We spend a lot of time planning. Your leadership expects you to have a plan. PMs develop a product roadmap in partnership with Engineering. Your team expects you to communicate what they’ll work on. There are many methodologies to help drive organizational alignment around proactive planning. However, consider how much effort goes towards unplanned work! How many of your senior engineers are working on things that are not on a list? Customer issues, production incidents, incremental tooling/polish, etc. are all things you can’t put on a roadmap, but benefit immensely from increased awareness and communication. In this session we’ll talk about strategies for how to handle the unplanned, the reactive, and the low-severity incremental work that is normal and healthy for a fast-moving team.

As you go from Engineering Manager, to Director, to VPE, your role fundamentally changes. As your responsibilities grow, you need to evolve as a leader. This evolution also necessitates what you focus on, and more importantly, what you don't! Join Nidhi for this talk to hear what this journey looks like and how you can get prepared. This will be a fun and interactive session. Be ready to walk away with a leadership roadmap.

At the beginning of 2020 Discord was a small SF-based startup with millions of users and a small team of engineers. Prachi was just hired as head of engineering…and then the world changed. Today, Discord is a hybrid company with 150 million users and hundreds of engineers distributed across the U.S. In this session, Prachi will take us through her journey of evolving a beloved product during the pandemic, expanding her family, and growing the team, while still remaining agile and focused on building belonging and community. She will share strategies on execution, lessons learned through startup trials, and how to give away your Legos.

How to combat imposter syndrome and build the project of your dreams What would you do if you were not afraid? Studies show that women tend to be more cautious and less self-assured than men in their career decisions. Fear of imperfection, being not able to live up to the expectations of the job, or making mistakes is what often holds us back. But growing in your career requires taking risks. Every successful leader has stories about how their failures led to their success, but sometimes we forget that process happens at every stage of our careers, and in every part of the organization as well as outside of it — in our day-to-day lives. In this session, our panelists — influential women leaders in tech — will talk about how overcoming fears, accepting risks, and making bolder moves have helped them excel in their careers.

Your product is great, gaining traction and your team is growing fast - great news! But success like this opens up a new class of challenges and requires an expanded set of leadership/management skills that both you and your team must develop. This fireside chat with April Chang and Charley Ho will explore early-stage growth challenges like how to grow people into new roles, set first-time managers up for success, transition into a manager-of-managers, teach your team to recruit, and introduce layers without slowing down decision-making!

Stripe CTO David Singleton shares insights from the first decade-plus of the company's history, from building the Stripe API to launching its remote-first engineering hub in 2019. Learn how the company has approached the challenges of managing change, growing its product ecosystem, and keeping a laser focus on the end-user experience.

If you ever find yourself staring at a screen not knowing how to even start an important presentation this session is for you! In this talk I underscore the importance of storytelling in public speaking. It’s filled with tips on how to craft a narrative and get your point across in a way that feels natural for you.

We’re all looking for ways to improve engineering productivity - so what’s the secret behind great teams? This session with Cyrus Radfar and Ali Irturk unpack some of the invisible elements of culture that can cause dramatic increases in engineering productivity. They’ll cover how to increase ownership and empathy, what creates the right environment driving great documentation, and how to align incentives to help you release faster and with higher quality!