Every session, keynote, and workshop slot — sorted by day so you can plan your path through the conference.
In tech teams it's a constant firefight. We react. Then we react to the reaction… the cycle continues. In all this noise, in all this chaos, how do we move forward. How do we remain proactive?
A great leader must be an enabler for the team. At times this means insulating the team from the noise. At other times it means improving the environment for the team. At all times, however, it requires setting clear priorities and conditions for success.
This session is focused on the art of moving forward in even the noisiest environments.
Contrary to popular belief, software engineering culture is not about the free food, open office spaces, and ping pong tables.
You can sense a great team culture when you observe it, and unfortunately you've probably experienced (or are currently experiencing) elements of a bad team culture. Not to worry - it's never too late to grab the reins and make small changes to steer your team in the right direction!
In this talk, Kate will highlight 8 tactical tips that attendees can implement on their teams immediately to help shape their team's culture!
Delivering feedback is arguably the hardest part of being a leader. Eventually, the time will come when someone on your team isn’t meeting expectations, and you will be faced with a choice. You can choose to ignore the situation, hope it improves organically, and accept the toll it takes on the broader team, or you can choose to have the tough conversation.
In this interactive session, you will learn more about your communication style, a simple framework to provide actionable feedback, common red flags to watch out for, and advice on how to quickly course correct on a dev team. You’ll leave with a template for giving feedback that you can tie directly to a situation you’re currently facing as well as plenty of examples that you can leverage in the future.
Congratulations! You've accepted a position as an Engineering Manager and are excited to embark on your adventure into the wonderful world of people leadership. As you start preparing for the transition into your role, an overwhelming panic starts to build. What should I be doing with my time? Who should I be meeting with? Does my team trust me? Will my email inbox ever stop growing?
This one hour session will provide helpful checklists, daily/weekly plans, and real life examples that will help ease your transition into management.
Engineering Leaders across industries and timezones are struggling to retain technical talent even after offering the shiniest of benefits and perks. Why is that?
This one hour session will uncover key factors that lead to highly engaged teams followed by 5 common reasons Engineers choose to leave an organization and changes we can make to proactively avoid these departures.
Our software engineering teams are facing new challenges every day that come with the rapidly changing industry and recent events.
People don't seem to be motivated by the same things that they previously found compelling. Organizations are giving up glamorous office spaces and pivoting to remote teams. These changes require us to quickly pivot as leaders to learn new skills, frameworks, and techniques to continue supporting our teams while maintaining our own sanity.
In this workshop, you will learn and practice key skills to help your team propel through today's modern challenges and setbacks. The topics will be relevant to all Software Engineering leaders who wish to find ways to motivate and inspire their teams - regardless of their organization's existing circumstances.
Specific topics will include:
Activities will require a handout - please download (and print if preferred) the course handout located in the Slides folder.
Our software engineering teams are facing new challenges every day that come with the rapidly changing industry and recent events.
People don't seem to be motivated by the same things that they previously found compelling. Organizations are giving up glamorous office spaces and pivoting to remote teams. These changes require us to quickly pivot as leaders to learn new skills, frameworks, and techniques to continue supporting our teams while maintaining our own sanity.
In this workshop, you will learn and practice key skills to help your team propel through today's modern challenges and setbacks. The topics will be relevant to all Software Engineering leaders who wish to find ways to motivate and inspire their teams - regardless of their organization's existing circumstances.
Specific topics will include:
Activities will require a handout - please download (and print if preferred) the course handout located in the Slides folder.
Software projects can be difficult to manage. Managing teams of developers can be even difficult. We've created countless processes, methodologies, and practices but the underlying problems remain the same.
This session is full of practical tips and tricks to deal with the reallife situations any tech leader regularly encounters. Put these techniques into practice and create an enviable culture and an outstanding development team. At the same time, you'll avoid common management mistakes and pitfalls.
It is very rare that a particular, single, action causes a failure. The chances of success, or failure, often depend on many factors including how we communicate, trust, execute, and more.
Culture and attitude also have a significant impact. Often issues go unnoticed because of the way we have worked as a team or an organization. We can learn from others' failures and look deeper into issues that lead to them and how we can steer our own teams toward success.
Finding the right candidate is hard, irrespective of the market conditions, and in a good labor market, it gets harder. The worst is to hire, out of urgency, a person who is not suitable. The person has to be the right fit for the team and the team in the right place for the person to thrive and be effective. Following archaic interviewing techniques often frustrates the interviewee and also does not provide for a good evaluation for the team. How can we avoid a hit-or-miss interview when hiring for a technical position?
