"Be transparent." We hear this all the time, but are we all on the same page about what it means? In our professional lives, transparency is a practice that helps us to communicate better, build trust, and increase engagement. The concept is simple: employees will make better decisions when they are better informed. But how do you get there? In this presentation, learn how Everingham measurably boosts transparency among his teams at Facebook.

Optimizing for strengths is one way to build and grow an organization for impact. We'll discuss why building an organization that is great at only a very few things i.e., a spiky org -- can be a template for success. We'll also touch on technical, product, and organizational examples of strengths that a lot of organizations spend time developing but are often not necessary to the ultimate success of a business. Finally, we'll talk about how you can maintain these spikes as you grow, and other tricks that every manager and leader should know to keep their organization focused on the most important things.

Leadership is as operational as it is inspirational. Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Petersen discuss the nuts and bolts of managing and optimizing your scarcest resource in order to scale yourself and your team or company.

In this talk Allan will tackle the topic of balancing the desires of engineering teams to build innovative products at a fast pace while at the same time avoiding building up an unhealthy amount of technical debt. Too much innovation and engineering teams can lose focus on their customer and product-market fit while too much technical debt can crush the strongest of engineering teams with continual firefighting. Achieving the right balance is a skill that engineering leaders need to work on continuously to have healthy and productive teams. Allan will share his techniques that have helped scale teams at Cisco, Zynga, ServiceNow, and Slack.

Most managers were previously individual contributors that transitioned to management without any coaching on critical leadership capabilities: what should they optimize for, how executives evaluate them, or how to accurately assess (and fix) gaps in their skill sets, etc. As such, they eventually reach a point where they don't understand how to advance to the next level and stall their careers. Research shows 60 percent of new managers fail within the first 24 months and 40% of new Executives fail within 18 months. Even more become walking dead, stuck in current (or similar) positions, doing enough to not be fired but clearly not enough to progress. Stalled careers turn into an atrophied careers and lead to increasingly less interesting roles. Grand Rounds CTO and SVP of Engineering, Wade Chambers, will draw from 25 years of experience in Silicon Valley to walk through rubrics developed over time, first hand experiences (often learned the hard way), and leading research to help you optimize your management career.

Influence is the ability to affect change indirectly. It's also a ""superpower"" that will enable you to get results and stand out in your job and in your career. Our panel will discuss the different components of influence, and practical tips for developing and utilizing influence successfully throughout your career.

Process dictates outcomes. We know this as engineering leaders. The questions that remain are: Which process is the right one to implement in our team? And exactly how do you implement it? As engineering leaders, we continually face challenges around creating and operationalizing effective engineering team processes to scale our impact, regardless of our team size. Specifically, we struggle with:

how to get the team aligned and involved

how to measure success and improve iteratively

how to balance the structure and overhead these processes bring

how to drive adoption beyond your own team or organization

As CTO and Head of Platform Engineering at Atlassian, respectively, Sri and Steve will share insights on how they faced each of these challenges with hundreds of engineers. Moderated by Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team, this fireside chat will explore potential frameworks on what to consider when creating and operationalizing team process – and how to figure out what the right one is for your team.

The way we work, lead and care for our employees has changed dramatically in recent months. Companies that optimized for densification of workplace are now contending with a remote workforce, culture and employee care have evolved to mean much more than perks, the tools we use to get the work done have changed and the way we lead has as well.

In this talk, LinkedIn's Mohak Shroff will discuss the impacts this has on the way we work, how leaders can move the business forward while ensuring employee wellness takes top priority and the importance of self-care to ensuring we're preventing our own burnout as we navigate through it all.

It's one of the age-old questions for engineering leaders: do I build or acquire new technology to grow and scale our business? Whether building software from scratch, or integrating technology built by someone else into your software stack and infrastructure, the journey is typically more complex and costly than expected. What principles, priorities and trade-offs can today's engineering leaders apply to making the build or buy decision? While an acquisition can transform the acquiring company overnight, how can a leader beat the statistical odds when only 50 percent of transactions are successful? And, how can instilling a start-up mindset within a mission-driven engineering culture accelerate the product development cycle? In a conversation led by TechCrunch Editor TBD, Intuit CTO, Marianna Tessel, will draw upon real-world experiences to describe the best practices – and pitfalls – of the build or buy decision.

