ELC Summit 2020

"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.