share opinions, and push for better ideas? How do you build teams and empower people to make decisions at scale? Thuan Pham (CTO of Faire, former CTO @ Uber & Coupang) & Franziska Bell (SVP Digital Technology @ bp) will share strategies behind leading through empowerment vs. fear. They’ll cover how to build a culture that encourages problem-solving without fear of making mistakes and how to empower employees to contribute ideas and make autonomous decisions. Plus they’ll discuss how to scale yourself, and scale your team alongside the growth of your company.

Join Marcel Weekes, VP of Engineering at Figma, for a conversation with Arquay Harris, former engineering leader at Webflow and Slack. Explore how collaborative team rituals—and tools—can create a more efficient and engaging engineering culture.

In this session, we explore lessons on engineering culture and operational excellence across experiences from large companies to startups with Shibani Sanan (CTO @ Ladder), Rakesh Rajan (VPE @ Rippling) & Thanos Diacakis (Software Engineering Effectiveness Coach & Technical Leader @ Cosmic Teacups)! They’ll share insights on scaling systems and platform strategy to encourage speed, innovation and to minimize dependencies. Plus perspectives on shaping culture for engineering and operational excellence covering expectations for managers, production operational reviews, rewarding excellence, prioritization and more.

Building, retaining and growing diverse teams is critical to creating the strongest organizations. Learn why and how to build strong teams from the start, how to retain and grow diverse teams, and ways to grow your own career as an engineering leader with Mikaela Smith (Fractional Head of People @ The New Club) and Nancy Wang (former Director of Product & Engineering / GM @ AWS). Presented in partnership with The New Club, a members-only network of 1,700+ women in engineering connecting members with the community and careers to excel.

True success in any workplace requires a commitment to our people. Pedro Canahuati (CTO @ 1Password) and Sue Nallapeta (CTO @ Trusted Health) will discuss how fostering happiness and emotional investment in work amongst engineering teams is vital for crafting exceptional products. Pedro will share ways to unlock happiness and engagement in engineering teams, uncover individual motivations, strategies to boost team engagement, and nurture a culture that embraces risk, failure, and exploration. You'll learn how to apply specific tactics to increase employee engagement, such as holding AMAs and conducting open and blameless postmortems after incidents.

When technology evolves, market conditions shift, or goals change, your culture often needs to transform too. But how do you change culture at a massive scale to maximize the opportunities these industry shifts create? In this fireside chat, Dave Richardson (SVP of Software & Services Engineering @ GM) and Kathryn Vandiver (Former VP of Engineering @ Quanata) discuss culture change at massive scale. They’ll discuss inspiring teams regardless of size, introducing a startup subculture of speed and action in established companies, and how to keep teams focused during industry or company transformations. Plus forming high-performing teams, how to push decisions down to scale, how to be decisive and blunt while maintaining focus and inspiration within the team, and how to earn and lead with respect vs. fear. Whether you’re a startup or an established company this session will equip you with insights to help you transform and evolve your culture.

Lakshmi Baskaran shares insights on impromptu communication, why it’s important, and a framework for successfully navigating these tricky situations! We also cover team topology and why it’s so important to have the right composition of product-minded vs. technical-minded engineers within any eng team. Lakshmi shares how prioritizing team topology will impact hiring, influence engineering culture, and aid in eng team reorgs / restructures. She also discusses what the future of AI looks like for executive eng leaders & what to consider when adopting AI practices / technologies. And to bring it all together, we dissect how Lakshmi’s Triple-A impromptu communication framework operates in the context of both team topology & AI adoption.