Is investing in, or advising other startups or companies a good idea for you? How do you choose which companies to get involved with? What expectations should you set with the companies you help? What are the pitfalls and conflicts and how do you navigate them? How can advising companies help your company or your career? What are signs that a startup is working? How can you help? This session covers these and other topics related to becoming an investor or advisor to other people's companies.

Elad will speak to his experiences as a serial founder, operator, and investor in 25+ billion dollar companies including Airbnb, Airtable, Coinbase, Figma, Gusto, Instacart, Notion, Pinterest, PagerDuty, Stripe, Square, and others.

How is managing an AI team different from traditional engineering teams, and how should founders and leaders think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling their organizations?

In this fireside conversation, Anna Patterson from Gradient Ventures and Adrien Treuille, Co-Founder and CEO of Streamlit, will dive into best practices for streamlining collaboration between AI and engineering teams. This discussion will also draw on personal experiences to touch on the process of transitioning from engineer to founder, from a team contributor to managing teams of contributors, ultimately highlighting how to ensure effective collaboration amongst AI and engineering teams as a leader.

Our industry offers so many opportunities to develop and build the career we want. There is no fixed path, no map, and so many ways to have a meaningful career. In this talk, we will unpack how to think about building a career drawing on what Quentin has seen in his 20+ years of operating and working with different companies, startups and founders. He will cover ways to think about the principles at play, what kinds of experiences lead to what opportunities, and how intentionality goes a long way to being ready for serendipitous.

Eisar Lipkovitz will share the value of being direct as well as other insights on leadership. You’ll hear how to practice the art of direct communication, how to prepare for difficult conversations, and overcome the fear of being direct, as well as Eisar’s insights on where engineering leaders get stuck in their career and how to help them grow. Joining Eisar is Ritu Bhargava, sharing her take on being direct through experience in software engineering leadership roles, specifically building, scaling and integrating enterprise SaaS and on-premise applications.

Early companies often recruit a core team that builds an MVP product and finds that mythical “product / market fit”. Then growth and, if you're lucky, more growth sets in with a new set of challenges and surprises. How much time should everyone in the engineering organization spend on recruiting? Your original core developers built all of the key components but how do you hand it off to new people joining? Is there a role for managers or will you end up with a traditional military hierarchy? What about product management? What about technical debt? As organizations grow, how much time goes to communication and meetings? … Bill will speak from his experience as a founder, from Google, and with many of the Sequoia companies he's worked with.

Many people have heard early in their careers that the secret to success and career growth is to "under promise and over deliver". In reality though, this can be a disaster for your team, your flexibility, and your credibility. The power of transparency will get far more out of your teams, budget, and cross functional relationships, and empower you to sidestep IT blackholes, and pivot quickly when life throws you challenges (like a global pandemic). It also more quickly develops trust and scales leaders in the process. In this fireside chat, Pinterest’s Head of Engineering, Jeremy King will share his experiences leading the largest and fastest growing organization at Pinterest, in addition to lessons from years running teams at Walmart, eBay and startups.

Tia and Nick Caldwell share the tips and tricks of job switching in Silicon Valley. When to to stay, when to go. Evaluating culture. Inheriting salty teams. Mission versus money. And more! It's all covered in this excitedly candid 30 minute fireside chat + Q&A featuring two engineering management powerhouses. Leave Q&A in advance on twitter @nickcald @_Tiacaldwell

Long-lasting and deep relationships have always been what drives technology companies. John & Dan have collaborated for over 20 years to build Mozilla, invest at Greylock, and across numerous startups. They’ll discuss how long running and deep relationships span disciplines, projects and companies, lead to building exceptionally high performing organizations, and help with making great investment decisions.

Jason shares communication best practices, the signs of ineffective communication, and other effective protocols for leading distributed teams. He also identifies common challenges found with remote workforces as well as how to align, motivate, and manage distributed teams of engineers to achieve the best results possible.

