You lead a team. In your business, you're an acknowledged expert in your domain. You're kicking goals. You've got this.

Yesterday, the leader of your wider function left. Today it's your job to step into their role. Overnight, your team quadrupled in size. You have direct reports who have direct reports who have direct reports. You've gone from being a practice manager to an enterprise leader and people across the business are now expecting you to have the answers. Oh, and you're now responsible for 10% of the company's sales. At the team all hands meeting, everyone's looking at you, expecting something profound to come out of your mouth. Are you ready?

I wasn't. I wasn't even close - even with over a decade of practice leadership experience. My goal in this talk is to start getting you ready for the biggest career step you're ever likely to take - moving from expertise leader to general management.

If you're a manager in Product, Design or Engineering, you need to be a Leader. But why do so many Leaders end up firefighting and stressed out? What makes Leading Teams in Tech harder than other areas of a business, and how can you set yourself up to succeed (or at least survive)? It's all about asking yourself 3 simple questions – join us to find out.

A lot of people have known for a lot of years that the technical interview process has many, many flaws. From pseudo-code white boarding to writing complex algorithms, to multi-day take home tests, bad practices still abound. Additionally many interviewers suffer from lack of focused training (the belief that once you have 5 years coding experience you are a skilled interviewer), gatekeeping, and the belief that the interviewer should be the interrogator.

This talk will cover some better ways to set up the interview process (and culture) for technical hires. They include:

What should be avoided

How to set up a interview training program

What types and how many interviews should your process contain.

Understanding candidate care and the philosophy that interviewing is a two way street.

How to evaluate your companies interviewers and how you can make them better

Culture is complex. Startups grow. So how do we build an effective organisation that gets shit done, and the people doing the work love what they do and where they work. We know a secret! It came from a clown, and is backed up by the science. It’s a word we have lost the true meaning of.. it’s play. Come and listen to how a head of people and a clown helped co-create a company culture grounded in play that navigated the waters of remote working, global expansion and high growth… while the world was going through some things. This talk is going to be weird, fun and above all super useful.

Leadership is hard but we have an established set of tools and techniques for building software systems that we can use to build our leadership systems.

In this collaborative talk, presenters Rick and Andrew share their stories about how they took advantage of the untapped potential of applying software engineering practices to engineering leadership. Plenty of stories, hypotheses and learnt lessons are shared along the way!

We start with the concept of "Pairing beyond Programming," where we discuss using pair programming techniques to achieve robust, meaningful outcomes in leadership. We discovered that this technique helped us achieve better quality work, improved efficiency, more accountability and quicker learning.

The conversation then shifts to "Test-Driven Development (TDD) for Leadership," breaking down its core principles and showing how they can be adapted to create a more effective leadership system which improves the impact our leaders have, overall communication and risk management.

Through our applications of these techniques and lean/agile principles we have found our leaders have been able to experiment faster, build a strong learning culture and feel more supported by the organisations they work in.

We want to share these insights so you can help your established and emerging leaders as well.

In the fast-paced world of technology, the only constant is change. Making the right technological choices can make or break a project, but what happens when the initial decisions need to be reconsidered? This talk aims to delve into the challenges and opportunities that engineering teams face when pivoting their technological foundations.

Drawing on real-world experience, including recent significant shifts in our own team's technology stack, this presentation will provide actionable insights into Identifying the Need to Pivot, Securing Team Buy-In and Maintaining Morale During Transitions.

By the end of this talk, attendees will walk away with a roadmap for successfully navigating technological pivots, ensuring not only project continuity but also team well-being.

Github's Keith Cirkle works on their platform systems teams delivering GitHub.com's JavaScript & UI components, to over 100,000,000,000 customers.

Few people ar ebetter placed to help us consider how we should be architecting web apps, today and into the future.

The foundations of the Web platform–JavaScript, browser APIs, CSS, have evolved tremendously in recent years. But how are developers using them 'in the wild?'.

The State of… surveys (CSS, JavaScript, React, HTML) have for years looked to take the pulse of the web from developers perspectives. Hui Jing Chen, who is heavily involved in the project will look at results from the most recent surveys, to help you benchmark where your technology stack is at and consider what technilogies you should be adopting.