Most teams track numbers—but few measure what truly matters. In this insightful and practical session, Ken Sipe breaks down how to align organizational goals with measurable outcomes using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that actually drive success.
Ken will cut through the buzzwords and frameworks to show how engineering teams, product leaders, and executives can build a measurement culture that’s both data-driven and purpose-aligned. You’ll learn how to define metrics that motivate, avoid vanity indicators, and establish traceability from daily work to strategic outcomes.
Key takeaways include:
How to craft meaningful OKRs that align technical and business goals
The difference between activity, output, and outcome metrics—and why it matters
Techniques for cascading objectives across teams without creating chaos
How to use metrics as a feedback system, not a weapon
Real-world examples of OKRs and KPIs that improved clarity, accountability, and results
Whether you’re scaling an engineering organization or trying to bring more focus to your current team, this session will help you turn measurement into momentum—and ensure that success isn’t just tracked, but achieved.
Most teams treat incidents as technical failures. Great teams treat them as coordination failures under stress. This session gives engineering leaders a practical incident command system they can apply immediately: roles, communication cadence, decision logging, escalation paths, and postmortems that create learning instead of fear.
When incidents hit, technology matters — but leadership determines outcomes. This session walks through an operating model for incident response that scales across teams and time zones without chaos.
We cover clear roles (incident commander, comms lead, operations lead, and scribe), fast status loops, and decision frameworks that lower risk under pressure. You’ll see practical templates for timeline capture, stakeholder communication, and recovery prioritization.
We also cover the most ignored part: after-action learning. You’ll leave with a blameless postmortem structure that improves systems, process, and team behavior instead of assigning guilt.
Includes realistic scenarios, facilitation techniques for cross-functional pressure moments, and a leadership checklist you can use in your next production incident.
Outcomes:
No panic theater. Just practical leadership patterns that work when production is on fire and Slack has gone feral.
In the fast-paced world of software delivery, we often mistake “management” for “leadership.” Management is about complexity, stability, and the coordination of resources; leadership is about change, alignment, and the inspiration of people. For many tech leaders, the instinct is to manage the code, the deadlines, and the tickets—but great systems aren't built by managed workers; they are built by led innovators.
In this session, Ken Sipe explores the critical shift from a command-and-control mindset to a high-trust leadership model. We will dive into the “Anti-Patterns of Management” that stifle creativity and slow down velocity, and replace them with actionable leadership strategies designed specifically for technical teams.
Building an AI model is the easy part—making it work reliably in production is where the real engineering begins. In this fast-paced, experience-driven session, Ken explores the architecture, patterns, and practices behind operationalizing AI at scale. Drawing from real-world lessons and enterprise implementations, Ken will demystify the complex intersection of machine learning, DevOps, and data engineering, showing how modern organizations bring AI from the lab into mission-critical systems.
Attendees will learn how to:
Design production-ready AI pipelines that are testable, observable, and maintainable
Integrate model deployment, monitoring, and feedback loops using MLOps best practices
Avoid common pitfalls in scaling, governance, and model drift management
Leverage automation to reduce friction between data science and engineering teams
Whether you’re a software architect, developer, or engineering leader, this session will give you a clear roadmap for turning AI innovation into operational excellence—with the same pragmatic, architecture-first perspective that Ken is known for.
What happens when a self-taught programmer with a background in anthropology finds himself leading engineering teams? In this candid, humorous, and emotionally resonant talk, Robert Harris shares his journey from BASIC on a Commodore 64 to building psychologically safe, high-performing cultures in modern software organizations.
Blending fieldwork with frameworks, Robert explores the human side of engineering leadership—imposter syndrome, accidental management, and the painful lessons that shaped his philosophy. Drawing on his training in anthropology, he offers a practical guide to shaping team culture through shared language, rituals, experiences, and artifacts—from flaming pull request beacons to rubber duck onboarding kits.
Attendees will leave with:
•A fresh perspective on leadership rooted in emotional intelligence and cultural design
•Actionable strategies for building trust, accountability, and psychological safety
•A toolkit of metaphors, rituals, and artifacts to transform team dynamics
Whether you’re a reluctant manager, a seasoned leader, or just someone who’s ever stepped on a rake in production, this talk will help you turn dysfunction into culture—and culture into your team’s greatest asset.
Engineering culture is not created by values statements or team rituals. It emerges from
thousands of small signals - who speaks, who hesitates, what gets reinforced, and what
quietly disappears.
Across years of observing software engineering organizations, one pattern appears
consistently: when teams go remote or hybrid, culture doesn’t disappear - informal signal
flow does. The hallways where trust, learning, and psychological safety once formed are
removed, and nothing intentionally replaces them.
In this session, a software engineering leader with formal training in psychology and
anthropology examines why remote teams so often struggle with silence, disengagement, and false alignment - and why most culture initiatives fail to address the real problem.
Using cross-cultural comparison, this talk contrasts engineering organizations with digital communities that have thrived online for decades, surfacing what those cultures get right about feedback, trust, and informal learning.
The core insight is simple but uncomfortable: distance is not the enemy of culture,
poorly designed environments are.
Rather than focusing on tools, mandates, or performative connection, this session
reframes culture as an environment shaped by observable behavior, especially
leadership behavior. Attendees will explore how meetings, async communication, and
everyday leadership moments become the new hallways - for better or worse - and how
teams silently adapt when those spaces fail them.