As your business grows and becomes more successful, how will you do the same in your role? After all, you don't know what you don't know. In this fireside chat, David Hornik and Selina Tobaccowala will share lessons learned as they scaled their careers. We'll hear about the exciting moments to the "stuck" moments and everything in between. David has been a venture capitalist for over 20 years and currently invests in consumer and enterprise software and services as General Partner at August Capital. Selina helped Evite grow as its co-founder, scaled Ticketmaster internationally, and joined SurveyMonkey as its 18th employee.

The top priority for any startups is to find their product-market fit through rapid iterations of their products. “Move fast, and break things” becomes the de-facto motto and reality for many. After years of hard work, your product finally attracted millions of loyal users, including many paying customers. Your users developed high expectations, and trust on your product. At the same time, technical debts and “breaking things” gradually shifts from a convenient aspect you chose to ignore, to become major concerns raised by your users, customers, and even many of your teammates. In this session, the speaker will share Coursera's journey on quality as they scaled, and how they took a head-on approach to overhaul its technology, dev process, and culture to drive quality focus with their hundreds of engineers. You will hear what worked, what did not, valuable lessons they learned. This session is for audiences who are interested in driving quality focus for their company, as well as those who are interested in sharing their own stories.

Join Wendy and Akhil in a fireside chat about the ins & outs of taking over a new organization. They'll give insights and advice on when they've successfully taken on new roles leading new teams, as well as share learnings from the challenges it brings.

High performing teams are critical to the success of any business. As technology leaders, we will often be measured on our ability to cultivate a culture that leads to high performing teams. A critical place to start is to first understand how people really work - how our brains function and react to the information we share and receive. There is much we can learn and adapt from the field of behavioral psychology to create the environment necessary for teams to thrive, delivering both high business value while delivering robust technology solutions that scale.

We know that diverse teams matter. They build better, more innovative products, which in turn are better for the people using the products. But when teams are growing quickly, how we approach “culture” is a vital part of the puzzle. Pooja has worked in and led product engineering teams for over a decade, and will share her experiences, learnings and the impact of getting “culture” right.

The future of work is decentralized. With no one single point of failure, companies have the opportunity to unlock the full potential of anyone, anywhere. One company who is taking decentralization seriously is Twitter. As the company works to grow its global workforce to reflect the diverse voices who use the service daily, they're also looking at ways to enable anyone, anywhere to work at Twitter. Join Twitter's head of engineering, Michael Montano, as he shares more about his thoughts on building Twitter's engineering organization for the future, enabling asynchronous collaboration, and hiring diverse, specialized talent faster.

Prior to starting AppDynamics and leading it through a journey that would result in a $3.7B acquisition by Cisco, Jyoti Bansal was an engineer at Wily Technology. In this session, Jyoti will discuss his transition from engineering to entrepreneurship with one of AppDynamics' first investors (and now Jyoti's co-founder at Unusual Ventures), John Vrionis. The conversation will explore when he knew it was time to make the leap, the challenges he faced as a first time entrepreneur, what he knows now that he wishes he knew then, and more. Jyoti will share the lessons and insights that are helping him build and scale his two latest companies—Harness and Traceable— as well as the guidance he gives first time founders in his role at Unusual Ventures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies around the world to operate remotely, with employees temporarily working from home and relying on Zoom and Slack to collaborate. But what would it mean for a company to work this way permanently? In this conversation, Adam D’Angelo, the founder and CEO of Quora, and Ozzie Osman, co-founder of Monarch Money, will discuss Adam’s decision to make Quora a “remote first” company. They’ll talk about the factors that informed the decision, what it means to be “remote first”, and what opportunities and challenges the company has seen so far.

A mediator's role is to help people involved in a conflict come to an agreement. A facilitator's role is to help a group come to a joint decision. A mediator-facilitator is a critical part of every organization and facilitates communication and problem-solving. Their role is often ill-defined and hard to measure but they are required in any successful organization to spread information and resolve disputes.

This talk will look at one real-world application of a mediator-facilitator as a Production Engineer, how to create an organization where they will strive and how to grow and nurture them.

Your company is committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace, right? Great. Let’s talk about how hiring formerly incarcerated engineers fits into that picture.

Jessica will talk brass tacks on both the inclusive recruiting infrastructure needed to give formerly incarcerated applicants a fair chance, and a strategy that actually works for sourcing high-caliber engineers from this overlooked and undervalued talent pool.

This is good for business, but ending employment discrimination for people with records is also a crucial step in decarcerating the United States.

Engineering Managers need different tools to coach new grads to independence, to coach accomplished software engineers into seniority, and to support senior engineers in breaking through to the staff level. Most engineers get stuck at the mid-career level, and most managers think that's inevitable. Spoiler alert: they're wrong. Jocelyn will discuss a framework for engineering career growth that gives tech leads tools to advocate for themselves, managers tools to accelerate their team members, and leaders tools to systemically improve the career growth engine across their organization.

Regardless of whether you have direct reports or not, influence across an organization is a prerequisite of getting things done. It's often more effective to have broader cross-functional influence when you don't have a large vertical team with you. In this panel discussion, we will uncover some actionable insights about influencing as senior IC, as well as some real stories/examples where these insights are applied.

Making decisions about which open source & SaaS solutions to use isn’t easy. Historically, every company has had its own process for making these decisions, some companies even document them. Now, large companies are converging on a standard process for making technology decisions and recording them. Recently GitHub, Spotify, and eBay have written about Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and why they’ve valuable, while organizations like the CNCF have created their own Technology Radar to help technical teams streamline the assessment of new technologies. We’ll unpack ADRs, technology radars, and how they can be useful for large teams.

This talk will offer practical insight into how leaders can scale the values of agile across an enterprise.

Despite near universal recognition that we live in a complex and interconnected world, most organizations are still using industrial age management practices. In today's world, where the future rewrites itself in the time it takes to type 140 characters, a fundamentally different leadership style is required for success. Dave will share his experiences building adaptability across a wide range of organizations. His presentation will draw on his 13 year career as a Navy SEAL and 10 years of business expertise helping technology companies lead complex technical programs at scale.

The ability to identify and hire top talent is as difficult as ever. Leaders that invest time to build a more inclusive, consistent and efficient closing process and scale it throughout the organization tip the scales in their favor. How do you build the right tools, culture and platform to do this within your own organization and how do you know if it's working? Join Anthony Kline and Megan Zengerle as they talk about approaches they've used at Stripe, Creative Live, AppDirect, and any other companies across their portfolio.

Today, Pinterest has hundreds of engineers working to bring Pinners the inspiration to create a life they love. Bug management is a critical part of ensuring a high quality experience for those Pinners. Every week, we identify hundreds of bugs, and it is crucial to have a scalable system for identifying, tracking, managing, and addressing them in a timely manner. In 2018, we realized our processes around bug management were no longer sufficient for our rapidly scaling product, team, and technology base. Our teams were working hard to fix bugs, but the number of issues in our bug DB was growing. At the same time, confidence in the quality of the data in the bug DB was shrinking. To address this challenge, we implemented a Bug SLA (Service Level Agreement) process, and it has significantly improved our ability to understand and raise the quality of our product. Putting this process in place at scale required a combination of project management, technology, and - most importantly - engineering cultural change. We'd like to share what we learned along the way about the benefits and limitations of this approach, how it fits into our overall strategy of building a strong technical foundation, and the next steps we're taking to further improve quality.

At Dropbox, our infrastructure team uses a belief, purpose, and values system to scale efficiently and make effective decisions. In this session, Vice President of Infrastructure at Dropbox, Andrew Fong, will discuss how to identify, operationalize, and reinforce values within an organization to empower team members and retain talent. Andrew will also discuss challenges and solutions to managing a values-based team.

The global pandemic has changed the way we live, work, and collaborate together. Effectively building and managing teams remotely has gone from an aberration to the norm, and is now more critical than ever.