We will discuss some techniques and practices that can help hire the right match, both for the team and the person.
Code reviews are essential to improve the quality of code and reduce defects. Yet, everyone, from the developers to managers, dreads that activity. However, when done right it can be one of the most effective ways to not only improve the quality of the application but also promote learning among the team members.
In this presentation, Venkat will discuss the issues with conventional code reviews and look at ways to turn this into an effective practice that the team will relish.
In the last 30 years, our industry has been upended by advancements that unlock previously unimaginable capabilities. It still seems like there is far too much failure and not enough success in IT systems though. To be successful in the 21st Century, you will need to understand where we are and where we are going. It is a complex amalgamation of developments in hardware, computer languages, architectures and how we manage information. Very few people understand all of the pieces and how they connect.
In this talk we will cover how technology changes are enabling longer term capture of business value, modernization of legacy systems, resilience in the face of increased mobile user bases, IT sovereignty and distributed, layered, heterogeneous architectures.
The key to unlocking the promised potential of Agile is unlocking the first value of Agile—Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools.
In this session, we will introduce the Golden Questions™. These three powerful questions, when applied, can transform a group of individuals into a highly cohesive team. Agile teams and enterprises are built as teams and leaders. Answering these questions will unlock the diverse strengths and desires of each individual and begin to unleash those strengths via powerful interactions throughout each and every day.
What would be possible for your team?
What would be possible for you as a leader?
Good Morning.
Q: How are things going? A: Good.
We want to be the best!
If those statements define your day, your week, and your world … You need to leverage the Power of Better™ to break free of the good/best trap.
The results we want and hope for are often rooted in striving to be the best while living in a world of nondescript good. As a leader, unlocking the Power of Better will move you to achieve better results and give you the sustained success you have been searching for. The Power of Better will transform you as a leader and unleash the potential of your team.
What would be possible if you moved from good to better?
What if there was something better than what you thought was the best?
As a leader, we sometimes dread Monday and don’t feel fulfilled by the time Friday rolls around. The cycle continues until we realize the month and year are almost over. A shift in the way you see and define your week will move you from drifting through the year to accomplishing more in less time. Leverage the Intentional Week™ with your team and unlock even more productivity, engagement, and fulfillment.
What would be possible if you had a more Intentional Week™?
What would be possible if your team had a more Intentional Week™?
20 years ago, the Agile Manifesto was created and unleashed the spirit of agility into a grassroots movement. Unfortunately, as Agile has become commonplace and mainstream, the spirit of agility has lost its way. Agile implementations have become mired in over-processed, over-planned, and over-documented while lacking in customer collaboration.
In this session, we will introduce you to the 3 key ingredients to ignite the spirit of Agility and reap the immense rewards of an agile team, organization, and mindset.
What could you accomplish if you re-ignited the spirit of agility?
Over the last decade, DevOps has emerged as an influential business philosophy and practice, helping businesses drive high quality software to market faster. DevOps focuses on the elimination of bottlenecks that occur when development and operational resources are too divorced from one another. But what about friction in the development and test process? What about the delayed feedback cycles that come from slow builds and test flakiness? How can we reduce friction in areas that are outside of the focus of DevOps? The presentation will include examples of DPE practices in action from Java projects using the Maven or Gradle build tool.
Attendees will walk away from this presentation with a better understanding of:
Please follow the workshop requirements here:
https://nfjs.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/static/pdf/DPE_Workshop_Prerequisites.pdf
Whether you want to effect culture change in your organization, lead the transition toward a new technology, or simply get more out of your team; you must first understand that having a “good idea” is simply the beginning. An idea must be communicated; a case must be made. Communicating that case well is as important, if not more so, than the strength of the idea itself.
You will learn 6 principles to make an optimal case and dramatically increase the odds that the other person will say “Yes” to your requests and suggestions, along with several strategies to build consensus within your teams. As a professional mentalist, Michael has been a student of psychology, human behavior and the principles of influence for nearly two decades. There are universal principles of influence that are necessary to both understand and leverage if you want to be more effective leader of change in your organization.
Some aim for leadership positions, team lead, manager, director, VP, and so on whereas others slide into that position due to the opportunities that arise. Many grow into those positions from a strong technical background as opposed to formal training to be a manager. Join Venkat and learn how you can be a more effective technical manager?
We will look at some characteristics that can help us to better meet the needs of the organizations and help the team perform at its peak, to deliver good results.
