In the fast-paced world of startups, building a solid team is a key component to building a great product. However, experience has shown that there’s more to it than just “hiring the best people”. In this session, we will share practices learned from building startups and dive into pragmatic processes that you can implement in your organization.

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.

Hear insights from Chief Technology Officer, Sriram Thiagarajan on how Ancestry, 30-year-old tech company, reinvented itself by taking advantage of technology transitions and the evolution of modern technology architectures. Sriram shares details on the successes and challenges of Ancestry’s digital transformation journey, including migrating to a 100% public cloud architecture, adopting cloud native services, and unleashing the power of AI/ML to accelerate the pace of innovation and deliver new features more frequently.

What does it take to build a digital technology organization from the ground up? This session features a conversation with Anshu Narula and Khawaja Shams exploring how Anshu transitioned away from larger more established companies like PayPal and Ebay to build and scale Rivian’s digital tech org from scratch. They’ll discuss critical cultural values, early guiding principles and processes for the org, Anshu’s approach to scaling out the engineering team/leadership, and a starting point if you’re building from 0.

Culture is a word we hear time and time again, and is often difficult to define and codify. As Engineering Leaders we play a critical role in defining the culture of our teams, but how? Eric Yuan leads a rapidly growing team of over 2,500 people at Zoom and "culture" is an intentional and deliberate part of his leadership. Join Eric Yuan and Li Fan in a discussion of how you intentionally build and operationalize culture into every facet of your operations so it is more than "just a word"

Your once small team has grown, but it doesn't feel like it. Everything seems to be moving at a glacial pace. Deadlines are being missed, projects are running late, and quality has slipped. Managers say they need to hire more people, engineers are blaming tech debt, your superstars are burning out, and product and engineering are pointing fingers at each other. All you know is that you aren't moving fast enough and opportunities are slipping you by. Don't fret - your situation isn't unique. Drawing on his experience transforming multiple engineering organizations, Scott will distill the key techniques and lessons needed to transform your team into an execution powerhouse - one that ships quality software, drives innovation and hits commitments. Understand the key principles and skills you'll need to imbue your leaders with, the rhythms and rituals of an effective engineering organization, and how to set goals your team can achieve. With a focus on OKRs and intentional culture, the lessons here are directly applicable to managers of managers and above.

What does measuring productivity mean and what does it enable? While many engineers love making data-driven decisions, it’s easy to fall into the trap of over-indexing to a few numbers that only tell a small part of the whole story. In this session, we’ll explore several different ways engineering teams can effectively measure productivity and some common traps to avoid. We will discuss best practices for illustrating and sharing what we measured to motivate and evaluate the internal team as well as keep upper management and stakeholders informed. Finally, our speakers will share their personal experience on productivity insights during these peculiar pandemic times.

A well-structured organization is key to any high-functioning team. However, how does one decide on the ""correct"" organization structure? The key lies in knowing how to properly identify the appropriate org-structure for a team given its size, project complexity, geographic distribution and talent composition. Moreover, it's important to know when to evolve an org-structure from flat to hierarchical and visa-versa. In this session, we'll guide you through the appropriate decision framework to define a well-functioning structures and discuss criteria for identifying successful orgs.