Join a discussion between Prachi Gupta, Discord’s head of engineering and former head of LinkedIn’s feed, and Minal Mehta, head of product management for Next Billion Users (NBU) at YouTube, as they talk about taking over the “virtual” reins of a distributed workforce, her approach to building diverse teams, and her mission to make tech a place where women and people of color thrive.

No one has a crystal ball into the future. All of us are required to make decisions under uncertainty. The most difficult ones are the ones that can have a big impact one way or another in the long term. How do you decide if it's better to buy or build? When do you use open source vs developing proprietary technologies? How and when do you change a decision like this from the past? And how do you scale this kind of decision making across a company? Join Parag Agrawal, CTO of Twitter in this fireside chat, where he will discuss his personal experiences scaling these kinds of decisions in companies both large and small.

You started small. "2 pizza" team with a fully automated CI/CD pipeline. You were a hero. People literally threw rose petals everywhere you walked. And then you were asked to scale it across the entire company. That's when everything changes.

You went from hero to zero real fast.

Don't be that zero. Attend this talk.

Scaling DevOps means making everything easy. Self-service is the mantra. We'll tell you how to create an easy to use self-service platform. How to democratized automation so that nothing is manual. When and how to encourage people to take risks. And what guardrails help avoid the fallout of production mistakes.

About our speakers. Sanjeev Sharma and Ahmed Datoo have been in the trenches and have the scars to prove it. Sanjeev is a VP at a major Fortune 500 bank and the author of "DevOps for Dummies" and "The DevOps Adoption Playbook." Ahmed is a serial entrepreneur who's helped engineering organizations scale from 5 people to thousands of people.

After spending my entire career as an engineer, and having spent the last several years leading engineering organizations at Dropbox and Convoy, I jumped into an individual contributor role, as Technical Advisor to Convoy's CEO. A detour into a staff role is unconventional for an engineering leader, so I'll spend some time talking about my motivations for making this move, and also talk about what I've learned so far (spoiler alert: I think I'll be a much more effective engineering leader when I return)

2020 has been a series of unprecedented moments, certainly becoming one of the most defining periods in US history. During this time, the need for empathetic leadership has been stronger than ever. Splunk’s CTO and SVP, Tim Tully, shares best practices in a fireside chat with Index Ventures' Partner, Mark Golberg, on why we all need to be empathetic leaders and stay focused on opportunities for innovation.

Join Fiona Tan, Global Head of Customer and Supplier Technology at Wayfair, Deborah Singer, Chief Marketing Officer at Girls Who Code and Christina Wick, VP of Engineering at Harry's, for a fireside chat about overcoming the major obstacles to achieve gender equity in tech. Attendees of this session will gain perspective on how to be mindful of the development pipeline for women and marginalized groups, and strategies for creating an inclusive culture and opportunities for advancement in the face of the technology industry's increasingly difficult landscape.

It’s common for engineering leaders, in organizations of any stage, to receive technical due diligence requests on behalf of an investor or for M&A purposes. In some organizations, this process leads to panic, poor results, and last minute scrambling in an attempt to accentuate an organization’s product processes, IP, technological resilience, team competencies, and more. This chat will focus on what engineering leaders need to consider in order to prepare for successful investor and M&A technical due diligence. Leigh will also share key excerpts of his firm’s engineering due diligence playbook to give leaders tools and a framework to use towards success.

The state of software is driving to get software out the door more quickly, an ever-accelerating pace. We admire companies doing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, even if we aren’t there ourselves. What can you do as one person in an organization or one team in a company to make your software ready for the world more quickly?

This talk is for people who are frustrated at how hard it can be to change things sometimes, and ways that they can advocate for change and show it is safer than people assume.

This talk will cover these concepts:

• Release vs. Deployment
• Feature flags
• CI/CD requirements
• Ring deployment
• Flags for all departments!

When you're a startup with a small team, it's easy to stay close to your cross-functional teammates and collaborate on product launches. But as the company scales, and you build out teams and launch new features, it can be tough to stay connected and aligned with your counterparts across product, design and engineering. When you should sunset a product? How should you think about the number of features you're planning to ship in a given year? David Thacker has managed teams of hundreds of people, and worked on some of the most used and beloved consumer and enterprise products. During this fireside chat, David will share how to think about collaboration and prioritization as you scale based on learnings from his time as a product executive at Google, LinkedIn and Groupon.

Due to the events of 2020, many companies and hiring managers have found themselves having to adapt to changes in the hiring landscape. Which changes are permanent, and which might be temporary? Which hiring principles and techniques are timeless, and which ones should hiring managers re-think? Ozzie will interview Aditya about which of the tactics he applied to scale teams he led at Facebook and as CTO of Dropbox still apply, and what advice he gives the founders he currently mentors. Ozzie and Aditya collaborated on writing the Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring.

Top-down development is on its way out. When people are aligned and have appropriate context to form opinions and work towards them, teams move and build more quickly. But how do you empower your team and source the best ideas from them? How do you shift people from a reactive state to a proactive one, where they are forming opinions and taking initiative?

In this fireside chat, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, and Sabry Tozin, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, will discuss how to effectively get your team to form and share opinions at work.

The collaboration between Product and Engineering is critical to developing, launching, and growing high quality products. Former Product Engineering Lead at Square and Caviar Lead, Gokul Rajaram, will share best practices in product development, including organizational structure, goal setting, and lessons learned from his stints at Google, Facebook, and Square. Moderated by Michael White, head of Engineering for Caviar at DoorDash, this fireside chat will help engineering leaders build stronger, more impactful collaborative relationships with their partners in product management.

Technology teams can often be likened to a basketball or soccer team, and the strategies needed have surprising similarities. One characteristic that stands out is balance. Just like a team that is all attack and no defence will eventually run aground, you have to balance your teams in every way possible. What is required however is a philosophy around which you build your team and balance it such that the goals of the collective can be met.

But there is more. The need to balance applies to you the leaders as well. If you are too immersed or paying too much attention to the details, you may miss the big picture and vice versa.

In this chat Shrijeet will talk about his personal strategies for navigating these questions and more.

One of biggest career secrets for reaching the top levels of executive leadership is the power of sponsorship, particularly for women and URMs in technical organizations. While mentorship and allyship are necessary components of leadership development and inclusion programs, they are insufficient for putting women and URMs into the C-suite and the board room. Every single executive leader has the power to be a sponsor in accelerating the careers of others, but there are few playbooks on how to be a great sponsor for your highest potential employees. In this talk I'll cover the ins and outs of how to achieve breakthrough sponsorship while building a lasting legacy of leadership growth, fueled by a culture of sponsorship.

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.

Just a year ago, the future of work was often described as one that existed beyond office walls where anyone could work from anywhere. Unknown to all of us then, a pandemic would strike the globe quickly accelerating the future of work to the present-day realities that we see today. The world isn’t going to go backwards in time now that we’ve seen the future. How do leaders adapt to the challenges of building distributed teams in this new reality?

In this panel, we discuss the challenges leaders face in building distributed teams and explore solutions.

Have you ever tried to hammer a nail with a pair of pliers? While you may succeed eventually, the process is inefficient and frustrating because you’re using the wrong tool. The same holds true for developers who try to work with application performance management (APM) solutions to monitor mobile and web applications. Because these solutions are designed for DevOps and infrastructure teams to monitor backend systems and performance, they don’t provide the insights developers need into release stability, errors, and how these are impacting the customer experience.

Then there are application stability management (ASM) solutions, which are built specifically for engineering organizations. ASM provides actionable insights into how stable the application is, where bugs exist, and how to improve the end user experience. Join James Smith, CEO of Bugsnag, as he explains the differences between the two solutions and outlines the benefits organizations can achieve when APM and ASM are provided to the right teams.

In this session, Kristian will outline some of the stages of evolution the Spotify engineering team has gone through over the years to stay lean and effective. He will outline some of the underlying principles and also some of the concrete practices they have put into place to optimize for the needs of the business.

