In this session, Jonathon will discuss why Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of the most successful relationships, product teams, and organizations. He will provide a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product initiatives fail or underperform. Next, he will highlight how top-performance digital product companies build alignment to inform effective product strategy and empower product teams to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

Starting with the announcement of OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 in April of this year, enthusiasts and research engineers alike have generated a tidal wave of interest in the latest quantum-leap ML advances for Generative AI—particularly for forms of human expression. DALL·E 2 pioneered a new AI technique known as Diffusion Models: learning from a huge range of photography and visual expression on the open web, then “denoising” an initial input of random noise, while using the power of Transformers to structure how the resulting image evolves based on an input prompt. Over the last 6 months, DALL·E 2 has attracted enthusiastic supporters (and a few critics, as with any new disruptive technology) in artistic, engineering, and research communities. That’s because these models power new forms of expression, including techniques that work “backwards” from images to understand the concepts the model “sees”. In this panel, we’ll compare and contrast the impact that Generative AI has had across a wide range of products and tasks, from the impact on the field of software engineering, to the workflows adopted in creative fields. We’ll also talk about the impact on curation and community on the web, and how the act of discovery and inspiration might change with workflows powered by Generative AI.

Cash App’s engineering team has historically had a very bottom-up culture where teams are chartered with constraints and goals, and are empowered to achieve those goals however they choose. And while we share a lot of technical foundations, such as service containers, frameworks, common/shared infrastructure, tooling & developer experience, teams may choose to adopt different tools, vendors, technologies, architecture or programming languages & paradigms if this allows them to achieve their goals more quickly or efficiently. However, while this approach has allowed us to build a successful business, as we’ve grown in scale to almost 1,000 engineers, it has started to show signs of failure, and manifests as overchoice, confusion, redundancy, and lack of leverage. In this presentation we will walk you through some of the history of Cash App’s engineering team, how we developed the culture that we have, our successes, and the unique challenges that this causes. We’ll talk about how we’re approaching solving them with a high level of engagement & alignment across our entire engineering team.

Media and e-commerce companies intuitively understand the necessity of storytelling, but the practice of narrative crafting is still developing for Machine Learning teams. Storytelling is a superpower, and one that leading technologists must acquire to effectively lead teams. Building a high-functioning ML team means uniting perspectives–on data value, on MLOps, and on how your problem domain evolves. Using examples from Scale AI, including work with media and e-commerce, Vijay will articulate how to structure your ML team's story–in a way which is both inclusive, and committed to solving the world’s most pressing challenges.

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.

The last two years have been monumental in terms of the impact current events have had on modern business. But even before the impetus of COVID-19, there was already a more fundamental transformation taking place with the rise of the developer. Every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. Join us for a discussion with Navin Chaddha, Managing Director at Mayfield, Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO at DevRev and former Founder, CEO & Chairman at Nutanix, and Nikil Viswanathan, Co-Founder & CEO at Alchemy for a discussion on dev-first, product-led growth, and web3 trends. What kinds of platforms and business models are thriving in today’s modern cloud-first companies? Where do developers come into the picture? And what will lead the way tomorrow?

As leaders, we make a thousand decisions every day. Clear, high-quality decisions are one of the best gifts we can give our teams. So how do we ensure we’re making good decisions? Success doesn’t depend on perfection, it’s about making a series of good decisions at the right time. So let’s talk about the anatomy of good decisions, the right timing for a decision, and how to make them stick. And most importantly, let’s look at how to delegate decision making effectively, provide autonomy, and make that unscary for your team, too. I will share examples from my experience as an engineering leader, and we'll talk about building a decision-making framework that’s right for you.

In this session, we explore the leadership journey of Cal Henderson and the different ways he had to evolve as “force multiplier” through the different phases and scales at Slack. We cover the early days of eng leadership at Slack, different inflection points/phases & scales at Slack where Cal needed to scale-up or transform his approach to leadership, and how “thinking like an engineer” helped him become a force multiplier for the company. Plus we discuss debugging management (and other topics).