Programme

Self-management is understanding what it means for you to thrive in a leadership role, and it's also something you will need to instil in people you report to you, to help them scale their own responsibilities.

In this talk, we will cover:

• Defining your job, and evolving it to meet the organisational need
• Identifying your leadership style(s), and matching them to the appropriate situations
• How to manage your energy when that is a bigger constraint than your time
   

We exist within a larger organisation, whether that be a company, institute, university, political party, charity or some other type of organisation. Understanding the key success metrics of that organisation is essential for you to be a leader in the company – don’t become the stereotype of the “techie sitting in the corner” who only pipes up on engineering-specific topics. In this session, we’ll cover the basics of business acumen and help you understand for your own organisation what matters most and how success is measured. 

In this section we'll look at:

• Understanding what type of organisation you work at
• Understanding what that organisation’s primary driver is
• Common types of businesses that exist
• Common types of funding that exist
• How to read a P&L
• Understanding common business terms – and the ones your org might have made up to measure itself
• Basics of CAPEX vs OPEX
• R&D Tax Credits aka why your Finance team wants engineers to use time tracking software
• Translating your projects into business terms

In this talk, Hywel will discuss the skills needed as engineers progress on different career paths (both technical leadership and people management), and how they can be learned outside the ‘production environment’ of the team.

There's a requirement to understand the technical issues facing engineers day-to-day and the responsibility to help them navigate an uncertain future.

So, how do you stay in the loop? And how can you ensure your decisions are not just reactive but proactive, shaping the future rather than merely responding to it?

This talk is about how to overcome this challenge and we’ll discuss:

• Strategies to develop a proactive mindset by tapping into your experience, intuition, and awareness to anticipate future events and trends.
• Tools to identify areas you need to be up to date by exploring the three areas you need relevant knowledge about.
• How to effectively navigate situations where current knowledge is lacking, or intuition is outdated by leveraging your 'leadership stack'.
   

In this section, we will look into what makes a good technical strategy and what doesn’t. We will learn the basics of how to craft an effective technical strategy for your organisation.

This interactive session will cover:

• the skills to understand what makes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ strategy

• how to put together a new strategy

• how to articulate and communicate it 

• how to adapt it as times change.

Engineering teams face compounding pressures to meet business objectives while maintaining operational excellence. The last year, in particular, has forced engineering leaders to maximize productivity with limited resources, forcing them to search for solutions to improve engineering velocity.

Research shows that improvements to developer experience have compounding effects on organizational effectiveness, and incremental improvements increase productivity by an order of magnitude. 

Companies are more eager than ever to quantify the output of their engineering teams to feel confident that they're maximising the return on that investment. Unfortunately, when non-engineers try to increase the output of engineering teams, they often wind up optimising short-term deliverables and devaluating key aspects of an engineering team's job.

In this talk, I'll explore what engineering leaders need to do to credibly own velocity and deeply align their work with the company strategy.

We’re going to take a look at delivery through a cross-functional leadership lens rather than functional leadership lens. We’re going to disconnect from whether our teams can or cannot get things done and instead focus on how you create alignment and the foundations for teams to succeed in delivering on the expectations of the organisation.

In this section we'll look at:

• What does your organisation mean by ‘delivery’
• Managing expectations and setting priorities to get things done
• Plotting types of deliverables and how best to get things done
• Creating back pocket plans for when things go wrong, preparing for the inevitably unexpected 
  
   

These things happen to companies throughout the industry on a regular basis with increasing frequency. How often do you think about whether your organisation is structured to serve the most important business and product goals of your company, and what would it look like if you did?

In this workshop, we'll play with a reorganisation that is thrust upon us, examine the structures and shadows of our teams, draw up new organisations, and tease out the tensions and pathways between the old and the new. 

You'll walk away with a better understanding of your organisation, better tools to talk about organisational change, and a solid hour among friends to spend designing the reorg you worry you'll need to do in six months.

There exists, however, a conspicuous gap in discussions surrounding the development of our engineering managers (EMs, Directors, etc.). In my proposal, I aim to not only address this gap but also present a comprehensive framework tailored for senior leaders.

This talk will delve into the intricacies of being an effective engineering manager by dissecting the multifaceted role into distinct components. Chiranjiv will explore technical excellence, people management, and delivery, breaking down each aspect into manageable units that can be employed for evaluation and strategic planning. To enhance comprehension and infuse an element of enjoyment, he will overlay these topics with the metaphorical architecture of a typical operating system.