The talk will be followed by a panel of Kristian alongside 2 other engineering leaders who have all been heavily influenced by Spotify's approach. They will debate and discuss their learnings and thoughts on how to effectively organize and scale engineering teams.

Super Bowl 2020 set a new record for peak concurrent live streams while also offering the content at a new quality bar - UHD HDR - for the first time. For Fox Sports, this meant 5X'ing its previous platform record on the highest stakes day of the year when several things broke, but customers never knew! In this talk, Melody Hildebrandt, EVP of Engineering at FOX, will share lessons learned from preparations to deliver this event digitally - from architecting a highly scalable API tier to aligning 20+ technology partners against a common objective.

From tough 1:1 conversations to term sheet negotiation to rallying up a team to take on the world, it all comes down to communication in leadership. Executive coach to Silicon Valley's top CEO, Alexis Rask, will share her insight into how leaders can master communication to drive success.

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.

As an engineering leader today, the war for talent understates the bigger challenges you face. The landscape is littered with new competitors who are fighting for the same talent you are trying to acquire and keep. While your mission and culture may have been enough to win, now compensation and rewards are becoming an inordinate challenge and stress in many cases. Figuring out how to acquire talent you need in a reasonable timeframe without alienating or losing your existing talent is a daily worry. There is no one right answer, especially as a company scales. Ashish Raina will lead a conversation with a few engineering leaders to uncover strategies that work and pitfalls to avoid as you build the rewards pillar in your engineering culture. Among other topics, we will discuss how to overcome challenges when others can pay more, how to communicate your rewards and how to build a framework for career development and mobility through levels.

Hiring is often touted as the biggest priority of an engineering leader, but in practice, both high-level strategy and day-to-day tactics are usually handled by the recruiting team. Is this the right approach? What do the numbers tell us?

In this talk, Aline will dig deep into hiring funnel data to quantify the opportunity cost of engineering leaders taking a backseat in hiring and outline the best way to maximize ROI on very limited time and resources -- as an engineering leader how do you best allocate these to maximize hires while minimizing interruptions, lost engineering time and productivity, and bad decisions? Should engineers actually do sourcing? How can just a few hours of involvement from engineering leadership drastically increase close rates? How do you build an actually productive relationship with your recruiting team where you each play to your strengths? Aline has been on all sides of the hiring table (engineer, engineering manager, head of talent) and will leverage both my experience and industry hiring funnel data to lay out exactly what role engineering leadership should play in recruiting and how engineering leadership can build the best hiring process for their org from day one.

What really separates the best product teams from the rest? In the best product companies, rather than silos with product management responsible for "requirements," product design responsible for wireframes, and engineering responsible for code, there is a very different working relationship - one where the three disciplines collaborate both in understanding the problem, as well as discovering the necessary solution. In this talk we'll describe what this means in practice, and how this impacts the role of engineering, and the resulting level of consistent innovation.

Engineering leaders everywhere are exploring global talent as they scale their teams to fuel business growth. In Codifying Different Expansion Strategies to Unlock Engineering Capacity, Terminal Co-founder Dylan Serota along with panelists Niall Smart, CTO and Co-founder of VTS and Rohini Pradeep, Head of Engineering at Gusto will explore best practices for how to build, hire, and expand engineering teams internationally, and fast. From noticing the early indicators for when to grow across borders, to selecting the right new markets to enter, this panel will provide expert insight for those ready to jump into the international arena.

Strong technical knowledge and high team performance are certainly key ingredients for an engineering organization to deliver the results the business needs. But there is obviously a lot more to it, especially in times of accelerated organization growth. In this session, we want to quickly talk about the importance of adaptability and experience: in a rapidly changing world, software engineers are constantly challenged with situations that require them to quickly adapt - new technologies they need to learn, new processes they need to embrace, conflicting and ever-changing requirements, different people they need to interact with, etc.

In this panel discussion, engineering and recruiting leaders from Stripe, Facebook, Dropbox and Sequoia will talk about their experiences managing and maintaining quality hiring during hypergrowth—how to grow beyond your core networks, how to work with recruiting, how to hire faster through expanding to new geographies, and more.

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.

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"