Participants will leave with:
• A practical lens for diagnosing signal loss in distributed teams
• Clear indicators that silence is masking risk, not agreement
• Design principles for creating “digital hallways” that allow trust, community, and
psychological safety to emerge naturally
• A deeper understanding of how leadership behavior trains culture - whether
intentionally or not
This session is grounded in real-world leadership experience, systems thinking, and
comparative cultural analysis, and is designed for engineering leaders who want to build resilient, high-trust teams in remote and hybrid environments without sacrificing
performance.
Most software engineering leaders struggle for a reason no one talks about.
They were promoted for being great at writing code - and then handed responsibility for humans.
Meetings.
Conflict.
Silence.
Motivation.
Trust.
We quietly expect the same instincts that worked for technical systems to work for people.
They don’t.
In this session, we’ll explore leadership through a systems lens - not as a set of personality traits or management hacks, but as an adaptive human ecosystem that responds to risk, safety, and meaning.
You’ll learn:
• Why silence in meetings is rarely agreement
• How everyday leadership behaviors quietly train teams to wait, escalate, or
disengage
• What makes leaders accidentally become bottlenecks
• Why “helpful” interventions often have unintended consequences
• How human systems learn - even when you’re not teaching
This is not a talk about tools, frameworks, or performance management templates.
It’s about seeing what’s actually happening in your team - and realizing how your own
behavior shapes the system you’re leading.
Drawing on real-world stories from 20+ years in software engineering leadership (and a
background in anthropology), this session gives leaders a language for the invisible
dynamics they’ve felt but never been able to name.
Attendees will leave with:
• A new mental model for leadership
• A sharper lens for reading group behavior
• And a deeper understanding of how to create environments where people actually
think, speak, and decide
No blame.
No buzzwords.
Just a clearer view of the human system you’re already inside.
In moments of uncertainty, teams don’t listen more closely to their leaders.
They watch them.
Across years of leading software organizations - and hundreds of documented leadership
moments - one truth becomes unavoidable: engineers take their emotional cues from
leadership behavior, especially under pressure. Stress, urgency, and fear propagate
through teams not by announcement, but by example.
This talk explores how leaders unintentionally amplify chaos through tone, timing, and
reaction - even when they believe they’re being clear or decisive. Drawing from psychology,
anthropology, and long-term observation of engineering teams, this session focuses on
principles, not tactics: stable leadership rules that hold when incidents, deadlines, or
change collide.
Attendees will learn:
• How leadership behavior becomes a system input
• Why urgency often masquerades as clarity - and how teams experience the
difference
• How trust is like a bank, being deposited or withdrawn during moments of pressure
• Practical ways leaders can become a stabilizing force without suppressing reality
This is not a talk about staying calm for appearances’ sake. It’s about understanding how
human systems react to stress, and how leaders can intentionally reduce noise instead
of becoming part of it.
Leaders will leave better equipped to guide teams through chaos - not by controlling
outcomes, but by shaping the environment in which decisions are made.
“How are you helping unite and bond your teams? What creative team buildings have you tried, both virtually or inperson, to connect the team on both a personal and professional level?”
Join this fun discussion on 12+ creative teambuilding ideas you can give a try to help take your team's connection to the next level! We’ll introduce ideas such as Values Exercises, Wellness Contests, Collaborative Team Development, SkillsBased Volunteerism, and unique games such as ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader’ that our teams have loved!
In an era where AI tools are reshaping the workplace, effective adoption strategies are crucial for both uncovering potential application and driving tool utilization to influence creativity, save time and drive ROI. This session will shine a light on the specific techniques we used to drive companywide user engagement and utilization of Microsoft Copilot, our internal AI tool of choice.
We will dive into 8+ key strategies that we found impactful in fostering a culture of adoption within our organization. We will discuss ideas such as: identifying Change Champions, conducting training sessions, and leveraging ondemand resources to empower users. Attendees will learn how to create a vibrant community around AI, share success stories, and utilize analytics to track progress and drive continuous improvement.
Participants will leave equipped with actionable ideas to help transform team members into enthusiastic advocates for AI tools. Whether you're a leader looking to enhance your team's capabilities or a practitioner eager to implement change management best practices, this session will provide stops for your respective roadmaps to drive awareness, education and change!
Reliable systems are not accidents. They are designed with explicit operating limits. This session translates lessons from high-risk domains into practical engineering guardrails for microservices: latency budgets, timeout strategy, retry discipline, concurrency limits, and blast-radius controls.
In high-consequence systems, teams define and respect operating limits. Software teams should do the same.
This session introduces an operating-limits model for modern microservices and platform environments. We’ll map common failure patterns (retry storms, cascading timeouts, queue overload, dependency fan-out) to concrete design and operational constraints that prevent small issues from becoming full incidents.
You’ll learn practical techniques for timeout layering, bulkheads, error budgets, load shedding, progressive degradation, and observability signals that reveal approaching limits before customers feel impact.
We’ll also cover leadership practices: how to align teams around reliability contracts and how to enforce guardrails without turning architecture into bureaucracy.
Outcomes:
Yes, we will talk about when your retries are lying to you. And no, adding one more queue is not always the answer.
Two and a half days of insightful sessions, inspiring ideas, and meeting your peers. Learn the skills and methods that will take your organization to the next level.
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