Join the ELC team as we welcome everyone to this year's virtual summit

To grow your engineering team from 200 to 1,200+, you can expect many different phase changes in your org. How might your role change and what can you anticipate along the journey? This fireside chat with Ryan King and Clarence Choi explores how Ryan’s role has evolved over the last 10 years at Chime through different phases of Chime’s growth.

They’ll cover how team topologies have changed, how he’s hired senior leaders/VPEs for different phases of the company, how goal setting changes, and other great insights to help you scale your org to the next level!

Hiring talent is a challenge for all engineering leaders. We want talent wherever we can get them. This conversation with CTO of Remote Marcelo Lebre gives us a glimpse of his approach to manage a thriving remote team.

In her talk, Solmaz Shahalizadeh shares tech independent principles for scaling AI that can be implemented in any organization, and any domain. Walking the audience through her own journey, Solmaz will illustrate how these principles enabled Shopify to go from implementing one successful model, to now having over 100 models in production across all aspects of the business.

Spend some time connecting with Solmaz debriefing their session and get answers to your questions around scaling AI in your org

Go check out some of our partners in the solutions tab and meet other attendees in roundtables or speed networking!

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.

Spend some time with Arquay Harris digging into your public speaking questions and how to become a better storyteller

Our career path as eng leaders can be nonlinear and present many unexpected twists, turns, and opportunities. This session with Zhichun Li and Jerry Li explores the career leap from engineering to business leadership. They’ll cover principles to navigating career decisions, translating engineering experience to ops/business, building a business unit from the ground up, and pitching ideas to executive leadership.

This session with Nidhi Gupta and Kenji Kiuchi will discuss how to build more inclusive hiring practices. They’ll share ideas on where to start, how to gain buy-in at the executive-level, and how to measure success. Plus simple ways to increase your candidate pool AND de-bias your hiring process, interview modules, and coding interview (especially when you’re resource constrained and your recruiting team also happens to be your engineering team…).

Join this session to hear Phil Braden, Co-Founder at Jellyfish, and Sam Benediktson, Senior Director of Data and Analytics at Vibes, discuss when to invest in data to power better decision-making. This session will share how Vibes uses a framework to calculate the value of data for decision-making and decrease the cost of getting that data to drive initiatives more effectively.

Descript's engineering team has scaled 4x in the last few years without having any attrition. Sunny, Descript's VP of Engineering, shares some of the key reasons why people leave companies and Descript's approach to getting ahead of those problems. If you're a startup founder or an engineering leader at a startup, this talk would be valuable for you.

Broken data is costly, time-consuming, and nowadays, an all-too-common reality for even the most advanced data teams. In this talk, Barr will introduce this problem, called “data downtime” — periods of time when data is partial, erroneous, missing or otherwise inaccurate — and discuss how to eliminate it in your data ecosystem with end-to-end data observability.

Drawing corollaries to application observability in software engineering, data observability is a critical component of the modern DataOps workflow and the key to ensuring data trust at scale. Barr will share why data observability matters when it comes to building a better data quality strategy and highlight tactics you can use to address it today.

Go check out some of our partners in the solutions tab and meet other attendees in roundtables or speed networking!

Mishires sting. When a candidate doesn't work out, it's costly and demoralizing. So how can you avoid getting it wrong while still hitting your hiring goals? Wes Winham Winler shares practical tips based on helping hundreds of engineering managers with 50k+ completed technical assessments at Woven.

Learn about how to define a global site strategy, frameworks for picking sites, and optimizing for long-term outcomes. Ankur will share models, and real-world examples and metrics from their experience.

Conflict Resolution is a key skill in working effectively in engineering organizations. In this workshop, we'll review the causes of conflict, how to navigate and negotiate differences in perspectives, and develop language and process skills to manage, mitigate, and prevent conflict.

Leaders who scale teams are constantly faced with a tension between control and agency, ensuring that everyone follows a common plan on one hand, and avoiding micromanagement on the other. Join Marco to learn how Noom's Engineering team achieves these objectives through the application of a principles-based approach that ensures great alignment with lightweight supervision.

We're excited to kick-off day 2 of the Summit with you! Come learn about some of the highlights from day 1 and what you can looking forward to in day 2.

In this fireside chat, Sri Shivananda and Joel Beasley cover some of the principles and frameworks that have made the greatest impact on Sri’s career as an engineering leader. They’ll cover Sri’s approach to organizational transformation, Sri’s COWS method to pick the right technology, build vs. buy, areas to look for when you’re building a pipeline of leadership, and recognition and disruption of patterns through self-reflection.

Have you ever wondered how to create product teams that effectively and efficiently solve complex challenges? How can you ensure the team is aligned and talks the same language cross-functionally? Over the course of her career, Fatemeh has led and been a part of a variety of teams. In this session, she will share the secrets she has learned to build empowered teams.

Spend some time in a Q&A with Fatemeh Alavizadeh after her session.

In this fireside chat, Bill Coughran and Melody Meckfessel discuss different dynamics to help your engineering org become a strategic advantage to your company. They’ll cover how to leverage feature/system “simplicity”, how to weigh when you should bring insights into your product usage, when to strategically bring in SREs, and how to balance tech debt and refactor work.

Go check out some of our partners in the solutions tab and meet other attendees in roundtables or speed networking!

Brad will walk us through some of the anti-patterns around hiring that are common and how to learn to spot behaviors that aren’t serving you or your organization so you can make better decisions.

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, he will share practices learned from building startups and dive into pragmatic processes that you can implement in your organization.

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!

Hear insights from Chief Technology Officer, Sriram Thiagarajan on how Ancestry, a 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.

After CoderPad acquired CodinGame late last year, the company has been working through a countless number of challenges as they're moving from a 5 people team to a 100+ team worldwide in 3 years. In this session, Loïck Michard extracted key takeaways they've learned merging two engineering teams that span people, process, product and planning for you to consider acquisition as a really efficient growth and diversity lever.

Go check out some of our partners in the solutions tab and meet other attendees in roundtables or speed networking!

What does engineering leadership have in common with an ancient, interdimensional war between the forces of good and evil? Tune in to hear me talk about why I think the hit 90s television show "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" is THE great underappreciated leadership roadmap of the last thirty years.

As an engineering leader, do you ever feel inadequate or undeserving of your achievements despite evidence of your high performance and success?

If so, you might be suffering from imposter syndrome which could be holding you back from reaching your full potential and depriving yourself of a sense of belonging in your role. In this session, we will dig into what imposter syndrome is, explore where it comes from, and identify tactics to combat it once and for all!

This session with Jiani Zhang and Patrick Gallagher will cover some of the emerging trends and critical areas of focus for both startup and established engineering orgs. You’ll learn about how to overcome challenges with recruiting senior engineers, build resilience against uncertainty and churn, and leverage mentoring programs to bridge the gap between junior and senior engineers!

What makes a great leader? For many of us with engineering and science backgrounds, leadership is critical as we transition from building technology to building teams. It is often a difficult transition because we have to switch from being analytical to being humans.

In this talk, Chip will share with us wisdom from his experience of building the U.S.'s second largest boutique hotel company Joie de Vivre Hospitality, being a “mentern” at Airbnb working with co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, and now helping more than 2,000 mid-lifers with life transitions through MEA. Chip brings an insightful perspective for us in tech because of his background in business and psychology. We will talk about his books including Wisdom@Work. We will learn about why Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is so relevant to leadership. We will leave this talk inspired to lead with wisdom and compassion.

Platform teams build the “invisible” features that often power the features that the end-users see and experience. But how do you get buy-in to invest in infrastructure that cannot be “seen” or “experienced” by the end-user? Many non-technical leaders assume that if it’s not broken, it doesn’t need maintenance or upgrading – and voila, tech debt is born! It doesn’t have to be this way.

In this talk, Jan Chong, VP of Engineering at Tally, will share her insights and best practices on how engineering leaders can best position their platform team’s work within an organization and think through their relationships with their product and design peers.

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.

Data-driven decision-making (DDDM) is the golden rule of this decade. Today, every company uses facts, metrics, and data to guide business decisions. Teams use them to achieve goals, objectives, and initiatives.

In this keynote, you will hear real-world examples of how executives are accidentally misguided. Chu-Cheng, Chief Data Officer of Etsy, will share pitfalls, myths, and lessons that cost millions of dollars of opportunity loss he encountered in his career. He will also share practical tactics to spot these pitfalls early so you can avoid costly lessons at work.

Acquisition is a powerful way to fuel company growth. As engineering leaders, how do we navigate acquisitions? What does the process look like? What are the potential pitfalls to look out for?

Join Keng He and Sagar Batchu as they share their experiences and insights from navigating successful acquisitions.

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!

Engineering leadership can be a difficult and sometimes lonely job… But there are a few things you can do to make it easier! This session with Andrew Lau (CEO @ Jellyfish) & Patrick Gallagher (Head of Experience @ ELC) will cover the dynamics that often isolate eng leaders and important sources of internal & external support you can build.

Plus they’ll share approaches & key conversations to help your cross-functional peers become more empathetic and better understand the world of engineering!