It has been said that everything rises and falls on leadership and that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. As you serve your team as their manager and leader, one of the most critical decisions for you to make is what kind of leader you will be.
In this session, we will focus on one of the keys to good leadership; how you manage yourself. From cultivating healthy personal routines to developing a culture of feedback, during this session we will explore some best practices in self-leadership that will help you bring your very best to the team you serve.
Among the many lessons the pandemic has taught us, one is that it is possible for many of us to collaborate as a remote or distributed team without jeopardizing the quality of our work. Every day, new tools are emerging in an attempt to address the unique challenges of being remote.
In this session, we will take a look at some of the best tools and strategies for improving communications with your remote team to ensure that you are keeping projects on schedule and maintaining healthy boundaries for work and life.
Modern work practices demand management excellence. And, you might never have seen management excellence—certainly not applied to you. If you can’t manage yourself, you can manage or lead others.
Learn to see how you manage and to manage yourself:
Do you ever feel caught between what your manager wants and what your team needs? Too much of what passes for management or leadership pushes people away instead of creating an engaging environment.
You can create an environment that frees people to do their best work with your leadership:
Have you ever thought, “If I could just avoid all this bureaucracy, I could get things done?” You’re right. Too many organizations think they’re helping the teams when those very practices make work more difficult to accomplish. Sometimes, all you need to do is stop demotivating people from doing the work. Innovative organizations don’t just innovate their products—they innovate their processes.
You might not be able to influence all of these ideas, but you can start the conversation:
Do you ever wonder where the time goes? The team thinks they can finish features faster, but the features often take longer than they expected. Or the team spends the last 80% of the time finishing the last 20% of the features. Then, they all learn no one uses those features. Or the management team wants everyone to create innovative products and services in a too-short time. Why? Because they want to go to the next project in the project portfolio.
A real culture of innovation means shortening the learning time, in the team, for the product strategy, and with the corporate strategy. The faster we can learn, the faster we learn what does work for whom—and what doesn’t work for whom. We can use shorter feedback loops to focus on delivering what our ideal customers want and need. We can avoid doing work they don’t need.
If you’ve ever been surprised by how long the work takes, the value of that work to the customers, or how to make time to innovate, learn to see and measure your feedback loops.
You will learn:
All leaders require excellent feedback skills—both to offer and receive feedback. However, too few leaders get feedback training. Worse, no one knows how to support their teams in learning how to offer and receive feedback. That means the leader intervenes in the team, creating a power-over culture.
Instead, leaders can create a power-with culture when they teach team members to offer each other feedback. That allows the team to create an environment that works for them.
You can lead a feedback lab, so everyone can understand how to offer and receive valuable and respectful feedback. Valuable feedback focuses on the data and the impact of that data on others and the team. Armed with that information, people can see what and how to continue or change.
You will learn:
All leaders require excellent feedback skills—both to offer and receive feedback. However, too few leaders get feedback training. Worse, no one knows how to support their teams in learning how to offer and receive feedback. That means the leader intervenes in the team, creating a power-over culture.
Instead, leaders can create a power-with culture when they teach team members to offer each other feedback. That allows the team to create an environment that works for them.
You can lead a feedback lab, so everyone can understand how to offer and receive valuable and respectful feedback. Valuable feedback focuses on the data and the impact of that data on others and the team. Armed with that information, people can see what and how to continue or change.
You will learn:
This session will dive deep into the way that our mindset affects our peers, direct reports, supervisors, and customers.
We’ll talk about the “collusions” we collectively create in our organization that demolishes communication, progress, relationships, and results. We’ll discuss what being “in the box” means, how we carry those boxes into our relationships, and how that can create a biased view of corporate problems and our roles in them. Lastly, we’ll discuss a proven strategy to rebuild our relationships while simultaneously breaking down our corporate silos. Come ready to think about how you think!
The enneagram is a personality typing system that describes patterns on how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. Like many other typing systems, the enneagram is taking off in the “business self-help” world as an effective leadership tool.
This session will dive into what the enneagram is, what enneagram type you are, understanding the enneagram types of others, and how you can use your type to effectively manage others into a growth mindset while leading them away from stress.
Many career ladders focus on a person’s solo achievements. But very few people actually finish anything alone. And we want agile teams to work together. When we reward “individual” achievement, we discourage agility. What if we based career ladders on agile behaviors we want to reinforce? Then, we can use collaboration and influence to see how a person contributes to the greater goals. Not only can we see our contributions more clearly, but we can then create our own remarkable careers.
You will learn: